I was writing on the front porch of our mix-matched old farmhouse the morning that the pigeon came. Like a kite finally freed of its string, he sailed between the fluted white columns and landed at my feet. I didn't move, just stared into his tarnished-nickel eyes. His feathers were a dull gray ruff, like peeling paint, but his feet were Easter-egg pink. He looked old. He had a gold band on one leg and what looked like a cuff of white paper on the other. Had somebody given up trying to reach me by phone or mail and sent me a message by way of carrier pigeon? Maybe one of my grown children, or the IRS, was trying to break through the fog of my imagination.I held out my writing hand and the pigeon flew up, wings whooshing over my head, then lit on scrolled back of my wicker swing near my right shoulder. He made a burbling sound, like water over rocks.
That was the first time I saw what would become as commonplace as the sand tracked in from my dirt yard every day--pigeon poop like pilled cotton from a stuffed animal.
I eased up from the swing, careful not to let it creak and sway, and went inside. Got a cup full of dry grits, came back, and sprinkled it on the porch floor. I went inside again and watched through my kitchen window as the bird pecked grits and jigged, his knotted-rag head yanking side to side and up. Leaking pigeon poop onto the floor with every step, especially when he flew up and settled on back of my porch swing. I expected him to be gone the next day.
But come morning of the next day, he was still perched on my swing; his ashy poop had turned mushy and he looked puffed up. His head had retracted into his neck feathers, his bead eyes were half-closed, lids like crinkled gray plastic.
I started calling everybody I could think of who might know about carrier pigeons, and finally was referred to a man in Cordele, Georgia, who used to raise them. He told me more than I cared to know about pigeons--that the gold band was engraved with the pigeon's birth date and an ID number that might lead to the pigeon's master--but never mentioned the pigeon's mission, my message. To retrieve the ID band I would probably have to wait till dark and net him, the man said. I felt too vain and presumptuous to ask about the message, which I admit was filling my head with notions of strange admirers and their opposites. I might understand why I write if I could read that message.
After the pigeon gets rested up, the man said, he will be on his way. And here he broke in with a story about driving to Washington, D.C., with a crate of pigeons and letting them go, and how they got back to South Georgia before he did. Feed him bird seeds, he said, preferably sunflower seeds. Just don't feed him grits. Grits will bloat him, could kill him.
I hosed down the porch, drove fifty miles roundtrip into town to buy sunflower seeds. In a few days, the pigeon was taking short flights and bathing in the clay bowl of water I'd left for him to drink, then perching on my swing to preen and sun himself. His feathers took on an iridescent sheen like oil on water. But his gray poop looked like lead solder between the white wicker lacing of my swing.
Day in and day out, I tried to lure the pigeon to my outstretched arm, to get the message. I was the one who fed him; why wouldn't he come? But each time I neared the swing his dyed-pink claws would jig and he would flap his wings and fly from the porch to one of the live oaks in the yard.
Morning. Mid-summer, 1996. Around 9 o'clock. I hosed the poop from the porch floor while the pigeon who had laid claim to my wicker swing was out for his morning flight. I had given up writing to focus all my creative powers on ways to discourage the pigeon from roosting on my swing: a web of fishing line strung across the top, or maybe a snare of sheer packaging tape, sticky side up. Both of which seemed inhumane. But I went inside for my husband's fishing rod and came back to the porch and began reeling off line, then crisscrossed it from chain to chain of the swing, like one of those string games children play with their fingers.
A few days later, my husband came home from work to find me and my pigeon on the front porch again. The pigeon was perched on top of the swing with his tail leaking stuffing on my fresh scrubbed floor. The normal, healthy kind of bird poop. Dry and acidic as potash. Scraping his boot soles on the edge of the doorsteps, my husband said, "That pigeon has to go."
"No," I said. "We need to build him a perch with a tray underneath that I can slide out and hose down every day."
Not a request, but a command. My husband knows the difference. He built the perch from a two-by-four, and beneath the perch, a square frame for the tray snipped from a sheet of galvanized tin. It looked like a tall shelf on the north end of our old farmhouse porch-- too high for a mailman to reach, too small for storing garden tools. But not all that strange-looking to me with our odd seventies columns, pieced-lumber walls, notched rafters and side-set mullioned window. I love this old house, built around 1860, added onto and decorated by the various farm families who scrapped out a living from the surrounding 250 acres of sandy dirt before we bought the place twenty-five years ago. It's where I live, it's where I used to write.
Before the pigeon came to stay. Now, if I could only train the pigeon; if a man can be trained, a pigeon can be trained. It would take time. Maybe the message contained instructions.
Later that summer, during a lashing rainstorm, the pigeon suddenly pitched from the top of the swing back to the floor and lay still with his gaudy pink feet up. I could retrieve the message; I could write.
I carried him out to our farm pond in the field behind our house, and placed him between a wax-berry myrtle bush and a willow tree. Gold band glinting in the sun, and the white message still cuffed to his twig leg.