MY GRANDMOTHER FOUND ME HUNCHED OVER in the dark, my head down, and my hands on my knees. She admonished me for breaking bottles, but I didn’t hear her, absorbed as I was in my corner of the cellar. I didn’t realize she was there at all until I felt her wrinkled hand running through my hair.
“Hobby owls,” my Grandmother said. “How many chicks do you count?”
“Five,” I answered, my voice hushed in reverence.
“Did you touch them?”
I shook my head.
“If you touch them, they will die.”
“Their nest is broken.”
My Grandmother sucked her teeth. “It’s not your fault. They must have moved in after we bottled last year’s cider. You couldn’t have known they were there.”
I’d been crying, but hadn’t realized that Grandmother could tell. It was dark, and she was practically blind without her glasses. Fat drops dripped from my lashes. They left salty craters in the cellar’s dirt floor.
The small owl’s nest lay on the ground, leaning very slightly against the shelf that housed my Grandmother’s dusty jars. I’d tried to take the bottles from the top shelf, above my eyesight, because last year I hadn’t been able to reach those jars. Three of the owlets now chirped against each other in a third of their nest, but two others had tumbled to the ground.
“Will they die?” I asked. I’d like to imagine my voice didn’t crack.
“Maybe not,” Grandmother said. “But first you’ll show me your hand.”
She gripped me by my sticky fingers and led me up the stairs, carefully steering me away from the shards of glass sparkling on the cellar steps. A long gouge traced a bloody line across my palm, where the glass had cut me. She clucked her tongue and led me into the kitchen.
Grandmother kept a sewing kit above the fridge and a first aid kit in the medicine cabinet, both of which she pulled out and placed on the table. She didn’t make me sit on her lap, but I had to hold my hand out as she picked out shards of glass with a pair of tweezers. She dropped the fragments into a candy dish. I watched red slowly pool beneath them.
Worst was the disinfectant. My Grandmother made me hold my hands above the sink while she doused them in hydrogen peroxide. I squirmed as imperceptibly as possible, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out as the liquid foamed pink over my cuts.
After I had been cleaned and bandaged, my Grandmother equipped me with rubber gloves, a large wire strainer, and a coat hanger. We marched back outside and down to the cellar. There, my Grandmother instructed me to carefully lift the nest, owlets and all, and place it in the strainer.
The prodigal owls were trickier. After my Grandmother’s earlier admonishment, I was loath to touch them, and I burst into tears again when she sharply upbraided me. She was sore over the loss of so many glass bottles, but doing her best not to show it.
Without putting gloves on, my Grandmother lifted the two owlets and placed them in the nest beside their siblings. “It’s a Grandmother’s touch,” she told me. “They’ll be all right. I’ve lifted you up a hundred times, when you were a baby, and you grew up just fine.”
We carried the strained owls up the cellar stairs and walked them to the edge of the wood that sided my grandparents’ property. There, she had me straighten the coat hanger until we could use it to tie the strainer to a tree branch, forming an impromptu home for the birds.
“What about your strainer?” I asked.
My Grandmother waved a dismissive hand, “Later. You don’t like my borscht anyway.”
I said nothing to that, but a few months without borscht sounded heavenly.
When we’d finished tying the strainer to the tree, my Grandmother had me jog back to the house for a roll of masking tape. The first three drawers that I pilfered turned up nothing, though I’d gone through where she kept all of her pens, markers, and paper. I finally found it in plain sight, on the dining room counter, where I’d absentmindedly left it two days earlier.
Grandmother used the tape to coat the ends of the hanger, “So the birds don’t shish kebab themselves on the pointy ends,” she said.
“Will their mom be able to find them, so far away?” I wondered aloud. My Grandmother put a gnarled hand on my shoulder.
“She’ll know where they are,” my Grandmother said. “These owlets are her direction.”
My Grandmother and I sat on the grass beside each other, looking up at our handiwork—at the birds that we had rescued from the cellar floor. The sun slipped behind the woods and for about ten minutes the grass blazed orange and copper before slipping back into shades of dark blue and green. The trees’ shadows stretched out and over across the lawn and, before too long, the branch that we were watching was swallowed by black.
My Grandmother twirled a piece of grass between her aged lips as we sat in the dark. She held my hand, but I didn’t protest. As the light disappeared, she looked back at the winking house and said that we should go make supper, or gramps would starve to death.
I followed her to the front porch, where her distillery now sat coolly in the evening gloom. She held a hand up, “Nuh-uh, young man. The deal was first you sweep the cellar.”
Still feeling guilty over the smashed glass, I complied without a peep. I grabbed a flashlight from my bedroom and held it clenched between my teeth as I swept up every piece of glass I could find.
Exciting as the cellar’s mysteries were during the day, the place seemed haunted at night. The pickled cucumbers and onions took on the cast of dismembered fingers and eyeballs floating in brine. The taxidermied moose’s glass eyes watched me whenever my back was turned. I heard creatures—mice, probably, though my mind conjured much worse—scurry through the cellar’s recesses in the dark. I contemplated my grandfather’s shotgun, should it come to self-defense, but knew better than to pursue that fantasy.
The glass swept, I ran back to the house. The long grass bypassed my shoes and tickled my bare ankles. The wooden porch creaked as my footsteps thundered across it.
I burst into the kitchen. My Grandmother smiled at me, told me to wash my hands and set the table, and for gosh sake leave those muddy shoes outside. Supper was boiled chicken and steamed carrots, hand-picked from her garden. Over dinner, she told my grandfather all about my day’s misadventures, emphasizing the spoiled batch of cider and all the wasted bottles that I’d broken on the cellar stairs. Despite that, she gave me her dry chuckle when I peered up at her regretfully, and gave me an extra scoop of cranberry preserve.
My spirits only dipped when my grandfather told me that I should have fed the owls to the neighbour’s cat.
That night, after my grandparents had tucked me in and the house resumed its usual late-night creaking, I quietly climbed from my bed. I tied my blanket around my throat like a cape, clutched my flashlight like a sword, and pulled clothes on over-top of my pajamas. The walk to the edge of the woods felt three times as long in the dark as it had during the day, but the stars shone bright above me like so many bits of broken glass.
I shone my flashlight’s beams through the trees like a searchlight, until at last it caught on the steely surface of Grandmother’s strainer. Having found the tree, I sat back down on the grass and watched. Though wilder, the woods seemed kinder to me than my Grandmother’s cellar, the dandelions and gnarled elms less alien than her preserves, and the soft grass an improvement over sharp, wooden steps. I sat vigilantly, watching the owl’s tree, until sleep took me on the lawn, and dew draped me like a fishing net.