Memory Woodpeckers by John Brantingham

At first, when Henry is woken out of his nap by knocking, he thinks the dog is upstairs scratching herself in a way that bangs the wall. When he turns, Lizzy is there on the floor near his chair watching him. It’s a woodpecker, he realizes, pecking into his house, trying to make a nest in the wall and insulation of Henry’s home.

His father’s first instinct would have been to grab a gun. Henry realizes that his own first instinct at this late stage in his life, is to remember his father and what he would have done. It’s strange how he can go so long without thinking of the old man, and then when his house is being slowly undone, he snaps back into that headspace.

He goes into the kitchen and takes a steel wool SOS Pad from under the sink. Outside, he shoos away the bird, who flies off to a nearby tree to watch him. The little creature has poked a dime sized hole in his wall that Henry stuffs with the wool. “This is the way you do it, Dad. It doesn’t hurt the bird and we can patch it later,” he says, and in his half-asleep state, he waits for a response, thinking his pop is ready to talk. 

  

Henry, who is 68, realizes he’s instructing his father; his father died in his forties, and he’s just trying to help the guy out. Strange to think of his father only just started on middle age. When Henry was a kid, his pop always looked so old, and the mistakes he made seemed so awful, but could he have known better? In his forties, Henry felt so lost, so confused.

Henry watches the bird in the tree, and remembers his dad going for a gun again and again to fix his problems. He wishes he knew then what he knows now so that he could have been there for his pop who was so alone.

John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.  He lives in Jamestown, NY.