Dad’s Martin Houses Go Back Up

Sunday

On Sunday after church, all of us drove out to the lake. Me and my husband, Darlene and Kyle, and Dad in his own truck, because he does not let anybody drive him anywhere.

Ozzie was already on his bench by the duck pond. A woman named Imogene from Dad’s Sunday school class had brought a lemon pound cake, because word gets around in a town our size, and she said she had not seen Thurman’s birds this thick since the year his wife counted thirty-one.

We ate cake on paper plates on the tailgate. Kyle sat on an overturned bucket next to Dad’s chair and asked him questions about martins. How long they live. Where they go in the winter. Why they come back to the same houses.

“They come back to where they were raised,” Dad told him. “Or to where they had a good year. They remember.”

Kyle looked over at his covered boat in the slip, and then up at the houses, and did not say anything.

Darlene caught my eye across the tailgate. She did not smile, quite. But she lifted her plate an inch, like a toast.

After

It is the middle of summer now as I write this. The young martins have fledged. You can see them in the evenings, sitting in rows along the dock rail, bigger than their parents almost, being fed and fussing about it.

Kyle bought a better cover in June, the fitted kind, like Dad told him. He keeps it on the boat every day he is not fishing. He told Darlene it was worth every penny because now he does not have to scrub, and he can spend his Saturday mornings on the water instead of on his knees.

Some Saturdays he stops by Dad’s chair on his way down to the dock, and they talk about the birds for a few minutes. Some Saturdays he does not. That is all right too.

Dad wrote the date in his spiral notebook that Saturday, under the March date for the scout. He did not write what happened. He just wrote the date and a number.

“Reraised. 22 birds by 2 p.m.”

I asked him once why he did not write down the rest of it.

“Because the rest of it doesn’t matter to the birds,” he said. “And it won’t matter to me in a year. What matters is they came back.”

I think about that. I think about how close I came to making it a war. How easy it would have been to call the town, or to call my sister on Thursday morning, and let it all blow up. How it might have ended with Darlene in the middle and Dad alone in his chair at the lake, counting birds with nobody beside him.

Instead it ended with my sister’s voice carrying across the water, and her husband’s hand on the crank.

Every morning on my way to the 4-H office, I drive the long way past the town lake. I do not stop. I just slow down and look.

Four houses, sixteen feet up, and Dad’s chair under the first one.