The Broken Bird Feeder

The storm came through around three in the morning, and Harold was awake for most of it, the way he was awake for most things now. He sat in the dark kitchen with a cup of decaf he wasn’t drinking and listened to the maple tree work itself loose, branch by branch. There was a particular sound around four, a snap and then a soft clatter against the siding, and he knew what it was even half-asleep, even before he let himself know it.

He went out at six-fifteen, same as every morning. He’d been a mechanic for forty-one years, and his body still believed it had somewhere to be.

The feeder lay in the wet grass under the maple, the plastic dome cracked across the top. The branch it had hung from for almost three years was down too, splintered white at the break, pointing at the house in a way Harold found accusatory and stupid.

He stood there in his coat over his pajamas, and a sensation moved through his chest. For one lousy second the yard felt empty and wrong, like a room with the furniture taken out.

Then it passed, and what was left in its place was a nice, manageable irritation he could actually hold on to. Forty dollars of birdseed spread in the grass for the raccoons. He could work with that. He crouched, knees telling him about it, and started picking up the bigger pieces.

Evelyn’s back door opened across the property line. He didn’t look up. He knew the sound of her door better than he knew the back of his own hand.

“Well,” he said to the grass. “Storm finally solved the rat problem.”

“There were never any rats, Harold.”

“There would’ve been.” He set a cracked piece of dome on the driveway. “You feed them, they come. That’s the whole arrangement.”

Evelyn came down off her step in her good gardening shoes and her late husband’s flannel, which she still wore in the mornings because it was warm and because nobody was around to have an opinion about it except Harold, who had never said one word about it in three years and never would. She was seventy-one and stood very straight, a habit from thirty-four years of standing at the front of a classroom telling small people to settle down. She looked at the branch. She looked at the wreck of the feeder. Sadness crossed her face for a brief moment, and she put it away before he could have noticed it, even if he’d been looking, which he was being careful not to do.

“You don’t have to enjoy it quite so much,” she said.

“I’m not enjoying anything. I’m picking up your mess in my yard at six in the morning.”

“It’s not your yard. The tree’s on the line.”

“The tree’s on the line. The seed’s on my driveway. The seed attracts the squirrels, the squirrels get in my gutters, I’m up a ladder I’ve got no business being up. You want to talk about whose yard.” He stood, slow, one hand on his knee. “Whole thing’s been a damn nuisance from the start.”

“Then I’d think you’d be relieved.” She said it lightly and crouched at the edge of her own grass and started gathering seed back into her cupped palm.

What Evelyn was thinking, and would not have said with a gun to her head, was that she had heard the branch go in the night too. She’d been awake. She was always a little awake. And she had laid there thinking about the morning — coffee, the news she didn’t watch, the church committee she’d resigned from twice and rejoined twice because the alternative was a Tuesday with nothing in it — and the one fixed point in all of it, the thing the rest of the day hung off of, was twenty minutes in a cold yard arguing with a stubborn old man about birds.

“I’ll get a new one this week,” she said.

“Don’t bother on my account.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

A cardinal came down anyway, out of habit, and landed on the broken branch where the feeder used to be. It sat there a moment, confused, then lifted off and went over the Petersons’ fence. Neither of them watched it go. Both of them watched it go.

It took the neighborhood about a day and a half to notice, and about two days for the amusement to spread.

Across the street, the Castellanos were a young couple in a blue house with a toddler and a second baby coming, and they were delirious in the kind of way that makes everything either unbearable or hilarious. They had a kitchen window with a clean view of the property line and they watched Harold and Evelyn in the yard on the third morning, the two of them six feet apart and facing away from each other, having what was, quite obviously, an argument about gutters, and Dani Castellano said, around a mouthful of cold toast, “They’re basically married.”

“They’re definitely basically married,” her husband said. “He left it in the grass for a day so she’d have to see it.”

“That’s a love language.”

It got around, the way things do. The neighborhood’s chatter was not malicious. Just the small recreational amusement of people watching other people from a window. By the weekend somebody on the sidewalk said they were “an old married couple” loud enough that Harold heard it through the screen, and he took it poorly.

