Songbird

by Lisa Samson

  “Yep. It’s going to be real nice. But we’ve got to make payroll.”

  “God will provide, Harlan,” I say. “He always does.”

  There, that sounds holy.

  Harlan nods, kisses my cheek, and rises out of the bed. “Your desires can’t be first in the pocketbook, Charmaine, but they are first in my heart. Do you know that?”

  “I do. I do know that.”

  He sits back down and I curl up against him, my head on his lap. “I never promised riches, did I, honey? Did I lead you to believe we’d ever be comfortable?”

  “Well, not in a financial sense. But I think we’ve achieved comfort of another kind.”

  He strokes my hair, really softly, over the top layer of hair because Harlan knows better than to try and run his fingers through my rat’s nest. “And maybe heavenly riches? Can you be content with those rewards in the meantime?”

  “They’re the only kind I’ve ever had anyway, Harlan. I wouldn’t even know what the other kind looks like!” I try to lighten it all up so he’ll be at his best tonight. With Hope asleep there I can’t make love to him to boost him up, not that I really feel like it anyway, so I figure I’ll make love to his male ego and his sense of purpose. “We live for heaven, Harlan. I may not know much about much, but I know the difference between corruptible and incorruptible.”

  Just like my little pink King James Bible says.

  And then I give his buns a squeeze to let him know we are in this together and we always will be. He laughs, like I knew he would.

  “You don’t get serious for long, do you, honey?”

  “Nope. It embarrasses me.”

  “That’s all right. It just makes me listen hard the first time.”

  “Pastor Hopewell?” It’s Melvin’s voice. “Pastor Chorey’s in his office. You coming out?”

  “Be right there.”

  Harlan quickly brushes his teeth, puts on a little fresh cologne, and I watch him out the window as he strides toward the church.

  “Melvin?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Melvin stands outside the motor home. I speak to him through the louvered window. I can see the hood of his yellow rain slicker.

  “I need a local phone book.”

  “I’ll fetch you one.”

  “I need to get my hair cut.”

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Hopewell.”

  “It’s been a while.”

  He just shakes his head and hurries toward the church to do my bidding.

  10

  Mama didn’t buy me many toys as one could well imagine. However, she did get me a Lite-Brite. I loved that contraption. I loved all the colors, even the clear pegs. Sometimes I’d do the snowman with little clear pegs, making snowflakes all around him. I loved the butterfly and the groovy flowers. I loved the house and sometimes made up my own houses that never, ever looked like Mrs. Blackburn’s boarding house.

  My favorite Lite-Brite creation was my own name. Mama said to me once, a smirk on her face, “Myrtle, you just have a thing for seeing your name in lights, don’t you?”

  I just nodded and said, “I guess so, Mama.”

  Now, I don’t see my name in lights per se very much but every once in a while I do see it in those plastic letters they use on lighted church signs. And there it glows on the Suffolk church’s sign. Ruby, who’s driving me in the crusade pickup truck to get my hair cut in the vast metropolis of Suffolk, Virginia, says, “How come Grace and I never get our names up there?”

  I bark out a laugh. “If you’d have been the one to marry Harlan, you’d have yours up there.”

  “Well, then, I suppose I ought to be thankful it’s not. So what are you going to get done to your hair?”

  “Just a trim.”

  “Charmaine, nobody in this darn crusade can afford a trim. So what’s the real deal?”

  I sigh. “Ruby, how can you always tell when I’ve got something else in mind?”

  She points a finger at me, turns on the right turn signal and pulls out of the church parking lot. “You may call it something else in mind’ but where I come from we call it ‘being up to something.’”

  Here is the chance to finally tell somebody the truth. I know I can trust Ruby, I just don’t know if she wants the responsibility.

  “You’re hiding something, aren’t you, Charmaine?”

  I nod. “You want to hear all about it?”

  “It’s not an affair, is it?”

  “Oh, my lands, no!”

  “Is it some other kind of sin problem?”

  “In a roundabout way, I guess.”

  “How long have you been carrying this secret around?”

  “Good heavens, Ruby, do you want to hear it or not?”

  “Okay, yes, I do.”

  “Then pull off the road down there at the Hardee’s and I’ll buy you a sweet tea and tell you the whole thing.”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to regret this.”

  “You can stop me at any time.”

  When we settle in the beige plastic booth with sweet teas for both of us and an extra large fries for Ruby, I take her hand.

  “I’m going to ask you this. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  She hesitates. “Let me ask you one question. Does this have to do with your parents? ”

  “My mama.”

  “Was she from this area?”

  I nodded. “Might still be from, I don’t know.”

  Her eyes round. “You mean your mother may be alive?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You told me you were orphaned.”

  “I might be.”

  “But then again, you might not be.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know who your father is?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have a sister?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, you do now. Tell me it all, honey.”

  I do.

  It all comes out quite calmly, like I am telling her about a harrowing time in traffic, or maybe something even not that bad.

