Glen Pourciau
I'd been walking the sidewalks and alleys of our neighborhood for years and had gotten to know some of the neighbors this way, one of them Olivia, an older woman who lived across the street and five or six houses down. I first spoke with her when she was planting clusters of periwinkles in her front beds. "They love the heat," she said. Sometime later we struck up a conversation about our vegetable gardens and she led me to her backyard to see her tomatoes and bell peppers. We then sat in a shaded area on a weathered teak bench where she commented on the faux bois birdbath in front of us. She and her late husband had found it in an antiques market during a road trip and had driven it home with them. And though our talk turned to our favorite vegetables, my eyes lingered on the birdbath, on its nuance and texture.
Olivia died of heart failure in her mid-eighties, about a year after we sat on the bench. A for sale sign soon appeared in her yard, and I assumed that like many aging homes in our neighborhood, it would be torn down by the new owners and replaced with some imposing two-story monument to affluence. But the house remained on the market for months, and I watched the beds become overgrown and the graying wood fence surrounding the backyard sag, several of its pickets rotting and cracking. And then one afternoon, at the end of a long walk, I noticed that the sign had at last been removed.
There was no discernible activity at the house for some time, but I began to watch it closely after twice seeing a white pickup truck parked in front of it. While walking through Olivia's alley following the second pickup sighting I saw that her decrepit fence had been knocked down and hauled off, and in its place stood a temporary fence. The birdbath and bench remained in place, and I asked myself what would happen to them. The buyers would likely want to erase all signs of Olivia's life in the house, and I imagined they'd view the bench and birdbath as pieces to retire so they could put their own stamp on the property.
Vance and I had lived in our house for forty years, raising our two children there and building our lives together. At times I thought of our house being flattened by the next owner without the slightest regard for its history. Perhaps for that reason as much as any other I felt a desire to protect Olivia's property, and I could see only one way to act on that desire. On my walks and at home, I kept thinking of the birdbath as something that could be salvaged from the demolition and removal of what was left of her life.
So I took it as providence when I saw an empty wagon near the garbage container behind Olivia's house as I walked her alley. I'd never seen the wagon before, but I guessed that the future residents had come across it and had put it out to be taken away by the city. I stared at the wagon for at least a minute while making up my mind, my pulse going wild as I picked up its handle and opened the gate. I pulled it toward the birdbath, alert for sound and movement in the yard. I worked the birdbath off its base and lifted the base into the wagon, telling myself not to appear rushed or to look around to see if anyone was watching. I rolled the wagon through the open gate, no one else I caught sight of in the alley and no one coming near me on the way home. I hid the base between our fence and the back of our garage and then drove our SUV to the alley to pick up the rest of the birdbath. I barely had enough strength to heave it over the bumper.
The whole thing went off without any problem that I was aware of, though someone could have been watching me from a window. I didn't tell Vance, unsure how to justify myself to him. I had a sense of accomplishment that I'd saved the birdbath and wagon and they were now mine, but in the heat of the transfer I hadn't considered what I'd do with the birdbath when I got it home. I tried to put it in a mental box until a solution occurred to me, yet its presence nagged at my thoughts, along with the worry that I could have been seen taking it.
Other reasons to worry emerged. I learned from a neighbor that Olivia's son, Newt, had bought her house. He was not going to tear it down but renovate it and move in with his new wife. Newt, I feared, had to be familiar with the birdbath. He may have commented to his wife on the birdbath's disappearance and speculated that a workman had taken it, lamenting that he'd been deprived of this memory of his mother and father. My mind ran through the possibilities and various storylines unfurled to me in the middle of the night, beyond my control.
And if I took encountering the wagon as some sort of providence, how should I interpret the circumstance that Newt's daughter, Charlotte, and her family moved into the house directly across the street from ours? She had a husband, who was a lawyer, and two young children, all of whom seemed delightful when I introduced myself at the end of a long walk. They too might recognize the birdbath if they saw it, and I thought it dangerous to fabricate a story that Olivia had given it to me when Newt could know for a fact that it had stood in her backyard for a long time after her death. Perhaps to compensate for my fear of what they might eventually think of me I grew friendly with them, speaking with Charlotte and her son and daughter if they happened to be playing in the yard when I passed by.
