Winter Birds

by Jamie Langston Turner

  When he finishes, I hear the sound of weeping. Potts’ deep voice is broken. He thanks Patrick for his prayer. He speaks of things such as the sinner’s unworthiness, Satan’s stranglehold, the dark valleys of life, and God’s grace. He speaks of his burden for Tyler and the temptations he has to face as a teenager, of his regret that he “can’t be there for him every day.” There is a rhythmic eloquence in Potts’ rolling tones that reminds me of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which my father drove to Washington, D.C., to hear in 1963 when it was first delivered, and which I have heard from a library recording. Rachel speaks to Potts softly. I can’t hear her words.

  Patrick keeps repeating himself, using less formal language now, telling Potts that “God is in control,” that “God’s not going to let the devil get at Tyler,” that “the Lord is always on duty,” and so forth. Patrick supplies no documentation for such knowledge, and Potts lets his empty assertions go unchallenged, saying over and over, “Yes, yes, I’ve got to keep looking up. I’ve got to keep my eyes fixed on Jesus.”

  You’d best keep your eyes on the solid ground beneath your feet, I want to tell him. I’ve seen people stumble and fall flat on their faces while craning their necks to look at something in the sky.

  The sound of breaking glass interrupts their conversation. It seems that Patrick has overturned his glass, which shatters on the hardwood floor, for he is the one who says, “Well, good. I’m getting rid of these old glasses one by one.” He laughs and tells Potts that he never has liked these glasses because they’re too tall and too narrow at the base, making them easy to tip over. “Case in point,” he says, no doubt thinking he is witty.

  I hear the opening and closing of the broom closet and Patrick’s cheerful talk as he sweeps up the pieces. I will say this for Patrick: He is not afraid of housework. Last Saturday Rachel went to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Shortly thereafter Patrick appeared at my apartment door with the vacuum cleaner. “Rachel says she didn’t get around to vacuuming in here,” he said. I watched him from my recliner as he moved about briskly. The sound of the machine didn’t stop him from talking. “This has been a good little vacuum!” he shouted. “We got it at Montgomery Ward, must have been twenty years ago!” He was not as thorough and methodical as Rachel, but at least he was done quickly. It was a mercy when he finished and left my apartment, taking his flow of words with him.

  I can’t help wondering what Potts thinks about Patrick and Rachel, who have invited him into their home but whose kitchen walls are decorated with pictures of happy Negroes beside their shanties in the cotton field. Is he accustomed to the blindness of white men who imagine themselves free of prejudice yet who are taken aback by any sign of intelligence in other races?

  Rachel must have brought dessert to the table, for Potts makes appreciative sounds and says, “I certainly don’t get anything to compare to this at my house.” Patrick tells him that the “whipped cream is the real McCoy, not that processed abomination.” This explains the sound of the mixer earlier. I hear the stacking of dishes as Rachel clears the table. Most hostesses would clear the table before serving dessert.

  “Here, let me take those,” Patrick says to Rachel. “You sit down.” I wonder if Patrick is showing off in front of Potts, trying to display a superior level of servanthood to confirm that he is a Christian Man. I wonder if the doctor has told Rachel to take things slowly until she regains her strength.

  Back at the table Patrick tells Potts he should write a book sometime about his life. “I’d buy a copy!” he says, as if all a writer needs is the assurance of one reader. I suspect Patrick of considering a collaborative effort. Potts could tell him the details, and Patrick could write the book for him. What a story it would make: Black Drug Dealer Turns Religious by Patrick Martin Felber. Patrick would not be above embellishing the facts.

  Potts deflects Patrick’s suggestion about the book. He tells Patrick that he is grateful for the job at the office supply store. He says that job offers in Greenville, Mississippi, are limited, especially to black men on parole. He likes the work at the Main Office, he says, and hopes to repay Patrick by being an “exemplary employee.” Patrick takes this as an opportunity to educate Potts as to how he got his own start at the Main Office, first as a cashier, then stock clerk, then stock supervisor, then floor manager, then general manager. The unstated message is this: See, if you are diligent, you too can work your way up the ladder until you are as successful as I am.

