Winter Birds

by Jamie Langston Turner

  But all were not glorious victors among these so-called heroes. The writer was at least honest enough to include the defeats: the tortures, the mockings and scourgings, the imprisonments, the stonings. The language has an old-fashioned extravagance: some were “sawn asunder,” others were “slain with the sword,” and still others “wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented.” The conclusion of this depressing record contains, as I have heard it said, good news and bad news. The good news is the reminder that these unlucky souls “obtained a good report.” The bad news is that they did not receive “the promise.”

  I imagine the heroes of the faith as schoolchildren presented with a choice between a good report card or extra recess time. Stern and dutiful pupils that they were, they chose the report card, though no doubt my nephew and others would argue that in the end they received both. But such arguments rest on the flimsy, elusive, unprovable commodity known as faith—a commodity in even shorter supply than hard cash in the home where I grew up.

  As children, Regina, Virginia, and I were not “churched,” as I have heard it called. Our names were not on the Sunday school roll of any of the four churches in Methuselah, Mississippi. I have at times wondered how it might have been if my father had been embraced by his Jewish grandparents, if he had been taught the law and the prophets, if he in turn had instructed my sisters and me in the pillars of the Jewish faith. But against the word if, the facts stand immutable: My father wasn’t embraced, he wasn’t taught, and he didn’t instruct.

  One may be irreligious, however, and still hold to many of the same principles as religious people—that of divine judgment, for instance. “Chickens come home to roost” was something Daddy often said. He threw open the door to impending disaster, acknowledging its likelihood long before it arrived, eyeing it with certainty as it took shape, stepping out of the way so it could enter. It was not that he welcomed disaster but rather that he knew it was inevitable, that if he did not stand back and let it in, it would break the door down and flatten him. In this sense, I suppose he did have faith of a sort—faith that he was doomed.

  Once I heard Daddy tell Mother during one of their nighttime debates over finances that he was destined to fail in matters of money because of God’s wrath. Imagine this from the son of an atheist. As he explained it, he was paying for the sins of his parents—of his father, who said there was no God, and of his mother, who had left God’s chosen people to marry such a man. This God would confiscate every cent of Daddy’s money for so great a debt. There was no hope for him nor, because she had cast her lot with him, for my mother. I do not recall what my mother replied, if anything. Perhaps she wondered why he couldn’t have informed her of his hopeless state before she had agreed to marry him.

  Oppressed with thoughts of faithlessness, I stand at my open door now and watch my nephew strike a match to light the new fire. Leaning forward in his red flannel pajamas, he looks small and vulnerable. I could span his back with my two hands. I think about the hope and faith of a man like Patrick. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” and “I go to prepare a place for you,” and “I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”—these are words I have heard him read aloud at the supper table, words he could not have heard at the supper table of his childhood, for his mother, my sister, knew as little of the Bible as I, and his father spent most of his time before he died on the gambling boats along the Mississippi River.

  Patrick’s hopes, I think, are few and simple. He hopes to turn a profit at the Main Office each month, to become a writer, and to have a mansion in a place called heaven. More immediately, he hopes to light a fire. The matches appear to be giving him trouble. They are the kind one tears out of a small cardboard book, the kind with a flat head that bend too easily when scratched against the emery strip. He tries several, discards them into the wood stove. I wonder what it would take for Patrick to fly into a rage, to shout, curse, and stamp his feet. As a child, he had a temper. Regina told me stories about him over the telephone. As a teenager, he battered another boy’s car with a baseball bat. Then something happened, Regina said, and he went to that religious crusade and turned into a fanatic, a development over which she fretted more than she had over his tantrums.

  Just as Patrick finally succeeds with a match, Rachel enters the kitchen. Brown-robed and solemn, she needs only a hood to look like a monk. She does not see me in the doorway. She opens the drawer at the bottom of her stove and takes out a pan. She stands for a moment looking into it as if wondering what to put in it. She moves beyond my view, and I hear her running water at the sink. And what, I wonder, are the hopes of a woman like Rachel? Can she put a name to them? I imagine her hopes, like Patrick’s, to be simple: an eternity in which she will have her babies again, where she will wake for happy days without end to hear their laughter, to hold them and sing them to sleep.

