On April 22 I at last attended a service at Birdie’s church. No one played the organ at her funeral. Mickey was not present; he was still confined to the hospital. I suppose that my tale is in some way balanced by the fact that it begins and ends with a funeral, and further, that at Birdie’s funeral, as at Mayfield Spalding’s, tribute was publicly paid by Eldeen Rafferty. Though I groaned inwardly when the large, ungainly woman stood to speak, I was soundly instructed in the minutes that followed, and not without great surprise, as I listened to her words. As I said earlier, Birdie was not one to talk of herself. Smarting from my own past wounds, I had taken what had amounted to no more than a fleeting interest in Birdie’s. Eldeen Rafferty opened my understanding.
Eldeen stood at the front of the church beside Birdie’s casket, which was closed. She wore a dark navy dress that had no belt, giving her the contour of a massive pillar. Around her neck was wrapped a gaudy scarf striped with the colors of summer fruit—watermelon, raspberry, peach, lemon—bunched and fastened clumsily with a silver pin in the shape of a butterfly. Before speaking, she laid her hand upon the lid of the casket and closed her eyes briefly as if in prayer. Then lifting her face, she proclaimed, “Birdie Freeman was a saint of the Lord Jesus and a precious gem in his crown!”
She spoke with such thunderous conviction that Thomas, seated beside me, visibly flinched. “And she was one of the sweetest, truest friends I had in this world,” Eldeen continued, “and there’s probably lots of other folks that says the same thing ’cause she never met a stranger. I’ve planned out a speech that comes from her name, Birdie, B-I-R-D-I-E, even though that wasn’t her real name, which was Bernadetta, but hardly a soul ever called her that. The first letter of Birdie is B, and that stands for bright, ’cause Birdie was the brightest, cheerfulest, faithfulest Christian I ever knew. She was always smilin’ and would just sparkle up a room with her pretty little laugh.”
Eldeen put her head to one side and pursed her lips before resuming. “I don’t know if I should even say this or not—I hadn’t counted on sayin’ it, and she probably wouldn’t want me to—but I’m goin’ to anyhow ’cause I feel like the Lord wants me to.”
She nodded emphatically and moved her large forefinger across the audience. “Birdie’s smile was a sign of the grace and goodness of Jesus in her heart,” she said, nearly shouting once again, “’cause if anybody had a right to look out-of-sorts and down-at-the-corners, it was Birdie! Some of you maybe didn’t even know she never had her a real mama or daddy. She was shoved around here and there when she was a little girl, nobody really wantin’ her.” Here she paused and engaged in a bit of playacting, changing the timbre of her voice with each line and gesturing dramatically. “Here, you take her!” “No, I don’t want her. I got enough kids of my own!” “Get a load of this little scrawny girl—probably can’t even earn her keep!” “Send her back to the orphanage!” “I can’t take her. What good would she do me?”
Eldeen shook her head sadly and lowered her voice. “Why, she was almost a grown-up woman ’fore anybody down here on earth loved her!” Eldeen jabbed her finger as if singling out various individuals and said, “Can you imagine bein’ a little girl and not havin’ a soul to love you? With some folks it would of closed ’em up tight and made ’em feel mean and sorry for theirself, but with Birdie it made her open herself up wide ’cause, you see, she had Jesus in her heart. She got saved by readin’ a gospel tract when she was only a little girl, and she latched onto Jesus and lived for him the rest of her life!” Someone seated behind me blew his nose loudly.
At intervals Eldeen herself wept freely as she spoke but halted only once to wipe her eyes with a man’s handkerchief that she removed from inside the cuff of her dress sleeve. “She was a little bitty thing,” she said, “but she was strong in the Lord! She bore up! She knew about bein’ sick and about doctors’ knives and such. She looked old Mr. Death in the eye nearly twenty years ago, but she asked God to heal her and he did it!”
