Blue Aviary

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWOThe dilapidated kennel, built years before, was designed to hold a dog. Beep worked tirelessly to ready the enclosure with new posts and wrought iron fencing. Little Tilly arrived for my brother Zach’s sixth birthday. She was a rolypoly bundle of a little yellow lab. The very first day, Zach threw her into Jolly’s pond to teach her to swim. Instead of struggling to save herself, she loved the water. She used her little club of a tail like a boat tiller, and that’s how she got her name, Tilly. She quickly endeared herself so completely to the entire family, imprisoning her in the kennel was never a real option, so she slept in Zach’s bed every night.

Instead, the kennel became a place for the birds with the addition of a coop. First there were chickens. Chickens, after all, legitimized the little farm. “We’re a going concern,” Beep said of it once the members of the first class of infant egg layers began to fulfill their God-given purpose. First there was one egg, then a few days later maybe two or three. It wasn’t long before the Bowden farm was in full production. Eight, ten eggs a day almost filled my little cane basket.

The pigeons came a year later. It was Zach who first imagined a place for pigeons. He put the idea to Beepah one morning while standing at the kennel gate eating a dirty carrot yanked fresh from the garden. If I recall, it was a Saturday, Zach’s favorite day by far. I was five or so, and there to collect eggs at Beep’s insistence. I scissor-stepped across the bales of straw, shooing chickens from their nests. I gathered the warm eggs in my basket or Beep’s baseball cap.

“I was just out there checking my rabbit trap,” Zach said. He pointed with his carrot toward the garden out back, as if Beep needed a reminder as to the whereabouts of the infamous rabbit trap.

Beepah was always inquisitive. “Get anything?”

“Just this toad.” Zach clutched the fat amphib in his hand opposite the carrot. He raised it over his head for inspection. “He jumped in there in the middle of the night. Toads like the dark. Anyway, he’s the biggest toad I ever caught. I might keep him for a pet. A toad’s a toad,” he said, giving a shrug. It was a small victory by Zach’s standards, and his frustration showed. He kicked at the iron gate. “A rabbit would make a good pet.”

Beepah used a pitchfork to move old straw to the scratch yard where chickens churned it up in their hunt for cracked corn and bugs. “Rabbits are generally gentle creatures,” Beep said. “Their talents are limited. They don’t fetch or herd cattle. They’re lousy swimmers too. I tried to teach one myself when I was about your age. It didn’t end well.”

Zach was familiar with Beep’s teasing and this time it bothered him. “I don’t care about that stuff. I don’t need a rabbit that can swim. That’s just dumb anyway,” he grumbled.

Beep laughed and jabbed at Zach again. “It’s a good thing you think so,” he said. “It’s not easy sorting the smart rabbits from the less gifted. Much like people in that regard.”

Zach snapped off a bite of his dirty carrot and chomped on it until it was chewed fine enough to swallow. I could tell his mind was grinding over Beepah’s digs. He chomped off another bite and crunched it in his teeth. All the while, his eyes surveyed the kennel and the coop. At last he spit the carrot chunks to the ground, inciting a rush of hungry chickens. “You know what this chicken coop needs? A whole bunch of pigeons, that’s what,” Zach declared.

Beep leaned on his pitchfork and c****d his head to watch the last of the orange sunrise drain from the morning sky to the east. He smiled. “You might be onto something, Zach boy,” he said.

I remember clear as day how Zach’s simple suggestion started things rolling and how a lowly chicken coop became an aviary. Quickly there was progress made. One afternoon I came home from school to discover an odd contraption mounted on the roof of the coop. It was an entry trap. Pigeons could learn to enter the coop through the trap, but they could not exit. It was an ingenious idea. Beep said he saw it in a sporting-bird magazine.

After church that day, Beepah loaded Zach and me into his old Chevy van. Zach sat up front, and I slid into the back seat behind Beep and off we went. All the way down Trumpet Hill, Beep explained what he had learned about pigeons and his rationale for driving into the big town of Kingston on a Sunday.

“Here’s the plan,” he said. “Parking lots are empty on Sunday, except if there’s a concert, or a flower show, or something.” Then at a red light, and complete with hand gestures, he said, “We swoop in there and set up the trap and haul off with a load of city pigeons while the townsfolk are still scratching their behinds.” There was no talk of legal entanglements. The purpose was to capture pigeons, pure and simple. Jail times were barely discussed.

The plan got Zach’s attention. “Like Vikings on a raid!” he jumped in. “Only they don’t use traps. They chop up all the boys and haul off all the girls. Go figure that, Sydney!”

“The cattle raid of Cooley!” Beep blurted out of the blue. His sudden outburst even in cited his own laughter.“Your grandmother told me the story many times. Cooley . . . that’s where her people come from. Your grandmother lived there until she was ten. She had a way of telling a story, the dear woman,” Beep said.

“She sang to me at bedtime,” I said.

“She had the sweetest Irish lilt till her dyin’ day,” Beep said. “It seems the Queen of Connacht became jealous of the Cooley bull, the most magnificent bull in all of Ireland. She sent her army to steal the beast away,” Beep said. “Ah, but there is a hero to this tale: a boy named Connell.

