The bedspread itself was growing thin from use. The looped fringe along the edges looked ragged as if frequently snagged. The gold braided rug beside the bed had begun to unstitch near the center, and I saw a corkscrew of transparent nylon thread lying loose atop it. The plain dark blue curtains at the windows looked listless from repeated washings. They were the same curtains that I had hung in the room when I first moved into my duplex. The bedside lamp, with its stout wooden base, was purely functional. It had never possessed aesthetic appeal even when new. The lampshade, once a creamy white, had darkened to the color of scorched parchment.
Having no eye for decorating, Thomas had never expressed discontent with his bedroom or its spartan furnishings, although it was he, strangely, who over the years had brought home a number of accessories for other rooms of our duplex: an oak magazine rack, a ceramic urn, a rattan wall shelf, and an Oriental umbrella intended for ornament.
Thomas’s bedroom was clean and tidy, for there were no knickknacks to clutter it. As I scanned its length and breadth, however, it came to me that it was a cheerless place to spend one’s private hours. There was but a single picture in the room, a large framed print of a Carolina wren upon a dogwood branch, and above the bed hung a gun rack displaying one rifle, which I believe was in working order though, of course, unloaded.
I ran my hand across the raised geometric pattern of the chenille bedspread and wondered whether Thomas had a bedtime ritual. Did he look through back issues of Field and Stream before turning out his light? Several were stacked neatly upon his bedside table. Did he plump his pillow? Did he pull the bed covers snugly to his chin, or did he fling them back to sleep unfettered? It struck me that I did not even know whether my husband customarily slept on his back or on his side. Furthermore, it had never occurred to me to wonder. Did Thomas fall asleep immediately upon lying down, I wondered now, or did he remain awake, tossing restlessly? If so, what did he think about during the night hours? On the chair beside his bureau I saw the electric heating pad, its cord wrapped neatly around it. Thomas must have used it recently, but why? I wondered whether he had ever gone into my bedroom when I was not at home and sat musing upon my bed as I was doing upon his.
By the time Thomas returned home later that afternoon, I had collected my wits enough to have our Sunday meal ready to serve. Though it had not taken a great deal of effort, the food was tasty and received Thomas’s verbal approbation. I had saved the gravy I had served with the pot roast a few days earlier, and to that I had added the roast beef that still remained from what we had used for sandwiches the previous night. I had cut the meat into chunks, stirred it into the gravy, and simmered it slowly. This I spooned over beds of rice as a rich, savory sauce. To complement the main dish, I also served purple hull peas, creamed corn, julienne carrots, baked zucchini sprinkled with basil and parmesan cheese, and sweet muffins.
I attended to Thomas’s talk at dinner that day more closely than usual, and I observed him when he was not looking at me. As I have said in an earlier chapter, Thomas is not an unattractive man. He looks a decade younger than his seventy years, carries his height with a natural dignity, and has what has been called a photogenic smile. If he did not speak aloud and if he dressed the part, I suppose he could pass for a veteran politician, even a former president perhaps. He is more handsome than Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, or Richard Nixon but lacks the youthful lines of John Kennedy or Bill Clinton. His looks run more toward those of Ronald Reagan, I suppose, although during the Reagan era Thomas could never reconcile himself to the fact that “a movie actor was runnin’ the whole John-Brown country.”
Early in the meal he launched into a tale related to him that afternoon by Ned Boswell, one of his card-playing foursome. It was a farfetched story, a “humdinger” as Thomas called it, involving a dead cat and a shopping bag, and I interrupted him midway, asking, “Did Ned Boswell witness this incident firsthand?”
“Naw, but his next door neighbor said she knew the woman’s best friend who it happened to over near Pelzer,” Thomas said. He resumed the story, and I listened to its conclusion, in which an ambulance figured.
“I believe Ned has been taken in by what is known as an urban legend,” I said when Thomas had finished the story.
“A what?” he asked. “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think it’s true?”