“She knew about wantin’ somethin’ and not gettin’ it, too,” Eldeen went on. “It like to broke her heart that she couldn’t ever have babies, for she did love little children, Birdie did, but then she settled her mind about it, and one day she said to me”—Eldeen pitched her voice higher, producing an odd, husky squeak—“‘Eldeen,’ she said, ‘I might of been too busy to help out all the folks that needs help if I’d of had children. I think God wanted me to use my spare time bein’ light and salt to all the people that needs it!’ Birdie was like that Shunamite woman Brother Hawthorne was preachin’ about last week. She did what she could! And I only hope I can be a tenth as givin’ and carin’ and lovin’ and faithful as she was!”
With the ease of a natural-born storyteller, Eldeen moved through her acrostic outline, and although some of her key words seemed at times to overlap with others, and although her illustrations often failed to pertain directly to the point at hand, she held her listeners entranced. The letter I stood for inspiring, R for ready, D for diligent, I for industrious, and E for eager. She must have spoken for twenty minutes, though I was unaware of the passage of time.
At last she appeared to be finished, moving as if to sit down, but then she stopped and held up her hand. “And one more thing I just now thought of!” she said. “A bird flies!” Eldeen extended both arms and flapped them with large, almost graceful motions. “A bird was made with wings to push hisself up off the ground, to mount up. And that’s how God made Birdie. She did exactly what her name says! She waited on the Lord God and trusted in him, and he renewed her strength and gave her wings like a eagle!” The fluttering of her arms had grown slower as she spoke her concluding words. “And that’s what he wants every single one of us to do, too—soar up above the world with praise on our lips!” She looked across the audience and then said firmly, “That’s what Birdie would want me to close with.”
The funeral ended with the reading of Scripture and the singing of a congregational song, identified by the pastor as Birdie’s personal favorites. As he read the third chapter of John’s gospel, I felt the falling away of a doubt—not that God sent his son, not that his son must die, not that man must believe in Jesus, for indeed from childhood I had never balked at these truths, but that God so loved the world. Oddly, this had been my stumbling block—not God’s plan for man’s redemption, not the vicarious atonement itself, but the motivation behind it. Again I imagined Birdie’s voice: “See, Margaret, God planned for his own son to suffer, but he did it out of love for us.” When one looks at suffering with this fact in mind, it is hard to remain bitter.
And as we sang “Footprints of Jesus,” I closed my eyes and saw a strange sight, one I can yet see: Birdie Freeman pausing inside the threshold of heaven, turning back to beckon to me, smiling with great joy in the presence of angels. Curiously, I see upon her shoulders wings of the finest feathers, pure white, outstretched as if in flight, though she stands at heaven’s gate. I want to tell her that she may fold her wings, for she has reached her destination.
Meanwhile, I stand at the edge of a deep forest, ready to emerge from its shadows, and when from these woods I part, I shall, in the words of Eldeen Rafferty, push off the ground and mount up.
Epilogue
The epilogues that I have read at the ends of books have affected me in different ways. At times I am annoyed by them, for the story is done. Some writers, it seems, cannot bear the thought of silence and must, like Eldeen Rafferty, continue talking because after so long, I suppose, it has grown to be a habit. At other times I am gratified to find that the author has written an epilogue, because without it the story is still loose, not tamped down. The epilogue, as I understand it, should serve a purpose. It is not merely for adornment. It often reflects upon events that have occurred between the final chapter and some subsequent time.
Note to the reader: Do not deluge me with protests concerning the death of the central character, for you were amply forewarned. Did not I deplore the “pall of death” upon my story at
the end of chapter one? Did not I speak of Birdie Freeman always in the past tense from her earliest appearance in the tale? Did not I stress repeatedly her physical proximity to a cemetery? Did she not seem to belong more in heaven than on earth? Taken together, these and other signposts pointed plainly to Birdie’s end.
And yet, of course, she has not ended.
Two days ago I saw Algeria in Winn Dixie. We met each other in the center of an aisle, between the paper towels on one side and the dishwashing liquid on the other. I spoke first.
“Good day, Algeria.”
She nodded, without smiling, and said simply, “Margaret.”
