A Short Season with the Birds

Not long after his fiftieth birthday, Lester Hines began for the first time in his life to endure pangs of self-reproach. Passing a mirror these days he would be startled by the look in his own face. One night in line at the grocery store he heard himself curse the Louisiana State Tigers football team with such casual and thoughtless venom the words rang in his ears all the way home. At night, instead of sleeping he found himself searching his memory for his past crimes, large or small. And when he did sleep in his dreams he felt he was trying to claw from beneath buildings that had collapsed.

It was true enough, Lester Hines' life was unfairly empty and difficult. He had grown up in foster homes. He had known little affection. Animals disliked him, generally. He kept his credit cards frozen in a block of ice.

Lester worked as logistics coordinator for Holyland Book Publishing, a distributor for a chain of Christian Booktores, a job he despised but had held too long to quit. His position involved spending his days taking down complaints and scouring maps and running figures to find the most efficient routes for their drivers to make through the ArkLaMiss area. The drivers and he were often in disagreement.

And the town where he lived was ugly, full of angry traffic, a paper mill on the river fouling the air every few days and chasing everyone indoors. And all the worse because it appeared too slight a complaint, among his burdens he counted his chronically sweaty feet, their fungal growths and sour odor.

In these moments of self-awareness Lester accepted for a moment the idea of a just universe. He was to blame: he had mismanaged things, driven away his few friends and cut himself off from love. He saw himself at these times as filled with acid, an unhappy man who consoled himself of his loneliness with the unchallenged conviction in his superiority.

Thankfully for Lester Hines, these flashes of awareness were not common, and for most of his life he was comforted by the certainty of his own righteousness. In this way he was much like the rest of us.

And yet there had been a time when he was truly happy. He had been in love. For a short time Lester Hines had seemed to pass through a period of ease and pleasure. Those days he rose each day at four in the morning, usually a few minutes before the alarm. He did not find it hard to wake up so early; he could sit on the side of the bed smoking a cigarette and then get up without much of a struggle. By the time the sun was up, he would be working on the day’s delivery and pick-up routes as others might work a crossword puzzle. By noon each workday he would have his copies printed out and placed in each of the driver’s mailboxes, plus a copy to the sales manager’s secretary. Then he was home by one-thirty for his afternoon walk, yard maintenance, a series of caustic television shows and news programs, and then a skillet-fried dinner and an early bed.

It was one winter afternoon during this time that he looked from his kitchen window and noticed the birds filling the trees in his back yard and the alley beyond his house. It had snowed the night before and he hadn’t gone to work and, without anything to do, he had wandered the house for much of the morning. Finally pacing in the kitchen he had heard some buzzing noise and looked out from the back porch of his house and noticed the bare branches of the Sweetgum tree crowded with birds chirping and jostling each other. They had appeared as a flock in one body and now filled his backyard with their noisy calls. The birds annoyed him sitting there looking hungry in the cold, looking down at him. He wondered why they hadn’t learned to fly south for the winter like other birds. He threw out a few donuts he’d let go stale and stood watching a few birds swoop down, then more, until the whole mob of them flitted around pecking ravenously at the bread. There was something menacing about them. Half an hour later he’d emptied an entire bag of hot dog buns in the yard and watched the mass of birds mill and squabble.

The next day after work, he wandered the pet aisles at K-mart. How many objects one could buy just to attract birds! Feeders of course, but baths and lighted perches and houses of all sorts of design. He filled a cart and wheeled it to the check out, noticing as usual the line he’d picked turned out to be the slowest, some fool ahead of him trying to cash a check. He bought two feeders and a ten-pound sack of thistle seed, and by the time he’d gotten back and installed it the light was gone. But a week later the feeders were regular stops for many birds, and by March he had five feeders, a concrete birdbath, a line of custom-built nesting stations and a wire cage for his homemade gourmet suet. He had bought an Audobon book and a pair of binoculars and spent the afternoons at his kitchen window or on the deck on warm days watching the birds darting down, complaining and sparring for their places at the feeders. If he kept still long enough the birds flocked in the trees would forget him and swoop down over his chair and peck and warble and now and then a brave one might alight on the deck nearby, cocking its little swivel head up at him as if in communication. They seemed such fragile, airy things, and to see them in such numbers and hear the whispery flaps of their wings in the air above him gave Lester a feeling that he had seen into the mystery of nature's machinery.


