Birdy

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