MacGyver looks across the field and sees what looks like a space-ship. He blinks and shakes his head, then looks again. A glowing figure is walking toward his car. But MacGyver is not afraid. He has had much experience with thugs of all kinds. He gets out of his car and walks toward the figure, who is carrying something that looks like a floor lamp. The next frame shows MacGyver slumped unconscious on the ground.
* * *
I wake up when Rachel knocks at my door and brings my lunch. She is removing from the tray a bowl of something when the doorbell sounds again. “I’ll be right back,” she says to me, and she leaves the tray on the table. From my recliner I cannot see the back door, but I hear the same voice as before, then laughter. Though I’ve never heard her laugh, I know this laughter isn’t Rachel’s. “So it was just a false alarm,” the voice says, “but I sure appreciate your help. I didn’t know what else to do. Hope I didn’t upset your plans for the day.”
Rachel says no, her plans weren’t upset, she had planned to be home all morning anyway. Before the woman leaves, she thanks Rachel again.
“You said her name is Veronica, right?” Rachel asks.
“It was my mother’s name,” the woman says.
“It’s a pretty name,” Rachel says. “She’s sweet.”
I wonder who Veronica is and where she is. Surely if she were a child there in the kitchen with Rachel and the visitor, I would hear her.
The other woman must have stepped out into the carport by now because I can’t hear her reply. I hear Rachel, though, when she says, “Could you come over for some dessert tonight?”
In the weeks that I have lived here, only the white electrician and the mailman have come to Patrick and Rachel’s house. An empty lot of weeds stands on one side of their house and an unoccupied house, surrounded by a tall hedge, on the other. I haven’t thought of my nephew as having friends, but I have wondered if Rachel does, perhaps someone at their church or a neighbor down the street, though I have never heard nor seen her talking to another woman until today.
After my trial visit in the summer, I worried briefly that Rachel might have agreed to take me in part to ease her loneliness. I wondered if she wanted more from me than my money. I liked the fact that she was to be home all day, for I wanted to hear the sounds of living, but I had no desire for the door between my apartment and her kitchen to stand open. I made it clear that I wanted shelter, food, and privacy. I was to have no responsibilities beyond my modest monthly contribution to Patrick’s household expenses. I had long since had my fill of talk. One does not want to spend her final days trying to follow someone’s story or participate in the fruitless discussions most women seem to enjoy, the kind I myself once enjoyed. That time is past.
But Rachel has left me alone. She has told me no tales, has read me no rhymes, has sung me no songs. Nor have I imposed my words upon her. She is a riddle for which I need no answer. I am content with her silence. Watching her is sufficient.
But “Could you come over for dessert tonight?” This is a breaking of the silence. She steps out into the carport to talk. But what is a single word in a vast emptiness? What is a flicker of light in a dark night? Only a moment and then it is gone.
I think of the dangers of love. Romeo’s line comes to my mind: “I must be gone and live, or stay and die.” I hear Juliet as she tries to dissuade him, to make him believe that the light in the sky is not daylight but only “some meteor that the sun exhales.” I think of the ill luck of Romeo and Juliet. If Tybalt hadn’t been so quarrelsome. If Romeo hadn’t avenged Mercutio’s death. If old Capulet hadn’t insisted on Juliet’s marrying Paris. If the letter telling Romeo of the sleeping potion hadn’t miscarried. If Romeo had patiently grieved long enough for Juliet to awake.
And if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their rumps when they jump.
Rachel reappears to finish laying out my lunch. She works quietly, her lips slightly parted as if a spring is loose, but no words come.
Chapter 5
The Wide World and All Her Fading Sweets
The horned lark loves the open country and with its mate builds its nest on the ground. The male, the black tufts of his “horns” barely visible, performs his courtship ritual by circling at great heights while warbling sweetly, then closing his wings and plummeting silently to the ground.
