Free Gentlehands by M. E. Kerr

creature of habit, because after we’d sat around for a while talking, my grandfather jumped up and said it was time to fill the bird feeders. He said the raccoons didn’t come until very late on Sunday nights because a neighbor down the way was out on weekends and left his garbage out. “But I have to attend to the feeders,” said my grandfather, “because I do every night at this time.”
    I was beginning to feel high, not on the wine, particularly, but because it was such a great place, and he was the way he was, and Skye kept smiling at me, trying to hold my eyes with hers for long looks. When my grandfather carried the sunflower seeds out to the feeders, I went over and sat beside Skye, and I guess it was the wine then that made it easy for me to start kissing her. We just kissed and held each other while the opera played, and the sound of the waves crashing on the beach below came through the open windows.
    “I’m crazy about you,” I whispered into her soft, long black hair.
    “Oh Buddy.”
    “I am.”
    “I am, too.”
    We were both whispering, and excited, and I sat back and tried to get control of myself, because I didn’t want to be embarrassed when my grandfather returned. I looked at her face and she wasn’t smiling and neither was I. I couldn’t stop myself and reached for her again, and I don’t know how long our lips pressed together while we held each other very hard, but I heard my grandfather clear his throat and we both sprang away from each other.
    “Don’t be uncomfortable,” he said, because I guess we both looked that way. He went and sat down in his chair and smiled at us.
    “I never really knew anything about that sort of thing when I was your age,” he said.
    “Didn’t you have a girlfriend?” Skye asked.
    “I was too busy being educated. I was raised a Catholic, very strictly, and it was my father’s wish for me to be a priest. It was a very long time before I ever loved a woman.”
    “How old were you when you finally did?” Skye asked.
    “Much too old,” he chuckled.
    “Were you out of your teens?”
    “I was divorced, and no longer a young man.” He had one of his pipes in his hand and he was filling it the way someone does before launching on a story. Skye sensed that and urged him on.
    Then he told us that he’d traveled a lot andvery long distances until he met the only woman he’d ever loved, in Cuba. He said she was very beautiful, with long black hair like Skye’s, only she was a woman, not a girl, and she had a mystic quality about her, a “fatalism” my grandfather called it. She loved all animals, as my grandfather did, particularly birds.
    “Carla was her name,” he said. “She believed that birds were in tune with nature, that they had more psychic dimensions than man. Man, she would tell me, is too busy computing data from his five senses to pay any attention to his supersenses. The reason man, most men, seem to think telepathy and such psychic phenomena are strange, is because there is just too much to cope with. Their brains receive so many impressions they can’t grasp the deeper knowledge of life as animals can.”
    “Fascinating!” said Skye. “Mummy would love you, Mr. Trenker!”
    “The birds that came to Carla’s yard were unlike any I have ever seen before or since, rare and extraordinary ones of many colors and songs. We watched them for hours. We were just happy watching them together, as though it was our own special pageant.”
    “Did you marry her?” Skye asked.
    He shook his head. “I wanted to, though. I wanted nothing more.”
    “What happened?” Skye asked.
    While he got his pipe going, I poured myself another glass of wine.
    “One day at dusk we saw these two very large white birds gliding over the water. We’d never seen anything like them. Were they swans, some form of giant seabird? I don’t know. We watched them, entranced, and Carla said they seemed like omens; they had a dazzling brilliance and their great