“I heard Francine tell the same story to Algeria and Birdie two months ago in the school kitchen,” I said. “The only variation in her version was that the final scene took place in a doughnut shop instead of a Chick-Fil-A. According to Francine, her mother heard the story from a man who used to live in Powdersville, whose brother knew the ambulance driver. Moreover,” I added, “after Francine recovered from her fit of giggles at the end of the story, Algeria informed her that her mother had heard the story a year ago from her mailman, who said that his chiropractor told it to him. According to the chiropractor, he saw it happen outside a McDonald’s next to a mall. In Francine’s story the victim was a white woman, and in Algeria’s it was a black man.”
Thomas gaped at me for a brief time and then threw back his head and laughed robustly. “Wait’ll I tell Ned!” He laughed again, thumping the table, and then asked, “What’s that you call it again?”
“An urban legend.” I then told him in abbreviated form another such story about a man, a cigarette, and a can of hair spray that had been passed around as fact in the Midwest many years ago. It, too, ended with ambulance attendees bearing the hapless man away upon a stretcher. When I was a girl, my mother had told me of hearing the story upon five different occasions, each time in slightly altered form, from persons claiming to have close ties to someone who knew the man.
Thomas pondered this silently for some time. “’Course stories like that could’ve started out true, you know,” he said. He was slowly peeling the paper from around another muffin, handling it gently, almost admiringly, as if fearful of doing it harm. “It could be a case of passin’ somethin’ around so much that it just keeps gettin’ a little bigger. And then so’s he won’t sound like a total fool, the feller tellin’ it says he heard it from so ’n so, who knew the person—had him over for supper ever’ Tuesday or played checkers with him or somethin’.”
I conceded that such might be the case, that were it possible to trace an urban legend to its source, there very likely could be an original anecdote of valid credentials bearing some slight resemblance to the augmented public rendition. “But mankind is seldom satisfied with the plain truth,” I said, and Thomas nodded gravely.
The rest of the meal passed in a routine manner. At five o’clock, after the dishes were washed and put away, Thomas said to me, “Come go with me, Rosie. I want to run over to Derby for just a minute. We won’t be gone long.” He was standing in the kitchen doorway, retucking his flannel shirt inside his trousers.
“I have things to do here at home,” I said, and picking up the dishcloth, I wiped the countertop again, although I had already done so three times. The truth was this: Though pleased at the invitation—for Thomas seldom asked me to accompany him anywhere—replying negatively had become such a habit that the words had fallen as if of their own accord.
“Aw, come on, Rosie. You’ll like this. It’s a new county flea market Norm told me about. They’re doin’ it just one weekend a month through the winter, but it closes down at six on Sundays. It’s indoors at the old fiber mill in Derby. He told me today there’s some feller’s got a booth with all kinds of tools and car parts for sale.”
“Flea markets are a blight on society,” I replied. “They are often nothing but dens of thieves peddling their stolen wares.”
“You know good and well that’s not always the case,” Thomas remonstrated teasingly. Then his eyes brightened. “Say, I’ll tell you what, though. You ride along with me, and I’ll drop you off at that library in Derby you like so much, and then I’ll go and hobnob with the thieves and robbers all by myself.”
“Some of the vendors ha
ve been arrested and their goods confiscated,” I said with asperity. The mention of the library made the offer tempting, however. I generally visited the Derby Public Library on Tuesdays after my piano lesson at Birdie’s house, but if I went today I could return the books that I had already finished and check out more. I was particularly wanting to look for a copy of a book by Tobias Wolff called This Boy’s Life, of which I had read several favorable reviews. I had known of the book for perhaps four years but for some reason had never secured a copy. Only recently I had once again seen it cited on a list of “Contemporary Memoirs Worth Reading.” Though I prefer novels, I also read biographies, historical works, adventure sagas, and collections of essays. In this way I am able to mollify my literary conscience. I do not live altogether in a fantasy world, I can tell myself. I have one foot firmly planted in reality.
“The library closes at six on Sundays,” I said, with a glance at the clock upon the wall.
