Months later, in the sunless gorge of despair, that is how Flavian would remember these days and the remembering was a knife to the heart because it came paired with the knowledge of paradise lost, the inarguable reality that however beautiful the opera of memory, at the time, immersed in those particular moments, what he felt was not wonder at their beauty and his good fortune but frustration and something nigh on to anger. Looking over Johnny Faye’s shoulder Flavian reminded himself silently, constantly, that his pupil was more frustrated than he, that Johnny Faye picked up and magnified his teacher’s emotions, that the key was to keep it light and relaxed because tension fed on itself and only made their work harder. But Johnny Faye rang like a tuning fork with the vibration of Flavian’s growing impatience, and though Flavian was impatient not with Johnny Faye but with his own inability to teach, the result was the same. Johnny Faye never said I told you so but Flavian felt the words hanging between them, an enclosure wall, high and blank and DO NOT ENTER.
But there was his warm summer-caramel flesh and blood and though Flavian had not yet learned the lessons of loss he knew enough of desire that he prolonged the agony of their lesson until long after it became clear that he was not getting through. And for all his smart-mouthing Johnny Faye stuck with it, stayed with the pen, listened and repeated and drew the letters as best he could, pausing between each letter to study the next as if it held all the secrets of a rune. THE STONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED . . .
Finally Flavian’s knees could handle his half-crouch no longer and he stood and stretched. “You have your homework. Do you remember the alphabet?”
“A B C D E-F-G. H I J K L-M-N-O-P. Q-R-S and T-U-V, W, X and Y and Z. Now I know my A B Cs—”
“OK, enough, right. Take this primer with you, and between now and next Sunday I want you to print the capital letters of the alphabet until you can write them without looking at the book. And bring that notebook with you when you come back.”
“Yes, sir.” Johnny Faye snapped his hand in a soldier’s salute so crisp and instinctive that it recalled a war-torn world very far removed from this small creek, this lingering summer sun, this peaceful place. Flavian regretted his impatience then but Johnny Faye had already set aside his notebook with the exhilaration of a child released from school—already he was down among his scrodded plants.
But he did not take up his hoe. Instead he climbed past Flavian to the lip of the bank. “Come on, Brother, we’ve got a lake to break!” Before he could think Flavian was out of his seat and up to the top of the bank and hoisted onto the haunches of ’Sweet and they were off like a rocket, JC nipping at their heels.
While they were at the oxbow bend Johnny Faye had worn his usual ratty white cotton singlet but somewhere between the creek bottom and mounting ’Sweet he had put on a long-sleeved tan shirt spun from some synthetic material that had not seen sunlight in a few million years and that when they dismounted showed not so much as a wrinkle. Johnny Faye unbuttoned it and hung it on his walking stick, propped against a rock outcrop.
“Nice shirt.”
“Some threads, huh. Looks even better with the badge.”
Johnny Faye pulled the shirt back on. From a pocket he pulled a silver badge and a nameplate, which he pinned to the shirt. Flavian leaned closer. “STATE POLICE. SMITH. Is that your real last name? What’s so mysterious about that?”
Johnny Faye took off the shirt and hung it back on his walking stick. “Not my last name now. But will be when the right time comes.”
“What’s this business about STATE POLICE? And SMITH. Who is Smith? Do I want to know about this?”
“Officer Smith. He’s the state policeman ragging my ass. But that’s enough. Bad luck to tell a story before you get through to the other side. Don’t worry, you’ll hear about it quick enough from me or somebody else.”
“I don’t know. News reaches us pretty slowly inside the enclosure.”
“Then you’ll hear about it from me. If you hear about it from somebody else, just remember the hillbilly’s famous last words.”
“And what might those be?”
“Watch this!” Johnny Faye roared, even as he was out of his pants and into the lake and Flavian following and for yet another time Flavian missed an office for no good reason at all. He was lazing in the lake, now a warm summer-comfort bath, treading water to stay with the occasional cold spot where a spring welled up from the deep, when Johnny Faye called from the limestone ledge. “We better get a move on or you’re going to miss Benediction.”
