Natural Bridges

by Debbie Lynn McCampbell

  Birdie had been able to sleep on the sofa, but she kept waking up with nightmares about worms crawling up her nose.

  When Daddy got there, Birdie ran up to him and said, “Daddy, go in there and do something. Don’t let Grandma die, she needs me.”

  We reassured her that Grandma was going to be all right.

  Daddy led her into Grandma’s room.

  I followed them in, and sat down in the seat over by the window, away from the bed.

  Daddy walked over to Momma.

  She took his hand, squeezed it, let go. “She may make it,” she said. Her voice was tired.

  I looked at Daddy’s face. He had not yet acknowledged me, or any of the rest of us, just Momma and Birdie. His face was strained, tight. I imagined that he probably realized what losing Grandma might do to his family. Birdie seemed to be the most important thing in the world to him, and here he saw how she was suffering. He had to know, deep down, he was part to blame.

  He looked at Grandma, whose eyes were open, not focused, but alert. With all the tubing connected to her nose and mouth, it was hard to read her expression, but she was looking at him. Daddy didn’t say anything; he nodded at her, as if to only acknowledge her survival, not necessarily give praise for it.

  He turned to Momma. “I’ll take Birdie on home, now. Anything else you need?”

  She shook her head. “I believe I want to stay here tonight. Just in case.”

  Daddy hesitated, bent down, kissed her cheek quickly, then turned to go.

  Not once did he turn to face me, nor did he look back again at Grandma. But I was almost certain, as he was walking out, that Grandma’s eyes were boring through him.

  44. The Couch

  Grandma’s recovery was slow, but steady. She seemed to have gotten over the hump. Her condition had stabilized, and she hadn’t experienced a relapse, but they wanted to keep her in the hospital to monitor her progress.

  I was off the whole week before Christmas, and Birdie, Florabelle, and I spent a lot of time up at my place baking cookies. Florabelle seemed to have adjusted pretty quickly to Jason being gone. He still hadn’t called, but he’d mailed her an envelope with one hundred dollars in it to the house. She guessed that one day he would call, just to see how Daisy was doing, if for no other reason.

  Culler had called for me again at work, one day before my vacation started, but I wouldn’t talk to him. I didn’t tell Florabelle. I wanted to concentrate on her dilemma, not my own silly affair.

  I was beginning to understand Florabelle, to see a side of her I’d never known until lately. She was growing kinder, and I was starting to like her more than I ever had. Although I always knew she had a good heart under all that malice and resentment, she seemed to let a softness show a little more often these days. The bitterness and anger had somehow subsided. I supposed it was having Daisy, finding a constant in her life who needed her that brought on the change.

  She had gone in with Momma and Hazel, and ordered me a couch from Sears for Christmas. I knew she must have used some of the money Jason had sent her to pay for it.

  It was delivered Christmas Eve morning, and they were all there waiting for the truck to come, so they could see the surprised look on my face. Florabelle, Bird, Hazel, and Momma had walked up to my house around nine o’clock that morning. I was glad to see them all, but I was a little curious about their coming so early. It was nice to have Momma there; she hadn’t yet seen how I’d fixed up the place. It was when she and Hazel started moving my living room chair and bookcase, that I started to get a little suspicious. They were making a spot for the couch.

  It was colonial style, with yellow and brown floral print fabric and a high back. It fit real nicely against one wall; I was certainly surprised. We all took turns sitting on it, getting up and down, and rubbing it. The print was bold and really brightened up the room. I could just imagine what the drivers thought of us, making over a piece of furniture like it was some rare treasure.

  I thanked all of them, and gave Momma a kiss. She was determined I was going to come up the next day, and spend Christmas with the family. No matter what Daddy said. It felt good to be included. I was starting to feel whole again.

  When they’d all left, I went in my room and looked for my letter from Transylvania. I found it, still crumpled up from when I’d thrown it, stuffed in the back of my underwear drawer. I unfolded it, carried it out to the living room couch, and sat down to read it again.