“Well, then, that’s perfect,” said Thomas. “It’s all set. We can be there in twelve minutes, and that’ll leave us both forty-five minutes or so to look around. Let’s go!” He bowed in the kitchen doorway with an absurdly exaggerated flourish of the hand toward the front door, in the fashion of an Elizabethan courtier.
Without reply I hastened to gather my library books and purse from my bedroom, then put on my coat and followed Thomas to the car. The trip to Derby passed quickly, with Thomas telling me a story I had heard before. It was a story his aunt Prissy had loved to recite concerning her father, who had purportedly driven his 1928 Ford down into the Grand Canyon on a mule trail and forded the Colorado River in the car.
“Come to think of it, betcha that was one of them urban legends, too!” he said when he finished. “Nobody could’ve done that. Betcha there’s grown people all over the country claimin’ their uncles and grandpas did the same thing.” A few moments later, as we passed Shepherd’s Valley Cemetery and the Freemans’ house, Thomas chuckled. “I’ll have to ask Mickey if he’s ever heard any of these crazy stories. He’ll get a kick out of ’em.”
I found myself wondering, as I cast my gaze upon Birdie’s house, how the icing of the cupcakes had gone the night before. Had Mickey helped her as he had promised? And in spite of myself, another thought crossed my mind. I wondered if the Christmas program at their church had been well received that morning. Had Birdie played an organ solo at some point? It came to me that Birdie and Mickey would soon be preparing to leave their house, frosted cupcakes in hand, for the Sunday evening service and the fellowship of which they had spoken.
I did, in fact, find This Boy’s Life at the library that day, along with several other books that interested me, and as I stood in the glass-enclosed lobby a few minutes before six o’clock waiting for Thomas to return for me, I riffled through the pages of Tobias Wolff’s book, sensing the familiar swell of anticipation that every avid reader knows. My eyes lighted upon an account of Tobias Wolff’s mother, who was an active listener to the woes of others, responding readily, as he described it, “with intense concentration and partisan outbursts of sympathy.” A picture of Birdie sprang to my mind. I saw her brown eyes agleam with feeling as she listened to a stranger in a supermarket line. I heard her prompt words of comfort, of encouragement, of goodwill. And, oddly, I felt the touch of her hand, as if I were the stranger.
It was at this juncture that a most unexpected encounter occurred. A station wagon pulled to a stop in front of the entrance. Behind me I heard a voice from inside the library. “Here’s our ride, Willard! I’ll go on out and tell Jewel you’ll be along directly, soon as you get all the lights out and things locked up nice and tight.” Even though spoken from the other side of the glass door, I heard the words distinctly.
The door behind me opened, and I heard the voice again. “Oh, my stars, I didn’t know somebody was out here waiting in the vestibule!” I believe it was at that instant that I identified the woman’s voice, though I did not turn around. Deep and throaty with a muffled resonance, it was not a voice that one could easily forget. “Just set your mind at ease, honey,” she said, and as I heard her slow steps shuffling toward me from behind, I stiffened with dread. “We won’t go off and leave you all by your lonesome. No, sir, not a bit of it! Willard and me will wait right here with you till your ride shows up.”
By this time she had reached my side. As she turned slowly to face me, a most peculiar smile transformed her features into an expression of luminous pain, although, given her words, I was quite certain, as I had been upon our first meeting in Birdie’s driveway, that she meant it for joy. Her face was prominently presented to the world with no softening frame of hair, for she wore a dark green woolen scarf wound and cinched tightly about her head, well off her brow. Indeed, she could have passed for an old Russian grandmother. Her eyebrows, extraordinarily thick, hung down over her eyes like bushy visors. She was a large woman, you may remember, and the copious gray cape that she wore today amplified her size.
“Why, I’ll be if it’s not Margaret Tuttle!” she cried. “Remember me—Eldeen Rafferty? I met you at Birdie’s that day when the Lord sent me out there to give away my prize turkey. And there you were in Birdie’s driveway, just standin’ there waitin’ like you are right now! My, my, my. I’m glad I decided to come to the library today, else I wouldn’t of seen you!” She laughed with delight and clapped her large, gloved hands together. Then she leaned forward a bit and raised the volume of her voice, as if my hearing were impaired. “Did he bake up nice and juicy and golden brown for you?”
