Birdy

by William Wharton

  While I’m up in the tree, I think of myself trying to teach my babies to fly. I look down from the tree and wish I could fly here and have them fly with me in the open. It’s that day in the tree when I decide how to do it. I make all the plans and I’m so full of them, I hardly pay attention when my father and mother holler at me during dinner about cutting school. They keep wanting to know where I was. I tell them I was up in a tree but they won’t believe me. I don’t know where it is they wanted me to be.

  After my parents finally settle down, I go out to the cage and listen, but none of Perta’s birds have hatched. I wonder if the birds in the dream will hatch if hers haven’t. It’s hard to tell which is in front anymore, the dream or real life. I go to sleep not knowing what will be.

  When I arrive in the dream, Perta is excited. She tells me one of the babies is cutting the shell with its beak. She stands high on her legs so I can look in. One of the eggs is opening. Perta reaches in and carefully pulls off part of a loose shell with her beak. We can see a dark eye and moistened head. I’m nervous but Perta is serene and happy. I do some of my best flying around the cage to calm myself.

  Within two hours, all the babies are hatched. I help Perta take the shells out of the nest. I can see that two of the young ones are dark and two of them are light. Perta tells me there are two males and two females. Both the males are dark and the females are light. I’m a father! Perta lets me feed them and it’s such a wonderful feeling to put the small bits of food into their mouths. The little cries of demand and delight are a special bird song.

  The next morning before breakfast, when I go out to the aviary, I check Perta. She has eggshells under her nest. I put some egg food in the bottom of the cage and she comes down immediately. I look and there are four little babies, two light and two dark, the same. When I go out she flies up and starts feeding. I wish I could help her, too. I feel I’m using her, having her live without a male. I’m afraid to put a male in with her because of the dream. I might be jealous, too.

  During the days, I do everything I’m supposed to. I go to school, do my work, help at home and do some designing on my bird models. I’m trying to use things I’ve learned as a bird to improve the models. It also helps the days go by. It’s not so much I want to fly or make a model I can fly; I’m only trying to bring some of the dream into my life.

  During the course of the breeding season, Perta and I have three nests. For each nest we have, I take eggs from other nests and give them to Perta in the daytime cage. I’m afraid not to. We have twelve babies but one of them, a young male, dies. Perta says she could tell from the first that it wasn’t meant to live or fly, there was nothing of the sky in its eyes. In my dreams, birds have a kind of knowing humans don’t. I don’t know why this is. I’m only human, so I suffer very much at the loss of this young one. It is five weeks old when it dies. In bird time, it was in Scheen.

  Birds don’t have any kind of time except in relation to themselves. The movement of the sun or the earth doesn’t mean much to them. They have two kinds of time. First, they have the time which is one year or breeding period. It begins with Ohnme. This is the period after the molt and before breeding. Then, there is Sachen, the time of courtship, till the first egg is laid. Kharst is the fourteen days of sitting on the eggs. The next time is from when the young hatch till they leave the nest; this is Flangst. After this is Scheen, which is until the young can crack seed on their own and live without their parents. It is in Scheen when our son dies. Then, there is the first molt period of young birds; this is called Smoor. The molt time for older birds is called Smoorer. After Smoorer the adult birds go into Ohnme again. So, the bird year has six different periods. The longest is Ohnme and the shortest is Kharst. Kharst, Flangst, and Scheen are repeated three times in the typical bird year.

  The other kind of time birds have is related to the individual bird and not so much to the mating-molting season. The whole first year before breeding is called Tangen. The years of breeding are called Pleen and the last days before death are called Echen. Sometimes in old age or illness a bird goes into Echen. It is a time when a bird does not want to fly or eat. The birds have no word for death. As far as I can tell, Echen includes our idea of being dead. When Perta told me our son had gone into Echen, I went down to help him; he was not dead yet but there was nothing I could do. He was in Echen. When he finally died I told Perta and she only said:

  ‘Yes, he is in Echen.’