  Potts asks Patrick to explain the new system of inventory at the store, a system I have heard Patrick expounding upon recently to Rachel. He eagerly begins detailing the modifications he has devised. This is further evidence of Potts’ intelligence: Always appear to be in awe of your boss’s methods.

  Suddenly there is a knock at my door and Rachel opens it. “Aunt Sophie, here’s your—” She stops when she sees me sitting in the chair beside the door.

  I bend over as if scanning the floor. “I’m looking for a button,” I say. “It came off my dress.”

  “Let me set this down, and I’ll help you,” Rachel says. As she carries the tray to the round table, I wrench a button off my dress and drop it onto the floor. She comes back and kneels down. She moves heavily as if kneeling is a great effort. She bends forward on all fours and runs one hand lightly over the carpet. “Did you see it roll over here?” she says, and I answer yes. I glance toward the round table and see a mound of whipped cream on top of a piece of yellow cake, with something red between the cake and whipped cream. Strawberries, cherries, raspberries—I have no preference. I like them all.

  “Here it is,” Rachel says, holding the button up for me to see. I nod.

  “I’ll sew it back on for you after I wash your dress,” she says, and I nod again. She hoists herself from the floor.

  You have made unnecessary work for this woman, I tell myself, then push the thought aside. She will be paid for her work when I die.

  “Aunt Sophie, I’d like you to meet our guest,” Patrick calls from the kitchen. He comes to stand in the open doorway, and Potts appears behind him. Still seated in my chair beside the door, I look up at them. Potts is a big man. Patrick looks like a child next to him. Potts is exceedingly dark-skinned, with a round face and very large smile. Sir, you have no reason to smile, I want to tell him. You have been in prison twice, you are prohibited by law from seeing your own son, and you are working for a tedious, small-minded man.

  He steps around Patrick, beaming, to take my hand and declare himself pleased to make my acquaintance. His grandmother, he tells me, lived with his family when he was a child, and he has always had “a healthy respect for women of your generation.” I say nothing but allow him to pump my hand briefly before pulling it away. I wonder if his grandmother was still living when he started dealing drugs and went to prison.

  I am not offended by his reference to my age. I am an old woman of eighty. Anyone would be an idiot not to recognize the fact. I think of the man who bought my house before I moved from Kentucky to Greenville, Mississippi, the man who called me “young lady” in the lawyer’s office. If I had thought him capable of improvement, I may have offered a word of instruction. As one does not try to reason with a retarded child, however, I turned away and refused to converse with him except through my lawyer.

  Patrick is now speaking again, telling me things I have already heard through the door. I think of Jaques’ famous “All the world’s a stage” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. I want to tell Patrick to hush his “childish treble” so I can hear Potts’ voice. I think of the four of us in my apartment right now, whose ages span many years: Potts in his thirties, Patrick and Rachel in their fifties, and Sophie the octogenarian. I think of Jaques’ lines that all men have “their exits and their entrances.” It struck me when typing it in one of Eliot’s papers that he must have accidentally reversed the two words. Surely the entrances should come before the exits.

  But, no. I looked up the reference and saw that El
iot had quoted it right. Perhaps the order was dictated by the metrical pulse, but I believe there is a statement there: One’s life is over before it begins. I think of what a sad speech it is. In thirty lines the sum of life is told, from infanthood to “second childishness and mere oblivion.” I think of the depressing closing line: “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Granted, Jaques is a moody moralizer who takes himself too seriously, and as such he is a comical character. Yet for all his affectations, he sees the truth that life is not the grand enterprise young men like to think it is. Rather, it is ultimately a pathetic thing.

  I think of all the ways men and women like to justify their existence on earth as important and worthy. I think of all the words spoken in the history of mankind, of all the ones spoken in the course of a day, of those I have overheard tonight through the kitchen wall. I hear Patrick now, his words like the endless piping of a bird.

