At the time, I was counting the cartons of milk in the cooler. With the holidays approaching, I wanted no surplus. While I did not gawk unabashedly at the two of them as did Francine, I could not help wondering why Algeria, who, like me, generally bristled when touched, had conducted herself in this manner.
“Hey, hey, you two, what’s going on?” Francine asked but received no answer.
At last Algeria released Birdie, held her by the shoulders, and said gruffly, “Bless you, Birdie.”
“Oh, honey, you’re as welcome as can be,” Birdie said, and though they both laughed, I believe they could as easily have wept.
That afternoon the mystery was brought to light. I stayed later than usual, busying myself in my office and the pantry, and then I drove to the bank to make the day’s deposit, after which I returned to the school, for I meant to speak with Birdie privately. By this time she had settled herself at the desk in my office cubicle with a stack of papers before her, assuming that I was gone for the day.
She had typed and duplicated a Christmas issue of Sheep Tales a week earlier but was reading through poems and stories on the subject of winter fun in preparation for the January publication. She remained charmed by the samples submitted to her by the teachers, although my assessment of the children’s writing skills was considerably less glowing. In comparing their facility with language to my own as a child, I felt that our schools were falling far short of the mark. There were, of course, isolated examples of clean and unspoiled writing. One child, for example, had written “I shook the burned-out light bulb and heard jingle bells far away.” This, I thought, was a felicitous metaphor. Another child wrote that “the brook rushed and swirled over the rocks like foamy milk,” and another wrote about a fairy who “had little yellow wings the size of a flower petal” and lived inside a cookie jar.
When I walked into my office, Birdie leapt to her feet. “Oh, Margaret, I’m sorry! I thought you had already left. Here, do you need your desk back?”
I told her that I did not and went to my filing cabinet as if searching for something. I removed a folder, of which I had no need, and, after closing the drawer, asked Birdie whether she would be traveling during the Christmas holidays. She looked surprised but not displeased that I had questioned her thus and answered that their plans were to stay at home. We talked in this manner for several minutes, she turning the same question upon me and proposing in dulcet tones that we “get together again over the holidays.”
My primary aim in seeing her after hours was to satisfy my curiosity concerning the incident between Algeria and herself that morning. I was hoping that she would talk of the incident unprodded, but when she did not, I asked her forthrightly, and she willingly explained the matter.
On Monday of the same week, only two days earlier, Birdie had invited Algeria to her home for supper the following night, but Algeria had declined, saying that she could not leave her mother. When urged to bring her mother, Birdie said that she had again refused, at last explaining that her mother was bedridden.
“Come to find out,” Birdie said, “Algeria never goes anywhere at night because she’s always taking care of her mother. During the day while she’s here at work, she pays a neighbor to go over a couple of times to check on her, and of course she has brothers and sisters coming in and out, but they’re grown and have families of their own, some of them. There’s two brothers that still live at home, I believe, but one of them’s had a lot of trouble with the law and that’s really on Algeria’s mind a lot. And there’s an elderly uncle who lives next door who can hardly walk, so Algeria helps him out when she can, and she’s always baby-sitting for her nieces and nephews, too—or maybe it’s great-nieces and nephews. Anyway, she’s the mainstay for the whole family! If she decided to think about just herself and go off somewhere for supper, there’d be nobody to look after her mother and her uncle and her brothers and everybody else.”
To think that I had worked with Algeria for over ten years and had never known these facts about her life, except that her brother Sahara had been in jail, caused me to feel a twinge of shame. I wondered whether she had ever told Francine about her family.
“But if she declined your invitation, what prompted the display of emotion toward you this morning?” I asked.
Birdie shook her head as if discounting a minor point. “Oh, well, when we found out what the situation was, we decided to take supper over to her. Mickey was such a big help. He got off work early and fixed some of his soda biscuits and roasted a whole chicken and made the best glaze for it! I made this mashed potato casserole that everybody seems to like and some crowder peas and other things. Mickey helped me make a pie—just a plain old apple pie, but it turned out pretty.”
