When I Was Young and In My Prime (4 page)

He lights the lantern—the hum audible all the while—and when the thing comes into view again its back is green as new metal and the light has sprung its black throat into a deep red.

Nothing like it in the Old World, that much is for sure.

And though he is late for the evening meal, and though he comes to them lightened with awe, and though they laugh and hoot and slap their knees saying,
Oh that's a good one, a fairy caught in the barn and can't get out, oh that's a good one, that is,
he falls asleep content in this new country.

The hummingbird will always be his favourite.

(Try whistling that sound—can't touch it.)

4 the starling
(sturnus vulgaris vulgaris)

Though even he did not quite know it, he decided to marry her one Saturday afternoon while standing in front of the diner. Counting his change with the sun in his eyes, he spotted her coming out of the general store. A

starling swooped close,

and she was not startled.

5 the red-winged blackbird
(agelaius phoeniceus)

After share-growing tobacco in southwestern Ontario for seven years, moving his family nearly every spring to a better deal, he's finally saved a down payment for his own farm: ninety-eight acres of mediocre land with thirty-two acres of tobacco rights, a debt-load he's been trying hard to fathom.

Spring's come early this year—late March rain. The farmyard is bottomless with mud. The truck, loaded up and ready to move for the last time, spins its wheels in the melted lane, burrowing deeper and deeper.

Some say red-winged blackbirds are the real harbingers of spring.

The males come a week or two early—before the females. Come to claim their territory. Come bearing a red so handsome, so bold, so brand-spanking new it must mean God approves of machines.

At the moment the first bird touches down on the naked maple beside the rented house, the neighbours gain purchase in the pushing, truck wheels engage solid ground, and he honks the horn:

kong-ka-ree!

Landowners.

Think of it.

6 the house wren
(troglodytes aedon)

One year the wrens nest in the mailbox. (That's the year the crop suffers from too much rain.)

Another year the wrens nest in an empty clay flowerpot by the shed. (That's the year the crop suffers from too little rain.)

This year they nest in the pocket of his canvas winter coat which Mary has left hanging too long on the clothesline because three times in a row

                                    
just

                                                 
when it dried

                                                 
the sky up
                                                 
and rained again.

7 the barn swallow
(hirundo rustica)

The morning he puts the question to his son he is near fifty. His son is thirteen. Swallows flash in and out of the barn above them.

If you want the farm it's yours. We can start this summer shifting the load. If not, there's no point me sticking it out alone. I'm not getting any younger and the work isn't getting any lighter and it's a good time to sell. I'll finish the season and sell in the fall.

Choice is yours.

                            
A fork-

                            
tailed bird cuts

                            
between them. An awkward

                            
silence.

I don't know what it is I'm gonna be, but whatever it is it's not gonna be a farmer.

The boy pronounces each word as if he's practised for this moment.

The swallows twitter from their mud nest in the timbers.
 

It's done then
, he says, and turns his back to finish the season.

8 the chimney swift
(chaetura pelagica)

It's early evening and he's up the ladder, looking down the chimney to figure the obstruction, when a plume of swifts, sudden and soot-coloured, breaks

into flight.

(When that ladder tipped away from the house and I knew in my bones I was going over
I tell you time

                  
stood still)

His wrist bone snaps when he hits the ground, breaks

through skin.

Alone—Mary at choir practice, the kids grown and gone— he puts the ladder away with one arm, pens a note in childish left-handed writing, and walks to the hospital where he is a nurse (
a male nurse
, he always says), works six shifts a week.

(Good thing we sold that farm I guess, moved to town.)
 

Neighbourhood kids trail him, his bright

bone a silent piping in the failing sun.

9 the winter wren
(troglodytes troglodytes)

On the porch swing he tries to teach me the wren's song. My lips ache and my whistle is vanishing into the thin winter air. I can do the chickadee, the robin, the goldfinch and the sparrow but

                 
wrensong is slippery and insistent, more fishtail

than birdsong.

To have a grandfather is to be spellbound and unsettled, to be surrounded by languages you can't speak.

10 the scarlet tanager
(pirana olivacea)

When my parents' marriage ends my mother moves us to the outskirts of Brampton; our new house (along with forty- five others exactly like ours) crouches on a small circular suburban street called Tanager Square.

Peter Friesen comes to inspect, sees the high-fenced yard.

Postage stamp,
he mutters, and spits,
not enough room to grow a bloody thing. And it must of been a damn fool who named the place—you sure won't be seeing any tanagers

here.