Winter Birds (2 page)

During the past summer I traveled from my home in Kentucky to visit each of the five respondents, ten days in each home, with a suitable interval for rest between each trip. This took the entire summer, after which I announced my decision. All travel arrangements were furnished by the applicants, as stipulated in the letter. I would not negotiate airports alone.

In each home I looked at the accommodations with an eye to light and privacy more than to space and luxury. I would not spend my winter in darkness nor in the hub of chaos. I wanted many windows but few doors, though I did not state these requirements in the letter.

As for privacy, I saw the necessity for interior access to my quarters, but I wanted a solid door with a bolt on my side. That is not to say that I wanted absolute quiet, however. I wanted to hear convincing evidence of living on the other side of my walls. One home I eliminated because, among other reasons, it was too quiet. My great-niece Adrienne offered me an entire apartment in what she called her “deluxe townhouse” in Jackson, in a private community with iron gates and a guardhouse, but for the ten days I was there, I felt as if I were in a vacuum-sealed vault. Adrienne was away all day in an office downtown. Her maid fed me breakfast and lunch, then left at one o’clock. I had a phone number and a television for the long afternoons and evenings.

I can tolerate a great deal of noise. I am not deaf, although because I sometimes choose not to reply, people often assume wrongly that I am. I do not take pains to relieve them of this misconception. I have learned to turn to my advantage such misconceptions. They may serve to gather useful information, as in the case of Adrienne.

“Oh, I’ll get a system worked out,” I heard her say to a man in her kitchen late one night, a man she called Roger. “The food part will be easy,” she said. “I gave her a Lean Cuisine tonight—put it all on a plate, and she thought I’d made it.”

Young people are forever overestimating their cleverness. I had seen the frozen dinners in her freezer. While she was at work that very day, I had explored her house.

Roger said something, and she laughed. “Don’t worry, she’d never figure it out. She’s deaf as a fencepost. Besides, she probably wouldn’t care. She had plenty of boyfriends in her day.” Obviously, Adrienne had mixed me up with my sisters. I had friends but never a boyfriend, not until a short, bearded man became charmed by my typing skills, which I faithfully exercised on his behalf through numerous lengthy articles for scholarly journals and papers to be presented at conferences. He rewarded me at last by marrying me.

I heard Roger’s car leave Adrienne’s driveway the next morning before eight. I wondered what attracted him to Adrienne, who was severely thin with a square jaw and a garish blond streak in her short black hair. I had also heard her say of me, “She’s loaded.” Maybe Roger was interested in sharing the profit. She left for work soon after he did, and I counted on my fingers the number of days I had been in her house, sorry that I still had four to go. When I heard the maid arrive, I turned up the volume on the television and waited for her to pound on my door.

“Dolly here to clean!” was how she announced herself. She always sounded angry. I wondered what Adrienne had told her about me, if anything. The routine was unvarying. First Dolly set a plate of food on the large ottoman, then a glass of orange juice on the table beside it. The menu was not creative—a single fried egg, a piece of toast, a slice of bacon. I was never consulted as to preferences. As I ate, Dolly moved about the apartment, never speaking, never glancing at me. She made no noise with her feather duster and Windex. She was short and round like me. Perhaps she avoided looking at me because she did not want to see how a short round woman looks when she gets old.

My only view through the windows of Adrienne’s apartment revealed other luxury townhouses on every side. A patio and garden in the rear were enclosed by a high fence of bleached wood. Adrienne had filled a shelf in the guest apartment with books, had left a large volume of Shakespeare on the mahogany table beside the sofa. Like others in my family, she imagined I was an intellectual, had heard the rumor, which I do nothing to dispel, that I had lectured on Shakespeare in my days of university teaching. Many people do not realize how much information one can pick up secondhand and pass off as his own, how narrow his understanding may be of things he references with apparent ease. A person can feed the assumptions of others by affecting an aura.

