Some Wildflower In My Heart

by Jamie Langston Turner

  With such a prelude as I have described, you may well imagine my confusion when, upon entering the emergency waiting room, I saw Thomas, from all appearances unscathed and in full possession of his faculties, seated in a chair upholstered with gold velour. His ball cap was resting on one knee, and a thick sprig of gray hair behind his left ear had been disarranged and was stiffly angled upward like the stub of a small antler. He was calmly leafing through a Popular Mechanics magazine in the midst of a great hubbub of noise and motion.

  Though a profound relief swept over me, I also felt the outrage of having been duped. While I had been flying toward the hospital, my heart filled with uncertainty and dread, Thomas had been browsing through a magazine in a padded chair. The tender thoughts spawned by what I had taken to be an endangerment of his life—the illumination I had witnessed en route of our feelings for each other—were pushed aside as I now surveyed him in the velour chair scratching the back of his neck. I bore down upon him.

  “Thomas Tuttle, what are you doing here?” I asked, halting directly in front of him.

  A young child curled in a chair nearby stirred and cried out. At the same time I heard a woman’s voice behind me. “Is there a Farley Whitcomb in here? You have a phone call, Farley Whitcomb.”

  Thomas was looking up at me in great perplexity. He inhaled quickly and said, “Well, Margaret, how come you’re here?” He closed the Popular Mechanics, took up his baseball cap, and stood to his feet. I stepped back, almost overturning a Styrofoam cup of coffee that someone had carelessly left on the floor.

  “I came to …” I paused, suddenly unsure of how to state my purpose for coming. “I came because I thought my help might be required.”

  He shook his head. “Naw, not now, I don’t guess. Nurse said they’d git things settled down with ’im, then come tell me how he’s doin’.”

  As Thomas continued to speak, I soon came to understand what had transpired. Thomas had been in the ambulance, as I had suspected, but only as a neighborly escort to Nick Purdue, Thelma’s husband, who lived in the other side of our duplex.

  As Thomas told it, he had come home that afternoon around 1:30 to meet with a man he had contacted about cutting down two pine trees in our backyard. As the two of them were talking in the yard, Thelma Purdue had suddenly “screamed bloody murder,” as Thomas put it, and had hobbled down her back steps to “sputter and hiss a bunch of nonsense” that neither Thomas nor the other man could comprehend. Thomas had rushed to her assistance, however, and discovered Nick Purdue inside at the kitchen table, slumped over a piece of sweet potato pie.

  “All Thelma could do was gabble and cry,” Thomas said. “I don’t see how Nick’s put up with her all these years. The tree man, he come on in Thelma’s house, too, and took over with Thelma, tryin’ to keep her from goin’ off the deep end while I checked on Nick and called the ambulance. Looked like to us he’d had him some kind of attack right in the middle of eatin’ his pie. The whole side of his face was smashed right into that pie, and the fork was still in his hand.” He paused and shook his head, lifting his own hand to stare at it.

  Behind me I heard a nurse call out, “Mrs. Cordell? Wait a minute, please. I need you to fill out some information.” Somewhere in the room someone was crying, a shrill gasping and sputtering.

  “When Thelma heard the siren comin’,” Thomas continued, “she got all riled again and started hissin’ like a steam valve and shakin’ all over. So I called Phyllis Jansen, and she come over and said she’d stay with Thelma if somebody’d go in the ambulance with Nick, which I naturally said I’d do since the tree man had his work to get back to. I called Thelma after we got here and told her Nick was bein’ tended to now and they’d be tellin’ us somethin’ before long. She said Phyllis was still there and was helpin’ her get dressed and was gonna bring her on up here to the hospital. Poor Phyllis, she’s got her hands full. I bet Thelma’s runnin’ ’round there like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  “Thelma was standing quietly outdoors with Phyllis Jansen, Ivan Zix, and Ruby Hamrick a few minutes ago,” I said. I suppose Phyllis Jansen was the ideal companion in this time of crisis, for her ready flow of speech would have allowed Thelma little opportunity for hysterics.

