A Man Is a Slave to his Nature

Whenever anybody asked what my daddy did, no one ever said anything about the job he had. They said only that he was a pigeon man, because that’s what he was, first and foremost. At home on North Street, he’d built a coop in the backyard where he bred his birds to be prized racers. It looked like a playhouse version of our house, painted the same bright blue with a shingled roof and shutters framing the windows where they flew in and out. He put up a fence, too, along the back and on the School Street side to protect them. Our yard bumped up, back to back, with the schoolyard. If it wasn't for that fence, half the neighborhood would have used our yard as a cut-through. Even with it, Daddy was watchful; my cousins Marcel and Roland, who lived next door, and I were the only kids he would abide near his birds. But it was I alone who got to name them (except for his most prized racer Flash Gordon). Among them were Glinda, the pure white hen with the dark bull-eyes; Auntie Em, the palest of the piebalds, her breast spangled with pearls; Tin Man, the bar-less winged silver with the leaden-gray head and tail; and the Wizard, the checkered blue with the purple and green jeweled neck.

And there was my dog Toto, too, who I missed as much as them. Toto didn't look a whole lot like Dorothy's Toto. His fur was a tangle of gray and browns, his snout and one front paw white, but he was just his size with the same pricked-up little ears and shaggy coat. No matter where he was, at the sound of the recess bell, without fail, Toto came running, shooting through the broken slat in the fence behind the pigeon coop and bounding across the schoolyard. One time when he was in the house and Momma didn't respond to his barking at the 10:15 bell, he tore right through the screen door. No one at Cogswell Elementary ever played kickball without him racing around the bases along with them, tail wagging. The two years it had been since all that, since Momma had died and I got sent to live with Auntie Marie, Uncle Albert, and their brood, felt like a lifetime.

One thing worth knowing about pigeons is it’s not just the mommas that sit on the nest to keep the eggs warm; the daddies do their share, too. They even produce milk the same as the hens do. Such facts left me hoping, every moment of every day since I’d been sent away, that Daddy would change his mind and come for me. In all that time I only ever saw him once a month when he’d come to Silver Street for Sunday dinner, envelope in hand, to pay Uncle Albert what it cost to keep me. I was always on my best behavior when he got there and throughout the meal, using my ‘please’ and ‘thank yous’ like I was supposed to and abiding by Uncle Albert’s rules for children by speaking only when spoken to. But I could never sustain it. Sometimes I made it all the way until he was making for the door, sometimes only until it was time to clear the table. Invariably, I ended up rushing to him, throwing my arms around him, begging, pleading, batting my eyelashes, doing everything I knew how to do to at least get him to let me come home to visit Toto and the pigeons.

And then, finally, come the second anniversary of Momma’s death, I had had enough. I didn’t need anyone to take me to North Street. I knew the way. Like the pigeons, I had dead reckoning. No matter how far away I was or how many times I got spun around, I knew the way back home. I didn’t know how the pigeons did it. But ever since I’d been exiled to Auntie Marie’s, everywhere I went I practiced drawing a map in my head, using details like the names of streets and the colors of houses to trace the way back to North Street.

Being only ten years old, I wasn’t allowed to just go walking across the city of Salem on my own. I was supposed to go straight back to Auntie Marie’s after school with my cousins Caroline and Janine. But with a little help from my friend Carol Murphy, it was easy to free myself from my cousins. With one hand behind our backs, fingers crossed, Carol and I stood side by side while I lied, telling them I was going to Carol’s house and that her brother would walk me home before dinner. They were happy to be free of me, I knew. But just in case, I walked two full blocks with Carol before turning back. The most direct way home would have been to continue past Carol’s up Federal Street, but instead I backtracked, hugging the south side of Mac Park where the lilacs would be in full bloom. I lingered only long enough to pluck a single blossom and touch its drop of sweetness to my tongue as Momma and I had done so many times. And then, I made a made a beeline for North Street, stopping only to glance in the window of Bill’s Variety on the corner. Had Mr. Gagnon let the place get run down? The store seemed dim with many of the jars nearly empty and the floor in need of a good sweeping, nothing like I remembered. Something seemed off, too, as I crossed over, catching the first sight of our house— the bright-blue shingles seemingly less bright, the curves and loops of the porch railing somehow not the right shape. If every house the length of the block didn’t have those same railings, some painted white, some black, but with the identical pattern, I would have sworn ours had been replaced with another.