I don't know what got into me as I look back on it, but I started to think of Charlotte's kids playing with the wagon. They liked to spend time together outside, and seeing them from a window on a cool weekend morning I went out to the garage and uncovered the wagon from under a pile of stuff and pulled it across the street and up their driveway. Charlotte and her kids seemed to love the wagon at once, and it became part of their play routine. They all waved at me and thanked me when I left, and for a while I felt good seeing them with the wagon, the gift assuaging somewhat my uneasiness about the birdbath.
My feelings changed course as Newt took to showing up regularly at his house to check on its progress. He might know the wagon on sight and ask where they'd gotten it, and I imagined them pointing toward our house and Newt squinting in my direction, the missing birdbath rising from his memory, click, click, click. If Charlotte suspected me of anything, I couldn't tell it. They were friendlier to me than ever, so friendly that I could see it as a natural development that they would come over for a visit and the kids would spill out our back door to play in the yard, their mother joining them and just happening to catch a glimpse of the faux bois birdbath behind the garage. Maybe she'd think nothing of it at the time, but slowly it could come to seem familiar and she could ask Newt to refresh her on what Olivia's birdbath had looked like.
As I continued to picture Charlotte and her kids in my backyard, the thought that I'd given them the wagon unsettled me for many weeks. Had I intended at some level to expose myself? Did I want them to discover the birdbath, which could lead to a confrontation and confession to Newt?
As soon as Newt and his wife moved into their renovated house, I couldn't doubt that they'd all begin to spend extra time together, and a couple of times I saw the kids pulling their wagon down the sidewalk to Newt's. I repeatedly imagined that they'd connected the wagon with the birdbath and were discussing possibilities that inevitably led to me. It became more difficult for me to put my fears aside, and I came to a realization that I could not rest unless I returned the birdbath.
I decided to write Newt a letter telling him how it had all happened, finding the wagon and my mistaken assumptions about the new owners. I asked our yard crew to load the birdbath in their truck and deliver it to Newt's house, place it in the side yard, and put the envelope containing the letter under his front mat. They agreed to make the delivery, and I waited to hear something from Newt.
Within a week, I received a handwritten note in which he assured me that no harm had been done and there was no reason for me to be concerned. We'd all done things we regretted in our lives, he said, and I felt relieved reading his note.
A month later, someone in the neighborhood threw a party that we and many other neighbors were invited to, including Newt and his wife. He had a slight reaction when I introduced myself, his mouth coming open, and I'm sure I blushed as I identified myself as the birdbath lifter. But once he spoke he couldn't have been more gracious and forgiving, and I said how grateful I was that he hadn't reacted with anger. I didn't tell him how miserable I'd been, preferring not to overdo it. I was nervous facing him and kept my talk with him brief.
I went on my way, a fear slowly taking hold that Newt might say something about the birdbath to Vance, who would have been put in the awkward position of asking Newt to explain what I'd done. Another worry was that Newt might not only tell the story to Vance but repeat it in the days ahead to our neighbors. He might come to see it as oddly amusing, especially if he learned that Vance hadn't heard it, and he'd probably include the part about giving Charlotte's kids the wagon.
When we got home, I told Vance. I couldn't stand not to anymore. The story rattled him, and he had trouble sleeping.
"You can't do things like that," he said. "You can't know who will hear about it."
I began to take my walks less frequently, but when I did I studied the faces of neighbors I passed to see if I could detect judgment in their gazes. I saw nothing unusual, but I knew that at any time they might appear and then grow in number. Vance asked why I'd cut down on my walks and why I sometimes drove to other neighborhoods to take them. I answered that my body was growing old and tired and I wanted to see different surroundings, which opened the door to another subject. Our daughter, Sarah, and her husband had recently moved to a new home in a city four hours south on the interstate. I suggested to Vance that we look for a house there so we could be closer to her. We'd been in our house for decades, I said, and it needed more repairs than we cared to deal with. He liked the idea, so we searched online and in under a month we'd bought a place five minutes from Sarah, the first step in separating from our old neighborhood.
We sold our house quickly, made the move, and haven't been back since. The interstate is too dangerous, loaded with eighteen-wheelers thundering forward at high speeds, swerving as they change lanes, as if threatening retribution to anyone intruding on their territory. We'd rather see new places or stay where we are than return, though my mind does drift back to the birdbath and the question of who's heard the story and who might occasionally be telling it.
I've tried to make a clean breast of it in these pages, but I now have misgivings about letting anyone else see them. Yet, concealing my account won't help resolve the episode, which still lingers inside me, like an itch that I can never quite reach.