When Olivia called that time, she said, “Mother, you want me to come?”
And I said, “Well, why don’t you wait until we go home.”
And she said, “I’m coming for you, not for Mother Ollie.”
The next morning they said, “She’s become a medical problem now,” and they moved us up to the next floor. I always will feel angry toward them. Because they knew she was dying.
They got her in this room, and she laid just as quiet, didn’t move a muscle. I had gotten my cot in, and Olivia was sitting in the big chair, and she was where she could see Mother Ollie, you know. And finally she said, “Mother Ollie’s not breathing.” And she was gone just like that.
Redbird, Sundown
Everywhere else, in every other place where the wide sky reaches, the space beyond the trees is still blue, the black branches spread out on a flat plane as if cut from construction paper, as if pasted in delicate tracery on an azure scrim. The pure, blinding blue that reaches from treetop to treetop in the east is the only sign that this is not a sepia world made entirely of brown grass and rustling beech leaves, pale as dawn light, and the dormant hydrangea’s dry ghost petals and the white scaling of the sycamore.
The earth has faded, but the sky will not give up its right to color, doubling down in the west with reds and oranges and yellows. The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line.
Never mind. Mind only this tree in winter and this redbird, this tiny god, all fiery light leading to him and gathered in him, this lord of the sunset, this greeter of the coming dark.
Twilight
AUBURN, 1982
I went to a land-grant university, a rural school that students at the rival institution dismissed as a cow college, though I was a junior before I ever saw a single cow there. For someone who had spent her childhood almost entirely outdoors, my college life was unacceptably enclosed. Every day I followed the same brick path from crowded dorm to crowded class to crowded office to crowded cafeteria, and then back to the dorm again. A gentler terrain of fields and ponds and piney woods existed less than a mile from the liberal arts high-rise, but I had no time for idle exploring, for poking about in the scaled-down universe where forestry and agriculture students learned their trade.
One afternoon late in the fall of my junior year, I broke. I had stopped at the cafeteria to grab a sandwich before the dinner crowd hit, hoping for a few minutes of quiet in which to read my literature assignment, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, before my evening shift at the dorm desk. But even with few students present, there was nothing resembling quiet in that cavernous room. The loudspeaker blasted John Cougar’s ditty about Jack and Diane, and I pressed my fingers into my ears and hunched low over my book. The sound of my own urgent blood thumping through my veins quarreled with the magnificent sprung rhythm of the poem as thoroughly as Jack and Diane did, and I finally snapped the book closed. My heart was still pounding as I stepped into the dorm lobby, ditched my pack, and started walking. I was headed out.
It was a delight to be moving, to feel my body expanding into the larger gestures of the outdoors. What a relief to feel my walk lengthening into a stride and my lungs taking in air by the gulp. I kept walking—past the football stadium, past the sororities—until I came to the red dirt lanes of the agriculture program’s experimental fields. Brindled cows turned their unsurprised faces toward me in pastures dotted with hay bales that looked like giant spools of golden thread. The empty bluebird boxes nailed to the fence posts were shining in the slanted light. A red-tailed hawk—the only kind I could name—glided past, calling into the sky.
I caught my breath and walked on, with a rising sense that glory was all around me. Only at twilight can an ordinary mortal walk in light and dark at once—feet plodding through night, eyes turned up toward bright day. It is a glimpse into eternity, that bewildering notion of endless time, where light and dark exist simultaneously.
When the fields gave way to the experimental forest, the wind had picked up, and dogwood leaves were lifting and falling in the light. There are few sights lovelier than leaves being carried on wind. Though that sight was surely common on the campus quad, I had somehow failed to register it. And the swifts wheeling in the sky as evening came on—they would be visible to anyone standing on the sidewalk outside Haley Center, yet I had missed them, too.
There, in that forest, I heard the sound of trees giving themselves over to night. Long after I turned in my paper on Hopkins, long after I was gone myself, this goldengrove unleaving would be releasing its bounty to the wind.
In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of the Day She Was Shot
LOWER ALABAMA, 1982
It was the twenty-ninth day of November. I had been sewing and became tired and bored. This was like many days since Mother died in September. She had been such a comfort to me when my husband died in 1977. Now it seemed I had no anchor.
I decided to drive down to our little country store, where I was sure I would find my best friend and her son, who owned it. I had been there about ten minutes when a man came to the door and asked about some oil for his car. Thomas asked him whether he wanted the can with the red label or the can with the green. The man went out to his car and came back with a rifle.
I was sitting in a rocking chair just inside the door to his left. When I looked up, he was pointing the gun at Thomas to his right. I yelled, “Thomas!” The man turned on me and fired into my chest. This gave Thomas time to get his own handgun. He fired twice at the man, killing him instantly.