  I have read that bird watchers cannot agree on the towhee’s call. They hear the same thing but interpret it differently. People may also disagree on what a man says. They may hear the same words but interpret them differently. Throughout my eighty years, I have heard many regional accents, dialects, foreign tongues. I have listened carefully and have found that most of the words spoken may be reduced to a few: I, me, my, mine.

  “You’ll like the dessert,” Potts says, gesturing toward the tray on the table. I rise and go toward it. Though life is a pathetic thing, I cling to its small joys. And, I remind myself, I have not yet lost everything in this “last scene of all.” I still have my teeth, my eyes, and my taste. I sit at the round table and prepare to eat.

  Chapter 15

  A Tattered Weed, of Small Worth Held

  The nest of the great crested flycatcher may be constructed of an odd assortment of materials: leaves, sticks, roots, bark, even cellophane and plastic. According to bird lore, the flycatcher sometimes discourages predators by weaving a discarded snake skin into its nest.

  I sit in my recliner through Christmas Eve, unwilling to go to bed and wake up disappointed. Disappointment is easier to take if one slowly steeps himself in it than if he is suddenly plunged in head first. If given a choice of one day to eliminate from the year, I would choose December 25—a day that brings to mind empty dreams.

  My father, having grown up with people who had conflicting feelings about Christmas, was never one for holiday merriment. His Jewish mother had met his father in New York City and had believed him when he said he was interested in converting to Judaism. After she married him, his interest in Judaism was revealed for the lie that it was. Within a year he was interested in agnosticism. Having been disowned for marrying outside her faith, his mother threw over all her Jewish heritage. I have often wondered if, as time wore on, my grandmother ever regretted the trade—her Jewish family for Gentile freedom.

  Daddy’s father went from agnostic to atheist and after ten years left his wife, the Jewish girl he had liberated from her strict religion, with three little gaping mouths in the nest.

  These were shadowy grandparents I never knew, born and bred in New York City, over a thousand miles from the delta of Mississippi, where my father eventually settled with my mother, a native daughter of Methuselah, Mississippi.

  My father, afflicted with wanderlust as a young man, had left his mother in New York City in the year 1914 and over the next two years made his way southward to Atlanta, taking whatever odd jobs he could find to earn his keep. In the summer of 1916 he decided to seek his fortune in the West. He didn’t make it very far, however. He hitched rides on the backs of wagons through Alabama and Mississippi, and when the last driver, a drunk farmer, passed out and turned his wagon over in a ditch somewhere near Kosciusko, Daddy got out and walked, arriving early the next morning in the little town of Methuselah, so named because the first family of settlers were supposedly very long-lived.

  The first house Daddy came to, on the edge of town, bore a hand-painted wooden sign on the front gate that read Wiggins’ Boarding House. Hungry and exhausted, Daddy turned in. Fatigue won out. He paid for a room, washed up, and slept for ten straight hours. When he woke up, he heard a bell and went downstairs to find supper on the table and an empty chair beside a girl with two dark brown braids tightly wound and pinned around her ears—“curled up like skinny rattlesnakes” is how Daddy described it the only time I heard him talk about first meeting my mother.

  She was only sixteen, and her name was Penelope Wiggins. Saul Langham, weary sojourner and man of the world at twenty-two, sat beside Penelope Wiggins, only daughter and youngest child of the owners of the Wiggins’ Boarding House, and asked her to pass the platters of stewed chicken and fried squash.

  According to the story, she was so shy she wouldn’t even look at him, and when he asked her a question, she bit her lip and looked the other direction. Her father first scowled at her from the head of the table, then tried a lighter approach by leaning down to ask the family cat, which was lying in his usual post under the table, what he had done with Penelope’s tongue, and then finally rebuked her outright for displaying to a guest a “shameful want of southern hospitality.”

