The Saturday morning the cockatiel appeared, Carol and a dozen other sketchers met at the public seating area they’d chosen for that month’s session. The small town was behind them, and in front was the wide river that dominated the region. Scanning across the river, she found her attention drawn to a late nineteenth-century house with a mansard roof. It stood alone on a hill, lush with grass and shrubby trees that reached down to sandier soil nearer the bank. She decided to make it her sketch’s centerpiece.
Estimating the best vantage point would be that bench over there, she raced to claim a place on it. A young social worker named Raj joined her. Soon after, George sat down at his other side. Though now retired, he looked weighed down by his former life as some sort of corporate exec. Raj, George and Carol were often a threesome like this, even though she never saw either of them away from these gatherings, and she doubted they saw each other socially. What the two men had in common, it seemed, was affection for her.
As she was extracting her sketchbook and lidded watercolor palette from her shoulder bag, the cockatiel wandered into the seating area. Thanks to a TV nature program, she recognized the species from its lemon-yellow face, blush orange cheeks, and the crest curving from its head down its gray body. Such coloring, she recalled, meant the cockatiel was a male. Up close, he was the size of a crow, though nothing like the shape and definitely not the color.
As she stared, the cockatiel headed straight for her, stopped at her feet and cooed.
“Hi, cockatiel,” she said.
The bird looked up at her with mild gray eyes, seeming to comprehend kindness. He waddled past her feet and nestled under the bench where she sat. To be worthy of such trust made Carol feel as radiant as that morning’s late spring sun.
Speaking to anyone who chose to hear, Raj said, “That cockatiel is someone’s pet. It must have been let loose from its cage when its owners forgot they’d left a window open.”
Carol agreed. “I hope they’re looking for him.”
George said, “Good luck to them. It could have come from anywhere. Back there.” He pointed behind Carol to the town. “Or from across there.” Now he pointed at the river.
“Naw,” Raj said, “not the river. A tame bird wouldn’t have the stamina to fly that far after being cooped up its whole life.”
“Still too many places if the owners are out looking for it,” George persisted.
“He likes it here,” Carol said. “Maybe he’ll stay long enough for his owners to find him.”
“We could make him stay,” George said.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Raj said.
“Just saying.”
“You’re such a teenager, George!”
Raj’s good-natured chiding inspired a rumble of dry laughter from George.
Carol thought how she was older than both men, a senior citizen no less, but that she still had a youthful way about her. She’d been told so, and she felt it.
On the sketchbook page before her, she penciled in two light lines to keep her focused on where the mansion and river would go. And perhaps she would put a figure here in the bottom-left corner. Raj, perhaps? But first there was a cloud formation she must capture before it drifted away. She colored much of the page’s upper space blue, leaving the clouds the white of the paper. Then she mixed cerulean blue and vermilion to create the purple that suggested a cloud’s shadows. The paint would give a feel of three-dimensionality against the white of the paper.
From time to time, she thought of the cockatiel’s yellow face and how he’d spoken to her through his gray eyes and greeting coo. Maybe he was sleeping under the bench. After his flight from captivity, he must be exhausted.
“Look, the bird is going to take a stroll,” Raj said. Carol glanced down to see the cockatiel venturing out from under the bench.
“Whoa there!” Without warning, George leapt around Raj to grab him. The bird shrieked and wildly flapped his wings. George yelled in pain, and the bird escaped his grasp.
“It bit me!” he cried out as the bird flew away. Carol tracked the bird until he became too small to see.
Staring at George, Raj demanded, “Why did you do that?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I guess so we could take it to a vet or something. Goddamn bird. This hurts.”
“You don’t catch birds like that,” Raj said.
“How was I to know? I’ve never owned a bird.”
“If you didn’t know…”
In her head, Carol completed Raj’s sentence: “…then why do anything?”
To George, she said, “When trying to hold a bird, you need to wrap it in a towel or some other cloth to protect its wings from getting bent back if it resists.”
“How was I to know?” he repeated.
Carol felt shaken. She’d loved that the gorgeous bird had chosen her shadow to rest under during his hour of freedom.
Except was that really freedom? Trying to settle back into work, she found herself distracted by the question. Even after his escape, hadn’t the cockatiel been more lost than free? Being free where you didn’t belong, among humans—even admiring humans—wasn’t really free, was it? For him to be free meant returning to the place he did belong, a world away in northern Australia where his ancestors had thrived with neither human jailers nor human protectors. Even then…
She glanced at her two neighbors and saw George looked unhappy. Modulating her voice to sympathetic, she said, “You were trying to do the right thing.”
“Yeah, right,” he muttered.
“You were,” Raj said. “By the way, you need to get a tetanus shot.”
Carol asked herself whether George’s impulse had been the right one after all. They could have taken the cockatiel to an animal shelter or vet for safekeeping and possible reunion with the owners.
Then it occurred to her that George’s ineptitude had granted the cockatiel one more occasion for his God-given talent.
How quickly he’d left the ground. For the first few yards, his wings had whipped up and down with rough cracking sounds. But he soon gained distance. In almost no time, all she could see was a beautiful image soaring into the cloud she’d reproduced in her sketch.
Did a cockatiel have self-awareness? Surely yes, if perhaps different in some unknowable way from hers. She hoped he was right now reveling in the glorious gift of flight, suppressed until now inside a cage.
Still, she couldn’t help worry for his future, having so little experience of the wild. Like a homing pigeon, could he find his way back to his owner? It would mean accepting confinement for safety. Otherwise, the possibilities were unthinkable. She must remember him for the trust he’d given her and for the gift of flight that she wanted desperately to believe gave him joy.
What could be more majestic than a bird sweeping through the sky? What accomplishment could possibly be more exhilarating?
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