“Mickey wrote us a letter last week,” I said to her. “He has found an apartment near his sister’s house in Tuscaloosa.”
“Uh-huh. He sent my brother a postcard,” she replied.
“We have only three weeks before school starts again,” I said, and she grunted and shook her head. As she reached to take a box of Brillo pads from the bottom shelf, I asked, “How is your mother?”
“Not gettin’ no better,” she said, straightening and tossing the box into her cart, which was quite full and poorly arranged, as if she had given no thought to organization. “But she ain’t no worse off neither, I don’t guess.” She frowned at the shelves of paper goods behind me. “I gotta get back to her,” she added, pushing her cart forward a few inches.
“Yes, well, good-bye. I hope you …” but I could think of no way to end the sentence.
We both moved forward, past each other, and then I heard her ask from behind me, “Margaret? You got somebody gonna take her place yet?”
I turned back. “A woman has been hired,” I said. “But she will not take her place.” We looked at each other for a long, silent moment.
“Nuh-uh. No way nobody could do that,” Algeria said before turning once again. “No way in the whole world nobody could do that.”
We never drove to Hampton Plantation, of course, at least not the four of us. As I mentioned earlier, Thomas and I took a day trip to the coast a few weeks ago. We left early one morning and visited Hampton, where the wild indigo, marsh pinks, meadowsweet, and red woodbine were in bloom. We walked to the edge of the Great Santee River, heard the drone of cicadas, and smelled the moist earth. We saw the George Washington oak festooned with moss.
We then drove south to Charleston and toured the Battery and the Market. We walked along the beach until the sun began to sink toward the horizon. Having looked past the beauties of nature during my years of isolation, I feel a great urgency to drink in forests and hills, shores and valleys, flowers and trees. “About the woodland I must go,” as A. E. Housman put it. Thomas and I both removed our shoes to walk along the Charleston beach, and when he took my hand, I did not pull away. Before we left the shore, we stood and looked out toward the ocean, its waters enflamed by the sunset.
“She wanted us to come here together,” I said at last. “I wish we had.” And I turned to Thomas and laid my head upon his shoulder. He gathered me to himself tenderly, and I wept. “I miss her so,” I said. As the waves washed over my feet, at last I opened my heart and released my great burden of sorrow. I was flooded with remorse, of course, for my many unkindnesses toward Birdie, and I was filled with wonder that she had countered each rebuff with yet more love. I know not how long I wept in Thomas’s arms, but when I had emptied myself of tears, I spoke these words aloud: “Thank you for giving her to me.” I was not speaking to Thomas, of course.
Later we ate dinner at a small restaurant that charged exorbitant prices and arrived home after midnight.
Whether there can be any romance for Thomas and me I do not know. I feel certain, however, that there can be, that there is love in plentiful supply. When we pulled into our driveway at half past twelve in the morning, I said to Thomas, “I would like to go back to Charleston sometime.” And then I added, “I would like to stay longer than a day.”
He glanced at me quickly, breathed in sharply, and said, “Anytime you say, Rosie. You just name it.” In the months since Birdie’s death, I have begun to share small bits of my heart with Thomas and have found him to be a most gentle and ready listener.
In May, after Mickey went home to recuperate, Thomas and I visited him frequently. Mickey’s recovery was slow and painful. His heart was wounded in every way. He closed his eyes when I spoke to him of Eldeen’s speech at Birdie’s funeral. He was sitting at home in his recliner at the time with a tray in his lap, for Thomas and I had brought supper to him. “Oh my, I don’t think Birdie would’ve wanted everyone feeling sorry about her upbringing,” he said. “I hope Eldeen didn’t overdo it. That was something Birdie didn’t like to dwell on. I can’t figure out how Eldeen ever dragged it all out of her. I sure never heard Birdie bring up the subject.” He smiled ever so slightly and added, “That Eldeen—she might be long-winded herself, but she sure has a way of getting other folks to open up and talk, too.”
