Birdie swatted Mickey’s napkin away and, turning to Virgil, asked, “Going back to mysteries, how do you think the Egyptians ever got those huge pyramids in place?” Mickey and I shared a look.
My second memory is a picture. Joan was telling of a man with whom she worked, describing his idiosyncratic nature, though not in a mean-spirited fashion. “At least once every half hour he combs his hair,” Joan said, “and he writes everything out by longhand before he enters it in the computer, and he uses a pencil, never a pen. And of course the pencil has to be sharpened after every few sentences. Oh, and if he’s in a strange room, he’s got to figure out which direction north is or he can’t function.”
She went on to narrate the story of attending a meeting in the company of this man. “We had to go down several flights of stairs because the elevator was broken,” she said, “and then we twisted around through all these hallways until we came to the conference room, which was big and well lit but didn’t have any windows. So the meeting starts and Gerald is acting so weird—squirming around in his chair, looking up at the ceiling, then at the doors, tracing patterns in the air with his finger, sighing, and on and on. So I finally lean over to him and say, ‘What in the world is the matter with you?’ And do you know what he says? You won’t believe this! He gives me the most desperate look and says, ‘Which way is north? I’ve lost track.’ Of course, I didn’t have the foggiest idea, but I pointed immediately to the back wall, and then he settled right down.”
Throughout this tale I watched Birdie. Her face was alight, her teeth clamped firmly upon her lower lip and her eyes fixed intently upon Joan. A phrase from Tracy Kidder’s splendid book Old Friends came to my mind as I studied her. Mr. Kidder, in describing one of the residents of Linda Manor Nursing Home, wrote that the man had “a large capacity for vicarious enjoyment.” If this man’s capacity was large, Birdie’s was immense, enormous, surpassing all limits. I can see her yet, bending toward Joan as she listened.
As I said, this memory is but a picture, for I cannot recall precisely what Birdie said following Joan’s story. No doubt it ran along these lines: “Well, now, aren’t people just the most interesting things? There are so many different kinds!” And had she met Gerald someday, she would have taken him under her wing with great tenderness and would have done everything within her power to ensure that he never lost his bearings.
My third memory of the evening is as a blinding white flash against which I hide my eyes. Before we parted, Birdie and Mickey walked with Thomas and me to our car, which was parked in the lot to the rear of C. C.’s. Joan and Virgil had already said good-bye and driven away.
“I wish we had time to play some Ping-Pong,” said Mickey. “Or go for a walk—I’m full as a tick, as they say in Kuwait!” And he patted his stomach gently as if it were sore to the touch.
“If we get done at church at a decent time, maybe we could call you and you can come over for a little while,” Birdie said with an expression in her eyes, which, as I look back upon it, seemed beseeching. Mickey had already told us before supper that they were scheduled to meet at the church at seven o’clock, along with other members of the decorating committee, to “add a few little touches” to the sanctuary for Easter Sunday.
“Or you could drop by our place,” Thomas said. “Maybe we could play some Rook. Margaret and I need to get you back for last time.”
“Well, we’ll have to see how it goes,” Mickey said good-naturedly. “Knowing some of the folks on the committee, it won’t go fast. There’ll be a lot more talking than decorating.”
“And you’ll be one of the worst!” Birdie said, laughing. Mickey pretended to be offended, pushing out his lower lip.
The two of them bade us farewell and had already moved away when Birdie appeared to think of something and swung back around. “Margaret! Thomas! Won’t you …” She paused and contorted her face as if agonizing over what she was about to say. It was only a fraction of time, but I believe that I sensed what was coming. She took a step toward us and held out her hands, tilting her head imploringly. “Well, what I’m trying to say is…would you please at least just think about coming…well, tomorrow is Easter Sunday, you know, and…oh, I know we’ve been over all this before, but …”
Mickey broke in, feigning a Chinese accent and holding his hands before him in a subservient, prayerlike pose, trying, I suppose, to ease the tension. “Ah-so, me translate for tongue-tied wife. Thomas and Margaret welcome to come to Church of Open Door tomorrow. We have special Easter service.” Then, speaking normally, he added, “And we could probably even arrange a meal afterward, couldn’t we, treasure?”