It seemed ages before anyone could call an ambulance. They also called the sheriff and the coroner. All the way to the hospital I was conscious and in terrific pain. After surgery I had the strangest feeling that there was a ring around me holding me up or protecting me. I’m sure now it was the Lord’s presence. I was on all kinds of life supports—breathing machine, heart machine, oxygen, IV, catheter, etc. But I had no thought that I might not live. I left the hospital on December 23. When the doctors or others would say, “It’s a miracle that you’re alive,” I always replied, “I know it is a miracle because my God answers prayer.”
All the time during my husband’s last illness and then my mother’s, I prayed to be strong for them. I wanted to look after them. Then, when they were gone, I thought, Nobody else needs me. Now I know the Lord wants me for something else, and I’m praying for him to show me what it is.
Babel
PHILADELPHIA, 1984
I thought I had escaped the beautiful, benighted South for good when I left Alabama for graduate school in Philadelphia in 1984, though now I can’t imagine how this delusion ever took root. At the age of twenty-two, I had never set foot any farther north than Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the time I got to Philadelphia, I was so poorly traveled—and so geographically illiterate—I could not pick out the state of Pennsylvania on an unlabeled weather map on the evening news.
I can’t even say why I thought I should get a doctorate in English. The questions that occupy scholars—details of textu-ality, previously unnoted formative influences, nuances of historical context—held no interest for me. Why hadn’t I applied to writing programs instead? Some vague idea about employability, maybe.
When I tell people, if it ever comes up, that I once spent a semester in Philadelphia, a knot instantly forms in the back of my throat, a reminder across thirty years of the panic and despair I felt with every step I took on those grimy sidewalks, with every breath of that heavy, exhaust-burdened air. I had moved into a walkup on a main artery of West Philly, and I lay awake that first sweltering night with the windows open to catch what passed for a breeze, waiting for the sounds of traffic to die down.
They never did. All night long, the gears of delivery trucks ground at the traffic light on the corner; four floors down, strangers muttered and swore in the darkness.
Everywhere in the City of Brotherly Love were metaphors for my own dislocation: a homeless woman squatting in the grocery store parking lot, indifferent to the puddle spreading below her; the sparrows and pigeons, all sepia and brown, that replaced the scolding blue jays and scarlet cardinals I’d left behind; even deep snow, which all my life I had longed to see, was flecked with soot when it finally arrived. I was so homesick for the natural world that I tamed a mouse who lived in my wall, carefully placing stale Cheetos on the floor beyond me, just to feel the creature’s delicate feet skittering across my own bare toes.
If I was misplaced in the city, sick with longing for the hidebound landscape I had just stomped away from, shaking its caked red dirt from my sandals, oh, how much more disrupted I felt in my actual classes. The dead languages I was studying—Old English and Latin—were more relevant to my notions of literature than anything I heard in the literary theory course. The aim of the course, at least so far as I could discern it, was to liberate literature from both authorial intent and any claim of independent meaning achieved by close reading. “The text can’t mean anything independent of the reader,” the professor, a luminary of the field, announced. “Even the word ‘mean’ doesn’t mean anything.”
To a person who has wanted since the age of fourteen to be a poet, a classroom in which all the words of the English language have been made bereft of the power to create meaning, or at least a meaning that can be reliably communicated to others, is not a natural home. I was young, both fearful and arrogant, and perhaps I had been praised too often for an inclination to argue on behalf of a cause.
“The word ‘mean’ doesn’t mean anything”—these were fighting words to me. I raised my hand. “Pretend we’re in the library, and you’re standing on a ladder above me, eye-level with a shelf that holds King Lear and Jane Fonda’s Workout Book,” I said, red-faced and stammering, sounding far less assured than I felt. “If I say, ‘Hand me down that tragedy,’ which book do you reach for?”
The other students in the class, young scholars already versed in the fundamental ideas behind post-structuralist literary theories, must have thought they were listening to Elly May Clampett. They laughed out loud. I never raised my hand again.
Once, not long after I arrived in Philadelphia, a thundering car crash splintered the relative calm of a Sunday afternoon outside my apartment, and the building emptied itself onto the sidewalk as everyone came out to see what happened. I’m not speaking in metaphors when I say that my neighbors were surely as lost as I was: mostly immigrants from somewhere much farther away than Alabama, they couldn’t communicate with each other or with me—not because we couldn’t agree on the meaning of the words, but because none of the words we knew belonged to the same language.
Bare Ruin’d Choirs
The miserable heat of summer lingered and lingered and lingered, and the drought deepened and deepened and deepened, from moderate to severe to extreme. Most leaves simply curled up from the edges, fading from green to brown before dropping to the ground with hardly a flare of color to remind us that the world is turning, that the world is only a great blue ball rolling down a great glass hill, gaining speed with each rotation.
My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.
How foolish it is for a mortal being to need such reminders, but oh how much easier it is to pay attention when the world beckons, when the world holds out its cupped hands and says, “Lean close. Look at this!” This leaf will never again be exactly this shade of crimson. The nestlings in the euonymus just beyond the window will never again be this bald or this blind. Nothing gold can stay.
