The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

Here is how he got the birds.

Last Easter weekend, Grandpa asked Brady to help him get the boxes down off the high shelf. His knees had gotten too bad for the ladder, and he wanted the boxes on the floor where he could reach them.

Brady carried all twelve boxes down. Then, when Grandpa went to the house to start dinner, Brady carried four of them out to his car and drove them back to Bangor.

Grandpa noticed in June. He counted the boxes the way he always did, and there were eight instead of twelve, and he stood in the middle of his shop and knew exactly who had been up the ladder last.

He did not say a word to anyone. Not to Dad, not to me, not to Lise. He went to Mass on Sunday and came home and carved a chickadee.

I found out because of the woman who keeps our farm books. She comes out to the house once a month with her ledger and her laptop, and in August she turned the screen around to show me something.

“Caleb, isn’t this your grandfather’s work?”

It was a selling site, one of the big ones online. And there was a chickadee, plain as anything, with a photo of the bottom showing NT and the year burned into the wood.

Forty dollars. Sold.

She scrolled down. There were more. A cardinal. A loon. A pair of goldfinches. She counted them for me, because I couldn’t make my eyes do it. One hundred birds, all listed by the same seller in Bangor, all marked sold.

The seller’s name was Brady’s.

I drove straight over to Grandpa’s house. He was out in the shop, sitting at his bench with the door open for the breeze, painting the red breast on a robin.

I didn’t know how to start, so I just held out my phone with the page on it.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he put his brush down in the water jar and wiped his fingers on a rag.

“I know,” he said.

“You know?”

“I counted in June.” He nodded at the back of the shop door, where the numbers were written in pencil, one for every year. The last one had been crossed out. Three hundred. Two hundred.

“Grandpa, why didn’t you say something?”

He folded the rag in half, then in half again. “Say what? Call my grandson a thief at Sunday dinner, in front of his mother, in front of his children?”

“He is one.”

“He is my grandson,” Grandpa said. “He is my son’s boy. I held him the day he was born.”

I wanted to argue. I had the words lined up. But I looked at his hands on the rag, all knuckles and old cuts, and I couldn’t say any of them.

“I won’t make him a thief in front of the family,” Grandpa said. “I won’t do it, Caleb. And I won’t have you do it either.”

When I told Dad that night, he got up from the supper table and went out on the porch, and I heard him walking up and down in his boots for a long time.