Home from the Vinyl Cafe (15 page)

Twenty minutes later, Dave was still trying to explain things to the neighbors standing on his lawn.

“It was announced on some birders’ hotline,” Dave was saying, when there was a sudden commotion at the Turlingtons’ house.

Dave stopped talking, and everyone turned just as the Turlingtons’ front door flew open and the entire Turlington family burst out of the house. They had wrapped themselves in a large white sheet and were moving down their sidewalk like a bunch of Shriners in a horse costume. They all had their heads low, even Bert, who was leading the way, waving his hands in the air and screaming, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Arthur, sitting at Dave’s side, began to bark furiously and pull on his leash.

That night at eleven-thirty, Dave was standing on a ladder in his kitchen, tacking a sheet over the sliding glass door in the kitchen.

“It’ll be over soon,” he said to Morley. “There can’t be that many birders in the city.”

The phone rang at midnight.

Dave and Morley stared at each other.

Dave picked it up.

“Yes?” he said.

There was a pause, and he said it again, “Yes.”

Then again.

“Yes.”

And again.

Then he said, “You’re welcome,” and he hung up.

“Who was that?” said Morley.

“Some guy from Halifax asking if the bird is still here.”

“Halifax,” said Morley.

“He said he’d be up on the weekend. He said he heard it was a mega-twitch.”

The next morning Arthur began barking at six-thirty. When Dave opened the door to pick up the paper, two men passed him on their way down his driveway toward his backyard.

“Morning,” they said in unison.

“Morning,” said Dave.

It rained on Friday. One of those unpleasant February rainstorms.

When Dave lifted the sheet in the kitchen to look outside, there was a group of seven men standing in his driveway staring back at him balefully. They were looking at his coffee. He let the sheet drop. “It’s not my fault it’s raining,” he muttered.

Saturday morning at nine-thirty, when Dave came downstairs, there were already fifteen people outside. Sam was heading out the front door with a hammer and a large piece of cardboard.

“Where are you going?” said Dave.

Sam stopped. As he flipped over his sign, he dropped the hammer. SEE THE BURD, it said in large hand-painted letters. Under the writing was an arrow that Dave assumed would soon point down his driveway.

“We’re going to sell hot chocolate,” said Sam.

By ten o’clock there were close to a hundred people milling around Dave’s house. Arthur was beside himself. He spent the morning throwing himself around the house, barking from window to window. By eleven o’clock he was getting hoarse.

“Shut up, Arthur,” said Dave.

Even though all the birders were within twenty yards of the bird feeder, they had ringed it with binoculars and telescopes, many on tripods. One man was peering through a camera with a lens as big as a toilet bowl.

At noon, when Dave stepped outside with fresh worms, he heard someone whisper, “Feeding time.” He sensed the crowd stirring. He felt like an aquarium showman. Maybe, he thought sourly, he should climb onto the feeder and hold the worms between his lips so the bird could pluck them out on the fly.

After lunch Dave watched a woman pushing a man up his driveway in a wheelchair. The man had an IV drip in his arm. The couple were arguing. When she got him to the end of the driveway, the woman stormed to her car and drove away without looking back.

Early on Sunday a man arrived in an airport limousine, ran into the backyard, saw the bird, jumped back in the limousine, and headed back in the direction he came from. He never even closed his door. The limousine never shut off its motor.

“Not unusual,” said an older man near the end of the day. Dave recognized him as one of the group who had been standing in his driveway the morning it rained. He was wearing sneakers and a rumpled canvas hat. He gestured over his shoulder where the limousine had been.

“We call them twitchers,” he said. “When they get close to whatever bird it is they’re trying to add to their list, and they aren’t sure if they’re going to see it or not, they start to twitch.”

It was getting chilly. Only this man and Dave were left in the driveway.

