The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

He came back in and said he was driving to Bangor on Saturday to have it out with Brady face to face. Mom didn’t say anything. She just looked at me.

The next morning Dad went over to Grandpa’s to tell him. He came back an hour later and sat down in his truck in the yard and didn’t get out for a while.

“He told me no,” Dad said, when I walked over. “He told me no the way he told me no when I was sixteen and wanted to quit school. You know that voice.”

I knew that voice.

So that left me with nothing but the phone call, the one I told you about at the beginning, standing at the end of a potato row in the wind.

After Brady hung up, I worked until dark. Then I didn’t sleep much.

I went back to Grandpa’s the next afternoon. He was in the shop again, and the robin was finished and drying on a nail board with six other birds.

I sat down on the stool across from him. The woodstove was cold. It was too warm yet for a fire, and the shop smelled like basswood shavings and paint thinner, the way it always has.

“Grandpa,” I said. “What does someday mean?”

He looked up at me over his glasses.

“I mean it,” I said. “You’ve had those boxes up there twenty years. You told me I’d know when it was someday. I don’t know. So I’m asking.”

He was quiet for a minute. He picked up a rough blank of wood and turned it over in his fingers, the way he does when he is thinking.

“Your grandmother couldn’t have children for the first eight years,” he said. “Did you know that?”

I didn’t.

“We prayed and we prayed. And while we waited, every Sunday after Mass she would go down to the green with a bag of peppermints in her pocketbook, and she would give one to every child she saw. Every Sunday. For eight years.”

He set the blank down.

“Then your father came, and your uncle, and she never stopped. She gave out peppermints on that green until the last Sunday of her life. Half the people in town over forty got a peppermint from Albertine Theriault.”

He looked up at the high shelf, where the eight boxes sat.

“Kids,” he said. “I always meant them for kids, Caleb. I just never could figure out how to do it. I’m not a man who knows how to stand up in front of people.”

I sat there and thought about it. I thought about the green in town, with the maples around it and the white church at the head, and the harvest fair they hold there every year on the last Saturday in September, when the schools are out for harvest break.

“The fair,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“The fair is in four weeks. Every kid in the county will be on that green. We set up a table. You hand them out. One to each kid.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

He turned the blank over again. Then he set it down and took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

“Two hundred birds,” he said. “That’s a lot of children.”

“It’s a lot of children,” I agreed.

He put his glasses back on. “Then I’d better get the robins finished,” he said.