The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

The second one was better. By spring he had a dozen, and by the next winter he had ordered real carving knives out of a catalog and a set of small brushes and good paint in little tubes.

He carved every winter after that, from the time the harvest was in until the fields dried out in May. Twenty winters. He worked in the shop with the woodstove going and a radio on the bench playing the French station out of the valley.

Chickadees mostly, because Memere loved them. Cardinals, blue jays, goldfinches, nuthatches, a robin in spring. Once in a while a loon, which took him a week because of the black and white checks on the back.

He burned his initials and the year into the bottom of every one with a little wood burner. NT and the year. You could turn any of his birds over and know exactly which winter it came from.

The first birds he made went to the family.

There are eleven of us grandkids, and over the first few winters each of us got one, picked out special. Mine was a blue jay, because Grandpa said I was loud as one when I was a boy.

Then the great-grandkids started coming, and each of them got one too, on the day they were baptized. He would wrap it in a clean handkerchief and hand it to the mother at the back of the church.

But he made far more than the family could ever hold. After the first few years the birds started going into boxes. Plain cardboard boxes, twenty-five to a box, each bird wrapped in newspaper.

On the side of every box, in pencil, he wrote one word. Someday.

I asked him once, when I was in my twenties, what someday meant. He was sanding the tail of a goldfinch at the time, and he just smiled and kept sanding.

“You’ll know when it’s someday,” he said.

By last winter there were twelve boxes on the high shelf in his shop. Three hundred birds, not counting the ones on all our windowsills. I know because he counted them every fall and wrote the number on the back of the shop door.

Brady is my cousin, the son of my father’s younger brother, who died of a heart attack in the woods cutting firewood when Brady was fourteen.

Brady’s mother is my aunt Lise. She raised him and his sister alone after that, working as a cook at the school, and she raised them well. Nobody in our family ever said a word against Lise.

Brady was the smart one of all of us. He read everything. He went to the university down in Orono when the rest of us were going to work, and our grandfather was so proud of him he put Brady’s graduation picture on the refrigerator.

But the degree did not turn into a job. Brady moved to Bangor and drove a forklift in a warehouse and married a nice girl from Old Town and had two kids, and the loans kept growing every year he could not pay them down.

Forty-one thousand dollars. That’s what he said on the phone, and I believed him, because Lise had mentioned it once at Christmas when she thought nobody was listening.

I am not telling you this to excuse what he did. I am telling you because it is true, and because you can understand a thing without calling it right.