J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

He was touched by this, in spite of himself. Now that they’d found the bird, she was saying, it would be all right. Was ever a bird in worse shape? With food it couldn’t eat, water it probably hadn’t drunk and wouldn’t, and with a house it couldn’t get into — and them ! Now they punished him with their faith in themselves and the universe, and later, when these had failed and the bird began to sink, they would punish him some more, with their faith in him. He knew what was the best thing for the bird. When the children took their naps, then maybe he could do the job. He was not soft. He had flooded gophers out of their labyrinthine ways and beheaded them with the shovel; he had purged a generation of red squirrels from the walls and attic of the old house when he moved in, knowing it was them or him. But why did animals and birds do this to him? Why did children?

“Why’d you pick this bird up? Why didn’t you leave it where it was? The mother might’ve found it then.”

“She couldn’t lift him, could she?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, he can’t fly.”

“No, but if you’d left it where it fell, the mother might see it. The mother bird has to feed a baby like this.” Why couldn’t she lift it? Why couldn’t the two parents get together and just put it back in the nest? Why, down through the ages, hadn’t birds worked out something for such an emergency? As he understood it, they were descended from reptiles and had learned how to grow feathers and fly. The whale had gone to sea. But he didn’t know whether he believed any of this. Here was a case that showed how incompetent nature really was. He was tired of such cases, of nature passing the buck to him. He hated to see spring and summer come to the yard, in a way. They meant death and mosquitoes to him.

It had been the worst year for mosquitoes that anyone could remember, and in Minnesota that was saying a lot. He had bought a spraying outfit, and DDT at $2.50 a quart, which, when you considered that there was no tax on it, made you think. A quart made two gallons, but he was surprised how quickly it went. The words on the bottle “Who enjoys your yard — you or the mosquitoes?” had stayed with him, however. He had engaged professionals, with a big machine mounted on a truck, to blow a gale of poison through the yard. (In other years, seeing such an operation in other yards, he had worried about the bees.) The squirrels and rabbits in residence had evacuated the trees and lily beds while he stood by, hoping that they and the birds understood it was an emergency measure. He believed, however, that the birds received too much credit for eating annoying insects. Wasps, he knew, consumed great numbers of mosquitoes — but what about them ? The mosquito hawk, a large, harmless insect, was a great killer of mosquitoes, but was itself killed by birds — by martins. That was the balance of nature for you. Balance for whom? You had to take steps yourself — drastic steps. Too drastic?

“Now I want you to show me exactly where you found this bird.”

The little girls looked at each other.

“Don’t say anything. Just take me to the exact spot.”

They walked across the yard as if they really knew where they were going, and he and the little boys followed. The girls appeared to agree on the spot, but he supposed the one was under the influence of the other. The older one put out a foot and said, “Here.”

He hadn’t realized they were being that exact. It was surprising how right they were. Fifty or sixty feet overhead, in a fork of a big white oak, he saw a nest, definitely a dove’s nest, a jerry-built job if he ever saw one, the sky visible between the sticks, and something hanging down. He moved away and gazed up again. It was only a large dead leaf, not what he’d feared, not a baby bird hanging by its foot. He felt better about having had the yard sprayed. The machine on the truck was very powerful, powerful enough to bend back the bushes and small trees, but he doubted that it had blown the baby dove out of the nest. This was just an unusually bad nest and the bird had fallen out. Nature had simply failed again.

“The nest! I see it! See?”

“Yes.” He walked away from them, toward the garage. He hadn’t called the nest to their attention because restoring the bird was out of the question for him — it was a job for the fire department or for God, whose eye is on the sparrow — but that didn’t mean that the children might not expect him to do it.

“Just keep the bird in the shade,” he called from the garage. He drove down to the office, which he hadn’t planned to visit that day, and spent a few hours of peace there.

And came home to another calamity. In the kitchen, the little girls were waiting for him. Something, they said, had jumped out of the lilies and pushed one of the young bunnies that hadn’t been doing anything, just eating grass near the playhouse. A weasel, they thought. Their mother hadn’t seen it happen, had only heard the bunny crying, and had gone up to bed. There was no use going to her. They were in possession of what information there was. He should ask them.

“Don’t go out there!”

“Why not?”

“Mama says if the bunny has the rabies it might bite.”

He stood still in thought. Most of his life had been spent in a more settled part of the country. There was a great deal he didn’t know about wildlife, even about the red squirrel and the yellow-jacket wasp, with which he had dealt firsthand, and he knew it. He could be wrong. But there was something ridiculous about what they were suggesting. “Did you see whatever it was that pushed the rabbit?”

“Of course!” said the older girl. It was this that distinguished her from all others in the house.

“What did it look like?”

“It went so fast.”

This was ground they’d covered before, but he persevered, hoping to flush the fact that would explain everything. “What color was it?”

“Kind of — like the rabbit. But it went so fast.”

This, too, was as before. “Maybe it was the mama rabbit,” he said, adding something new. The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. “Maybe she didn’t want the young one to come out in the open — in the daytime, I mean. Maybe she was just teaching it a lesson.” He didn’t know whether rabbits did that, but he did know that this particular mother was intelligent. He had first noticed her young ones, just babies then, in a shallow hole alongside a tiny evergreen that he had put a wire fence around, and that he’d draped with Shoo — rope soaked with creosote, advertised as very effective against dogs, rabbits, and rodents of all kinds. And as for the punishment the young rabbit had taken from whatever it was, he had once seen a mother squirrel get tough with a little one that had strayed from the family tree.

“Would she hurt the young rabbit?” said the younger girl.

“She might. A little.”

“This one was hurt a lot,” said the eyewitness. She spoke with authority.

“Maybe it was a cat,” he said, rallying. “You say it was about the same size.”

The children didn’t reply. It seemed to him that they did not trust him. His mama-rabbit theory was too good to be true. They believed in the weasel.

“A weasel would’ve killed it,” he said.

“But if he saw me ?”

“ Did he see you?”

“Of course.”

“Did you see him ?”

“Of course!” cried the child, impatient with the question. She didn’t appear to realize that she was cornered, that having seen the attacker she should be able to describe it. But she was under no obligation to be logical. He decided to wait a few years.

Out in the yard he scrutinized the ground around the playhouse for blood and fur, and saw none. He stepped to the edge of the lilies. Each year the lilies were thicker and less fruitful of flowers, and a gardener would have thinned them out. A gardener, though, would have spoiled this yard — for the fairies who, the children told him, played there. He didn’t enter the lilies because he didn’t want to encounter what he might.