Heart with Joy

by Steve Cushman

  That night, while Dad went out to buy some new running shoes, I made dinner, roasted chicken with potatoes and carrots. I considered telling my father that I’d seen him out running but didn’t.

  Roasted chicken was pretty easy to cook. You just rubbed a mixture of rosemary, thyme, and cracked black pepper all over the skin, which I’d already rubbed down with olive oil. Then the chicken went in the oven at 350, for two hours. It was one of the meals, along with pot roast or manicotti, Mom would make on Sundays.

  As we ate dinner, my father said, “Where’s the wishbone?”

  “Up on the windowsill.” Mom always played the wishbone game with me, but I couldn’t remember the last time Dad had. He usually just sat there and watched us.

  ”You ready?” He held one side of the bone. I grabbed the other. He closed his eyes tight and said, “Ready, set, go.”

  The thin bone snapped. I had three quarters of it, but wondered what he would have wished for if he’d won. Would he wish for Mom to be back here, with us, tonight? I assumed so because that is what I wished for. I wished my father talked to me like Mom used to, instead of walking by and nodding as if I were supposed to understand what that meant. I wished my parents were sitting next to each other right now, on our couch, watching a movie, splitting a bowl of popcorn. And I wished a bird would fly down and land on my hand and peck at the crumbs I offered.

  But why was my father smiling at me from across the table? Was it because he knew Mom was coming back soon? Or was it because he knew I’d win the game and he was trying to give me a sliver of

  hope? I wasn’t sure, but that was okay. It would have to be. He held his hand out and I gave him my broken bone. He walked to the garbage can and threw it away.

  10

  The next morning, I walked over to Old Lady Peters’, carrying the pot I’d found on the side of the road. I’d scrubbed it twice yesterday, so it looked practically new. Lucky met me at the gate. The table was already laid out with milk and tea, a half dozen sugar cookies. Old Lady Peters was on her knees in the yard. My first thought was that maybe she’d fallen, but then I realized she was pulling weeds.

  When she heard me, she stood up slowly and started walking over to the table. “Morning, young man.” She sat down across from me. “What do you have there?”

  I set the pot on the table. “I found it on the side of the road and thought you might be able to use it.”

  She lifted the pot to examine it. “Someone was throwing it away?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The world is full of waste,” she said, setting it back on the table between us. She poured tea for her and milk for me. I leaned back in my chair and drank the milk. It was good and cold.

  A sparrow landed on the table, opening and closing its mouth. He hopped toward me, then stopped and turned back to Old Lady Peters. He hopped up to her, took a bit of the cookie and flew off into the shrubs. Then a little white and grey bird, about the size of a sparrow, with a black head, flew down and took another piece of cookie from her hand.

  “What kind of bird is that?” While I knew some of the most common birds, like cardinals, blue jays, doves, and sparrows, this was a type of bird I’d seen before but didn’t know what it was called.

  “That’s a chickadee,” she said as it flew away.

  “How do you get them to eat out of your hand?”

  “Oh, much practice, about sixty years worth. Only certain birds will do it—chickadees, titmouse, the rare sparrow. But you get them in your yard, get them used to the feeder food and then you take it away for a couple days, then offer it again, this time in your hand. It takes a while, but with a little patience you could do it.”

  “Was Simon mad about me being over here?”

  She laughed. “Who knows? Sometimes I think he gets mad when he comes over here on Sunday and finds me still breathing.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “He’s your son. I’m sure he loves you.”

  She smiled at me. “So where is your mother? I haven’t seen her in a while, haven’t smelled those cigarettes of hers drifting into my backyard.”

  I wasn’t sure how much to tell her. I didn’t think it was any of her business.

  “She’s down in Florida, working at her parents’ motel. The manager quit. She’s there until they hire someone else, and she’s finishing up her novel. It’s going to be published when she’s done with it.”

  “Good for her,” she said. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something else but stopped herself.

  I didn’t want to talk about my mother anymore, not today, so I walked out into the yard and got to work filling the feeders and birdbaths.

  As I worked, I could hear her behind me calling out bird names: “Mourning dove, cardinal.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m identifying the birds who are talking.”

  “Talking?”

  “The bird calls. I hear a bird and can tell what kind it is without looking up. It’s a habit, a way for me to stay in practice, identifying them. Also, I like to do it while I’m out here working because that way if I can’t see the bird right away, and don’t feel like craning my neck to look for it, I can put a mental image of the bird in my head. It’s always good to keep your brain working.”

  “So you just hear the bird and know what kind it is?” I asked.

  She nodded and pulled a fat worm from the ground and tossed it onto the brick path. It didn’t take long before a robin flew down from one of the trees, picked the worm up and flew off again.

  “I better get going,” I said.

  “Do you want to see the sparrow’s eggs before you go?”

  “Can we?”

  “Bring that bucket over here.”

  I carried the bucket over to the birdhouse.

  “Climb on up and have a look,” she said.

