Some Wildflower In My Heart

by Jamie Langston Turner

  At the commercial break, Thomas looked back at me and grinned. “They like my program, Rosie. See? I been telling you how funny it is.” Mickey and Birdie looked at me also, both of them smiling. “Come on in and set yourself down,” Thomas said, waving toward the couch.

  “We’ve got to get going,” Mickey said, springing to his feet. I had seen Birdie tap the face of her watch. “We didn’t mean to stay but a few minutes, and here it’s already been an hour. I don’t have a very good sense of time. Seems like Birdie’s always having to tug my leash and drag me away from places, aren’t you, dumplin’?” Birdie rose to stand beside him.

  This is when the idea that I mentioned earlier made itself known. When I spoke, my voice sounded serrated and metallic, like a rusted saw. “Will you stay for supper?” I asked from the doorway, my heart still thudding within me. What if they accepted my invitation? While I earnestly hoped that they would not, I felt my heart filling with a curious sense of adventure. Thomas swung his chair around and gaped at me, making no attempt to disguise his shock.

  Birdie was making signs of protest, shaking her head and moving one hand rapidly from side to side, palm down, as if brushing crumbs from a tablecloth. “Oh no, Margaret, no, that’s sweet of you, but I don’t want you to feel obligated to feed us just because we don’t know when to leave. We’ll just take our coats and get on our way.”

  Looking at Mickey, she added, “We still need to stop by Marvella’s, you know, and pick up those cupcakes she wants me to decorate for the fellowship tomorrow night. I told her we’d come by sometime late this afternoon.” She tilted her head in thought. “And if we wait till later, she won’t be home.” Birdie glanced at me and, as though I cared about a total stranger named Marvella, offered, “Marvella’s going over to Harvey and Trudy Gill’s tonight to help them make a Christmas wreath for their front door.”

  “It will be a simple meal,” I said. “Should you want something more substantial than roast beef sandwiches and potato soup, our supper would be unsatisfactory. Should you choose to join us, however, we will eat at six o’clock.”

  Mickey and Birdie turned to each other for help in deciding the matter. Thomas still sat in his chair as if thunderstruck. Whispering loudly, Mickey jerked a thumb toward me as he addressed Birdie. “Do you think there’s any chance she’d let us break in the new dishes if we did stay to eat?”

  “‘Break’ is an unfortunate word choice when speaking of my new dishes,” I said, and Birdie and Mickey both laughed.

  “Oh, now, she’s a quick one, isn’t she?” Mickey said. “Yes, a really quick one, she is.” Though by no means a devotee of the Andy Griffith Show myself, I could nevertheless tell that Mickey’s imitation of Floyd Lawson, the barber, was indeed quite good. Thomas still appeared to be disoriented. He did not speak but gazed first at Mickey and Birdie, then at me, then back at Mickey and Birdie, then again at me.

  It was decided that Birdie and Mickey would drive to the home of their friend Marvella, who lived midway between Filbert and Derby—“right under the shadow of the water tower,” Mickey said—and then return to our duplex by six o’clock to be our guests for supper. Now that it was settled, I found it difficult to believe that I had actually extended the invitation, that it had been accepted, and that, barring unforeseen conflicts, we would be seated at our kitchen table with Birdie and Mickey Freeman within the next hour.

  “Could I stay and help you with the meal?” Birdie asked. “Mickey could go get the cupcakes by himself.”

  “No,” I said. “I will see to everything myself.”

  “You’ll help her, won’t you, Thomas?” Birdie said, and Thomas smiled distractedly.

  “I will get your coats for you,” I said, since Thomas had made no move to do so. Walking into Thomas’s bedroom, I heard him emerge from his trance at last to say, “Well, now, we’ll sure look forward to seeing you folks back in a little bit.”

  As I gathered Birdie’s coat and Mickey’s jacket into my arms, my gaze fell upon Thomas’s blue chenille bedspread. I paused briefly and looked at his bed. Though of only a moment’s duration, I was suddenly and unaccountably pierced with a feeling that I knew to be pity, though I had not felt it for many years.