  “She never came back?” Ruby asks, and she sips the last of her tea, that final gurgle at the bottom a hollow punctuation to my story.

  “No.”

  “So you found your grandmother’s address?”

  I nod.

  “Let’s skip the hairdresser and drive by her house, Charmaine.”

  “Really? You don’t mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  She gathers her coat and bag, as do I. Then she turns toward me after she slips on her jacket. “You planned on telling me someday, though, right?”

  “I did. I didn’t know when, Ruby. I think I waited more for your sake then for mine.”

  Did I? Who knew?

  And Ruby coughed away a tear.

  Ruby grips the wheel of the crusade pickup truck, the one that hauls her trailer. “I left Grace in the travel trailer. I asked her if she wanted to come along but she just said ‘no.’”

  “She scares me, Ruby.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I swear she was high before the service the other night back in Emporia. Had those glassy-looking eyes and all.”

  Not to mention the slight odor of Vermont clung to her hair.

  “I know she was, Char.”

  “You’ve known about this for a long time.”

  Ruby nods and turns off the road onto Freemason Street. “I told her I wouldn’t tell anybody, but I wasn’t into the hiding business either if she got careless. I tell you what, I’ve made up some of my own creeds for life and one of them is not to assume any responsibility for other’s people’s actions.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s an easy enough creed to adopt for now. But just wait until you fall in love someday.”

  “Well, I’m determined that will never happen, Charmaine. Men may not all be alike, but they all have the potential of being alike.”

  Poor, Ruby. I won’t tell her that love’s heady waters become a
most delightful and needful brew. That when it’s right, its silks and satins turn not into sackcloth and ashes, but the most comfortable of brushed cottons. I’ve learned something along this path — people need to learn for themselves. I could talk until I’m blue in the face, spouting all sorts of advice until I’m worn out. But people are going to do whatever they wanted anyway. So I keep my mouth shut about stuff like that and usually go on and on about the inane.

  Besides, nobody wants to hear about the intricacies and Lessons of your Life, Myrtle Charmaine.

  You know, one time I heard that nephew of Mel’s call me “shallow.” Now he didn’t know my ears were in close proximity, and I went back to the motor home and cried and cried until I realized that I do seem shallow, but that’s only because I feel so deeply I could never begin to drag those feelings up to the surface much. After all, it would be like dragging a Chinaman through the earth and up to Virginia.

  The thought of Grace destroying herself rips me to ribbons. You see, I met her parents once and they were the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.

  Grace is Mama in the making, I tell you. And maybe that’s why I find her so hard to stomach.

  Ruby makes a right turn. “What number did you say it was?”

  “Twenty-three-oh-six.”

  “There’s Twenty-one-ten. Up two more blocks.”

  I breathe in.

  “You nervous, Charmaine?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “But we’re just driving by.”

  “But a house tells a lot about a person.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  I mean, I should know, I live in a motor home.

  “And what if Mama lives there?”

  We pass the first block. Lots of old white or brick homes sprouted from the Southern soil, as if some old Civil War general threw seeds of a dying way of life before going off for the final battle.

  They were probably built in the 1920s and I’m too dumb to know it.

  Ruby shakes her head. “I don’t think she’s there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just doesn’t make sense. Did she ever strike you as the type that would go running back home to her mother?”

  “Never.”

  “So there you go.”

  “My stomach still feels sick.”

  Ruby slows down as we make it to my grandmother’s block. “That should be it, third house on the right.”

  It sits on a small, narrow lot, plopped down between two bigger houses. “You think that was a guest house or something?” I ask.

  “Looks like it to me.”

  “Huh. This isn’t at all what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Well, Mama was so brash and sassy, I figured she was from the wrong side of the tracks.”

  Ruby stops in front of the house. “It’s a modest little home. But this sure is a nice neighborhood.”

  “Maybe she grew up in that big house next door! Maybe they were really rich and then something happened and they had to sell that big house and move to the guest house.”

  Stop theorizing!

  “Maybe you’re right about that. Hard times can fall on anybody, Charmaine.”

  “I sure know that.”

  “Sounds like you had a weird childhood.”

  “No stranger than yours.”

  Ruby shakes her head. “No. Mine was garden variety tragic. Yours definitely isn’t run of the mill.”

  “What if my grandma isn’t playing with a full deck?” I only say that to add yet another cliché to the conversation.

  “I don’t see why that makes any difference at this point.”

  “I’d like to think she remembered she had a granddaughter out there somewhere.”

  Ruby thinks about that. “You’re right. Now why do you think she never tried to find you?”

  I shrug. “Don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t even know about me.”

  “Oh, that will be rich. What a reunion.”

  “Thanks, Ruby. That really makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  The house looks as if it was born to this world of antique homes sometime back after World War II. It appeared to be the I Peter Pan of the neighborhood, refusing to grow up big like the rest of them.

  “Kind of like a fairytale cottage,” Ruby says.

  “You think?”

  “Sure. Can’t you picture the seven dwarves poking their heads out of the dormers, and that entryway with the pointed roof?”