  As I climbed up on the bucket, I stood a foot or so above the nest. I expected the father bird to fly down and pop me on the head, maybe drive his beak into my temple. I could see the headline: Teenage Boy Killed by Angry Bird.

  I lifted the top of the birdhouse. There were four eggs, white with brown specks, sitting on what looked like a bed of pine needles. Each egg was about the size of a large grape.

  “Cool,” I said, because no other word seemed right.

  “Cool indeed,” she said. “Let an old lady have a look.”

  I stepped down and held her arms as she climbed up on the bucket. It probably wasn’t a very good idea for her to be climbing up on this narrow bucket, but I didn’t think it would do any good to tell her that. Plus, she’d probably done it hundreds of times before.

  “They are coming along nicely.”

  “How much longer until they hatch?”

  “A few more days, I’d say.”

  “I better go or I’ll be late for school.”

  “Well get moving then,” she said.

  I laughed. My father had left for work almost an hour earlier, but still I peeked around the corner to make sure no one was around.

  11

  On Friday morning, I found Old Lady Peters at her patio table, sipping tea. After saying hi, I walked over and grabbed the bucket of bird food. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To work.”

  “What’s your rush?”

  “School starts in an hour.”

  “We don’t work without nourishment around here. I don’t want you passing out on me. Then I’ll have to call an ambulance and it will wake up half the neighborhood and the next thing you know people will wonder what I’m doing working you half to death.”

  I had no idea what she was rambling on about. I sat down at the table. There were three cookies and a tall glass of milk on my side of the table. As I picked up a cookie, a sparrow landed on the table in front of her. She held a cookie out and the bird took it. When another sparrow landed on the table, I held my cookie out but the bird flew away.

  “Is that the same bird every time?”

 
; She shrugged. “Maybe. Do you hear that?” I could hear a bunch of bird calls and didn’t know which one she was talking about.

  “Right there,” she said, pointing at a little grey bird on the ground beneath the closest feeder. “It sounds like a cat, but it’s actually a bird. A catbird. Funny name for a bird but fitting.”

  As the bird walked around, I listened closer. It did sort of sound like a cat. Lucky walked between my feet. “How old is Lucky?”

  “Twelve or thirteen, I can’t remember. Got him when he was eight weeks old.”

  I wondered if I should ask her anything else. She must have sensed this because she said, “Young man, it is okay to just sit here and not talk, enjoy the birds in the garden. That’s the best part of it.”

  At that moment, I knew why I had started to look forward to coming over here. Like my mother, Old Lady Peters made me feel comfortable and acted as if she actually enjoyed my company and, despite the fact she served me milk and cookies, talked to me like I was an adult. Plus, helping her gave me something to do and I could pretend, for a little while, that when I walked home my mother would be sitting there, waiting for me.

  “So what is it with you and these birds?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re only birds.”

  “Only birds?” She raised a hand to her chest, pretending to be shocked.

  “You know what I mean. They’re everywhere. It’s not like they’re special.”

  “Oh but they are,” she said and smiled. “Take those sparrows, for example.” She lifted her hand to the yard. There were at least ten out there at the feeders. “They were brought over from England. One pair was released in New York City in 1850 and now they are all over the country.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Anything is possible, Julian. Two beget four, who beget eight, who beget sixteen. Science and math and poetry. That’s what birds are. I’ve spent a lifetime watching them and reading about them. I started with a basic bird book with pictures of birds and their names. I’d see a bird and match it to the picture and identify the type. You do that a while until you know them by sight. Then you watch them and open your ears and listen and you learn what sounds they make.

  “Each type of bird is different with unique calls and songs. And once you can name birds by sound, you start to read about their habits and how they got their names. The more you learn about them the more you want to know. Some paleontologists believe they are direct descendants of dinosaurs.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start slow, notice the common birds, your cardinals or robins or sparrows. Learn a couple new ones each week and before you know it you’ll recognize twenty different species, then fifty. I’ll look and see if I have an old guide book lying around I could let you borrow.”

  “But I still don’t get why you like them so much,” I said.

  “Let me say this. Everyone should have something they are passionate about, something that fills their heart with joy. Those who don’t, I’d say, are missing something. For my son, it is money. He makes a lot of money and he likes his money and I imagine him—though it saddens me—reading over his bank statements each night before bed with a gleam in his eyes as if they were some sort of fairy tale, maybe even stuffing a crisp hundred-dollar bill under his pillow for safe keeping. For my late husband, it was numbers. He was an accountant and loved to sit with his calculator and his numbers. He wasn’t interested so much in the fact that he dealt in currency, only that when he put his numbers together they equaled zero. My mother loved to watch clothes flap about on a clothesline during a windy day.

  “For me, it has always been birds. The summer I first discovered their magic I was six. My parents went on vacation and left my brother and me at my uncle’s in Arizona. A man named Frank the Crank lived in his neighborhood. He was a strange man. A hundred and ten degrees and he would walk down the street in a big, grey jacket, pulling a cart behind him. I still to this day don’t have a clue where he was going. But there was a big, wooden box in his cart.”

