“Oh, look, a ball practice!” said Birdie. Mickey started singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” quite loudly, and Thomas joined him. The man at home plate stopped midsentence and glared in our direction. Several of the boys laughed as if grateful for a break in the tension.
“Okay, now, listen up!” the man bellowed, turning back to the field. “You let your concentration down like that in a game and you’re sunk! You’ll be exactly the kind of players in a game that you are in practice!” Mickey and Thomas let the song die out, of course, and some of the boys cast uneasy glances toward us.
“Not exactly the Mr. Rogers type, is he?” Mickey said, and we continued along the sidewalk, Birdie never taking her eyes off the field. “Did you play ball as a kid?” Mickey asked Thomas.
“Ate, drank, and slept it,” Thomas said. “My dream was to someday break Babe Ruth’s record.” It was difficult to tell whether he was reporting a fact or employing hyperbole. He had never told me of harboring such a dream as a child.
“How many times do I have to tell you to get your glove down!” the man on the field yelled. “That’s the worst mistake a fielder can make! Don’t let me see that kind of sloppy stuff again, Porter!” The shortstop, who had let the ball roll between his legs, hung his head as the center fielder trotted forward to retrieve the missed ball. The man then hit a fly ball to right field, and a unison moan rose from the field. “Aw, no, Hawkins’ll never catch that,” we heard the first baseman say. All eyes turned toward the right fielder, whose head was thrown back, whose mouth hung open, whose hands dangled loosely at his side, and whose feet were firmly planted. Anyone could see that the ball was going to fall many feet behind him.
“Oh, back up, honey, back up!” Birdie was shouting, gesturing with large, sweeping motions. “You can do it! Get your glove up!”
The boy did take several timid steps backward but had waited too long to move, and the ball landed behind him.
The coach shook his head in disgust, and the boys all seemed to brace themselves for what was coming. “Hawkins! Look at me!” the man yelled, and the boy did. “Do you know what these are?” the coach said, pointing the bat to his own large feet. “They’re called feet! And do you know what these are?” he continued, jabbing two fingers toward his own eyes. “They’re called eyes! And this is a hand!” he said, waving his left hand dramatically. “The eyes and the feet and the hands work together, Hawkins! When your eyes see where the ball is going, you move your feet in that direction, and you raise your hands to catch the ball.”
The coach paused and filled his cheeks with air, then expelled it slowly, shaking his head all the while. “And there’s another part of you that’s got to be working, too, Hawkins, and that’s your brain.” Here he tapped his head lightly with the bat, crossed his eyes, and wagged his tongue. “I know you got feet and hands and eyes, but I got to tell you I’m starting to wonder about the brain!” The other boys laughed, though I suspected that they were doing so not purely out of cruelty but also because they knew that it was what the coach wished them to do.
Birdie stood rooted to the sidewalk for a moment. I had heard her utter a small, choked cry at the beginning of the man’s speech to the hapless right fielder, and she stood now with one hand to her face. Mickey and Thomas had continued walking, talking all the while, unaware that we were not following.
All at once Birdie sprang to action. She made her way quickly to the opening in the fence and directed her steps straightway toward the man standing at home plate, calling all the while, “Excuse me, sir, excuse me! May I have a word with you?” Mickey, hearing her, turned around in alarm. By the time he had taken it in, however, the scene was underway. Birdie had stationed herself only a few inches from the man and, her head lifted upward, was earnestly but quietly conversing with him. Her hands were crossed and placed under her neck as if to shield against a draft, or perhaps a blow.
Mickey, galvanized by the sight, leapt forward and ran toward the fence, waving his hands and crying, “Hold it there, sugar cake! He’s not going to let a woman on his team! It’s for boys! Here, sir, I’ll try to explain it to her!” It was apparent to me, and maybe to the coach also, that Mickey was speaking with irony, using humor to avert a fracas.
Birdie scarcely paused, however, but continued to address the man entreatingly, though I could not hear her words. For his part, the coach appeared to be dazed, glancing back and forth between Birdie, positioned beneath his chin and delivering a seamless monologue, and Mickey, advancing toward him with comic comportment.
