The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

The next four weeks were the busiest of the year, and we did it anyway.

Harvest started on the eleventh. We run a two-row harvester behind the tractor with a crew of four on the picking table, plus two trucks hauling to the potato house. Dad drives the tractor. I run whatever breaks.

Every evening, after the trucks were unloaded and the crew had gone home, I drove over to Grandpa’s. He would be in the shop with the boxes open, checking every bird, touching up paint where it had chipped in the newspaper.

Some of the older ones had faded. He repainted the cardinals, mostly, because the red never held as well as the others. He did six or seven a night, sitting under the good lamp, and he didn’t say much.

Our neighbor Gilles came by one evening with his wife’s folding table in the back of his pickup. He’d heard about it from Dad, though nobody had said a word about Brady.

“For the fair,” Gilles said, and set the table down inside the shop door. “Normand, I want a loon for my granddaughter if you’ve got one left.”

“You’ll have to get in line with the rest of them,” Grandpa said, and for the first time in weeks I heard him laugh.

The Thursday before the fair, Lise called the house. Mom answered and talked for a while in the kitchen with the door shut.

When she came out she said Lise had asked whether Grandpa was coming to the fair this year, because she was bringing Brady’s two kids up for the weekend and the kids wanted to see their great-grandfather.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“I told her he’d be on the green,” Mom said. She looked at me. “I didn’t tell her anything else. It isn’t mine to tell.”

I didn’t sleep well that night either.

The last Saturday in September came up clear and cold, the kind of morning where the frost lies white in the low spots of the field and burns off by nine.

Dad ran the harvester alone with the crew that day. He wouldn’t let me argue about it. “Go,” he said. “We’ll be fine one day without you. Take care of your grandfather.”

I drove over to Grandpa’s at eleven and loaded the eight boxes into the back of my truck, two hundred birds, each one still wrapped in newspaper. Grandpa came out of the house dressed the way he dresses for Mass.

A gray work shirt, buttoned up. His red suspenders. His good shoes. He had combed his white hair flat with water, and it was already starting to stand up again in the wind.

“You look sharp,” I said.

“Your grandmother bought me these suspenders,” he said, and got in the truck.

The green was already full when we got there. The harvest fair isn’t much, by city standards. A few tables of pies and jam, a bean supper in the church hall, a hay wagon ride, a pumpkin contest, a fiddle player on the bandstand.

But everybody comes. The whole town, and the farms around it, because it’s the one day in harvest when people come up out of the fields and see each other.