  Here is another verse I read in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Women received their dead raised to life again.” This, according to the reference in the margin, speaks of a widow whose son was raised from the dead after the prophet Elijah stretched himself out over the child’s body and said, “O Lord my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again.” And how does a woman like Rachel remain faithful in the face of such preferential treatment? How does she reconcile the God of Elijah, who chose to return one woman’s child alive, with the one who let her own children die?

  Is not such a God a tyrant? Is he not like the kingbird, which sits on a high branch scolding the world? Yet even the kingbird has a soft spot for its young, swooping down to attack any threat, great or small. I think of the lullaby Rachel sang to Veronica. Winky blinky, niddy nod, / Birds watch their babies, Why can’t God? Maybe he needs to take a look through Patrick’s calendar sometime for a few tips on Resourceful Thinking in Times of Danger or Concentrating on the Task at Hand.

  Patrick has already begun talking to Rachel, telling her animatedly of a dream he had during the night in which he was locked inside a giant freezer with slabs of meat hanging from hooks. “Everywhere I turned,” he says, “I ran into a side of beef or a whole skinned hog!” He cuts a ridiculous figure in the kitchen, shuffling about in his red flannel, pretending to spar against phantom meat slabs, a little featherweight boxer of a man. I think of such a man battling the forces of life, sure to be knocked out. I cannot see Rachel’s reaction to him. Does she look at him now, I wonder, and despair at the thought of having to live out the rest of her life with a man who dreams of boxing with meat in a freezer?

  He stops springing about abruptly and says, “And when I woke up, I was completely uncovered. So that must have been why I was dreaming about being in a freezer!” I have noticed that Patrick is never so pleased as when he trots forth the explanation for some difficulty.

  I think of the difficulty of his children’s deaths. I see a sudden picture of the daffodils in the backyard, today putting out “tender leaves of hope, tomorrow blossoms,” as Cardinal Wolsey says in Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s last play. It was one of Eliot’s least favorites. “The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,” says Cardinal Wolsey. Just when man thinks his greatness is ripening, he says, the frost of fate “nips his root, and then he falls.” Gone are his hopes. “And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again.”

  I would argue the last phrase. Though unschooled in the Bible, I know who Lucifer is, that according to legend he was thrown out of heaven and now prowls the earth, having appropriated it as his kingdom. Thus, “never to hope again” is puzzling, for surely Lucifer harbors many hopes and with good reason. If one believes the myth that his intent is to do evil, surely the fallen angel should have much cause for rejoicing in his kingdom on earth.

  With a sigh I retreat from the doorway to make up my bed. You have started another day, I tell myself, this time with thoughts of murdered children, Lucifer, and dashed hopes. The sparrow is still busy
at his cheeping. I move to the window, but I cannot see him anywhere. Yet I know he is there, for I hear his cry plainly, the evidence of things not seen. Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!

  Chapter 22

  A Tide in the Affairs of Men

  A highly intelligent bird, the American crow squawks out news of food sources or approaching danger. It can be silent and furtive near its nest, however. Though slaughtered in large numbers by humans, the crow flourishes, its audacious caws heard throughout every mainland state.

  I sit in my recliner waiting for two o’clock to arrive, a book in my lap. It appears that the rain has stopped for today. The daffodils in the backyard hang their heads. Buds swell on the spindly branches of the plum tree. Low bushes beneath the plum tree bear early flowers called passion roses, some white and some pink. “A wet February”—this is what the weatherman in Greenville, Mississippi, has said of the month. He could have said “miserable” to include both cold and wet, but weathermen do not editorialize. They deal in absolutes: “2.5 inches of rain in four hours,” “seven inches above last year’s rainfall for the month,” “measurable rainfall for twenty of the twenty-six days thus far,” “a high temperature of forty-two, a low of thirty-four.”

