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.
If Patrick and Rachel’s two children had reached school age, they would have attended Carrie Stern Elementary School in Greenville, Mississippi, at the corner of Moore and McAllister, the very school where I once taught before moving to Kentucky. But their children never attended school. Patrick and Rachel’s children were kidnapped from them at the Memphis Zoo, and their bodies were found a month later at a little spot in the road called Golddust, along the Mississippi River north of Memphis. This was in 1986, and these babies were two and three years old, a boy and a girl.
I was still in Kentucky at this time, a widow by then, having taught Fundamentals of English Composition to uninspired college freshmen for fifteen years at two different colleges. My sister Regina, Patrick’s mother, called me on the telephone and communicated the news of the kidnapping between long silences, then later sent me a newspaper clipping, which showed a picture of Patrick’s family taken less than a month before the abduction, a picture that had recently appeared in their church directory.
Patrick and Rachel had received an eight by ten of the same pose from the photography studio, free to all participating families of the church. This eight by ten, Regina told me, was what Patrick had taken from an end table in the living room and lent to the Delta Democrat Times for the write-up. This was only one of the many random details Regina wove into her halting narrative. Another was that Rachel couldn’t hold anything on her stomach, that she had been vomiting constantly since the children’s disappearance. Others were that it had rained solid for twelve hours, that Patrick’s roof was leaking right over the bed in the master bedroom, and that their church had held a prayer vigil through Saturday night and all day Sunday. No regular services, Regina had said, just people on their knees all over the sanctuary praying, many of them out loud.
Imagine hundreds of prayers floating up, hitting the ceiling, and vanishing just as the two children had. The case was never solved. Leads flooded in, but nothing turned up until four weeks had passed and a twelve-year-old boy saw his dog pawing at the ground along the riverbank in Golddust, Tennessee. Patrick and Rachel never had any more children. Regina never knew why, though I’m sure it wasn’t for want of asking. My sisters were not timid, especially Regina, who was the oldest of us and who believed in a Woman’s Right to Know Everything. Even as a child, when Regina sensed that information was being withheld, she would pester and snoop until she found out.
Eager to replace the gaps those two grandchildren had left in her life, she no doubt felt she was due an explanation as the years passed and Rachel bore no more children. As far as I know, however, her curiosity went unsatisfied. Because her other son never married, her obituary listed no grandchildren among her survivors. She died in her sleep at the same age our father had died of a heart aneurysm. Several years later our other sister, Virginia, likewise succumbed while stooping to water the African violets on her back porch. I have often thought I would prefer to go swiftly, as my father and sisters did, rather than linger as my mother, a curmudgeon and an inconvenience at the end.
But who can say? There is no good way to die. I cling to life, empty though it is. Soon the trees outside my window will shake in the cold wind, their leaves fallen, their branches “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare describes it in his seventy-third sonnet. Most of the birds have already flown farther south, but some will stay through the winter. Those that do will be intent on survival, and I mean to help them. The laws of the universe demand that someone help the weak. If not someone stronger, then let the weak help the weak.
The trip to the Memphis Zoo in 1986 had been a church outing. They had gone by bus, ten or twelve families, had taken their picnic baskets with them that hot summer day, had eaten together a little past noon, then separated for another two hours with plans to meet back at the bus at three o’clock to head back to Greenville. Since most of them had young children, they didn’t want to be too late getting home, especially since the next day was Sunday and there were Sunday school ribbons to be earned for perfect attendance. The preacher of the church, with his wife and four daughters, was among the group that day.
The specifics of the actual abduction were few. I discarded the newspaper article after reading it. I saw no need to keep it. It was a great tragedy. Why should I want to review it? Though I had not seen Patrick since he was a child, I was touched by his loss. I had not met his wife at the time, had no blood ties with her, but their children were my great-niece and great-nephew. I felt enraged by the crime but powerless, as one always is in the face of evil. I did not go to the funeral.
