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Wounded Birds

Allison Baggott-Rowe, M.A.

    I felt the thump before I heard it. A deadened, muffled splat against the front-facing window. Putting down my newspaper, I crept over the cream-colored carpet to the front door. I peered out onto the veranda and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The sprinkler was spritzing the azaleas while my husband, Arthur, was at work. His mother was fond of azaleas, he had told me on our first date. But he had never kept a garden.
    Turning the brass knob with my right hand, I pressed my left fingertips flat against the windowpane and craned my head out of the doorjamb to scan the length of the porch. A little black bundle lay curled in a heap under the potted begonias. Arthur’s mother, Martha, did not like begonias.
    I could feel the bile creeping up my throat as I looked at the dead thing, willing it to be a pile of mulch or a disgusting hairball spat up by the neighbor’s cat, Missy. But it wasn’t. It was a bird.
    Before I could pop my head back inside the safety of our two-story colonial, I heard the most perfectly horrible noise.
    It cheeped.
    Or tried to.
    Oh God, I thought to myself, it isn’t dead yet.
    It was only pushing one o’ clock now and Arthur would not be home for hours. Who could I call to get rid of this almost dead bird in the middle of the day?
    It cheeped again, the grotesque little monster, and an involuntary shiver ran up my spine.
    Someone was going to see this pitiful thing and me looking even more pitiful staring at it.
    I closed the door and bolted it. I chastised myself, knowing full well that birds could not open locked doors. All the same, best to bolt the deadlock too. Moving back to the sofa I picked up the paper again and continued the column on “Mini-Home Efficiency in the Midwest” in the Arts and Leisure section that Eloise had recommended to me last week when we visited with Martha for Sunday supper.
    Eloise was another resident of Oak Hills Senior Care Center. Unlike Martha, she had not been moved to the memory unit yet. It was really only a matter of time, poor thing.
    “Perhaps that will give us something to talk about next week,” she offered as a kind suggestion, when the conversation had faltered after Martha had removed each of the begonia stems from the small, home-grown bouquet we had brought. By the time the staff had brought out the differently colored Jell-O cups, brown and green twigs adorned the communal dining room table like discarded garnishes.
    “Really too kind of you, dear,” Martha had said, that faraway fog glazing her hyacinth blue eyes. It was not her fault that Lewy-body dementia ran in Arthur’s family. It had only been a matter of time and when she had left the gas on overnight, we knew it was important to move closer and find her a more permanent situation. Her decay had been much faster than either of us could have predicted, just tragic. No sooner had we spoken with her doctor and been accepted to Oak Hills than she needed a bed on the memory floor. It did not leave much time for trivial things like meeting the new neighbors or keeping up with the few friends we had made with our last migration for Arthur’s job to Sacramento. Other work wives like Nancy, who was back in chemotherapy again. On the Friday before we drove the moving van out for the last time I had brought her favorite meat and lasagna casserole. She had been resting at the time and so I left it with the day nurse they had hired when she didn’t have enough church friends to bridge the gap.
    With Arthur having such a demanding role in sales it was really all too predictable that we would find ourselves in a constant state of flying north, then south, for a few years with the inevitable corporate changes and promotions. Arthur would joke that it was simply an occupational hazard. We would circle back in a migratory pattern that made starting over the only constant. Poor Arthur worked such long hours it was a wonder he found time to come home at all, let alone be such an attentive son.
    My reverie ended with a strangled squeak.
    Cheep.
    It sounded exhausted.
    As I skimmed the article on downsizing to bare essentials, I decided to make a concrete plan for dinner. Perhaps we could have those salads that Martha had been looping back around to every five minutes last week. Arthur had feigned interest while I took meticulous mental notes each time she came back to the word “arugula” like a newly discovered planet.
    Cheep. Chee-eep.
    By a quarter past, my nerves couldn’t take it anymore and I strode back into the foyer, rooting around in the closet. I found just the thing I was looking for—the empty Chad’s shoebox from our cancelled party two weeks ago. Taking a deep breath I unlocked the deadbolt, removed the lock, and turned the brass knob for a second time.
    The bedraggled, black ball had rolled closer to the front stoop, and I resisted the urge to kick it or just gag.
    Not looking directly at the wet, crumpled beast I coerced it into the box with the lid, pushing and batting at it like a hockey goalie with gloves that did not fit. Eventually the miserable thing lay still in the box, and I covered it with the top, crossing back into the living room.