“Oh, by all means!” Birdie said. “I’ve got a ham I’m going to fix for our Sunday dinner, and we’d love to have you join us after church!”
“Ah-so!” said Mickey. “Eat ham with chopsticks!”
I despised myself for my response. I have relived the scene many times, wishing that I could alter my role. I was selfish and obstinate.
It is important to understand that in the past weeks, before our outing to C. C.’s Barbecue, I had actually begun to entertain the thought of visiting Birdie’s church unannounced some Sunday, of arriving at the last minute and sitting in a back pew, of exiting swiftly at the conclusion of the service so as to escape the attention of church members such as Eldeen Rafferty. I had begun to feel a strong yearning to see Birdie at the organ, to hear prayers offered and hymns sung, to hear her beloved Brother Hawthorne preach, to observe firsthand the people of whom she so often spoke.
I had taken to arguing with myself over the matter. Remember Marshland, I warned myself. Remember your grandfather. Remember the hypocrisy. Remember your vow never to enter another church. I then answered my own objections. This is not Marshland. My grandfather is dead. My vow has already been compromised by my organ lessons at the church.
Like a petulant child, however, I opposed being led by the hand, and as we stood in the parking lot of C. C.’s Barbecue, I was filled with a perverse contrariness.
Thomas looked at me, his eyebrows raised as if in resignation. He shrugged and seemed on the verge of acquiescence when I spoke. “I thought that we had reached an understanding on the subject of your church,” I said to Birdie. “Your needling and cajoling only serve to confirm our suspicions that your friendly advances are driven by ulterior motives.” Like a child, I shoved away the very thing that I wanted because—oh, the shame of it—because it was offered to me.
Even as I spoke, fully aware of my disgraceful behavior, I was too proud, too stubborn to retract my words. The excuses that I chanted silently were feeble and altogether insubstantial. I will not have my actions dictated. I will not surrender unless on my own terms. I will not be snared by offers of dinners, and the like.
I whipped about and opened the car door, seated myself, and pulled the door shut with far more force than necessary. Through the closed window I heard Thomas’s voice, then Mickey’s in reply, but I could not distinguish their words. From Birdie I heard nothing. I was aware that the conversation had ended and that Thomas was walking around the car to the driver’s side. I turned my head slightly and could see, through my peripheral vision, that Mickey and Birdie were moving away from our car toward their own.
Once seated in the car, Thomas made no move to start the engine. All was quiet except for the sound of his breathing. I have often wondered, at times with amusement, why women can breathe noiselessly, yet men must make an audible business of it. I found no amusement in the thought at this moment, however. At last Thomas spoke in a low, even tone. “That was uncalled for, Rosie. You hurt Birdie’s feelings.” He paused and then added, “She was cryin’.” Another short interval and then, “It wouldn’t hurt a thing in the world if we was to go to their church one Sunday. It’d sure mean a lot to ’em.” Another pause before he inserted the key into the ignition and then, “Birdie sure sets a store by you. There was no need to answer her so rough.” I said nothing, but my heart burned with shame.
It did not slip my notice that they must have arisen before daybreak to bake and deliver homemade sweet rolls before going to church. I believe that I had only to say the word church and Thomas would have brushed off his black suit and stood ready at the door within minutes. I did not say anything, however, and when we ate our Sunday meal at two o’clock, neither of us seemed to have an appetite.
On Monday morning, April 17, I summoned Birdie to my office cubicle shortly after her arrival at school. At that time I delivered a carefully composed, pathetically inadequate apology. “My words on Saturday night were not meant to offend you. I regret having spoken hastily.”
