Vetch was leaning against the car, arms folded. “What was that about?”
“Only a moment of pleasure at the feel of rain in this dry summer,” she said. “Mr.—Harry. In this country where I am in charge of my destiny I will ask for your help. As the physician responsible for Matthew Mark Smith, I am asking you to intervene to protect him and his mother from violence at the hands of Mr. Smith. Officer Smith.”
A pained silence, then Vetch moved from his car and stood before her. “Look, Meena. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m thrilled to have a doctor in this county—I’m significantly responsible for your coming here, you know that, yes? But no good deed goes unpunished. Plenty of people are already saying, ‘We got along fine without a doctor.’ Some of them object to a—foreigner in our midst, a doctor who is first, a woman, and second—well, not like them. If you prove to be—difficult, you-know-who will get the blame. I have a vision for this place. I don’t want to see it derailed by finger-pointing and gossip. I’m assuming I don’t need to finish out that line of thinking.”
“You do not need to finish out that line of thinking.”
“Now. You understand that I’m not the bad news, I’m just the messenger, I’m describing things as they are, not as I might want them to be. You are the boy’s physician, you can push me to take action against Officer Smith and I’ll oblige. But consider what might come to pass. The boy gets placed in a foster home and that’s no guarantee that his situation will improve, not in my experience. Or he doesn’t get put in a foster home and you’ve waved a red flag in front of the bull. And you don’t have to live with the bull. It’s his wife and the boy who are living with the bull.”
Meena turned away. “I understand what you are saying.”
“On top of which Smith comes from a big family in a small county and they vote for their friends. Watch your tongue—for the sake of the Smith child but first and foremost for your own sake. So long as you are not a citizen or at least resident alien you are very vulnerable. You understand this, yes? Forget about protecting him. Think about protecting yourself. I will help in every way I can but I need your assistance.” He met her eyes. “Or at least cooperation. Yes? Can I count at least on that?”
Then they were driving back to the town, around the central square with its symmetrical courthouse, past a large church with white pillars and a silver steeple. He stopped in front of her office. She opened the car door.
“Meena. Think about what I said.”
“On that front you need not concern yourself. I think of little else.” A gesture was wanted. She held out her hand. “Thank you for your concern.”
Inside her office, alone with her thoughts. The air was a hot wet clutching hand—it might have been the last of the nights before the monsoon except that there would be no monsoon, only more drought. No man in her life had ever worked to earn her favors. Her father’s voice in her head. A hundred ways to do something and our Meena will choose the hardest. Many years since she had laid eyes on her father and she would rephrase his observation: A hundred ways to do something and the hardest will choose our Meena. The room was a cinderblock oven.
She had not gone on this date for the sake of Matthew Mark. She had not gone even in hopes of marriage. She had gone in hopes of being saved from herself. Saved from her responsibilities to Matthew Mark. Saved from Johnny Faye. And Harry Vetch would be happy to save her. All that was required was submission—no. All that was required was the appearance of submission. And she was a Bengali woman, well-schooled in the art of the appearance of submission.
She knelt and turned on the air conditioner and basked in its stream of cool air.
For the past year Harry Vetch had found himself conscious of his hands. He had always admired them—small and fine-boned. As he aged their veins had grown more prominent in a way that gave them character. Lately he had taken to displaying them to his clients—splayed against the polished wood of his desk they conveyed authority.
Driving home from his date with Meena he felt them acutely—he waved his right hand in the space above the passenger seat where a few minutes before Meena had been sitting. He removed first the left, then the right from the steering wheel and flexed each open, then shut. His fist was not as compact as it had once been—swelling in the joints. In the gesture he understood his growing consciousness of his hands’ breadth and length and bones, the tightness in their muscles and sinews, the prominence of their veins: Evidence, prima facie, inarguable, of his growing old—of his mortality.
The next day he sent her flowers.
Chapter 23
“Listen.”
Meena tilted her head. A sweet bobbling, pure and cool—spring water.
“Carolina wren.”
“When are you going to tell how the birds got their names?”
“Are you asking?”
“Yes, I am asking. Please.”
“Well. Since you say please. Not long after settlers arrived in these parts the birds pretty much disappeared. I know all this because of a accident of the blood. My mamma is the youngest child of the oldest child of the youngest child in her particular family. And that meant that when she grew up the stories she heard every day were stories from way back because of the way remembering works. You see what I mean? Since her mamma was the oldest child she heard the stories of the oldest people alive and so her stories went way back. But since her mamma—my mamma’s mamma, my grandmamma—was the youngest child, she lived a long time into my mamma’s remembering and so my mamma heard all her stories over and over and she had plenty of chances to remember them.
“And she’s the one that told me about the years when there weren’t no birds. The birds was mad at white people for our guns and our selfish and thieving ways and they turned up their bills and went away, stayed north or south depending on their natures, and if they had to fly from one place to the other they did it at night so we couldn’t have the pleasure of seeing them and they flew quiet so we wouldn’t have their music in our ears.