The incident lasted no more than two or three minutes, but when Mickey escorted Birdie back to the sidewalk, I saw that she was breathing hard and her mouth was set in a grim line. “Let’s go on back to your house now,” Mickey said to us, and we set off without delay, Thomas and I leading the way.
Ten minutes later we were seated at our kitchen table. I had filled the teakettle with water, and as we waited for it to boil, Mickey attempted to put us all at ease with a silly story about a man who worked at the Barker Bag Company with him, who supposedly had collected old crutches for years and had recently painted them all white and used them to construct a fence for his backyard. He kept looking at Birdie as he talked, and when she laughed at the conclusion of his story, he appeared to be relieved of a burden.
As I served our dessert, white cake with peppermint frosting, Birdie cleared her throat and spoke.
“I’m okay, everybody, so you can all quit walking on eggshells.”
“Well, that’s a load off my mind,” Mickey said, pretending to wipe his brow and examine the soles of his shoes. “But it’s going to take forever to clean up all the little pieces on the floor.”
Birdie slapped his hand lightly and said, “Oh, stop it.” Looking at Thomas and me, she said, “You must think I’m half crazy, but something just comes over me when I see a little child being mistreated. I don’t know of anything that upsets me more! That poor little boy couldn’t help it. He was so…so …”
“So ill equipped to do what was demanded of him,” I said, and to my surprise, the others laughed in a sudden simultaneous rush, as if a valve had been turned to release pressure. Feigning more annoyance than I felt, I continued. “The boy’s parents should not subject the child to such punishment. Anyone can see that he finds no joy in baseball, and he certainly has no natural gift for it. It is a parent’s responsibility to provide opportunities for his child to excel in areas for which he is suited.” I had never before in my life expressed such an opinion, though I do believe it to be true.
Birdie nodded emphatically. “You’re absolutely right, Margaret. Absolutely.” But then her eyes clouded. “So many problems with children are really the parents’ fault—but, then, of course, some of these little children might not even have parents to look out for them. I wonder if that little boy does…. Hawkins, wasn’t that what the man called him? I wonder how many Hawkinses there are in the phone book. Maybe we could …”
“Now, puddin’, you can’t solve all the problems of the world,” Mickey said.
Though we eventually moved to other topics, Birdie still seemed heavy of spirit when she and Mickey wished us a good-night at half past eight. Our evenings together rarely ended so early. After they left, Thomas said, “She sure is a softhearted thing, isn’t she?”
On the following Saturday, March 25, Birdie proposed a picnic. Only once, before we were married, had Thomas and I eaten a picnic lunch out of doors, and my memories of the experience were anything but agreeable. Perhaps an entomologist would have remembered the occasion with greater fondness, but as for me, we had hardly unwrapped our sandwiches before I suggested that we repack our basket and return to my duplex to eat apart from the company of flies, ants, and gnats.
We accompanied Birdie and Mickey on a picnic that March day, however, for Birdie’s heart was set on it, and in Mickey’s words, she would “pout and kick and scream all day if she didn’t get her way,” to which Birdie simply laughed and replied, “No
t to mention holding my breath and biting and scratching!” Mickey urged us to wear comfortable shoes for walking and arranged to pick us up at one o’clock. It was a clear day. The sky was a rinsed blue.
It had been a mild winter, and spring had come early. We drove sixty miles to a state park called Jones Gap, and there we ate our lunch at a table beside a stream. Birdie spread a clean cloth over the table, and I can see its design yet: trellised ivy and yellow butterflies. As it was too early in the year for insects or crowds of people, my recollection of the day is unmitigatedly happy.
We talked of many things as we ate. I recall in particular Mickey’s description of a circus that he and Birdie had attended in Tuscaloosa in the early days of their marriage. “She had never been to one before,” he said, “so I thought I’d better educate her.” He began laughing as he continued, so much so that Birdie had to pick up the narrative and complete it.
