3) Frankie was going to say that it wasn't her job to tape our mail shut for us and she wasn't doing it anymore; we needed to bring it already taped.
4) Anna was going to complain that her children wouldn't talk to her just because she'd spent their inheritance on immortality. That their refusal to be happy for her was evidence that they'd never loved her.
5) Harry was going to tell us to let a smile be our umbrella.
6) Brother Porter was going to wonder why the arcade wasn't bringing in more money. He was going to add that he wasn't accusing any of us of pocketing, but that it did make you wonder how all those tourists could stop and spend so little money.
7) Kitty was going to tell us how many boys in the arcade had come on to her that day. Her personal best was seventeen. She would make this sound like a problem.
8) Harry would tell us to use those lemons and make lemonade.
9) Vincent was going to say that he thought his watch was fast and make everyone else still wearing a watch tell him what time they had. The fact that the times would vary minutely never ceased to interest him and was good for at least another hour of conversation.
10) Frankie was going to say that no one ever listened to her.
It was a kind of conversation that required nothing in response. On and on it rolled, like the ocean.
Wilt always made me laugh, and that never changed either, only it took me so much longer to get the joke. Sometimes I'd be back at Always before I noticed how witty he'd been.
* * * *
What Happened Next:
* * * *
Here's the part you already know. One day one spring—one day when the Canada geese were passing overhead yet again, and we were out at the arcades, taking money from tourists, and I was thrilling for the umpteenth time to the sight of the migration, the chevron, the honking, the sense of a wild, wild spirit in the air—Brother Porter took Kitty out to the cathedral ring and he died there.
At first Kitty thought she'd killed him by making the sex so exciting, though anyone else would have been tipped off by the frothing and the screaming. The police came and they shermanned their way through Always. Eventually they found a plastic bag of rat poison stuffed inside one of the unused post-office boxes and a half-drunk cup of Hawaiian Punch on the mail scale that tested positive for it.
Inside Always, we all got why it wasn't murder. Frankie Frye reminded us that she had no way of suspecting it would kill him. She was so worked up and righteous, she made the rest of us feel we hadn't ever had the same faith in Brother Porter she'd had or we would have poisoned him ourselves years ago.
But no one outside of Always could see this. Frankie's lawyers refused to plead it out that way; they went with insanity and made all the inner workings of Always part of their case. They dredged up the old string of arsons as if they were relevant, as if they hadn't stopped entirely the day Brother Porter finally threw his son out on his ear. Jeb was a witness for the prosecution, and a more angelic face you never saw. In retrospect, it was a great mistake to have given immortality to a fourteen-year-old boy. When he had it, he was a jerk, and I could plainly see that not having it had only made him an older jerk.
Frankie's own lawyers made such a point of her obesity that they reduced her to tears. It was a shameful performance and showed how little they understood us. If Frankie ever wished to lose weight, she had all the time in the world to do so. There was nothing relevant or even interesting in her weight.
The difficult issue for the defense was whether Frankie was insane all by herself or along with all the rest of us. Sometimes they seemed to be arguing the one and sometimes the other, so when they chose not to call me to the stand I didn't know if this was because I'd make us all look more crazy or less so. Kitty testified nicely. She charmed them all and the press dubbed her the Queen of Hearts at her own suggestion.
Wilt was able to sell his three years among the immortals to a magazine and recoup every cent of that twenty-five hundred he put up for me. There wasn't much I was happy about right then, but I was happy about that. I didn't even blame him for the way I came off in the article. I expect coquettish was the least I deserved. I'd long ago stopped noticing how I was behaving at any given moment.
I would have thought the trial would be just Mother's cup of tea, even without me on the witness stand, so I was surprised not to hear from her. It made me stop and think back, try to remember when her last letter had come. Could have been five years, could have been ten. Could have been twenty, could have been two. I figured she must be dead, which was bound to happen sooner or later, though I did think she was young to go, but that might only have been because I'd lost track of how old she was. I never heard from her again, so I think I had it right. I wonder if it was the cigarettes. She always said that smoking killed germs.
Not one of the immortals left Always during the trial. Partly we were in shock and huddled up as a result. Partly there was so much to be done, so much money to be made.
The arcade crawled with tourists and reporters, too. Looking for a story, but also, as always, trying to make one. “Now that Brother Porter is dead,” they would ask, exact wording to change, but point always the same, “don't you have some doubts? And if you have some doubts, well, then, isn't the game already over?” They were tiresome, but they paid for their Hawaiian Punch just like everyone else, and we all knew Brother Porter wouldn't have wanted them kept away.
Frankie was let off by reason of insanity. Exactly two days later Harry Capps walked into breakfast just when Winnifred Allington was telling us how badly she'd slept the night before on account of her arthritis. By the time he ran out of bullets, four more immortals were dead.
Harry's defense was no defense. “Not one of them ever got a good night's sleep,” he said. “Someone had to show them what a good night's sleep was."
The politicians blamed the overly-lenient Frankie Frye verdict for the four new deaths and swore the same mistake would not be made twice. Harry got life.