  I had registered, received some financial support, and I still really wanted to go, but just in the past few days, a little bit of guilt was beginning to creep up on me. I knew that now that things were patched up between me and Momma again, she could use my help with Grandma sick and Florabelle back home with the baby. I was feeling the pull back to my post of duty.

  Pressing the letter on my couch, I flattened out the edges. I thought of my own life, how for a while it would be smooth and wrinkle free, then the next minute could crumble. I lay back on the firm new cushions and fell asleep in the bright yellow flowers.

  45. Guns and Roses

  Christmas morning, I loaded up the back of my car with presents and drove down the hill to the house for the first time since the fire. While I was rushing out the phone rang twice, but when I picked up, no one said anything.

  At the house, everyone was already up, and Momma had made a big breakfast of apple pancakes, biscuits and gravy, and grits. Hazel was there, and she volunteered, for the first time ever, to say the blessing.

  Florabelle had told me that since Grandma’s heart attack, Daddy had been a little bit nicer, treated Momma more decent, had finally put up a Christmas tree, but still wouldn’t turn grace. She said he didn’t have a whole lot to say and stayed up in his gun room or the garage more than ever.

  He sat down at the table that morning, poured cream in his coffee, looked up and nodded at me.

  “Good morning,” I said, my throat tight. I took an extra sip of milk to wash down my grits.

  “Merry Christmas, Daddy,” said Florabelle.

  Daddy mumbled. “Merry Christmas.” He looked at Birdie. “Did Santie bring you anything?”

  “I haven’t looked yet,” she said. “Momma wanted to wait on Fern.” She looked at me, spoon in hand, smiled.

  It was good to be home.

  Suddenly, Daddy got up, scuffed his chair back and went outside in the garage. When he came back in, he was carrying a high chair, one I recognized that he’d designed and carved when Birdie was born.

  “I smoothed the nicks out of it, refinished it.” He brought it over to where Florabelle was sitting, sat it down next to her. “Thought you could use it for your baby.”

  Florabelle, who was balancing Daisy on her knee with one hand, trying to eat with the other, started crying.

  This got Momma crying too, and Daddy got uncomfortable.

  “It’s the least I could do,” he said, sitting back down at the head of the table. “After all the grief I’ve caused all of you this past year.” He hung his head, stared at his pancakes, forked at them absently. “I can’t ask you all to forgive me. The damage, as I see it, is done.”

  Birdie got up and took Daisy out of Florabelle’s arms and tried to stuff her into the highchair.

  “Be careful,” I said. “Her back isn’t that strong yet. She’ll grow into it.”

  Momma was still in tears.

  Hazel looked around the table, trying to think of a way to free the tension. “Oh, Raymond,” she said, way too loud to sound sincere, “don’t go getting all sad on us, it’s Christmas. Everything’ll work out. Now let’s all eat up and go open gifts.”

  “No,” said Daddy, “you all go ahead. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.” His eyes were puffy, bloodshot. “You folks don’t deserve for me to come in there and spoil everything.” He looked at Momma. “I don’t deserve your patience anymore either.” Then he left the table.

  We heard his footsteps on the stairs, headed for his room.

  No one at the tab
le wanted to move, but Hazel made us get up and go out to the living room and sit around the tree. She wanted this to be a nice Christmas, no matter what, because everyone was finally all back together. For all four of us, she had bought our favorite perfumes. She looked so proud as we unwrapped the small pretty boxes.

  Mine was White Shoulders, she had bought Momma Chanel Number Five, Birdie’s was Avon Soft Musk, and Florabelle’s of course was Chantilly. She had bought Daisy a stuffed dog that looked a lot like Jimmy and made Birdie sob.

  I gave everyone sweaters, and my gift from them had been the couch.

  Momma and Hazel gave Florabelle a basinette, and Birdie got school clothes and a bead necklace. Santa had brought her a new Cabbage Patch doll, female, to keep Waylon Jennings company.

