Martin Houses

“Open space,

it says they like it open.

Maybe there’s too many trees?”

Mama looked up, with an expression I’ve memorized,

to see if anyone was listening

but Daddy just kept tearing coupons out of the Sunday paper,

slowly ripping them out,

and I played with my Legos

because I knew she’d stop talking if I ignored her too,

and she did.

She just rocked near the window

watching the row of martin houses sillhouted

against the ranks of slender pines behind the fence.

There was a new one that year,

shaped like a little white plantation house

with a portico and a row of green-painted bushes

that Daddy had cut out with the band-saw.

Standing next to it were the others she’d tried--

a hexagonal aluminum house with a sliding roof,

(“Do you think it was too hot inside?”)

a chalet of stained cedar with scrollwork in the gable-ends,

(“They probably didn’t like the cedar smell...”)

a log cabin on an adjustable metal pole,

(“Maybe the holes are too small?”)

But they all stood empty,

and though the scouts came and went,

wheeling and chirruping over the row of houses,

and for a week Mama sat by the window every afternoon

with a pack of Pall Malls and a mint julep

and called Granny saying,

“I know they’ll come--I’ve done everything right,”

still that year, like every other, the houses stood empty.

Today I went to Weatherton to pick Mama up.

She was sitting at one of the long tables in the cafeteria,

leaning over a plastic tray that held a glossy glob of mashed potatoes,

a slice of turkey, its corners neatly rounded, slathered with

thin brown gravy, and three pieces of candy corn

in a compartment to themselves.

I wheeled her to the car and she hardly spoke

except to ask where we were going

and I helped her in and we drove away.

I asked her how she had been feeling,

mostly because its what we both expected to talk about,

and she told me her knees bothered her

so that she couldn’t sit down in the tub

and the nurse had got a showerhead installed,

while I glanced in the mirror

as we passed an olive-skinned woman

jogging down the sidewalk and nodded absently.

Mama grew suddenly silent, and I followed her gaze

into the back of an overgrown lot

where martins circled and chirruped

over a handful of hollow gourds hanging from

an old TV aerial.

I pushed the gas a little harder

wishing the day were already over

as Mama sighs and looks at her hands.