Some Wildflower In My Heart (57 page)

Birdie smiled at me, but it was a restrained smile. “I'll learn sooner or later, Margaret, not to push you. I'm sorry, too. I promise not to ask you again.” I suppose that I should have received her pledge with gladness, but strangely, I did not. “You know, Margaret,” she continued, “I was thinking, being your friend might just be the happiest and most important thing I do in my whole life. It might make you mad for me to say this, but I believe God has been getting me ready to be your friend for all these years. And I want to be a good one!”

Before I could respond, she smiled again, her face radiating with joyous purpose, and left my office. She appeared to have forgiven and forgotten my harsh words of Saturday night, for twice within the course of the morning she stopped by my office to converse briefly, once to share a story that Algeria had told her concerning a foiled burglary at a 7–11 store and later to ask for Joan's telephone number. “Mickey suggested that the six of us have a cookout at our house sometime soon,” she said. “Do you think Joan and Virgil would play croquet with us?”

On Tuesday, April 18, she brought to work a tiny origami bird, which she placed upon my desk. One wing was slightly higher than the other, but as the bird was no more than two inches tall, the mild deformity resulted in only a faintly perceptible list. “There, that's the first one I've made that looks like anything,” she said. “Mickey got this book at the library, and we've been trying different shapes. His are better than mine, though. You should see the grasshopper he made!” I picked up the bird and studied it at close range. It was made of pale blue paper, folded intricately. That it had taken a great deal of time was evident.

“Thank you,” I said. “I shall display this beside the bonsai and figurine on my piano.” One of Birdie's most recent gifts to me had been one of Mickey's “nut people.” Fashioned from a small pecan shell and a large peanut shell, the figure wore a little white dress. Glued to one pipe-cleaner hand was a miniature wooden spoon and from the other dangled a red thread affixed to a dime-sized cardboard disk imprinted with tiny numbers, which was intended to represent a stopwatch. On the bark base were stenciled the words
Lunchroom Superviser
. Uncharacteristically, I smiled over the spelling error, seeing it as part of the figurine's charm.

We had our piano lesson as usual that Tuesday afternoon, and the last words I heard Birdie say before I got into my car and backed out of her driveway were these: “You know, Margaret, I think one sign of true friendship is that when you say good-bye, you're already looking forward to the next time you'll see each other.” She could have said this at any number of other times during the course of our friendship, but she did not. She said it on the afternoon of April 18. This was the last time I saw her.

Sixteen hours later she was dead. Perhaps to some her death was overshadowed by another tragedy of national proportions on that day of April 19—the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Surely those whose lives were directly affected by the bomb had no thought for a small, plain, obscure middle-aged woman in South Carolina whose life had suddenly ended. For my part, though I mourned with my countrymen the great magnitude of death and destruction in Oklahoma, and though I felt outrage at the cold premeditation of the act, it was but a pittance of sorrow compared to the vastness of my grief over losing Birdie.

When she had not arrived at school by seven o'clock on the morning of April 19, Francine came to my office door and asked, “Birdie didn't call in sick, did she?” I was aware of her tardiness, of course, and had already walked through the lunchroom and into the hallway twice, hoping to see her small form hurrying toward me.

“She did not,” I answered. I saw Algeria glance at the large clock on the kitchen wall and then toward my office. She was in the act of arranging slices of bread on a baking sheet for the making of cinnamon toast.

“'Cause if she did, we're in a fix,” Francine said. “It's hamburgers for lunch, and Birdie always starts them fryin' while me and Algeria finish up breakfast.”

“I know perfectly well what is on the menu for lunch,” I said, “and as I told you already, Birdie is not ill. No doubt there is a good reason for her being late.” I felt a chill of dread nevertheless, for it was now well over thirty minutes past her usual time of arrival.

Algeria joined Francine at my office door. She was shaking a large plastic jar of cinnamon and sugar. “You gonna call her house?” she asked gruffly, scowling at the telephone.

“I telephoned five minutes ago and received no answer,” I said.

