Winter Birds

by Jamie Langston Turner

  But the most astounding observation is one that has never occurred to me, that most likely never occurred to Shakespeare himself. Mindy strains to illustrate another literary term: ambiguity. It is a term we explored in some detail in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories. “Where late the sweet birds sang,” she writes, “illustrates ambiguity. It could mean either that the birds used to sing on the bare branches of the tree before they flew away for the winter or else that the best birds aren’t afraid of the cold, so they stay late in the year and sing late in the night.” To think of a seventeen-year-old girl coming up with something like this. I read the sentence many times to make sure I have not fallen asleep again.

  I think of birds I have read about in my book: night-herons, nighthawks, owls. I think of the vesper sparrow that winters in the South and sings plaintively in the quiet of evening. And who can say? Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of night birds when he wrote the line. Perhaps he was listening to a nightingale.

  I hear the sound of Ahab’s voice in the kitchen. He bursts in, calling out, “Aunt Wachel! Aunt Wachel!” We are all aunts and uncles except Mitchell, who is Daddy. All of Ahab’s r’s are w’s. Patrick is Unca Patwick, Potts is Unca Cicewo, and Teri is Aunt Tewi. Mitchell has told us that a doctor has used the term verbal delay in reference to Ahab, who didn’t start talking at all until a couple of months ago. Now it appears that he is making up for lost time.

  The boy appears at my door, Rachel and Teri behind him. “Buds?” he asks, which is his word for birds. He is pointing to my bird window and moving across the room at the same time. He runs, wiggles, and flails his arms. This is his customary method of moving. He arrives at the window and squeals, “Bud eating!” A chickadee at the feeder takes flight.

  Ahab sees the plastic swimming pool in the backyard and begins cavorting. “Go swim! Go swim!”

  “After you lie down a little bit,” Rachel says.

  “Good luck on that,” Teri says. They both laugh, and Teri leaves for home.

  “Remember, we always lie down for a little while in the afternoon, and I read you a story,” Rachel says to Ahab. She nurses a hope that one of these days he will actually fall asleep. She comes to the window and picks him up. Ahab twists around in her arms and points to me. “Aunt Sophie come wead?” he says.

  “No, we’ll let Aunt Sophie take a rest, too,” Rachel says. “Let’s go back to Aunt Rachel’s bed. I’ve already picked out a story for today. You’ll like it. It’s about a man named Joshua and a big city called Jericho with high walls. And guess what?”

  “What?” he shouts.

  “Well, you just wait and see,” Rachel says. “It’s exciting.”

  I have read this story in the Bible. I have read of the Israelites marching around the walls of Jericho, of the priests blowing their trumpets, of the people shouting with a loud voice. I have read of the walls of Jericho falling flat. Many years ago I heard a Negro choir on the television singing a spiritual: “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” I remember the mighty conclusion of the song, the words and notes falling all over each other. I have read of other miracles in the Bible—of water turning to wine, of a man living in the belly of a great fish, of food falling from heaven, and water gushing from a rock in the desert.

  These are stories that religious people like Rachel and Patrick take at face value. Their faith blinks at nothing. If the Bible says a wall fell down or the sun stood still or a man walked through fire or the waters of a sea parted, then the matter is not to be questioned, only repeated endlessly as fact.

  Their faith does not stop with Bible stories. They believe that the God of the Bible still works miracles. They believe that walls still come tumbling down. At the supper table one night I heard Patrick read these words: “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Not one of the three of them laughed at this, neither Potts nor Rachel nor Patrick. I have read of another rock being moved: a great stone rolled from the mouth of a sepulcher. And who can say that there are not miracles? Has not the heart of man through the ages wished to think so?

  “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.” In his despair Macbeth acknowledged that the reins of the universe were not in the hands of man. He was a guilty man, and he saw visions that made his blood run cold. And do we not all see such visions? Do we not all wish for a miracle to vanquish our guilt?

  The same night he read the verse about the mustard seed, I also heard Patrick say to Potts, “Did I ever tell you about the time I won the eighth grade spelling bee?” I have read in the Bible of a donkey speaking like a man. This did not strike me as a miracle of much note, for I have heard such a thing many times since living in my nephew’s house.

  From the back of the house I hear an outburst of childish laughter. I picture Rachel lying on the bed beside Ahab, a storybook propped on her stomach. I look back at Mindy’s essay, and my eyes fall on the meaning she has wrenched from Shakespeare’s sonnet: “The best birds aren’t afraid of the cold, so they stay late in the year and sing late in the night.” I think of Mindy, so young and so beautiful. Since I am not religious, I have no right to pray for a miracle. But I hope for one.

  With the aid of the concordance in the back of the red Bible, I try to find the verse about faith the size of a mustard seed. Instead I find another verse: “Unto what is the kingdom of God like? . . . It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it.”

