House of Wings Read Online Free PDF Page A

over him. He looked down at the ground and then right into his grandfather’s eyes. “Anyway, I don’t care if he does die.”
    His grandfather seemed ready to add something about the dangers of life in the woods, but he stopped. For the first time he looked as if he had been hit by what Sammy had said. “You what?”
    “I don’t care if he does die,” Sammy repeated, glad to have hurt his grandfather at last. “He’s nothing but a bird.”
    His grandfather looked hard at him. “I’ll tell you something. Maybe you’re not worth telling nothing to, but I’m telling you this anyway.”
    “You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Sammy said. “I’m not interested.”
    “When I was about your size, I was good at one thing and that was rock throwing. It was the only talent I ever had. I could throw a rock.”
    “Anybody can do that. That’s nothing.” They faced each other and glared.
    “It was something, the way I done it,” his grandfather said. “I could throw and I could hit. I could hit anything I could see. I’m telling you it was a talent!” Angrily he wiped the ends of his mustache. He glanced at the crane and then said in a lower voice, “Well, there was a redbird that roosted under the eaves of our house that particular year, and every day I would watch her. To get to her nest, this bird would have to hover beside it for a second. Well, one day I got a rock—I don’t know to this day what made me do it—I got a rock and I waited by the corner of the house and when the bird came to her nest I aimed and I threw.” He looked at Sammy. “And the bird fell down to the ground.”
    “You got it with just one rock?” Sammy had thrown hundreds of rocks at birds and never hit one.
    “I hit it all right, hit and killed.” His grandfather drew his heavy brows down low over his eyes.
    “Killed it with one rock? It fell dead?”
    “Well, it was fluttering its wings a little as I ran over, but by the time I got there it was dead.” He wagged his head sadly. “I picked it up and I tell you, boy, I never felt any heavier weight than that dead bird. That bird was something, hear, and I didn’t find it out until I was standing there with it dead in my hand. There’s no such thing as ‘nothing but a bird.’ I learned that.”
    “Huh!”
    “There ain’t. You watch a bird in the air one minute, boy, and hold it lifeless in your hand the next, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. And I learned doubly hard. Because then, to make up for what I’d done, I took them three baby birds and tried to raise them. Those birds were no more than three or four days old. All they could do was squirm and yawn. They couldn’t even sit. You could still see the pink of their bodies.”
    “Did they live?”
    “I thought they was going to at first. I took the nest in the house and I started feeding them grasshoppers. All day long my brother and me combed the fields for grasshoppers. Every fifteen minutes those birds wanted grasshoppers.” He wiped his mustache. “Then one day one of the birds wouldn’t open its eyes and it stopped begging for food and that afternoon it died.”
    “What about the others?”
    “Well, one of them died too. I come in one morning and the nest was crawling with mites, and the birds, both of them, looked sick. I burned the nest and set the birds in a berry box, but one of them just got weaker and weaker and died. The last one lived to be set free, but I tell you one thing—I never threw a rock again.”
    When his grandfather finished Sammy straightened. He was disgusted with himself for listening, and this made his hatred for his grandfather sweep over him again. He jerked his head toward the crane. “Why should I care about a bird I never even saw before? He doesn’t mean anything to me.”
    “I’m telling you he should.”
    “And I’m telling you he don’t!” Sammy’s chin jutted forward and his head snapped up. The only thing that seemed different about them in that