  The headboard and footboard of the bed were of oak. The design had a certain sturdy elegance, as if crafted by a colonial cabinetmaker. The bed had belonged to Thomas before we married. Very possibly it was the bed he had shared with his first wife, Rita, though I had never asked about its history. Thomas kept a tidy bed. The bedspread was drawn up and snugly tucked beneath the pillows, its nubby geometric design precisely centered, the fringed edge clearing the floor by an even inch. He had never been one to leave his bed unmade nor to toss articles of clothing upon it.

  I looked at the bed now as if for the first time. “This,” I said to myself, “is where my husband”—I rarely thought of him in this way: as my husband—“has lain every night for the fifteen years of our marriage; this is where he has lain alone.” I came into the room only to vacuum the carpet on Fridays, to dust the furniture on Tuesdays, to return clean laundry to his bureau drawers on Mondays and Thursdays, and to hang freshly ironed shirts in his closet on Wednesdays. Since the day of our marriage, he had changed the sheets on his bed each Saturday, though I, of course, had always washed, folded, and stored them on the shelves of the linen closet.

  I knew that if I sat down upon the mattress now, the box springs would squeak, for I heard them from my room each night. The thought of Thomas sitting upon the edge of the bed in his nightclothes and then slipping his feet beneath the sheets and the blue bedspread descended upon me now as a frail mist of sorrow.

  The feeling of pity had its source, I suppose, in an image registered only minutes earlier but now permanently lodged within my mind. I envisioned Birdie and Mickey Freeman side by side in their own bed, propped with pillows and furnished with mugs of cocoa and a gooseneck lamp. I heard their voices reading aloud and saw their eyes focused intently upon the printed page. I wondered briefly whether they shared a single book or secured two copies. This picture of conjugal harmony stung me, contrasting as it did with the present thought of Thomas lying in silence and solitude.

  When one clutches his past bitterness like a prized gem, it numbs him to a great many things; it blinds and deafens him. His thoughts are concentered in self. Though it may seem beyond belief, I had never before this moment given thought to Thomas’s life as the husband of a woman like myself. Perhaps this was one of Birdie’s most valuable roles as my friend: Besides giving me cause to trust and hope again, she demonstrated to me the ballast provided a man by his wife’s open and steady love.

  Without intending to do so, I raised Birdie’s tweed coat to my face, then immediately felt foolish. I must lay aside my weak sentiments, I told myself. Birdie and Mickey were waiting for their coats, and I had a meal to complete. I removed my face quickly from the folds of Birdie’s coat, but not before I had caught its scent, a faintly spicy odor as of woodsmoke and crushed bayberry.

  The thought crossed my mind that the garments of the Old Testament priests, as they prepared sweet incense for the holy place, must have smelled like this. As I turned to leave Thomas’s bedroom, I heard Mickey say, “Maybe she decided to take a nap in there,” and I noted that the aroma of baking bread was beginning to fill the house.

  25

  An Enduring Substance

  It is no great wonder to me that Leo Tolstoy could write so long a book as War and Peace; rather, I marvel that it is so short. I had hoped by the end of this month, July, to have completed my story, but I feel that it has scarcely begun. In the writing of each chapter, I find myself engaged in a battle. Perhaps other writers struggle similarly. I do not know. It is as though my heart is swollen with my story. I feel that I must set it down upon paper, and quickly, or I will surely break open and fly apart. Curiously, I imagine my heart as a fordhook lima bean allowed to soak too long and thus bursting its jacket. The metaphor perplexes me, for I do not like
fordhooks. They are too large and lack the flavor of the baby lima. Furthermore, I see no relationship between a bean and the composing of a manuscript.

  My battle is this: As I tell my story, I am impeded, first, by the sheer magnitude of material I wish to record and, second, by a proclivity for detail. No sooner do I set about to describe a simple interaction between Birdie Freeman and me than I realize it is not at all simple. Each incident is rich and expansive, teeming with sensory impressions and intersecting my life at many points. It cannot be condensed; or perhaps I mean that to condense it would minimize its role in my life, would blur the story, would verge on desecration. Yet I fight within myself. I must include this fact. No, it is of no ultimate consequence in the larger story. But it is, for it is as a subtle shading in a fine painting. No, you must omit it. I cannot, for it adorns the whole.

