Winter Birds

by Jim Grimsley

  Mama watched him carefully from across that one big room, continually gauging the distance.

  No neighbors came to visit, except Mrs. Crenshaw at the first of each month, standing in the door wearing her smile and her blood-stained apron, talking jovially about Holiness revivals, holding out her dough-white hand for Mama to count green money onto. Mama watched the money slide into Mrs. Crenshaw’s apron pocket and Mrs. Crenshaw turned away, wiping her hands on that apron. Until one month Mama met her with a smile, no money. Papa had to pay on the hospital bill for his arm, Mama said, or else the hospital would arrest him. So could Mrs. Crenshaw wait a little while for the rent? A week or two?

  Mrs. Crenshaw, being a woman of firm business principle, shook her head no. Only a little later you moved again, away from the Fish House.

  AMY NAMED the next house the Ice House because there was only one heater in the whole place, in the kitchen. All winter you and the others sat there watching television till it was time to go to bed, with the rest of the rooms closed off and dark around you, too cold to live in. Allen Raymond had grown big enough now to sit up on Mama’s lap and suck his thumb; you couldn’t call him a baby any more. But Mama was going to have another baby soon. Her stomach was growing bigger and bigger.

  Mama and Papa argued the whole winter about this baby that was coming. Papa didn’t see how Mama could expect to feed another mouth on forty dollars a week, which was what he was making now that he had worked for the gas company for a while. Mama asked what Papa expected her to do about it now. It was water under the bridge. The new baby was on the way, they couldn’t do anything but love it. Papa said, expensive love, if we all have to go hungry to feed it.

  Later you watched him standing in the doorway to their bedroom, staring at the stump of his arm and grinding his jaw. You understood their fights only vaguely, but you knew that the strange dulled look on Papa’s face meant he had been drinking from the bottle Mama hated. He drank from that bottle more and more as Mama’s stomach grew. Through the cold months their arguments blended one into the other.

  Once he came home late in the night with a cut over one eye and a story about a fight in the Downs, the part of Potter’s Lake where black people lived. Papa said some coon cut him with the lid of a tomato can. The sheriff’s deputy broke up the fight before it went any farther, but since he was a friend of Papa’s he didn’t arrest anybody. Mama tended the cut and put Papa to bed, glad he had picked somebody else to fight for an evening. He slept like a lamb till the next afternoon, curled up like a baby under mounds of quilts. A frost-covered Sunday slipped by, Papa laughing and joking with all of you.

  The next week Amis John Crell was born. Papa drove Mama to the hospital in his work truck. Mama’s youngest sister Delia stayed in the house with you children, sleeping in Amy Kay’s rickety bed, in the same room with Allen and you. Mama stayed in the hospital four nights running. Papa visited her at first, but he didn’t like hospitals and never stayed for very long. At night when he came home he talked to Delia in a low voice and gave her long looks you didn’t understand. But they made you feel afraid. Delia was always careful to keep you children in the room with her and to ask about Mama and the baby. She went to bed when you children went to bed, and locked the bedroom door, but once she stood beside it listening for a long time.

  The hospital bill totaled five hundred forty-nine dollars and seventy-three cents.

  When it came in the mail Papa read it and left the house without a word. You watched him splash on the headlights and roar out of the yard, his face hard and angry, his whitened knuckles gripping the steering wheel. Amy, Allen, and you fell asleep before he came home. But every hour Mama tiptoed into the room to check on the new baby that slept like a little pink nut inside his shell of blankets. Whenever Mama came in the room you woke up and watched her standing over the crib with that tender look on her face.

  Early in the morning Papa came home and the argument began. The shouting woke you up too, and you listened. Pretty soon Amis John began to cry because of the noise, but when Mama tried to comfort him Papa chased her out of the room and wouldn’t let her come back inside. You heard her call out once in pain. All night the baby sobbed, with only Amy, Allen, and you to quiet him. In the morning Mama’s face was swollen on one side and her eye was dark blue. Papa sat at the kitchen table drinking his coffee as if nothing had happened. When he left Mama took Amis John to her room and they stayed there all day with the door closed.