“But then one day a little bird with a big voice found its way into a patch of woods in these parts and got lost. It was one scared little bird too, because it had heard all about how mean white people was. And so the little bird was lying in a dust hole hoping not to be seen and wondering what to do when a little girl comes along. A little girl who has come from a far and foreign land that feels lost and alone in this strange new country.”
“That would be me.”
“Like you say. And the girl takes up the little bird and at first the little bird is wondering if he has saved up enough money for a wooden coffin but after a while he relaxes and lets her make a fuss over him and shares her bread and cookies, and before long they are best friends.
“But the little bird notices one day that the little girl is sad and he says, ‘Little girl, why are you so sad?’ And she says, ‘I am sad because where I came from there was lots of birds and my heart lifted when I looked up at them but there aint no birds here except for you and I know that you’ll get lonely and that someday I’ll come looking for you and you’ll be gone back to the place where you’re not the only bird.’ And the little bird says, ‘Don’t cry, little girl, I can tell you how to bring back the birds.’ And at first she don’t believe him but then she figures what has she got to lose and so she says, ‘You’re on, little bird.’ And the little bird says, ‘Now just imagine you went to a party where nobody had a name. How could you talk to those people? The people that came before had names for all the birds. But then white people came and they was too busy making money to pay attention and give us names. But if you want the birds to come back all you got to do is give them names and call them out. They will come back if you just invite them back.’
“And the little girl said, ‘Aw, stop pulling my leg,’ and wouldn’t believe him until finally he stomped his claw and said, ‘OK, you call out a name for a bird and if that bird don’t come back you can bake me in a pie and serve me to a king.’ So she says, ‘OK, all r
ight, whatever. Sparrow,’ and pretty soon there comes a great flapping and flittering and chirping and sure enough a flock of sparrows has taken up roost in the woods. And the little girl sets about right away calling out name after name and more and more birds come until the trees are filled with that particular chattery noise they make around sunset.
“And finally all the birds have come back, the old crow and the slate junco and all the ducks, horned larks and meadowlarks, the whippoorwill that you never see and the starling that you see too much, grackles and shrikes and chickadees, vireos and robins and thrushes and kites, orioles and herons and egrets and the warblers and the peewee so happy to be back that all it can say over and over is its name, pee-wee! And all the others, too many to name, and the little girl says, ‘Have I forgotten any?’ and the little bird bows its head and she takes it up tender in her hand and she says, ‘and you I will call my friend.’ And the little bird says, ‘Beg pardon?’ And the little girl says, ‘My friend, my friend!’ And the little bird rises into the sky, singing, ‘My wren, my wren!’”
Meena turned to walk down the path.
“Where are you off to?”
“You have told me not merely to see but to look. I am going to look. There is always something to look for.”
“Well, yes and no. You been lucky.”
“In America people make their own luck. Or so I have been told. So hush up and walk behind and allow me to make my own luck.”
They walked into the deepening green. She had exchanged her pumps for a pair of Keds and each step was a creation of silence. The path twisted and turned of its own accord until she had no faith that she could find her way back and still she pushed on. When she could no longer see the lines in the hand held in front of her face she turned to him. “On this particular evening luck seems to be elusive.”
“For you, maybe. I feel lucky just being here.”
“Then you may use your luck to lead us back.”
He laughed, a little explosion of air. “It don’t work that way. You been leading the way, I took a little vacation from paying attention. I aint never walked in this stretch of woods long enough to be walking ’em at night.”
“You’re not serious.”
“’Fraid so. I’m serious but I aint terrified. It’s warm, we aint going to freeze to death. Once the sun comes up we’ll be fine, no problem.”
“But I have to get back. We have to get back. I have paperwork, I have early appointments.”
She heard his grin in his voice. “Welcome to the woods. They got a mind of their own. There’s no moon, neither.”
“You do know the way back. You are trying to make a point. You have made it.”
He sighed deeply. “No, ma’am, I aint got a clue as to where we are but there’s not much to trouble us except poison ivy and the foxholes that grab your ankle and give it a good twist. If you watch your step I’ll see what I can do. Follow me. Close, now.”
He set out in the opposite direction from that she would have chosen. Earlier that evening a breeze had stirred the leaves but with the approaching dark the forest fell still and closed around them.
“Your turn to tell a story,” he said as they walked. “The price of the ticket of getting us found, though I kind of prefer lost. Any kind of story. A story from when you was a kid. Talk the way you talked when you was a kid—I just want to hear how you talked. Not in English, in your own language. I don’t need to know what it means. I just want to hear what you heard in your head when you were young, the way your people talked. The way you talked.”
“What kind of story do you want to hear?”
“Makes no difference. Whatever you want to tell. Maybe something about the first time you thought about coming to America.”
Meena considered this a moment, then spoke.
