House of Wings

by Betsy Byars

  “Twenty-one?”

  “Yes, twenty-one.”

  “I never heard of any crane getting to be twenty-one,” Sammy said. His grandfather shifted his weight but did not move toward the crane. “Fourteen maybe, or fifteen,” Sammy added, yielding a little on this one point, “but no crane that I knew ever got to be—”

  His grandfather took a step forward while Sammy was speaking, and a dry stick cracked beneath his foot. Abruptly the crane moved to the side. He walked with quick, jerking steps, and his head moved forward, held a little to the left. Then the crane turned his head around as if he were peering to see what had caused the noise. He hesitated. His head snapped higher. Then he began preening the feathers of his wing and back. He ran the feathers between his beak again and again in a quick nervous movement.

  “What’s he doing that for?” Sammy asked.

  “He’s trying to decide whether to run or fight. He’s scared.” Sammy’s grandfather was standing with one foot ahead of the other, waiting for the crane to settle down. “Some birds do like this—act funny when they get scared. You ever had a rooster?”

  “No,” Sammy said. He added quickly, “I could have had one if I’d wanted it but—”

  “If a rooster don’t know what to do in a bad situation—say, a strange animal shows up—well, the rooster won’t run, he’ll start going through the motions of eating. There won’t be a piece of food in sight and yet that old rooster will be pecking and eating as if his life depended on it. Some birds will start building a nest when they’re upset. Some birds will go to sleep.”

  “If it was me I’d run.”

  Sammy’s grandfather took a step forward. He said, “Just keep moving easy and talking quiet and don’t startle him.”

  “Why don’t he run now? You’re getting closer and closer. He must know you’re going to grab him.”

  “I don’t know for sure. There’s something wrong with him.” He hesitated, then added, “Anyway I hope he don’t run, because once he gets going he can outrun both of us, I can tell you that. My brother and I used to chase them cranes I was telling you about. We’d about kill ourselves running after them, and they would just keep striding along. They never even worked up a sweat.” He resettled his hat on his head. He took another silent step. “Still,” he added in a low voice, “there’s something wrong here.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m going to catch him and maybe we’ll find out.”

  “You going to eat him?” Sammy asked.

  His grandfather turned around and looked at Sammy. His brows were pulled low. He said, “I’m going to catch him because he can’t fly with that wing and it’s just a matter of time till he dies out here in the woods.”

  “What could get him though? Foxes couldn’t, or dogs. I bet nothing could. He could stab you all the way through the hand with that beak if he wanted to. Nothing could happen to that bird.”

  “He could starve to death or die of thirst. He could freeze if he lasts till winter.” His grandfather was still looking at Sammy. “If he gets weak, anything roaming the woods could get him.”

  “Huh!” Sammy said. “I’d like to see that.”

  “Listen, boy—”

  Sammy turned his head away with one sharp movement. When his grandfather called him “boy” the anger rose in him again. The memory of the chase washed over him. He looked down at the ground and then right into his grandfather’s eyes. “Anyway, I don’t care if he does die.”

  His grandfather seemed ready to add something about the dangers of life in the woods, but he stopped. For the first time he looked as if he had been hit by what Sammy had said. “You what?”

  “I don’t care if he does die,” Sammy repeated, glad to have hurt his grandfather at last. “He’s nothing but a bird.”

  His grandfather looked hard at him. “I’ll tell you something. Maybe you’re not worth telling nothing to, but I’m telling you this anyway.”

  “You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Sammy said. “I’m not interested.”

  “When I was about your size, I was good at one thing and that was rock throwing. It was the only talent I ever had. I could throw a rock.”

  “Anybody can do that. That’s nothing.” They faced each other and glared.

