A Redbird Christmas Read Online Free PDF

I don’t either. Just make out a list of what you want and I’ll go and get your groceries for you so I don’t have to listen to you complain.”
    Mildred looked at her, highly incensed. “And just how am I supposed to know what I want until I get there? That’s why it’s called shopping, Frances!” And with that she marched out the door.
    Although Jack was a real handful and, without a doubt, could be a pest at times, he had grown from the tiny ugly mud hen he started out as in life into a beautiful scarlet-red and black-masked bird. With his lipstick-colored beak and shiny little reddish-brown eyes, he looked exactly like a redbird should, but for some reason when Jack looked right at you, he seemed to have a silly smile on his face. One day Roy told Claude Underwood, “I swear that crazy bird has a sense of humor. Every morning I come in and he’s done something else just to make me laugh. I came in yesterday, and the fool was hanging upside down swinging back and forth in the fishnet.”
    As time went on, Roy saw how smart the bird was and began to teach him tricks. Pretty soon he had Jack riding around on his finger and eating sunflower seeds out of his hand. His favorite game was when Roy would hide a sunflower seed in someone’s pocket and Jack would go inside the pocket of the surprised person and come back out with it and fly over and hand it to Roy. Then Roy would give him ten more.
    Jack clearly loved all the attention he was getting. When he saw himself in the mirror for the first time, he hunched down and bobbed his head at his reflection and tried to attack it, so Roy had to get rid of all the mirrors. Jack had made it known that as far as he was concerned the store was his territory, and he did not want another bird around. When the bird in the mirror had disappeared so quickly, Jack was convinced that he and he alone had run the intruder off, so he puffed up and strutted around and became bolder and bolder. Most of the time he rode on Roy’s shoulder or on his hat, but he pretty much went where he pleased. Eventually that turned out to be dangerous.
    One day, the postmistress Dottie Nivens’s big fat orange cat named Henry sat outside the store all day, looking in the window at Jack fluttering around the cash register, just waiting with his tail swishing back and forth, his eyes never losing sight of the bird. He was determined to catch it one way or another. Around three-thirty, when the kids from Lost River got off the school bus from Lillian and started coming in for candy and cold drinks, the cat saw his chance. He lunged through the open screen door, and before anyone saw him he had leaped up on the counter and made a grab for Jack. Jack shot straight up in the air, just barely managing to escape Henry’s claws, and landed on top of a shelf. Not to be deterred, Henry went tearing through the store right behind him, knocking racks of potato chips, cigarette cartons, cans and bottles on the floor as he chased Jack all around the room. And then everybody was running through the store chasing the cat and yelling. What a racket! It sounded like an earthquake. Poor Jack with his feathers flying and his crest standing straight up on his head, was hopping and leaping as fast and high as he could, with the cat continuing to miss him by mere inches. Jack somehow flapped and hopped his way all the way to the back of the store and landed on top of the meat counter, and the cat immediately sprang up after him and slid on all four feet all the way down the other end, knocking off bottles of ketchup, barbecue sauce, and horseradish in his wake. In the meantime, Jack, in one herculean effort, took a tremendous leap from the counter and flapped his wings long enough to land on the deer head, just out of the cat’s reach. Roy was finally able to shoo the frustrated Henry out the back door with a broom while Jack, with his feathers still all fluffed up, sat on his safe perch and fussed at the cat as he slunk