  Daddy, who wasn’t used to shy girls, thought Penelope Wiggins’ southern hospitality was just fine the way it was. He stayed on in Methuselah, lodging at the boardinghouse and working at a new enterprise in town, a small printshop, until Penelope was finally able to look at him when he asked her a question. After he asked the big question and she said yes, they were married, and when Grandpa Wiggins died suddenly a year later after being kicked in the head by a horse, Saul and Penelope moved from the room in the rear of the printshop back to the boardinghouse as the proprietors.

  Daddy, whose penmanship looked like Thomas Jefferson’s, painted a new sign for the front gate: Langhams’ Boarding House. Grandma Wiggins took the big room off the kitchen for hers and gave the rest of the house to my parents. She was done with cooking and washing and collecting rent, she said. She was ready for a rest now that she was a widow.

  Mother’s four brothers all scattered to other parts of the state, evidently wanting no share in the running of the family business. Two of them went off to fight in World War I, but only one came home. The boardinghouse was a huge edifice with two wrap-around porches—one for each floor. My parents, and eventually my two sisters and I, occupied most of the first floor except for Grandma’s room and another small bedroom rented for many years to Mrs. Beadle, whom my father referred to as “Methuselah’s grandmother.” As mentioned earlier, it was from Mrs. Beadle that I learned I was not a pretty child. She and Grandma Wiggins didn’t like each other. They called each other names not befitting their status as southern ladies.

  It is early Christmas morning now. Grandma Wiggins and Mrs. Beadle are long dead. Saul and Penelope have likewise recited their lines and exited life’s stage, along with two of their daughters. Their middle daughter is now an old woman sitting alone in the dark on Christmas Day.

  In many ways we were strangers in Methuselah. Though the bloodline was diluted and the religious beliefs held in contempt, we were labeled Jews. Daddy spoke out for equality of the races in a day when it never occurred to most white men to do so. He printed flyers expressing his beliefs and exposing certain outrages conducted by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Daddy’s was a well-known name in Mississippi but not a popular one among those in high places.

  My father’s Jewish mother and atheist father left Daddy with troubled memories of Christmas, which he recycled and passed on to his three daughters. The Methodist church in Methuselah staged an outdoor nativity play each Christmas, but Daddy forbade us to go. “Silly theatrics,” he called it. It didn’t matter that the whole town turned out for it; in Daddy’s opinion, this was only more reason for the Langhams to stay home. Daddy never argued against Christmas on religious grounds, however. It was simply a mindless tradition and a waste of good money—this is what he told us over and over.

  My mother eventually found it easier to be s
ilent than to argue with him. Besides, by the time Christmas rolled around each year, the last thing she wanted to do was take on anything extra in the way of baking or decorating. Any charms to be found in housewifery lose their luster quickly for women who run boardinghouses. Holidays mean very little for those whose daily duties never cease.

  Not being in the habit of celebrating Christmas, I continued to pass the season quietly after I left home and began teaching. My students gave me small gifts, of course—a benefit of teaching I had not expected. These were a great joy to me. I would arrange them on a table at home and marvel over the sight: all these gifts for me! I recall a green velvet pincushion and a red sachet pouch among my favorites. Though I allowed my students to decorate the classroom and sing carols, and though I presented each child with a candy cane the day school let out for Christmas vacation, this was the extent of my festivity.

  Aside from the candy canes, I had never bought a Christmas gift for anyone until I married Eliot at the age of forty-two. And having received very few that I could remember, I looked forward to what the season might hold. As I had happily embraced marriage, so was I ready to embrace Christmas, especially the tradition of exchanging gifts. Though Eliot and I had not talked about how we would spend our Christmas break that year, I began laying my plans in early December. I bought a charcoal gray cardigan sweater and a pair of leather gloves for Eliot, wrapped them up, and hid them in my closet. We had no tree, a fact I laid to Eliot’s preoccupation that December with a new Shakespeare textbook for which he was serving as a contributing editor.