By seven o'clock we were done with almost half our tickets, and I had somehow managed to start liking my driver again. We were rolling down a long alley in the west end, manicured enough to have that country lane feeling. Crepe myrtles bunched and hung pink flowers over our passing, trees barely canopied over the truck. The sun had not yet broken through the haze of the morning so the temperature managed to hover in the mid nineties, mercifully. I was holding on tight to what was at best an attitude of sullen but quiet helpfulness. It felt like utter bullshit. Long hot weeks have passed since I've liked any of the drivers. It was too early to be rolling this hateful machine just yards outside peoples bedrooms. Adolescent rabbits and chipmunks scattered before us.
I located the house by a faded address spray painted across the back of a supercan, spilled out onto the gravel while my driver mounted the ladder to the operator's chair. Two small piles of branches, purple pokeweed stalks, flattened and limp outside a short wire fence lining a smart white clapboarded outbuilding. I grabbed the pitchfork from the underbelly of the truck, walked back to consolidate the piles and noticed a robin in distress on the ground next to the building. An ordinary thing.
It was rolling, one wing out, and beak open. It seemed as though it couldn't get itself righted. I was just about to reach over the wire fence when it tumbled over on it's back and looked up at me over it's white heaving breast. He met my gaze, then stretched out straight as a cat in a sunbeam, head up, wings down and legs straight, and moved no more.
I thought maybe the roaring truck or lowering boom had scared it. We got the piles up and I went back, made sure it wasn't breathing. I've rescued no less than four adolescent robins this summer. I supposed I was the last thing the bird saw before it died. Feeling like a kid, I nudged it with one of the tongs. My driver came down and got back in the cab, switching off the high idle, filling out the paperwork for the stop. As I shoved the pitchfork back under the frame of the truck I think I managed to say something out loud- Commend this spirit whose passing I witnessed. I suddenly wanted to leave from that place. I resisted the urge to ask all the questions- What had killed it, Why did it have to die, Why did I need to be there. I've been asking Why too much lately. Why can be the most hateful word under heaven.