And yet in winter the bare limbs of the sycamore reveal the mockingbird nest it sheltered all summer, unseen barely a foot above my head, and the night sky spreads out its stars so profusely that the streetlights are only a nuisance, and the red-tailed hawk fluffs her feathers over her cold yellow feet and surveys the earth with such stillness I could swear it wasn’t turning at all.
Thanksgiving
PHILADELPHIA, 1984
Winter break came so early in December that it made no sense to go home for Thanksgiving, no matter how homesick I was. But as the dark nights grew longer and the cold winds blew colder, I wavered. Was it too late? Could I still change my mind?
It was too late. Of course. It was far, far too late. And I had papers to write. I had papers to grade. Also, I had no car, and forget booking a plane ticket so close to the holiday, even if I’d had money to spare for a plane ticket, which on a graduate student’s stipend I definitely did not. Amtrak was sold out, and the long, long bus ride seemed too daunting. I would be spending Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, a thousand miles from home.
“I don’t think I can stand it here,” I said during the weekly call to my parents that Sunday. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Just come home,” my father said.
“It’s too late.” I was crying by then. “It’s way too late.”
You can always come home, Sweet,” he said. “Even if you marry a bastard, you can always leave him and come on home.”
My father intended no irony in making this point. He had never read Thomas Wolfe—might never have heard of Thomas Wolfe. These were words of loving reassurance from a parent to his child, a reminder that as long as he and my mother were alive, there would always be a place in the world for me, a place where I would always belong, even if I didn’t always believe I belonged there.
But I wonder now, decades later, if my father’s words were more than a reminder of my everlasting place in the family. I wonder now if they were also an expression of his own longing for the days when all his chicks were still in the nest, when the circle was still closed and the family that he and my mother had made was complete. I was the first child to leave home, but I had given no thought to my parents’ own loneliness as they pulled away from the curb in front of my apartment in Philadelphia, an empty U-Haul rattling behind Dad’s ancient panel van, for the long drive back to Alabama without me.
I gave no thought to it then, but I think of it all the time now. I think of my father’s words across a bad landline connection in 1984 that reached my homesick heart in cold Philadelphia. I think of the twenty-six-hour bus ride into the heart of Greyhound darkness that followed, a desperate journey that got me home in time for the squash casserole and the cranberry relish. I think most of my own happiness, of all the years with a good man and the family we have made together and the absorbing work—everything that followed a single season of loss, and only because I listened to my father. Because I came home.
The Unpeaceable Kingdom
In spring, I used to search for nests. I would part the branches of shrubs and low-limbed trees, peering into their depths for a clump of sticks and string and shredded plastic—the messy structure of a mockingbird’s nest. I would squat and look upward for a cardinal’s tidy brown bowl. I scanned the ivy climbing the bricks, searching for a hammock tucked into the leaves by house finches. I checked the hanging fern for the vortex tunnel built by a Carolina wren. I watched at my window for blue jays flying into and out of the tree canopy and tried to pinpoint the exact Y-crook in the branches where they’d hidden their young.
For ten years, this was my faithful nesting-season ritual because our little dog, Betty, a feist mix, was hell on fledglings. In her leaping, tree-climbing youth, I took down my feeders and emptied my birdbath, determined not to invite songbirds into the yard. They nested here anyway, perhaps because our lot backs up to a patch of sheltering woods, pe
rhaps because birds will nest more or less anywhere.
I couldn’t keep Betty in the house all spring and summer, but I could certainly keep her inside during the few days when new fliers are most vulnerable. But to do that I needed to know when the babies were likely to leave the nest, and to know that I needed to find the nests and keep watch over them. If I knew the species of bird on the nest, and I knew the day her eggs hatched, I could make a good guess about when her young would fledge.
The problem with knowing something is that I cannot unknow it. Knowing there are two eggs in the redbird nest means knowing not only an approximate fledge date for the redbird babies but also exactly how many eggs the rat snake ate between yesterday afternoon, when I checked on the mama bird, and this morning, when I found her nest empty. The loss you don’t know about is no less a loss, but it costs you nothing and so it causes you no pain.
Human beings are storytelling creatures, craning to see the crumpled metal in the closed-off highway lane, working from the moment the traffic slows to construct a narrative from what’s left behind. But our tales, even the most tragic ones, hinge on specificity. The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.
The grief of the failed nest echoes in an entirely different register, but it is still a grief. In Tennessee it’s common for cardinals to nest twice in a season, hatching between two and five eggs each time, but few of their young will survive. The world is not large enough to contain so many cardinals, and predators must eat, too, and feed their own young. It should not trouble me to know the sharp-eyed crow will feed its babies with any hatchlings it steals from the cardinals, but I have watched day after day as the careful redbird constructed a sturdy nest in the laurel, and I have calculated how many days and nights she has sat upon those eggs, how many trips she has made to the nest to feed the babies, how many times she has sheltered them through a downpour. Day after day after day.
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