The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

“What’s your name?” Grandpa said to the boy, loud enough for Brady to hear. “Tell this man your name.”

The boy told him.

“Now you,” Grandpa said to Brady. “Tell him yours.”

Brady’s voice came out rough. “Brady,” he said. “Brady Theriault.”

“That’s my grandson,” Grandpa told the boy. “He’s going to give you your bird.”

They handed out the last twenty-five together. Grandpa in his chair asking the names, Brady standing beside him handing out the birds, and me behind them stacking the last empty box on the pile.

When it was done, there was nothing left on the table but newspaper and red maple leaves.

Two hundred birds. Two hundred children. Grandpa had kept the count in his head the whole afternoon, the way he always does. He sat back in the lawn chair and looked out at the green, where kids were running around with chickadees and blue jays and cardinals held up over their heads.

“There,” he said. “That’s someday.”

Lise drove Grandpa home in her car. I took the boxes and the folding table in my truck. Brady followed us in his own car with his kids, and nobody planned it, but we all ended up in Grandpa’s kitchen as the sun was going down.

It was still light. Mom came over with a pot of beans and Dad came in from the field, dusty and tired, and stopped in the doorway when he saw Brady at the table.

For a second nobody breathed. Then Dad hung his cap on the hook by the door, the way he has hung it on that hook since he was a boy, and sat down across from his nephew.

“How’s the job?” Dad said.

“Not good,” Brady said.

“No,” Dad said. “I didn’t figure.”

And that was all, for that night. The kids played on the kitchen floor with their birds. Grandpa fell asleep in his chair at seven. Lise washed the dishes and cried a little at the sink where she thought nobody could see.

Brady came back up alone two Saturdays later. It was a bright cold day in the middle of October, and we were still digging, and I saw his car go by the field toward Grandpa’s place around ten in the morning.

I didn’t go over. It wasn’t mine to go over to. But Grandpa told me about it later, a little at a time, the way he tells things.

Brady sat in the shop on the stool across from the bench, where I’d sat when I asked about someday. He told Grandpa everything. The loans, and the job, and the bills, and how his wife didn’t know where the money had come from.

“He told me he’d been about to lose the car,” Grandpa said. “He said he figured he’d put the money back before I ever noticed. Then he figured I’d noticed and I’d say something. And then I didn’t say anything, and he said that was the worst of all.”

“What did you tell him?”

Grandpa was quiet for a while. He was carving at the time, a new block of basswood, and he didn’t look up from it.

“I told him I loved his father,” he said. “And I told him I loved him. And I told him he could pay it back however he could, and I didn’t want to hear another word about it.”