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stained with thin red lines—and he knew that the hawk had come to ambush the martins.
    It happened from time to time. A Cooper’s hawk or a sharpie hid in the catalpa tree early in the morning or, like now, when dusk was falling and the martins were flying into their nests. Some mornings, Mr. Dees came out to the houses and found a scatter of black feathers, iridescent with purple, lying on the ground. The martins were so confident about their aerial skills that they thought they could always escape danger, and sometimes that faith cost them. They were ferocious at high altitudes. There they mobbed any hawk that swooped down on them. They called a loud, raspy
accck
as they dived on the hawk, coming within inches but not striking it, relying on their number and their noise to drive it away. But now, as they came to roost, they were stupid, blind to the Cooper’s hawk, who waited for his chance.
    Mr. Dees wouldn’t come down from his ladder, not even after Ray had let go of his hand and said, “Almost dark, Teach.”
    “Over there.” Mr. Dees pointed. “In that catalpa tree. A Cooper’s hawk.”
    A martin gliding down to roost suddenly streaked upward. It shrieked an alarm call. The Cooper’s hawk, its wings popping, burst from the tree, but it was too late. The martin was still rising, gone. Other martins dived at the hawk. Their mob calls filled the air.
    Mr. Dees was shouting, but only later would he understand that he had done this. He was waving his arms. “You, you, you.” He clapped his hands together. “You, shoo.”
    Finally, the hawk rose higher and banked off toward the woodlands. The martins swirled in a black mass, their calls gradually fading.
    Mr. Dees realized then that Ray’s hand was gripping his bicep. He felt the ladder wobble. “Easy, Teach. Easy.” Ray’s voice was steady. “I’ve got you. Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall.”
    It embarrassed Mr. Dees for Ray to see the secret he kept: how much the martins mattered to him. He couldn’t begin to say what it did to him mornings when he heard their song. The first time, each spring, it was always a lone male, a scout, gliding and swooping through the sky, which was just beginning to brighten. He warbled and chittered, high above the martin houses that Mr. Dees had made ready. This was the dawnsong, the one that touched him the most—a sign of spring, a call to other martins that here, here, here was home.
    He couldn’t tell Ray that. He couldn’t call it what it was, love. But, and this was what amazed him, Ray knew it without anything having to be said, and, what’s more, he understood.
    “I hear those martins singing,” he said, “and I think, It’s not so bad, this world. It’s not so bad as we’d have it. No, sir. Not at all.”
             
    CLARE LIKED to wake early and listen to the martins singing. Such a happy, bubbling sound, the song of babies babbling and cooing. She liked to lie in bed, close to Ray, and think how lucky she was. Spring had come, and the martins were singing, and she was in love. Who would have thought it, particularly back in January when Bill had died and left her alone? But here she was, almost sixty years old, with another chance at happiness, and who cared what the neighbors thought? Her life was hers, and if someone didn’t like the fact that she had set up house with Raymond Royal Wright, then they could lump it.
    He wasn’t particularly handsome. Clare could say that without feeling ashamed; it was as much a fact as her own plain looks. He was a stocky man with a round, sunburned face, and his red hair had already thinned. Because he knew he wasn’t, in his own words, “easy on the peepers,” he tried hard to make up for it by being friendly.
    One evening—Ray had gone down the road to help Mr. Dees with his birdhouse—Clare looked out the front window and saw Thelma and Tubby Carl coming out of Lottie and Leo Marks’s house across the street. Thelma was carrying an empty