The newspaper reported a disappearance so swift as to be beyond possibility, except that the facts spoke for themselves. The children were indeed gone. They were sitting on a bench one minute, with ice cream cones, and in the blink of an eye they had vanished. Both parents were within arm’s length, one fetching napkins at the concession counter behind the bench, the other turned sideways on the end of the bench, loading the camera with a new roll of film. Imagine turning around to wipe a mouth or to snap a picture and finding your children gone.
I met Rachel for the first time at Regina’s funeral, by which time she looked different from the picture in the church directory. Her face had lost its smooth roundness and its smile. At her mother-in-law’s funeral I saw people treat her tenderly, as one who had suffered much. I saw them follow her every movement with their curious eyes. I heard the hiss of whispers as she and Patrick entered the chapel behind Regina’s casket, and I imagined the words: “They’re the ones whose babies were snatched.”
I would like to state that curiosity played no part in my coming here to live, though many will not believe me. I am something of an anomaly among southern women, for I have no morbid urge to wallow in tragedies or feast on the grotesque. I am too old to ponder such darkness. I serve only myself. Old age is tragedy enough. Like the birds at my window, I am intent on surviving the winter.
Since coming to Patrick’s house, I have never heard the children referred to, have certainly never spoken of them myself, have seen no evidence that they ever existed in this house. Their names were Toby and Mandy, I remember that, and they both had yellow-white hair, as did their father in his childhood. I imagine their mother to be a saint, martyred by grief and sanctified by pain. I have constructed for her a purified essence that I know to be false, for I know people. Yet it is easy to maintain my fantasy, as she rarely speaks. Fantasy may account in part for my survival thus far, as may silence for hers.
I have no fantasies about Patrick. He is a simple, literal-minded man concerned with office supplies, which are sold at a store called the Main Office, where he goes by the title of Manager. I hear him talk to Rachel at length about his employees, new products, late shipments, monthly profits, and the like. He reads aloud letters to the editor from the Delta Democrat Times and comments on each, sometimes angrily. He reads aloud from the Bible in a preacherly voice. He follows sports, though he was never an athlete himself. Dugout brawls and slugfests on the basketball court interest him, as does boxing, the most primitive and brutal of sports.
He reads historical accounts of battles, explorations, and naval disasters, as well as biographies of inventors, presidents, and entrepreneurs. He also reads Time magazine and Reader’s Digest. At the supper table he often speaks in great detail to Rachel about what he is currently reading. Patrick has high blood pressure and an abundance of nervous energy. He has an opinion about every subject and gives it unsolicited. Though he windily claims to be politically independent, it is clear that his bumper stickers in an election year bear
the image of an elephant rather than a donkey.
Patrick and Rachel attend a church regularly. I do not know its name. Whether it is the same church that chartered the bus to the Memphis Zoo in 1986 I cannot say. Neither do I know whether the loss of their children reinforced the foundation of their religious beliefs or gnawed away at it. I do know, however, that they leave the house before ten o’clock every Sunday, dressed for church and carrying Bibles. During the first two weeks I lived here, they invited me to go with them. The second time I told them they needn’t ask again. I believe I made it clear that my religion, or lack of it, was my own business. Another Sunday they invited me to go for an afternoon drive with them, but again I declined. I have no desire to see beyond Edison Street. I know what Greenville, Mississippi, looks like.
There is another view from Patrick’s house besides the backyard view of field, gazebo, and the like, though to see this one I must go to some trouble. This I do. When I hear Rachel start her car and drive away for groceries or other errands during the day, or when she and Patrick leave for church on Sunday, I open my door and walk through their kitchen into the dining room and from there into the living room. I turn the rocking chair around to face the window, and then I sit down.
Across the street is a lawyer’s office in what was formerly a neighbor’s redbrick house. To the left of this is the parking lot of a funeral home, and to the left of that the funeral home itself, a two-story white Victorian-style house with gingerbread trim. A signboard, like a doctor’s shingle, hangs above the top step: WAGNER’S MORTUARY. The clients here, however, have passed beyond a doctor’s skill. I wonder if this was the same mortuary where the bodies of Toby and Mandy were taken. Imagine looking out your front window to the place where you chose caskets for your babies.
Winter Birds Page 2