* * * *
Why I'm Still Here:
* * * *
Everyone else either died or left and now I'm the whole of it. The last of the immortals; City of Always, population one. I moved up to the big house, and I'm the postmistress now, along with anything else I care to keep going. I get a salary from the government with benefits and a pension they'll regret if I live forever. They have a powerful faith I won't.
The arcade is closed except for the peep shows, which cost a quarter now and don't need me to do anything to run them but collect the coins after. People don't come through so much since they built the 17, but I still get customers from time to time. They buy a postcard and they want the Always postmark on it.
Wilt came to fetch me after the noise died down. “I brought you here,” he said. “Seems like I should take you away.” He never did understand why I wouldn't leave. He hadn't lived here long enough to understand it.
I tried the easy answer first. I got shot by Harry Capps, I said. Right through the heart. Was supposed to die. Didn't.
But then I tried again, because that wasn't the real answer and if I'd ever loved anyone, I'd loved Wilt. Who'll take care of the redwoods if I go? I asked him. Who'll take care of the mountains? He still didn't get it, though he said he did. I wouldn't have known how to leave even if I'd wanted to. What I was and what he was—they weren't the same thing at all anymore. There was no way back to what I'd been. The actual living forever part? That was always, always the least of it.
Which is the last thing I'm going to say on the subject. There is no question you can ask I haven't already answered and answered and answered again. Time without end.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Familiar Birds
Between the ages of eight and fifteen, I was packed off to the seaside for a month every summer to stay with the Hutching family. Norma Hutching had been my mother's college roommate. She had three children—two boys considerably older than me with whom I had almost nothing t
o do, and one girl, Daisy, only one year my elder. Since I had lived most of my life in a house with a television and a city with a sports franchise, you might have thought I had things to say worth listening to. You didn't know Daisy. She always acted as if she'd packed a lot of learning into that extra year she had on me.
Daisy's mother ran a seafood restaurant, and her father a charter fishing boat. My mother would join us most weekends, sometimes with my father, when his job permitted. The Hutchings weren't rich enough to live at the beach with their tourist clientele, but had a house half an hour away in woody seclusion. It was a property littered with thorns, bugs, and birds. Daisy became my self-appointed docent to the natural world.
"This tree,” Daisy would say—she took me around the property every year on the day I arrived to remind me that I was on her turf now—"is older than Columbus.” Which made me wonder, first, how she could know this, and, second, how old Columbus was. Do you keep counting after you die?
There was no point in asking. Daisy, while more than generous with her information if allowed to offer it spontaneously, would answer no questions. I'd had teachers like that. To their way of thinking, questions expressed less interest than doubt. (To be fair, as far as my questions went, this was often accurate.)
"We used to have lots of bees here when I was little,” Daisy said. “They all died of a stomach parasite.
"Those leaves have five fingers, just like a hand. That's why they call them finger-leaves. Some word that means finger-leaves.
"Every seven years you get a whole new skin. Everything on the outside of you, everything you see, is already dead.” Daisy poked me with the sharp corner of her fingernail. “Dead person,” she said.
I spent these summers trying to get the upper hand. At my school I was quite likely to win a spelling bee, have the best birthday party, sing the solo for the Christmas concert. I could see that Daisy, dropped into that competitive environment, would be no one. I would have liked it if Daisy had seen this, too, but it was a hard point to make on her home ground. I spent my summers bossed about by someone to whom, anywhere else, anywhere real, I was clearly superior.
Sometimes we went with Mrs. Hutching to the restaurant. If she was short-staffed, we'd be asked to stamp the restaurant name (Crow's Nest) on pats of butter, fold the napkins into the wine glasses. When we were done, we'd hang about the pier. If there were tourist kids around—there usually were—I'd make it plain that I didn't live here, either. Daisy had hard little eyes, eyes like buttons. I'd feel them on me, but I didn't care. Down by the pier, I'd be the one doing the talking.
Have I been clear? I didn't like Daisy and she didn't like me and this was because neither one of us was likable. Anyone but our mothers would have seen that straight off. But they liked each other so much, our friendship was compulsory. “Our Daisy,” my mother would say appreciatively. “She is one smart little girl.” Just because Daisy'd once said she preferred a good book to any television show. I actually laughed when she said this, and even laughing didn't tip my mother off to the fact that she was being played, only to the fact that I was being rude.
"I wish,” Daisy's mother would tell Daisy, “that you had the manners Clara has.” Clara being me. And all I had done was thank Mrs. Hutching for the meal she'd made, tell her it was good. I hadn't even eaten the food. You had to wonder sometimes just how smart our mothers were.
"You can't drink the stream water here,” Daisy said. “There are eggs in it, and if you swallow them, they hatch into worms that live in your gut. Down by the Columbus tree the water's cleaner, because it's just gone over the rocks. The rocks scrape the eggs out of it.
"When you find three stones piled up like that, it means, danger. Beware. The Indians used to do that. Some of the stone piles around here are from Indian times.
"That bird there built a nest last year in the porch eaves. It was a lousy nest. All the eggs dropped right through and smashed on the porch. Birds can go crazy, just like people. That one has. She's like those old ladies you see in the city in their ratty old sweaters, talking to themselves."