“People who loved Birdie should know what she overcame,” I said. “It helps us to see things differently in our own lives.” I wonder now at times whether Birdie could have shaken me from my stupor sooner had she taken a different course, had she looked me squarely in the eye, for instance, and said, “Quit wallowing in your past! Use it as a springboard! Move ahead! You didn’t invent suffering!” Had she enumerated for me her own history of suffering—her rejection as a child, her battle with disease, the pain of barrenness—perhaps she would have disarmed me earlier. But perhaps not—who can say? It was not her way.
With his eyes still closed, Mickey told us again of standing at a window as a young man in his house in Tuscaloosa and seeing Birdie at the clothesline next door. “The wind was whipping up good that day,” he said, “and she had to practically wrestle those clothes to get them on the line. I could tell she had spunk, little as she was. I yelled something foolish out the window to her, but she wouldn’t hardly give me the time of day—acted like she had to get done and get back inside. We found out later she’d lived with those people next door for over a year but wasn’t related to them in any way, and they let her know as soon as she came to live with them that she was there to work. They had six kids, so there was plenty to do.”
Mickey went on to tell how his mother had taken an interest in Birdie and had looked into the situation next door more closely than the neighbors would have liked. “We weren’t exactly their favorite people after Mother reported them,” he said. “They ended up moving away, and months later Birdie came to live with us. She was seventeen, almost eighteen by that time.”
Eldeen Rafferty’s words came back to me. “Why, she was almost a grown-up woman ’fore anybody loved her!”
“The interesting thing about that family next door to us,” Mickey said a few minutes later, “was that they were the ones who started Birdie in piano, even though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing and sure wouldn’t have done it if they’d known.”
One day a week, as Mickey told it, a piano teacher came to the house to instruct the oldest child, a pampered, indolent boy of ten or eleven who had not the least bit of musical inclination. Arranging to be in or near the room where the piano was located, Birdie listened with utmost attention, all the while dusting, mending, ironing, and so forth. When opportunity arose for her to be alone in the house, which was seldom, she flew to the piano to practice what she had heard. “When Mother signed her up for her own lessons after she came to live with us, Birdie cried,” Mickey said. “I can still see it. I mean she turned on both spigots full force!”
He stopped speaking for a few minutes to finish his meal, and I removed the tray. “But she sure didn’t like to talk about her past,” he said at length. “Maybe it would’ve helped if she had—I don’t know. She was a real private person in a lot of ways.”
“Eldeen said that Birdie never knew her parents,” I said.
Mickey shook his head. “No. I don’t know the details, but from what my mother found out, I think it was one of those cases you hear a
bout—a baby being abandoned in a public place.” He laid a hand to his forehead. “The whole thing sounds made up, doesn’t it?”
“She would have been a good mother,” I said.
Mickey nodded. “Oh, the best. The very best.” He sat forward and laid his hands on his knees. “She probably never told you we tried to adopt a baby once. Had the room all painted and a crib set up—the whole works. At the last minute the mother backed out. It was real hard on Birdie. She said she couldn’t ever go through that again, so we never did.”
Before Mickey moved back to Tuscaloosa at the end of May, we drove to his house on three consecutive Sundays to take him to church. Of course we attended the services with him. I could not bring myself to look at the organ on those Sundays, but I could feel its presence, cold and mute. It still sat unoccupied.
One Sunday as we were leaving his house, Mickey walked to the piano and removed the cross-stitched poem from the wall above it. “I’ve been meaning to give this to you,” he said to me. “Birdie would want you to have it. She was always telling me I ought to do another one so she could give it to you, but I never got around to it.” He advanced toward me holding the picture before him.
“It is too great a gift,” I said, stepping back.
“She loved you, Margaret,” Mickey said. “Think of it as a gift from her. You wouldn’t refuse her the happiness of giving you something, would you? Anyway, I’ve got to start packing up, and this’ll be one less thing to worry about.” I took it, of course, and the next day Thomas hung it for me on the wall above my piano, where I see it each time I lift my eyes from the keyboard.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 44
