The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

“He’ll never miss them, Caleb,” my cousin Brady said on the phone, in the same easy voice he used to ask for a ride. “He’s ninety-one. They’re just sitting in boxes.”

I was standing at the end of a potato row with the phone pressed hard to my ear, because the wind was coming across the field and I wanted to be sure I heard him right.

It was a bright Tuesday in late August. The tops were dying back the way they should, and in three weeks we would be digging. I had sixty acres to worry about and no time to be on the phone.

“He counts them,” I said. “He knows how many are in every box. He’s always known.”

Brady laughed a little, not mean exactly, just tired. “Then he’ll figure it out and he’ll get over it. They’re wooden birds, Caleb. He can make more.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. A crow went over. Down at the road a truck from the next farm was hauling empty barrels to the potato house.

“You sold a hundred of them,” I said.

“I sold what people would pay for,” he said. “Forty dollars apiece. I didn’t even ask that much. You know what I owe? Forty-one thousand dollars. For a piece of paper that says I studied history.”

“That’s not Grandpa’s fault.”

“I never said it was,” Brady said, and he hung up.

I stood there with the phone in my hand. Then I put it in my shirt pocket and walked the row out to the end, because there was nothing else to do with it, and the potatoes did not care.

That was the last day of August. This is how the rest of it went.

My grandfather is Normand Theriault. He has lived his whole life within twelve miles of the house he was born in, up in Aroostook County, where the potato fields roll on until they reach the woods and the woods run on to Canada.

He farmed potatoes for fifty-one years. My father took over the place, and now I farm it with Dad. Grandpa still drives out to the field every harvest in his old truck to watch the digger go by.

My grandmother, Albertine, died twenty years ago this past January. She went in her sleep in the middle of a cold snap, and Grandpa found her in the morning when he went to bring her coffee.

He did not talk for most of that winter. My mother used to drive over with soup and find him sitting at the kitchen table, looking out at the bird feeder Memere had kept full every day of their marriage.

Then one day in February he went out to his shop, and he came back in with a block of basswood and his old pocketknife, and he started to carve.

The first one was a chickadee. It was not very good. The head was too big and the tail was crooked, and he painted it with house paint because that was what he had in the shop.

He set it on the windowsill next to the feeder anyway. I was seventeen. I remember thinking it was the first thing he’d done since the funeral that looked like he planned to keep living.