  Moreover, I have woven other stories into my story of Birdie, and those, too, must be told. My path has diverged into many. In rereading parts of my manuscript, for example, I see that I have abandoned Thomas’s cousin Joan for many pages, leaving unresolved her dilemma concerning Virgil Dunlop, the teacher at Berea Middle School with whom she had developed a friendship; indeed, I see that I carelessly failed even to complete the account of our telephone conversation in which she asked my opinion of him.

  I clearly recall Joan’s final remarks in that conversation: “Of course, I could never marry someone with a name like Virgil Dunlop. Can’t you just imagine it? Joan Spalding Dunlop. People would think I was a sporting goods heiress or something. Everybody would expect me to be an expert at all the racket sports.” She had attempted a laugh, but it had punctured and gone flat. “Besides,” she had said, trying for an offhanded manner, “he wouldn’t have me. He already as much as told me that. ‘I’m looking for somebody who knows the Lord’ is how he put it.” When I did not reply, she had concluded our conversation with a tone of false brightness. “And we all know I don’t qualify in that category!”

  Between the time of our dinner at the Field Pea Restaurant in November and Birdie’s coming to my house with a new set of dishes in December, I had spoken to Joan by telephone one other time and had accompanied her only a week earlier, on December 10, to a concert in Greenville by a touring brass quintet from New England who called themselves the Gateway Five.

  As after any other performance, we went to the Second Cup Coffee Shop, where she composed her newspaper critique. My contribution, as with all musical concerts, was largely confined to suggestions concerning diction, for she possessed a broad understanding of music.

  Though disinclined to ready displays of affection, Mayfield Spalding had given his daughter something of value, something that she had never interpreted as an act of love, though I have attempted from time to time to instruct her in this matter. From the time Joan was six years old, her father had engaged teachers for her in piano and later violin. He had monitored her practice sessions in the evenings and had attended every recital in which Joan had played, though, according to her, he had always sat in the back row and then, after she played, had left and waited for her in the car. She continued her study of piano and violin through college. Even now she plays in the community orchestra in Greenville and has a standing invitation as guest soloist at the Fiddlin’ Fair, which closes the annual Hayride Festival in Clinton.

  The Gateway Five performed a repertoire astounding, I thought, in its variety, especially considering the fact that the concert was in December, thereby leading one to believe that the program would consist of Christmas music. This was not the case; the pieces ranged from Baroque fugues to transcriptions of standard orchestral works to ethnic dances. In her description of a stunningly discordant passage in a twentieth-century piece, Joan used the word rambunctious, for which I recommended a more aurally precise substitution: bellicose. She nodded as she made the change. In another sentence I suggested that she utilize the adjective confluent to describe the merging of two melodies in counterpoint. Again, she did so.

  Though Joan made mention of Virgil Dunlop only once during the evening, I knew that she still thought of him often. As we sat at the Second Cup after the concert, she asked if I thought the trombonist of the Gateway Five was as technically proficient as the other four players. In fact, I did not. Though my ear is not trained in the finer aspects of brass instrumental techniques, I believe that I possess a keen sense of hearing and a naturally discriminating ear for musical quality. I had detected a want of facility and crispness in certain exposed passages by the trombonist, who was a rather gaunt man with a beaklike nose and long wisps of wiry gray hair that fanned out stiffly behind his ears as if from an electrical charge. He looked to me like a character from Washington Irving’s imagination, a kinsman of Rip Van Winkle, perhaps.

  Joan scribbled a sentence or two, then paused to stare at the plastic cap of her Bic ball-point pen. “Virgil said he used to play the trombone in high school,” she said. She wrote two or three more words and then looked up again, pressing the knuckle of her forefinger into the center of her chin. I wondered if she was perhaps thinking of the cleft in Virgil Dunlop’s chin. “He said every instrument had its own personality,” she continued, “or I mean the people who played them.” I must have looked puzzled, for she began to explain. “All the trumpet players in his band were these feisty, fast talking show-offs, he said, and the clarinets were these odd little fastidious kids, and the—”

  She broke off as if suddenly losing interest in the whole business. Running a finger across her brow to straighten her bangs, she returned her attention to the sheet of paper before her. As she bent her head to write, her black hair fell about her face like a dark silk veil.

