The Man Who Loved Birds

by Fenton Johnson

  In afterglow he asked again that she talk to him in her native language. She told him stories in Bangla, from the Mahabarata, Great India, tales of Krishna and Hanuman the monkey king and Arjuna the reluctant warrior and Sita his faithful wife. Once she told how Sita lived in exile with her king Arjuna and his brothers, deep in the forest in a hut exactly like the one in which they lay right here, right now. At the story’s end, silence, in which she understood the spoken word, her mother tongue, as the key that had opened her to him, even if he did not understand what she was saying—better, perhaps, that he did not understand.

  Then he spoke. “Mouth music.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s like mouth music, hearing you talk on like that and the pretty little way you bob your head with the words when they go up and down, kind of like you’re saying yes and no at the same time. That’s all words are anyway. Mouth music. We’re just like sparrows at sunrise, making all that racket just to say hello to another day and prove to ourselves and anybody that’s listening that we’re alive. It don’t mean a thing excepting it means everything.”

  He was echoing her thoughts, she understood, because he was meant to say the right thing at the right moment. “I should break this off. I should stop seeing you.”

  “That is what you ought to do. But you aint never much done what you ought to do nor said what you ought to say else you wouldn’t be here, aint that right.”

  “I have my whole life in this country at stake. Why am I doing this? I am Brahmin, you cannot know what that means but a Brahmin must marry someone worthy.” A terrible thing to say but she made herself say it, whatever was needed to bring this to an end. “You might as well know. I have had dates, Harry Vetch is eager to see me again.”

  “Then maybe you should see him again.” He kissed her breast. “Maybe he can help you out with Rosalee’s boy.”

  “I have asked him as much.”

  Johnny Faye lifted his eyes to hers. “I knew you’d figure out something. You just got to take your time, like a lot of people. What did he say?”

  “Precisely what I have already told you but with the authority of the law. I am to guard my tongue and keep my place.”

  “So do you listen to the law or do you listen to your heart?”

  The little voice, Rosalee’s words came of their own accord. She broke her gaze from his. “Matthew Mark Smith is my patient. He is no concern of yours.”

  His turn to look away. “How about letting me be the judge of that.”

  A sinkhole of silence.

  “In my childhood I read novels and I thought, ‘The stupid things people do. They must be making this up. How can they not know better? Who can believe this? Nobody could be so reckless.’ And here I am, a Brahmin, creeping through the woods to meet with a dacoit.”

  “Here we are.” He took each nipple between thumb and forefinger and put his mouth over hers and they did not speak for a long while.

  He asked nothing more than her presence. Not once did he ask to meet her, he never came to her office, though after their lovemaking he always saw her to the edge of the woods. Her heart’s deep spring, once desiccate, flowed anew. She loved him because he loved her as she was—a childless and once-married exile.

  An evening came when she dressed in a pale blue choli and the single sari she had brought from India, a scrap of the evening sky star-bangled and edged with silver, wrapped around her waist and thrown over one shoulder. Though it was not a night on which he might expect her to appear she followed the path to the statues on nothing more than the hope that he would divine her longing and of course he was there waiting because he was her destiny.

  In the clearing in front of the sleeping apostles she struck a pose her body remembered from the dancing classes required of all Bengali girls. She moved with the bearing of a woman wearing a garment held in place by presence and grace. Her hands assumed their poses, agile and independent, two actors on the stages of her wrists, Parvati hands that of their own accord know how to sleep, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, or else to lie palms up, invoking the stillness of eternity until in an instant they wake, her fingers forming complicated little temples that dissolve with a circular rotation of the wrist opening outward to reveal a flat palm with a blood red dot at its center, the thumb and forefinger a perfect circle and the remaining three fingers saying up! Released from its skewered bun her hair fell almost to her waist, gleaming as if brushed with oil. She wore gold bangles at her wrists and the hot breeze from the west carried their tinkling. In one nostril a chip of glister in the evening’s last light—a diamond. She joined her hands palm to palm, then moved them left-to-right while her head moved right-to-left, even as her eyes followed her hands. Contradiction in union—the parts of her body discrete and independent even as the body was complete and whole—the tension between the movement of her body and the tranquility of her countenance, between time and eternity. She formed a complex knitting of the hands and fingers around a ball of air and in that moment the space her hands enclosed and contained became as real as a stone, a place that she shaped into a house that she inhabited and into which she invited Shiva, her consort. He was his father’s son. She was her father’s daughter. “For me you are this place, a place to call home. My own country.” She took his hand and led him to the blind.

