The Dove's Nest

5.29.06


He has a tree in his back yard, this young boy, with branches that reach half way across the expanse. It shades the grass in places, reveals sky in others and is home to a single dove's nest. A mere sapling when it arrived, hoisted into the ground with a forklift, it has now grown to 10 times its size and just as wide. When the wind blows the leaves whistle to each other and in the heat of summer they barely rustle. His job now is to mow the lawn underneath and sweep up the scattered twigs that fall away in the night. He loves to sit in its lowest branch and feel the comfort of its many scratchy arms around him. From his crouch he can see the dove's nest and how it grows from year to year, bringing back the love birds whose songs wake him in the spring. When the cat found the nest, he fiercely shooed her away each time she attempted to scale the trunk until finally she gave up and he could rest again.

One day a typhoon like wind storm knocked his tree over and it brought tears to his eyes, the huge exposed root ball ripped out of a gaping hole in the earth. Like a toppled hero the tree shivered as it rested on his newly mown grass. He grabbed a blanket and threw it over the arterial system of the tree and watered it down, to keep the moisture in until the arborist arrived. Miraculously, the dove's nest was not unseated and as there were no eggs yet, he hoped the accident would not prevent their mating. He sat in the yard and waited for the rescue team and as the wind died down he lay back in the grass and closed his eyes. A memory of his father returned to him. His father playing baseball with him and helping him build stilts and doing homework with him years ago. But this was odd, he thought to himself, as those things had never happened. Was he dreaming? His father was gone and he was now "the man of the house." A sound brought him to attention as the arborist readied his equipment.

The older man with dark brown skin and a straw hat smiled at the boy as he set up his pulleys and ropes. The boy removed the blanket and then checked on the dove's nest and stood aside as the man slowly raised the tree back to its vertical glory. The boy cried out in joy as the root ball settled back into its home with a deep thunk and the behemoth shooks her green arms in relief. The man and boy worked together to pile dirt back into the hole and around the trunk and when they stood back to admire the restored glory the older one put his hand lightly on the younger's shoulder.

Every day the boy would check to make sure his tree's roots were taking hold again, that the cat would not renew her quest and that, when the doves returned, their nest was safe. One morning he noticed a few new additions to their twigged enclave: a blue thread, a torn yellow movie ticket, and a scrap of seraphenous fabric. Perhaps during the windstorm they had found these items caught in time and felt they would bolster their roost. This re-decorating signaled to him that the mother dove was due soon and he knew what he must do.

He brought his sleeping bag and camping lantern out to the base of the tree, to protect the nascent avian couple from the neighborhood beasts. Raccoons had made their rounds, an oppossum and his own cat could not be trusted. His canteen had fresh water and a bag of pretzels would quench his hunger, although he would make sure to chew them slowly so their crispness wouldn't attract attention.

Over the course of a week he watched as the mother dove sat quietly in the nest and the male left and returned with his nourishing worms and insects. Once when he nodded off he could feel the cat sniffing around his head and he quickly turned it, opened his eyes and peered into the pure animal drive of this feline face. He laughed at her instinct and his own to protect and she turned away, once again. He looked up into the branches and noted that the mother dove was gone and the male was now the sole occupant.

Excited, knowing that this shift of duties meant her eggs had been laid, he scrambled out of his sleeping bag and quietly, ever so slowly climbed up into his perch. It was a windless day so he avoided rustling too many leaves on his way up. It wouldn't have mattered, though, as the male was intent on his task of warming his offspring and not even bear swat would have unseated him. The boy inched closer all the while looking at the male, his concentration, his focus, his barely moving body and he wondered if human fathers were supposed to be this way. What he had seen on TV were buffoons with beer cans, artistic types making pancakes in the kitchen or shouting coaches on a ball field. He couldn't imagine his own sitting quietly, motionless watching his son grow, for he actually couldn't remember him at all. There was a picture of him on a dresser, stern looking man with a felt hat, a clarinet on his lap. All he had been told was that he had gone, would never come back, but that his mother would always be there for him. He was okay with that.

Now, the dove shifted a couple of times and the boy's breath quickened. It was time. He closed his eyes so he could hear what he knew would come, the beating of the female's wings as she returned with her own neighborhood groceries. When he opened them, he saw both birds perched on the edge of their nest, looking once at each other and then inside at what would come. He dared not move, but in his mind's eye he could picture two little gray blue eggs, wobbling on themselves as they cracked open. Tiny beaks would be waving in the air and scrawny tensile thick legs would push away their shelled cage. Covered in amniotic slime their miniscule feathers would be matted against their silver thin bodies, tiny thread like veins criss crossing under powder down. In a few minutes, they would right themselves and bleat the scrick-scrawk sound you could only hear from within the tree, so small were their lungs. But mother and father dove are there and watch their babies with pride as they kick away at the paper thin shells they now longer need. The boy opened his eyes now and could see mother dove offer regurgitae to her new borns and smiled as they opened their mini-beaks to accept it. This was going to be a good year, he felt. Both babies looked strong and he would be ever vigilant against the potential predators.

After a while, he climbed down the tree trunk and put away his sleeping bag. He was really hungry now, could feel the cranky gurglings in his stomach and felt he could eat the proverbial horse. He stomped down a clump of the freshly turned dirt and shoo-ed the cat away again. Realizing that he could use a good sleep in his own bed, he went behind the garage and found the chicken wire his mother used to grow tomatoes in the summer and wrapped the netlike material around the tree's trunk, slanted out like an a-line skirt. This would flumox any 4 footed fiend in search of dinner. Secure now that he had done what he could, that it was time to go back in the house, he looked up at the new family. Mother and father sat still on either side of their tumbling, scrawny kids and the male now looked at the boy with bullet black eyes. His gaze was as firm and focused as it had been on his own, but now he directed it at his guardian, the young boy with matted hair and his shirt on inside out. A bird is incapable of smiling, the boy knew, but he could feel something coming from that stern gaze, a thank you perhaps, a nod, for sure.

He grew that summer, an extra inch, the boy with dreams of things that did not happen. And the nest was knocked assunder one year when the phone company dropped a tool from high above the tree, while repairing the lines. He wasn't there when it happened, but found the broken nest on the ground. He was now tall enough to simply replace it in its spot without having to climb and he marveled at how these branches had held his weight during his yearly vigils. New dove couples came back and his mother kept up the practice of the chicken wire skirt during hatching seasons.

The boy, grown man, would inhabit a new perch in a city high rise during the day, and watch a falcon build and defend his nest, another father fierce in protecting his young. There were no natural predators at this height, only the window washers, whom the man would warn with arm gestures and window signs and finally a letter to their company. Soon, the couple became famous, within the building and without and the young man took on the role of protector, political activist, provider, while the falcons went about their procreative tasks.

Years later, his own son would ask about grandma's funny tree in her back yard, the one with the "bushy hair" and the weird skirt. He would explain the history of the battered chicken wire and his boy just couldnt' believe that such a flimsy thing could keep harm away. So he put his boy on his shoulders and showed him the dove's nest, now thick with years of additions and weathered subtractions. And he told him that sometimes even the smallest gesture, the slimmest of shields, the lightest sword can keep danger at bay. The boy looked at him with those same dark eyes, the dove's eyes from his youth and laughed aloud. He then took a feather from the nest and stuck it in his father's hair and the two left the tree and went back into the house.