He did not linger on Myrtle Street; he planned to make the visits there on his way back that evening. Janet’s boys, Carlos and Carleton, walked on either side of him up Myrtle to North Capitol, then to the corner of K Street. There they knew to turn back. Carlos, seven years old, told him to take it easy. Carleton, younger by two years, did not want to repeat what his brother had said, so he repeated one of the things his grandfather, who was losing his mind, always told him: “Don’t get lost in the city.”
Robert nodded as if he understood and the boys turned back. He took off his tie and put it in his pocket and unbuttoned his suit coat and the top two buttons of his shirt. Then he adjusted his hat and placed the rattle nearer the baby, who paid it no mind. And when the light changed, he maneuvered the carriage down off the sidewalk and crossed North Capitol into Northwest.
Miles the barber gave Betsy Ann two pigeons, yearlings, a dull-white female with black spots and a sparkling red male. For several weeks, in the morning, soon after she had dutifully gone in to fill the feed dish and replace the water, and after they had fortified themselves, the pigeons took to the air and returned to Miles. The forlorn sound of their flapping wings echoed in her head as she stood watching them disappear into the colors of the morning, often still holding the old broom she used to sweep out their coop.
So in those first weeks, she went first to Miles’s after school to retrieve the pigeons, usually bringing along Ralph Holley, her cousin. Miles would put the birds in the two pigeon baskets Robert would bring over each morning before he took to the street in his taxicab.
“They don’t like me,” Betsy Ann said to Miles one day in the second week. “They just gonna keep on flyin away. They hate me.”
Miles laughed, the same way he laughed when she asked him the first day how he knew one was a girl pigeon and the other was a boy pigeon.
“I don’t think that they even got to the place of likin or not likin you,” Miles said. She handed her books to Ralph, and Miles gave her the two baskets.
“Well, they keep runnin away.”
“Thas all they know to do,” which was what he had told her the week before. “Right now, this is all the home they know for sure. It ain’t got nothin to do with you, child. They just know to fly back here.”
His explanations about everything, when he could manage an explanation, rarely satisfied her. He had been raising pigeons all his life, and whatever knowledge he had accumulated in those years was now such an inseparable part of his being that he could no more explain the birds than he could explain what went into the act of walking. He only knew that they did all that birds did and not something else, as he only knew that he walked and did not fall.
“You might try lockin em in for while,” he said. “Maybe two, three days, however long it take em to get use to the new home. Let em know you the boss and you ain’t gonna stand for none a this runnin away stuff.”
She considered a moment, then shook her head. She watched her cousin peering into Miles’s coop, his face hard against the wire. “I guess if I gotta lock em up there ain’t no use havin em.”
“Why you wanna mess with gotdamn pigeons anyway?” Ralph said as they walked to her home that day.
“Because,” she said.
“Because what?” he said.
“Because, thas all,” she said. “Just because.”
“You oughta get a puppy like I’m gonna get,” Ralph said. “A puppy never run away.”
“A puppy never fly either. So what?” she said. “You been talking bout gettin a gotdamn puppy for a million years, but I never see you gettin one.” Though Ralph was a year older and a head taller than his cousin, she often bullied him.
“You wait. You wait. You’ll see,” Ralph said.
“I ain’t waitin. You the one waitin. When you get it, just let me know and I’ll throw you a big party.”
At her place, he handed over her books and went home. She considered following her cousin back to his house after she took the pigeons up to the coop, for the idea of being on the roof with birds who wanted to fly away to be with someone else pained her. At Ralph’s L Street house, there were cookies almost as big as her face, and Aunt Thelma, Clara’s oldest sister, who was, in fact, the very image of Clara. The girl had never had an overwhelming curiosity about her mother, but it fascinated her to see the face of the lady in all the pictures on a woman who moved and laughed and did mother things.
She put the pigeons back in the coop and put fresh water in the bath bowls. Then she stood back, outside the coop, its door open. At such moments they often seemed contented, hopping in and out of cubicles, inspecting the feed and water, all of which riled her. She would have preferred — and understood — agitation, some sign that they were unhappy and ready to fly to Miles again. But they merely pecked about, strutted, heads bobbing happily, oblivious of her. Pretending everything was all right.
“You shitheads!” she hissed, aware that Miss Jenny was downstairs within earshot. “You gotdamn stupid shitheads!”
That was the fall of 1957.
Myrtle Street was only one long block, running east to west. To the east, preventing the street from going any farther, was a high, medieval-like wall of stone across 1st Street, Northeast, and beyond the wall were the railroad tracks. To the west, across North Capitol, preventing Myrtle Street from going any farther in that direction, was the high school Gonzaga, where white boys were taught by white priests. When the colored people and their homes were gone, the wall and the tracks remained, and so did the high school, with the same boys being taught by the same priests.
It was late spring when Betsy Ann first noticed the nest, some two feet up from the coop’s floor in one of the twelve cubicles that made up the entire structure. The nest was nothing special, a crude, ill-formed thing of straw and dead leaves and other, uncertain material she later figured only her hapless birds could manage to find. They had not flown back to Miles in a long time, but she had never stopped thinking that it was on their minds each time they took to the air. So the nest was the first solid indication that the pigeons would stay forever, would go but would always return.
About three weeks later, on an afternoon when she was about to begin the weekly job of thoroughly cleaning the entire coop, she saw the two eggs. She thought them a trick of the light at first — two small and perfect wonders alone in that wonderless nest without any hallelujahs from the world. She put off the cleaning and stood looking at the male bird, who had moved off the nest for only a few seconds, rearrange himself on the nest and look at her from time to time in that bored way he had. The female bird was atop the coop, dozing. Betsy Ann got a chair from the kitchen and continued watching the male bird and the nest through the wire. “Tell me bout this,” she said to them.
As it happened, Robert discovered the newly hatched squabs when he went to look for dead birds before going to work. About six that morning he peered into the coop and shivered to find two hideous, bug-eyed balls of movement. They were a dirty orange and looked like baby vultures. He looked about as if there might be someone responsible for it all. This was, he knew now, a point of no return for his child. He went back in to have his first cup of coffee of the day.
He drank without enjoyment and listened to the chirping, unsettling, demanding. He would not wake his daughter just to let her know about the hatchlings. Two little monsters had changed the predictable world he was trying to create for his child and he was suddenly afraid for her. He turned on the radio and played it real low, but he soon shut it off, because the man on WOOK was telling him to go in and kill the hatchlings.