The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

The table

Saturday came up clear and bright, one of those fall mornings when the sky over the school looks like it has been washed. By eight there was frost on the grass strip along the curb but not on the blacktop, and the sun was already warm on my neck.

Sylvia came with me, in her green sweater, and carried the folding table. We set it under the end of a row of white canopies near the front walk, next to a woman who sold knitted hats and a man who turned bowls on a lathe.

We lined up the birdhouses in rows, bluebirds on the left, wrens and chickadees in the middle, nuthatches and titmice on the right, and I set an index card in front of each one with the bird’s name in my own handwriting.

By 8:45 I had thirty-two out. I kept the rest in the truck bed under the tarp and brought them in as the table thinned.

Dad sat in the wheelchair behind it, in his red plaid flannel shirt, with a tin cash box at his elbow. He had insisted on shaving himself, and had missed a patch under the chin.

I wore my brown canvas jacket, the one with the torn pocket, and I stood by his shoulder and did not know what to do with my hands.

“Nobody’s coming,” he said at 9:50, which was not true, but there is a stretch before an event gets going when it feels true.

“Give it a minute.” The first buyer was a man in a seed cap, maybe fifty, who stopped with a cider donut in one fist and looked at the bluebird row. He reached for a red house with a green roof.

“What’s this one for?” Dad leaned forward. All the worry fell off his face like a blanket.

“That’s a bluebird house,” he said. “Hole’s an inch and a half, no more, no less. You mount it four to six feet up on a post in the open, facing east if you can, so the morning sun warms the eggs. Not in the trees. Bluebirds hate trees. Put it where they can see a long way.”

The man blinked. “Does it need a perch?” “Never,” Dad said. “A perch is a porch for the sparrows.”

“Huh.” The man turned the house over, found the bottom, and read the carpenter’s pencil. “Bluebird. 2022. E. Gosch.” He looked up. “You built these?”

“Since I was sixty-six.”

“I’ll take it,” the man said. “And that one. And that one over there.” He bought three. He handed me sixty dollars, and when I started to make change, he said, “No, sir. Keep it. My dad did this too.”

That was the first sale. The second was a woman in a quilted vest who had come for the knitted hats. The third was a retired teacher.

By 10:15 there was a line. I am not exaggerating. It ran from the table to the end of the sidewalk, and I had to stop making change and just take money and let people make their own.

Everyone asked the same thing. What’s this one for?

Dad told them. He told every one of them. He told the woman buying a chickadee house that she should put a handful of wood chips in the bottom, and hang it six feet up, near some brush. He told a farmer that the nuthatches liked to creep head-down along the bark and that a house at ten feet suited them.

He told a young father with a toddler on his shoulders that if they put a titmouse house up now, the birds might not take it until spring, but they would remember it was there.

“They remember,” Dad said. “They look at it all winter.” The young father said he would bring his daughter back in April to see.

I stood at his shoulder and made change and watched my father come back to himself. His color rose. He sat taller. At one point he reached out of the chair without being asked and straightened a row of nuthatch houses that had gone crooked.