  “It was something, the way I done it,” his grandfather said. “I could throw and I could hit. I could hit anything I could see. I’m telling you it was a talent!” Angrily he wiped the ends of his mustache. He glanced at the crane and then said in a lower voice, “Well, there was a redbird that roosted under the eaves of our house that particular year, and every day I would watch her. To get to her nest, this bird would have to hover beside it for a second. Well, one day I got a rock—I don’t know to this day what made me do it—I got a rock and I waited by the corner of the house and when the bird came to her nest I aimed and I threw.” He looked at Sammy. “And the bird fell down to the ground.”

  “You got it with just one rock?” Sammy had thrown hundreds of rocks at birds and never hit one.

  “I hit it all right, hit and killed.” His grandfather drew his heavy brows down low over his eyes.

  “Killed it with one rock? It fell dead?”

  “Well, it was fluttering its wings a little as I ran over, but by the time I got there it was dead.” He wagged his head sadly. “I picked it up and I tell you, boy, I never felt any heavier weight than that dead bird. That bird was something, hear, and I didn’t find it out until I was standing there with it dead in my hand. There’s no such thing as ‘nothing but a bird.’ I learned that.”

  “Huh!”

  “There ain’t. You watch a bird in the air one minute, boy, and hold it lifeless in your hand the next, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. And I learned doubly hard. Because then, to make up for what I’d done, I took them three baby birds and tried to raise them. Those birds were no more than three or four days old. All they could do was squirm and yawn. They couldn’t even sit. You could still see the pink of their bodies.”

  “Did they live?”

  “I thought they was going to at first. I took the nest in the house and I started feeding them grasshoppers. All day long my brother and me combed the fields for grasshoppers. Every fifteen minutes those birds wanted grasshoppers.” He wiped his mustache. “Then one day one of the birds wouldn’t open its eyes and it stopped begging for food and that afternoon it died.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Well, one of them died too. I come in one morning and the nest was crawling with mites, and the birds, both of them, looked sick. I burned the nest and set the birds in a berry box, but one of them just got weaker and weaker and died. The last one lived to be set free, but I tell you one thing—I never threw a rock again.”

  When his grandfather finished Sammy straightened. He was disgusted with himself for listening, and this made his hatred for his grandfather sweep over him again. He jerked his head toward the crane. “Why should I care about a bird I never even saw before? He doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I’m telling you he should.”

  “And I’m telling you he don’t!” Sammy’s chin jutted forward and his head snapped up. The only thing that seemed different about them in that moment was that one was young and one was old. “I hope he does die.”

  His grandfather had an old dusty face and old dusty clothes, but his eyes, fixed on Sammy, were very bright. He said, “I don’t reckon you mean that.”

  “I do too mean it. Let him die.”

  Behind his grandfather, the crane took one step toward the bushes. He tried to move through them, but the foliage was too thick. He remained pressed into the leaves.

  “Boy, you don’t—”

  “Don’t you tell me what I mean and what I don’t mean! I wish that old crane would just fall down dead right this minute.” Sammy glanced down, and his eyes focused on a rock by his foot. With his eyes blazing he picked up the rock and threw it at the crane. The rock
missed, but the crane jerked his head around and tried to run forward into the bushes again.

  Sammy’s grandfather seemed to get a little taller. He said, “Well, you just go on to Detroit, hear? Just head on out of here. Keep on running as long as you want to. Ain’t nobody going to try and stop you this time.” He made a sharp shooing gesture with both hands. “Go on. You don’t belong here.”

  Sammy stood there. He was startled by the violence of his grandfather’s reaction. He stepped back and said, “I will go. You think I won’t, but I will. I’ll show you.”

  “Well, go on then. Show me. What are you waiting for?”

  Sammy stuck out his chin and did not answer.

  “Don’t keep me standing here all day. I got work to do. I got to get this crane home one way or another. I got to save this crane’s life. Get going!” His grandfather looked at him, his eyes burning in his old face. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m not waiting for anything.”

  “Then go! Get away from here!” And then he spoke to Sammy as if he were an animal. “Git!” he said.

  Sammy stayed as if he were rooted to the ground. His grandfather was wilder than his clothes now, wilder than the woods. He threw his hands into the air. “Git!” he cried again.