  In the spring after the second winter in the house, Papa found a place he thought was better, and you moved again.

  IN THE Pack House Amis John got his nickname—Duck—by taking his first steps through a mudhole. He had his share of cuts and bruises but they healed quickly, and the doctors soon declared him as normal as Allen before him as far as bleeding was concerned. Mama breathed easier when she found that out. Even with a new baby she watched you every minute, Danny, and you never stepped out of the house without hearing her warning to be careful. You were always careful. You never walked barefoot in the grass. For a while your spells of bleeding didn’t come so often. You were happy, listening to Mama sing as she changed Duck’s diapers, calling Amy Kay or you to come hold the pins.

  After moving to a new house Papa was always calm for a while, as if in finding a new place to live he accomplished something that eased his mind. But this house was particularly ugly. Mama said it looked like it hadn’t been painted in forty years. Amy and you took turns finding bits of old paint on the clapboards outside. You couldn’t tell what color the house had been, though Amy swore it was powder blue. Amy studied the Sears catalog and knew what all the colors were. The house had three rooms standing side by side: a kitchen and two bedrooms, with a porch in the back. Behind a grove of saplings stood the outhouse, surrounded by mint-green grass and lush goldenrod.

  That spring Papa paid three hundred dollars for an old brown Ford with half a seat in the back. Mama put a three-legged stool there in place of the missing half-seat and told Amy Kay always to sit there because it was her special place. Because of his arm Papa had to drive with a steering knob. But he never let Mama drive when he was with her.

  To help pay for the car Mama got farm work, and because there was no place for you to go, you all went to work with her. In the early months of spring she helped a farmer down the road set out his baby tobacco plants into the fields. In the summer she worked with the other women in the neighborhood tying the green tobacco on sticks so it could be hung in barns to be cured. You children played in the fields near the women and their trucks of green tobacco. You remember the hats the women wore, bright-colored straw sun hats with wide brims and striped strings that tied under the women’s soft chins. The women rolled their pants past their pale, dimpled knees. Mama’s hat was blue as a robin’s egg and her string was striped red and white. On one of her knees was a small purple scar from a fight with one of her brothers during which he hit her with a garden hoe. Her white legs freckled in the sun, never turning an even shade of brown like the other women. Mama laughed and talked with the women all day long, waiting for the tractor or the mules to drag another creaking truck of tobacco from the fields. She had a different way of looping the tobacco onto the stick than the local women were used to, Mama having grown up in Pike County near Madisonville, hours away from Potter’s Lake. The Potter’s Lake women always watched her work, remarking that they sure couldn’t judge why people around here thought there was only one way to do a job when lo and behold here was Ellen Crell proving that people in different parts of the world could do the same job a different way. It was a revelation.

  You children wandered in and out of the barns, smelling the dry, bitter leaves and wondering what the big companies did to the tobacco to make cigarettes out of it. Amy Kay said they took all the dry leaves and made a big heap and then hired teams of horses to walk on the heap till there was nothing left but crushed powder. Which worked all right, Amy said, except sometimes the horses pissed on the tobacco, which was w
hy some cigarettes had filters on them. Most days Amy stayed in the shade of the barn tending Duck, who grinned at her from his blanket and made soft noises in his throat. Amy talked to him all day long, giving him her finger to play with and generally treating him as if he were a friend with whom she was conducting a serious, private conversation.

  For dinner you rode home in the truck and ate chicken Mama fried that morning, or else scrambled eggs and fatback, or macaroni and tomatoes, or whatever could be quickly cooked. By the time you sat at the table your faces ran with sweat from the kitchen heat. Mama kept a fly swatter next to her chair and used it during the meal, flicking the dead flies into the trash bag next to the stove. In a good week she could earn as much money as Papa. Together they stretched the dollars to cover the groceries and the rent and the car, and sometimes even farther than that to pay for the car insurance or pieces of the hospital bills.

  That fall Amy Kay started school. Mama drove you all to Gibsonville to buy Amy’s school clothes. You and Allen watched the two of them discuss dresses and shoes and prices, Mama bending to listen to Amy as seriously as if Amy were as tall and old as she. The tobacco money slid through Mama’s fingers into various cash register drawers. Since Mama carried Duck, Amy carried the bags, now and then stopping to admire her new things.

