Before I had kids of my own the bird would have stayed on the front steps fending
for itself, but my daughter spied it, a speckled baby robin
tumbled from the nest, bird legs splayed beneath it, not yet able to fly. “Put down
the newspaper and do something,” she told me, old enough now
to have ideas of her own. So I took one last swig of coffee and went to lift the
ladder from its hooks in the garage. Under the white oak
where we’d watched the robins build and raise, the parent birds set about attacking
me—they knew their job—and a mockingbird
dove at my head, too, sensing some meanness it would be a shame to miss out on.
The stranded bird was small enough to fold neatly
into the hollow a pair of hands could make, my palms cupped into a fleshen shell
to be pecked at resentfully. You shouldn’t expect anything wild
to comprehend help. Maybe this wasn’t help at all. I stumbled up the ladder with
only my elbow to keep me steady. Did I mention
it was raining? From the top rung in a gray drizzle on tiptoe, I could barely reach
over the lip of the nest to return the bird to safety,
and then one of its nestmates flung itself over the edge. I descended the slick
aluminum treads to retrieve that one
from where it’d landed in a scolding heap on the clipped Bermuda lawn. As I
climbed up the ladder again, an incensed adult robin
dove at my head. Then a mockingbird, then the other robin. When I stretched to
put back the bird in hand, two more fledglings leapt out, sudden as popcorn
popping free of the oil. My daughter had lost all interest by now. The front door
that framed her watching was empty. But I kept climbing
the ladder—how many times?—until the birds gave it up, perhaps beginning to
understand I was in earnest and they would have to hunker down
to save their last leap until the ladder was put away and I’d gone back to the
newspaper, my cold coffee warmed with the pot’s last burnt-down dregs.