Birdie smiled at me, but it was a restrained smile. “I’ll learn sooner or later, Margaret, not to push you. I’m sorry, too. I promise not to ask you again.” I suppose that I should have received her pledge with gladness, but strangely, I did not. “You know, Margaret,” she continued, “I was thinking, being your friend might just be the happiest and most important thing I do in my whole life. It might make you mad for me to say this, but I believe God has been getting me ready to be your friend for all these years. And I want to be a good one!”
Before I could respond, she smiled again, her face radiating with joyous purpose, and left my office. She appeared to have forgiven and forgotten my harsh words of Saturday night, for twice within the course of the morning she stopped by my office to converse briefly, once to share a story that Algeria had told her concerning a foiled burglary at a 7–11 store and later to ask for Joan’s telephone number. “Mickey suggested that the six of us have a cookout at our house sometime soon,” she said. “Do you think Joan and Virgil would play croquet with us?”
On Tuesday, April 18, she brought to work a tiny origami bird, which she placed upon my desk. One wing was slightly higher than the other, but as the bird was no more than two inches tall, the mild deformity resulted in only a faintly perceptible list. “There, that’s the first one I’ve made that looks like anything,” she said. “Mickey got this book at the library, and we’ve been trying different shapes. His are better than mine, though. You should see the grasshopper he made!” I picked up the bird and studied it at close range. It was made of pale blue paper, folded intricately. That it had taken a great deal of time was evident.
“Thank you,” I said. “I shall display this beside the bonsai and figurine on my piano.” One of Birdie’s most recent gifts to me had been one of Mickey’s “nut people.” Fashioned from a small pecan shell and a large peanut shell, the figure wore a little white dress. Glued to one pipe-cleaner hand was a miniature wooden spoon and from the other dangled a red thread affixed to a dime-sized cardboard disk imprinted with tiny numbers, which was intended to represent a stopwatch. On the bark base were stenciled the words Lunchroom Superviser. Uncharacteristically, I smiled over the spelling error, seeing it as part of the figurine’s charm.
We had our piano lesson as usual that Tuesday afternoon, and the last words I heard Birdie say before I got into my car and backed out of her driveway were these: “You know, Margaret, I think one sign of true friendship is that when you say good-bye, you’re already looking forward to the next time you’ll see each other.” She could have said this at any number of other times during the course of our friendship, but she did not. She said it on the afternoon of April 18. This was the last time I saw her.
Sixteen hours later she was dead. Perhaps to some her death was overshadowed by another tragedy of national proportions on that day of April 19—the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Surely those whose lives were directly affected by the bomb had no thought for a small, plain, obscure middle-aged woman in South Carolina whose life had suddenly ended. For my part, though I mourned with my countrymen the great magnitude of death and destruction in Oklahoma, and though I felt outrage at the cold premeditation of the act, it was but a pittance of sorrow compared to the vastness of my grief over losing Birdie.
When she had not arrived at school by seven o’clock on the morning of April 19, Francine came to my office door and asked, “Birdie didn’t call in sick, did she?” I was aware of her tardiness, of course, and had already walked through the lunchroom and into the hallway twice, hoping to see her small form hurrying toward me.
“She did not,” I answered. I saw Algeria glance at the large clock on the kitchen wall and then toward my office. She was in the act of arranging slices of bread on a baking sheet for the making of cinnamon toast.
“’Cause if she did, we’re in a fix,” Francine said. “It’s hamburgers for lunch, and Birdie always starts them fryin’ while me and Algeria finish up breakfast.”
“I know perfectly well what is on the menu for lunch,” I said, “and as I told you already, Birdie is not ill. No doubt there is a good reason for her being late.” I felt a chill of dread nevertheless, for it was now well over thirty minutes past her usual time of arrival.
Algeria joined Francine at my office door. She was shaking a large plastic jar of cinnamon and sugar. “You gonna call her house?” she asked gruffly, scowling at the telephone.