As she told it, she had become “woozy when I saw those people up in the air,” and when the trapeze artists began their routine, “I had to put my head between my knees to keep from passing out.” Later, a clown had squirted a water gun into the crowd, hitting Birdie squarely between the eyes, at which she had emitted a startled shriek that “cut right through all the other noise and even made the ringmaster stop and ask if one of the monkeys had gotten loose in the crowd.” When the dogs came out and started doing their tricks with hoops and balls, she said that she “laughed so hard I started crying and hiccuping at the same time.” To make matters worse, Mickey had told all the people sitting around them that he was a scientist and had brought her along with him because he was doing a research project on “Schizophrenics in Highly Stimulating Environments.”
What I remember most vividly about the day, however, is the walk along the trail beside the stream and into the woods off the marked path. There were, of course, many evergreens, and the early pale buds of the basswood, poplar, and river birch were abundant. Most notable, however, were the many species of herbaceous plants that Mickey pointed out as we moved along. Some time earlier I had acquired, as I related in a prior chapter, a personal copy of a field guide for wildflowers and had browsed through it at length. I had not realized before the day of our picnic, however, that one of Mickey’s many interests was the study of regional flora, a hobby he had pursued with keen and assiduous enthusiasm. Indeed, he was a wealth of botanical knowledge, and though he dubbed himself “an amateur,” I had every reason to trust his observations as fact.
As we hiked, Mickey pointed out and identified by name many plants, offering instruction both in simple matters such as the difference between the dicot and monocot, directing our attention to examples of each, and in finer distinctions such as petioled and sessile leaves, various blade margins such as ciliate, serrate, and dentate, and floral structures such as superior and inferior ovularies.
He was filled with delight that day, I recall, to come across a number of early blooming wildflowers: purple field pansies, which, although according to Mickey “you can find them practically anywhere there’s dirt,” were nevertheless a favorite of his; bluets, which grew in delicate clusters along the stream bank; bloodroot, the juice of which may be used as a dye; henbit, which Mickey called “a cute little nuisance of a weed”; and a clump of small bluish flowers newly unfolded that he conjectured to be a species of veronica called bird’s-eye speedwell.
“We’ll have to come back next month,” he said as we turned to make our way back toward the stream. “In April you’ll see a lot of Solomon’s seals and wood anemone and—well, would you look at that!” We had come to a small clearing, and Mickey held up his hand for silence, then tiptoed in exaggerated fashion toward the base of a large rock.
“Look! It’s a trillium!” Mickey said. “It must be the first one of the season. You hardly ever see them this early.” He went on to name the different varieties that grew in our region: the yellow, the narrow-leaved, the nodding, Vasey’s, and the rose trillium. This one was a rose trillium, although the petals were white. Mickey explained that in this species the flower bloomed white and then turned pink.
“Isn’t that pretty the way the petals curve back?” said Birdie. “Oh, Mickey, let’s pick it for Margaret!”
Mickey appeared to pause before reaching down to pluck the trillium, stem and all. Handing it to me, he said, “I can pick flowers by the armload from our backyard and it doesn’t bother me a bit, but it’s hard for me to pick the wild ones for some reason.” Looking down at the flower, he pretended to pat its head and said, “Sorry, little feller, my wife made me do it.”
I have the rose trillium yet today, pressed between sheets of waxed paper in my dictionary, between pages 534 and 535, on which are printed the words beginning with frequent and ending with frolic. Between those guide words lies the word friend.
On the following Saturday, April 1, we pulled into the Freemans’ driveway at four o’clock in the afternoon. The sky had clouded earlier that afternoon, but it had not yet stormed, though heavy rain was in the forecast.
The Freemans’ front door was open, and Mickey waved to us, then disappeared briefly. Moments later Birdie emerged from the house wearing a bright salmon pink dress with a ruffled collar and a black stole of artificial fur draped about her shoulders. Mickey’s dark suit was enlivened by a green and yellow polka-dot bow tie. He carried a large multicolored umbrella. “I told Mickey I’m afraid we look like a couple of April fools!” Birdie said. “I hope we won’t be an embarrassment to you, but I didn’t know how dressed up we should get since we’ve never been to something like this.” She wore pendulous pearl earrings, and two rhinestone combs were nestled among her curls.
