The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

We set Gilles’s folding table up on the grass across from the white church, under one of the big maples. The leaves had gone red that week, and the sun came through them and threw red light all over the table.

I took the birds out of the newspaper one at a time and set them on the table in rows. Chickadees in front. Then cardinals and blue jays and finches. The loons in the back, because they were the biggest.

When I was done, the whole table was covered in birds. Every color. People walking by slowed down to look, and then stopped, and then came over.

“Are these for sale?” a woman asked.

“No, ma’am,” Grandpa said. “They’re for the children. One for each.”

She looked at him like she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. Then she went off across the green, fast, and I knew she was going to get her kids.

The first child in line was a little girl named Josie Cyr.

She was seven, with her hair in a ponytail and a denim jacket on, and she had come over with her older brother while her mother was buying a pie. She stood at the end of the table and looked at the birds for a long time before she said anything.

“Can I have one?” she finally asked.

Grandpa leaned down to her. He picked up a chickadee from the front row, a little one with a black cap and a pale gray back, and held it out on his flat palm.

“This one,” he said. “That was my wife’s favorite.”

Josie took it in both hands, careful, like it might fly. She turned it over and looked at the letters burned in the bottom.

“What was her name?” she asked.

Grandpa didn’t answer right away. I saw him swallow.

“Albertine,” he said.

Josie looked at the chickadee a long time, the way children look at something they have decided to keep forever.

“Then that’s her name now too,” she said. “Albertine.”

She held the bird up to her cheek, just for a second, and then ran off across the grass to show her mother.

Grandpa straightened up slowly. He put one hand on the table. I came around and pulled the lawn chair up behind him, and he sat down in it and took his glasses off.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. I put my hand on his shoulder and stood there with him while the church bell rang one o’clock across the green.

After a minute he put his glasses back on and said, “Well. Who’s next?”

The woman who had asked if they were for sale came back with three boys. Then the woman behind her had two girls. Then a father with a baby on his hip and a boy on his shoulders.

And then the line started, and it did not stop.

Town kids and farm kids. Kids still in their harvest clothes because they’d come straight from picking that morning. Little ones in strollers whose mothers picked for them. Big boys of twelve and thirteen who pretended not to care and then held their birds very carefully.

Grandpa asked every single child their name. He asked what bird they wanted, and if they didn’t know, he picked for them, and he always seemed to pick right.

“A blue jay for you,” he told one loud boy, “because I can hear you from here.”