“Had you told Algeria that you were bringing a meal?” I said.
“I told her not to cook anything that night,” Birdie said, “so she had to know what we were up to. But we didn’t get there till after six-thirty, and I was afraid she was going to think I wasn’t coming even though I told her it might be after six. It turned out that when we got there, she had run next door to her uncle’s, and it was one of her brothers that let us in. Cairo, I think he said his name was. We took everything to the kitchen and then said hello to her mother—oh, Margaret, she’s the pitifulest sight—and then we scooted away before Algeria got back from next door. It was such fun!”
I realized then that this mission of hospitality must have been executed the day before, on Tuesday, the afternoon of my piano lesson. Yet Birdie had spoken not a word to me of her plan on Tuesday, and I had sensed no anxiety in her manner, no attempts to cut short my lesson so that she could be busy about her work. She had walked with me to the driveway, as was her custom, and had stood waving while I maneuvered my Ford onto Highway 11. By my estimation she had been left with only three hours to assemble and deliver the meal for Algeria and her family.
It came to me as I stood in my office that afternoon that Birdie Freeman considered the feeding of others her ministry. She took to heart the injunction “Feed the hungry.” Food was her craft, her defining grace, her gift to the world. It is perhaps surprising that I felt no pangs of jealousy upon hearing of her labor on Algeria’s behalf. Now that she was my friend, I could have clamped down upon her in an emotional sense, becoming possessive and resentful of her overtures to others. That I did not do so is a credit to Birdie, not to myself. Though her service to others never slackened after we became friends, I nevertheless felt that she extended to me a double portion of her generosity, the cream of her love. Perhaps others felt the same way, that she was their special friend. If so, it was because of her great supple heart, capable both of absorbing all and of wringing itself dry.
Concerning her relationship with Algeria, another notable interchange occurred later, in January, when emotions nationwide were flaring over the courtroom drama involving the former black football hero accused of murder.
On the day after the verdict had been made public, Francine and Algeria had engaged in a brief but acrimonious row, after which each had gone about her work sullenly for some time. Francine, of course, hotly maintained that “O. J. Simpson was guilty as a dirty rag,” that “he blew a gasket and killed those two people, then tried to cover his tracks.” She was enraged that he had “gotten off scot-free” and attributed his acquittal to “money and power, pure and simple.” Algeria, on the other hand, held that “a bunch of bigoted police” had “set ’im up” and “they was so blind with hate they didn’t even see their own stupid mistakes.”
Birdie winced visibly over the heated altercation and, after a long interlude of rancorous silence, set about making peace. “Oh, let’s don’t quarrel like this,” she said, flashing appealing looks to both Algeria and Francine, though they pointedly avoided her eyes. It was already late morning by now, and most of the preparations for lunch had been completed. Birdie sat down on a stool at the large steel table with a slice of cheese pizza—the main selection for the day—on a napkin before her. W
hen no one responded to her plea, she bowed her head and closed her eyes for what seemed to be several minutes. She always prayed before eating her lunch but seldom at such length.
I was standing in the kitchen at the time, replenishing the stock of disposable tableware at the serving line. I saw first Algeria and then Francine cast watchful glances toward Birdie. Generally, the three of them sat down together for an early lunch sometime before eleven o’clock, but today Francine and Algeria had stationed themselves in opposing corners of the kitchen, like boxers between rounds. Each was eating pizza, Francine sulking at a smaller worktable beside the large sink and Algeria leaning against the ice machine, almost hidden from Francine’s view. Thus positioned, Algeria was only a few steps from Birdie whereas Francine was perhaps twenty feet away.
Birdie at last opened her eyes and looked up, first at Algeria, then at Francine. She had to speak quite loudly to be heard over the hum of the ventilators. “Nobody’s asked me,” she said, “but I’m going to tell you what I think about all this O. J. business anyway.” She took a small bite of pizza and chewed with great deliberation. “There’s probably no way we’re ever going to know the truth,” she said at last, “but I think you’re both right.”