He told Evelyn about it the next morning because he had to tell somebody, and she was the only one out there.

“The Castellano girl thinks we’re a couple,” he said with disgust, picking at the bark of the dead branch he still hadn’t taken down. “Heard it off the sidewalk.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Evelyn said immediately, with so much speed and so much heat that they both heard it, and she covered it by yanking a dandelion she didn’t need to yank. “We can’t agree on a feeder. Most married people manage at least the small things.”

“My point exactly.”

“Your point exactly.”

Then Harold said the city had a bylaw about feeding wild animals within thirty feet of a property line, he was nearly sure of it, and Evelyn said there was no such bylaw and he was thinking of the one about livestock, and Harold said no, that’s wrong, and they went on like that for a good long while.

The arguments over the next week became ridiculous. The seed brand, which Harold said was the cheap kind that was forty percent millet, the birds wouldn’t eat. It was the squirrels. It was the gutters. It was whether a maple that had been planted by a man neither of them ever met, on a line surveyed before either of them was born, belonged to the deed on the left or the deed on the right. It was salt — Harold put down ice salt in November like he was salting the earth against an enemy, and Evelyn said it killed her hostas, and Harold said her hostas were already an eyesore and the salt was an improvement. It was a great many things, and it was never once, not for a single sentence, the thing it actually was.

The birds had no idea any of this was about them. The cardinals and the one ill-tempered blue jay and the rotating committee of sparrows experienced the broken feeder as a brief inconvenience and then went and ate somewhere else. They had a maple. The maple was fine. They did not require it to mean anything, which is the great advantage birds have always had over the people who feed them.

Harold stood at his kitchen window at a quarter past midnight, not looking at anything, except that Evelyn’s bedroom light was on too, which it usually wasn’t at that hour, and he stood there until it went off and then went to bed and would have told you, if you’d asked, that he’d only gotten up for a glass of water. They noticed each other more now, in the quiet hours. Evelyn noticed the new way Harold favored his left hip on the steps, and Harold noticed the morning Evelyn coughed too long. They were two people standing watch over each other through six feet of silence and a quarrel about millet.

Harold came closest. It was a gray Thursday and Evelyn had said something offhand about how she supposed she’d just take the bracket down for good, no sense in a bracket with nothing on it, and Harold opened his mouth and what was almost in it was: If the feeder goes, then what? He felt them get as far as his throat.

“Squirrels’ll just find something else to ruin anyway,” he said, and turned and went inside, and stood in his front hall for a while not doing anything, his coat still on.

Evelyn got close, too. She watched him go up his own steps with that hip and she very nearly said the truest sentence she owned, which was that he was the only person she spoke to before noon, most days the only person she spoke to at all who wasn’t a cashier, and that the sound of his door at six-fifteen was, and she knew exactly how this would sound, the reason she got up.

“You’re tracking salt onto the walk again,” is what she said, and he didn’t even hear her, and she went inside and was angrier at herself than she’d been in years.

He took the bracket down on a Tuesday afternoon while she was at the doctor’s. He didn’t know that; he only knew her car was gone and had been for two hours, and the bracket and the splintered stub of branch had been sitting up there mocking him for nine days, and he was a man who could not abide a thing left half-done. He got the bracket off in about ten minutes, three screws and a curse, and sawed the dead stub flush to the trunk, and now the maple was just a maple, clean, and he stood at the bottom of the ladder looking up at how finished it was and felt, instead of the satisfaction he had been counting on, like he had taken something out of his own chest with a screwdriver.

Evelyn got home at four. She saw it from the car. She sat in the driveway with the engine ticking and her hands on the wheel and looked at the clean trunk where the feeder had hung every single morning for two years and ten months, and the thing she’d been so disciplined about not thinking arrived all at once and without permission, and it was much worse than she had budgeted for. She did not cry. She went inside and put the kettle on, and then took it off before it whistled because she could not stand the noise.

That evening the two houses sat eight feet apart and did not make a sound.

