Clockwork Bird

The Clockwork Bird is a small mechanical ornament that briefly gives Bunny Junior a source of delight amid a painful visit with his grandfather. Its song and moving wings make it more than a valuable possession: the boy remembers it later as a moment of pleasure he wants to share, even as his father’s distress consumes the journey onward.

Appearance and Setting

The bird sits inside a little cage on an antique Sutherland end-table by the window. Its perch is threaded with ivy, and its tiny wings are red and blue. Bunny Junior runs his fingers along the cage’s gilded bars, drawn to the object before he sets it in motion. The bird’s elaborate placement and ornamentation give it an air of preciousness, later reinforced by his grandfather’s warning that it is worth a fortune.

Mechanism and the Visit

Bunny Junior turns the gold key at the front of the cage. The automaton jumps to life, singing in short, sweet notes while its beak opens and shuts and its wings lift and fall. The boy’s face registers immense pleasure. The scene sets his unguarded curiosity against the strain of the adults around him: while Bunny tries to care for his coughing father, the old man rebuffs him and struggles with his twisted fingers to pull up his flies. When he warns Bunny Junior not to break the bird, the warning expresses its monetary value, while the boy’s response remains an apology.

The bird’s operation is temporary. Later, as Bunny Junior stands in front of his grandfather and speaks in defense of his father, the Clockwork Bird winds down, stops singing, and grows still on its perch. The passage places the end of its song beside the boy’s intervention, without making the mechanism responsible for the conflict or its sudden, oppressive silence.

Memory and Significance

During the drive through heavy summer rain, Bunny Junior clutches his encyclopaedia but cannot find in it an answer to what to do about his crying father. In that helplessness, he keeps thinking about the Clockwork Bird: its colorful wings and pretty song make him wish all over again that Bunny would stop crying, so that he could have a turn. The remembered object gives the boy’s wish a concrete shape—not an answer to his father’s grief, but a small pleasure he longs to experience without that grief taking over.

The bird’s significance lies in this contrast between its delicate, repeatable performance and the unsettled human scene around it. A gold key can start the song, but the song winds down; the boy can remember its sweetness, but cannot make his father stop crying. The Clockwork Bird thus links a brief moment of childhood wonder at the grandfather’s house to Bunny Junior’s continuing concern for Bunny on the road.