It

to the inner sleeve was always locked now.
‘Is it still full of water?’ Stan asked.
‘I guess so,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve seen firetrucks filling up there during grassfire season. They hook a hose to the pipe at the bottom.’
Stanley was looking at the dryer again, watching the rags go around and Mound. The clump had broken up now, and some of them floated like parachutes.
‘What did you see there?’ Bev asked him gently.
For a moment it seemed he would not answer at all. Then he drew a deep, shuddering breath and said something that at first struck them all as being far from the point. ‘They named it Memorial Park after the 23rd Maine in the Civil War. The Derry Blues, they were called. There used to be a statue, but it blew down during a storm in the forties. They didn’t have money enough to fix the statue, so they put in a birdbath instead. A big stone birdbath.’
They were all looking at him. Stan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.
‘I watch birds, you see. I have an album, a pair of Zeiss-Ikon binoculars, and everything.’ He looked at Eddie. ‘Do you have any more aspirins?’
Eddie handed him the bottle. Stan took two, hesitated, then took another. He gave the bottle back and swallowed the pills, one after another, grimacing. Then he went on with his story.
10
Stan’s encounter had happened on a rainy April evening two months ago. He had donned his slicker, put his bird-book and his binoculars in a waterproof sack with a drawstring at the top, and set out for Memorial Park. He and his father usually went out together, but his father had had to ‘work over’ that night and had called specially at suppertime to talk to Stan.
One of his customers at the agency, another birdwatcher, had spotted what he believed to be a male cardinal — Fringillidae Richmondena — drinking from the birdbath in Memorial Park, he told Stan. They liked to eat, drink, and bathe right around dusk. It was very rare to spot a cardinal this far north of Massachusetts. Would Stan like to go down there and see i f he could collect it? He knew the weather was pretty foul, but . . .
Stan had been agreeable. His mother made him promise to keep the hood of his slicker up, but Stan would have done that anyway. He was a fastidious boy. There were never any fights about getting him to wear his rubbers or his snowpants in the winter.
He walked the mile and a half to Memorial Park in a ram so fine and hesitant that it really wasn’t even a drizzle; it was more like a constant hanging mist. The air was muted but somehow exciting just the same. In spite of the last dwindling piles of snow under bushes and in groves of trees (to Stan they looked like piles of dirty cast-off pillowcases), there was a smell of new growth in the air. Looking at the branches of elms and maples and oaks against the lead-white sky, Stan thought that their silhouettes looked mysteriously thicker. They would burst open in a week or two, unrolling leaves of a delicate, almost transparent green.
The air smells green tonight, he thought, and smiled a little.
He walked quickly because the light would be gone in an hour or even less. He was as fastidious about his sightings as he was about his dress and study habits, and unless there was enough light left for him to be absolutely sure, he would not allow himself to collect the cardinal even if he knew in his heart he had really seen it.
He cut across Memorial Park on a diagonal. The Standpipe was a white bulking shape to his left. Stan barely glanced at it. He had no interest whatsoever in the Standpipe.
Memorial Park was a rough rectangle which sloped downhill. The grass (white and dead at this time of year) was kept neatly cut in the summertime, and there were circular beds of flowers. There was no playground equipment, however. This was considered a grownups’ park.
At the far end, the grade smoothed out before dropping abruptly down to Kansas Street and the Barrens beyond. The birdbath his father had mentioned stood on this flat area. It was a shallow stone dish set into a squat masonry pedestal that was really much too big for the humble function it fulfilled. Stan’s father had told him that, before the money ran out, they had intended to put the statue of the soldier back up here again.
‘I like the birdbath better, Daddy,’ Stan said.
Mr Uris ruffled his hair. ‘Me too, son,’ he said. ‘More baths and less bullets, that’s my motto.’
At the top of this pedestal a motto had been carved in the stone. Stanley read it but did not understand it; the only Latin he understood was the genus classifications of the birds in his book.
Apparebat eidolon senex — Pliny
the inscription read.