  I have noticed something on the Milestones page in Time magazine. Starting with the last entry as has been my habit, I have not always made it all the way to the first. More recently I have begun starting with the first entry, and sometimes I do not make it to the end. Sometimes I stop along the way to study a picture or muse over a curious fact: “DIED. FRANK PERDUE, 84, folksy chicken tycoon,” who was featured on his company’s television ads holding a chicken as if it were a football he was ready to throw and saying gruffly, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”

  But here is the thing I have noticed. Sometimes the first entries do not begin with DIED. Sometimes they are still bleak: AILING, PLEADED GUILTY, OUSTED, ARRESTED, CONVICTED. But other times they mark a happy event in someone’s life: ACQUITTED, RECOVERING, AWARDED, ELECTED, RELEASED.

  Chapter 31

  The Thread of His Verbosity

  Even before it hatches from its shell, the baby killdeer peeps as if trying to converse with its parents. Once out of its shell, it rests under its parents’ wings until warm and dry. For a month the adult birds work tirelessly to train and protect, often pretending to be crippled to distract enemies away from the chicks.

  The peaches are especially good this year, Patrick tells me as he takes them out of the sack one by one. He begins explaining the cause in his usual long-winded fashion, citing amounts of rainfall and average temperatures throughout the last several months, but I am more concerned with the product itself than the steps that led to its development. I stand at the kitchen counter admiring the shape and color of perfect fruit. There are eighteen beautiful peaches lined up before me when the sack is empty.

  Patrick is in the middle of a sentence when I say, “I’m ready to start working now. I can’t be talking while I work.” What I mean is, I can’t be listening to you talk while I work.

  “Well, by all means,” Patrick says heartily. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

  “I want to do it by myself,” I say. This is a phrase I must have picked up from Ahab, who says it frequently.

  It has been longer than I can remember since I last made a peach pie. Perhaps the last one I made was for Eliot almost forty years ago. After he said, “Had I known of your desire for children, I would have relieved you of your false hope before we married,” I must have lost my appetite for peach pie.

  But Patrick has told me t
hat peach pie is Rachel’s favorite, and suddenly I remember my own taste for it. Tomorrow is her birthday, the fifth day of July. It pleases me that we were born the same month. I have laid my plans for her birthday. I will present her with gifts, one tonight and one tomorrow.

  Today being July the Fourth, Teri has gotten Rachel out of the house on the pretext of needing her help in preparing for company. It has been three months since “God took Veronica to heaven,” which is how Teri speaks of her daughter’s death. I have heard her tell Rachel that she still cries during the day when she passes Veronica’s room. “I see her empty crib and feel like somebody’s knocked the wind out of me,” she says. But I have also heard her say that during the night she sometimes awakes with tears of joy after dreaming of “my sweet angel laughing and singing and running through the streets of heaven.”

  And at long last I have heard Rachel speak of her own children. One day she placed both hands over her heart and said to Teri and me, “They are always with me, every minute of every day.” She remembers their birthdays, their ages. Like Teri, she dreams about them. “Just think,” she said to Teri that day, “maybe Toby and Mandy are playing with Veronica right now. Maybe the three of them are walking along holding hands.”

  It was Steve’s idea to have a July Fourth cookout for family and friends, and Teri agreed. She was ready, she said, “to crawl out of my hole.” The only family member who accepted their invitation, however, was Teri’s aunt Helena in Yazoo City. Not to be discouraged, they went out into the highways and hedges and have now compelled a host of motley guests to come to their cookout.

  Then Teri’s aunt called back and said she was afraid she and Della Boyd would have to cancel because Della Boyd’s brother and his family were coming through Yazoo City on their way to Biloxi and would be at their house over the Fourth. “But I just told her to bring them along, the more the merrier!” Teri told Rachel. “Besides, they have kids Mindy’s age, which will be good for her.”

  And so it is to be another odd combination. Cicero Potts, Mitchell, and Ahab will be coming, also, and two of Steve’s friends from the catfish plant. In addition, the vacant house next to Patrick and Rachel has finally been sold to a young couple in their twenties, who have also been invited. They are expecting their first baby sometime in August. Wes and Joanna Lebo may have a tall hedge around their house, but it will do nothing to isolate them from their well-meaning neighbors. You may as well mow the hedge down, I want to tell them, for you will not be left alone, not in this neighborhood.

  Every day for the past week I have heard about the details for the party. There will be grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, baked beans, potato salad, and homemade ice cream. Patrick has bought a large watermelon to take over. He and Steve have staked out an area for horseshoes. Teri and Rachel are setting up tables in their backyard with box fans situated so as to keep the air circulating and thus discourage flies and mosquitoes. They are covering the tables with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and there will be centerpieces of hydrangeas and tiny American flags. Later there will be fireworks at the levee for those who want to go.

  But the business at hand for me is a peach pie. It is two o’clock, and the party is scheduled to start at four. I have no time to waste. “Maybe Steve needs help with something,” I say to Patrick.

  “So you want to get rid of me, huh?” Patrick says. He sticks out his bottom lip as if pouting. “I could peel the peaches, you know.”

  I consider this. “Very well,” I say. “Peel the peaches and then go see if Steve needs help.”