  DECISION

  “IT WOULD SERVE YOU right if I did go,” Sammy said, baring his teeth. He continued to stand where he was. He put his hands on his hips and then he let them slide down into the pockets of his pants. He could feel his belongings—his knife, his fighting rocks, some rubber bands, a ring he had found on the road one day, a magnifying glass advertising Roger’s Fertilizer, and some hazel nuts. They were things from home and Sammy felt surprised to find them there now. They were strange objects.

  His grandfather was still staring at him. Sammy looked back at his grandfather, his chin out. In his pockets each of his hands clutched a rock. He kept these rocks in case of a fight. They fitted his hands perfectly. He could beat anybody with these rocks in his hands. He took his hands out of his pockets, the rocks as tight in them as seeds in a peach, and put his fists up a little.

  “Git!” his grandfather said. He was terrible to behold. He seemed to darken like a thunder cloud. His voice trembled with power. “Git!”

  Sammy thought of a movie he had once seen on television. There was a huge statue towering over a tropical village and an earthquake had started. The huge statue had trembled and shaken and twisted, and then it had fallen forward, crushing the whole village and splitting the earth.

  Sammy took one step backward. Still looking at his grandfather, he took another step. He kept doing this until he came up against a tree and then he stopped. He waited against the tree, the rocks getting a little looser in his hands.

  He waited to see what his grandfather would say next, but his grandfather’s face was set as firmly as if he would never speak again. His eyes were shadowed by his heavy brows so Sammy couldn’t see what they were like, but he knew they were set and hard too.

  There was a long moment in which Sammy and his grandfather looked at each other. Sammy said, “Why do you want me to go so bad anyway? You trying to get rid of me?” His voice had a strange sound. He clutched his rocks tighter again. “You can’t make me go if I don’t want to. Nobody can make me do anything!”

  His grandfather kept looking at Sammy, but his face got softer. He lifted his shoulders a little and then turned away. He said, “Well, if you ain’t going, then come on and help me with this crane.”

  Sammy hesitated. The desire to show his grandfather that he would go was strong, but the walk to Detroit seemed long and lonely. He was tired. The anger began to go out of him, not quickly, as it had his grandfather, but slowly, jerkily, bit by bit.

  His grandfather was moving toward the crane as if he had already forgotten the trouble with Sammy. Sammy said to his back, “I didn’t say I wasn’t going.” His grandfather did not answer and Sammy said, “It would serve you right if I did go. It would serve you right if I got lost and the police came.” He said this in a lower tone of voice, mumbling the words, winding down. “Then you’d have some explaining to do.”

  “Hush up.”

  “Well, you would.” He hesitated, then to add weight to what he had said, he added, “A boy I know got lost that way and they blamed it on the grandfather. They would even have put the grandfather in jail if the boy had wanted them to.” The thought of his grandfather being led away to jail, the thought of saying generously, “Oh, let him go free,” was comforting to Sammy.

  “Hush up.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Hush. It ain’t.”

  “Well, it could be.”

  “If you’re staying, hush.” His grandfather smoothed his long, ragged mustache and turned away.

  Sammy had the feeling that there was nothing he could say now that would get any reaction other than that absent-minded “Hush.” He hesitated, then left the tree and started walking along behind his grandfather, shadow-like. As he walked, he put his fighting rocks back into his pockets.

  The crane began preening his feathers again and then he stopped and lifted his head. There was blood on his breast, and Sammy said, “It looks like he’s bleeding. See, right there.” He pointed with one dirty finger to the line of stained feathers.

  “He flew into something probably. It’s unusual to see a crane around here, so something must have happened, something went wrong.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, he could have been on his way north, to Michigan maybe, migrating, and got blown off course. We’ve had some bad storms this spring, one right after another. Then he could have got crippled flying into something and here he is.” He shook his head. “I expect there’s lots of birds that get lost migrating. Thirty sets out and only twenty-eight makes it.”