  Chapter 26

  Meena knelt on the floor of Rosalee’s kitchen next to Matthew Mark, who lay with an array of colored pencils in front of a square of poster board. The aged nun teaching summer school had charged her students with illustrating some principle from their catechism, and after much deliberation he had chosen Three Roads to Heaven. “Everybody thinks you can only get to heaven by being a priest or a nun or a monk or getting married,” he told Meena. “But the catechism says a single person can get there just like anybody and I thought about you and how you’re not married and how I want to be single when I grow up because I want to be like you. So that’s what I’m going to draw.”

  “Surely a very hard thing to draw,” Meena said. “Might you choose an easier subject?”

  “I always choose the hardest subject. It’s more fun that way.” He was drawing big puffy clouds with an azure pencil. “Heaven,” he said, by way of explanation. “Where Jesus lives. Jesus was single.”

  “I see.”

  “Did you learn about Jesus when you were a kid?”

  She smiled. “I prayed to Jesus, because he was the most handsome.”

  And so they worked together while Rosalee quartered tomatoes and dropped them into large kettles on each of the stovetop burners. “I used to wait for a cool day to make juice,” she said, “but don’t seem like we get cool days in the summer anymore.”

  While sharpening pencils the doctor explained to Matthew Mark that yes, she had learned about Jesus in the convent school but that at home her father had taught her about Lord Krishna, who was a bit like Jesus in that they were both the subjects of a lot of good stories. Matthew Mark asked for a story and the doctor said there are many but the most famous involved a great battle and Matthew Mark interrupted her to say, “Tell that one!”

  And so while Matthew Mark drew his poster the doctor told of Lord Krishna and Arjuna at the great battlefield of Kurukşetra. Arjuna had engaged Lord Krishna to drive his chariot but when the day of battle dawned Arjuna’s courage failed him. Looking across the field he saw his opponents arrayed in their splendid armor and he knew that he should fan his hatred for them so that he could kill as many as possible, but all he could think about was how they were men just like him, some of them his cousins and friends and all of them men who just wanted to be happy in the same way that he wanted to be happy and how could he summon any pleasure for the task that awaited?

  Matthew Mark held up his pencils. “Do music notes have to be black? I wore the black down and I don’t like using it anyway.”

  Meena crouched at the boy’s side. “Music notes?”

  Matthew Mark turned the drawing so she co
uld see. It showed a field of red tulips from which a road branched into three paths. The leftmost path led to a cloud that contained a cross and a miter hat and a scarlet heart pierced with seven swords. “That’s the religious life,” Matthew Mark said. The middle path led to a cloud that held two interlocking rings and a paper labeled “CONTRACT” and a baby bassinet labeled “Junior.” “Married, I assume,” the doctor said and Matthew Mark nodded. The rightmost cloud was blank. “I can’t think of anything that stands for being single,” Matthew Mark said, “so I thought maybe I could draw some music notes. But when I hear music notes they sound like all kinds of colors but in the music book at school they’re always black. So should I draw them in black like they are in the book, or in colors like they are in my head?”

  “Musical notes must be black,” the doctor said. “But what do musical notes have to do with being single?”

  “Single people get to be happy all the time,” Matthew Mark said. “They don’t yell at each other like my—anyway, they don’t yell at each other and they don’t look mad all the time like Father Poppelreiter. So I thought I’d draw a bunch of dancing notes on their cloud.”

  “I see,” the doctor said. “Perhaps you should make them different colors after all.”

  And so he selected a rainbow of pencils while she told how Lord Krishna spoke to Arjuna about how each of us has his duty in life—how some have the duty to lead and others the duty to serve, some have the duty to be shoemakers and others the duty to be kings but each profession is just as important as the other in the great scheme of things, which is too vast for people to understand. And so Arjuna’s duty that day was to be a soldier and as part of his duty as a soldier he had to kill other men. And even though it was not a pleasant part of his duty, his job was to perform it as well as he could because when each of us performed his duty as well as he could he helped keep the universe in harmony. “Like your three roads,” Meena said. “Each person has a road to follow and his job is to follow the road as well as he can, and Lord Krishna is equally happy with all three roads, so long as we contribute to the harmony of the universe.”

  Rosalee handed her an apron. “Now’s where I need some help. Matthew Mark, you climb up on that chair and get ready with the tomato mill. I’ll pull the jars out of the hot water. Meena, you get the messy job—you bring the tomatoes to Matthew Mark and let him run them through the mill. Then you carry the juice—it’ll be boiling hot now, you be careful—over to the sink and I’ll ladle it into the jars.”

  They worked until the half-gallon jars were filled with bright red juice and the compost bucket a steaming pile of pulp. Then Rosalee took some watermelon sticks from the freezer and they went outside.

  They sat in aluminum lawn chairs, listening to the pink and pock of the juice jars sealing. Matthew Mark sat at the picnic table putting finishing touches on his poster. Next to their chairs was a crude structure of wooden slats and sheets of translucent plastic. “My greenhouse,” Rosalee said. “Winter comes, it can be awful gray around here. I like to see something bloom.”

