Some Wildflower In My Heart

by Jamie Langston Turner

  From there the conversation had somehow veered into the subject of prison reform, I believe—or perhaps it was an upcoming concert in Greenville by an eleven-year-old Korean violinist or the new billboard advertisement on the interstate, promoting an internationally acclaimed circus and containing a glaring spelling error: See Amazing Acrobatic Feets. “Yeah, they should’ve taken off the s,” Mickey had said. “Everybody knows more than one foot is feet,” to which Thomas had responded, “Or a yard if it’s three feet,” to which Virgil had added his own droll remark. “I never saw a three-footed acrobat.” Even Joan had laughed.

  The waiter returned with the rolls and tea, and at some point Joan told about a woman with whom she worked whose first name was Laureth. “She said her mother took all the names of her children off the back of a shampoo bottle,” Joan said. “She’s got two brothers named Keratin and Amino and two sisters named Glycerin and Xylene.” Virgil commented that Laureth had come out the best in that deal, and Mickey had begun a rapid monologue of other names the mother could have selected: Purified Water, Sulfate, Hydrolyzed Protein, Citric Acid, and Yellow Dye Number Seven. Once more, Thomas had laughed with gusto at the little man’s quick though adolescent wit. Birdie had laid her hands on either side of her face and exclaimed, “Why, Mickey, you’re a nut! So that’s why you take so long in the shower—you’re reading the back of the shampoo bottle!”

  Somehow dessert had been ordered and our dinner plates removed, and in the lull, during which the waiter placed our slices of pie before us, Virgil spoke with thoughtful deliberation, once again turning to serious matters. “And just what kind of God do we have anyway? If a person believes in God—in a God of love, that is—how can he reconcile all the suffering that goes on in the world? Or in his own life, for that matter?”

  He went on to explain that he had been debating this very issue with a fellow teacher. Early in the evening, most likely during the introductions around the table, it was revealed that Virgil Dunlop was a teacher at Berea Middle School, instructing seventh graders in world history and eighth graders in American history. “That’s Bruce’s big hang-up,” Virgil said. “He says he could never get into religion because any God who would let somebody go through what his father suffered before he died of cancer wasn’t anybody he cared to get mixed up with.” I saw the waiter studying Virgil with a look of repugnance, as though he had stumbled upon a nest of vipers. He set the last dish of pie upon our table and interrupted tersely with a promise to return with coffee for those who wanted it.

  “So what did you tell Bruce?” Birdie asked, her brown eyes glowing with interest.

  “Oh, what haven’t I told him?” Virgil said. “We go around and around, but he doesn’t even half listen to what I say before he’s off on his same old line: If God is so good, he says, then why doesn’t he do something about all the hunger and pain and all the ugliness. That’s his favorite word when he’s talking about life’s bad side—ugliness. If there is a God, he says, then it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t care the least about people. And if he doesn’t care about people, he says, then I don’t want to have anything to do with him. And then he always adds, ‘But I’m sure there’s not a God.’”

  Virgil let his head fall backward as he released a sigh of frustration. “There’s no easy answer,” he said. “It’s not something you can figure out like a math problem. Do I believe that God directs our suffering? Bruce asked me that the other day. Does he have a big chart he marks it down on? Or is it like a lottery where your number suddenly comes up at random and it’s your turn? How does God go about divvying it all up so everybody gets a share?”

  For a long moment we all fell silent. I am quite certain that three of us—Joan, Thomas, and I—sincerely wished that the conversation could in some way be relieved of its heavy weight. Did it not occur to Virgil Dunlop, I wondered, that there might be those of us who preferred not to sit in a public restaurant among people we barely knew and discuss the attributes of God and the mysteries of human suffering?

