Beneath the tripod legs, a collage of jigsaw puzzles spread about the floor in front of us. For me, stars were a fascination and jigsaw puzzles a hobby. While I was piecing together seven puzzles simultaneously, she spent her time reading or sketching. Amid the stereophonic birdsong that surrounded us, Emma read Great Expectations and sketched the birds that perched nearby.
I had taken all seven thousand puzzle pieces, thrown them into the same basket, and then mixed them together like numbers in a bingo game. Then I dug my hand in and began forming the outlines of seven different pictures. I would need two weeks to put them all together, but it was the process that I enjoyed. One jigsaw was difficult enough, but add the other six, and that's when it started to get fun.
It was, I believe, my introduction to the scientific process. With each piece, I'd reason: if not here, then here, and if not here, then here, and ... so on. Puzzles forced me to look at something from several angles before I moved on, to look again, and again, and possibly again because each piece-no matter how small or seemingly insignificant was critical to the whole. With the outlines scattered about me, I let my hands and eyes work the floor while my mind wandered beyond the boundary of the porch and over the surface of the farmer's moon, which was full and had risen early.
After the storm, which was preceded and followed by a good bit of wind, I heard a cardinal singing. But the singing was different from the usual; the sound was hollow and haunting. I looked out my window to see a male cardinal standing on the porch next to the fluttering form of his mate. Apparently she had fallen or been thrown during the storm and had either broken or severely bent her wing. Our neighborhood was pretty well armed with cats so, given time, she wasn't long for this earth. And all her flopping around was only making matters worse-almost like fishing with live bait.
The male stood over her, next to her, encircling her, singing and calling at the top of his lungs. When I walked outside, he hopped up on the railing and eyed me with anger and suspicion-the feathers rising to a point on the top of his head and back of his neck. And when I cupped her in my hands, he flew in circles, just a foot or two from me, between the porch and the branches.
"It's okay, girl," I said. "Let me get you inside where I can take a look at you."
The male cardinal flew up to a branch, changing his tune to alert and alarm. Halfway through the door, I turned and said, "Don't worry, sir. I won't hurt her. You can look inside my window if you want."
I took her inside, placed her under my magnifying glass, and immediately saw the problem. Somehow during the storm, debris had blown through her wing, bending a few feathers, marring the skin, and placing a deep cut in one wing. The fine bone wasn't visibly distorted, but I'd have bet my microscope that it was fractured. I cleaned out the fine debris and then taped her wing closed, but not so much that she felt trapped. I pulled my birdcage off the shelf, filled the water bottle, and placed her inside.
All the while, watching me like a hawk, her fire-engine-red mate was sitting outside my window, singing at the top of his lungs. I knew that cardinals mated for life, so he wouldn't be going anywhere. "Don't worry, sir. She'll be okay. I'll take good care of her."
The loneliest sound I have ever heard is that of a male cardinal calling out for a female who does not answer. And he will stand on that limb and sing at the top of his lungs for days.
Emma whispered, "He's crying."
"You sure?" I asked.
"I know," she said matter-of-factly.
"How? How do you know? Doesn't sound like crying to me."
She looked back at the cardinal and said, without feeling the need to prove it, "That's 'cause you're listening with your ears and not your heart."
"What do they do when they find each other?"
"They sing together."
Emma slid across the floor, sat Indian-style, and bumped knees with me. She raised an eyebrow and whispered, "No man is an island, entire of itself. . . " She placed a finger on my nose. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ... therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls ..." She tapped me twice. "It tolls for thee."
I have since come to believe that the cry of the cardinal, heard at random across the planet, out every bedroom window or screened back porch, is the sound of the multitudes pleading for the one.