  I examine it afresh. “You’re right. It’s actually kind of cute, isn’t it?”

  “I mean, if it has to be here among the behemoths, at least it’s got its own peculiar brand of charm.”

  I nod. “I like it.”

  “Me, too.” She drums her glossy nails on the steering wheel. Ten minutes pass as I get more and more nauseous. “How long we gonna sit here, Char?”

  “I was hoping she’d come out,” I say.

  “Maybe the house is good enough for the first day. We’ll be here four more days.” “That’s true.”

  “Maybe anything more would be too hard to digest.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Maybe we should come back tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe you could call her on the phone.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Hey, you never know. She might even go to that church we’re at.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Ruby glances over at me. “Why?”

  “This is a Methodist neighborhood if I ever saw one.”

  Ruby looks around and considers my statement. “You’re right. Rich people don’t really like to get messy and sentimental about God.”

  “I think tears of the Spirit embarrass them, don’t you? I mean think about it, it’s not usually the well-dressed members that are coming up to the altar and throwing themselves on the mercy of God, is it?”

  “No, you’re right about that, Charmaine. It’s that rich man and the eye of the needle thing, I guess.”

  I laugh. “Well, with the way things are going, that’s one thing we sure don’t have to worry about!”

  “You said it, girl.”

  She pulls the gearshift from park into drive and we putter away in the truck.

  “Maybe I’d do better to leave well enough alone.”

  “Maybe.”

  A light rain begins to fall. “But I can’t do that.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Will you find out about your family, Ruby?”

  “No.”

  I just nod. I mean, what can you say to that?

  We drive about a mile before I get the courage to ask her why.

  “Remember that day we went into the rescue mission off the boardwalk?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “I found out something that day, Charmaine. I discovered the true definition of family. And those drugged-out people that neglected me and left me for days in my crib and only a bottle here and there, they don’t fit the description. Do you know when social services came to get me I had a staph infection from the feces and urine constantly against inflamed diaper rash?”

  “Oh, God, Ruby.”

  “I almost died in the hospital.”

  “Oh, Ruby!”

  “So, no. Why would I want to find people like that?”

  “Maybe you have a grandma, too, an aunt or somebody who’d care.”

  “If they cared they’d have found me by now.”

  The funny thing is, there’s no bitterness in Ruby’s tone. Matter-of-factness straight down the middle of her verbiage wrangles me more than any sort of rage might have.

  She points to me. “I’ll bet you anything your grandma doesn’t know you exist.”

  “I don’t know what would be better. Either one makes it horribly difficult for me to approach her. And if she doesn’t know, how could I prove it to her? I don’t look a thing like Mama.”

  “Maybe you look like your grandma.”r />
  “Lord help the poor woman if I do!”

  Ruby shakes her head. “Did anybody ever tell you you were ugly Charmaine?” “No.”

  “Then why on earth are you always so down on yourself?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not really, girl.”

  “Well, if I’d been pretty and genteel and charming and all, Mama wouldn’t have been ashamed of me. She wouldn’t have kept me cooped up in that apartment and she wouldn’t have left the way she did.”

  “Oh, Charmaine. That had nothing to do with it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, please. The woman was mental. It’s the only explanation.

  “Mental? My mama?”

  “Of course. Why else would a woman leave her child like that?”

  “You mean Mama was crazy?”

  Ruby shrugs. “If the shoe fits.”

  “You know, Ruby. You love clichés, don’t you?”

  “So sue me.”

  We laugh and I think right then I’ll take a trip to the library tomorrow and find out what in the world kind of mental illness would cause a mother to abandon her only child.

  Mental?

  Do I laugh now? Or do I cry?

  11

  I stare at the entry in the phone book. Harlan sleeps in the back. The little white alarm clock flips all its number tiles from 12:59 to 1:00 in the morning.

  We had a wonderful service tonight. The Songbirds sang “Just a Little Talk with Jesus” and the folk got to their feet, clapping and shuffling around. Now, if Suffolk is as stuffy as I’ve been led to believe, obviously these people have chosen to break the mold! I sure do admire that.

  Even Grace broke a sweat during the number. We went with the flow, I sure can say. Henry Windsor kept bringing us around for another chorus. And its true, just a little talk with Jesus does make things right. I mean, it may not take away your problems, but it sure does help you get through them.

  Although, sometimes I wish talks with Jesus would just take them right away. Wouldn’t that be nice? Hi, Lord! And poof!’ Bye, ‘bye cares and tears!

  Why He didn’t just create Heaven and us people in our glorified bodies and skip this whole earth phase is beyond me. I can only suppose He had His reasons and they’re good ones. I It’s all anybody can suppose having taken that initial leap of faith.

  I’ve heard people say, “Christianity has all the answers.” Well, as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t. It just has the most answers. Because there are some things we’ll just never know this side of glory. So we trust God’s got His finger on the situation or we turn our back on Him and get all mad because He hasn’t sat down with us and explained it in minute detail.