Dad’s Martin Houses Go Back Up

Ozzie Quarles called the 4-H office at twenty after eight on a Thursday morning in early April, and I knew from the way he said my name that something was wrong.

“Rosetta,” he said. “Your daddy’s martin houses are down. All four of them. They’re lying in the gravel by the trash bins.”

I was holding a stack of county fair entry forms. I set them down very carefully on the corner of my desk, the way you set something down when your hands want to throw it.

“Down how?” I said.

“Cranked down and pulled off the poles,” Ozzie said. “I watched him do it at sunup. I was feeding the ducks. I should have said something. I didn’t think he’d go through with all four.”

“Who, Ozzie?”

There was a long breath on the line. Ozzie is seventy-eight and he has been feeding the ducks at our town lake every morning since he retired from the elevator. He does not like to carry bad news, and he does not like to say a man’s name.

“Kyle,” he said. “Your sister’s Kyle.”

I told the extension agent I had a family thing and I would make up the hour. She waved me out the door. Twenty minutes later I was pulling into the gravel lot above the boat ramp, and I sat in my car a moment before I could make myself get out.

The four poles stood along the bank where they have stood my whole life, weathered wooden utility poles Dad had set in concrete himself, sixteen feet tall, with a hand winch bolted on each at chest height. Every one of them was bare at the top.

And over the bare poles, the martins were circling.

They went round and round in that quick, dipping way they have, chirping that low gurgling chirp, landing on the empty pole tops and lifting off again. They had come all the way from South America to rooms that were not there anymore.

The houses were where Ozzie said. Four white aluminum houses, twelve rooms each, stacked crooked in the gravel by the trash bins like somebody had hauled out an old dresser. One roof was cracked clean across. Two had dents in the sides where they had been dropped.

There were no eggs, thank the Lord. Martins do not lay until May around here. But there were bits of fresh green leaves in some of the rooms, and a few pine needles, where the early birds had already started claiming.

I stood there with my hand on the cracked roof and I did not cry, because I was too angry to cry. I just looked down the bank at the dock.

The town rents eight boat slips on the little dock beside the ramp, three hundred dollars a season. Kyle had rented the one at the near end in March. It sits almost right under the first pole.

His bass boat was not in it that morning. He had taken it home.