His white singlet a beacon in the dusk. “I must be boring you. I have heard that Americans do not like to listen to tales from the past.”
“Naw, I like hearing it, the way it runs up and down. Kind of like a river over a riffle.”
“I got a little of that. I heard you say ‘cinema’—you’re talking about going to the movies. I wouldn’t have thought you had movies but that goes to show how dumb I am. They had ’em in Nam, why not India? What kind of movies did you see?”
“Every few months my father took me to Calcutta for an eye examination. He left me alone at the movies while he took care of his business. Sometimes I saw Indian cinema but mostly I saw American movies—not at all like Indian movies. American movies make sense. Sometimes I think that is what made me want to come to America—I wanted to come to a place where the movies make sense.”
They reached the clearing with the statues. “I fell in love with America at the cinema,” she said. “My father left me there when he ran his errands in Calcutta. But one day he was late—the cinema hall had emptied and the usher told me I had to leave. And I went out into the street and I was alone.
“The theater was near a monastery where foreign guests stayed. That afternoon I saw my first American—I knew this man was an American because I had seen men like him in the cinema and because he was tall and white and walked like an American. He took space for granted. And he was wearing Levi’s, like the cowboys in the movies.
“A little boy—I had seen him at other times when I came to the cinema, a street urchin, really, raised to beg, with his territory guaranteed by a protector who would beat him if he did not pay—this little boy was begging the American for money and the American walked on, until finally the little boy seized the American’s hand and even so the American kept walking. The little boy followed him into the street—he ran in front of him and tried to block his way. A lorry was bearing down on them, and the man, who was walking forward, saw it first. The boy didn’t see it because he was small and had his back turned and he was hungry—what was life to him? The American saw the lorry and stepped in front of it—he was protecting the boy with his body. All this happened so fast that the American and the boy were acting from who they were, from instinct—they had no time to think. The American seized the boy by his arm and dragged him out of the lorry’s path. And then he stuck his hands in his pockets and kept walking.
“So this American who would not dig in his pocket for a rupee was willing to give his life to save the child.” Meena turned to Johnny Faye. Her expression drew inward. “We are so many and yet I know you never give us a thought because you have no reason to think of us. You were the powerful, we were the weak. But we thought of you all the time because you were in our minds, you were in our cinema halls. You never imagined me but every day of my childhood I imagined someone—an American man whose broad shoulders carry no weight of history—someone like you.” She placed her finger in the center of his breastbone. “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.” A small grimace. “I have always wanted something different, larger, greater, more. Like your Scarlett. That is what brought me to this country. But the gurus speak of a state—a way of being in the world they call rasavadhana, a place outside of desire, of pure consciousness and joy. When we saw the—what did you call it? The bird of the forest.”
“Whippoorwill.”
“That was for me an experience of rasavadhana. That is what I was looking for tonight—that is what I set out to see.”
“Is that a fact. That’s the kind of thing that you caint set out to see. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you made yourself ready but you aint looking.” He took her hand. She felt again that surge of electricity, of power, of desire. Life—she fought back as a swimmer fights the flood—she had never been so alive. She left her hand in his. She the doctor of the flesh, not the spirit had never known desire, she had never before been seized in its fist and dragged in its wake, never before this here and now.
And then she recognized their surroundings—they were back at the clearing. He led her past the statues and up the hill to the blind. JC trailed behind.
At the blind he pulled aside the hangin
g vines that formed the door and led her through. JC laid down outside with a heave and sigh.
Inside he fumbled in his pockets—the flare of a match, then the flame from the stub of a candle, at first timid, then bold. It was as much light as she could bear. He sat on the clean-swept earth and tugged at her hand. After a moment she sat next to him. Their shadows large and monstrous on the blind walls. He rested his hand atop hers. After a small while she turned hers over and linked their fingers.
He told her his stories then, stories of Vietnam, of desolation and terror and sorrow. She responded in kind—stories of Bengal, of planes flying over her grandparents’ home, flying east to bomb her parents’ village. While they spoke the insects’ infernal buzz grew louder, grind and racket and saw, until as if by some invisible, inaudible signal they stopped. Now there was only the thin lone chirp of a cricket and the pounding of her pulse. The candle guttered. “That is what I know. That is what I remember,” she said, but in telling these stories she understood for the first time why her father had taken her as a young country girl to Calcutta, why he took her for eye examinations for her nearly perfect eyes every month for three years, why he left her at the cinema alone—unheard of! a little girl, left alone in the great city—for those long afternoons of American films, why he exacted her promise, eagerly given, never to tell her mother where she had been. Her father, who read only poetry written earlier than Wordsworth—what monthly “business” could he have had in Calcutta? Sitting in the blind with Johnny Faye, she understood that her father had made these journeys because he had taken a lover.
She had never been so revealed, to herself or to another. Desire stripped her naked. She turned to him and pulled him to her and covered his mouth with hers.
The Man Who Loved Birds Page 21