  Nick Purdue came home from the hospital three days later, having recovered from what was diagnosed as a mild stroke. The event itself had few permanent repercussions, except for a new prescription of medication “to add to the truckload I’m already takin’,” as Nick himself put it.

  As for myself, however, the eleven-minute drive to Dickson County Hospital that day was an emotional benchmark. For many years prior to that October day, I had allowed myself no tide of feelings. They had ebbed long ago, and I took care to keep them low and distant. On the day of Nick Purdue’s stroke, Birdie had already begun her patient work on me, of course, but it was the threat of losing Thomas that suddenly impelled me to care about something with absolute fervor. Had my emotions been quantifiable, as on a thermometer, the mercury would have soared during my ride to the hospital that day. I felt, irrationally and eruptively.

  This is not to say that I outwardly became a changed woman from that moment onward. To be honest, I believe I concealed any trace of my emotional enlightenment as I spoke with Thomas in the waiting room and as we resumed our daily routine at home following the incident. Even as I write this some nine months later, I have not as yet told Thomas of the change of heart I felt that day. I do not believe he suspected for a moment that my sudden appearance at the hospital was motivated by a trepidation that harm had befallen him. There was no tearful expression of devotion to him on my part. There were no overt gestures of appreciation for what he meant to me.

  In fact, I perversely altered my plans to prepare lasagna for our supper that evening, for it was one of Thomas’s favorite meals. Instead, I made Mexican rice and served corn bread muffins reheated from a previous meal in order that I might give no signal of tenderness. I do not know why I quashed any impulse toward the display of my feelings except that it was out of habit, a habit that had been nurtured by a deep-seated conviction that no one was to be trusted. And, of course, this was a habit born and bred of fear.

  The awareness had triggered something within me, however, and ever afterward I was to remember my ride to the emergency room as evidence that I was capable of feeling and of reentering life as a participant. And ever afterward I was to observe Thomas more closely. For eleven minutes I had lost him—in a sense—and finding myself repossessed of him, I began to take careful and daily note of his…person is the only appropriate word that comes to mind.

  I am quite certain now as I write this that Thomas must know I have begun to contemplate the possibility that I may feel for him, if not love, at least a supreme measure of gratitude for his companionship. Such knowledge has brought into our home certain changes of which we do not speak openly. Since Thomas is seventy years old, and I am now fifty-one, the prospect of openly declaimed love is daunting. Romantic simpering is a garment befitting only the young.

  The day following Nick Purdue’s stroke was Thursday, October 27. When Birdie came to school that morning, she appeared to have been crying. Ironically, however, she brought with her three bookmarks inscribed with the words Joy Cometh in the Morning, which she presented in the meekest of manners to Francine, Algeria, and me. I accepted my glossy, betasseled bookmark, which in addition to the verse also bore a picture of a pale violet sunrise streaked with gold, and put it in my purse.

  The day’s work went smoothly, as I remember. The menu called for boiled eggs and French toast for breakfast and chicken nuggets for lunch. While passing through the lunch line, several teachers offered comments to Birdie concerning the church that she attended, for Birdie had invited the entire faculty and staff of Emma Weldy to what she called “Fill-a-Pew Night” at the Church of the Open Door in Derby the previous night. A visiting evangelist named Jesse Goodyear from Memphis, Tennessee, was “holding a week of special meetings,” as she exp
lained it in the written invitations that she had distributed on Monday. When she had delivered an invitation to me at my desk and asked if I would be able to attend, I had replied in a single, resolute syllable: No. I did not elaborate, nor did she press me.

  In addition to teachers, a number of staff members—Ed Silvester, the janitor, for instance, as well as Merle Cameron, one of the secretaries, and Blanche Triplett, the school nurse—offered remarks concerning the church service. Ed Silvester told her he hadn’t heard such “celestial organ playing” since he was six years old. “Of course, I’ve not cast my shadow across the threshold of a church since I was a young tyke knee-high to a grasshopper, either,” he said, grinning. In his conversation with others, Ed Silvester seems to be searching for a style that suits him, one minute affecting the speech of a scholar and the next sounding like an unlearned rustic.