Associations may heighten one’s reputation, but they may also lower it. “Birds of a feather flock together,” as the old saw goes. If the flock is predatory as a whole, each member will be judged a predator. If they are songbirds, bird watchers will expect each bird to sing. In a flock of crows, it will be assumed that each one is a messy squawker. One may stain himself by the company he keeps just as surely as he may catch the reflected shine. Because of my husband, I consorted with scholars. Though I was quiet, having many questions but few answers in matters of philosophy and literary criticism, I was considered one of the windbags by association. I have read that the pine warbler soils his feathers by living in the pine tree.

Patrick’s house was my next visit after Adrienne’s, and the last of the five. It was also the smallest and most modest of all the homes. Though I am in no way averse to luxury, perhaps I settled for this one since it was closest to my childhood home in Methuselah, Mississippi, or perhaps because I had taught school in this town for a few years in the sixties. Perhaps it was because of all the windows facing the backyard. From my vantage I could see a field where children played, birds at the bird feeder, a birdbath, pine and poplar trees, a gazebo with a weathervane on top, a neighbor’s trampoline. Perhaps these images held more interest for me than those of the other four houses.

Or perhaps, weary of the interviewing process, I had lost my powers of concentration and my capacity and patience for comparison. It was easy to simply surrender and say, “This one—I’ll take this one.” Maybe it was that Patrick and his wife didn’t act falsely eager for my company, as some of the others did. Or maybe there was some mysterious quality this house possessed. Who can tell? I have chosen it. Here I am, and here I shall stay.

I will admit to one certainty: Patrick’s wife intrigued me during my ten-day visit. People, like the ginkgo fruit, may look small and harmless on the outside yet emit the vilest of smells when crushed. I know that Rachel cannot be as good as I imagine her to be. One does not live to be eighty and still harbor delusions about the fundamental goodness of humankind. Perhaps this in itself should have driven me to choose another home, one in which the inhabitants wore their imperfections like old clothing. But then, maybe I purposely sought the site of inevitable disillusion for the final act in my play, to confirm to the end what I have known life to be.

The first night of my visit with them, I watched Rachel slice red potatoes for supper. I pretended to be looking at a magazine Patrick had placed in my hands, telling me in his strident voice that I would be interested in the article on a certain page. I was not. It was an article about the unreliability of college entrance exams, especially the new writing component, but I read only the first sentence, which opened with the pedestrian words “Statistically, the likelihood of a quality education in the public schools today is lower than it has ever been.” I was not interested in statistics or a quality education. I was interested in Rachel’s slicing of the potatoes.

I sat at the kitchen table in view of the counter where she was working. She handled the potatoes as someone working her way through a delicate puzzle. She first sliced each potato into four segments, then studied each quarter, as if measuring it into equal parts before laying her knife against its red skin. She sliced each quarter into three parts, then gently scraped them to one side of the cutting board before beginning the next quarter.

After finishing the seventh potato, she looked at the small pile of neat wedges for several long moments before stooping to get a pan from the bottom drawer of the stove. This she filled with water and set on an eye of the stove. I thought it curious that she would slice the potatoes before setting the water to boil. Did this suggest a lack of intelligence, a habitual failure to plan ahead, or simply a reluctance to presume upon the future?

I remembered the pots of boiling water on the stove in my mother’s boardinghouse kitchen, usually two or three of them churning furiously as my mother stood at the counter hacking vegetables into pieces so large that the boarders had to cut them down to size before they could eat them. At least they were always soft enough to cut easily. In fact, they often verged on mushy, since my mother’s method was to let everything “cook down” until the liquid was nearly gone.

Rachel took up the saltshaker and gave it four deliberate shakes into the water before turning on the eye. When it grew red, she wiped her hands on the apron she was wearing over her blue jeans, then opened a cupboard door and stared inside before reaching up to remove a can of green peas. She cranked it open with a handheld opener, then emptied its contents into another pan, rinsed the can, and threw it into the garbage.

Hanging on the kitchen wall nearest where I sat were four matched prints in blue frames. The titles of the prints were
Granny Airs the Quilts
,
Grandpa Chops Wood
,
Aunty Hoes Cotton
, and
Mama Washes Clothes
. The scenes were of tidy shacks beside cotton fields, with happy, neat-looking, colorfully dressed Negroes doing their work under large shade trees. The prints were matted, but two were not centered properly. On the counter beside Rachel’s canisters was a large ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a fat, jolly Negro mammy. Her big scarf-tied head was the lid, which lifted off at her broad shoulders so that she could be filled with cookies to make everybody else as fat and jolly as she was.

