ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Candler speaks with an English accent and grows vegetables in Kentucky.

White Bread Sparrows

By Tim Candler


When I was little, on a flat rooftop in the city of Karachi, I shot at a sparrow with a rusty air rifle. It fell five stories and when I reached it a hungry alley cat had already made a meal of it. What I did not know when I took my aim was that this little bird herself had mouths to feed.

That city sprawls across a mudflat. It has rich and poor together in a chaos that I understood better when I was little. It cries with a bustle that sometimes turns angry. It has gangsters and beggars, beautiful women and orphans jammed together in what bees would call a hive. When I knew Karachi, it had an air of bonhomie and swagger that still lingers in my imagination. That sort of utterance in the soul that can make a person cry out “I love this place,” and the next minute wonder why.

Then, because it was hot, I could hear the night run into morning and that sound of feathered children. They were on a ledge that ran between the second and third floors of the building. Boldly they had ventured from their hiding place, as hungry children do. There is movement, of course, loud and sudden noise, colors perhaps, and these things are all curiosity until they are dangerous and then they are fear. A pariah kite finished my hungry children. One by one, he snatched them from the ledge. I might have wondered what could make a world so cruel. I might have wondered why I had made the world so cruel. Instead I wanted wings.

I remember the sense of it, as though I was eating ice cream in the arms of clouds. Soaring, diving in that spirited way. For a moment I had wings. I could feel them spread from my back, and these were not the chubby little wings that sparrows have but graceful blades that cut the air in that same way that I might have climbed stairs. Thoughtless, careless, effortless, but with wings it would be wonderful.

Who knows how minds change, or even why minds change. Now when I see a raptor I am inclined to curse it. I am not one to mourn the loss of a peregrine, that chicken hawk in cold-weather clothes. Give me instead the hard work of a city sparrow grown portly on white bread from the hot dog vendor. He at least walks in the grime of my world.

But my turn did come. This time the city was Cardiff. And it sounds like an old man’s tale, but I would walk one hour to work, and felt lucky to have it when I got there. My origin was now a distant place, and Cardiff was dour, grey, cold, and wet. Every Tuesday and Thursday we would euthanize. My job was to lead them from their cages, and afterwards to incinerate them, their bodies still warm to my touch. On the way home I would save some lunch to toss at sparrows on the sidewalks. I could hear the wrens in the shrubberies outraged, not by my presence but by the begging. That work broke me, not because of the killing, but because it was pointless. It was the sort of dirty work that has to be invisible, and because of that there is no honor in it.

When I was little, I learned of a place a man would go when he died. He would follow the lead bull into the night and return again as a child. And whenever I did eat meat it was after first thanking the bull for it. Death is not to be feared; rather, the manner of death is to be feared. Like the Vikings we must die bravely and in a suitable way, not caged and forgotten.

In Pittsburgh I fed sparrows white bread. It made them fat as tennis balls. They would greet me in the morning as I wrapped roast beef sandwiches for the office workers, those busy important people for whom so much is invisible, and then on into the afternoon until I became rich enough to pay taxes.

Now I sit on a winter night, a cat warm on my lap, and outside, the house sparrows, huddled against the cold, find a friend in me.



Published April 2009