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Monongahela, but there was not a single one didn’t live close to me as a neighbor. All existed as<br />

characters with a history profiled in a hundred informal mental libraries, like the library of her<br />

neighbors my grandmother kept.<br />

Shooting Birds<br />

On the way up Third Street hill to Waverly school each morning to discover what song Miss<br />

Wible was going to have kids memorize that day, I would pass a shack made of age-blackened<br />

hemlock, the kind you see on old barns long gone in disrepair. This shack perched at the edge of<br />

an otherwise empty double lot grown wild in burdock, wild hollyhock, and briar. I knew the old<br />

woman who lived there as Moll Miner because boys tormented her by shouting that name as they<br />

passed in the daily processional headed for school. I never actually saw her until one Saturday<br />

morning when, for want of anything better to do, I went to shoot birds.<br />

I had a Red Ryder BB rifle, Moll Miner’s lot had birds, and so lying on my belly as if birds were<br />

wild Indians, I shot one. As it flopped around dying, the old woman ran shrieking from her shack<br />

to the fallen bird, raised it to bosom and then fled shouting, "I know who you are. You’re the<br />

printer’s boy. Why did you kill it? What harm did it do to you?" Then overcome with sobs she<br />

disappeared into her shack.<br />

Her wild white hair and old cotton housedress, light grey with faded pink roses, lingered in my<br />

vision after I went home. Who could answer such a question at eight or at twenty-eight? But<br />

being asked made me ask it of myself. I killed because I wanted to. I killed for fun. Who cared<br />

about birds? There were plenty of birds. But then, what did it mean, this crazy old lady taking the<br />

downed bird into her home? She said she knew me; how was that possible? It was all very<br />

puzzling. I found myself hoping the BB hadn’t really killed the bird but only shocked it. I felt<br />

stupid and tried to put the incident out of my mind. A week or so later I got rid of my BB gun,<br />

trading it for an entrenching tool and some marbles. I told myself I was tired of it; it wasn’t a real<br />

gun anyway. Around Halloween some kids were planning a prank on the old lady. I protested,<br />

saying we should pick on someone who could fight back and chase us. "We shouldn’t pick on<br />

weak people," I said. "Anyway, that lady’s not crazy, she’s very kind."<br />

That winter, without asking, I shoveled the snow around her house. It was a business I usually did<br />

for pocket money, and I was good at it, but I didn’t even ask permission. I just shoveled the<br />

sidewalk without asking for money. She watched me from her window without saying a word.<br />

Whether she recognized I was the boy who shot the bird, I wish I could tell you, but that’s all<br />

there is. Not a sparrow falls, they say. That was the way I learned to care about moral values in<br />

Monongahela—by rubbing shoulders with men and women who cared about things other than<br />

what money bought, although they cared about money, too. I watched them. They talked to me.<br />

Have you noticed nobody talks to children in schools? I mean, nobody. All verbal exchanges in<br />

school are instrumental. Person-to-person stuff is contrary to policy. That’s why popular teachers<br />

are disliked and fired. They talk to kids. It’s unacceptable.<br />

Table of Contents<br />

Page 239

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