  Birdie gave us all photographs of ourselves, pasted on construction paper, with poems she had written underneath them. Mine read, “Roses are red, Ferns are green, this sister’s nice, but the other one’s mean.” I folded it up and put it aside.

  We left Daddy’s presents for him, still wrapped in a little pile under the tree. Maybe he’d come down later, we figured, when he got over his blues. It concerned Momma to see him like that, feeling so down on himself.

  We watched the Christmas parade at Madison Circle in Indianapolis, then we watched Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol. I’d seen it maybe ten times in my life already, but I always liked to watch it over the holidays.

  Besides, it was so bitter cold out, that staying snuggled up together on the couch inside, seemed the best way to spend Christmas.

  Momma got up and down checking dinner. She had a big ham in the oven, and brought us warmed up biscuits with honey from breakfast, to tide us over.

  Around noon, we called the hospital to talk to Grandma. Her spirits were low, having to spend her Christmas there, but she was doing a lot better and the doctors told her she could go home soon.

  Some roses had been delivered to her from the house, and she said that made her day. They made her think of springtime and gave her hope.

  Birdie got on the phone to talk to her a while, and we told her to say that if the snowstorm let up, we’d try to come down and visit later tonight.

  It didn’t look too promising, the wind was blowing, and the snow fell in large flakes against the living room window. You could barely see out. The roads would be bad.

  “Who sent the roses?” asked Hazel, hanging up the phone.

  Florabelle and I shrugged.

  “I didn’t,” said Momma. “Now, ain’t that strange.”

  Right about the part in the movie where the Ghost from the Christmas Future comes to see Ebaneezer, we heard a gunshot upstairs.

  Birdie screamed.

  My heart stopped.

  “Good God in heaven, what was that?” said Hazel, jumping to her feet.

  Daisy woke up and started crying. Florabelle tried to quiet her, a look of panic in her eyes.

  Momma ran in from the kitchen, white as a ghost. “Fern,” she said. “Run up there, check on your father. Hurry!”

  My body was frozen stiff.

  “You reckon he’s gone and shot himself?” said Hazel, shaking like a leaf. She turned the sound down on the TV set. Ebeneezer was off in the distance, looking on at his own gravestone.

  “Hurry, Fern!” shouted Birdie.

  Daisy still wailed, kicked and fussed at Florabelle who hadn’t said a word, scared to death to move.

  I looked over at her; she nodded towards the staircase.

  As I climbed the stairs, my heart raced ahead of me. My legs felt like rubber, they were so wobbly. With each step, I had to hold onto the banister. I was almost numb, worrying about what I might find.

  When I got to Daddy’s room, I listened at the door. It was silent. I grabbed the doorknob and turned it slowly. Peering in, I saw Daddy sitting at his desk, staring at the wall.

  “Daddy?”

  I startled him. He turned around, looked at me. “I don’t know if I hit that stud or not,” he said, pointing at the wall.

  All his guns were off the wall rack, the casings were empty. The desk was surrounded with boxes.

  “What happened?” I asked, feeling my blood start to circulate again.

  “Oh, I was taking these guns down off the wall here and throwing them in the box. One of them fired off. Didn’t know they were all loaded.” He picked at the wall, measuring the damage.

  “We heard the shot,” I said. “They’re worried down there.”

  He looked around the room, threw up his hands, brought them down, slapping his knees. “I don’t know where I’m going to put all this stuff,” he said, exasperated.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m cleaning the room out, storing the guns. Making some room.”

  His desk was empty, all the things in the drawers were piled on top. A cloud of dust and gunpowder hovered above the boxes.

  Daddy seldom had paperwork other than the bills and few pieces of junk mail to sort, but inside his desk, he kept his personal items like old letters from Army buddies, key chains from different places he’d been, and in the double drawer, a few childhood remnants like photographs and newspaper clippings.

  “Come here,” he said. He opened a cigar box, still strong with tobacco scent, shuffled through it, and took out an old photograph. It was a picture of his mother. In this particular setting, she was holding an infant, and four other small children stood around her chair. She looked about twenty-nine or thirty. The baby in her arms was him.

