Part Two
Nathan Bates
2 September 1965
Feathers
Two years before that, on the afternoon before his first day of kindergarten, Nat Bates found a baby bird in the front yard. Under the maple tree.
It was almost too much to bear.
One new thing to accept, that was difficult and exhilarating and stressful and wonderful enough. But kindergarten and a baby bird was almost too much. Like something in his chest might burst, and then that would be the end of him.
At first he didn’t even know what the tiny lump under the maple tree was. He knew only that it was alive. It didn’t look like a bird. It didn’t look like anything he had ever seen before. It had no feathers. It was no bigger than his palm. Pink. Bony, like the pictures he’d seen of dinosaurs, with the skin stretched over those bones looking strangely translucent and wrinkled.
It opened its beak as if demanding something from Nat. Something he was sure he didn’t have.
He scooped it up in his hands and carried it in to Gamma.
“Oh, dear,” she said.
She didn’t like animals in the house, Nat knew. But he felt he’d had no choice this time.
“What is it, Gamma?”
“It’s a baby bird. It must’ve fallen out of the nest.”
“Maybe I could put it back.”
“Now, how are you going to get all the way up there?”
“I could climb up.”
“With a baby bird in one hand?”
“I could borrow a ladder from Mr. Feldstein. If you could hold the ladder, I bet I could.”
“It’s too late, anyway,” Gamma said. “You touched it. You can’t put a bird back in the nest once you’ve touched it. The mother won’t feed it any more. Not once it smells like a human.”
Nat considered this for a time. Unwilling to accept any solution that ended badly for the bird he had touched.
“I guess I’ll have to feed it, then.”
“Oh, Lord,” Gamma said. But she did not say no. Seeming to know from experience that he would not accept it as an answer.
? ? ?
Nat rinsed out an eyedropper in the bathroom sink while Gamma went to fetch the heat lamp she used when her back went out.
They made the baby bird as comfortable as possible in an old hat box — which Gamma had been unhappy to give up — cushioned by a handful of Nat’s white socks.
“His name is Feathers,” Nat said.
“You may not name him,” Gamma said. “If you name him then he becomes a pet. And you’ll want to keep him. And I don’t like pets, and besides, you can’t keep a wild bird, anyway. He’ll either die or fly away. So you can’t name him.”
“But I already did,” Nat said.
Gamma sighed deeply. “Besides, that’s a silly name for him. He doesn’t even have feathers.”
“But that’s just it,” Nat said.
“What’s just it?”
“It’s like a wish.”
Gamma just shook her head and went unhappily off to find something that could be fed through an eyedropper to a bird.
? ? ?
She came in before bed to say, “Stop looking at the bird and go to sleep.” In fact, she said it even before looking into his room. Leaving Nat to wonder if she could see through walls.
She’d often told him she had powers he could never understand. And certainly never foil.
“I was just checking on him.”
“You have school in the morning, so go to sleep.”
“I don’t want him to die.”
“Well, they usually do die, so don’t get too attached.” Nat began to cry.
It was only partly the idea of the bird dying. More than that, it was a sense of too many new things to bear, and the feeling that something in his chest would burst because of it.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear. Don’t cry, now. I didn’t mean to make you cry. Just go to bed and we’ll see.”