On Sunday morning it is raining. Patrick informs me after breakfast that it will be best if I move to the back bedroom for the three-day electrical project. He apologizes for the inconvenience. I do not ask if the rewiring is necessary. I know men and their home repairs. In their minds they are always necessary. If asked, Patrick would launch into a lengthy discourse about the dangers of old wiring and the advantages of new. He would talk about the age of the house, the demand for increased voltage capacity, and many other things that would give him great joy to explain. I will deny him the pleasure.
While Patrick and Rachel are at church, I take a few things to my assigned bedroom across the hall from theirs. Rachel has set several magazines on the table beside the single bed and has opened the blinds and curtains. I wonder if this is the room where Toby and Mandy once slept. There are two windows in the room—one of them facing the street, the other looking out on the tall hedge around the empty house next door. A small chair upholstered in pale green chintz sits between the bedside table and window. A pink towel and matching washcloth have been laid out on the foot of the bed.
A note, presumably from Rachel, is propped against a lamp on the dresser: “There’s plenty of closet space. Patrick will move your radio back here. He will bring in the TV from his study.” This does not surprise me that Rachel has written something she could have told me. Her handwriting is large and sensible, her style economical.
I go back to my apartment to get two dresses to hang in the new closet. I have five dresses, all alike except for color, which I wear in no particular order. They button in front and are of a crinkly fabric that requires no ironing. Over these I wear sweaters, often more than one at a time. I also wear heavy socks and slippers. My apartment has its own thermostat, set at 78 degrees. I have told Patrick that I will not suffer cold to save money on an electric bill. I have two pairs of pants with elastic waistbands, but I prefer the dresses. I also have three other dresses, nicer ones suitable for dining out and attending church, neither of which I intend to do, and three pairs of rubber-soled lace-up shoes, which I have not worn since coming here.
I sit in the pale green chair and find that it both swivels and rocks. I turn to face the window, from which I can see Wagner’s Mortuary. It is the kind of cold, gray, wet day common to the months of November and February. A woman is getting out of her car in the parking lot of the mortuary and walking quickly toward the front door. She has no umbrella but has pulled her raincoat up over her head. Sunday is generally a slow day at Wagner’s, at least at the front entrance. No doubt the deliveries at the rear continue unabated, as death observes no day of rest.
Though I will miss my bird feeder for the next few days, I will not object to staying in this room as much as I will pretend to. There is a bathroom separating it from Patrick’s study, with doors on either side, like the shared bathrooms in old hospitals. I will sit in this chair and observe the small world of Edison Street in Greenville, Mississippi. Between meals I will watch television and read Rachel’s magazines.
I look through the small stack on the table and find, among the issues of Country Home and Country Chef, an old copy of a magazine called Writing Life. The name on the address sticker is that of my nephew: Patrick Martin Felber. I have heard Patrick say he should not have quit college after two years, that he could be a tenured professor of history or literature by now if he had set his mind to it. I believe that the inflated value he places on universities has caused him to think more highly of me than I deserve. I notice that the magazine is two years old. I imagine Patrick eagerly opening it two years ago, drinking in its announcements of newly published writers, writers’ retreats, fiction contes
ts, and the like. No doubt he still dreams of seeing his own name someday on the page titled Recent Winners of Grants and Awards.
I thumb through the magazine now, taking note of the feature articles: “The Spirit and the Hand,” “Time-Tested Words,” “Benefits of Solitude,” “Finding the Heart of a Story.” Someone has highlighted passages with a yellow marker: I aim for a style that is pared down, with a rough-hewn elegance, and I insist on an artist’s right to break the rules, and Look for an agent who is well connected, pushy, and visionary, with a little gypsy blood in his veins.
