“I took two weeks off,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Doug and Emma are going home tomorrow. I’m staying at Dad’s. I’ll finish the house, every room. You’re done carrying.”
I watched her decide whether that was an insult. She was too tired to make it into one.
“Key’s under the same brick,” she said, and went inside.
Doug hugged me in the street for a long minute. “You want me to say anything to her?” he asked.
“No.”
“You want me to go knock on some doors and buy some ducks back?”
“No. I don’t want anybody thinking I came to collect.”
“Then what’s the list for?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. And I didn’t.
I found out that night.
Dad’s shop is in the back corner of the basement, under the kitchen. There’s a bench he built out of bridge planks, a shaving horse, a drawknife on a nail, rasps hung by size, a coffee can of brushes gone stiff. The piece of hair comb was on the windowsill. The shelves along the wall were empty, with forty-seven clean ovals in the dust where the birds had sat.
On the bench was one more. A canvasback body, roughed out and hollowed and glued, with no head. The head was beside it, half shaped, the bill still a square block. Gail hadn’t put it on the table. I suppose it didn’t look like a duck to her yet.
I opened the bench drawer looking for I don’t know what, and there they were. Green cloth ledgers, the same kind he’d used at the lock, eleven of them, with a pencil on a string thumbtacked to the drawer front.
He had logged the ducks.
Not only the ducks. He had logged his winters at that bench the way he logged his river. I opened the oldest one to the first page.
Jan. 9, 1966. Cook off the towboat give me a pine block. Tried a mallard. Looks like a potato. Jean laughed till she had to sit.
Jean was my mother.
Emma came down the stairs in her sock feet and found me sitting on the shaving horse with the book open on my knees. I read her that one, and she laughed the same way her grandmother must have.
“Find mine,” she said. “I mean, find yours. The little one.”
It took a few minutes. Third ledger.
Jan. 22, 1974. Girl born 4:10 this morning. 5 lb 2 oz. Jean fine. Home by noon to feed the stove and couldn’t sit still. Started a teal. She’s about that size.
And two weeks on:
Feb. 6. Finished the teal. Jean held the baby on her lap down here so I could work. Baby slept through the rasp. Burned her year on the bottom.
Emma didn’t say anything. She came and sat on the end of the horse with me, and I let her read it herself, because my voice wasn’t going to do it.
That was when I knew what the list was for.
Those neighbors had each carried off a bird. They ought to have the rest of it. Not so they would feel bad. So they’d know what they had.
We started that night at the bench, under his light. Emma read me a name and a year off my notepad, and I hunted the entry in the ledgers, and then I wrote a note on Dad’s own lined tablet paper. We did nine before she fell asleep with her head on her arms. Doug carried her up. I did the rest over the next three nights, by myself, after the day’s boxes were packed.
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