Winter Birds

by Jamie Langston Turner

  I feel a hand on my arm and look down to see Della Boyd patting the sleeve of my sweater. “That is the softest, prettiest shade of gray,” she says. “It’s almost a blue, isn’t it? Did you say you got it for Christmas?”

  “No,” I say, not meaning that it wasn’t a Christmas gift, only that I had not identified it as such.

  For it was indeed a gift. When Rachel came to my apartment this morning with my bowl of oatmeal, a cinnamon roll, and a peeled tangerine on her tray, Patrick accompanied her, bearing in front of him a present wrapped in silver foil paper with a gold bow on top. Another smaller gift, wrapped in red-and-green plaid paper with a sprig of evergreen tied on top, was sitting on the tray next to the silverware and napkin.

  “Merry Christmas!” Patrick said loudly. He set the larger present on the round table.

  As Rachel removed the things from the tray, setting them on the round table, also, Patrick walked over to my recliner, as if to help me up. I stood before he could do so.

  He pointed to the bird feeder outside my window. “What kind is that, Aunt Sophie? Do you know?”

  Though I did know, I shook my head. It was a white-breasted nuthatch. The sight of the presents had muddled my thoughts and bound my tongue. I have read of the nuthatch in my bird book. It copes skillfully in difficult circumstances. It gleans for its food in places already foraged by larger birds, finding nourishment where it can. It is used to leftovers in life. It hangs onto branches and tree trunks tightly with its curved claws and bill. I wonder what a starving nuthatch would do if it encountered a great spread of insect larvae laid out for the taking instead of hidden in the usual crevices. Out of context, would the bird recognize its favorite food for what it was?

  Sometimes one is so accustomed to the mere necessities of life that he cannot comprehend liberality. Sometimes when confronted with a dream come true, one cannot take it in. Sometimes he turns from it, as from a stranger. He may even fear it.

  It was Patrick who pressed me to open the presents. After I sat down at the round table, he thrust them into my hands, first the small one and then the large one. The small one was a pin, as one might wear on the collar of a blouse or the lapel of a jacket, two articles of clothing I do not own. It was a cloisonné bird with its wings outspread. No bird I can name, in a pattern of bright enamel colors. No bird in my bird book sports such plumage.

  The larger gift was a sweater—coincidentally, the blue-gray of a nuthatch—with silver buttons and small pink flowers embroidered around the neck and cuffs. I had never owned such a sweater, certainly never received one as a gift. I was filled with consternation. How does one respond to such gifts? I could think of nothing to say. Perhaps Patrick and Rachel took my silence as ingratitude.

  I was staring down at the sweater, and I must have been shaking my head, for Patrick said, “Is it the wrong color? Wrong size?” Turning to Rachel, he asked, “How did you decide what size to get? Can you take it back?” Then, “I don’t think she likes it.” He reached to take the box from me, but I clasped it to myself.

  “Oh, well now, maybe she does,” he said. This is something people often do around old people, talk as if they are not present, or as if they are babies or dimwits. Rachel, standing a few steps away holding the empty tray by her side, said to me, “I thought you’d look pretty in that color.” Though the thought of my looking pretty in any color was laughable, her words did not sound empty. Rachel is not one for mindless talk. Perhaps she has her own definition for a common word like pretty.

  The woman next to me is talking again. “Well, my stars, I’ve been so busy admiring your sweater I didn’t even see that!” She has twisted her head around farther and is gaping openmouthed at the cloisonné bird pinned near the right shoulder of my sweater. “Why, that is so beautiful it takes my breath away! Look, Helena, can you see it? Can you see Sophie’s pin? It’s a work of art!” Now Helena is leaning forward trying to see the pin, and Steve and Teri are nodding and murmuring in agreement from the other side of the table. Patrick is smiling with satisfaction, proud that his gift has inspired such admiration. Potts observes that such a wonder should be passed around the table for closer inspection.