I close the Writing Life magazine, feeling sorry that my nephew has an aspiration to write. I remember the way Eliot haunted our mailbox when he had a manuscript circulating among scholarly journals. I remember his descent into silent gloom when an article was rejected. When an article was accepted, he exhibited only the briefest joy before a grim resolve took over and he got back to work. He must publish again and yet again. My bird book tells me that the horned lark may sing sweetly at great heights, then suddenly and silently dive groundward. The pressure to publish was considerable in the English Department of South Wesleyan State College, where we taught, and even more intense in the larger academic circles in which Eliot was anxious to make a reputation.
I met him at a time when his song was often cheerful, when he saw in me the chance for improving his life, particularly in regard to his writing—an activity that necessitated a reliable proofreader and typist. I knew nothing of the black moods to which he was prone after his literary setbacks. Yet my life as Eliot’s wife was not unpleasant. Between moods he could be considerate and jovial. I learned to read him, and it was a book I loved. I knew when to leave him alone, when to draw him out, when to serve quietly.
What time does to “the world and all her fading sweets” is a common theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets. How time touches the body can be seen with the eye. What it does to the spirit may be hidden from sight but be more cruel by far. I have heard it said that a woman never really knows a man until she marries him. This much is true. Yet sometimes a woman may marry a man and live with him for many years, may learn many things about him during that time, yet still not truly know him.
As a teacher of freshman grammar and composition, and content to remain so, I felt none of Eliot’s compulsion to be published but rather gave myself to helping him prepare his manuscripts and lecture notes. I had come to university teaching late, having spent almost twenty years in elementary school classrooms. It was Eliot who urged me to take summer courses in English Education, then apply for an entry-level position at the college where he taught Shakespeare and Seventeenth-Century Literature.
Teaching university students was not the grand, uplifting experience I had imagined. It was tedious and only rarely rewarding. In the areas of attention span and ability to follow directions, I found little difference between ten-year-olds and college freshmen, who saw no glory to be gained from learning rules of grammar and composing a research paper. To say that their efforts were halfhearted would be an exaggeration.
Yet I dutifully drilled the rules and graded their papers for ten years at South Wesleyan in Hillcrest, Kentucky, and another ten at Tri-Community College in Carlton, Kentucky, before retiring from teaching. During that time I often wished I had remained in the elementary classroom, but having already fallen into the habit of university teaching, meeting students only three hours a week instead of six or seven hours a day, I found it was a habit not easily broken. Recalling, furthermore, the great outlay of physical energy required to teach children, I never went back.
I want to tell Patrick that his job at the office supply store is eminently more interesting than grading workbook exercises on subject-verb agreement, marking comma splices and fused sentences in essays, checking sources in the library for plagiarism. I want to tell him of the emotional battering he will experience if he insists on trying to write for publication. I want to describe the lonely valleys of discouragement the writer must walk, the long hours of toiling in the field for only a handful of fruit. Sometimes there comes a drought and there is no crop at all.
Or I could take a different tack. I could tell him that writing in itself is harmless, may even be deeply, personally gratifying. I could encourage him to write reams of pages out of the abundance of his desire, to collect these treasures into large notebooks, to build bookshelves to house them all, to add a room onto his house if necessary. “Empty your heart,” I could tell him. “Get it all out on paper.” Then I could fix him with a stern gaze. “But don’t expect an editor on the face of God’s green earth to care in the least about what you have written. And don’t expect to be paid a red cent for any of it. And don’t pawn it off on friends and family to read.”
From hearing Patrick’s spoken words, I know what his writing would be like: bombastic, self-important soapboxing. I have read some of his letters to the editor printed in the Delta Democrat Times. The words clear, direct, and understated do not describe Patrick’s style of communication.
I put the writing magazine at the bottom of the stack and see that there are also a few old issues of Time magazine on the table. I find the Milestones page in one of them. “DIED. SIDNEY JAMES, 97, founding editor of Sports Illustrated.” I wonder if Sidney James included a swimsuit issue in the early years. Pictures flash into my mind as I think of the different ways women try to please men and of the degrading uses to which the human body can be put.