  I will continue the story of Joan and Virgil as my narrative moves forward, but as Christmas neared, this is how the relationship stood: Joan’s interest in Virgil Dunlop had not waned but had apparently grown warmer. The fact still amazed me, knowing Joan as I did. That Virgil seemed unwilling to pursue a deeper friendship could be seen as one of his chief attractions, I suppose, although I am in no way suggesting that Joan was drawn to him only as a teenager, adoring one who appears inaccessible, who “plays hard to get,” as the saying goes. Since Joan is sensible, intelligent, and mature, I do not believe this was the case.

  To return to December 17, Birdie and Mickey reappeared upon our doorstep within an hour of departing, Mickey now wearing a ball cap to the back of which was affixed an imitation ponytail. Thomas, whose display of mirth once again exceeded proper boundaries, reacted with great hilarity and asked Mickey where he had bought the cap, after which he declared his intention of buying one for himself. “That’ll really go over big in the hardware store,” he said.

  Birdie shook her head and said to me, “Margaret, I think we’ve got a couple of little boys on our hands.” She meant it in fun, of course, but I knew it to be true.

  Between the time that Birdie and Mickey had left and returned, I had completed the making of a large pot of potato soup. I had already peeled and diced the potatoes earlier in the day as well as fried, drained, and crumbled six strips of lean bacon. The actual assembling of the soup was no difficult task. I always use one can of evaporated milk to one cup of two-percent milk and one-half cup of water for the soup base. On this day I quadrupled the amounts designated on my recipe, also adding increased portions of chopped onion, parsley, salt, and pepper for flavor. The roast beef had only to be sliced and arranged upon a plate. I had cooked it for our supper on the previous night and, as is my custom, had wrapped part of what was left to use for sandwiches. I had baked a chocolate cream pie that morning and set it in the refrigerator to chill.

  We sat down to supper at half past six. At my direction Thomas had inserted several compact discs into the player so that the music of Strauss, and later of Mozart, could be heard from the living room. I had laid the table with a blue-checked cotton tablecloth and blue napkins, both of which complemented the blue violet of the morning glory design on the dishes. Both Birdie and Mickey ascende
d into ecstasies over the table setting. “It belongs in a magazine!” Birdie kept repeating.

  Although I ate only a small serving of soup and half a sandwich, the others took seconds. The kitchen seemed to me a contracted version of itself that night, as if the ceiling and four walls had shifted inward. The effect for me was as of finding myself suddenly hedged about in a thick fog, hearing sounds that were at the same time muffled yet amplified. And though on the one hand I felt adrift in my own home, ill suited for my role as hostess, I felt on the other a deep satisfaction, as of setting one’s craft upon a straight course. In spite of limited visibility, my chart was reliable. Hospitality was good, and the laughter and talk around our table seemed a fitting thing.

  The evening of December 17 is engraved upon my memory. I could write an epic titled “December 17: Six Hours of Time.” Someday perhaps I will do so, but at present I feel that I must pass over many of the particulars of the evening in order to reveal a discovery that came to my attention as Birdie and Mickey were taking their leave a few minutes past ten o’clock.

  The evening had been a success. Though my nerves were somewhat frayed from the strain of navigating through unfamiliar waters, it had surprised me to find that Thomas was a comfortable and genial host. Had he been as awkward as I, our venture into entertaining would surely have capsized.

  We had talked of many things both during and following our meal. Mickey had spoken at length of kite flying, a lifelong hobby, and of purple martins, which flocked to his gourd birdhouses in great numbers each spring. Birdie had told amusing stories about former neighbors of theirs in Tuscaloosa, one of whom discovered in an attic trunk a genuine Stradivarius violin. Another neighbor, by the name of Oliver Malone, had been extremely fond of turnips and had planted turnip seeds each spring. “Imagine everybody’s surprise,” Birdie said, “when a new family moved in right next door to the Malones with the last name of—you won’t believe this,” and together Birdie and Mickey had cried, “Turnipseed!”