“I telephoned five minutes ago and received no answer,” I said.
Francine and Algeria looked at each other without speaking and went back to their work. A few minutes later I found Mervin Lackey’s telephone number in the directory and dialed it. As you may remember, the Lackeys were Mickey and Birdie’s closest neighbors, or as Mickey was fond of saying, “our closest living neighbors,” though their house was two hundred yards behind the Freemans’ and through a stand of trees.
A woman answered the telephone, and it was clear to me that I had awakened her. When I identified myself and told her of my concern, she asked me to hold the line while she went to the back door, from where she could see through the trees to the Freemans’ carport. She returned within seconds and said that their car was gone. I thanked her, then notified the school office of Birdie’s absence, and went out into the kitchen to help Francine and Algeria.
“I don’t like it,” Algeria said. “Somethin’s wrong.” She was transferring a sheet of crisp toast from the oven to the warmer.
“Birdie’s never been late a single day!” said Francine. “She’d call if something was wrong…unless maybe she can’t get to a phone. I sure hope nothing bad’s happened. Did you read about those two women in Pickens who got kidnapped by those teenagers that set fire to a church? The women came in to clean the church and caught the boys pouring gasoline all over—”
“Francine, that is totally irrelevant to Birdie,” I interrupted impatiently. “Now, watch what you are doing. You have spilled sugar all over the floor.”
When Mr. Solomon came into the kitchen twenty-five minutes later, I could read disaster upon his face. I did not want to hear his words. The children had begun filing through the line for breakfast by now, and I was standing at my post beside the cash register. As Mr. Solomon approached me, I heard a fourth-grade boy call out, “Hey! Where’s Miz Birdie at?”
The very word accident implies a departure from what is expected and desirable. Most are senseless, without pattern. I know firsthand of such calamities. I suppose I should have been prepared, and perhaps to some degree I was, for I had come to think of my friendship with Birdie as a treasure highly cherished, of inestimable value, yet ephemeral. I felt as though it were—as the saying goes—too good to last. Her death completed a trinity of losses in my life. In that regard, therefore, I suppose it was not without pattern. I lost my mother. I lost my son. I lost my friend.
Driving south on Highway 11 that morning,
Mickey Freeman had suffered a near fatal heart attack. His body had collapsed forward, and the car, traveling at an estimated speed of fifty miles per hour, had left the road and collided with a tree. Birdie had died instantly.
To have Birdie snatched from me could have—and perhaps only a month earlier would have—pushed me backward, spiraling me once again into profound darkness and railing against the God who allows those whom he claims as his own to suffer. I cannot say why her death did not send me reeling and cursing, but I know this: Though the depth of my sorrow over losing her cannot be measured, I believe that I felt it to be inevitable. I will not say fitting, though were she able to speak today, she would no doubt take it a step further. I can almost hear her saying: “God had it all planned out, Margaret, and he meant it for good!” I believe there is one word that Birdie would desire, could she choose a descriptor for her death. Not tragic, not disastrous, not calamitous, but beneficial.
A person’s death forces scrutiny of his life by those left behind, and for those who knew Birdie Freeman, such examination could serve only to enlighten and uplift their hearts. In contemplating the life of Birdie, the fight has gone out of me. I have no Rosetta stone by which to decipher the meaning and purpose of suffering, but I know that its imprint upon the scroll of mankind is foreordained. I cannot understand, nor do I need to. To borrow the words of David, the thought “is high, I cannot attain unto it.”
I have read that Kierkegaard, a philosopher whose ideals would hardly agree with those of Birdie and her fellow churchgoers, was obsessed with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, for he believed that it exemplified perhaps better than any other the divine contradiction of God’s nature: He is good and he allows, even demands, suffering. That confidence in such a God requires a “leap of faith” is an understatement. The chasm is broad and dark. But Birdie had done it. She had crossed the gap and had bade me follow.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 43
