Winter Birds (14 page)

Many rooms of my past were filled with laughter. I was not always a fearful woman or a disillusioned one—certainly not an angry one. Though not gullible, neither was I cynical. As a young woman, I cried when I read sad books or watched sad movies, and these were the kinds of books and movies I preferred. I loved sentimental stories, and even though Eliot eventually coaxed my literary tastes to a level closer to his own, introducing me to many classics I had never read, I still considered
Anne of Green Gables
and
Little Women
the two best books ever written.

This is no longer true. I know that Anne Shirley could never have existed, nor could Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March. Lucy Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott, grown women both of them when they wrote their books, could not have been portraying the world they saw but rather the world they wished for. I want to say to them what my mother often said: “Shame on you.” But then I remember how many times I read both books, delighting in those alternate worlds, and I cannot help feeling grateful for them, false pictures though they were. I cannot help wondering if I would still be rereading those books, living contentedly among their romantic ideals, their scenes of sweet domestic tranquility, had I never unlocked Eliot’s desk and opened the bottom drawer.

But I did unlock the desk. I did open the drawer. Life molds a person. Once fashioned and fired in the kiln, he cannot go back and redesign the mold. Life is not a freshman composition that can be rewritten and turned in for a better grade. If I had not found the twelve folders, would I still be a happy woman today? This is a question without an answer. A student once asked me, “If it weren’t for the ten spelling errors, would I have made an A on my paper?” This, too, was a question without an answer. If I had not been so distracted by the poor spelling, I told him, perhaps I would have seen and marked other kinds of errors. Or perhaps not. As Judge Jack says, “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their rumps when they jump.” In eighty years of living, I have learned it a waste of time to imagine how things could have been.

Before the five minutes of truth in Eliot’s study, however, before life had molded me and baked me in its hot oven, I knew happiness. I had my own allotment of regrets, as any woman, but if allowed twenty or thirty pleasant days to repeat for the heaven of my preference, I would have a wide store of memories from which to choose.

My sister Regina, nine years older than I, read to me as a child. We had one book I especially loved called
Easy to Read Stories
, a large blue book with a picture on the cover of three little girls dressed in coats and fur muffs, standing on a snowy hillside. I liked to imagine that the three little girls were Regina, Virginia, and myself, though the snowy hillside was obviously in a distant land far from our home in the flat delta of Mississippi. This is the only book I have kept in my possession throughout the years. It is in the top drawer of my dresser. The flyleaf bears the inscription “To Sophia and Virginia, From Grandma, Christmas 1930.” We would have been four and three years old. Regina was thirteen, too old for such a book.

All the words in the storybook were divided into syllables. I suppose this technique justified the book’s claim to be “easy to read.” “The twen-ty-fifth of June was El-sie’s birth-day,” one story starts. “When the lit-tle girl came down to break-fast on that day, she found six beau-ti-ful ros-es with long stems and pret-ty green leaves ly-ing on the white ta-ble-cloth, placed so that they formed a wreath a-round her plate. There were six su-gar kiss-es in a new hand-some chi-na dish up-on which sis-ter Mar-jo-rie had paint-ed some pink rose-buds.”

Curled up beside each other in bed, Virginia and I would listen to these stories as many times as Regina would read them. We would pore over the pictures, dark, richly detailed engravings with captions such as “Nell and the Ma-gic Lan-tern” and “Babs and Her Kit-tens.” Snug in bed, we could hear our mother in the kitchen of our boardinghouse, preparing for the next morning’s breakfast. These would be among the happy scenes I would choose for my heaven.

When I started school, my teacher was Miss Reynolds. She was a young woman, engaged to be married, and I adored her. Watching her every move, I vowed in my childish heart that someday I would be like her. I would have beautiful dark hair, fair skin, and a diamond ring upon my white hand. I would stand before children and make them love me as I loved her. I would teach them to read and write, would print in straight lines on the chalkboard, would wave my arms gracefully as I led them in singing “Camptown Races” and “Oh! Susanna.” For my heaven of happy scenes, I would choose any day of my first year in Miss Reynolds’ classroom.