  Remarkably, the new furnace installed by the low-bid trio operates efficiently so that the cold and wet do not touch me. Because the human body and mind operate inefficiently, on the other hand, February has touched me in unexpected ways, ways not of my own choosing. I speak not of my own body and mind but of Rachel’s body and Mindy’s mind. If the two of them could trade body and mind, one of them could be whole. As it is, both are broken. Time has drawn its sword upon both. Both may wish to die, but those who love them take up the shield in their defense. That I should be enlisted to help is a strange matter—I, who came to Patrick’s house to be served.

  Were Rachel to die, hers would be called an early death. Were Mindy to die, hers would be called a tragic and untimely death. My intuition tells me, however, that neither Rachel nor Mindy will die, not yet and not of their present illnesses. For Rachel, time has wounded her but will sheathe its sword and retreat briefly, for hers, I have discovered, is a malady common to women of her age. I recall my own time many years ago and its deep silent sorrow. Before, I had sorrowed because Eliot had declared there would be no children, but now I sorrowed because nature had seen to it that there could be none. Perhaps Rachel does not sorrow as I did. Perhaps she is thankful at last to be ensured of an empty womb to match her empty heart.

  While Eliot, preoccupied with his own concerns, appeared to take no note of my physical or emotional discomfort, Patrick has attended to Rachel’s needs perhaps more than she would like. With Patrick there is very little moderation. He has researched on the Internet and checked books out of the library. Imagine a man of fifty-four bringing a stack of books on this subject to the circulation desk. And he did not intend the books to be for Rachel alone. He has read them, discussed them, quoted from them at the supper table. Rachel has suffered him to do so, listening silently unless asked a direct question.

  To his credit, Patrick has not only talked but has also acted, taking on certain housekeeping chores to lighten Rachel’s work. He has often brought home meals for supper, emptied the dishwasher, folded clothes. He sometimes goes to the grocery store on his way home from work or on evenings when he doesn’t have a class. I believe he sees this time in Rachel’s life as a project to be completed, along the order of cleaning out a garage, finishing a basement, insulating an attic, and like many men whose mental scope is not broad, Patrick enjoys a project, especially one that he is supervising.

  “I feel so slow,” Rachel said to him one night in the kitchen, at which he launched into a description of the changes a woman’s metabolism undergoes due to fluctuating levels of thyroxin. I did not listen to all he said. I was wondering if there had ever been a time when Rachel moved briskly, nimbly. Her slowness was such a part of the woman I knew as Rachel that I found myself unable to imagine a different Rachel, one who was a paragon of efficiency, whipping around the house, breezing in and out of my apartment with her tray, stirring up little whirlwinds as she set the table and sorted laundry.

  The house has settled into its afternoon quiet now. Because Rachel’s nights are not restful, she routinely naps after lunch, at Patrick’s suggestion. Over the past week I have taken my own lunch dishes to the kitchen, rinsed them, and put them into the dishwasher. “Go to your bed and lie down,” I told Rachel one day as she was setting a bowl of potato soup on my round table. “Leave the tray here, and I will clear the dishes after I eat.” She turned and looked at me, then opened her mouth as if to say something. “I want you to lie down,” I repeated. “I want you to do it now.” She looked at me another long moment, then closed her mouth, turned, and left, the ham biscuit and dish of applesauce still on the tray.

  I hear her at times in the kitchen in the dead of night. She resists taking pills to make her sleep, though the doctor has given her a prescription. Patrick has told her that hot milk may help her sleep. She makes cocoa and takes it into the living room. I have looked into the living room, have seen her sitting on the sofa with her Bible in her lap, talking aloud with her eyes closed. Some nights she cuts old clothing into small squares with which she plans to make a quilt someday. She clips articles and recipes out of magazines and writes in a diary. She dusted the furniture one night and polished Patrick’s shoes another. She often sees the sunrise.

