31 Frank’s eye and shrugged. He shook his head at me grinning — we’d been through this scene before. A little later, after examining Macey and finding no clinically injured parts, Frank patiently explained to William and his side kicks that Macey seemed to be an old bird dying a natural death. Finding him in the waves and bringing him home had just forestalled the inevitable. He craftily suggested that Macey would be a lot happier dying amid the foliage atop the dune in front of our house rather than con-fined www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM in a cardboard box. And so the parade threaded its way amid the prickly fabric woven by the brambles, sandspurs and thorny vines that encircled the dune. At the crest, they scooped out a depression in the sand under a bush and laid Macey there to die. The woebegone procession winding its way back down the dune was positively funereal and I prayed Macey would die and be buried before a cat or dog found him and left a scattering of feathers and feet. As the afternoon wore on, Macey survived numerous visits from the children as they tried to coax him to eat and drink. Finally they left him alone with a plastic water bowl alongside, just in case. I must say that I entertained wishes of a predator coming in the night and carting away the entire carcass so the children might think he’d revived and flown away. I watched anxiously as William made his way up the dune the next morning, his shoul-ders drooped and his countenance dejected, much like Mary Magdalene must have looked when she returned to the tomb. As I waited in the kitchen for his sorrowful return, I contemplated what favorite breakfast I might fix to assuage the pain for as my daughter says, I love with food. But instead, William came running back down the dune to announce joyfully that Macey had survived the night. Couldn’t I see, declared William, that Macey had a will to live? The other chil-dren came shrieking to savor the good news, but still, we convinced them that Macey was best left alone in his own environment for another night at least. And lying on his side in the scooped out hollow atop the dune with one eye opened skyward, he got through the next night as well. The children decided that Macey did indeed need the protection of a confined space and begged to be allowed to remove him from the dune. That day, Macey was returned to the box in the playroom and the miracle began. Perhaps it was the goodwill emitted by the myriad visits of the children or Janet’s daily inquiries, or the show-and-tell ses-sions provided by William to any interested party; Macey began to revive. Indeed, as his story spread, he gained quite a reputation on Wrightsville Beach. Still he lay on his side in the box barely moving and showing no signs of wanting to get up. One morning William thought he would enjoy a change of scenery so he accompanied us to the ocean where he lay between our low beach chairs. He seemed to savor the heat com-ing up from the sand and the glint of the sun on the ocean for though still on his side, the visit to his home territory seemed good for him. The ocean was calm that day and William took him down to the edge so that the waves could wash over him. As the seawater swished beneath him he rallied a bit, and when William took him farther out, we were surprised to find that on the water Macey could keep himself upright. It was a breakthrough
Wrightsville Beach Magazine May 2014
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