I was a kid being a kid watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. My favorite scene was upon us, and my sitter, my grandfather, sang along, “Just whistle while you work! Whwhwh, whwh: whw-whw, whwh—whwh whwh!”

Whistling was around the bend. At the time, tinged with wizardry, unworkable along the lines of yodeling and ear wiggling, in which my grandfather was also learned. Some puckering, only blustery sounds coming out (the disappointment of kissing thin air), and I’d given up already.

My mother had told him he could feed me fast, and I had a Happy Meal toy to show for it. Doc and Bashful pumped either end of a railway push-cart—they seesawed as I ran the wheels on the ground, a big, plastic topaz whirling between them.

On screen, precious stones lodged in the cave’s wall twinkled, blinked, and shone like eensy strobing stars of Bethlehem. All the dwarves had to do was pry them out with their picks, It ain’t no trick! Dopey kept screwing around, though. Maybe Dopey had the same syndrome as my cousin. Next time I’d ask. My aunt would tear up, sneering, and Mom would tell her to stop, just because I was healthy and her son wasn’t; how could she begrudge her sister that?! But that’s later.

My grandfather’s garden was margined with boulders the size of smallish pumpkins, chalk-grey and veined. They were in the front yard, but some had been taken. People knew they were moon rocks. Cracked open there were smoky crystals. I’d look at them, wanting so bad to drop them on the driveway and see the icy molars inside. But I could just hear my mother, minatory—Don’t. Some stones grew on cave walls, I gathered, while others grew inside rocks like those, like pearls, or babies.

Mom had said that Papa used to work the mine, and I thought it must be how he got his moon rocks, the way the dwarves did. On screen, the seven of them were at it, Dig, dig; dig, dig; dig, dig; dig, dig!

“Mom told me you did that.”

He laughed. There were no gemstones in his line of work, just filthy coal.

My feelings showed, I’m sure.

“But there were birds!” He flapped his arms.

It didn’t make sense to me. “Papa, you mean bats.” I flapped. Bats weren’t birds, they were mammals.

“Nope.” He said he meant birds. “Real pretty yellow ones.”

It was part of his job to buy the birds. He took care of them and bought new ones when the others died, which they did sometimes. Leaks weren’t that uncommon.

“You’d be surprised how often,” my grandfather said. “Keep ‘mind, before, you couldn’t see or smell the gas. You didn’t know if it weren’t for those birds.”

He didn’t have to take all the canaries home too, but did that. He loaded up the cages after work and hung them up singing in the porch at home. (Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho! It’s home from work we go!) Back to work for them in the morning.

I imagined lemon bursting against the dark hips of the mines.

“They went, ‘TWEET, TWEET; CHIRP, CHIRP.’”

That’s what the men wanted to hear. To put an ear up to the cages and for the din in them to be happening. They had a system for who would check the birds and when.

Unscheduled men came by to hear too, and no one gave anyone else shit for needing it.

They knew the ongoing chirrup was more soothing than any of their wives, on par with their late mothers, bless their hearts.

He explained when they got quiet: Sure enough, alarmingly, they’d be on their backs on the newspapered floor of their cage.

“‘CHIRP, CHIRP, CROAK,’ meant, get out now.”

The men would retreat, the birds stayed behind.

Much later I learned that when he quit, he took a canary. He came home with just one bird and set it down on the kitchen table, and that’s how my grandmother knew something was going on. Did he feel it was owed to him? Maybe on the way home he’d told the canary, his little comrade, they were done. Probably not, though—because men in those days didn’t outright bitch and weren’t of the something-more philosophy.

Either way he had the bird for a long time.

Story Chantel Louise Tattoli
Photography by Rachel Rebibo