Without hesitation I began speaking and did so without interruption for thirty-two minutes. To my recollection I had never in my adult life talked for so long an unbroken span except when reading aloud the chapters from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the Emma Weldy library many years ago and when conducting opening staff meetings in the lunchroom each fall. Without sharing graphic specifics, I revealed the cause of my alienation from God: my grandfather’s predacious acts against me in private over a period of four years while in public he served as a church elder.
I told of the two losses that flanked the casting away of my faith: The deaths of my mother and of my son. While Thomas drove, staring straight ahead and hearing for the first time many things about which he could have only wondered, and while Mickey and Birdie sat silent behind me, I abridged the story of my life into thirty-two minutes, concluding with these words: “Therefore, as I have seen no evidence of God’s love to me, I can muster none for him, and as churches exist for the purpose of exalting this God, I can only avoid them.”
I felt calm when I had finished, though at the same time expectant, for I knew that my words would stir a response. We must have driven for at least a mile before another word was uttered, and it was Birdie who spoke first.
“That’s a sad, sad story, Margaret. I had put some of it together already from things you’ve told me, but hearing it all at one time almost takes my breath away. Nobody can argue that you’ve had a hard life and have—”
We were passing through Hodges by now, and I grasped the edge of the seat as a black dog suddenly darted across the road in front of us, though by the time Thomas had applied the brakes, the dog had vanished between two houses.
“Well, dog-gone,” said Mickey, and Thomas laughed. “Now, then, go on with what you were saying, lambkin,” Mickey urged.
“God doesn’t let people suffer just to be mean, Margaret,” said Birdie. “He’s not out to get us. He loved Job, but he let him go through some awful times. We all have to go through bad times—it’s the curse of sin—but the difference is that Christians have the Holy Spirit in their hearts to hold them up. God’s aim for us when we suffer is to heal us and to bring us out stronger than when we went in.”
Birdie leaned forward and laid her hand upon the back of the front seat as if to substitute for touching me. “Suffering is part of life just like happy times,” she said, “and you have had some happy times, Margaret. You had four terrible years with your grandfather, and I sure don’t want to make light of that, but God did give you the wits and strength to finally get away from him. And you also had four years of being a mother and having a little boy of your own, and I can’t think of anything more wonderful than that! Of course, I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to lose him, and your mother, too—oh, but I’m so glad you had them both, at least for a little while. Even if you had to lose them, you still had them.”
She fell silent and leaned back in her seat, but Mickey picked up the theme. “You can look at suffering lots of different ways, you know. Sometimes it’s the only way God can get a person’s attention. Take this man who just joined our church a couple months ago. He’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of his life because he picked the wrong place to dive into a lake. Young guy, not even forty yet, married, three little children, had a real active life, was a golf pro at a country club over in Athens, Georgia, and now he can’t walk. You know what he does? He’s started a counseling ministry for accident victims. He has an office in Greenville and Spartanburg both and visits people in hospitals all over the state. That’s what I call putting your pain to good use. Now, I don’t have anything against golf pros, but which job do you think does more good and helps more people—the one he used to have or the one he’s got now?”
No one said anything for a short space of time, and then Mickey resumed. “And of course I don’t need to remind you that you can’t judge everything in a pot by what’s floating on top. Seems to me like you’re painting all churches black because of one bad man in one church you went to over thirty years ago.”
Once again Birdie leaned forward. “You never can tell how you might use your sad past someday to help somebody else, Margaret,” she said.
The words of Birdie and Mickey did not chafe. With the memory of Birdie’s physical scars upon my mind and of the brittle, splintered brightness of her voice when speaking of children, I took in what she said and reserved it for further consideration.
By the time we arrived in Abbeville, the day had taken on a decidedly meditative cast, though not melancholy. The sky still lowered, and thunder rumbled in the distance. The four of us had never before sustained such a conversation; though solemn, it was strangely uplifting. We ate a most satisfying meal at a popular restaurant operated by Mennonites and later, after walking the streets surrounding the quaint town square, found our seats in the Opera House for the performance of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.
Driving homeward late that night, we discussed the play. Thomas and Mickey laughed at Amanda Wingfield’s nattering tirade over her son’s failure to chew his food properly, but Birdie said, “It’s really a sad play, though, isn’t it? They all wanted something different but didn’t get it.”
More than any other work by Tennessee Williams, this drama had always haunted me. Perhaps I had for all of my life felt a kinship with Laura, whose hopes were dashed when her long adored savior proved unsatisfactory. As we rode in silence for a few moments, I heard again the closing lines of the play, spoken by Tom Wingfield. “Blow out your candles, Laura—and so good-bye.”
I had seen the play only once before but had read it many times, relishing the pensive gloom of the ending. Tonight, however, I felt a curious buoyancy of heart not at all in keeping with the mood of the play. Once again, and more powerfully than before, I felt the seed of hope sending down roots within me. While Laura’s rescuer had been only a brief illusion, I felt that my salvation was a sure and imminent reality, that it would be no concealed and closely guarded secret, but that a cloud of witnesses, both seen and unseen, stood by awaiting the unshrouding of my buried faith.
