The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

The dump

The Dunmore Township dump sits two miles out on County Road 1200 North, past the Lutheran cemetery and the Rasmussen cornfield. The corn was down by then, and the stubble ran gold to the tree line.

There is a scale shed, a gravel lot, and a row of open steel containers the size of boxcars, the kind a truck hooks onto and hauls away when they fill.

Howard Haskins runs the place Tuesdays through Saturdays. He is seventy and he wears the same insulated coveralls from October to April.

He was standing outside the shed when I rolled up, a thermos in one hand. He did not wait for me to say anything.

“Emmett’s, ain’t they?” he said. “I wondered. Figured somebody’d come.”

“Where?” He pointed with the thermos at the second container. I climbed the ladder on the end. The steel rungs were cold through my gloves. Over the lip, I saw them.

They sat on top of a heap of cardboard and a busted recliner, in a loose scatter, like birds that had landed on a snowbank.

Red ones. Yellow ones. A blue one with a white roof. A green one with a little brass hinge on the cleanout door that Dad had saved off some railroad box years ago.

“Compactor would’ve got ’em by three,” Howard called up. “I held off the second load. Didn’t feel right.”

I carried them down one at a time, the way you carry something that might wake.

Forty. I counted twice, once on the ladder and once at the tailgate, and I did it out loud, because that is how Dad does it.

Three of them had cracked roofs where they had struck the steel on the way in. One had lost a chimney. The rest were whole, and not a one had a scratch on the paint.

“He builds ’em tight,” Howard said, handing a yellow one up to me. “Always did. I put one on my fence post in ’09. Bluebirds have had it every spring since.”

“That’s the one with the hole an inch and a half.” Howard grinned, a little surprised. “He told me that too. Told me never to put a perch on it.”

“A perch is a porch for the sparrows,” I said. We said the last part together, the way you say a grace you both learned young.

I laid the birdhouses in the bed of my truck on a pair of moving blankets, tied them down with bungee cords, and Howard would not take a dime for the ladder.