  “How lovely! May I look?”

  “Oh, there’s not much to look at now. I raise things that bloom in winter. Orchids and cactus. The cactus I scatter around the yard in the summertime, the orchids are just a bunch of green sticks right now. I like ’em because they look ordinary and no-count and then right when you need it most, out comes this beautiful flower.”

  “I had an orchid once, my favorite flower, that bloomed in basanto, our season for weddings,” Meena said. She told how as a teenage girl, sent by her grandparents to bring in the family cow from its foraging, she found a bright yellow orchid in a damp hollow of a banyan tree. A stream of water trickled from a spring in a rock wall and followed a limb down to a mossy hollow in the trunk, where the orchid had rooted itself and lived on air and water and filtered light. “I visited it all the time after my parents sent me to my grandparents’ village. On the day I was married, I cut one of the stalks and wove the blossoms into my hair.”

  A moment of silence. “I never knew you was married.”

  “A complicated and difficult story,” Meena said. “I should never have mentioned it. If I could be so bold. Please—if you would—I would be so grateful if you would keep that knowledge to yourself.”

  “Well, of course, honey, you know you can count on me but little pitchers have big ears,” Rosalee said, staring at Matthew Mark. He did not look up. “Matthew Mark.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You heard the doctor.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what do you say.”

  “I promise.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “And hope to die.”

  “All right, then. I don’t guess you ever worked this hard in Bengal,” Rosalee said. “Nothing hotter than canning tomatoes in August. Though if you was a country girl I expect you had work of your own. For all I seen of the world you might have been canning tomatoes.”

  “Mrs. Smith—Rosalee. Might I ask your opinion on a private matter?”

  “Why sure, honey, however I can help.” A pause. “Matthew Mark, you take your poster inside and finish it up. We’ll be along directly.”

  A small protest overruled, and then the women were alone. “I appreciate your sensitivity,” Meena said, “though I am only curious, of course.” She described Johnny Faye’s pointing out the birds and Harry Vetch’s vehement warning. She could hear her effort to keep her voice colorless and uninflected. “And so when people say Mr. Faye is a character, what do they mean?”

  Rosalee twisted her wedding band. “Could mean a lot of things. Partly it’s a compliment. Says you give people something to talk about. You could say he was a community asset, though I caint imagine my husband seeing it that way. It’s not like he breaks the law—I mean he does, but he and his kind never lived by no law that come from anywheres but inside. Let’s just say you won’t ever have to worry about getting paid on time and probably a little extra. He’s too ornery to pay attention to the ins and outs of the law. I wouldn’t go trying to civilize him. He’s too honest to be civilized.”

  Meena sucked on her watermelon stick. “What would you do, if you were given a choice between love and security?”

  “I already told you. I’d listen to the little voice.”

  “But what if there’s too much noise to hear the little voice?”

  “Then I’d get myself to some quiet place, I guess. That’s one thing church is good for. But you know better than me you’re choosing between something that is and something that aint. There aint no such thing as security, not that I been able to see, anyway. I went chasing and I know. That’s just a dream somebody come up with to get us to buy whatever they happen to be selling.”

  “I might as well tell you. Harry Vetch has asked me for a second date.”

  “I aint surprised. Harry Vetch can be a pain but he aint dumb, and you’re the best thing that’s happened to this little town in a long time.”

  “What would you say? Our first date was not especially successful.”

  Rosalee shrugged. “That can happen on a first date. Aint no harm in a date. Keep your legs crossed and make sure he pays your way, he can afford it. And don’t be too eager. He’s got a reputation for notching the gun, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, but with Harry I don’t feel the need to worry about keeping these legs crossed,” she said, pointing to her legs. “Instead I have to keep these crossed,” and she pointed to her lips. “That is considerably more difficult. I have been told before that I can be too—direct. That is what I like about Johnny—Mr. Faye. I can say anything with him, or nothing. Either way we have a lovely time.”

  Rosalee gave her a peculiar look. “How many times have you seen Johnny Faye?”

  “Oh, a few. We encounter each other at the monastery—at the statues. He comes to watch birds and I come—I enjoy the peace and quiet.”

  “Peace and quiet’s not the firs
t thing I think of when I think of Johnny Faye. What is it about that man? Seems like everybody—everything that moves has the hots for Johnny Faye. Something about that mix of rounder and saint, I guess. And the little boy, we all want to take care of the little boy. Sometimes I think it’s women’s fault that men are so messed up. We don’t want ’em to grow up, we want to keep ’em kids forever. Our kids.” Rosalee bent to tug a handful of crabgrass from the orchid planter. “I’d keep a tight rein on that if I was you.”

  “And what makes you say that?”

  “You live with a police officer, you hear lots of things you best keep to yourself.”

  “The same is true of a doctor.”