Dad’s Martin Houses Go Back Up

One, Two, Three

We put the second house up at about half past eight, and the third at a quarter after nine. Ozzie cranked the third one so I could rest my arm. He went slower than me, and his face got red, and he would not let me take over.

“I cranked grain augers for forty years,” he said. “I can crank a bird house.”

By the time the third house was up, there were birds coming in from everywhere. They had been around the lake all along, I suppose, roosting in the trees and waiting. Now they came back in twos and threes, circling the poles, landing on the porches, chattering at each other.

Dad sat under the first pole and counted out loud.

“One,” he said, as a bird went into a top room. “Two.” Another landed on a lower porch and ducked in. “Three.”

He said it softly, the way you count a sleeping baby’s breaths. He did not take his eyes off the house. His lips moved after he stopped saying the numbers out loud.

I went and stood behind his chair and put my hand on his shoulder. He reached up without looking and patted my hand twice.

“Your mother counted to thirty-one one year,” he said. “That was the best year. 1998.”

“I remember,” I said. I did. I was twenty-seven and pregnant with my first, and Mama called me at work to tell me.

The fourth house sat on the sawhorses we had brought, still wrapped in its bedsheet. It was the one with the new roof, and the paint on the rivets was still a little soft. Dad wanted it to cure in the sun another hour before we handled it.

So we waited. Ozzie went down to the pond and fed the ducks. I sat on the grass beside Dad’s chair. The birds kept coming.

The Boat

At ten, a pickup truck came down the hill from the highway pulling a bass boat on a trailer.

I knew the sound of that truck before I saw it. Kyle’s truck has a lifter tick he has been meaning to fix for two years.

He pulled into the lot and swung wide to line up on the ramp. Through the windshield, I watched him look up and see the poles.

Three white houses. Martins all over them.

He saw Dad in the chair. He saw me. He saw the fourth house on the sawhorses.

His face did not change much. Kyle’s face never does. But his hands went still on the wheel for a long second.

Then he backed down the ramp.

He did it well. Kyle backs a trailer better than any man I know. He put that boat straight down the concrete into the water without one correction, and got out, and walked back to unhook the winch strap.

The men fishing off the bank had gone quiet. The older fellow was standing by his tailgate with a cup of coffee, watching. Everybody in our town knows those are Thurman Gaddy’s martin houses. Half of them knew by now who had taken them down.

Kyle floated the boat off the trailer and walked it along the dock on the bow line, toward his slip.

Toward his slip, right under the first pole.

As he walked, the martins kept coming in over his head, landing on the white porches above him, gurgling and chattering. One swooped low enough over the dock that he ducked.

I stood up beside Dad’s chair. Dad put his hand on my arm.

“Don’t,” he said quietly.

“I wasn’t going to say anything, Daddy.”

“I know. Just don’t.”

So I did not. I stood there with my hand on the crank box of the fourth pole, and I did not say one word. Neither did Dad. We just watched Kyle tie his boat up under the birds.

He tied it slow. He tied it carefully. He did not look up at us once.