I looked quickly toward the station wagon outside and saw that a woman had emerged from it and was hurrying toward the entrance with an umbrella, for a light pattering of rain had commenced. I wished earnestly for Thomas’s arrival. My mind suddenly filled with uncharitable thoughts as I imagined him engaged in price haggling with some shady huckster at the flea market while I was forced to wait in the company of this woman of unparalleled verbosity.
Turning back to Eldeen Rafferty, I nodded. “Yes, the turkey was most satisfactory.”
“Oh, now, that tickles me good to hear that!” she said. “I keep asking Birdie about you every week at church. ‘How’s your pretty friend Margaret Tuttle?’ I say to her, and she says, ‘Oh, just as pretty as ever.’ I told her there was something about you that I just couldn’t put my finger on”—she lifted a large forefinger and glared at it fiercely—“but it was something I liked, something I liked a whole lot.” With the last two words she jabbed her finger toward me and bestowed upon me another of her tortured smiles.
The other woman had made her way from outdoors into the lobby by now. “That’s my daughter Jewel,” Eldeen said proudly, and the woman smiled cordially. “This here’s my friend Margaret Tuttle,” Eldeen said to Jewel. “We’re just waitin’ till her ride comes.” Before I could assure her that I would wait outside alone, she cried out, “Oh, good, and here comes Willard now! You can meet him, too!” She pointed to the man now locking the interior door and said, as if announcing a dignitary, “That’s my son-in-law, Willard Scoggins. He’s Jewel’s husband.” I knew the man by sight, of course, having frequented the Derby Public Library for many years. He looked up and spoke a friendly word of greeting.
“He works here,” Eldeen continued, “and I’ve spent the afternoon today with him here at the library like I do sometimes, and now we’re on our way to church. Normally he doesn’t work till closing time on Sundays because of choir practice—he leads the choir, you see—but there isn’t any choir practice tonight. And even at that, he’d normally ride to church in his own car, except that it’s in the shop gettin’ the brakes fixed, so we’re havin’ to double up. He’s felt the brakes slippin’ for a while now. The pedal would go all the way to the floor!” She extended one arm, pressing the heel of her hand forward as if to demonstrate the faulty pedal. I was astounded, as I had been at our previous meeting, that the woman took for granted my interest in the mundane details of her life.
As Jewel turned t
o speak to Willard, Eldeen moved closer to me and said in a confiding tone, “Willard just got promoted to head librarian a little over two months ago. He moved into a new office, the one right off the big check-out desk, you know. That’s where Miss Mabel Weatherby’s office used to be. It has the big plaster of Paris penguin sittin’ by the door and that great big globe clock on the wall, which is sure a sight to behold except that most all the countries of Africa has different names now, but I say hang on to it ’cause someday it’ll be an antique!”
With barely a pause for breath, the woman pressed forward. “Miss Weatherby left lots of her things for Willard to use since she doesn’t have any place for them at home in her little apartment, which to hear her tell it is no bigger’n a doll’s house. You ought to see this pair of bookends she left Willard that’s two halves of a unicorn. They’re heavy, too—made out of real cast iron. I told him he sure better not drop the front half on his toe ’cause that horn could poke a hole right through a body’s shoe, not to mention their foot! She’s retired now, you know—Miss Weatherby, that is. They gave her a going-away party back in September and had it right here in the library with streamers and party hats and whistles and all kinds of folderol. Had lots of refreshments, too. Jewel made some of the best little cream cheese cakes with a little dollop of raspberry sauce plopped on top and some pretty little rolled-up ham salad sandwiches and deviled eggs and this punch that had dabs of orange sherbet floatin’ around in it and …”
“Mama, your friend might not be interested in the whole menu,” Jewel said, smiling at me from behind Eldeen. Her husband, I noticed, was moving about the small lobby, retrieving bits of paper and depositing them into the trash receptacle. He picked up two soft drink cans against the wall and shook them slightly.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 37