  It may surprise the reader to learn that the unleashing of vituperative condemnations upon God, such as those of Virgil’s colleague, bestir within me a sensation akin to fear. While I truly felt that God had deserted me those many years ago in my grandfather’s house, I had seen it as an oversight—an inexcusable oversight of awful consequence, to be sure, but an oversight nevertheless rather than an intentional and treacherous act against me. God had simply turned his back upon me for some reason that I could not fathom, and in so doing he had demonstrated his fallibility. I could have no part in a system of belief presided over by an irresponsible and careless deity, one who showed obvious favoritism or lapses of attention. To vilify God publicly, however, was not something I could ever find within my power to do.

  At the Field Pea Restaurant over seven months ago, on the evening of November 18, a sudden curiosity welled up within me, and I believe I am correct in stating that I surprised everyone at the table, perhaps myself most of all, by turning abruptly to Birdie and addressing her boldly and directly.

  “And were the opportunity to come to you,” I said, “what would you say in response to Bruce’s views? Why does God allow humans to suffer?”

  The fact that the seed of Birdie’s faith had grown hardy roots in a rich deepness of earth had been abundantly yet quietly manifest in her daily conduct in the lunchroom of Emma Weldy, of course, but at no time was the genuineness of her heart more powerfully demonstrated to me than by her simple answer to my question that night at the restaurant.

  I believe that had she answered in any other way—had she attempted, for example, to foist upon me some pat piety, some fraudulent platitude, had she recited a list of reasons for suffering (oh, yes, as a teenager I had heard such sermons, with their trite illustrations about the tangled yarns on the undersides of tapestries), had she tried, in Milton’s words, “to justify the ways of God to man,”—I would have rejected her soundly, once and for all.

  She grimaced, however, and shook her head sadly. “Oh, Margaret, honey, I don’t know exactly how to answer that,” she said. “I don’t know why he lets us suffer—I just know he does. It’s just part of life, and we all have our share sooner or later. And we can spend our whole life saying it’s not fair that we have to pay for something Adam did, but it doesn’t change a thing. I wish I had a mind that could figure it all out, but I don’t. I just know two things for sure, and they don’t seem to go together—God is good and we all have to suffer.”

  That she was honest and simple pleased me. Had she begun quoting lengthy passages from the Bible, I would have recoiled from her in a lasting way. Had she tossed off some literary quip, such as Shakespeare’s “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” I should have scorned her openly. Of a certainty I would not be writing a book about her.

  18

  A Time Appointed

  When I think of Birdie Freeman today, my mind is often filled with analogies from the world of science. I envision a microscopic organism surrounding and engulfing another. I imagine the slow seepage of colorless gases into what was once a vacuum. I think of the laws of thermodynamics concerning actions and reactions, of the effect of heat upon ingots of metal, of the principle of water displacement. I am reminded of the productive work of sunlight within green plants, of the irrepressible power of seeds, of the springing forth of flowers in the most hostile of soils—in the forest gloom, in the desert, upon a rocky mountainside. I see purple and yellow crocuses bursting through the crust of snow.

  And without fail, when I think of Birdie, my thoughts turn to the wildflower. I have in my possession a book titled Wild Flowers in South Carolina by a botanist named Wade Batson. Within its pages, the edges of which begin to give evidence of many turnings, are pictures and descriptions of over two hundred wildflowers native to our state, including those with euphonious names such as Star of Bethlehem, Honey-cup, and Fairy Lily, as well as those of harsher designation: Wild-Man-of-the-Earth, Devil’s Darning Needle, and Beggar’s Li
ce. I bought the book at the Derby Public Library Used Book Sale after the incident that I shall now set down in writing.

  It occurred on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving as I was gathering my books after my piano lesson with Birdie. By this time I was playing songs in the third book of The Music Tree series. Though Birdie had suggested from time to time that we omit certain songs, for it was her opinion that I could move far more quickly into more difficult music, I insisted upon studying the books methodically, page by page, even writing in my answers for every notation review, clapping out the practice rhythms, and playing each warm-up exercise on my piano at home. On this particular Tuesday I had performed four simple numbers: “Irish Tune,” “If Kangaroos Danced,” “Grasshoppers,” and “Cobbler, Cobbler.” As always, Birdie had poured upon me undiluted praise. “You’ve got so much talent!” she told me. “And what’s more, you practice! I wish all my other pupils were as faithful as you.”