  Patrick laughs a jovial July Fourth laugh, a day-off-work and the-sun-is-shining kind of laugh. “You tell it like it is, don’t you, Aunt Sophie?” He proceeds to peel the peaches and regale me at the same time with a discourse about last year’s July the Fourth, which was “a disaster from the word go” since everything had to be canceled because of heavy rain and flooding. “No parade, no picnics, no fireworks,” he says. He tells of the postponed church picnic held the following week, of the patriotic musical program, of the games and the greased pig chase. Someone had borrowed the pig from a farmer, he says, but when the chase began, the pig had a heart attack and died. He throws his head back and laughs with gusto. “We had to take up a special collection to pay for the pig,” he says.

  I want to tell him to stop talking and pay attention to his peeling, but as he is making good progress with the peaches I keep quiet and concentrate on the pie crusts. It will take two pies to feed twenty people. Even then, the pieces will be small. It is my hope that some will eat only ice cream and leave more birthday pie for Rachel. I go slowly, measuring the ingredients into a bowl, cutting in the shortening until it forms small soft pebbles, carefully adding cold water, stirring with a fork.

  “ . . . and said he’d help me remodel the master bath if I’ll help him with his kitchen after that,” Patrick is saying, “although I’m starting to have second thoughts about it.” He goes on to tell me his second, third, and fourth thoughts. I sprinkle flour on the countertop, spread it in a large circle, then roll the first ball of dough through it. “But what it boils down to is this,” Patrick says at last. “We could save a lot of money by doing just the floor repair without all the rest of it. We don’t really need a totally new bathroom.”

  He is not only peeling the peaches but slicing them, also. I do not object to this, especially when I see that he is slicing them neither too small nor too large. He pops a slice into his mouth, his fingers wet with juice. “These are delectable,” he says. “Rachel’s going to love the surprise. Maybe I’ll let her think I made the pies by myself.” He means to be teasing, but I give him no answer. I take Rachel’s rolling pin out of the drawer. “Hey, I take it back!” he says. “Don’t hit me with that thing! I’ll tell her you made them!” He throws up his hands as if to defend himself.

  “Watch what you’re doing,” I say. “You’re going to drip juice onto the floor.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says. He laughs and goes back to work, turning suddenly serious again. “Especially when I think about all those Christians in Bangladesh and Vietnam and what they’re going through every day,” he says. I do not have to ask what he is talking about, for I know. He and Rachel subscribe to a magazine called Martyrs for Jesus that comes in the mail every month. Patrick reads stories aloud from it after supper. He and Rachel pray for the people in these stories as if they know them personally: Umanu, Trang Chu, Redoy Roy, Giang Phan. If one can believe the stories, these are people who are “persecuted for the cause of Christ,” as Patrick likes to say.

  “So I have to ask myself whether I really should spend several thousand dollars on a bathroom,” he says, “when those people need so much help.” On and on he goes, telling now about another man who was beaten in the face and dragged through his village for converting to Christianity. As he slices peaches, he whips himself into a fury of rhetoric over the “lazy, selfish, carnal attitudes of all the comfortable Christians in the western world.”

  Today is not the first time Patrick has put me in mind of Don Armado, a ridiculous Spanish blowhard, full of affectations and pomposity, from Love’s Labour’s Lost. “He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.” So says the schoolmaster describing Don Armado. Yet today, though the thread of Patrick’s verbosity is as lengthy as always, there is something in the staple of his argument that does not rankle as much as usual.

  Regrettably, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a misunderstood play, full of obscure references and unintelligible jokes, many of which Eliot tackled in a paper he presented at a conference, a paper I typed for him. I was also in the audience when he read it. I recall wishing that he had addressed the title, another of the play’s unintelligible jokes in my opinion. For how could any labor of love be lost?

  “ . . . but he looked them in the eye,” Patrick is saying, “and told them he wouldn’t worship the ghosts of his ancestors any longer! That’s when they tied him up and ran a spear through his hand
. The next day they did his other hand, and the next day they ran the spear through his heart.”

  I could remind him that the martyrs, if the stories are true, will have their reward beyond the grave, if his religion is true. “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” I could say to him, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I could remind him of other words spoken by the apostle Paul, words I have heard Patrick himself read aloud: “Having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”

  I could also remind him of the large gifts of money he and Rachel have already given to the Martyrs for Jesus organization. I could tell him that the two of them cannot be expected to provide all the funds for all the projects described in the magazine: the children’s home, the supply of Bibles for new converts, the vocational training, the food, water, clothing, bicycles. Leave something for others to do, I could tell him. Don’t be greedy about your giving. Show some moderation.

  But I cannot say this, for I am not supposed to know about the gifts of money. This is information I gathered surreptitiously, by looking in Patrick’s checkbook one day while he and Rachel were at church. Imagine, Patrick and Rachel praying and singing hymns while Sophie snoops through their checkbook at home.

  “But a new bathroom would be nice for Rachel.” This is something I can say. And I remember something else I can say, something I read in the Bible: Besides, “‘ye have the poor always with you.’” I do not look at him, but I imagine his mouth falling open to hear me quote from the gospels.

  And he agrees. “Yes, that’s true. It really is. I keep thinking of how much Rachel would enjoy it.”