Francine and Algeria looked at each other without speaking and went back to their work. A few minutes later I found Mervin Lackey's telephone number in the directory and dialed it. As you may remember, the Lackeys were Mickey and Birdie's closest neighbors, or as Mickey was fond of saying, “our closest
living
neighbors,” though their house was two hundred yards behind the Freemans' and through a stand of trees.

A woman answered the telephone, and it was clear to me that I had awakened her. When I identified myself and told her of my concern, she asked me to hold the line while she went to the back door, from where she could see through the trees to the Freemans' carport. She returned within seconds and said that their car was gone. I thanked her, then notified the school office of Birdie's absence, and went out into the kitchen to help Francine and Algeria.

“I don't like it,” Algeria said. “Somethin's wrong.” She was transferring a sheet of crisp toast from the oven to the warmer.

“Birdie's never been late a single day!” said Francine. “She'd call if something was wrong…unless maybe she can't get to a phone. I sure hope nothing bad's happened. Did you read about those two women in Pickens who got kidnapped by those teenagers that set fire to a church? The women came in to clean the church and caught the boys pouring gasoline all over—”

“Francine, that is totally irrelevant to Birdie,” I interrupted impatiently. “Now, watch what you are doing. You have spilled sugar all over the floor.”

When Mr. Solomon came into the kitchen twenty-five minutes later, I could read disaster upon his face. I did not want to hear his words. The children had begun filing through the line for breakfast by now, and I was standing at my post beside the cash register. As Mr. Solomon approached me, I heard a fourth-grade boy call out, “Hey! Where's Miz Birdie at?”

The very word
accident
implies a departure from what is expected and desirable. Most are senseless, without pattern. I know firsthand of such calamities. I suppose I should have been prepared, and perhaps to some degree I was, for I had come to think of my friendship with Birdie as a treasure highly cherished, of inestimable value, yet ephemeral. I felt as though it were—as the saying goes—too good to last. Her death completed a trinity of losses in my life. In that regard, therefore, I suppose it was not without pattern. I lost my mother. I lost my son. I lost my friend.

Driving south on Highway 11 that morning, Mickey Freeman had suffered a near fatal heart attack. His body had collapsed forward, and the car, traveling at an estimated speed of fifty miles per hour, had left the road and collided with a tree. Birdie had died instantly.

To have Birdie snatched from me could have—and perhaps only a month earlier
would
have—pushed me backward, spiraling me once again into profound darkness and railing against the God who allows those whom he claims as his own to suffer. I cannot say why her death did not send me reeling and cursing, but I know this: Though the depth of my sorrow over losing her cannot be measured, I believe that I felt it to be inevitable. I will not say
fitting
, though were she able to speak today, she would no doubt take it a step further. I can almost hear her saying: “God had it all planned out, Margaret, and he meant it for good!” I believe there is one word that Birdie would desire, could she choose a descriptor for her death. Not tragic, not disastrous, not calamitous, but
beneficial
.

A person's death forces scrutiny of his life by those left behind, and for those who knew Birdie Freeman, such examination could serve only to enlighten and uplift their hearts. In contemplating the life of Birdie, the fight has gone out of me. I have no Rosetta stone by which to decipher the meaning and purpose of suffering, but I know that its imprint upon the scroll of mankind is foreordained. I cannot understand, nor do I need to. To borrow the words of David, the thought “is high, I cannot attain unto it.”

I have read that Kierkegaard, a philosopher whose ideals would hardly agree with those of Birdie and her fellow churchgoers, was obsessed with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, for he believed that it exemplified perhaps better than any other the divine contradiction of God's nature: He is good and he allows, even demands, suffering. That confidence in such a God requires a “leap of faith” is an understatement. The chasm is broad and dark. But Birdie had done it. She had crossed the gap and had bade me follow.

On April 22 I at last attended a service at Birdie's church. No one played the organ at her funeral. Mickey was not present; he was still confined to the hospital. I suppose that my tale is in some way balanced by the fact that it begins and ends with a funeral, and further, that at Birdie's funeral, as at Mayfield Spalding's, tribute was publicly paid by Eldeen Rafferty. Though I groaned inwardly when the large, ungainly woman stood to speak, I was soundly instructed in the minutes that followed, and not without great surprise, as I listened to her words. As I said earlier, Birdie was not one to talk of herself. Smarting from my own past wounds, I had taken what had amounted to no more than a fleeting interest in Birdie's. Eldeen Rafferty opened my understanding.

