One Came Home by Amy Timberlake Read Free Book Online Page A

notice.
    But whatever the configuration of pigeons that confrontsyou, when they leave, they are
gone
. Those birds move
together
—as if they have one mind and one set of wings.
    In 1871, I experienced wild pigeons on three distinct occasions. The first time was in February, when I saw a small, easily frightened group. I spotted them once. Then they were gone. In March, I saw pigeons a second time. This time they were the mighty cloud that Agatha spun underneath. These pigeons also left. And then there was the third time: in April, the pigeons returned and nested in our woods, not five miles west of Placid, Wisconsin.
    The first time I saw the pigeons—the twenty-eighth of February—was a day coming after a long freeze and little sunlight. Day after day had glowed dimly, and night had slammed down at four o’clock in the afternoon. Because of the cold, my fingers refused to do small work and I marched around the store to get blood into my toes. I had thought I would like being free from school. (I’d finished my sixth year of winter school the year before.) But no schoolwork only made the dark hours endless.
    That particular morning I awoke and saw the sky—a blue-sky day! By midmorning, everything outside glinted with running water. It ran along the edges of snowbanks and trickled down icicles. Drips hitting pans pinged in the store. By afternoon, patches of earth—red, brown, tan—appeared on the sides of hills. Everybody in the world came into town that day, with weeks of stored-up talk. They told jokes,described how they planned to lay out their crops, and whispered that they’d near gone mad during the long, dark days. Then they finally got to business and bought the supplies that had supposedly brought them into town.
    Agatha and I were about as helpful as two squirrels. We skittered through the store, trying to stay near the plate glass window. We offered assistance carrying packages (I swear, some the size of postage) out to our neighbors’ wagons to feel the sun on our skin and smell the air. Finally, Ma had enough of us, and said we should go ahead and run it off. “Don’t make me track you down for dinner,” she said.
    We didn’t wait to be told twice. We raced to get our coats. Agatha put her sketchbook and pencil in a satchel, and I went up the stairs to grab the Springfield from the gun rack in the hallway.
    Of course, Agatha gave me
that
look when she saw the rifle.
    I tried to change the topic by pointing at the sketchbook bulging in the satchel. “What are you going to sketch? It’s winter,” I said.
    She touched the Springfield. “You always end up killing something. I don’t know how you can be so sure about putting creatures to death.”
    Months later I would ruminate upon this remark:
I don’t know how you can be so sure …
But at the time, I lumped it together with her other overly sensitive statements. I’d seen Agatha kill spiders. She seemed
sure
enough then.
    Agatha glanced around and said what we both knew to be true: “We need to leave before Ma changes her mind.”
    We pushed out the door and ran down Main Street. It made an abrupt turn over the railroad tracks and went right by the train station before lining up with the Wisconsin River.
    As usual, Agatha decided our direction, but I thought she went toward the river for me. She knew I liked looking at rivers anytime—winter, summer, spring, whenever. And that day, near the rapids, spray froze to tree limbs and hung sharp from ledges. I put the Springfield down, found some rocks sprouting five-foot icicles, and knocked the ice free. “On guard!” I yelled, holding an icicle like a sword. Agatha picked up another, and we fought, sword-fight-like, until there was nothing left but stubs. Somehow, we both ended up stuck in the same snowbank and cackling hard.
    After we’d extricated ourselves, I picked up the Springfield and we started to walk again, talking the whole way about everything and nothing. We sang as many verses