I SET THE BIRDCAGE ON A SMALL TABLE NEAR MY SECOND-STORY window so the female could see her mate and he could see her. I changed the tape every few days, careful not to ruffle her feathers, and let her stretch her wing. And every day, that male cardinal stood like a sentinel at Buckingham Palace, singing for her. Most afternoons I'd collect some seeds, place some in her cage and on the sill, and let them eat together. They seemed to appreciate it, because they didn't waste any time. Eventually, he would fly to the windowsill and then onto the cage, where she'd peck at his feet. He'd flutter to the side of the food tray, and they'd peck beaks through the cage.
After three weeks of recuperation, I took the tape off completely and let her stretch inside the cage. Then I opened the cage door and turned it out toward the window. "Go ahead, girl. It's okay."
She flew gracefully out the door and lit on a small branch next to the male. Those two stayed in that nest outside my window throughout middle school and high school. And every day they sang their love song to each other. Emma used to tell me, when they'd come back to the window, that they were singing for me.
Chapter 12
y piece of property faces Charlie's. We own the opposite sides of a little finger off the eastern side of the lake. My view is of his house and vice versa, although he owns a little point that allows his guests-if he had any-a more panoramic view of the lake.
My house is a two-story, four-bedroom cedar shake with a red tin roof and heart-of-pine guts. Emma and I bought the land, an old fish camp, seven years ago after Charlie saw both lots come up for sale. We thought it'd be our weekend getaway, maybe someplace where I'd take a leave of absence and help nurse Emma back to health after her surgery. Emma thought we'd spend more time here, teaching our kids to swim and water-ski on the lake. She had big plans, and with her gift as an artist, she sketched them in detail.
Emma's plan called for three structures-a house, a dock, and a workshop. About five years ago, Charlie and I started construction on the workshop. Given Charlie's condition, much of the actual work was left up to me, but don't think Charlie was uninvolved. Born with power tools in his hand, I'm convinced he was a carpenter in Herod's workshop in a past life. While I sweated, grunted, and smashed my thumb with each whack of the hammer, he stood beside me running his fingers across the grain and cut of the wood, sensing the way it joined, held fast, or trimmed off a room. We subbed out the electrical because I know my lim its, but anything having to do with running water or sewage, or with the cutting, sanding, shaping, or fashioning of wood, we did. I guess it goes along with my carpentry and plumbing roots.
Countless times Charlie made me redo something I'd already cut two or three times because he didn't like the way it joined together, the way it made a seam, or because it left a gap. As a result, I got better, but I'll stop short of saying respectable.
My property slopes down to the lake at about a thirty-degree angle, so when we first bought it we hired a guy with a front-end loader and asked him to flatten the fish camp and then haul out about two stories' worth of rock and dirt. When he finished, we had a flat spot about ten feet above the level of the water that cut seventy feet into the side of the hill, where it met a huge rock wall like the kind you see along highways. We dynamited the wall, flattening it, and then built up from there.
On the last blast, we pulled away the rubble and discovered a small L-shaped cavity in the rock. It was about large enough to drive my truck into and tall enough to stand in. Nearly flat and level, we cleaned it out, hung a lantern or two, and then built a bunk along either side. During the hottest months of summer, we slept in our "cave," where the rocks kept it from getting too hot. It made for a silent and sa
fe retreat.
Half the first story of the workshop sat underground, while the second story rose out of and above it. The fact that half of it was surrounded by dirt meant that after we installed the potbellied stove, we stayed pretty warm in cool winters. And because those hills stay cold long after daylight, we kept cool in the summers. The workshop opened up through two sliding doors that, when opened, allowed you to drive two cars side by side straight through.
Charlie could tell you more about tools and construction in five minutes than I will know in a lifetime, but like a lot of other good teachers I've known, he taught me at my own pace. Once we finished the structure of the workshop itself, he left the finishing details to me.
We covered the walls in solid cedar and hung an exposed steel beam from the ceiling, running front to back, that would allow us to lift and move heavy and large objects like boats using a system of rolling pulleys. We installed four ceiling fans and recessed lighting, shoved the potbelly into the corner, and wired surround sound through ten speakers, indoors and out.