  The strange thing is that on the same day our son dies, one of the young birds in Perta’s nest in the cage also dies. It has the same markings as our son. I take it from the bottom of the cage and in the dream our son’s body disappears. I tell Perta this but she doesn’t want to listen. She never talks of him again. When I try to speak of him, of his death, of my sadness, she only gives the same response: ‘Yes. He is in Echen.’

  All these words are the closest I can come to what I’m hearing in canary. I have no way to know if they are bird ideas or Birdy ideas. In my dreams I’ve begun to hear the bird sounds as words like these, although to my ear, as a bird, they sound like bird sounds. I don’t know how this is happening. No bird word sounds in itself like any English word, but the birds sound to me as if they’re talking English. I’m converting the sounds as I’m hearing them and I’m only hearing my own conversions.

  At the end of the breeding season, Perta and I have eleven wonderful children. There are seven females and four males. The remarkable thing is that the young in Perta’s cage have the same markings as my children in the dream, and as far as I can tell, they are also the same sex. I can understand that I might have structured the birds in my dream to resemble the birds in Perta’s cage, but I knew the sex of Perta’s daytime young before I could know them in reality. Perta in the dream told me. This is something I can’t put together.

  I try talking to Perta, the bird in the cage, in sounds I remember from the dream but she doesn’t respond. However, if I peep or queep in the ways I used to do with Birdie, she’ll peep or queep back enthusiastically. She wants me to stay as a boy. My dream has nothing to do with her reality. Still, her babies are the same as mine in the dream. I’m getting so I can’t tell which reality is making the other. It must be that I’m tailoring the dream in some way to the things that happen, but sometimes it seems the other way around. It’s easy to fool yourself.

  The other flight cage is so full I have to do something. I’ve gotten three nests from almost every breeding couple. I need to separate the young males from the females and take the breeding birds apart. The season is over and the adult birds will be going into the molt soon. I need more space.

  To solve this, I divide off a part of the male cage for my project. I build in a new floor about one third down from the top of the aviary. Above this I put Perta and her young. The bottom part I use for the adult and young males. There are eighty-five young males and eighty-two young females. Now I’ll feed them and give them tonic to get through the molt and ready for the market. I hate to think about selling them, especially the children of Birdie and Alfonso. Still, making money is the excuse I have for keeping my birds. It’s the way I can hold onto the world which makes my dream possible.

  The reason I build off the special cage is so I can live privately with Perta and my children in the dream. The very night the partition is finished, it’s that way in the dream. We don’t have as much space to fly, but this will be all right after I get my plan going.

  My plan is to work out a way for free flying with my family. It is the idea I developed up in the tree.

  In the dream, I’m happy as husband and father. I spend wonderful hours teaching my children to fly, to crack seed, to eat. We bathe together and I teach the young males to sing. We start with simple songs about flying, without any difficult parts, and move on to harder songs. One of the children’s songs is:

  Down is up.

  Up is sky.

  Sing a song

  Don’t ask why.

  Another is:

/>   Touch the air

  Hold it tight.

  Stroke the wind

  Ride the light.

  When I sell the young birds, I sell off three of my breeding females and one of my breeding males. I replace them with some of the best of the new young birds. I replace the three females because they aren’t good breeders. One only laid two eggs each nest and raised a total of five birds. Another laid eggs but consistently pulled the nest apart scattering the eggs on the floor. The third abandoned each of her nests when the babies were less than a week old. I saved the babies by distributing them to other nests, but she has to go. The male I sell because he’s developed the habit of egg-eating.

  All of these young birds are even better fliers than their parents. It’s a pleasure to watch them. The rustling sound of their wings is musical. Because they fly so much and so well, they are all trim and longer-legged than ordinary canaries. I wish I could have Mr Lincoln come see my aviary and birds. I think about it of ten but I could never explain it to my parents. I wish people could be more like canaries.