  The crane twisted his long neck around as they moved closer. Sammy’s grandfather began to rub his hands together anxiously. He said, “I never caught a bird before in my life, not any kind of bird. I’ve had birds living with me the best part of my life, but I never went out and caught one.”

  “How did you get them though?”

  “Did you see that owl in my house?”

  “In your house back there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I didn’t see any owl. He was flying in my mom’s room though. She couldn’t get to sleep because he was—”

  “Well, I found that owl in my stove one morning.”

  “In your stove?” Sammy paused. “I never heard of any owl getting in a stove.”

  “Yes, in my stove. The owl got in the stove pipe one night. The pipe was busted on top, and the owl probably fell out of the oak tree and just landed in the pipe and then tumbled on down into my stove. It was just a baby. Anyway, I was sitting there one night and I heard a plop. I didn’t pay much attention to it, because I didn’t hear anything more, just that one plop. It stayed in my mind though and the next morning I opened up my stove and there was the owl. He was covered with ashes, and I tell you he just looked as disgusted as anything. He looked like a mad old woman. Well, I took him out of the stove and fed him, and that’s how I come to have an owl.” He paused and looked again at the crane. “Only I never had to catch one.” He kept rubbing his hands together.

  “If it was me, I’d just rush up and grab.”

  “He ain’t scared of us so maybe we can just ease up.” His grandfather finished rubbing his hands and both of them looked at the crane.

  The woods around them were quiet and it was beginning to get hot. Sammy felt lightheaded from hunger and the heat. His arms and legs were tingling. He suddenly thought that he would like to lie down in the shade and rest before doing anything about the crane.

  He noticed that his grandfather, strong as an old tree, was starting to move closer. Apparently his grandfather never got hot or tired or hungry. “Just don’t make any sharp quick movements. That’s the main thing,” his grandfather said.

  Sammy thought he could not ma
ke a sharp quick movement if his life depended on it. He said, “I’ll try not to.” He took another step along with his grandfather, putting his feet in his grandfather’s footprints.

  The leaves of the trees overhead began to move with a sudden breeze, but below, where Sammy was, the air was as hot and still as an attic. A gnat flew around his face and Sammy brushed it away.

  His grandfather turned his grizzled face to Sammy. He said, “Well, we might as well do something, even if it’s wrong. We can’t count on him standing there forever.”

  “No,” Sammy said.

  His grandfather wiped his hands on his jacket. Sammy could see the intensity, the purpose in the set of his grandfather’s shoulders, and he knew that if by some terrible chance the crane started to run away, his grandfather would run after him. His grandfather would run for the rest of this day and into the night if necessary. The crane would not get away. His grandfather could run for a week, a month, a year.

  “Try to get him on the first grab,” Sammy suggested. He thought that his grandfather would expect him to run along, to chase the crane until he dropped with fatigue. Sammy thought that would be about ten steps.

  “I’ll get him,” his grandfather said, “one way or another.”

  And Sammy said tiredly to himself, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  THE CAPTURE

  HIS GRANDFATHER TOOK ANOTHER step toward the crane. Sammy went along, keeping right at his grandfather’s elbow. The closer they got, the bigger the crane looked and the sharper the beak. Sammy said, “He sure is big for a crane.” He looked up at his grandfather. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  His grandfather shook his head. “I seen a whooping crane at a zoo in Louisiana one time and it was about as tall as me. It would make two of that one.”

  “Yeah, but that was a whooping crane,” Sammy said quickly. “This is big for a regular crane.”

  “A sandhill crane.” His grandfather looked beyond the crane into the trees. He seemed to want to put off the actual capture of the crane as long as possible. He said, “I remember I got myself a bag of salted peanuts that day and the whooping crane came up to the wire fence and I threw him peanuts and he caught them in the air. A lady that was standing by told me that whooping crane would eat almost anything you threw him—hotdogs, hamburgers, french fries. Just toss it and he’d catch it. You don’t see many of them whooping cranes any more.”