by Jack Conway

The red bird had been a nuisance to Edna Flint for weeks. The bird had been chirping loudly, in a fir tree, just outside her kitchen window, not in a melodic, bird song way, but with a grating, disturbing cackle. Perched in the limbs of the fir tree, the bird fluttered its feathers wildly, cackled and flit, nervously, in and out of the branches.

If Edna happened to make eye contact with the bird, which she did occasionally, the red bird staring sideways at her, Edna would scold it from her kitchen window. "Be quiet," she would call to it, as if speaking to one of her fifth graders. "You dirty bird," Edna would add.

The red bird would ruffle its feathers at her and cackle, its small black beak opening and closing defiantly, mocking Edna.

The commotion went on relentlessly, day and night, for weeks, straight through the Memorial Day weekend. The noise became so annoying that Edna finally had to close the kitchen window and draw the shade to shut out the clamor.

It was the first week of June, and warm. Edna hated to close the kitchen window, shutting out the sunlight and the warm breeze, but she didn't know any other way to get through the ordeal. The kitchen window faced the backyard, away from the road. It looked out over the stone wall that ran the length of Edna's property, and the field and the woods beyond. Out there, in back of Edna's old house, there were no noises from the street or from the other houses along the narrow road. There was only the sweet, low hum of busy insects. An errant bee, buzzing. The sway of the overgrown grass and leafy branches in the warm scented breeze.

But the silence, the serenity of the backyard, had been broken for weeks by the commotion of the red bird in the fir tree. Chirping. Cackling. Fluttering. Flitting.
Edna knew the bird must have built a nest in the tree. It must have laid its eggs there, concealed behind the thick, green branches. And it must have been sitting on its eggs, waiting for them to hatch. But the noise and the commotion had gone on long enough.

* * *

Edna carefully pulled the tea bag out of the cup that was on the table in front of her. She laid the bag on the edge of the saucer to dry. She would use it later. Edna always used tea bags more than once. She reluctantly pulled the shade up and opened the kitchen window a crack. She waited, for something, but nothing came. There was no sound from the fir tree outside her window. Edna was pleasantly surprised. The back yard was perfectly quiet. Still and quiet. It was as peaceful as she remembered it, before the red bird arrived.

Edna put on her eyeglasses and peered out the window. She looked and looked, but there was no sign of the red bird. The eyeglasses slipped down the length of her long, thin nose and she pushed them back onto the bridge of her nose using her bony index finger. The eyeglasses never fit right. They weren't her prescription glasses. She had lost them years ago. She replaced them with a pair of magnifying eyeglasses that she bought on sale at the drugstore. They worked just fine.

Edna continued to peer out the kitchen window, holding her magnifying eyeglasses on her nose with her finger braced tightly against the bridge of the glasses. She could see perfectly. The red bird was nowhere to be found.

She opened the kitchen window wide and listened, turning her head so that her ear faced the fir tree. She brushed the long wisps of her gray hair away from her ear so that she could hear better. Edna used her free hand to pull back her hair, tightly, into a makeshift ponytail. She listened this way for a solid minute and still there was no sound. No cackling. No fluttering. No flitting. No bird.

Edna turned and looked out the window again, this time squinting, as if by squinting that way she might be able to see through the dense, green branches to where the red bird might be hiding. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. The red bird in the fir tree outside her kitchen window was gone. She was sure of it. Edna almost smiled.

* * *

Edna fished the soft pack of cigarettes out of her apron pocket. There were an assortment of cigarettes of varying lengths in the pack, arranged by size. Some were half smoked, while others had only a puff or two drawn from them. They had all been snuffed out and returned to the pack.

Edna never smoked a whole cigarette all at once. She would smoke half, snuff it out, making sure not to break the cigarette, and then would carefully slide it back into the pack. She would always find time to smoke it later. There was no point wasting a whole cigarette after only a puff or two. She had this pack of cigarettes for a month -- ever since the red bird came to nest in the fir tree.

It was a dirty habit, anyway. That's what her father called it. Edna didn't start smoking until after he passed away. He would never have approved. And he certainly wouldn't have let her smoke in his house.

Edna pulled out a medium-sized cigarette from the crumpled pack, lit it and exhaled triumphantly. The red bird was gone at last. It's nest was probably still somewhere in the tree. The eggs were probably hatched now and the baby birds flown. If the nest was empty and the baby birds gone, as she suspected they were, Edna decided she would take the nest out of the tree and bring it to school to show her students. Her fifth graders always enjoyed it when she brought a bird's nest into class to show them.

* * *

Edna brought birds' nests into school before, to show her students. "This is a bird's nest," Edna would tell her fifth graders, as she held the delicate nest in the palm of her hand, being careful not to unravel the intricate braid of straw, and leaves, and feathers. The children always marveled at the nest.

"This is where the bird lays its eggs and sits on them, keeping them warm until they hatch," she would tell her students. "It's the baby birds' home until they learn to fly."
The empty bird's nest never ceased to amaze the children. She would let her students carefully touch the straw nest and peek inside.

The fifth graders would gather around her and listen earnestly as she told them all about the nest and the bird and eggs that had been inside it.