The pictures and the cookie jar are the kinds of things I hate about the South, even though I call it home. Perhaps these items should have provided further cause for me to eliminate Patrick from among the five applicants, but I think I knew, even as I was sitting in the same room with these things, that I would come here to live. I hate small, constricted minds, but I had seen Rachel slice potatoes and wipe her hands on her apron. I also saw her place a cube of butter in the pan of peas, open a can of biscuits, and take meat loaf out of the oven. It wasn’t the food itself that drew me but the slow grace of her actions, as of moving against resistance, like someone under water, someone capable perhaps of surprising, like a large mermaid.

I do not spend my days wondering if I should have chosen differently. I live in a single large room, a former “rec room,” as Patrick called it when I first arrived for his interview. I also have a walk-in closet and a small bathroom, which shares a wall with Rachel’s laundry room off the kitchen. The proximity of the washing machine spares Rachel from having to transport my laundry a great distance. Laundering an old woman’s clothes is no pleasant task. This I remember from the months that I was my mother’s keeper.

I watch birds and television. Patrick pays for cable service, which provides me with fifty-one channels. I also eat, sleep, and bathe, though not in excess. I do these things alone, without help. I read sometimes, mostly my bird book and old issues of
Time
magazine, which Patrick has saved and stacked on the bottom shelf of the bookcase.

And I listen. Rachel rings a bell every night sometime between five-thirty and six. It is a small gold bell that sits on the windowsill above her sink. She rings it for Patrick, thinking I can’t hear it. Then she comes to my door with a tray. She knocks and calls out, “Suppertime, Aunt Sophie.”

I watched her ring the bell the first night I visited, the only night I ate at the kitchen table with them. First she stood at the stove and lifted the lids of the pans to check the potatoes and peas. Then she opened the oven and looked inside. Then she filled three glasses with tea. Then she reached for the bell on the windowsill. The table was not yet set when she rang it.

Chapter 2

The Whirligig of Time Brings in His Revenges

The pileated woodpecker has demonstrated admirable resilience as its preferred habitat of mature woods has disappeared. It has been known to carry its eggs one by one in its beak to a new site when its nesting tree was destroyed
.

Certain names of cities are quite popular, appearing on the maps of many states. Greenville is one such name. Besides the one where I now live with Patrick and Rachel in Mississippi, there are Greenvilles in Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Kentucky, and Alabama. Tennessee has a Greeneville. These are the ones I know of. No doubt there are others.

At the feeder in the backyard I see woodpeckers among the birds. I sometimes hear them jackhammer on a tree or gutter. These are the large speckled variety with bright red heads. The feeder sways when they light on it. My
Book of North American Birds
tells me that the woodpecker family, which includes seventeen species, is amazingly adaptable. Adaptability is often a pathetic thing, coming on the heels of calamity.

Patrick’s house in Greenville, Mississippi, is on Edison Street. At one time strictly residential, the street is now an odd mixture of homes and various enterprises. Old homes have been torn down and new buildings erected so that there is no architectural unity. The concept of zoning appears not to have existed during the evolution of this street. At the north end a Taco Bell and a 7–11 convenience store stand side by side, and the south end is anchored by a coin laundry and what used to be the post office but has been turned into a pet grooming establishment called the Pooch Office. Between the north and south ends are two dozen more buildings, homes and otherwise, devoted to the business of living and dying.

Patrick’s house was built in the late 1940s, a plain three-bedroom structure with gray shingled siding. It has a carport and a large backyard. A former owner added the rec room and extra bathroom before Patrick bought the house. In 1980 he carried Rachel across the threshold, a feat of no mean effort. Patrick is slight now, was even more so in 1980. Rachel is perhaps an inch taller and more substantial of frame, a sturdy big-boned woman. They had doubtless dreamed of occupying one bedroom and filling the other two with children, had in fact begun living out their dream when the stiff wind of reality snuffed out the candle.