A Wedding on the Banks by Cathie Pelletier

didn’t seem to matter a hoot that he was on his way home to Giffordtown. He didn’t wish for a McKinnon or a Craft to come to his rescue, Goldie could tell. She would share the family dog with the kids, but Feathers was all hers.
    â€œNow oo stay wight here,” Goldie cooed to Feathers, and blew a soft kiss into the cage. Then she went back to the drudgery of her housework.
    As she did so, Little Vinal was crawling up the long hill on his stomach, dragging the BB gun behind him. Occasionally a stab of pain coursed through the bruised arm if he applied too much weight to it. But war was all blood and guts. The canary suspected something and cocked its head every now and then before it returned to its preening. It felt relatively safe where it was. After all, it was in a cage, protected from freedom, and dangling high enough in the air to outwit any cats.
    â€œYou ain’t built the fort that’ll keep me out,” Little Vinal sneered to the enemy, and let fly a dozen BB’s.
    Goldie herself saw the sharpshooter bounding away, guilt in every leap. But which of Vera’s kids it was, she was at a loss to say. They all looked alike to her. And for some strange reason she could never understand, they all seemed to be the same size, all eight of them. She suspected it was the steady diet of surplus food given out by the town. Goldie watched until the boy running down the hill disappeared into Vinal’s teetering garage. An hour later, when she went out to see what Bond McClure had left for her, she found Feathers already stiffening in his cage.
    â€œOh, Feathers,” Goldie said softly. She took the stiffening bird up into her hands. A breeze rippled over its body, the soft, sad caress of spring.
    â€œDon’t cry, Mama,” Priscilla, Goldie’s thirteen-year-old, pleaded. “We can get you another one.”
    â€œI don’t want another canary,” Goldie whispered.
    â€œLet’s get one of them white rats,” Little Pee excitedly offered. “They been at the Newberry’s forever.”
    Little Pee and Priscilla were able to find several of the little gold beads about the porch and ground. They were obvious misses or—and Goldie grimaced to think of it—ricochets. Now her grief billowed into anger. How dare they kill her bird! She was certain now of the culprit’s identity. Little Vinal had already built a wide reputation around Mattagash for escapades with his BB gun. All of the Giffords at the top of the hill had heard how Little Vinal had picked the candy beads off his teacher’s birthday cake and replaced them with BB’s. Several of his classmates ate plenty until the teacher bit firmly onto one and destroyed her new dental bridge. Questioned by an irate principal as to why he’d done it, Little Vinal said, “Because she’s always shooting off her mouth.” It brought in quite a large guffaw back home, at the bottom of the hill.
    â€œBy God, they won’t get away with this,” Goldie threatened, and stomped in to wake Big Pike. She promptly snapped off As the World Turns and insisted that he pay heed. The world wasn’t turning very well in Mattagash, Goldie let him know, and she demanded that he take Feathers down the hill and collect the five dollars she had paid for him.
    â€œWho?” asked a sluggish Pike. He wondered for a second if they had named one of their own Feathers. Flora, he suddenly remembered. They had one named Missy Flora. That’s what had tripped him up. The naming process had always bothered Pike, as it would any thinking man. When two people get married and set about having children, why not just alphabetize them according to birth? It would make things a whole lot easier when talking to the welfare people.
    â€œBut there’s no amount of dollars they can pay for my broken heart,” Goldie wept. “And you can tell them that!”
    Pike watched as the little white dot, the