    Small scratching sounds penetrated the utter quiet of the sitting room as I lowered myself back to the sofa and removed the lid.
    The black wings were crumpled into some broken origami pattern resembling nothing in particular. The protruding yellow beak opened and closed a few times, no noise now emanating from the little creature’s throat. It looked wet, but maybe it was just a bit flustered. It probably was dazed from hitting the window. Eloise had the most awful story about a crow that flew straight into her living room once when the pool boy left the sliding door open. Flew right into the lavatory and they closed it in there for two weeks just to make sure it wouldn’t come back.
    I contemplated leaving the shoebox in out half bath down the hall on the first floor and thought better of it. After all, this one was so very small.
    As its mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, I found myself driven to put something inside.
    What did birds eat? Worms? Where could I even get a worm for this bird?
    People kept birds as pets, there must be pet food for birds that wasn’t so horrific.
    As I inspected the bird, I found that it was just the left wing that was crinkled up under the little orange feet. A broken wing. Dear me, it probably had already missed its passage with fellow flyers for the south.
    Well, a broken wing was something I could do something about.
    Marching into the kitchen I attached two toothpicks and some medical tape to the wing, straightening it out to full wingspan.
    Cheep. Cheep. Cheep.
    “Oh, shut up,” I said, “You’re welcome, by the way.”
    The wretched thing was hopping around as if to show off its new one-wing salute.
    I took the Cadillac out and bought some of the bird seed meant for outdoor birds, not those fancy exotics that hippies kept in fringe basements. I sprinkled the seeds and what-have-you in the bottom of the shoebox and waited for the bird to begin chowing down. Apparently, he was shy.
    I poked some holes in the top of the box. I had seen it in commercials for pets before...and I brought in some leaves and grass from the outside with a twig I pulled from the begonia bush. They would just end up on the Oak Hills dining room table, anyway.
    Now the box was homey.
    Arthur came home and told me about his day over dinner but had a business call that kept him from finishing his arugula salad.
    I decided to wait to tell him about the bird until he had made some progress and stashed the shoe box in our second bedroom to keep him from hearing anything before he left for work the next morning.
    After cleaning up from breakfast, I carried my cup of coffee into the bedroom and brought out the box.
    The bird was on its side, its chest rising and falling, beak half open. It looked more dead than when I thought it had been.
    The toothpicks lay splintered on the bottom of the box, medical tape sticking to one of its orange feet that had gotten stuck to the bottom of the box and detached from the bird’s leg.
    When I called the vet’s office, the assistant told me to leave the bird where it was outside, that it would fly away on its own if I didn’t bring it inside. Silly girl, she had never rescued a bird before. What did she know.
    I went into the yard in search of worms.
    My pumps dug out little divots in the grass and the morning dew fogged up my glasses so after looking once or twice up and down the street I lowered myself to my hands and knees. I pawed the earth for anything that looked juicy and snatched at pill bugs when worms did not emerge.
    Dirt and grass clinging to the knees of my corduroy skirt I cupped my hand full of squished pill bugs and insects over the shoebox and shook them loose before letting the wibblies out through my spine and fingers.
    The footless, flightless bird looked up at me with hardened eyes. A tongue moving ever so slightly in the half open beak as a pill bug’s backside landed by his nostril.
    Ungrateful little beast, I decided, storming upstairs to change into cleaner clothes.
    He’s lucky to have me watching him.
    The shower and new clothes revived me as I heard Arthur’s car pull into the drive. I smiled as the casserole timer dinged in the kitchen like something straight out of the Mary Tyler Moore show.
    After kissing him hello and taking his hat and coat, I went to check on my patient in the second bedroom. One of the pill bugs had been crawling for his mouth the last time I had looked, and he had rolled to his opposite side.
    I opened the box and the black, beady eyes stared back at me, lifeless. Half a pill bug army-crawled over the right eyeball, not even caring to step an inch sideways onto the feathers of the spiteful vermin now laying in the scattered, browning begonia stems.
    Ungrateful, I thought to myself, shoving the lid on top and smushing the whole box into the trashcan, the side buckling in with a crunch. I should have just shut him in the half bath and saved us both the trouble.

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