  Mindy is eyeing the pin, frowning slightly, as if wondering how such a small thing, something she would never be caught wearing, can evoke such emotion from adults. Perhaps she will tell her friends about it later: “And this fat old woman was wearing this weird-looking bird pin that everybody was having a cow over!” Veronica’s eyes have landed on the light fixture above the table—an imitation chandelier, though most of the people at this table would likely think of it as the real thing. One of its six bulbs has burned out.

  Rachel returns with a serving platter in one hand and a bowl of gelatin salad in the other. On the platter are slices of the turkey and ham I have smelled baking in her oven since early morning. The gelatin salad is red with pieces of fruit and nuts mixed in. She hands the platter to Patrick and sets the salad on the table next to me. “Why don’t we start with Aunt Sophie?” she says to him, but he has already speared a piece of turkey with the meat fork and is reaching toward my plate.

  “I just love birds!” Della Boyd says. “Don’t I, Helena? Don’t I love birds?”

  “She loves birds,” Helena says dryly.

  “Especially little hummingbirds. They’re my special favorites. Last summer there must have been an explosion in the hummingbird population because we had them by the hundreds!” I wonder how Della Boyd has ascertained this, but I say nothing.

  Steve volunteers that he has seen an owl in his backyard. Patrick shares the fact that both long-eared and short-eared owls spend winters in the Southeast.

  “Why, I didn’t know owls had ears,” Della Boyd says. “Did you, Helena?”

  No one replies to this. Mindy opens her eyes wide and stares hard at her plate, as if thinking, Is anyone at this table going to say something normal?

  Rachel returns with two more dishes, one of mashed sweet potatoes, another of green beans.

  “But then, I suppose birds have to have some kind of mechanism for hearing,” Della Boyd says. “What I meant was . . .” She trails off.

  Patrick explains that the owls’ ears are actually only tufts of feathers that have nothing to do with their hearing.

  “Well, now, that is certainly interesting,” Della Boyd says, looking at Patrick with great awe.

  And thus, seated between a great innocent and a tiresome pedant, I am served my Christmas dinner. I think of what Samuel Johnson once observed, that one does not have to travel widely to see all there is to see of humanity.

  I think of the unfulfilled dreams represented in this small dining room: of children like Veronica born defective, of children like Rachel’s babies born healthy but crushed in the bud, of children like Potts’ son removed by distance from those who love them.

  I think of the women at this table. I think of us all—of Teri and Mindy, Della Boyd and Helena, Rachel and myself. I think of the things women will do for those they love. I think of the things they suffer because of love. I think of what becomes of women who are deprived of love. I remember a line from a play. It was one of Shakespeare’s Henry plays, perhaps Henry VI: “O tiger’s heart, wrapped in a woman’s hide.” I wonder what the three men at this table would say were I to quote the line now. No doubt Patrick would have something educational to offer about the tiger’s circulatory system.

  Chapter 18

  Now, Music, Sound, and Sing Your Solemn Hymn

  A native American legend explains the many vivid colors of the painted bunting’s coat this way: The Great Spirit, when assigning colors to all the birds, failed to save enough of a single color for the last bird in line—the painted bunting. He had to make do, therefore, by using all the leftover dyes from the other birds.

  DIED. YANG HUANYI, late 90s, believed to be the last writer and speaker of a rare language used exclusively by women; in Jiangyong, China.” Time magazine calls the language Nushu, which is Mandarin for “wo
men’s script.” The language, it says, was reserved for expressing the deepest woes of a woman’s heart, especially in matters of love and marriage. I find this of great interest. I agree with Shakespeare that words are weak props. For so heavy a load as the heartache of women betrayed in marriage, everyday language is inadequate. Though I have never spoken of my private sorrows, like Mary I have pondered them in my heart.

  Two days after Christmas I rise from my round table, having finished my midday meal—a bowl of turkey-rice soup and a ham sandwich. I recognize the turkey and ham from Christmas dinner. I have just heard Rachel on the telephone with Teri. She has called to me, telling me she will be back in an hour, that Teri needs her help.