  During the day, I spend hours watching the birds fly. The more I watch, the stronger, truer, my dreams are. I’m getting so much inside the bird world, my dream seems completely independent of the day. I don’t even know what I know anymore. I can’t know all the time why things are in the dreams or how they’re going to be. The dreams have gotten so complicated they’re at least as real as the day.

  I don’t do any flying experiments with the birds. I know all of them too well from my dreams. I’m not really that interested in flying anymore; at least not as a boy. It’s better to watch a bird fly naturally than to watch one with weights or with feathers missing. Flying is something practically impossible to take apart. You have to learn it all at once; it can’t be seen in pieces.

  The price of birds does go up and I sell my birds to a wholesaler from Philadelphia for even more than I thought I would. At the end of the year there’s over a thousand dollars profit. My mother can’t believe it and wants me to pay board. She says I live in the house and I’m making almost as much money as my father so I ought to pay. I don’t care. I’m not keeping canaries for the money. My father says no; he’s going to put the money in the bank for my college education. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to college anyway. I only want to raise my birds and fly with them at night. I can do that anywhere; I don’t have to go to college for that.

  The thing I’m more worried about is getting drafted when I’m eighteen. There’s nothing I can do about this. The army isn’t going to let me keep canaries, that’s for sure. I wonder if the dream would continue then if I didn’t have any birds to watch. The army will probably take one look at me with my pointed chest and mark me off as 4-F anyway. I hope so.

  My father is great about my birdkeeping. He’s proud of the canaries and begins to talk about them, and the money I’m making, to the people at school. Everybody there knows I’m crazy with birds but they didn’t know about the money-making part.

  I demonstrate one of my ornithopters in physics class and they put it in a glass case in the hall. This kind of clinches it for me as Birdy the bird freak; ‘most likely to suck seed’. I don’t care much; I’m happy doing what I have to do. Sometimes I wish I could tell Al about my dream. I know he wouldn’t understand; he’s so real. He’d just think I’d finally flipped and that was it. Also, I’m afraid the dream might stop if I tell somebody else about it.

  During that winter I spend hours training Perta’s young birds in the cage. In the night I play and fly with my own children and then in the day I play with them as a boy. The personalities of the two sets of birds are exactly the same, so it’s easy for me to train Perta’s birds. I know them as my own children.

  I train all of her birds and Perta, too, to come when I whistle. This whistle is the closest sound I make as a boy to the bird sound for food. I go over it with them thousands of times. I give the signal and they fly directly to my finger to be fed. They eat from my finger or my lips or out of my hand. In the end, none of them has any more fear of me than Birdie had. They are really my children, even during the day.

  I’m in my senior year in high school now. I ride my bike to school rather than take the school bus. I stay mostly apart. Al and I see each other some but he’s all involved in sports. He’s trying that winter to win the District Championship in wrestling. He does it and then goes on to be State Champion at a hundred sixty-five pounds. I’m at the districts to watch, but there’s no way for me to get to Harrisburg for the State finals. He wins the finals with a first-period pin.

  It’s on a warm day in the end of February when I decide to make the big test. I choose a little female who is the closest to me. She’s exactly like one of my daughters from our last nest. I take her out of the aviary on my finger. When we get outside, I check the sky for hawks and the yard for cats. It’s all clear. I throw her up in the air from my finger the way I’ve done it in the aviary. I’ve been practicing with the birds in the center part where the breeding cages are. The door to their flight cage opens onto this part. I throw her up into the sky the way you would a pigeon or a falconing hawk.

  First she flies up and lands on the roof of the garage. Her flight, which looked so competent in the cage, seems awkward here in the open air. She hops along the edge and peeps down at me. She looks so small against the sky, so yellow and vulnerable in the immensity of blue. I give my whistle and hold out my finger. She flies immediately back down to me and takes a bit of treat food from my lips. I stroke her on the head. She fluffs her feathers and peeps. It’s a peep lost in the air. She’s a beautiful lemon yellow, yellower than Birdie. She looks so pure and clean in the winter sunshine.