  From all indications, Birdie had succeeded splendidly in the campaign to fill a pew. It would not have surprised me to hear that she had lent some of her visitors to the sparsely occupied pews of other church members. Francine had been among those who attended the meeting, for I overheard her describing Jesse Goodyear to Algeria. “I never heard a preacher who could make me laugh like that. He was something else! And then he’d hit you with something so serious you couldn’t believe you’d been laughing a second earlier. And he didn’t preach long, either, was the other thing I couldn’t believe. He started off making a joke about his name. Said something about him traveling lots of miles but still having lots of tread and said people feed him so much he’s afraid he’s gonna turn into a blimp. Then pointed to his belly and said, ‘See, I already got me a spare tire around my middle.’”

  When Francine gave a jolly hoot, Algeria pinched in the corners of her mouth and shook her head. “Huh! Can’t stand preachers that tries to be funny,” she said.

  Though Birdie accepted everyone’s kind words about the church service with a gracious smile, she nevertheless remained subdued the entire day. She spoke sweetly to the children, of course, but without her usual spark of gaiety. After all the classes had been served lunch, Birdie went into the pantry, and when she emerged I saw her wipe her eyes with a tissue. Minutes later when I went into the kitchen to check on the quantity of leftover pineapple slices—for as I have said, we often serve the leftover fruit or cookies to the kindergartners as their morning snack the following day—I distinctly heard Birdie sniffle.

  “May I speak to you in my office?” I said to her. I saw Algeria whip around as though ready to take up Birdie’s defense, but I shot her a warning glance and she remained silent. Francine began humming off key but continued rinsing a large aluminum baking pan at the sink, producing drumlike clunks as she turned it over.

  I led the way into my office and positioned myself behind my desk, though I did not sit down. Birdie stood across from me, her small hands resting motionless upon the surface of my desk, fingers splayed as if sounding a chord on the piano. She fixed her brown eyes upon me, two worried seams running parallel between her eyebrows. Her hair was braided more tightly than usual, I noted, and pinned, as always, close against her head, thus giving her face a stark, unrelieved homeliness.

  “Are you ill?” I asked.

  She shook her head briskly. “No, Margaret, I’m feeling just fine—physically, I mean.”

  “Because if you were feeling ill,” I continued, “I was going to suggest that you make arrangements to go home.”

  “I’m fine,” Birdie repeated, shaking her head. “I appreciate it, though, Margaret.”

  “For we cannot run the risk of contaminating our kitchen environment with the coughing and such that typically accompany the common cold. The transfer of germs from the hands to the serving areas or to the food itself could of course be…deleterious.”

  It seemed to me that Birdie colored slightly. She lifted her hands and laid them against her cheeks, her movements producing a faint crackling of her white plastic apron. “I always try to be extra careful about keeping my hands washed,” she said, “and I’ll try not to—” She broke off and closed her eyes. Her voice fell to a whisper. “I just can’t get over those poor babies!” Her face was a pale oval of sorrow.

  I did not reply at once, for her meaning was unclear, but at last I did speak, hesitantly and perhaps even softly, though emitting a sigh of impatience. “As I have said before, you must not allow yourself to bear the collective burden of our students at Emma Weldy, for no amount of agonizing on your part will alleviate the difficulties that exist in the homes of many of these children. You must learn, as I have emphasized repeatedly, to lay aside your feelings at work or they will adversely affect the quality of your performance.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me. Dropping her hands from her face, she began nodding her head. “You’re right, Margaret. I know I can’t fix everybody’s problems.” She smiled sadly and added, “But it’s not our own little children I’m upset about today. It’s those two little babies in Union.”