  Mama and Papa took her to school together the first day. Later when she came home Amy said school was fun, except the girl’s bathroom was so big she like to got lost in it. Once it was clear to you that Amy could always come home when school was over, it didn’t seem like such a big deal any more.

  Soon after, in the autumn, Mama took in cured tobacco to grade, to make extra money. She cleared off the back porch and used the free space to house the sticks of dry, acrid-smelling leaves, sorting them into bundles according to the color and quality of the leaf. You helped her by taking the tobacco off the sticks. She tied the bundles of graded leaves at the top with a single soft leaf, tight as the handkerchiefs black women tied around their hair. The smell of the dry tobacco filled the house. When she was finished with one load it was packed in the back of the farmer’s truck and another load deposited on the porch.

  Papa watched Mama work when he came home at night. He would gaze at her fingers, quick and deft in the dusty piles of leaves, an angry, sullen look on his face. He would try to make her stop working and pay attention to him. “Why don’t you come in the house and talk to me,” he would say, “I haven’t had anybody to talk to all day,” and she would stop sometimes, if he was in a good mood, if she didn’t think the talk would end up in another fight.

  Winter came. This house proved as cold as the one before it, so Papa started to look for another place and soon found a house he thought was a better bargain. Mama didn’t always agree with Papa’s opinion of a house, but that!time she told him the place was much nicer. She needed to keep him in the best mood she could manage. Somehow that winter she would have to tell him she thought she was pregnant again.

  In early December you moved to the Blood House.

  THE BLOOD House stood in a confusion of tobacco barns, tool sheds, and rusted farm equipment, and had been used as a pack house for dried tobacco the last fifteen years, according to the farmer who owned it. This gentleman, Mr. Silas Henry Rejenkins, sported a belly that ballooned over his empty belt loops. None of his shirts, whether they buttoned down or pulled over, reached far enough to cover all of this vast fleshy melon. His navel, exposed to every kind of weather, sunk like a gulch into his soft, hairy stomach. The first day Amy and you saw him waddling about the farmyard Amy told you, “I bet that old man puts boogers in his bellybutton.”

  Mr. Rejenkins agreed to rent Papa the house for next to nothing, provided Papa would let Mr. Rejenkins store cured tobacco in the rooms you didn’t use, for Mama to grade and bundle. Papa agreed to the arrangement but he didn’t much like it. Mr. Rejenkins paid too much attention to Mama from the start. The day after you moved into the house Mr. Rejenkins knocked on the door first thing in the morning, to see whether Mama was satisfied with the condition of the house, he said. Though the morning was cold he smelled of sweat. Every few minutes he hitched up his pants to keep them from sliding off his slab of belly. When he smiled you counted his jagged yellow teeth. Amy Kay said from the way his clothes looked he must dress before he went to bed and sleep in them to get that many wrinkles. But someone took wonderful care of his shoes. They shone so bright you might have seen your reflection in the patent leather tips. The waxed black laces tied in a lopsided bow.

  That first morning he kept looking down at his shoes and then looking at Mama, as if he expected her to say something about them. Mama was polite as she led him through the chilled rooms, showing him the ripped-out back door screen and the broken lock on the back door. She pointed out in her most formal voice that without a lock and a good screen on the door she could hardly feel safe in the house. She showed him the leaky ceilings in two of the bedrooms, which would rot the roof if he weren’t careful. She indicated the loose floorboards in the kitchen, which had already caused her to stumble when she was unpacking her pots and pans. Suppose she had been carrying hot soup instead? Mama pointed out the broken windows in the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms, which were dangerous for her children, she said, and especially for you. She explained to him about the trouble with your blood, sounding out the name for it, hemophilia, and holding you in front of her hopefully. Mr. Rejenkins smiled at everything and watched you only vacantly. You might have been some kind of farm dog. Mama said she hoped Mr. Rejenkins would see to these repairs she had mentioned as soon as he could. Mr. Rejenkins smiled and gazed down at his shoes again.