Algeria and Francine looked at her suspiciously but said nothing, and she continued. “Yes, I do. I think you’re both right. My first reaction, when I heard the earliest reports, was that he probably did it.” She looked directly at Algeria, who grunted and jerked her head to the side. “And I still think there’s a good chance that he did,” Birdie said. “But …” she paused and addressed Francine across the room. “I also think it’s the lowest and most despicable thing in the world when men who’ve sworn to uphold the law are shown to have mean, lying spirits. That detective lied on the witness stand, and I wouldn’t put it past somebody like that to plant false evidence just to be spiteful.”
Algeria was looking at her again, studying her from grim, narrowed eyes. “It seems to me,” Birdie said, “that half the people are saying he’s guilty and the other half are saying the police are guilty, but I think—and Mickey says the same thing—that both sides could be guilty. Maybe O. J. did kill those people, and maybe the police did tamper with things.”
As I headed toward the pantry, I said curtly, “The first class will be arriving soon. I trust that things are in order.”
“Yes, they are, Margaret,” Birdie replied firmly, then closed her argument with Algeria and Francine thus: “A lot of bad, bad things were aired in public through all this. It’s hard to believe the ugly things human beings will do. Some days I tell Mickey I don’t want to even watch the news or read the paper, and lots of days I don’t! But there’s somebody who knows what the whole truth is about all this O. J. business, and that’s God. It’s all over now, at least the trial is, and we’ve got to go on living and working together. We’ve got to leave it behind us and just do our part to be good and honest and…well, just treat people the way we want to be treated. I say we lay it all aside and be friends like we’ve always been.”
She lifted her carton of milk and sipped through the straw, then set it down and smiled in turn at Francine and Algeria. Raising both hands as if in surrender, she said, “I’m done now! That’s all I’m going to say.” Very meticulously she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and added, “Well, then, I guess we’d better get ready for the children!”
Though Francine and Algeria did not give voice to their reconciliation, I heard Francine say later, after the last class had been served, “Oh, good grief, I just slopped peach juice all over the floor here,” and I saw Algeria make her way at once to the janitor’s closet and return to mop it up.
Sometime in January I discovered that Mickey Freeman had upon more than one occasion visited Algeria’s brother Sahara in the county jail. This came about when I overheard Birdie and Algeria talking in the kitchen one day. “Mickey says he thinks Sahara’s making a real turnaround,” Birdie said. Her back was toward me. Algeria’s reply was indecipherable. “Well, the last couple of times Mickey’s talked to him,” Birdie replied, “he said Sahara’s really listened. And he’s been reading the Bible Mickey brought him, too.”
Likewise, Birdie became a participant in Francine’s life. I learned from overheard conversations, for example, that Francine’s son Champ had attended a bowling activity with one of the teens from Birdie’s church, and that Francine and her children had gone to a Sunday morning service at the Church of the Open Door and stayed for a potluck dinner afterward. Also, Birdie and Mickey had kept Francine’s two youngest children, BoBo and Watts, overnight when Francine and her mother had driven to Aiken to visit Francine’s sister following an emergency operation for a ruptured spleen, which Francine had described in minute detail to Algeria and Birdie as they prepared macaroni and cheese in the lunchroom kitchen the day after she returned.
At last Algeria had said, “Shut up, you makin’ me sick!” and Francine had concluded her remarks with “Well, anyway, she’s gonna have a scar that’s something else.” Within minutes she had begun telling of a woman she had met in the hospital waiting room whose husband had lost a foot to gangrene and stopped only when Birdie patted her shoulder and said, “Well, Francine, I’m going to be praying for both your sister and that poor man on a regular basis. Now, honey, will you help me get these pinto beans heated up?”
It was from Birdie that I learned of Francine’s failure to collect child support from her former husband, who had left for work one morning two weeks after Watts was born and had never returned home. I had known none of this. “She sure is plucky to be raising those four children all by herself without a bit of help!” Birdie had said.