  I suppose I already knew, though at that moment I understood it more fully, that Birdie Freeman’s heartfelt anxieties on behalf of others were not restricted to individuals within her immediate circle of acquaintances. Indeed, I was beginning to discover that Birdie’s concerns pertained not to a simple circle at all, but rather to a sphere—that is, to the entire planet Earth. She was referring, of course, to the recent news report that I had first heard two days earlier, on the evening of October 25, of the disappearance of two young boys in an alleged car-jacking in Union, South Carolina. Susan Smith, the mother of the two boys, aged three and fourteen months, told authorities that she had been accosted at a deserted intersection and forced from her car, after which the thief, purportedly a black man, had driven away with her two children in the backseat.

  Birdie went on to explain, pausing at intervals to compose herself, that a co-worker of Mickey’s at the Barker Bag Company in Spartanburg lived in the same neighborhood as the two little boys and their mother. “He told Mickey that the whole family’s just torn apart over it, wondering if those two babies will come home alive,” she said. “And I can’t quit thinking about what they’re going through—especially that poor mother. She must be nearly out of her mind!”

  Over the following week, although she carried out her kitchen duties conscientiously, Birdie bore the Smith family’s grief as if it were her own. She looked as though she had been struck when Algeria cast aspersions on Susan Smith. “Huh! Ain’t no mama gonna look like a blank wall the way that woman look when she talk ’bout her babies on the TV, and I still say she know somethin’ she ain’t wantin’ nobody to find out.”

  “Oh, Algeria, honey, please don’t say something like that. Nobody knows how they’ll act when hard times hit. People take trouble in so many different ways. Why, that woman is probably so numb by now from the shock of it all that she doesn’t even know what she’s saying. Let’s don’t be harsh with her. She needs our prayers.”

  But Algeria was intractable. “Can’t help it. Don’t trust her. Her eyes don’t look right. Oughta pray for her babies, not her.” However, Algeria did not state her suspicions in Birdie’s hearing again.

  Many readers remember the outcome of this sordid saga. When the truth came out—that is, when the woman admitted to sending her two sons to their deaths in John D. Long Lake—the entire school was abuzz with disbelief and anger. When Birdie walked into the kitchen on the morning of November 3, the morning after the news of the confession had been made public, I saw that her aspect was drained. I was in my office cubicle filling out a form.

  Paper work, as I said earlier, constitutes the bulk of my duties as lunchroom supervisor, and because the particular form on which I was working at the time—one that bears the heading of Free and Reduced Meals—is confidential, I had closed the door to my office. Aside from the principal, I am the only person at Emma Weldy who is privy to the names of the children whose meals are subsidized by government funding.

  As Algeria and Francine had n
ot yet arrived, Birdie set about her breakfast duties alone, counting out the miniature boxes of cereal and packets of jelly in the pantry and transferring them by tray to the serving line. She was spreading melted oleo onto slices of bread with a pastry brush when Algeria walked into the kitchen. Thermos in hand, I left my office, first turning the form face down on my desk and then closing the door securely, and approached the ice machine. As Algeria donned her apron, I heard Birdie speak. “Well, Algeria, honey, I guess I owe you an apology.” I slowly filled my thermos with ice cubes. I could see them both in my peripheral vision. Algeria did not reply audibly, but I could well imagine her typical response, that of shrugging her shoulders.

  Birdie continued. “You saw right through it all, but not me. No, sir. I just went along so foolishly, thinking that little mother was telling the truth and insisting that everybody else think the same thing. You turned out to be right, and I was wrong. I sure wish I was quick enough to see things like you can. I feel just completely empty inside. Not that it matters about me being wrong. That’s sure not the first time that’s happened. But I just can’t figure it all out—how she could do what she did.”

  I walked to the sink and turned on the faucet. Allowing the water to run for a few moments until at its maximum coolness, I then decreased the water flow and slowly filled my thermos. Appearing beside me at the other side of the large double sink where I stood, Algeria turned on the hot water to wash her hands. She replied with her back turned to Birdie, slowly and ponderously as if wishing it were not necessary to formulate sentences so early in the day. “She bad, Birdie. No way to figure that out. Can’t nobody figure out liars ’n killers.”

  “I’m always so gullible,” Birdie said, then again added, heatedly this time, “but that sure doesn’t matter at a time like this!”

  “You just used to thinkin’ everybody good like you,” Algeria replied.