Joanne J. Henry - Promise of Bluebirds 汉译

The Pennsylvania landscape was in severe wintry garb as our car sped west over the interstate. The season was wrong, but I couldn’t get bluebirds out of my head.

Only three weeks before, at Christmas, Dad had given me a nesting box he’d made. He had a special feeling for the brilliant creatures, and each spring he eagerly awaited their return. Now I wondered, will he ever see one again?

It was a heart attack. Dad’s third.

When I got to the hospital at 2 a.m., he was losing the fight. As the family hovered at his bedside, he drifted in and out of consciousness.

Once he looked up at Mom sitting beside the bed holding his hand. “They want me to let go,” he said, “but I can’t. I don’t want to.”

Mom patted his arm. “Just hold on to me,” she murmured.

The next morning the cardiologist met us in the waiting room. “He’s still fighting,” the doctor said. “I’ve never seen such strength.”

A miner. Dad had not had an easy life. He and Mom raised six kids at a time when coal miners earned as little as 25 cents a ton, and he loaded nine tons a day. Even now, I’m sure we don’t know most of the sacrifices they made for us.

I remembered Dad’s hard hat, its carbide lamp showing a fine pall of coal dust. Dad’s gray-green eyes seemed large and wise as an owl’s in his blackened face. They often sparkled with devilment when they met yours in conversation.

Each evening he came home, eager to take up his crosscut saw or claw hammer. Dad could chock a piece of walnut on his lathe and deftly turn out a cherry fold-top desk with fine, dovetailed drawers as easily as he could fashion a fishing-line threader out of an old ballpoint pen.

Dad bought our plain, two-story house from the coal company and immediately began to remodel it. Our house was the first on the hill to have an indoor bathroom and hot water. He spent one summer digging out the clay-filled foundation to install a coal furnace. We children no longer shivered in our bedrooms on cold winter mornings.

Dad carried a spirit of craftsmanship into every job and expected the same from all six children. Each job had its claim on your best efforts. And every tool had its name. Those were his principles, and we lived by them just as Dad did.

His playful spirit would set us to giggling — like the time he was building a fireplace in the backyard. He sent us to look for the “stone-bender” he needed to make the cornerstones fit more evenly. “Guess I’ll have to bend them myself,” he said when we returned empty-handed. We saw the sparkle in his eyes, and knew we’d been had.

Sitting in the hospital waiting room, I thought back to an afternoon in Dad’s workshop several years ago. He was retired by then, but he kept busy building beautiful furniture, now for his children’s homes. A volunteer naturalist, I was eager to tell him about the help bluebirds needed.

When the early settlers had cleared forests for farmland, I explained, bluebirds flourished, nesting in fence-posts and orchard trees. But their habitat was disappearing, and now the birds needed nesting boxes.

Dad listened as I spoke, his hands gently moving a fine-grained sand-paper over a piece of oak. I asked him if he would like to build a box. He said he would think about it.

Several weeks later he invited me into his workshop. There, on his workbench, sat three well-crafted bluebird nesting boxes. “Think the birds will like them?” he asked.

“As much as I do,” I replied, hugging him. Dad put up the boxes, and the next spring bluebirds nested in his yard. He was hooked.

Dad became quite an expert on the species. Bluebirds, he would say, are harbingers of hope and triumph, renowned for family loyalty. A pair will have two or three broods a year, the earlier young sometimes helping to feed the later nestlings.

The presence of his children must have boosted Dad’s spirits after his attack because he grew stronger and left the hospital on Valentine’s Day. When I visited my parents at the end of March, Dad was confined to the downstairs. But I noticed that he paused longer and longer at the windows facing the backyard. I knew what he was hoping to see. And one day a bright flash of color circled the nesting box closest to our house.

“Well, it’s about time the rascals showed, don’t you think?” Dad said.

Sporting a resplendent blue head, back, and wings and tail, a male bluebird sang his courtship song so passionately that we dubbed him “Caruso” after the Italian tenor. A female appeared, but rejected the nesting box. Caruso found another in the field below the yard. He circled the new box, singing feverishly. She remained aloof on a distant perch.

Dad was walking more and more each day as the love story unfolded. I could see strength coming back into his wiry frame.

One day Caruso battled a rival for the female’s attention. Then she fought an even more vehement battle with another female. Afterward she resumed her haughty stance while he fervently continued with his rapturous repertoire.

Suddenly one exquisite morning, when the sky mirrored Caruso’s courting raiment, she flew back to the box nearest the house and inspected it thoroughly. Caruso hovered nearby and sang blissfully as she finally accepted him.

Shortly thereafter she proceeded to lay one egg a day until there were six. Caruso fluttered outside, defending the nest while she incubated.

Dad was now well enough to go outside, but he still couldn’t reach the backyard. He asked us to check inside the nesting box once a day. When we’d return, the question came. “Is she on the nest?” he asked. “Have the eggs hatched? Did you see that showboat what’s-his-name?”

“Caruso, Dad,” I replied. “He has a name, you know.” Dad’s sly grin reflected the devilment that had returned to his eyes.

When the eggs hatched, we marveled at the herculean efforts Caruso and his mate expended to capture insects for their brood. Nestlings must be fed every 20 minutes.

Near the end of May, the fledglings left the nest. By then Dad was able to walk to the fields beyond and see what other bluebird news there might be. Mom and I would watch him from the kitchen window. “He gave something to those bluebirds,” she said quietly one day. “Now they’ve given it back.”