  For Mindy, I believe hers to be a brief skirmish. For her, time will be put to flight, vanquished from the field for many years. To Mindy I wish to say, however, that “many years” is but an illusion. Perhaps I will tell her this today, for our lives now intersect in a way neither of us could have predicted. We sit together at my round table every weekday for a purpose other than eating.

  Steve and Teri have taken a bold step, perhaps a foolish one, certainly a desperate one. They have withdrawn Mindy from high school. They mean for her to complete twelfth grade as what they call a “homeschooler.” I have been persuaded to sign on as her instructor in English grammar and literature. Teri is, in her words, “giving geometry and economics a shot,” and Steve has undertaken history and chemistry at night. Patrick has confidently offered to provide additional help as needed with either English or history, two subjects in which he is “especially gifted,” a claim supported, first of all, by the spelling bee he won in eighth grade with the word kohlrabi and, second, by the medal he was awarded in tenth grade for his essay on Thomas Paine in the Sons of Liberty Essay Contest. It is amazing how often he can work these high points of his schooldays into a conversation.

  Today I will sit with Mindy again, as I have for three weeks, from two to three o’clock. A strange pair we make. If costumed, we might pass for Juliet and her old nurse, though in appearance only. We meet purely for instruction. We have no bond of affection. Were Mindy casting me, she would likely assign me the role of one of the witches in Macbeth.

  In three weeks we have concluded a unit of grammar: phrases and clauses. She has filled in blanks on workbook pages, demonstrating that she knows the difference between a gerund and an infinitive, between a dependent and independent clause. She has a keen mind when she chooses to put it to use. She can identify a participle, an appositive, an elliptical clause.

  We have also read a story titled “The Destructors” by Graham Greene, and Mindy has written a two-page paper on “Trevor’s Motivation for Destruction,” for which she received the grade of C-, having attributed the boy’s destructiveness to his environment instead of its true source: his black heart. Though her eyes registered surprise at the grade, she shrugged and stuffed the paper inside her spiral notebook. Perhaps she never took the trouble to read my comments accompanying her grade.

  Today we will begin the next selection in her literature book: Julius Caesar, another study of the motivations behind destructive actions, this time murder. Perhaps she will write another paper: “The Motives of Caesar’s Murderers.” This is o
ne of the essay topics suggested in the teacher’s manual. Julius Caesar is a play I have never read in its entirety before today, though I once typed a paper for Eliot titled “History Reconstructed in Julius Caesar.”

  I have made up a quiz for Mindy today to test her reading of the first two acts. I will read the questions aloud, and she will speak her answers. I do not trouble her to write them down. It is understood that I will award her a grade at the end of four months, after we have completed the course of study. She has behaved as though she does not care what this grade will be. To her these months must stretch like an endless road, though in reality they are but a few short steps in her lifetime.

  When one lives to be eighty, he understands that the drawing out of man’s days is a fleeting affair. “That we shall die, we know.” Thus says Brutus after the murder of Julius Caesar. And Cassius, in response, justifies the murder by declaring that he who “cuts off twenty years” of a man’s life “cuts off so many years of fearing death,” by which he means this: We have done him a favor by killing him! We have relieved his mind! We have spared him many years of dreading the specter of death!

  One may speak facetiously of death when it is that of another. When one is close to his own death, however, he sees life as a circle far too small: “Where I did begin, there shall I end.” So says Cassius before he dies, no longer speaking lightly.

  These are some of the things I may say to Mindy. But though I will speak, it is not likely that she will hear me. Certainly she will not heed me. While the old often cannot hear, even more often the young will not.

  Why man does the things that he does—this is the concern of the unit in Mindy’s literature textbook, the book I now hold in my lap. I run a finger over the title on the front cover: LITERATURE: INVESTIGATING THE WORLD. The title of the unit we are studying is simply “Why,” its subtitle “Character Motivations.”