And Flavian turned and swam farther from the shore, out to the middle of the lake where he lay on his back staring up at the deep blue sky of drought. Three turtles sunning themselves on a snag—their beaked heads swiveled as one as Flavian drifted by, then plop! plop, plop! they were gone, and he dawdled and doodled so that by the time Johnny Faye dropped him at the back entrance to the enclosure he could smell the incense and hear the hymns already underway. A shame-faced late entrance was out of the question—better to miss the service outright than draw attention to himself by showing up late—and so Flavian slipped through the vestibule and into the enclosure and up to his cell from whose open window he could hear his brothers in prayer. The thought came to him a second time, now with a different, lighter valence: I’ll go to hell.
Chapter 17
Rosalee Smith’s apron reached to Meena’s knees. “You don’t work with flour without an apron,” she said, tying it behind Meena’s back. Matthew Mark sat at the table nearby. “That boy does love to be in the kitchen but at home I caint let him help, my husband won’t have no part of it.”
By now Matthew Mark had redeemed Meena’s promise of a story several times over, but on this particular evening mother and son arrived together, Rosalee lugging a basket of peaches. She disappeared and returned with another basket. “I do so love a ripe peach,” she said, setting it down with a heave. “But a hundred ripe peaches is work.”
Some discussion then, about how best to turn the ephemeral peach into something more enduring and the admission by Meena that though once she had prided herself on her cooking she had not been near a stove since leaving India. And so Rosalee went back across the road to return with sugar and flour and lard and butter and cinnamon and pie pans. “We’ll make ourselves a pie, won’t that be a good thing to do, we’ll put it together here and then take it over to my oven—if we turned the oven on in this little bitty place of yours we’d be cooked before the pie. That’ll use a handful of these peaches and the rest we’ll cut up for preserves.” She set about searching through the tiny kitchen’s cabinets until she found a measuring cup. “Pie crust has got a temper that you got to pay heed to,” she said, sifting and measuring out the flour. “You got a day that’s wet and sticky, you use less water because the flour’s going to suck up some of that wet from the air and you got to be careful or the dough will turn gummy. You got a day that’s dry—they make the best pie days—you can ride herd on the dough pretty easy.”
She pinched off a chunk of lard and, using her fingers, mixed it with the flour until it grew crumbly, then pinched off another chunk and mixed some more. Then she sprinkled the dough with water, raked her fingers through the mix, and sprinkled a few drops more until she gathered it up into a neat round ball. This she stored in the refrigerator while they adjourned to the patio to peel and slice peaches.
Rosalee sat with a big brass kettle between her feet and gave a smaller bowl to Meena, with an old blue granite bucket between them for peelings and pits. “I pretty near grew up in a peach orchard,” Rosalee said. “We had a hundred peach trees and a thousand white Leghorns, and believe me when peach time come on and the hens was laying you didn’t have time to wipe your bottom. That was how we kept ourselves in shoes, though. This would have been your great-uncle’s farm”—this as an aside to Matthew Mark—“he was your mamma’s daddy’s brother, we called him Uncle Peach.”
“Better than Uncle Chicken.”
“You said it exactly right. He prett
y much took the place of my daddy, beings as mine was already dead.”
“My parents died when I was young,” Meena said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Rosalee said. “Both of ’em at once?”
“Yes. At least I think so. I have never known what happened. There was a war, I was sent away to the house of Thakurda—the house of my father’s father. I never heard from my parents again.”
“Somebody that loses her mamma and daddy so young will always be looking for a home,” Rosalee said softly. “What was they like? Do you have anything to remember them by? Seems like it would be hard, so very far from home, to remember who you come from, and I don’t know how you could carry much in the way of a remembrance.”