  No doubt Birdie had observed me at each piano lesson studying the cross-stitched poem on the wall, and very likely she understood that my interest was in the poem itself, or perhaps in poetry in general, more than in the design and craftsmanship of Mickey’s handiwork. As she had informed us earlier, Mickey had used no pattern but had merely begun stitching the poem in a script of his own devising, after which he had begun creating a border and a complementary scene of trees and flowers. Although neatly—perhaps even admirably—executed, it was no artistic masterpiece. The poem was not a profound statement nor a lengthy one:

  Gifts From the Wildwood

  I know not how to capture

  This fragrant wildwood’s rapture,

  The magic of these dells

  Where silent beauty dwells,

  Where noble strength and power

  In oak and pine tree tower.

  But when from these I come,

  I hope to carry home

  Some spirit not yet had

  To keep me strong and glad,

  Something from oak and pine

  To be forever mine;

  When from these woods I part,

  Some wildflower in my heart.

  I was taken by the poem. Beneath its measured plainness vibrated something that struck me as intimately familiar, as if I had read it before, although I knew that I had never in my reading so much as come across the name of the poet, Archibald Rutledge, much less the poem itself. By now I had come to believe that it was a simple thought dwelling within the quiet center of the lines, perhaps concealed from the casual eye, that drew from me such a convincing sensation of having known the poem from an earlier time.

  I have often over the course of my fifty-one years felt impressed with an idea that I do not recall putting into words. The idea is this: Something within me cannot die. This something, I have always known, is positive and strong, far bigger than the bitterness, fear, and hatred that thrives so rampantly in the human heart. Life for me, then, was not disposable. Though I did not give verbal expression to the idea, I know now that I have always felt it at the core of my soul, even during the years I was so mercilessly trodden upon by my grandfather.

  I suppose this is the reason that I was never tempted to take my life and end my misery. Life simply was not expendable. If taken, it would resume somehow, for there was something within me that could not die. Perhaps it was this belief in the immortal—the conviction that there was something inextinguishable within all human life from inception—that emboldened me to protect the life of the only child I ever carried within me, even when my love for it was uncertain. In short, then, I have always held a deep respect for life.

  My mother, of course, had spoken often of eternal life and had guided me in my youth to embrace the concept on a spiritual plane. As a child I considered the idea of a heaven and a hell to be a reasonable and fair conclusion to life on earth. The fact that my mother believed in such made it irrefutable, that is until the four-year interlude in my grandfather’s house when all of my mother’s well-laid theories of life and its orderliness were reduced in my mind to religious flimflam.

  Within a short while, during my early teens, I had chopped and winnowed the fields of my mother’s religion. Carried away as chaff was the simple belief in a divine God who arranged with loving attention to detail each step of my destiny. The sole surviving seed of my mother’s crop of ideals, I suppose, was the irradicable belief that I have alluded to: Something within me cannot die.

  As I read the poem above Birdie’s piano each week, I began to delve into another level of meaning besides that of a visitor who fondly remembers a literal wildwood. Whether the poet intended this alternate message I know not. My condensed paraphrase of the lines might read thus: I cannot express what resides within the deepest recesses of my soul, but I know that it is beautiful and enduring, and when I emerge from the dimness of temporal sight, I shall look within and behold a lovely, imperishable bloom.

  Though vague and incipient, the thought took root, and something began to stir within me. I began to wonder whether the concept of eternality might be a promise rather than a threat, whether it might be more than an extended period during which to suffer. The idea of the bloom being that of a wildflower—that hardy, widespread diversity of species that springs up uncultivated—appealed to me, for it meant that the seed could be largely ignored and yet in its time bring forth life.