I made several dozen more trips to Home Depot, Lowe's, and Sears and started stocking the shelves with tools of every kind and brand. I bought two band saws, a planer jointer, three disk sanders, several rasps, files, rubber mallets, wood mallets, clamps, a case of Titebond glue, two ninety-degree drills, a Dremel, two jigsaws, a punch saw, a handheld power planer, two entire sets of hand tools like screwdrivers, end wrenches, ratchets, and sockets, four rolling three-piece tool chests standing almost six feet tall, and every voltage of cordless power tool they offered. In short, when I made it to the checkout counter with four hourly employees pushing or pulling five overstuffed carts, every man standing in line stood with his bottom jaw at his toes.
While I enjoyed the tools, Charlie loved them. But, like Georgia, they did little to ease my guilt.
I spent three days thinking about placement and organization. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. Once organized, each tool was either within arm's reach or just a few steps away. Meaning we wasted little effort once work began.
As a finishing touch, I hung a dozen or so rolls of duct tape on well-placed hooks scattered about the workshop. Used by the Allies as a treatment for wounds in World War I, duct tape started as a medical dressing and has since grown to having several thousand uses-and it seemed like a day never went by that we didn't find a new one.
While I finished off the inside of both the workshop and the dockhouse, Charlie hired a team of talented laborers to help him build the stone bulkhead and steps that led from where the house would be down to the dock. Dropping a plumb line from the corner of the original fish camp, I staked out the slab for the rest of the house, called in the concrete trucks, and managed the guys pouring concrete while Charlie oversaw the stone team. At night we compared notes.
Charlie told me that every good house was built around a fireplace, so when his crew finished the bulkhead in a week, Charlie set them to working on the fireplace in the den, just off the kitchen. Before they left, the crew chief looked at Charlie and then at the leftover rock and said, "You got enough stone for a pit; you want one?"
Charlie knew what he was talking about. "Yeah." He pointed. "Put it right there."
The crew cleared a twelve-by-twelve flat between the house and workshop, poured their own slab, and built a barbecue pit big enough to smoke an entire pig and all the chickens and Boston butts you could manage.
With the workshop up and running, I turned my attention toward the dock. During the winter, when the lake was low, we sank twenty-four pilings and strung them with two-by-six stringers. Although we didn't own any boats at the time, we were planning ahead, so we built a two-story, three-bay, drive-in dock with remotecontrol garage doors and electric lifts. Off to the side we put a large platform three feet above the summer's normal water level, and dotted it with six rocking chairs. The second story was open, covered with a green aluminum sheeting roof, surrounded by a railing and centered with a huge picnic table. Next to the table hung Emma's hammock. It gave one of the best southward views on the lake. From my perch atop the dockhouse, I could see nearly five miles down the lake before it turned southeast toward the dam.
Having cut our teeth on the workshop and the dock, both admittedly allowing for more raw workmanship than the house, and with a cured slab and stone fireplace standing all alone, we started looking over Emma's sketches of the house. Her plan called for incorporating the old two-room fish camp into a two-story lake house. So, staying true to the plans, we kept the original kitchen, den, and porch.
Charlie was a big believer in overbuilding, so when we started framing the house, he studded it with two-by-eights, just ten inches center to center. Overkill, yes, but why not? Charlie was happy, and so was I. We only planned to do this once. Emma's painting was growing off the canvas, and we intended to give it all the texture and color we could imagine.
With the framing up, we walked through the empty inside of an unfinished house, and Charlie reminded me of what Emma had said as she stood over that bare ground and painted with her hands. Every time I walk in here, I want to feel as if a candle were lit in every corner. The rooms should glow ... with a golden hue. She had pointed to the old pine floors in the original kitchen. Like those floors.
"How do we get a `golden hue'?" I asked.