“I have very few things. My land was divided and I along with it. For many years I was not allowed to return. I returned to the village of my childhood only once. It was a difficult journey. I have tried to forget those times. I came here to leave all that behind. It has been a blessing to leave all that behind.”
A long silence, broken by the plop of peach slices into the bowl. “My daddy died in Vietnam, same week that eight other boys from this little bitty county was killed,” Rosalee said. “They sent us back dog tags and a coffin and they told us they knowed it was him but we would rest easier if we didn’t trouble to look for ourselves because they was nothing in there we wanted to see. And I don’t know that my mamma or his folks ever looked inside, I don’t think so, I never had the nerve to ask. I know they didn’t let me look, I was only a little girl ’bout the same age as Matthew Mark here and I know that not letting me look was the only thing to do, but I got to think sometimes that even the remembering of a bloody mess would be better than remembering nothing atall.”
“I know what you mean. I have awakened in the night to precisely that same thought about my parents. It is always the chotolok who get caught up.”
“What’s that?”
“My people make a distinction between the bhadralok—the big people who choose and shape their lives—and the chotolok, the little people whose lives are a matter of yielding and accepting what is given to them. The chotolok suffer most.”
“You pay attention to that, Matthew Mark,” Rosalee said. “You be grateful you live someplace where they aint forced a mother’s son to go to war in a long time.”
“There’s the war on drugs,” Matthew Mark said. “Daddy talks about it all the time.”
“Well, that aint the same. Here, you go dump these peelings in the compost heap, I expect that dough has chilled long enough.” Matthew Mark took the heaping bucket and ran across the road. “That child,” Rosalee said, more to herself than aloud. “He’s a skiff of a boy for certain, but he’s got his daddy’s smart mouth.” She hauled herself to her feet. “Let’s get ourselves inside.”
Rosalee took the dough from the refrigerator. With her palm she fanned flour across the countertop and placed the dough in the middle. Matthew Mark brought the emptied peelings bucket inside, banging it with his hand. “Hush that racket, we’re almost done. You sit and be quiet or you won’t be sitting there atall.” Rosalee rolled up her sleeves.
Meena stepped to her side to watch, to see a blue-black bruise on Rosalee’s arm. “Rosalee—how did you injure yourself?”
Rosalee sprinkled flour over the ball of dough and cut it in uneven halves, setting the smaller half aside, then covering the larger half for a long minute with her hands. “You chill it so as to keep it smooth but it’s easier to work with if you warm it up a little before you roll it out. You want to be gentle with it. Worst thing for pie dough is to handle it too much. Makes it tough. I just bumped myself on the kitchen counter, being stupid and clumsy as usual. You bruise easier when you get older but you know that. I hadn’t expected it to begin so early, is all.” She took up an empty whiskey bottle that she had brought from her house. “I caint keep a rolling pin in the house but these work just as good.” She coated it in flour, then set about rolling the dough into an even circle.
“When did this happen—I mean, when did you strike your arm against the counter?”
“Oh, sometime today. Or yesterday, I don’t pay attention to little things like that.”
Matthew Mark sat still as a small creature caught far from shelter, watching and listening and making himself invisible so as to avoid being made to leave, and everything was washed in evening color and summer light.
Rosalee took up a dinner knife and with a flip of the wrist carved a circle from the rolled-out dough. She laid the dough in the pie pan and sprinkled it with flour, then gathered the scraps into a second ball and returned it to the refrigerator. “Here, Matthew Mark, you break those eggs, your daddy don’t need to know you had your finger in the pie. You watch him now, he’s good,” and Matthew Mark jumped up. He took an egg in each hand and broke them one on each side of the bowl’s brim. With a shy grin he held out both hands to Meena, a perfectly halved shell in each. “He taught hisself that trick,” Rosalee said. “Lord knows I caint do it.” She brushed the pie shell with egg white, then beat the eggs with sugar and a little flour. Then she filled the pie shell with sliced peaches, poured the thickener over them, dotted them with butter, and sprinkled the whole with cinnamon.