I would also choose my high school graduation day. Our school in Methuselah, Mississippi, was small, with a graduating class of only thirty-two, of which I was valedictorian. My father was inordinately proud of this achievement. Though I was only seventeen at the time, I knew that mine was merely a small-town victory, that I would have been overshadowed by brighter minds in the academic competition of a larger school.

Still, I would like to follow my father that day, to hear him greet others about town and know that I was responsible for the note of good cheer in his voice. For one day his spirits were lifted from his worries over the dismal future of his printshop, and when I saw his happy face as I stood at the head of my classmates that day to give my valedictory address, I felt the deep satisfaction of having won the approval of a respected authority, of having lightened his countenance for a moment.

After the ceremony my father, not a demonstrative man, took both of my hands in his, kissed my forehead, and said, “You have brought me great honor today, Sophia.” I have often thought upon his words. That I remember them more than sixty years later attests to the fact that they were rare words and that they touched me deeply. Yet what is honor? Is it not relative? Good marks on a report card, a string of platitudes spoken from the mouth of a seventeen-year-old—are these truly honorable?

I believe many words could bear reexamination. My knowledge of Shakespeare is sketchy compared to that of a scholar like Eliot, but I gleaned more than a little from typing his papers. It was Sir John Falstaff, I believe, who spoke of honor in
Henry IV
. Honor is only a word, he says, only empty air, only a painted decoration signifying nothing of substance.
Scutcheon
is the word Falstaff used. “Honour is a mere scutcheon,” he says. A scutcheon is an ornamental shield—something pretty to hide behind. And yet, for all my doubts, I would like to relive the day my father said to me, “You have brought me great honor, Sophia.”

I would add to these scenes any number of days from my twenty years of teaching children. I would disqualify a few, such as the day ten of my thirty pupils came down with stomach flu in a continuous wave within the space of six hours, or the day a fifteen-year-old sixth grader, hauled to school by the truant officer, assaulted the principal, or the day one of my fifth graders was hit by a car and thrown from his bicycle on his way home from school.

The boy’s name was Dewey Flint, and it happened a week before summer vacation. He was high-strung, a tall boy with flaming red hair, quick in every subject and always laughing. I’ll never forget how much smaller and sadder he looked in the casket. No one could tell looking at him so still and somber in death that in life he could multiply large numbers in his head. He was the only child of his parents. His mother, whose hair was as red as Dewey’s, sobbed hysterically at the funeral, collapsed in the aisle on the way out, and was borne away in the arms of her husband. Dewey’s death left a gaping hole in our classroom that last week of school. I would not want to repeat any of those days.

But others, so many others, were full of the joy of watching children learn, of laughing with them, of supervising their play, of hearing them read and sing. At Carrie Stern Elementary School in Greenville, Mississippi, where I taught fifth grade for five years, we sang the state song and “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the end of every school assembly.

The state song started out “Way down south in Mississippi, / Cotton blossoms white in the sun. / We all love our Mississippi, / Here we’ll stay where livin’ is fun.” It was a cheery song, and the children sang it with abandon. In 1962, after I had moved to Kentucky, the state of Mississippi adopted a new state song with the unimaginative title of “Go, Mississippi”—an inferior ditty in every way. My new principal in Kentucky never closed school assemblies with the state song, the familiar “My Old Kentucky Home,” perhaps because of the troublesome line “’Tis summer, the darkies are gay.”

For my heaven I would go back to Carrie Stern Elementary School and choose one of the school assemblies—perhaps the one when the magician asked Miss Parks, our principal, to come to the stage. I would watch the children’s faces as Mario the Magnificent pulled a yellow canary out of Miss Parks’ nest of hair. I would close my eyes and listen to them sing “Way down south in Mississippi” and “Oh, say, can you see,” their voices full throttle, their eyes shining, their hearts too innocent to know that something can never come out of nothing.

In the heaven I am contemplating, one would see the scenes of yesterday with the eyes of age. Therefore, I would not relive my wedding day. Though I thought it was a happy day at the time, it bore within it the seeds of deep sorrow. In my white dress coming down the narrow aisle of the small chapel, I was a blind child walking toward a cliff.

