Wild Bird Post · Letter No. 0 · Bordentown, New Jersey, spring 1832
My dear,
Your last note reached me an hour before I meant to leave the city, which is the best luck I have had all week. I read it twice on the steps of the post office with the wagon already loaded, and it is in the crown of my hat now, where it will keep dry longer than I will.
I am away south tomorrow. The gun is borrowed, the paper is not, and the letter of credit they have given me is drawn on a house I would not trust with a dog. The work is honest enough. Skins and sketches, taken carefully, sold on to men whose names will sit under the plates instead of mine. I have made my peace with that, mostly on the days they pay in advance.
Before I go, the cardinal. There is a pair in the yard behind this lodging house and they have been the whole of my company for three days.
You would have smiled to see him this morning. He came down to the spilled seed under the window with his crest up like a man expecting an argument, and finding none, sat in the wet and sang anyway. He does not leave when the warblers leave. The pair that owns that yard in June is the same pair that owns it in January, and when everything about them has gone quiet and brown he is still there, burning, in a bush with no leaves on it.
Here is the part I thought you should have. His red is not entirely his own doing. It comes out of what he eats, the dogwood and the wild grape and whatever a kind woman leaves on a sill, and a bird that feeds well glows like a coal in a grate. One that does not, fades. So the ones at your window are red partly on your account. I thought of you at once when I understood it, and I have been warmer since.
One more thing and then I will let the candle go. She sings too. I had it from an old man on Second Street who has watched them forty years, and I have heard it myself since: she answers him from inside the thicket, phrase for phrase, the two of them carrying it back and forth across the yard like people who have been married a long time. The books say the male sings. The books have not been listening.
I will write again from the river. If the money holds I should be in the flooded timber by the turn of the month, where the ducks are said to come in numbers that make a man doubt his own arithmetic.
Keep the fire in, and keep the sill stocked.
Yours,
Josiah Rook