  Old Lady Peters picked up her cup of tea and took two sips before continuing her story: “So one day, I was riding a bike up and down the block when I turned the corner and he was walking along, pulling his cart, humming. He was older than my parents, but not real old, nowhere near as old as I am now. When I said hi, he didn’t move; it was like I scared him.”

  As she told the story, I could hear birds flying around, singing their songs out in her yard and the shrubs all around us. I had started to notice, over the last week, how they didn’t all sound the same: some sounded happy, others excited or mad.

  “I asked him what he had in the box and he said he’d show me for a dollar. I told him I didn’t have a dollar, and he said I better not tell anyone that he’d let me see for free.” She laughed and shook her head. “That’s probably the whole reason I fell in love with birds. I was so excited to see what he had in that darn box. He said, ‘you ready?’ and I said I was, then he lifted the lid on one side of the box and there was this huge white bird with a flat face. A barn owl. Of course, I didn’t know what kind it was back then. The bird jumped up on the edge of the box and stared at me with big black eyes as if considering whether or not I’d make a good lunch.

  “Frank let me pet the bird. Its claws were as big as my hand, and it kept its eyes on me the whole time. After a couple minutes, he put the owl away and opened the other part of the box. Three sparrows flew out, a foot or two in the air. They hung there, hovering for a few seconds because he’d tied string around their legs. He let them fly like that for a few seconds and then pulled them back in one at a time, like a kid pulling in a balloon or kite.

  “Seeing those birds changed me. Maybe because it was something unexpected on an otherwise boring summer day, in some place I didn’t want to be, some realization that beauty was all around me. I don’t know. Now, if I saw someone with birds in a box like that I would say it was cruel. But back then I didn’t. It changed my life. I started looking for birds and the funny thing is the more I looked, the more I found.

  “When I taught, I always kept a feeder or two outside my window, hanging from the limb of a tree. I did it for those days when the students weren’t paying attention or when I’d gone over the same point a dozen times and they just weren’t getting it. I would look out there and see a bird. Maybe it was a cardinal, or maybe a junco in winter, or even a chickadee, but it would buoy my spirits and get me through. There is nothing more beautiful than a bird taking flight. On my wedding day, I stared out the church window, watching a male cardinal feed a female in a maple tree. Breastfeeding Simon, I would look out his nursery window and see birds. They have always been there for me.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “So what about you, Julian. What fills your heart with joy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “That’s okay. You’re still young. You’ll find it. What about your parents, what fills their hearts with joy?”

  “For Mom,” I said. “It would be her writing.” As far back as I could remember she was at that typewriter everyday. Whenever we’d go on vacation, she would be okay for the first day or two, but after that she’d get fidgety, sometimes snapping at me or Dad, and she would stay that way until she got home and started typing again. Then she would be fine. It was like she needed to write. It was part of her.

  “And your father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s running. I’ve seen him trotting out of your yard a lot lately.”

  “He’s training for a marathon. I don’t think it’s running though. He’s only been doing it a couple weeks.”

  “You ever considered running with him?” she asked.

  I remembered Mom saying the same thing. “Not really.”

  She shrugged. “It might give you a chance to learn something about him. It’s amazing what we can learn about people if we just ask. But enough of this talk. You’ve got to go to
school and I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Peters,” I said.

  She winked at me and walked to her porch door, leading to the house. After checking that the coast was clear, I walked back to my house.

  12

  As my father pushed the grocery cart up to cash register number five, I spotted that Tia girl again. “Hi, Grimsley boy,” she said.

  “Hi, Greensboro Day School girl.”

  She laughed as she ran our groceries across the conveyor belt. I was checking my list again to make sure I’d gotten everything when she said, “Do you cook?”

  I looked up. She was holding Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals 2 cookbook in her hand. I’d asked Dad when I’d spotted the cookbook if I could get it and he’d said sure.

  “Maybe it’s for him,” I said, nodding back to my father who was once again flipping through the weekly issue of People.

  “No offense to your dad, but he doesn’t look the type.”

  “Do I look the type?” For some reason, I was comfortable talking with her. Maybe it was because we didn’t go to the same school, so I didn’t have to worry about saying something stupid and then running into her at school the following week.

  “Not really. So do you cook?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “I like Rachael Ray too,” she said, nodding at the book. “But Bobby Flay is my favorite. I’ve got three of his cookbooks and a couple of his DVD’s.”

  Behind us, someone yelled, “Help.”

  My father dropped his magazine on the counter and ran toward the back of the store. I followed him. In the dairy aisle, there was an old man lying on the floor. My father got on his knees, leaned over the man, and started CPR. People began crowding around.

  “Someone call 911, now,” Dad yelled as he continued with his chest compressions. “Julian, arch his head up.” I fell to my knees, beside my father. He positioned my hands under the old man’s head, so that I was lifting his chin up into the air. The back of the man’s head was wet with sweat. My father counted one and two and three as he continued compressions.