The salesmen at the book warehouse noticed a change in Lester. Some believed they had misjudged him, that he was off-putting at first but all right once he warmed up. Sherry Poole, the Sales Manager’s secretary, found herself laughing at a joke Lester made, a mild insult about the Sales Manager’s interest in Tai Chi, and immediately after stopped to ask herself if it had really happened. She wondered for a moment if it meant she were attracted to Lester.

The mood of the entire shipping department was improved. Eventually, the regional manager noticed the warm feeling and uptick in production to the extent that he made a note of the comradery in his annual report and subconsciously added another percentage point in the raise he alloted for the department supervisor.

For his part, Lester noticed that his job provided him with several moments of satisfaction other than clocking out for the day. Among these were the moments when he dropped off his paperwork to the Sales Manager’s secretary. She was a short woman with a loose bowl of curly blonde hair on her head and pale, pasty skin. She wore loose-fitting dentures that she tried to cover with her hand in a way that did nothing but draw attention to her mouth. Lester did not know that her name was Sherry nor that she’d been married to a gambling addict who drowned in the White River, nor that twelve years ago, when she was sixteen, she’d had an accident the very first time she drove a car, busting out her front teeth on the steering wheel. What he knew was that she had the smallest hands on a woman he had ever seen; her fingers were small and delicately constructed, like a doll’s hands.

As he dropped off the route schedules each day he made sure to speak to her, and one afternoon with a headache and lacking any conversation he asked if she had any aspirin in her desk. Sherry dug out for him a few capsules, thinking that Lester by the look of him had a hangover and she wondered that he must be very sad to drink on a weeknight. She gave him the pills with such a sympathetic smile that Lester walked away with a sensation of warmth blooming in his stomach. Only at the water fountain did he remember his headache.

They had gone on three dates together before he invited her to come see his birds. With a frozen lasagna thawing in the oven they sat in chairs behind his house with a bottle of Chardonnay, and Lester pointed out for her the species of birds they saw, the grackles cocky and macho, the arrogant cardinal, the doves waddling stupidly on the ground beneath the feeders. They even saw a pileated woodpecker knocking at the dead maple, a large bird, regal in its black and red colors. Sherry noticed how happy Lester seemed, how infectious was his pleasure at the lighter things of the world. She wondered what other warmth lay inside him.

He talked and talked, pointing out birds who seemed to be of a couple, and others who seemed mischievous or resentful or hysterical, and speaking about his birds in her presence Lester felt a new kind of grace enter his being. Perhaps it was the age he had reached, this new sense of confidence. He saw himself now as he had once seen older men he’d envied, wise and at ease in his own skin, full of humor and radiating self-contentment.

That night they made love in the darkness of his bedroom. Sherry kept her false teeth in her mouth until Lester had fallen asleep, then, feeling her way to the bathroom put them with water in her wine glass.

They were married three months later, and as Sherry’s minister turned them to face the small congregation it seemed to Lester he had escaped the mark and pattern of his own life and had come to inhabit the role of a luckier man.

But things changed, as they do. He was still Lester Hines, after all. Not so fast that he could notice it happening, but steady and downward turned the course of his life. Only afterward did it seem inevitable, and until he turned fifty he had kept the dam against his memory secure, pushing down into a dark space in his chest nearly everything that had happened: the sour feeling he felt after their first bitter argument, the sense of ruin and loss, the early, minor terrors of jealousy, angry letters he composed in his head but never wrote. And the creeping anger, the soft insults muttered beneath his breath, the sexual humiliation, the holes in the wall beside the front door, the cuts on his knuckles and the sound of her dentures breaking on the carpet beneath his shoes, the shouting matches with his neighbors, driving his car through the plate glass window of the K-Mart lobby. And eavesdropping on her phone calls, and lurking outside her new house with a can of gasoline and a rubber mallet, and poisoning the birds in his yard and cutting down the dead maple, and losing his heart medicine in the park, and slapping the fast-food worker, and arriving drunk to his bankruptcy hearing, and the lump in his neck that wasn't going away.

Sitting alone in the bowling alley on his fifty-second birthday, Lester Hines thought of none of this. He considered himself fairly happy. He thought of himself as having weathered a storm, an embarrassing phase. Time continued to pass, bringing new thoughts, new television programs. And the only price for his contentment was that he must never dwell on his memory of Sherry Poole, their first night together, the one evening in his life when the world seemed right and he knew the names of all birds.