The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

He paid it back.

It came in envelopes, all winter long. Sometimes fifty dollars, sometimes two hundred, once just twenty with a note that said it was a bad week. He mailed them to Grandpa’s box at the post office in town, every one with his name written on the outside.

Grandpa kept every envelope in a coffee can on the shelf in the shop. He didn’t spend a dollar of it on himself.

In January he ordered a whole case of basswood blocks from a mill down near Bangor, and a new set of knives, and every color of paint they had in little tubes. He paid for all of it out of the coffee can.

“For next year’s fair,” he said, when I asked. “There’s going to be a lot of children. Word gets around.”

The last envelope came in March, while the snow was still deep in the fields. Brady had written on the back of it, in pencil, the way Grandpa writes on boxes. Four thousand. Paid.

Josie Cyr’s mother stopped me at the feed store in November. She said Josie had put the chickadee on her bedroom windowsill and talks to it every morning before school.

“She calls it Albertine,” her mother said. “She told me she’s going to keep it until she’s a grandmother herself. Then she’s going to give it to her granddaughter.”

I told Grandpa that. He didn’t say anything. He just went out to the shop and came back in a while later and asked me to drive him to Mass, even though it was a Wednesday.

This spring, on the first warm Saturday in April, Brady drove up from Bangor with his wife and the two kids.

They came out to the field first. I was fixing a hydraulic line on the planter, and Brady got down in the dirt with me and held the wrench while I tightened the fitting. We didn’t talk about any of it. We didn’t have to.

Then we all went over to Grandpa’s.

He was waiting for us on the front step, in the sun, with a small bundle wrapped in a clean handkerchief on his knee, the way he used to wrap them for babies at their baptism.

“This is for you,” he told Brady.

Brady unwrapped it. It was a gray jay. A whiskey jack, we call them up here, the plain gray bird that comes to the woodpile and the lumber camps and eats out of your hand.

Brady turned it over. NT, and this year, burned into the bottom.

“Why a jay?” he asked.

Grandpa thought about it.

“Most birds leave when it gets hard,” he said. “That one stays all winter. It comes back to you, every time.”

Brady didn’t say anything. He just held it, the same way Josie had held her chickadee on the green, careful, like it might fly.

His little girl put her head against his arm and looked at it with him.

Grandpa leaned back on the step and closed his eyes in the sun, and the chickadees were going at the feeder Memere had kept full all those years, and nobody said anything for a long time.

Brady paid back the four thousand dollars, every cent of it, and Grandpa carved him a bird of his own.