Winter Birds

by Jamie Langston Turner

  “No, no. I scaled way back,” Patrick says. “We’re just going to use a few of the glass ones as accents.”

  “He doesn’t need to do that,” Rachel says to me. “That’s just extra trouble and expense. I could live out the rest of my life happy as can be without those glass tiles.” She says this while spending her Saturday to make a meal for her neighbors, while laboring to remove every corn silk so that Wes Lebo can have his favorite vegetable.

  “Wes said they were releasing her right after lunch, so they’re probably already home,” Rachel says.

  I glance at my watch. It is a silver one with a stretchy band, a birthday gift from Patrick. It has a large face the size of a quarter and sturdy black hands with arrows on the ends. Like a nurse’s watch, it is immensely practical. It tells me that it is a few minutes past two o’clock. Rachel has promised Wes that we will deliver the meal at six.

  “Wes said he’d hang a new door for us in here,” Patrick says to Steve in the bathroom. “He’s so good at it, he can practically do it with his eyes closed. He said it would be payback for wallpapering the nursery.”

  Steve chuckles. “I guess it’s a good thing we decided to do that job last Saturday instead of today.”

  “Yep,” says Patrick. “I guess nobody told the little guy he was supposed to wait another two weeks.”

  “Joanna sure did fix the nursery up cute, didn’t she?” Rachel says. She has taken a brush to the corn and is going after silks in hiding.

  “Yes, she did,” I say. It is not a subject I wish to pursue. I wonder what it must have done to Rachel’s heart to walk into that nursery with its circus motif, its clown curtains and elephant lamp, the posters of the man on stilts and the little dog riding a unicycle. To look at the yellow wallpaper with its border of flipping acrobats, to see the crib, its sheets imprinted with colorful balloons—well, I cannot imagine being Rachel and seeing such a thing.

  But it was something she asked for. “May I see the baby’s room?” Those were the words she spoke when we went over three days ago to take a gift. It was a blue, pink, and yellow blanket that Rachel made herself. Knitting and crocheting do not come easily for Rachel, but she goes slowly and carefully. She has taught herself from a book. I have seen her at it in the middle of the night, sitting on the sofa in the living room, her head bent close to her work.

  Joanna took us back to the nursery that day and laid the blanket on the crib. I could not look at Rachel’s face, but I heard her voice: “Oh, what a pretty, cheerful room.” Rachel’s voice is one I know well by now. It is low and slow. Over the telephone it must sound mournful.

  Perhaps it has always sounded so. Or perhaps it was suddenly and irreversibly infused with sorrow one day twenty years ago at the Memphis Zoo. All I know is this: When she said, “Oh, what a pretty, cheerful room” in her low, mournful voice, it was clear that she meant it. One must not judge from sound alone. He must look at all the evidence. I have read in my bird book that the mourning dove is a contented bird in spite of its name and the dark, pensive sound of its coo. I have read in the Bible that the dove is thought to be a symbol of mercy.

  I look down at my feet. Imagine slippers made out of purple yarn. I opened them on my birthday after I opened the watch Patrick gave me. At first I thought they were twin drawstring purses until Patrick announced, “Try them on! Rachel made them! The pattern said one size fits any foot, so let’s see!” No one would look at them and call them the work of an artist, a perfectionist, a master craftsman, but a thing does not have to be beautiful or perfect to be loved.

  “There she is!” Patrick says triumphantly. “Now just a little filling in around the edges, and we’re in business.” There is a soft thump. “Look at that. Just the least touch and it closes. I bet you could blow it closed.” There is a pause, during which he must be experimenting. Another soft thump. “See, what did I tell you?” Then, proudly, “You know, it really is true—you get what you pay for!” It is hard to think of a truism that Patrick has not uttered at some time.

  “How about the window molding?” Steve says. “Can we get it back up today?” No doubt Steve is thinking this: The sooner we finish Patrick’s bathroom, the sooner we can start on my kitchen.

  “Yes, but we’ve got to replace the sill,” Patrick says. “Remember, we got a little carried away with the sledge hammer and wrecked it!” He laughs his cheerful home-improvement laugh. He is fudging with the plural pronoun, for it was he himself who hit the edge of the windowsill and broke it off.

  “Did you read Patrick’s new story yet?” Rachel asks. She is cutting the kernels off one of the ears of corn with a long sharp knife. She goes cautiously, as if shaving hair close to a scalp.

  “Yes,” I say, “what there is of it.” I have finished with both the yellow squash and zucchini and am working on the small red potatoes. The recipe shows a diagram of how to cut them so that some of the red skin shows on each strip. The person who wrote the recipe down must have a lot of time on his hands. He must also fancy himself to be a wit. “To create the most colorful palette for the refined palate,” the recipe says.

  Patrick has not thought of an ending for his story yet. It is about a July Fourth backyard picnic. One of the characters is a boy named Harley, who shows up wearing white bell-bottom pants and a beanie with a little propeller on top. Another character is a girl named Melinda who tries not to like him but keeps laughing at the silly things he does. At some point in the story it is revealed that Harley will be a freshman in college in the fall. Furthermore, it is a religious college. The boy’s passion for unorthodox clothing is surpassed only by a passion for Christianity.

  I try to imagine what a religious college will do with a student like Hardy this fall. For a moment it makes me wish I could teach at that college, that I could have Hardy in my Freshman Composition class and read his papers.

  Surprisingly, Patrick’s story is not as pushy in its religious tone as one might expect. It does not openly endorse Harley. It plants the reader in Melinda’s viewpoint and raises questions about Harley at every turn. If shown this story six months ago, I would never have believed Patrick wrote it. Six months ago, in fact, Patrick could not have written it.