Eldeen stood at the front of the church beside Birdie's casket, which was closed. She wore a dark navy dress that had no belt, giving her the contour of a massive pillar. Around her neck was wrapped a gaudy scarf striped with the colors of summer fruit—watermelon, raspberry, peach, lemon—bunched and fastened clumsily with a silver pin in the shape of a butterfly. Before speaking, she laid her hand upon the lid of the casket and closed her eyes briefly as if in prayer. Then lifting her face, she proclaimed, “Birdie Freeman was a saint of the Lord Jesus and a precious gem in his crown!”

She spoke with such thunderous conviction that Thomas, seated beside me, visibly flinched. “And she was one of the sweetest, truest friends I had in this world,” Eldeen continued, “and there's probably lots of other folks that says the same thing 'cause she never met a stranger. I've planned out a speech that comes from her name, Birdie, B-I-R-D-I-E, even though that wasn't her real name, which was Bernadetta, but hardly a soul ever called her that. The first letter of Birdie is
B
, and that stands for
bright
, 'cause Birdie was the brightest, cheerfulest, faithfulest Christian I ever knew. She was always smilin' and would just sparkle up a room with her pretty little laugh.”

Eldeen put her head to one side and pursed her lips before resuming. “I don't know if I should even say this or not—I hadn't
counted
on sayin' it, and she probably wouldn't
want
me to—but I'm goin' to anyhow 'cause I feel like the
Lord
wants me to.”

She nodded emphatically and moved her large forefinger across the audience. “Birdie's smile was a sign of the grace and goodness of Jesus in her heart,” she said, nearly shouting once again, “'cause if anybody had a right to look out-of-sorts and down-at-the-corners, it was Birdie! Some of you maybe didn't even know she never had her a real mama or daddy. She was shoved around here and there when she was a little girl, nobody really wantin' her.” Here she paused and engaged in a bit of playacting, changing the timbre of her voice with each line and gesturing dramatically. “Here, you take her!” “No, I don't want her. I got enough kids of my own!” “Get a load of this little scrawny girl—probably can't even earn her keep!” “Send her back to the orphanage!” “I can't take her. What good would she do me?”

Eldeen shook her head sadly and lowered her voice. “Why, she was almost a grown-up woman 'fore anybody down here on earth loved her!” Eldeen jabbed her finger as if singling out various individuals and said, “Can you imagine bein' a little girl and not havin' a soul to love you? With some folks it would of closed 'em up tight and made 'em feel mean and sorry for theirself, but with Birdie it made her open herself up wide 'cause, you see, she had Jesus in her heart. She got saved by readin' a gospel tract when she was only a little girl, and she latched onto Jesus and lived for him the rest of her life!” Someone seated behind me blew his nose loudly.

At intervals Eldeen herself wept freely as she spoke but halted only once to wipe her eyes with a man's handkerchief that she removed from inside the cuff of her dress sleeve. “She was a little bitty thing,” she said, “but she was
strong in the Lord
! She bore up! She knew about bein' sick and about doctors' knives and such. She looked old Mr. Death in the eye nearly twenty years ago, but she asked God to heal her and he did it!”

“She knew about wantin' somethin' and not gettin' it, too,” Eldeen went on. “It like to broke her heart that she couldn't ever have babies, for she did love little children, Birdie did, but then she settled her mind about it, and one day she said to me”—Eldeen pitched her voice higher, producing an odd, husky squeak—“‘Eldeen,' she said, ‘I might of been too busy to help out all the folks that needs help if I'd of had children. I think God wanted me to use my spare time bein' light and salt to all the people that needs it!' Birdie was like that Shunamite woman Brother Hawthorne was preachin' about last week.
She did what she could!
And I only hope I can be a
tenth
as givin' and carin' and lovin' and faithful as she was!”