No more of this. The effort has wearied me. Happy memories can make one as fretful as sad ones. The last lines of the old state song of Mississippi were these: “The evening star shines brighter, / And glad is every dewy morn, / For way down south in Mississippi, / Folks are happy they have been born.” I could not sing this song today. There is ultimately nothing bright, glad, or happy about being born, either way down south in Mississippi or anywhere else.

So I close the day with my own easy-to-read story: “Soph-ie will sit qui-et-ly now and wait for Rach-el to bring her des-sert on a tray. Per-haps she will bring sher-bet in a pret-ty crys-tal dish. This is heav-en e-nough for an old wo-man in the win-ter of life.”

Chapter 11

So Strong a Prop to Support So Weak a Burden

When food is at stake, the loggerhead shrike is ruthless, catching and gulping insects on the wing, knocking smaller birds out of the air, and biting the necks of mice with its toothlike bill. Before eating it, the shrike often impales its prey on a thorny bush or barbed-wire fence
.

Three weeks pass. Midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I am served a piece of Rachel’s pumpkin pie. She has made it “from scratch,” Patrick tells me when he brings it to my apartment. He does not carry it on a tray. Rachel is in bed, he says. After baking the pie, preparing supper, and delivering my meal an hour ago, she sat at the table with him but did not eat anything. “I sent her to bed and told her I’d clean up the kitchen,” he tells me in a brisk, efficient manner. He is speaking much louder than he needs to. I wonder how closely Patrick’s idea of cleaning up the kitchen matches Rachel’s.

“She says it’s only another headache,” he tells me, “but I told her to go to the doctor if it’s not better tomorrow.” His tone tells me that he will make an appointment for her if she fails to. He sets the pie on the round table and starts to pick up my plate. “Are you done with this?” he says. “Weren’t you hungry?”

No, I tell him, I wasn’t. Don’t I like turkey, he wants to know. Yes, turkey is fine, I say. Is it because it was left over from Thanksgiving, he asks. No, I say, I am not opposed to leftovers. Am I feeling okay, he asks. I sigh. It is hard to imagine how Rachel tolerates this man. Yes, I tell him, I am feeling well enough.

The sight of the pie has kindled my appetite. It wouldn’t surprise me if Patrick were to take it back and say, “Well, no dessert for you if you’re only going to pick at your supper that way,” but he doesn’t. To my dismay, however, he takes my supper plate into the kitchen, leaving my door open, and then returns with another serving of pumpkin pie, which he places on the round table, also. He sits down at the table across from me. Apparently he means to eat dessert with me.

He has forgotten forks and must return to the kitchen for them. Before sitting down again, he glances at my half-empty glass of tea and asks if I want something more to drink. No, I tell him. But he decides that he does. He returns to the kitchen and comes back holding the lid of the Thermos he takes to work every day. He’s glad he didn’t throw his coffee out yet, he tells me, and he takes a noisy sip.

By this time, I have already eaten two bites of the pie. It is still slightly warm. He remembers the can of whipped cream in the refrigerator, and when he returns with it I have eaten two more bites. Before he can ask, I tell him I don’t care for any whipped cream. Still standing, he shakes the can vigorously and depresses the nozzle, ejecting a mound of topping on his slice of pie. White flecks spray out messily and dot the surface of the table. He wipes them off with his index finger, then realizes he has no napkin. Another trip to the kitchen and he sits down again.

I can eat quickly when I need to. By now I have only a few bites left near the thin fluted wall of crust. Assuming I am interested, Patrick proceeds to tell me how he selected a pumpkin before Thanksgiving, describing to me the difference between a regular pumpkin and a pie pumpkin, as if he is the only one who knows this secret. He then takes me through the process of cutting up the pumpkin, removing the seeds and stringy insides, then slow-cooking the pieces of rind in the Crockpot until soft enough to mash and store in freezer containers.

“I always do this for Rachel every Thanksgiving,” he says, as if he is to be commended for such difficult work, and as if it takes a man to do it. “You do this for Patrick every Thanksgiving,” I want to tell him as I watch him take a large bite of pie. The whipped cream appears to be somewhat runny, perhaps because the pie is still warm. He will be wanting a spoon before it is over, I predict, so that he can clean the saucer. Or perhaps he will lick the saucer like a kitten.