  “Teri said Hardy called Mindy again the other night,” Rachel says. “He seems to be talking real plain to her, trying to straighten out her thinking. He told Teri he’s talking a lot about head problems but also keeps circling back to the heart problem. He said he means to keep at it until he gets through to her.” She pauses. “Teri says Hardy is a godsend. Isn’t it strange how a young person will listen better to somebody her own age than to her parents?”

  I say nothing. The idea of a boy like Hardy trying to address someone else’s head problems is baffling. But this is only another mystery past explaining. The world is full of them. There are miracles that refute known laws. I find that I am pulling for Hardy to succeed. I want to see him get through to Mindy. I want to see her straightened out, for I am partial to her. I often hear the words of her essay: “The best birds aren’t afraid of the cold, so they stay late in the year and sing late in the night.” I remember the words Hardy said to me: “Mindy said you were smart.”

  I lift my knife and turn again to look at Rachel. If you want to behold a miracle that refutes known laws, I tell myself, look no further. “As the sun is daily new and old”—from a dusty corner of my memory I hear these words. They are from another sonnet, though I do not recall which one. Shakespeare’s sonnet form is generally thought to be the most difficult, for it places a high demand on the closing couplet to contain yet expand the meaning of the previous lines. I think of Rachel as I know her today, containing her past yet expanding upon it. Daily she is both new and old. That she has opened her heart and taken me in is another one of the mysteries of the world past explaining.

  “Aunt Sophie,” she said to me earlier today, “I wish you’d think about going to church with us one of these Sundays. I wish you would.”

  “You want to drag me all o
ver town,” I said to her.

  She knew I was referring to Dr. Robbins. “That didn’t hurt you one bit,” she said.

  “He told me nothing I didn’t already know.” This is not entirely true. He was Rachel’s doctor, a young man in his forties. Behind his thick glasses his eyes were enormous. “Your heart is strong for someone your age,” he said to me. I raised my eyebrows. Perhaps he needed a new stethoscope. Perhaps his hearing was as weak as his eyesight. He also said gravely, “And for someone your size.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sure you know that you would be healthier if you took off some weight.”

  “No doctor has ever told me this before,” I said to him. He did not know what to make of this, and I did not explain that I had avoided doctors my whole life. He looked at the bottom of my foot and told me it looked like it was “responding to the treatment,” by which he meant the liquid wart remover. I could have told him that.

  * * *

  “DISCOVERED. A possible NEW PLANET, as yet unnamed; by scientists at Caltech, Yale, and the Gemini Observatory.” On the Milestones page I learn that researchers have spied the mass of rock and ice from afar, on the outer fringes of the solar system, and have judged it to be larger than Pluto. Imagine, a thing of that size yet heretofore unknown.

  I have come to the brink of a new world, yet it is as old as eternity. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In the red Bible I have sought out this part of the gospel story, to read it for myself. The sacrifice of God’s son—it is a plan no man could have devised. This much I know.

  These are the things I think about in my recliner on an August afternoon.

  There is still much whirring and hammering in the bathroom. Having finished our kitchen work, Rachel and I wait silently for six o’clock to come. She is lying down on the living room sofa, and I am sitting in my recliner. I smell the bread she has baked, the Swiss steak simmering in the oven. After we deliver the meal next door, Patrick has said we will go out for supper. Rachel has requested that it be a quiet place, “not one of those noisy, busy places that’s too bright.” It will be noisy and busy enough, I want to tell her, with Patrick at the table.

  I think of sound and silence, as natural as life itself. Nowhere do I read that God said, “Let there be sound.” Having lit up the world, having created the land and sea and sky, having fashioned every living creature, he knew that sound would take care of itself. He made it so that a single voice could carry over many miles.

  “My gracious silence, hail!” The words come to me now, words spoken by Coriolanus, a Roman nobleman and warrior, in the play of the same name. Though I do not recall their context, what I do recall is that silence is spoken of as a gracious and welcome thing. To whom the words were spoken I cannot say. Perhaps Coriolanus was addressing his mother, Volumnia, or his wife, Virgilia, or perhaps Virgilia’s friend, Valeria. Shakespeare seemed to think all women’s names should begin with a V in this play.

  I think of the uses of silence, of what grows out of it. I think of the silence of the stars and the planets. I think of long silences broken by praise. I have read of the father of John the Baptist, stricken dumb because he doubted the prophecy of the angel Gabriel. The moment his tongue was loosed, he lifted his voice and said, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people.” Through silence one may be educated. And one may be awed. I think of great symphonies fading to silence, confirming the grandeur of what went before.

  Though I am no great symphony, one day my life will fade to silence. Perhaps it will awake to praise and awe. Perhaps I shall hear a rush of wings, the singing of a choir. We shall see.

  “You want to go with me to Joanna’s, don’t you?” Rachel stands in the doorway. She has taken her apron off and put on her shoes.

  I think of another story I have read in the Bible, a story in the Old Testament about two women not related by blood. Here is what one of them said to the other: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and whither thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

  “Yes,” I say, and I rise and follow Rachel to the kitchen.

  JAMIE LANGSTON TURNER, author of seven novels and winner of two Christy Awards, has been a teacher for thirty-eight years. Currently a professor of creative writing at Bob Jones University, she lives with her husband in Greenville, South Carolina.

  Books by

  Jamie Langston Turner

  Some Wildflower in My Heart

  A Garden to Keep

  No Dark Valley

  Sometimes a Light Surprises

  Winter Birds

  Suncatchers

  By the Light of a Thousand Stars