Dad’s Martin Houses Go Back Up

Why He Did It

I want to tell this fair, because Kyle Brewer is not a monster, and I have known him twenty-eight years.

He married my little sister Darlene when she was twenty-four. He runs a road grader for the county. He is up at five every working day of his life and he does not complain about it. He was good to our mother when she was sick.

And that boat was the first thing he ever bought for himself. An aluminum bass boat with a new motor, forty thousand dollars with the trailer. Darlene told me at Christmas it was every dollar he had put back for twenty years.

He had been talking about that boat since before they were married. He had pictures of boats taped inside his locker at the county barn. When he finally drove it home in February, he washed it in the driveway twice before it ever touched water.

Then he put it in the slip under Dad’s martins.

I understand what happened next. Martins perch on anything near their houses. Dock rails, boat consoles, the backs of seats. And a colony of martins leaves a mess. By the first week of April, Kyle was scrubbing that boat every evening after work and every morning before.

Darlene said he came home Wednesday with white streaks on his new seats and did not say a word all through supper.

So I understand it. I do. A man saves twenty years for one nice thing and the birds make a mess of it.

What I do not understand is a grown man walking out at sunup, before a ninety-year-old man could get out of bed, and taking down fifty years of his father-in-law’s springs without one word to anybody.

Fifty Springs

My father is Thurman Gaddy. He is ninety years old and he still stands six foot two when his back allows it.

He climbed telephone poles for thirty-eight years. He started when lines were still strung on wooden crossarms and he retired when they were stringing fiber. He knows poles the way some men know horses.

In the spring of 1977, he set the first martin pole at the town lake. The town parks man at the time was a friend of his from church, and he said the lake could use some birds to eat the mosquitoes, and that was all the permission anybody ever asked for.

I was six. I remember Mama holding the level against the pole while Dad tamped the concrete. I remember Darlene, who was three, eating a cheese sandwich on a quilt in the grass and pointing at the ducks.

That first spring nothing came. Dad said that was normal. You put up a house and you wait.

The second spring, a pair came. Dad called Mama out of the kitchen to see.

By the time I was in high school there were four poles and four houses, and every April the lake park was full of martins, swooping over the water at dusk and gurgling on the porches of their little white houses.

Dad cleaned the houses every fall after the birds left. He painted them white every few years, because martins like a white house. It stays cooler in the summer sun. He chased the sparrows out and kept the starlings off. He put new winch poles in when his shoulders got too old to raise the old telescoping kind.

Mama died eleven years ago this spring. The week after the funeral, Dad drove out to the lake in his truck and sat in a folding chair under the first pole for most of a day. He did not fish. He did not read. He just watched the martins.

He has done it every spring since. He has a tan windbreaker he wears every time, and a folding chair that lives in the bed of his truck from March to August.

He calls the first returning bird the scout. He writes the date it comes in a little spiral notebook. He has fifty years of dates in three notebooks in his kitchen drawer.

That is what Kyle pulled down. Not four bird houses. Fifty springs.