I look at my hands and think of the many hours I typed for Eliot, of the suitcases I packed and the meals I cooked for him, the trips we took together. I think of the thirteen years we spent as husband and wife, years that I considered to be good until the very end. I think of Eliot’s son, locked away for life in a Kentucky prison, of his daughter, living on a sheep farm in New Zealand, a woman I have never met. I think of her two boys, Eliot’s only grandchildren, whom he never saw. Nor did he know their names.
The lawyer’s office across the street is closed. The sign in the yard reads SAMUEL F. GRAHAM, ATTORNEY AT LAW. I wonder what kinds of cases Samuel F. Graham specializes in. Would he accept the defense in a murder case? If the defendant were a shiftless thirty-year-old who never called his father except to ask for money, who never visited except to follow up on a phone call, would he believe the claim that the gun had fired accidentally?
The two wicker rocking chairs on the wide front porch of the lawyer’s office are likely intended as a touch of domestic comfort, of assurance that Samuel F. Graham is just one of the common townsfolk: “Come on up and sit a spell. Tell me your troubles and we’ll talk it over.” People in the South have a great fondness for front porches. Surely no one with rocking chairs on his front porch would fleece you of your life savings. Surely he just wants to help.
The house next to the lawyer’s office has a discouraged look. Its high-pitched roof gives the effect of an old hat that is too large. The windows appear to have blankets or sheets over them, and rain is pouring from a misaligned gutter at the corner of the house. There are slats missing from one of the shutters, and the shrubs in front of the porch look beaten down, as if a large grazing animal has been tramping through them.
November can be a changeable month in the Mississippi Delta. Though it is forty-five degrees and raining today, two days ago it was a warm, sunny day in the sixties. On that day there was a great flurry of coming and going across the street as people arrived in shifts to help the family move in. The woman dressed as a man was in and out, doing a man’s work. The man did his share, also.
At one point the man appeared on the front porch with cups on a tray, and a half dozen other people came out to take a break. The teenage girl was among them, hunched over, looking down into her cup. They sat on boxes and drank whatever was in the cups, then got up and went inside again. Later the man came back out carrying the little girl. He was talking to a man and woman, and when they got in a car and left, he waved good-bye from the front step. He lifted the little girl’s hand to make her wave. All thi
s I watched for an hour while Rachel was at the Department of Motor Vehicles renewing her driver’s license.
It must have been the woman dressed as a man who came to Rachel’s door on Friday, the one who spoke of a false alarm, whose mother’s name was Veronica. She and the man came again that night for dessert. I didn’t see either of them, but by muting the television I heard much of the conversation.
They sat at the kitchen table to eat Rachel’s apple cobbler, and they patiently answered Patrick’s questions, which he fired rapidly, interspersing the questions with bits of advice about landscaping, which he knew they were eager to start on considering the former owners’ neglect, and repaving, which he likewise knew they had already thought about since the driveway was so badly cracked. He told them that one of his employees at the office supply store had a brother who did driveways and sidewalks, and he would be glad to give them his name and phone number; in fact, he would look it up and write it down right now while he was thinking about it.
The man, whose name is Steve, said he worked at the catfish processing plant. Teri, the woman, didn’t work, he said, “except at home, and she does plenty of that.” Teri interjected that it was a full-time job just keeping ahead of Steve’s smelly work clothes. They had two girls, Mindy the teenager and Veronica, who was almost four. Steve volunteered the fact that they had lost a boy, Jody, eleven years ago when he was only a baby.
I wondered if the mention of the boy’s death and the names Jody and Mindy, so close to Toby and Mandy, suddenly made Rachel feel that there was a noose around her neck. And did she feel that someone had kicked the chair out from under her and left her hanging when Patrick said, “We lost two children ourselves, so we know what that’s like”?
But Rachel’s voice was low and calm. “How many days a week does Veronica have therapy?” she asked.
Winter Birds Page 5