  In the light from the kitchen window the shoes sparkled and shone. Mama thought they must be new and he must want someone to praise them, so she paid him a politeness on the subject of new shoes in general. He favored her with a slow wink, as if this were the first word anyone had said since he walked through the door. “These are my Sunday shoes, honey, I’ve had them near two years. My wife she takes real good care of them.” He smiled slowly. “I wished she would take that good a care of everything.”

  Soon after, Papa told Mama over breakfast he thought the fat buzzard took an awful lot of trouble to fix up a shack for fifteen dollars a month rent. Mama said it wasn’t any knowing what people would do. Papa said the house had been sitting empty fifteen years and here all of a sudden he would rent it dirt cheap and then fix it up all nice and pretty by himself. It didn’t make any sense, Papa said. Mama said she could take care of herself. As long as he made the place fit for the family to live in she would put up with him.

  Papa said, almost angrily, maybe she better tell Mr. Rejenkins that her husband would do any fixing there was to be done on this house. Mama asked Papa when did he think he was going to have time to do any fixing? And what did Papa think Mr. Rejenkins was going to try when she had the younguns with her all day long? Papa said younguns won’t going to stop a man that size from doing anything he took a notion to do.

  Mama said, fat as Mr. Rejenkins was, Papa might not be able to stop him either.

  She meant nothing by it. But Papa looked at his arm. Quietly he said, “I can sure before God protect what belongs to me.”

  He finished his breakfast and went to work. Mama listened to the truck drive away and sipped a cup of coffee. Afterward she stood at the window looking at nothing while cars passed one by one on the road.

  One cold day not long afterwards, Amy Kay and you played in the high weeds behind one of the sheds close to the house. The two of you made houses out of sticks, laughing when you finished one all the way to the roof and the wind sent it flying. The winter wind ran strong across the barren fields, tossing Amy’s dark hair in whips. You both played there for hours, happy in the cold; till late in the day Amy said, “Uh-oh. Look back there. It’s Mr. Fatjenkins and he’s headed over here.”

  He rumbled toward you in his coats and sweaters, breathing vapor, calling “Hey little children! Where’s your Mama thi
s morning?”

  “She’s in the house washing clothes,” Amy said.

  “What’s your name, little girl?” he asked, petting her head.

  “Her name is Amy Kay,” you said.

  “That’s a pretty name, ain’t it?” His smile creased skin back to his ears. “Are you her little brother?”

  “His name is Daniel Nicholas,” Amy said. “You better not mess with him, either. He bleeds.”

  Mr. Rejenkins considered you with a thoughtful look. “Yes, I believe your Mama said something about that to me. You have a very pretty Mama. Don’t you think so?”

  “We know our Mama is pretty,” Amy said, “we don’t need anybody to tell us so. Come on Daniel. Mama wants us to come back to the house, I can tell.” She took your hand and you both walked away from the fat man, who watched the ground where you had stood as contentedly as if you were still there. On the way to the house, you said, “Mr. Rejenkins sure stinks, don’t he?”

  Amy Kay shook her head so fast her hair whipped out straight, and she ran ahead of you to the house, banging the door closed behind her.

  That was in January, when Papa was busiest at work. In cold weather Papa stayed on the job till late at night, fixing people’s broken-down furnaces and delivering bottled gas to their houses. Sometimes he didn’t come home till long after midnight. You children liked those nights. When Papa was away from the house you didn’t need to be so quiet, and you didn’t wonder if he had whiskey in his truck or if he was going to get mad at something Mama said and start to yell at her. At night that January you slept under warm mounds of blankets, and Allen let you lie against his back. But Mama walked the floor after you children went to bed, cold because the whole house was cold, afraid because so many windows surrounded her. There were no neighbors except the Rejenkinses whose lights she could see across the fields. For Mama, who had always lived in other people’s houses, the sight of that house did not make her less lonely. In her womb the new child was growing and still she had not told Papa. The fear of what Papa would say about another baby multiplied the vague night fears that haunted the quiet winter evenings as she paced the floor back and forth, back and forth. One night that January when Papa worked till long after dark, when all you children were asleep and the television was silent, Mama began her usual nervous walk. But that night a soft tap like a finger sounded at one of the windows.