By the time I walked into the yard, it was as if I was seeing a different world through each eye. With one I saw the details I had replayed over and over in the two years it had been—the expanse of green grass where my brother Batis would take me by the arms and spin me round until my legs floated up like the ends of his mustache; the great perch I had climbed upon, pasting stray pigeon feathers to my arms and trying to take flight on my last day living at North Street—while with the other I saw a mostly dirt patch of land, hardly big enough to play a game of hopscotch, and a simple picnic bench, little taller than the weeds that grew around it.

In an attempt to right myself, I set my sights on the pigeon’s coop, a reminder of the purpose of my journey. There was no sign of Toto. He hadn’t raced out to greet me, tail wagging, or barked from the front window. I wasn’t worried though; if Marcel or Roland had brought their bikes across to the Green Lawn Cemetery, Toto would have followed them. He liked to chase along beside them, biting at their tires. If he didn’t come home before too long, I’d go look for him there. Come hell or high water, there was no way I was going back to Auntie Marie’s without seeing him.

Auntie Em, always the tamest of Daddy’s birds, came right to me, pecking without hesitation at the corn I cupped in my palm. Tin Man and the Wizard held back, unsure after not having seen me in so long. There was no sign of Flash Gordon or Glinda, but that didn’t mean anything. Homing pigeons aren’t kept caged up like parakeets. They are free to come and go as they please. Their homing instinct being as strong as it is, there is no losing them. Nevertheless, I found myself searching the coop floor for Glinda’s white feathers, relieved when I spied one. She was one of Daddy’s older birds, perhaps close to living out her usefulness, I knew.

What I really wanted was to meet Flash Gordon and Glinda’s brood, but I had no way of picking them out from the half a dozen new birds in Daddy’s flock. They were all fully grown, as Flash Gordon and Glinda’s brood would have surely been. None that I could see were piebalds with pearl eyes like Flash Gordon or pure white with bull-eyes like Glinda. Maybe they too were out flying, I hoped. Some birds could be a disappointment to Daddy from the start, not worth the corn they ate.

From the time a pigeon is born, it knows only one home. And from the time it pairs with another, it knows only one mate, driven for life to return to both. Such drive made them valuable as racers. Because of it, men built them houses, fed and watered them, even guarded them from hawks. Daddy himself had shot at more than a few on their behalf. That aspect of their nature was a blessing, making it so they didn’t have to fend for themselves in parks and under bridges like other pigeons, cold and scrounging for food. But it made them vulnerable too, to their devotion to the ones they love being used against them by those same men.

Pigeon men called it the widowhood method. As soon as a pair’s young were weaned, the male would be separated from his babies and his mate, only allowed back to their nest as a reward for returning from training or a race. It was heartbreaking to watch the way a male would peck and peck at the divider between them until he had at last exhausted himself. Pigeons who live the park would never have had to endure that. And that wasn’t the worst of it, at least as far as Daddy’s birds were concerned. The lifespan of a well-cared-for bird was easily twenty years, but Daddy had no birds older than four or five in his flock. I had seen many come and go. When I was really little and birds disappeared, he used to tell me they had decided to go live with the wild birds in the park or that he had sent them away to live with another pigeon man’s flock. Neither of those stories made a lick of sense to me, knowing what I did about pigeons. But back then, to me, Daddy’s word was God.

I might have gone on believing forever that all those long-gone pigeons were still happily living somewhere else if Daddy hadn’t called me out to the coop the morning of my seventh birthday.

There he stood, the Mayor of Munchkin Land already captive in his hands. I wasn’t surprised; I knew the Mayor’s days with us were numbered. Daddy had had great hopes for the Mayor, him having been bred from two of his fastest birds. But he had turned out undersized and a little fat, showing only the promise to eat more corn than he earned. The Mayor, having been held by Daddy countless times, didn’t struggle, trusting that he would be ushered off to some faraway place and allowed to journey home. But then Daddy started saying something I couldn’t make heads or tails of about a man being a slave to his nature; that it was God, not him, that had made it so; that the sooner I came to know that, the better off I’d be. And just like that, Daddy wrung the Mayor’s neck and threw him in the can, like garbage. I dropped to my knees, sickness rising to my throat, the sudden truth of what had happened to all those other pigeons that Daddy had ‘sent away’ hitting me like a rogue wave, knocking me from my feet.