  I cannot call the poem a true sonnet, for in spite of its fourteen lines, its truncated meter renders it technically ineligible. Nevertheless, its form is appealing, and it was because of this simple poem by a South Carolinian poet, of whom I knew nothing at the time, that I began to hope once again. Perhaps that was the name of the wildflower within my heart: Hope. And perhaps the flower of hope may yield the fruit of faith and love.

  On that Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Birdie laid a hand upon my shoulder while I was still seated upon the piano stool and said to me, “You must like poetry, Margaret. Every week I see you reading that poem on the wall. Do you? Like poetry, I mean?”

  I did not answer at once. “I find that it incites deep thought,” I said at last.

  “He’s written lots of poems,” she said, by whom she meant, I assumed, Archibald Rutledge.

  “Most poets have written many poems,” I replied.

  “Well, that’s true enough,” she said pleasantly, then added, “I wish I knew more about poetry. So much of it seems so hard to understand—at least the kind that sounds worthwhile. And then the poems that are clear as day a lot of times just sound too…well, shallow, I guess I’d call it.” She removed her hand from my shoulder as I rose from the stool. “Not that I’m a great thinker by any stretch!” she said, laughing.

  “I, too, wish that I knew more about poetry,” I said, looking down into her brown eyes. “I do read a great deal of it, but I feel that my understanding of poetry as an artistic discipline is tangential at best. At times it is as though I hear the engine running and observe that I am being transported, yet I cannot describe how the vehicle operates.”

  Birdie sighed as I moved toward the door. “You sure have a way with words, Margaret. I just love to hear you talk.” She paused a moment, then laid her hand upon my arm as if to stay me. Though I still flinched inwardly at these uninvited advances, I was becoming somewhat accustomed to her touch.

  “You remind me of a wildflower in a lot of ways yourself, did you know that, Margaret?” she asked, and when I did not answer, she continued. “I read once, or maybe Mickey told me, that when a wildflower’s natural home gets destroyed, maybe by fire or by bulldozers coming through and tearing everything up—no, I think Mervin Lackey told me this—anyway, the plant will die out unless one of the seeds happens to be carried to a place that’s like the other place that got ruined. Say if it’s a marshy area that gets drained and dried out and turned into a shopping center—if they’d ever pick a place like that for a shopping center—then a wildflower seed from the marsh might get picked up by the wind or get stuck in a dog’s fur or on somebody’s jacket and then
maybe get dropped next to a pond miles away and start up a whole new patch of flowers there. But if that same seed got dropped in a dry spot somewhere, it would just die because the conditions wouldn’t be right for it to grow.”

  The principle was simple enough that it could have come from the mouth of a first grader; however, I saw in the body of Birdie’s little speech no connection to her introduction: “You remind me of a wildflower in a lot of ways yourself, did you know that, Margaret?”

  “I must go,” I said. Her hand fell from my arm as I bent to retrieve my purse from the rocking chair. Slipping the wide strap across my shoulder, I walked toward the door. I was beginning to weary of the thought of flowers, seeds, and the like. I had business to get about. I wanted to drive to the library in Derby and then stop at a grocery store on the way home to buy a turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.

  “I think your natural home inside you must have somehow been destroyed by something a long time ago,” Birdie said behind me.

  I grasped the doorknob and turned it.

  “But there’s a seed sticking in your heart just waiting for the right time and place to start growing again,” she added.

  I pulled the doorknob so forcefully that I lost my grip on it; the door flew open, swinging one hundred eighty degrees and hitting the wall with a dull heavy thump. I must have looked surprised, perhaps verging on apologetic, for she said, “Oh, don’t worry about that old door. It has a mind of its own sometimes. Mickey put a little stopper down by the baseboard so it wouldn’t hurt itself. See?” And she closed the door partway to point it out to me.

  I proceeded forward, opening the screen door and stepping outside. As I descended the steps and walked quickly down the sidewalk, it came to me that my trek from Birdie’s living room to my car was most often marked by a feeling of relief on my part, as if I were escaping a painful examination under a light of powerful wattage. I knew that Birdie was behind me, although her canvas-soled shoes made no sound.