No birds gathered because there was nothing to gather at. Harold ate a sandwich standing up at the counter and then sat in the front room with the television on and the sound off, a habit Margaret had hated and now he could not remember why, the gray light going over his face and over the chair that was still angled toward the chair nobody sat in. Most nights, alone, when the house was bad, he said small ordinary things out loud to Margaret — that the Petersons’ boy was back, that his hip was a son of a bitch, that he’d had the soup. Tonight he didn’t, and he understood, sitting there, that it was because what he’d have had to tell her was about Evelyn, and he didn’t have the first idea how to say that to Margaret, or to anyone at all.

Next door, Evelyn pretended to read. She had the lamp on and the book open and turned a page now and then. At eleven she gave up and lay in the dark and listened to a house with nothing in it.

Neither of them slept much. The maple stood in the yard between them, dark and clean and unremarkable, holding nothing, and the night went by very slowly for everyone except the birds, who were asleep, and fine.

It was the Castellano kid who fixed it, and he did not know there was anything to fix.

His name was Mateo, and he was seven and he had made a bird feeder at his cousin’s birthday party. His mother, who could not bear one more object in the house, had told him to go hang it somewhere outside, anywhere, she did not care where, just out. Mateo had looked at his own yard, which had no trees worthy of holding his masterpiece, and then over the low fence at the big maple between the two quiet old people, which was clearly the best tree on the entire street and was, as far as a seven-year-old could determine, currently not in use.

He did it Saturday at seven in the morning, in his pajamas and his father’s work gloves, climbing up on the wood pile and reaching as far as his arm would go and looping the wire over a low branch with the complete confidence of a child who has not yet learned that things belong to people. The feeder hung there crooked, jar half full of the seed his mother had bought him to make him stop talking about it. Then he went back over the fence and inside for cartoons, his entire involvement in the matter concluded forever.

Harold saw it at six-fifteen the next morning. He’d shifted to six-thirty since the bracket came down, on the grounds that there was no longer a reason for six-fifteen, but his body had not gotten the notice and put him out there at six-fifteen anyway, coatless, scowling before he had a target to scowl at. Then he had one. There was a thing in his tree. It was painted a mismatch of orange and green and hung crooked on the wrong branch. He stood on the wet grass getting his temper up to full operating heat with real relief, because here at last was something a man could be straightforwardly angry about.

Evelyn’s door opened. He heard it. He didn’t look. The world shifted itself slightly, back into a shape he recognized.

“There’s a—” he started.

“I see it.”

“Some child. Look at it. It’s hideous. That’s not even—”

“It’s the Castellano boy’s. I watched him do it from my window.” She had, in fact, watched the whole operation the previous morning, and had thought about it on and off all day with a feeling she’d declined to examine.

“Well, he can’t just—” Harold stopped. He’d been about to say the boy couldn’t just hang things in other people’s trees, but stopped short. “It’s hung wrong,” he said instead. “Whole thing’s amateur hour.”

“It’s a child’s feeder, Harold. He’s seven.”

“Seven’s old enough to do a thing right.”

“You sound,” Evelyn said, “like a man who is about to climb a ladder he has been told to stay off of.”

“I never agreed to stay off any ladder.”

Evelyn sighed in resignation.

He looked at the feeder. It really was hung badly. It really would spill. And the absurd green-and-orange of it was up there in the maple looking, he had to admit only to himself, alive, in a way the tree had not looked in nine days.

A chickadee came down to see about it. It landed on the crooked perch and the whole feeder swung and it didn’t care, and it got a seed and it went, and another one came, and then the disagreeable blue jay arrived and ran everybody off and took the place for itself, the way it always had.

Harold did not say anything. He watched the birds come and go, one by one, and wished Margaret was there to watch with him. He found himself thinking, against his wishes, that if Margaret wasn’t there with him, he was glad Evelyn was.

Evelyn came down off her step and crossed the wet grass and stood next to him, on the line, not six feet but close, close enough that the cold came off both their coats together, and she folded her arms the same way he had his folded, and she looked up at the terrible feeder and the bad-tempered jay and she didn’t say a single thing about millet, or salt, or the boy, or the angle, or whose tree it was.

The jay ate. The light came up over the Petersons’ roof. They stood there together, not saying anything. The two of them, in the cold, watching the birds, and that was the whole morning, and it was enough, and neither of them went inside for a long time.