Kathy Little Bird (35 page)

Abram took the phone back, saying it had done me a world of good hearing my father’s voice. It did bring back vividly the moment we had rushed into each other’s arms—been father and daughter.

After the conversation I was exhausted and took a nap.

I dreamed I had a daughter. At some level it wasn’t a dream. I knew I had a daughter and that I was dead to her. If those facts didn’t destroy me, how could a little thing like being trampled in a riot?

My mind was beginning to take in my situation.

There were two things I wanted to know. I knew that I could ask them, even with my limited vocabulary, but would I be able to disentangle a complicated answer?

The first question was, “Will Pam always be here?” I didn’t know to whom this should be addressed.

I was afraid of the answer. Or it may be that I had answered it myself. I knew Pam’s motive. But I doubt that she did. In fact I was sure she did not. She really was a good person.
She had a good and noble reason for being here, as good and noble as herself.

Abram, of course, was a man. Not a typical man, but a man. Men quite uncritically take adoration for granted.

My main motive for getting well was to be rid of kind, obliging, ever-present Pam. While not a high-minded objective, it was perhaps more effective than most. I would get that good, pious, selfless young woman out of my house, and the quicker the better.

So I strained to understand the torrent of words directed at me daily and picked a fight with the unsuspecting Pam, on whom my rancor and frustration had settled. It was over nothing, of course. I dropped my napkin and was about to retrieve it with my picking-up stick, a kind of tongs to grasp dropped items. It was quite efficient, and I was capable of managing, but before I could, Pam gracefully scooped up the napkin.

Did she have to do that? Couldn’t she let me do one of the few things I could do? She wants to show me up, show Abram how helpless I am, and how good she is at picking up napkins. How I hate you, I hate you for standing up and walking around, for being able to talk straight, for picking up things, for doing everything I can’t. God, how I hate you!

In my rage at not being able to communicate this, big tears rolled down my face. Pam knelt solicitously and wiped them away. She knew I had worked myself up, but from the emotional grunts and syllables had no idea that the fury was directed at her, that she was the object of my venom.

She continued soothingly with pious platitudes. “It’s good for you to let off steam once in a while,” she was telling me. “You’ve been so patient, I marvel at you, really I do.”

I made a lunge in her direction, hoping to strangle her. The chair I was in knocked her stool over, and we both went down under splintering wood, spinning metal wheels, and leather cushions. A tablecloth floated on top of us as silverware clattered and a china bowl rolled along the linoleum floor.

Abram, hearing the commotion, left a customer looking for a mid-Victorian mystery novel and, dashing in, lifted the chair off us, and me off Pam.

“What in the world?!”

Pam was breathing hard and looking at me as though she’d never seen me before—and I don’t believe she had.

Then she pulled herself together and said in her demure voice, “Kathy reached for something and the chair tipped over.”

“Kathy, is that what happened?”

I was laughing too hard to set him straight, even if I’d been able to.

Question number two was another matter.

Question number two was better unasked.

As long as I didn’t know the answer there was hope.

R
EPLACING
the shattered wheelchair was not in our budget. Abram hesitated to approach the Wertheimers; they had
given us so much. But there didn’t seem to be any other option.

At that point Providence unexpectedly came to our rescue, as if to settle the argument the church elders had debated so strenuously in our parlor—do God’s gifts come by grace or for merit? Abram was opening the semiannual statement from the distributors of my old recordings. He called out from the shop through the connecting door we always kept open.

“They fouled up the accounting again.” He laughed. “This time in our favor. Instead of six hundred dollars, it’s twenty-six thousand.”

He was about to return it with a note correcting their arithmetic, but I hammered violently on my bedpan. Abram rushed in, and I was able to convince him with garbled sounds and signs and pointing to the phone that it was worth a long-distance call before rejecting twenty-six thousand dollars.

The check was good. The company had been taken over by a group that specialized in reissuing old hits with new promotion.

That day Abram bought me a chair. It was the Cadillac of wheelchairs. Electric, of course. With the press of a button it raised or lowered, tilted forward or reclined. Its custom leather back, seat, and arms were not only comfortable but handsome. I had the handsomest wheelchair any girl ever had, the best that money could buy.

Abram explained to me in detail about my money. “Praise the Lord, we’ve got enough now to pay our bills and get you well. But we can’t count on this happening again. We’ve got
to stick with the old maxim: Waste not, want not.” He smiled, knowing I hated and despised such prudent sayings.

I smiled back. I had a more important agenda. “Pam,” I managed to articulate, and indicated with a wave of my hand that she was free to go, now that we could afford a practical nurse.

Abram shook his head. “No,” he said. “You need someone who loves you. We’ll make it up to Pam later. Help out with college, maybe.”

A few days later he explained our financial situation to me all over again. He didn’t know how much of what he said I could take in. I didn’t either. Sometimes, when I wasn’t tired, I thought I understood it all. Abram believed our windfall was due to a fluke, a passing craze for my cassettes among teens. That made sense to me most of the time. At other times it was a jumble and all I could do was smile up at him.