“They can pretty much tell as they drive up the street,” said the old man. “If everyone is looking through their binoculars, then they know they’re all right. They can relax. But if people are walking around … that’s when they start to twitch. Because they know as soon as they get out of their car, someone is going to say, ‘She was here two minutes ago, but you missed her.’ ”

“You watch her long enough,” said Dave, “and you get to know her habits.”

“She likes to fly in from the right,” said the old man.

“Out of the hedge,” said Dave. “She comes every fifteen minutes or so.”

As they stood watching, the little bird flicked out of the hedge and landed on the feeder. She looked around rapidly, knocked back a few worms, and flew off.

“She feeds more in the morning,” said Dave.

The old man nodded.

The bird flew back.

“This is a crippling view,” said the man.

“Would you like to come in?” said Dave. “Have a coffee?”

The man held out his hand. “My name is Norm,” he said.

It was like that for three weeks. But instead of trailing off, it got worse. Someone from one of the television stations did a feature on Dave’s bird. The following weekend, when Morley was coming home from grocery-shopping, she was stopped by a policeman a block from her home. “You can’t
go down that street,” said the cop. “Some idiot put up signs all over the place about a rare bird.”

“But I live down there,” said Morley.

The cop waved her through. There were cars parked everywhere and people walking in the middle of the road.

Sam was standing at the front door. He was wearing a pair of oven mitts that made his hands look ridiculously large.

“We dropped a pot of hot chocolate on the stove,” he said. “It put the flame out, and the stove won’t go on again. It smells of gas.”

That was the weekend when people who weren’t even interested in birds started coming. They wanted to be there because they had heard a lot of other people had been there, and they didn’t want to miss anything.

One of the men who had come in from the suburbs chewed Dave out. “It doesn’t look so special to me,” he said. “I drove all the way from Brampton. It’s not like it’s an eagle or anything. I’ll bet that bird has never killed anything in its life.”

The second time that happened, Dave called the hotline and said, “The bird has gone. Could you take it off your list, please.”

Then he went outside and took down Sam’s sign and put up a new one. THE BIRD HAS GONE, it read.

That was at the end of March. The bird hadn’t left, of course. Dave continued to feed her three times a day. He spent over two hundred dollars on mealworms during the winter. He came to know her well.

She was a woodland bird in the middle of the city, way off course, and she had landed at
his
feeder. He felt proud that he had seen her through the frigid months, that he had kept her alive. He felt affection for her. He felt that she belonged to him somehow. He knew this was sentimentality. He knew the
bird didn’t feel anything about him. If anything, he was just another intruder in the backyard, and God knows there were enough of those.

But on that fresh, soft morning in May, when Dave slipped into his backyard and counted the worms and found none missing, he knew she was gone, and he felt sad—although he realized the bird had probably migrated and that was the best thing for her.

Some of the birders told him they thought she had been blown north in a storm. But the old guy, Norm, who had come in for coffee, said he didn’t accept that theory. He said sometimes something happens to a bird’s wiring and it shows up in the wrong place. He said that birds who show up in wrong places have a way of doing it again.

So Dave sat in bed with the unread paper beside him early on that quiet Saturday morning and wondered if maybe he would see his bird again in the fall. He imagined that whatever else she had felt, she had felt a sense of home. She could have left anytime she wanted. And now she had. Just like everyone who has ever had a home, she had followed that universal urge to leave.

Dave picked up the paper. Then he put it down and got out of bed and stared out the window. He was thinking of the mysteries of migration. He was thinking that of all the mysteries, maybe the one true thing we know and share with the animals was this sense of seeking, finding, leaving, but above all, of returning home.

               
I
t was the mulberry spring. The spring the mulberries were fatter and juicier than anyone remembered. The sidewalk under the mulberry tree on the corner was stained deep purple for weeks. The birds got fat. Three times, Morley sent Sam out with a chair and a bowl. Three times in two weeks, she baked mulberry pie, the juices bubbling over the piecrust like wine.

It was the spring when rain only came at night. The spring of damp earth and blue skies. The spring of fat worms.