  I open my apartment door and step into the kitchen. Rachel has left the countertop cluttered with things. A small mound of potato peels sits beside a cutting board. I see something else in the kitchen that gives me pause. The wall beside the dinette table is bare. This is the wall where the four pictures of the happy darkies once hung. The cookie jar is still on the counter beside Rachel’s canisters, but the pictures are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps their removal is only temporary. Maybe Patrick wants to straighten the mats and reframe them. I look in the laundry nook off the kitchen, thinking they may be leaning against the wall or stacked on the folding table, but I don’t see them. But enough of snooping. I turn back to the kitchen. Perhaps Patrick has made a gift of the pictures to Potts. Patrick would be perfectly capable of such a thing.

  I walk through the dining room into the living room. Patrick and Rachel’s Christmas tree is still up, elevated on a table in front of the window where I like to sit. It is not much of a tree. A small artificial facsimile, it is nevertheless abundantly decorated, laden gaudily with its bells, angels, candy canes, and whatnot. A glittery plastic star is fitted onto the top. I wonder if Patrick and Rachel decorated this same tree when their children were alive, if presents for Toby and Mandy were placed beneath it.

  I pull the rocking chair over and sit next to the tree. Perhaps an eighty-year-old woman sitting by a Christmas tree should be filled with a warm glow. I am not. Like most things in life, Christmas trees—to quote my father—don’t amount to a hill of beans. The time for gaping in wonder over such a trifle, though a trifle I once longed for, has long since passed. How often in life we wish for things, and then, once attaining them, we have no use for them.

  By moving closer to the window, I can see the funeral home with its two wreaths on the double doors. I wonder if there is a Christmas tree inside somewhere. I wonder if the staff wishes people a Merry Christmas as they come through the front door during the holiday season. I wonder if the families of the deceased ask for Christmas carols at December funerals, for red and green bows to mark the family pews.

  I see a brown United Parcel Service truck pull up in front of the mortuary. A deliveryman walks to the door empty-handed and emerges, carrying a box the size of a cement block. I muse briefly over the various contents of a parcel picked up by UPS from a mortuary. Perhaps it is an urn of ashes. I would suppose most of the traffic of such an end-of-the-line business to be incoming, except of course for the very large boxes carried out by a hearse and put into the ground. I can think of no reason Wagner’s Mortuary would need to package something up for shipping.

  Unless perhaps a body being transported to another place for burial. My mother once told me of a woman she had known in Methuselah, Mississippi, whose burial plot was in Alabama. When she died at home, her husband put her body into her cedar hope chest, loaded it onto his pickup truck, and drove to Alabama in the middle of the night. He told no one. In the early hours of dawn, he dug the grave himself in the family plot and buried his wife. Inside the hope chest, according to the story, the woman was wearing a pink flannel nightgown and robe set. The man then drove home and called his five children, who were scattered throughout the Southeast, and told them their mother was dead and buried. “We take care of our own dead,” he said when the matter came to light, when he was called into question about the legality of transporting a dead body across a state line.

  The UPS deliveryman disappears into his truck and pulls away. A blue station wagon, an older model with wood-grained panels on the side, pulls into the parking lot, and a man and woman get out. The man assists the woman, who creeps along with the aid of a walker. Perhaps the old woman has cajoled her husband into coming to Wagner’s to prearrange her funeral. Or perhaps the husband has done the cajoling. Perhaps they plan to prearrange both of their funerals. They use the ramp instead of the steps, and at the front door they pause briefly to study the wreaths before the man takes hold of the doorknob with both hands and opens it slowly. He cups one hand under the woman’s elbow and guides her across the threshold.

  Seconds later a portly woman in a bright blue coat comes out carrying a large red poinsettia in a green pot. She descends the steps and waddles to a yellow sports car in the parking lot and opens the door. This will be a tight fit, I tell myself. She folds the front passenger seat down and places the poinsettia on the floor of the back seat, then walks around to get in on the other side. The car rocks as she sits down and slowly swivels herself inside. She rummages in her purse for several seconds before finally closing the door and fastening her seat belt. When at last she starts the car and drives away, I see her hubcaps blinking with multicolored Christmas lights. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble for this effect.