Two facts did stay with me. I had the best wheelchair in Quebec, and Pam would be here for the rest of my life.

O
NE
day a flash of retrograde violence overwhelmed me.

I thought I had put that behind me.

Apparently not.

I squeezed my eyes together in an effort to make the memory go away.

I was able now to take my life right up to the benefit I didn’t finish. People told me what had happened. They didn’t need to tell me about boots and shoes—seen from the perspective
of the floor. Looking up, I watched them descend. They blacked out the world.

I didn’t know how to keep out these sudden flashes—What if the episode kept recurring?

I saw I couldn’t handle it by myself. Abram had to help me. I trundled into the bookshop looking for him. He was checking a new catalogue, but he left it.

“The concert…” I managed to get out. “I see it.”

Abram sat down on an unopened crate of books. I could see he took this seriously. “You know what I think, Kathy? I think you buried all that too fast. You didn’t give yourself time to digest what happened. That isn’t always the best way to get rid of something.”

“What?” I asked, implying, “what is the best way?”

You could feel the tumblers drop in his mind. “How much do you know about benefit concerts?”

I shrugged. That was the easiest answer.

Abram was still thinking his way through the problem. “If you understood what your singing might have accomplished, you will see why you were perceived as a threat. To make it all clear to you, tomorrow you’ll accompany me to my favorite hangout, the central library. You know the one, on Sherbrooke Street, East.”

Since I hadn’t been able to banish the flashbacks on my own, Abram’s prescription was worth trying.

It was a big adventure for me, especially as I left Abram in the Philosophy stack and went by myself into the periodical section, where I tried out a new skill: bringing up microfilm
articles. I stared at a gray tinged screen and scrolled down to Benefit. I was surprised and pleased to find it.

The modern benefit concert was born in New York City in the summer of 1971, in Madison Square Garden. Two shows were given, at three-thirty and again at eight o’clock. They were gotten together by George Harrison to provide aid to the desparate people of Bangladesh.

I read that in an effort to control its former province, the Pakistani government drove ten million people over the border into India and murdered a million more. Those left were among the poorest people on the planet. Harrison had come to know of the plight of this pathetic remnant through the Indian master of the sitar, Ravi Shankar. Harrison studied sitar with him and the two became friends.

Shankar, recently returned from the area, was devastated by what he saw. He talked about it with different people, some in the UN, but mainly musicians. If only something could be done to focus attention on the distress and need, if only the world did not turn away from Bangladesh.

“Music moves people,” they told each other. “It unifies them. And song speaks directly to the heart; it speaks what words alone cannot.” People, they felt, by and large, have a natural innate desire to help one another, to alleviate want and starvation, especially where it affects children.

If they got together, pooled their talent, performed gratis, they could bring out a large number of people and money could be raised, a great deal of money.

They got to work, contacted Jackson Browne’s scholarship fund for Native American students and Pete Seeger’s sloop
plying the Hudson River, a floating classroom in environmental protection.

I looked up. I could see that wherever there was a cause—civil rights, antiwar movements, human rights, antinuclear crusades—there was now a new way to rally people.

Artists from all over answered. Ringo was in Spain making a film. Bob Dylan, who didn’t perform much since his motorcycle accident, performed. Eric Clapton came out of retirement, the entire Badfinger band played, and other musicans, good, professional…and courageous, because gigs were lost and contracts abrogated.

As I read, I realized that the breakup of our own benefit, my subsequent hearing, and the way they had seized on the oversight of not having my green card updated, were some of the consequences those who protest injustice must expect.

I experienced a warm sense of pride and kinship that fellow musicians felt so strongly, that they had gotten together and through song drawn people of goodwill together.

They made a difference…as I almost had. Thanks to Gentle, I had joined in. My motive was simply to get my songs heard. That the concert was organized to restore Indian lands pleased me. But it was not the main factor.

Some of the idealism must have rubbed off on me, however, because one way or another, I was part of this courageous group. I even began to think of myself as a casualty in the on-going battle between the makers and the takers.

I clicked off the viewer. There were different images that could come now when I thought of our benefit concert. I rejoined
Abram in Philosophy, my heart singing, and for the first time there was music in my head.

Once again Abram had known what to do and how to help me. Now I had to help myself, and to do this I had to think a few things through.

A
PRIL
1982, almost three years since my accident, but in my mind it was both yesterday and forever. I couldn’t walk. That question seemed to have answered itself.

Aside from a rest in the afternoon I no longer spent time in bed. In the morning I got up, washed my face, and brushed my teeth. I soaped, scrubbed, and rinsed myself in the shower chair. Applying makeup gave me a positive lift. I looked exactly like Kathy Little Bird, the famous singer. Twice a week Pam shampooed my hair, but soon I planned to take that over. Just as someday I would drive the Lincoln, which Pam thoughtfully kept limber by taking it into town.

A more urgent problem hovered in my mind. Nature helped me formulate it by devising a test. Not the winter that closed the port for months, whose thirty-below weather packed
snowdrifts to fifteen feet, sweeping traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, from sidewalk and streets, and livestock into heated barns. I was Canadian, I knew these winters.