As for Thomas and me, Mickey and Birdie continued indefatigably to seek our company. As the new year began, scarcely a week went by without our taking a meal together. We frequently played Rook, table tennis, and the Dictionary Game, and on an unseasonably warm Saturday in February we even played croquet on the expansive lawn in front of Birdie and Mickey’s house. After our croquet game, Mickey grilled hamburgers on their patio in the backyard, and with her hand mixer Birdie made chocolate milk shakes, which we drank out of root beer mugs. In the months that followed, Birdie taught me the joy of laughter. “You’ve changed so much since I first met you, Margaret!” she often said. Whenever we talked of our first two months together as co-workers, she always exclaimed, “I was just convinced that you couldn’t stand the sight of me!”
Thomas took to dropping by the Freemans’ house whenever he drove to Greenville on Saturdays, and he and Mickey often played checkers on these occasions and watched an Andy Griffith rerun. One day Mickey took Thomas to the Lackeys’ house through the stand of pine trees and introduced him to Mervin Lackey, who owned a fishing boat, and one Saturday the three men drove to Lake Jocassee to fish for trout.
My piano lessons continued on Tuesdays and Fridays, with the issuance in February of an unexpected proposal from Birdie.
“Margaret,” she said to me one Friday afternoon as we drove to her home, “how would you like to play the organ?” It was a chilly day, and she wore a tartan muffler about her neck.
“Have you given up on my learning to play the piano?” I asked.
“Given up?” she cried, throwing her hands in the air and laughing. “Why, I’ve taught you practically everything I know. In another year you’ll be way ahead of me, and I’m not just saying that.” She grew somber. “I was thinking,” she continued, fingering the fringe of her muffler, “you’re going to need somebody one of these days who really has some training to take you further in piano. I’m sure you could find somebody qualified over in Greenville. But here’s my idea for now—I was thinking it might be fun for you to try your hand at the organ.”
She pointed suddenly to a car coming toward us on the other side of the road. “I think that’s Dottie Puckett! She and Sid live up on the highway a little past us. Sid runs the Texaco, and Dottie has a beauty shop—you’ve probably seen the sign for it.” She le
aned forward and waved with vigor, though, of course, the other woman could not have recognized her. Settling back, she continued laying out her plan. “I don’t mean give up the piano but just branch out and take on another challenge. The organ’s got a different touch from the piano, but I think you’d like it real well. How would you like to try it?”
The proposition provoked my interest, although I wondered whether professional keyboard pedagogues would have endorsed the plan. It does not strike me as an ideal instructional tactic to introduce two different instruments in so short a time to a novice musician. Even as I considered the idea with piquant regard, however, I saw an immediate obstacle. “Neither of us has an organ,” I said.
Birdie had foreseen both the impediment and a solution. “Oh, but we do!” she said. “You see, I checked with our pastor, and he said we could use the church organ. I usually drive over sometime on Saturday anyway to practice my songs for Sunday, so we could set up a time and you could meet me there—if you could spare the extra time, of course. I know Saturday’s a busy day for catching up at home.”
Like Pharaoh of old, I felt my heart harden. “Have you not invited me without ceasing to your church functions, and have I not repeatedly declined?” I said stiffly. “Do you think that you can now resort to inveiglement to lure me inside your church?”
She appeared to be both puzzled and mildly insulted. “We would be the only ones in the church, Margaret,” she said, “except maybe Brother Hawthorne, but he would be in his office if he was there at all. We’d just be using the organ, and it would only be one time a week for an hour or less. I don’t know what that word inveiglement means, but I’m sure not going to try to force you to do anything. I just thought you might like to try something new is all.”
We were on Highway 11 now, passing the feed store and a defunct gas station with a faded sign: Buster’s Food & Gas. A wondrously gnarled tree stood beside the sign, and for a moment I marveled at the sinister energy suggested by its upraised tangle of black boughs. One could almost imagine that it had been frozen by still photography in the midst of a frenzied dance.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 39