  I think of the way mankind uses colors to hide the emptiness of life. I place a hand over the cloisonné bird pin on my sweater. I was once especially fond of the color blue. I think now of the picture of the painted bunting in my bird book. Some of its colors, the book says, result from a kind of optical illusion rather than genuine pigmentation. The book talks of light reflecting off microscopic particles in the feathers. I think of the optical illusions in life, of the many things we think are real or important that are only imaginary, of the ways we have perfected the art of disguise. I think of the painted buntings I have known in my life, their bright colors fading as the light fell and shadows deepened. I think of how time changes all things. I close my eyes and imagine a junkyard full of the rusted hulks of yellow sports cars.

  Christmas is over, but the holiday has given me much to think about. For two days now I have replayed the Christmas dinner in my mind. Over and over I hear Della Boyd’s breathless exclamations and Potts’ sonorous courtesies. I see Mindy’s eyes imploring her mother to do something about the Meal Without End. I see Steve and Teri feeding Veronica by turns. I see them wipe her mouth and chin after each bite.

  I smell the smells of Christmas dinner and taste the flavors. I feel the stiffness of the pink napkin in my lap, the lace edge of the white tablecloth. I see Rachel’s soft eyes scanning the guests, intent on their needs. I hear her announcing dessert, taking orders for the two pies she has made: chocolate and coconut cream. I hear myself requesting a small slice of each. I hear Potts say, “I like Aunt Sophie’s idea—I’ll have the same.” Though I have never had a black man refer to me as Aunt Sophie, I feel no displeasure over Potts’ words. Something radiates from this man.

  Rachel serves dessert with Patrick’s help. She rises after everyone has finished. As she starts clearing the table, Potts joins her, quickly stacking plates and collecting silverware, as if from long experience. I hear Teri tease Steve, telling him to pay attention to how Patrick and Potts have pitched in to help.

  And I hear Patrick’s words after the table has been cleared.

  He stood again and here is what he said: “Rachel and I want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of you for gathering around our table today. You are each a testimony to us of God’s answer to a very specific prayer of ours.” I glanced at Mindy, whose lips tightened. Again she gave her mother a quick worried look. It was a look that said, Get me out of here.

  Teri appeared not to notice, however, and Patrick sailed on. “For some time Rachel and I have felt a need to be more connected with people on a personal level. Several months ago w
e began talking and praying about it. We were convicted by our unhealthy isolation and our failure to obey the Great Commission.” He gave no explanation of this reference to the “Great Commission,” and no one asked. Della Boyd gave a sympathetic murmur at this point, the kind one gives to encourage a timid speaker to continue.

  But Patrick needed no encouragement. “Last summer we began praying,” he said, “that God would open our eyes to those around us and would allow us opportunities of ministry. Our prayer was twofold: that he would direct us to people and that he would direct people to us.” He paused, obviously pleased with this description of his twofold prayer, then continued. “It was less than a week later that we received a letter from my aunt Sophie concerning her need for retirement accommodations.”

  I refused to look at Patrick, to see the self-congratulatory beam in his eyes. Hearing his voice was enough. He went on to tell of the “honor of housing such a quiet, dignified, intelligent woman” as I, his “mother’s favorite sister.” I wondered if Virginia had known that I was Regina’s favorite. I wondered if Regina herself had known it. I wanted to kick Patrick under the table to show what I thought of such oratorical claptrap. Again Della Boyd made an approving sound, as if tasting something warm and soothing.

  Patrick moved on to describe the need he felt “to have a more compassionate outreach” with his fellow employees at the Main Office, to “view them as people with needs instead of mere workers.” He expressed great joy over the fact that “God guided the footsteps of Cicero Potts right to my office door” and that “the two of us enjoy a wonderful spiritual kinship.” He then exulted over the arrival of “our new neighbors across the street, the Lowes, who have allowed us the privilege of developing a friendship with them.” And it was his “earnest hope,” he said, that the house next door would soon sell and that God would “allow us the privilege of ministering in yet other lives.” And then the other two guests—Della Boyd and Teri’s aunt Helena—had to be mentioned as further proof of God’s “direct answer to our prayers.”