  Daddy held the picture, studied it a while, handed it to me. His mother’s expression was stern, lips tight. Her posture looked unnaturally erect, her knees touched, toes pointed in. Though it was not a face of kindness, or even beauty, there was a look of complacence, enduring strength, wisdom.

  It was not the face of a woman who would have ever needed, or even accepted, nursing care, had she lived. She had died when Florabelle and I were babies.

  “She was quite a woman,” said Daddy. “Strong and clever.” He shook his head. “Did you ever know that my momma and Esther were neighbors?”

  “No, I don’t think I did.”

  “Yes, when they were in about their midtwenties. We lived on adjacent farms and they competed for the earliest canning. It was always that way, one trying to outdo the other. But my Daddy and your Momma’s Daddy, they got along. Then my Daddy died when I was about seventeen. And Adam Trapper, Esther’s first husband, your Grandpa, was the minister of the town.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Well, I met your Momma at his church. We were always forced to play together at the Sunday school picnics, and one year we played Mary and Joseph in a junior-high Christmas play, and afterwards, I asked her to go with me.”

  “You were in a play?” Somehow, I couldn’t picture this since Daddy had always been shy, from what I could remember.

  He leaned back, his chair creaked. “You know, there was a time when I had great respect for your Grandma Esther. In her life with your Grandpa Trapper, she was different. Much more strong-willed, very religious, subservient to your Grandpa, and dedicated to raising their two daughters in a stable home. I can still remember that house, everything being so clean and orderly.”

  Daddy got up from his desk, started packing more stuff away as he talked. “That Esther, boy let me tell you she was strict. I remember being a bit afraid of her. If she got mad at the girls, she’d sure give them a piece of her mind. Piece of a tree branch across the bottom, too. But I’ll say this for her, she was brave. When your Grandpa died, she tended that farm alone for many years. And she remained very influential in the congregation.” He laughed, tossed a pistol in a box.

  Everytime he did this, I jumped a little, worrying another one might fire off.

  “I’ll share a secret with you, Fern. At one time it was Hazel I thought I loved, not your Momma. Sylvia was always more talented in the kitchen and better at sports, but it was Hazel who had the long lean legs.”

  I smiled
.

  “That’s right. But it was Esther who made it clear to me which one of her daughters I was to like and pursue, and eventually marry. She just laid it on the line one day when I walked them both home from school. Told me, flat out, which one I could court.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I can just hear her, but why did she pick Momma?”

  “Well, your Grandma always did take a liking to me. She never wanted me to know that, but she had a lot of respect for my whole family. She knew what I would grow up and want in a wife, and she also knew it would be Sylvia who would fit the mold. And she was right.”

  “That’s a great story, Daddy; but I guess you could never tell Momma, huh?”

  “I suspect she knows. She’s a lot like Esther that way, always knows what people are thinking.” He taped up a box, labeled it “HANDGUNS.” “Years have gone by, though, loss, change, they’ve all had an affect on your Grandma, but I suppose deep down, that old spitfire’s smoldering. I reckon she could still tell me which one of her daughters, or her granddaughters, is doing right by her book.”

  “Probably so,” I said, watching him work. “Where are you going to put all this?” I asked.

  “Attic, garage, basement. Anywhere it’ll all go.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell everybody you’re okay. You must have scared ten years of growth off Daisy. Come on down and open your presents.”

  “Fern?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “Merry Christmas.” He handed me a book off his desk. It was still in cellophane. The title was One Hundred Uncommon Cattle Diseases and Common Cures.

  46. More Signs

  “Do you want this in a bag, sir?” asked the checkout girl in Krogers.

  “No thanks, I’ll carry it like this. Just wrap up these hooks.”

  The girl yawned. “You taking that thing to a funeral home or something?”

  Daddy tucked the frame under his arm, the portrait facing out. “No, by then it’s too late.”

  There was no traffic this early in the morning, the sun was out, and the roads were clear.