The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ solve this, I divide off a part of the male cage for my project. I build in a new floor about one third down from the top of the aviary. Above this I put Perta and her young. The bottom part I use for the adult and young males. There are eighty-five young males and eighty-two young females. Now I’ll feed them and give them tonic to get through the molt and ready for the market. I hate to think about selling them, especially the children of Birdie and Alfonso. Still, making money is the excuse I have for keeping my birds. It’s the way I can hold onto the world which makes my dream possible.

      The reason I build off the special cage is so I can live privately with Perta and my children in the dream. The very night the partition is finished, it’s that way in the dream. We don’t have as much space to fly, but this will be all right after I get my plan going.

      My plan is to work out a way for free flying with my family. It is the idea I developed up in the tree.

      In the dream, I’m happy as husband and father. I spend wonderful hours teaching my children to fly, to crack seed, to eat. We bathe together and I teach the young males to sing. We start with simple songs about flying, without any difficult parts, and move on to harder songs. One of the children’s songs is:

      Down is up.

      Up is sky.

      Sing a song

      Don’t ask why.

      Another is:

      Touch the air

      Hold it tight.

      Stroke the wind

      Ride the light.

      When I sell the young birds, I sell off three of my breeding females and one of my breeding males. I replace them with some of the best of the new young birds. I replace the three females because they aren’t good breeders. One only laid two eggs each nest and raised a total of five birds. Another laid eggs but consistently pulled the nest apart scattering the eggs on the floor. The third abandoned each of her nests when the babies were less than a week old. I saved the babies by distributing them to other nests, but she has to go. The male I sell because he’s developed the habit of egg-eating.

      All of these young birds are even better fliers than their parents. It’s a pleasure to watch them. The rustling sound of their wings is musical. Because they fly so much and so well, they are all trim and longer-legged than ordinary canaries. I wish I could have Mr Lincoln come see my aviary and birds. I think about it of ten but I could never explain it to my parents. I wish people could be more like canaries.

      During the day, I spend hours watching the birds fly. The more I watch, the stronger, truer, my dreams are. I’m getting so much inside the bird world, my dream seems completely independent of the day. I don’t even know what I know anymore. I can’t know all the time why things are in the dreams or how they’re going to be. The dreams have gotten so complicated they’re at least as real as the day.

      I don’t do any flying experiments with the birds. I know all of them too well from my dreams. I’m not really that interested in flying anymore; at least not as a boy. It’s better to watch a bird fly naturally than to watch one with weights or with feathers missing. Flying is something practically impossible to take apart. You have to learn it all at once; it can’t be seen in pieces.

      The price of birds does go up and I sell my birds to a wholesaler from Philadelphia for even more than I thought I would. At the end of the year there’s over a thousand dollars profit. My mother can’t believe it and wants me to pay board. She says I live in the house and I’m making almost as much money as my father so I ought to pay. I don’t care. I’m not keeping canaries for the money. My father says no; he’s going to put the money in the bank for my college education. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to college anyway. I only want to raise my birds and fly with them at night. I can do that anywhere; I don’t have to go to college for that.

      The thing I’m more worried about is getting drafted when I’m eighteen. There’s nothing I can do about this. The army isn’t going to let me keep canaries, that’s for sure. I wonder if the dream would continue then if I didn’t have any birds to watch. The army will probably take one look at me with my pointed chest and mark me off as 4-F anyway. I hope so.

      My father is great about my birdkeeping. He’s proud of the canaries and begins to talk about them, and the money I’m making, to the people at school. Everybody there knows I’m crazy with birds but they didn’t know about the money-making part.

      I demonstrate one of my ornithopters in physics class and they put it in a glass case in the hall. This kind of clinches it for me as Birdy the bird freak; ‘most likely to suck seed’. I don’t care much; I’m happy doing what I have to do. Sometimes I wish I could tell Al about my dream. I know he wouldn’t understand; he’s so real. He’d just think I’d finally flipped and that was it. Also, I’m afraid the dream might stop if I tell somebody else about it.

      During that winter I spend hours training Perta’s young birds in the cage. In the night I play and fly with my own children and then in the day I play with them as a boy. The personalities of the two sets of birds are exactly the same, so it’s easy for me to train Perta’s birds. I know them as my own children.

      I train all of her birds and Perta, too, to come when I whistle. This whistle is the closest sound I make as a boy to the bird sound for food. I go over it with them thousands of times. I give the signal and they fly directly to my finger to be fed. They eat from my finger or my lips or out of my hand. In the end, none of them has any more fear of me than Birdie had. They are really my children, even during the day.

      I’m in my senior year in high school now. I ride my bike to school rather than take the school bus. I stay mostly apart. Al and I see each other some but he’s all involved in sports. He’s trying that winter to win the District Championship in wrestling. He does it and then goes on to be State Champion at a hundred sixty-five pounds. I’m at the districts to watch, but there’s no way for me to get to Harrisburg for the State finals. He wins the finals with a first-period pin.

      It’s on a warm day in the end of February when I decide to make the big test. I choose a little female who is the closest to me. She’s exactly like one of my daughters from our last nest. I take her out of the aviary on my finger. When we get outside, I check the sky for hawks and the yard for cats. It’s all clear. I throw her up in the air from my finger the way I’ve done it in the aviary. I’ve been practicing with the birds in the center part where the breeding cages are. The door to their flight cage opens onto this part. I throw her up into the sky the way you would a pigeon or a falconing hawk.

      First she flies up and lands on the roof of the garage. Her flight, which looked so competent in the cage, seems awkward here in the open air. She hops along the edge and peeps down at me. She looks so small against the sky, so yellow and vulnerable in the immensity of blue. I give my whistle and hold out my finger. She flies immediately back down to me and takes a bit of treat food from my lips. I stroke her on the head. She fluffs her feathers and peeps. It’s a peep lost in the air. She’s a beautiful lemon yellow, yellower than Birdie. She looks so pure and clean in the winter sunshine.

      I throw her up in the air again and this time she stretches her wings and flies across our yard onto our porch roof where the pigeons used to roost. I almost swallow my heart. She’s so beautiful flying, but so far away. My mouth gets dry and I have a hard time whistling but I manage. She flies straight back to me and makes a cocky, wing-down, no-flutter landing on my finger.

      Over the next days, I practice with the rest of Perta’s young ones. СКАЧАТЬ