Twenty-seven notes, for forty-five birds. Some people had bought more than one.
I’ll give you Mrs. Hill’s, so you know how they went.
Mrs. Hill, you bought the canvasback drake. On the bottom it says W.B. 77. Dad’s book says he roughed it out on January 14 of that year, the winter the river froze bank to bank and the lock shut down. My mother read him the newspaper while he worked, and Leonard Tucker stayed till ten. I am not asking for it back. I only thought the bird ought to go with its story. Patty.
I wrote all twenty-seven that way. Which bird, which winter, who was sitting with him. I wrote that line about not asking for it back on every single one, and I meant it every single time, even on Jacob Reed’s. That one took me four tries.
I did not put one word in any of them about two dollars, or about my sister.
Wednesday evening I walked them around town. Doug’s mother carried mail for thirty years, and I know better than to put anything without a stamp in a mailbox, so I tucked each one in a screen door. Four went out to the country with stamps on them.
Then I went back to Dad’s house and packed dishes, and nothing happened.
Nothing happened Thursday. Nothing happened Friday. Doug drove up for the weekend and we hauled the mattresses out, and he rewired the porch light that had been flickering since Christmas, and nothing happened. I thought, well, there it is. You wrote some letters. People have their own lives.
On the ninth morning after the sale, a Monday, I opened Dad’s front door to see about the weather. There was a paper grocery sack on the porch swing.
I knew the shape in it before I looked.
It was the canvasback drake, W.B. 77. Under him was my own note, folded in half, and on the back of it, in a careful hand in blue ballpoint:
Patty. In January of ’77 my Harold was a deckhand on a towboat that sat froze in below your daddy’s lock for nine days. He came home with his ears frostbit and said Walt Becker fed that whole crew chili out of a canning kettle every night and wouldn’t take a dime. I bought this bird because it was two dollars and pretty. I did not know I was holding that winter. He belongs with you. I wrote down my half so he has both. Mrs. Hill.
I sat on the swing with a duck in my lap and read it three times.
Then I went down to the basement, took the pencil on its string, and wrote in my father’s book, under his last line. Mon. Canvasback drake, W.B. 77, home 7:40 a.m. Mrs. Hill. Has her own story. See note.
I set him back on his oval in the dust.
After that they came like ducks do, a single and then a pair and then a bunch.
Dale from the bait shop walked his bluebill up the porch steps himself on his lunch hour. He said my father had let him ride through the lock in the pilothouse of a towboat when he was eight, and it was the reason he’d never lived anywhere but on that river. Then he asked whether he might keep the bird after all, on the shop counter, with a card saying who made it. I said he could, and I logged it. Dale, bluebill, W.B. 85. Staying. Will be seen by more people there than here.
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