Zach spoke up. “Hey, that’s my name!”

“Yup, Zachary Connell Bowden. It was your grandmother’s idea. In her story, it’s Connell who drives off the army with nothing but a slingshot. He saves everybody, and the family bull too.”

“I got named for him?”

“Yes, you did, Connie boy.” Beep reached across and gave Zach’s sandy brown hair a scrub with his knuckles. Beep rocked back in the driver’s seat and wheeled the old van off the highway and onto a quiet Flatbush Avenue. The van rolled past a gas station guarding the entrance to the town. Zach’s excitement was palpable. It was that very kind of derring-do, accompanied by bold talk, that had become Zach’s modus operandi and Beep discovered the willing spark in Zach over his first seven years of life.

The morning of the great pigeon raid might have been a story onto itself. But alas, we were not confronted by an angry mob of townsfolk seeking to waylay our planned plunder. None gave our raid the simplest notice. Strangely, after Beepah’s old van rolled to a stop in an empty parking lot, I stood with my eyes pointing skyward. My head turned to engulf the enormity of the universe in one swift pirouette. Suddenly, I passed from almost invisible to very conspicuous.

Zach was quick to point out the obvious, all of it said to frighten me. “Look at all those windows, Sidney!” he blurted. “Just because it’s Sunday doesn’t mean there’s not people up there watching everything you’re doing. If they catch you stealing pigeons, they’ll put you in jail!” He cupped his hand to his mouth and brought it near my ear. “And girls don’t get their own cage neither,” he warned me. I did my best to ignore him.

Beepah stood for a moment studying the building tops with his hand shading his eyes. He walked to the rear door of the van and swung it up and open. He removed the wire mesh contraption he had fashioned for capturing pigeons and set it on the pavement a few feet away. He raised the mesh door and strung a string from the trap to the van’s side door. I crawled back into the van. It seemed a more secure perch. Based on Beepah’s stories, I suspected a rain of pigeons was about to descend from the building tops to our little spot in the world.

“Hold this,” Beep said to me, and he handed over the string. He went to the back of the van again and retrieved a can of cracked corn and held it out to Zach. “Scatter a handful around the trap. Not too much. Just let them see it.”

Zach came prepared. “I got corn in my pockets,” he said. “I’ll use my own.” He reached into his jeans and hauled out a fistful of cracked corn and scattered it on the pavement. All the while his eyes were trained on the building tops. “Most of it goes in the trap. I caught squirrels this way before.” He swirled another handful inside the wire trap.

It took only a second, maybe two. The first pigeon dropped from an almost invisible flock strung from one end of the towering eave to the other. And, whether the bravest or the hungriest, he dropped in with barely a beat of his wings, almost skidding to a stop near the trap. Zach backed his way slowly toward the van where Beepah leaned quietly against the open side door. He watched as the awakened flock took flight overhead, circling more cautiously in its descent.

Zach poked his head into the van. “Give me the string, Sydney.” He snatched it from me before I offered. “I did this with squirrels, even a skunk once.”

Sure enough, the flock descended almost like a swarm, piling onto the pavement, muscling toward the trap door. Each was ravenous, desperate to get a fair share. Zach truly was a pro at catching animals. He waited just long enough. He gave the string a yank and held on tight to keep the contraption closed.

Beep made the few steps to the trap and snatched it up. He held the wire door closed in his big hands and hurried to the back of the van. He pushed the trap inside and tossed an old army blanket over the contraption to keep the birds quiet. After that, he pulled the tailgate door shut and slapped his hands together. The entire operation took less than five minutes. It was slick. It was stealthy, as much as daylight and a disinterested citizenry allowed.

We talked about the raid during the ride back home. Even though he had instigated the entire operation, Beepah suggested it was unfair to the birds, who had no say in the matter. They could have chosen freedom. They could have remained high up under the eaves. They were betrayed by human behaviors they had been conditioned to trust. People tossed breadcrumbs in the park and popcorn on the sidewalk in front of the movie theater. Beep said it was generosity without consequence until we showed up.

I think often about that first raid, its cruelty perhaps. I went only twice more during the year that followed, in part because Beepah and Zach would go off quietly on Sunday mornings and return a few hours later with a basket of birds. Even at an early age the practice weighed on me a little, but I was too young to truly measure the worth or the cruelty of it. I waged little skirmishes against the practice. Zach did his best to make me cry, and sometimes he succeeded. Beep took me on his lap on those occasions. “You can let the birds out in the morning,” he would promise. “If they come back, they’re welcome to stay another day.”

Like Beep promised, there were many mornings I sprung the entry trap. Out they went, led by a handsome male Beep dubbed Ralph Loren “Because he has s*x appeal,” Beep said. Ralph led the flock all around the place, over the forest rim and out over Jolly’s pond, and almost always with his little coffee-colored mate as wingman.

My repugnance for the raids did not diminish during the year or two that followed. I won’t deny a healthy militancy had reared its head in me, prematurely perhaps. But my efforts were rewarded with compromise, and after a time, the raids on the city pigeons ceased. The population in the aviary became self-sustaining. Mating dances were at a healthy frenzy, and when spring arrived, a rash of babies hatched in the rafters overhead.