I tried and tried to make sense of it all, what he’d done and said, and the best I could figure was that, to Daddy, the Mayor had been the ‘man’ that was a slave to his nature, that the blame for the cruel fate he would suffer, right there in front of my eyes, lay with God for having made the Mayor the way he was. Forever after, I tried to never think about what I had seen that day when I was with the pigeons. Knowing what was to become of them when they didn’t felt like a betrayal of their trust. The day I snuck back home to see them was no different. As Auntie Em ate the feed from my hand and let me stroke her, I thought only of how warm and silky her feathers were to my touch. And when I crouched, matching Tin Man and the Wizard’s coos, coaxing them closer, I thought only of the many homing flights they must have enjoyed since last I had seen them. I never did get either of them to eat from my hand that day, though, thanks to my sister Lorraine. Just as Tin Man came close, the Wizard trailing behind him, she burst out the back door, spooking them to the ceiling and out of the coop.

“Vitaline, what on earth are you doing here? Does your Auntie Marie know where you are?” she hollered, equal parts surprise and exasperation in her voice.

“Tin Man was going to let me pet him, and you scared him away,” I hollered back, my face gone to boiling.

“I need to get to work. They will dock my pay for the time it will take me to bring you all the way home to Silver Street and then get to Sylvania,” she said, reminding me, like she always did, of the burden I was to her.

“Don’t call that place my home,” I shrieked. “My home is here with you and Daddy and Toto, with Flash Gordon and Glinda and the rest of the pigeons. Tin Man was going to let me pet him, and now I’ll never get to because of you.”

Lorraine grabbed hold of my wrist, but I made myself dead weight and wouldn’t budge. I knew the way back to Auntie Marie’s; I didn’t need her to take me, and I wasn’t going back there, or anywhere, until I’d seen Toto. A tug of war ensued, her yanking me toward the street and me fighting to stay put until finally my poor wrist could take no more.

“I’ll go, I’ll go,” I finally agreed, ceasing my fight. “But only if we go across the street and find Toto first. He’ll be in the cemetery chasing after Marcel and Roland’s tires. I know he will.”

Lorraine let go of me then. And silly me, for one blissful moment, thought I had won. In a million years I couldn’t have anticipated what came next.

“I told Daddy he was to tell you,” she said. “Toto has been gone almost as long as you have. Daddy sent him to live with Uncle Wilfred on his farm. It was Momma that had wanted that dog around, Vita, you know that. Daddy never had any use for him.”

It was like the time I had jumped headfirst from the dock at Rope’s Point, not yet knowing how to dive, hitting the water belly first. From there, beneath the surface, the wind knocked out of me, the rush of water all around, the world had been reduced to a faraway muted light and a singular desperate need for my next breath. I had no memory of my legs carrying me back across Salem. We were halfway there before I resurfaced.

Lorraine had moved on from telling me how Daddy had sent Toto away to droning on about her engagement to Jimmy and their upcoming wedding. The flowers were all picked out—roses, dyed pinker than pink, the thorns removed, with wisps of baby's breath.

“Can you imagine how beautiful?” she kept saying as she described each, the boutonnieres the men would pin to their lapels, the dresses her bridesmaids would wear, the table favors, and more. But all I could imagine was Toto at the foot of my bed with his little ears pricked up and his trusting eyes looking at me like I was all the world to him. And suddenly, those words of Daddy’s from my seventh birthday came rushing back, their meaning clear to me in a way they had never been.

A man is a slave to his nature, Vitaline. It is God, not I, that makes it so.

Daddy’s eyes had been unblinking when he wrung the Mayor’s neck, his face unflinching as the bird kicked his feet for the final time, his once shining-orange pigeon eyes going dark. It had never been God’s fault or the Mayor’s like Daddy had wanted me to believe, any more than it had been the fault of any of his other birds, who were guilty only of never giving up on trying to come home.

When finally Lorraine delivered me back to Silver Street, I arrived there a different Vitaline, one who was older than her years and with her eyes fully open to her father’s cruel nature—a Vitaline who knew with certainty that what her sister had said about Toto living happily in Maine was as much a fairy tale as the stories she had once believed about her father’s missing pigeons happily living out the rest of their lives with another flock.