“Now for the hard part,” she said. She took the second ball of dough and rolled it out. Taking up the knife she cut the dough into strips, then set about weaving them into a lattice. “I guess you got to figure that the world belongs to the big people,” she said as her hands moved back and forth across the pie, “and those of us that never made much of ourselves got to sit back and keep our heads down and the best thing we can hope for is for nobody to notice. I do wonder sometimes, though, what it would be like to make something of yourself.”
“You made something of yourself, Mamma. You made a pie.”
“Oh, a pie. Any old fool can make a pie.” Rosalee pieced the last strips of dough together into one long strip, which she attached to the pie rim with wetted fingers, crimping and fluting with her right hand as she turned the pie with her left. She sprinkled the finished lattice with sugar. “OK, now. I’ll scoot this over to my house. Matthew Mark? Your job is tell me when it’s been exactly one half hour, because that’s when I’ll need to start thinking about getting back over there to check on the pie.”
Alone with Matthew Mark. He had pushed the four-wheeled oak chair from the office into the kitchen and was rolling it back and forth, back and forth as Meena wiped the counter and washed the bowls. After a moment he stopped his chair at her elbow. “She didn’t bump her arm against the counter.”
“I know that.”
“Then you can make my daddy stop hurting her.”
Meena dried her hands on a dish towel and crouched to face him. “I would like to do that, Matthew Mark. But your mother must have her reasons for telling us what she did. I have to respect those reasons even if I cannot understand them.”
“You’re all just afraid. You’re all just afraid of my daddy.”
She stood and turned back to the dishes. “You will grow up and then you will understand,” she said, because it was the only thing she could think to say.
Rosalee returned and they sat outside in the twilight and finished peeling and slicing the peaches. Matthew Mark pulled his chair to sit beside Rosalee. First he laid his head on her arm, then, when she turned to dump sliced peaches from the pan into the kettle, he slipped his head into her lap. Rosalee placed her hand on Matthew Mark’s towhead, shut her eyes, and sang in a low, tender voice.
Slumber, my darling, the birds are at rest,
Wandering dews by the flowers are caressed,
Slumber, my darling, I’ll wrap thee up warm,
And pray that the angels will shield thee from harm.
“What a lovely lullaby,” Meena said. “Once all I wanted was to have a child.”
“I’ll be darned. What makes you think you’re too old to have one now?”
“The world has too many children. That is our greatest p
roblem and challenge. And I have other priorities. To begin with I have no security in this country.”
“I tell you what. I’ll light a candle to the Virgin for you to get yourself a baby.”
Meena smiled. “That is sweet of you but my reasons are not entirely political. I am unable to bear a child.”
A pause. “Well, I swan, aint that a shame. You’re certain about that? I guess you would be, being a doctor and all. All the more reason to light a candle.”
“I suggest we place our faith in more scientific means. I am grateful that I am childless. If I had given birth to a child, I would still be in India. All the same, I thank you for your concern. You will light your candle and I will bear a child. A miracle child, like Krishna born of Devaki. And then you can teach me your lovely song.”
Rosalee shifted Matthew Mark’s head in her lap. “I aint never met anybody from another country, I don’t think, except maybe the Mexicans who come to work tobacco.”
Meena filled her bowl with peaches. “I love walking in the woods in the evening light. As a child I knew nothing like it. The sun rose, then it set—it was light, then it was dark. Here the light lasts and lasts and everything changing all the while.”
“You been walking in the woods? Alone?”
Meena busied herself cutting away holes the birds had pecked. “I walk to the statues at the monastery, but not usually alone, no. Often I have Mr. Johnny Faye for company.” She stole a glance at Rosalee’s face—a blank page. “Oh, I can imagine what you are thinking but he’s just—a character.”
The Man Who Loved Birds Page 16