“Yep, I bet we’ll turn a few heads with all our frippery,” Mickey said. Frippery was a word that Thomas had selected for a recent round of the Dictionary Game, which the four of us continued to play from time to time. As one would imagine, Mickey’s definitions were always highly preposterous, relying heavily upon wordplay. The definition he had submitted for frippery, for example, had been Chinese acrobatics.
After they had settled themselves in the backseat and Thomas had put the car into gear, Mickey said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, folks, or you’re going to get sick and tired of us.”
“Or the other way around,” said Thomas. As we proceeded down the Freemans’ driveway, I noted that there were three people standing around a grave in the cemetery. I saw one of them, a woman, kneel to lay a bouquet beside the headstone, and I wondered briefly whether she had loved the person buried there or whether she was only there out of obligation.
“Get tired of you? No chance of that!” cried Birdie. “I told Mickey just this week that I feel like the two of you are so deep we could never get to the bottom of you.”
Mickey sang the first two measures of an old Sunday School chorus, “Deep and Wide,” then stopped abruptly and said, “I don’t guess you two know that song, though, do you? And anyway, the wide part might not be taken as a compliment!”
I cannot explain why I spoke aloud the remaining words of the chorus except perhaps to prove that I did know the song. I believe I must have sensed even as I spoke “There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide” that something would come of my carelessness; in truth, perhaps I wanted something to come of it.
“Now, see,” Mickey said to Birdie, “there she goes again.” Then to me he said, “Margaret, I’m going to ask you something you might not like, but if that’s the case, you can just tell me to mind my own business, and we’ll talk about something else like hog-calling contests or the feeding habits of orangutans, take your pick.” Mickey, seated directly behind me, paused a moment as if waiting for encouragement, but I said nothing, neither turned my head to give the appearance of receptivity.
“Now, Mickey, don’t start poking your nose—” Birdie began.
“No, no, now don’t you go shushing me, precious,” said Mickey. “I mean to ask her. We’ve been friends for months now, and we’ve never gotten to the botto
m of this. If she doesn’t want to answer, she’ll make it plain. She’s not shy that way, you know.”
We were headed south on Highway 11 by now, toward Highway 72, which would take us to Abbeville where we were to eat supper and then attend a play at the Abbeville Opera House. The meal had been Birdie’s suggestion, the play mine. Thomas and Mickey had agreed to the trip because, as Mickey said, there was food involved.
“Okay, Margaret, here’s my question,” Mickey said, leaning forward. He took in a great breath of air and then said, “Did you know that when your car battery short-circuits it smells like rotten eggs?”
Thomas laughed a sudden explosive burst, and Birdie said, “Oh, Mickey, you’re just impossible!”
“No, seriously,” Mickey said, “I do have one question for you, Margaret. Here goes. We can tell from things you’ve said that you’ve been to church at some time in your life, and we can sure tell you don’t want to go back—to that church or any other one. What I’m wondering is this: Do you think God is bad because a certain church was bad? Or are you coming at it from the other angle—that churches are bad because God is bad? Or …” He paused for a few seconds, then ended lamely, “Do you just not want to talk about it?”
I believe there is a specific point at which one is ready to talk, when time and the totality of circumstances have coalesced into a ripeness of mind and spirit, and I believe that the trip from Filbert to Abbeville on April 1 was such a time for me. I was willing to open my heart. Seated as we were, I did not have to endure the discomfort and distraction of facing my audience. The question had been posed in the presence of sympathetic listeners, and I had ample time in which to answer it.
“You said that you had one question, but you have asked three,” I replied. I heard Thomas hum a few tuneless notes, as he often does when nervous or amused.
“Okay,” said Mickey boldly, “I’ll take back the last two. How about just the first one?”
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 41
