More Worth than Many Sparrows

It was autumn.
The sun sparkled across the tumbling current in the overflow canal behind the factory.
He had been told never to go near the treacherous waters, and up until today, had never been tempted. That changed as soon as he saw the break in the fence. The opening snipped in the chainlink was just big enough for a young boy with a sense of adventure to weasel through, his cotton jacket only snagging a little as pulled his scrawny frame through the gap . The raft was harder to coax through the fence. He was careful not to let the jutting wire ends scar the half-inflated rubber skin of the bulging inner-tube.
Now he stood on the edge of the concrete river, surprised at how quick the dark water was, and yet so quiet. It's black snake body hardly made a sound as it squirmed through the deep white trough.
He would be fine once he got down into the water. It would be fun. He would ride his little makeshift raft all the way to the lake. It was getting down to the water that would be the scary part. The sides of the canal were steep and it was a good six or seven feet down to the water's surface.
He sat down on the edge and let his feet over the side first. There was barely enough of a slope to stand on, and he began scooting down towards the water while pulling the edge of his small raft behind him in one hand, and using the other to keep his balance on the steep incline.
He tried to move the raft down in front of him and made it nearly three feet from the water's edge before slipping and plunging hands-out face first into the deep current. The splash was louder and colder than he could have imagined, and then everything was instantly muted again as sank and tumbled. He gasped and struggled against the swift flow of the dark water pulling him down and pushing him along. Air, and more splashing, and flailing. His head slipped under as he lost his grip on the tube--it felt slippery in his hands and flipped over every time he tried to get his weight on top of it. It wasn't long before his clothes felt heavy and his limbs began to shake in the cold water. His fingertips were white and trembling as he clenched his hands into the rubber of the raft. The canal made a series of bends and he scrambled to grab onto the steep banks as he passed, but the concrete sides denied any holds and the water pushed him along faster and faster and threatened to tear him from the raft. It was in these moments that he thought not of his mother and her warnings, or of his father and the trouble he would be in, or even of how much he had wanted to impress his brother by proving to him that he was big enough not to be left out of all the fun. It was in these moments, as he approached the culvert pipe, that he thought of the little yellow birds that had built a nest outside his window. He remembered the chick that had fallen from the tree and how his featherless frame had scuttled and spasmed in the grass before the night came and he grew silent in the cold.
Again, the rushing current sucked him under and into the maw of the pipe; his raft popping from his hands as the water pulled him deeper.
In the darkness, he saw the yellow bird with the black wingtips and scruff of orange on it's forehead flitting back and forth from the treetops to the bushes near the ground. It landed on his window sill to share a mouthful of carefully gathered seeds.
What was it's name?
Do birds have names?
Does God, who knows when every sparrow falls, give them each a name because they are his own?
In slow motion he saw every wingbeat as the little yellow-orange bird bent his knees to launch from the sill, the outline of his black tipped wings forming perfect v's as he raised and lowered them above his back. The bird pulled his legs in close to his body floated into the open air.
He watched the bird fly slowly away from his window, and suddenly night was falling. Everything dimming into dusky blue until he could just barely make out a faintly bobbing yellow beacon against the night horizon. And then there was no horizon, and no bird, and everything was quiet.