Daisy's recurring themes: you'll die here, because you don't know what you're doing.
And the city is lousy, too.
* * * *
The year I was eleven Daisy explained to me how she came to know so much about nature. She said that it spoke to her. She had conversations with birds and trees, just exactly the same as she did with people. They could talk to anyone, those birds, those trees. But mostly they didn't want to. They had to really trust you.
I was immediately suspicious. I'd caught Daisy in lies before (look at that ridiculous one about not liking television) and this, if true, seemed too big a secret to have kept so long. Besides, why her?
But I didn't tell anyone what she'd said, either, not right off, and since I so liked to make her look bad this is harder to explain. The best I can do is this: I was the kind of child who scraped the frosting from my Oreos, eating only the cookies until I'd collected a whole ball of frosting, which I then ate all at once. Daisy was the kind who ate her frosting first and then tried to make a deal for yours. Daisy was not the sort to save something good for later. I was.
"The Mormons used to make tea from this,” Daisy said. She was pointing to a particularly leggy, stickery plant. “They picked the leaves and dried them and then put them in boiling water. They thought this tea stopped pregnancies. Any woman found with the dried leaves was excommunicated. Or thrown into prison.
"We have cougars here sometimes,” Daisy said. “They hunt in packs, and they always pick the smallest, weakest person as their prey."
Daisy outweighed me by a good twenty pounds.
* * * *
The property only looked beautiful to me when I went around it with my mother. Then I would see the reflections of trees laid upside down on the water and rippling; the tiny rainbows woven into an insect's wing; a black feather floating like a boat between two stones.
When my mother stayed, she slept on a futon in the Hutchings’ living room. If I managed to stay awake long enough, I'd leave the bedroom Daisy and I shared and join my mother. “Do you think there are people birds talk to?” I asked her, that year I was eleven. I was lying in, close as I could get, one of her arms under me and one arm over.
I'd been reading The Secret Garden and had decided that loving the land reflected better on me than feeling slightly menaced whenever I went out. I'd thought of Daisy when I read how Dicken spoke to the birds, how the robin brought Mary the lost garden key. I wanted to be the kind of child birds brought keys to rather than the kind of child cougars picked off and ate. Loving nature in all her aspects seemed to me the first step in switching over.
"When I was a little girl,” my mother said, “we had a parakeet. It knew several words, but it also used to babble sort of sleepily to itself for hours at a time."
"Wild birds, I meant,” I said.
"My arm's going to sleep. Move off a minute.” My mother rolled me away and then rolled me back. “Anyway. I wasn't done with my story. My grandmother lived in Germany and I hadn't seen her for three years when we heard she'd suddenly died. My mother cried so hard and so long. She lay on the couch for days, weeks it seemed to me, facedown in a pillow, and if you touched her or tried to talk she said to please, please just leave her be. We even had the doctor in to see her.
"One day when she'd been lying on the couch, she suddenly sat up gasping. The parakeet had been babbling away and then said something absolutely clear, but in German. ‘Don't cry, little dearest. It's beautiful here,’ the bird said.
"Now, that bird didn't learn anything without you saying it over and over and over. Mother figured Grandma must have been working with it ever since she died."
"Did it scare you?” I asked. I would have been scared to think my dead grandma was in the house. Or anyone's dead grandma.
"It made Mother stop crying. I was much more scared when I thought she was never going to stop,” my mother answered.
&n
bsp; * * * *
There was another reason I didn't tell my mother about the claims Daisy had made. Whenever I tried to complain about Daisy, my mother anticipated me, headed me off. She did this in a cunning way, by telling me she was proud of me. “Daisy doesn't have as many friends as you,” she would say. “Living here, so out of the way, I think she's very lonely. I know she irritates you sometimes. Even good friends can really annoy each other. But you're always so sweet to her. It makes me very proud to see.
"Norma says Daisy spends all year waiting for summer, when you come back,” my mother said.
The whole arrangement worked so well for our parents. Daisy's parents could go off to work confident they'd left Daisy with company and things to do. Mine avoided the summer daycare problem, provided me with the benefits of brothers and sisters, and took a holiday from parenting themselves. No one was going to let a little thing like Daisy's and my mutual antipathy spoil all this.
My mother went back to the city. The weather improved. The tourists packed the road to the beach so you could hardly get to the store for milk without it taking the afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Hutching left early and came home late and exhausted. Mr. Hutching's nose had turned bright red and was now peeling.
They were less likely to bring Daisy and me to the beach, now that the workday was so long and hard. On July 4th they made an exception. Mr. Hutching was taking some tourists out in the evening so they could see the fireworks from the water. There'd be a picnic on the boat: potato salad, five-bean salad, hamburgers and hot-dogs. He'd barbecue any fish they caught. Daisy and I could come along, he said, and help.
The tourists turned out to be two families. There were four children—a two-year-old, two fives, and a seven. You'd think I'd find it beneath me, playing my usual game to such an easy audience. You'd be wrong. I told the children Daisy talked to birds.
What I Didn't See and Other Stories Page 9