* * *

Edna lived in the same house in Shakespeare, Maine that she had grown up in. Her father, Rupert, built the house eighty years ago. It was a plain, white-washed, farm house, with a practical front porch and a tin roof. The roof was noisy when it rained, the rain drumming against the squares of tin, but it would never need to be re-shingled. It was her father's idea.

The house was surrounded by a stone wall. Rupert Flint built the wall too, by hand, with granite he dug from the river bank and hauled to the property by horse and wagon. The property was strewn with trees -- huge Black Walnuts, maples, pines and firs, many of them damaged by winter storms and hurricanes. Broken limbs cascaded down to the ground in odd configurations, while others balanced precariously overhead, wedged between still sturdy branches. Edna never bothered to have the dead wood removed.

Behind the house was a field, overgrown with tall grass and briars, neglected for years. Edna saw no point in having the field cut each season since no one ever used it.

Beyond the field and the stone wall were the woods, tall and dense and dark. The woods had grown thick since the paper mills closed.

* * *

Shakespeare, Maine, west of Bath, was nestled along the banks of the once-sparkling Kennebec River. It billed itself as, "A small New England hamlet."
The town wasn't named after the great English playwright, but for the Shakespeare Paper Company, one of the largest paper mills in Maine. There were dozens of paper mills along the river, but the Shakespeare mill was the largest.

Since the late 1800s, the smokestacks of the paper mills, looking like great, black cannons poised along the river bank, bombarded the small town, day and night, with clouds of smoke and ash. So much lumber was turned into paper in the mills, there, along the Kennebec River in Shakespeare, that the town became known as, The Town That Trees Built. But most people called the place, Stinktown, because of the sickening smell of sulfuric acid that came from the mills.

Rupert Flint owned one of the paper mills along the river. He managed to keep the unions out for almost twenty years. When it looked like he could no longer stop the workers from unionizing, he sold the mill. The new owners moved the operation down South. But by then, Rupert was set for life, and so was his only child, Edna.

* * *

Edna lived alone. She had no brothers or sisters. Her parents died more than twenty years ago. And she never married, although she had once been engaged.
Irwin Saltmarsh worked in her father's paper mill until he left to start his own business -- a small convenience store in the center of town. Over the years, the store evolved into the town's only drugstore. Although it was a struggle, Irwin never sold out to the larger drug store chains. He still managed to muddle through with his small, neighborhood pharmacy.

At her father's urging, Edna and Irwin agreed to postpone their wedding until Irwin's new business was established.

"A man should be established," Rupert Flint advised his daughter.

"Financial security is at the heart of any union," Rupert told her.

"It's important to be set for life," he said.

So they waited.

Edna became a school teacher. And although Irwin's store became a mainstay in the small town -- the only drugstore for miles, it was never a huge success.
Over time, Edna and Irwin drifted apart. After a few years, Irwin broke off the engagement and married another woman. There were no hard feelings. No broken hearts. It was just the way things worked out.

Edna ran into Irwin occasionally at the drugstore, the very same drugstore where she bought her magnifying eyeglasses on sale. She and Irwin remained cordial. They said hello and nodded and smiled at each other.

She saw Irwin and his family, every Sunday, at church service. The Saltmarshes had been married for thirty years. They had two grown sons and four grandchildren. The Saltmarsh family took up two pews each week at Sunday service.

* * *

Edna arranged the vase of plastic flowers on the hall table before going outside to search for the red bird's nest. Real flowers took too much care and besides, they didn't last. She brought the flowers home from the cemetery after Memorial Day. She had placed them at the foot of her parents grave stone, as she did every year. She always made sure to bring the plastic flowers back home with her right after Memorial Day, otherwise, someone would take them.

She pulled on her galoshes. The ground would be damp. She had owned the worn, rubber boots since she was a little girl. They still fit. Her feet had never grown.
Edna went outside in her house dress and apron, with her hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail, tied with an elastic band. She went directly to the fir tree where the red bird had been nesting for the past month.

Edna carefully pulled back several of the branches of the fir tree and peered inside. Sure enough, cradled between two branches, hidden from view, was a small, perfect nest, made of straw, and grass, and red feathers.

She stood on her tip-toes and carefully looked inside the nest to see if there were any eggs or baby birds there. There were no tiny eggs and no baby birds. The baby birds had flown too. Using both hands, she carefully eased the nest out from between the limbs, cradling it in her hands. When she was finally able to look inside, she discovered there was a white golf ball in the middle of the nest. How it ever got there, she couldn't imagine. Several red feathers were stuck to the ball, which made her believe that the bird had been sitting on the ball all those weeks, waiting for it to hatch.

Edna was mesmerized by the bird's nest with the golf ball nestled inside it. Looking down at the nest and golf ball she thought, you can wait a long time for nothing to happen.

Edna never brought the nest to school and she never told her students about the golf ball inside it. It was something they would have to find out about on their own.

###

Jack Conway's newest book of poems, Life Sentences, was published in 2002.
His work has appeared in, The Antioch Review, The Columbia Review, Yankee, The Land-Grant College Review, The Perigrine Literary Review, The Norton Anthology of Light Verse and The Encyclopedia of New England Culture, published by Yale University Press. He is the author of, American Literacy: Fifty Books That Define Our Culture and Ourselves. A former adjunct professor at Boston University, Jack lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Julie, in a historic house called Birdsong Farm.

Copyright © 2003 Jack Conway. All rights reserved.

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