  I throw her up in the air again and this time she stretches her wings and flies across our yard onto our porch roof where the pigeons used to roost. I almost swallow my heart. She’s so beautiful flying, but so far away. My mouth gets dry and I have a hard time whistling but I manage. She flies straight back to me and makes a cocky, wing-down, no-flutter landing on my finger.

  Over the next days, I practice with the rest of Perta’s young ones. I throw them up one at a time and they all fly back to me. It’s much more fun than pigeons. It’s better than trying to fly model airplanes. I know these birds are flying for me.

  I wait every night but I still don’t fly outside the cage myself. This I can’t understand. My own children have started flying outside in the dream. I can see them flying but I’m caught in the cage.

  After a week, I try throwing up two birds together. I’m worried they might not pay attention to my whistle, but it’s fine. They come directly to me. I leave them flying for longer and longer periods before I whistle them back. One pair I leave out flying for fifteen minutes. Once I even go over and sit on the porch steps to watch them instead of standing in front of the aviary. They both come in when I whistle; no trouble. Still, I’m not flying myself; I’m confined to the cage.

  In my dream, I look more and more outside the cage and want to fly there. I talk to my children and they tell me it is a completely different thing. It’s not just flying to get food, or from one perch to another, but flying for the flying itself, flying free of everything.

  One day one of the young males sings from the tree hanging over our house. Hearing that beautiful song in the free air is a wonderful thing. The singing has all of space in it ringing out to the open sky.

  Next I throw all the birds up at the same time. With a rush of wings, they take off in every direction. Most of them fly back to places they’ve been before. It’s lovely to see sparkles of yellow and green on the roof and in the trees. The trees are coming on with new leaves. One yellow male is singing up on the chimney of the house. The yellow against the blue sky is sharp and clear.

  I’m concerned about how far they will fly. If they fly too far they couldn’t hear my whistle. Canaries don’t have homing instincts or capacities like pigeons. In fact, for free flying, canaries don’t have many skills left
at all.

  After five minutes, I whistle and seven of the twelve come right down to me. They come swooping in and land on my fingers, my hands, my arms. I walk into the aviary with them hanging onto me, give each some treat food, and put them in the cage. When I go out, the other five have flown to the top of the aviary. When I whistle again, they come down and jump on my fingers. It’s all gone well. I wonder what would happen if a cat or a hawk dispersed them. Would they still remember to come when I whistle or would they panic? I’m sure I’ll fly free in my dream that night, but it isn’t so. Even with all of them flying, I still don’t fly outside the aviary.

  As spring arrives, I take the birds out every day. They come to know and expect what’s going to happen. The other birds, the ones I’m saving for breeding, don’t seem to know what’s going on. In my dream I tend not to communicate with them; probably I’m feeling guilty.

  My fliers come to the door when I open it and jump onto my finger even before I whistle. I walk out of the aviary with them on my arms and shoulders and stand there in the open. I don’t want them to fly till I toss them up in the air. If one takes off by itself, I whistle it back. Soon they all know this rule. It’s like the starting of a track meet with false starts. The birds are between the pleasure of flying and the safety of what they know.

  After a month, I can leave all twelve of them, including Perta, out flying free for as long as an hour. The yard is their territory and nobody flies too far away. Once in a while, one will swoop over the fence out into the outfield of the baseball field, but there’s no trees to land on so they return. One bird ventures downhill toward the burnt-out Cosgrove barn but comes right back. They’re all learning the details of the territory and the landmarks for the aviary. I’m getting convinced you can train canaries to live in the open, like pigeons, and have an open aviary. I’m still not flying free in my dream and I’m beginning to know what’s wrong. I’m getting in my own way.