"Pine," Charlie said, pointing down at the floors. "Old pine. Preferably the heart, and you can't get it at the lumber store. At least not the good stuff. The kind you want ... like that"-he pointed again-"has been setting up a few hundred years."
So we got in the Suburban and spent six months scouring old Georgia highways and farms, knocking on doors and asking suspicious farmers if we could disassemble their rotten barns and leaning shacks and haul off the timber. Most nodded, bolted the door, and pulled the shotgun down from the mantel while we pitched a tent in whatever field was available and spent three days pulling apart boards and studying the craftsmanship of men who'd worked almost two hundred years ago.
With lumber starting to pile up, I bought a warehouse off the Clayton courthouse steps. The abandoned warehouse was located just a few miles up in the hills, so Charlie and I trimmed away the vines, swept out the floors, and started stacking our lumber in racks up off the ground where the moisture couldn't reach it. After six or eight more months, we had enough for my house and a couple of others. Everything-floorboards, walls, trim, ceiling, even the plate rack in the kitchen we built from wood that we had resurrected from barns and shacks throughout pecan groves and oak stands in Georgia. There's a gold mine in salvageable wood draped in kudzu, pine needles, and acorns if someone is willing to peel back the vines and plane the wood. It's a slow process, and you're bound to uncover a few snakes, but maybe life is like that-you never know when something that's been hidden is going to rise up and bite you, or glow with a golden hue.
After eighteen months and more sore thumbs than I care to count, I handed the air hammer to Charlie, and he drove the final nails into the ceiling trim. We unplugged the compressor, hung up our tool belts, blew the sawdust out of the workshop, split a beer, and stepped back to "look" at our work. Charlie ran his fingers along the walls and trim like a man searching a cave in the dark, his hands spread out across the wood and his nose close enough to smell it. When he finished, he nodded and said nothing.
A few days shy of Easter, I spread my sleeping bag across the floor, lay down in an empty house, looked out through the window, and noticed for the first time that I was surrounded by dogwood trees. The next morning, they were in bloom. I lifted the window of our second-story bedroom, poked my head out into the branches, and shook my head. Emma had known all along.
Chapter 13
e were swimming in the stream behind the O'Connors' house when Emma hit puberty. I was twelve, she was eleven, and Charlie just eight, which might explain his reaction. Emma was floating around like a seal in about a foot of water, not a care in the world, when the water around her started changing color. I prob
ably don't need to paint you a picture. Scared and surprised, she stood up, and that's when it became apparent that Emma was bleeding-a lot.
Charlie ran up the bank and started screaming, "Mom! Mom! Emma's dying! Emma's dying!" which probably wasn't what his mom needed to hear. I wasn't quite sure what was going on, but I had a pretty good idea she wasn't dying because she seemed fine, and when she stood up, she looked just as surprised as we were.
Charlie disappeared inside while I helped Emma up the bank and tried not to look at her legs. She was scared, and my staring wouldn't help matters any. I turned my back, and she slipped off her suit and wrapped herself in my towel. Then I held her hand, and we just stood there. She didn't want to sit down for fear of staining the towel.
"You okay?"
She nodded and tried to smile.
"You sure?"
She nodded again, squeezed my hand tighter, and looked cold. Miss Nadine came running outside, half-scared out of her mind, thanks to Charlie. She saw the suit, Emma's legs, and the two of us standing there quietly. It didn't take her long to put two and two together. She quit running, took a deep breath, put her arm around Emma, and smiled. "Sweetie, you'll be okay."
"But, Mama," Emma said, "I don't really feel bad."
"I know, honey, it's just part of life."
Miss Nadine put her arm around Emma and walked her inside, only to reappear a few minutes later with a hand towel tossed over her shoulder. She sat down on the porch bench, called us over, and put her hands on our knees. "I want to tell you two something. . .
Charlie was shaking, sniffling, and looked worried.
(2006) When Crickets Cry Page 6