The rain unleashed as we pulled into the Freemans’ driveway late that night, escalating almost immediately into a spring hailstorm.
“Gang, gang, the hail’s all here!” Mickey cried.
30
Joy in the Presence of Angels
For pure atmosphere, I do not believe that I have read a book to equal Archibald Rutledge’s Home by the River. Birdie gave the book to me in early April, wrapped in lavender tissue paper and tied with white ribbon. “Mickey brought this home yesterday, and we thought you’d like it,” she said, placing it upon my desk when she arrived at work one morning.
I removed the wrapping paper, leafed through the pages of the book, and thanked her sincerely. I had by this time read most of the poems in Rutledge’s collected works, Deep River, and I had formed many ideas of the kind of man he must have been. This new book would verify or amend many of my assumptions, and I looked forward to reading the poet’s account, in prose, of the restoration of Hampton Plantation, his ancestral home in the Low Country of South Carolina.
“Mickey said we all ought to take a trip to Hampton one of these Saturdays,” Birdie said. “It’s not all that far from Charleston. He said maybe we could even splurge and spend the night in a motel if you and Thomas were interested.”
I did not answer but glanced back at the book and pretended to study the photograph of Rutledge on the book jacket. What would Birdie say, I wondered, were I to tell her that Thomas and I had never stayed in a motel together? What would Thomas say were I to mention Birdie’s suggestion?
She took my silence for reluctance and did not press the matter. “Just ask Thomas about it sometime,” she said, “and we can talk about it later. It would probably work better to wait till after school’s out…if we decide to do it at all.” She left my office, humming.
As I said, the book evoked as strong a sense of place as I have eve
r encountered in literature. At times when I was reading, it was as if I were breathing in the very air—the warm, damp fragrance—of the coastal country with its profusion of magnolia, dogwood, yellow jasmine, red woodbine, camellia japonica, sweet bay, myrtle, gardenia, and holly. I could close my eyes and hear with perfect clarity the shrill cry of the bobolink in the rice fields, the lapping of river water against the sides of a cypress canoe, the grunting of a foraging raccoon.
With patience and absolute cleanness of style, Rutledge instructed me in the ways of the lowlands. I learned of the transplanting of the redbud Judas tree, the unearthing of old wine bottles and Delft tiles, the mystic oneness with nature achieved by the marshland natives, unexpected clashes with bull alligators and diamondback rattlesnakes, the flight of the wild turkey, the nesting of the wood duck, the heavy flooding of the Santee River, the shadowy stealth of the gray fox, the rise of the moon above the pinelands.
And as I read the book over the course of six days in April, my soul opened wider. I wanted very much to visit this plantation, to view the majestic columned house and the massive oak upon which George Washington had gazed and pronounced his blessing, to walk through the gardens once tended by the gentle Flora, a former slave, whose magical touch with growing things included first a liberal measure of love.
You may imagine the sharp piercing of truth I felt when I read the lesson that Rutledge drew from Flora’s gardening skills: “The best way to make people flower is just to love them.” I paused from my reading and lifted my eyes. I was sitting in my living room at the time, in my rocking chair, and all about me I saw tangible tokens of Birdie’s generosity of spirit: the tiny green leaves of the bonsai, the collection of piano duets, a crocheted doily, a cinnamon-scented candle, and the book in my lap, to name several. From outdoors I heard the delicate tinkling of the wind chimes that Birdie and Mickey had bought for us at a craft fair in Williamston. Thomas had hung them from a branch of the pear tree in our side yard.
Had I felt that her gifts were only a ruse to ensnare me, as I had once declared though never truly believed, Birdie never would have won my heart. I am not easy prey for tricksters. By April, however, I knew that her gifts were merely an appendage of her love. They were not calculated. They had no other purpose than to please me.
How could it be, I asked myself, that in so short a time I had begun to loosen my grip upon my past suffering, to acknowledge the pain of others, to ruminate upon the long-ago teachings of my mother, wondering if perhaps the seed that she had planted in my heart and that Birdie had watered after long dormancy could indeed flower. How could it be that I had gone to the attic, unlocked my trunk, removed from it my mother’s Bible, and begun reading the book of Job and the Psalms?
My question—“How could it be?”—was answered simply in a single word: love. I once again began to embrace truths that many years ago I had given over, for I saw in Birdie a trusting and selfless equanimity concerning the crooked places in her own past. She was the linchpin of my healing, the instrument of my salvation. Birdie had loved me to liberty, or at least to its brink. There were yet steps to be taken before my peace with God was secured.
School was closed for the spring break during the second week of April, prior to Easter Sunday. I met with Birdie as usual, however, for my piano lessons on Tuesday and Friday and for my organ lesson on Saturday morning. Though my ear informed me that I had much ground yet to cover in my musical training, I was progressing, in Birdie’s words, “by leaps and bounds!”
Following my piano lesson on April 11, the Tuesday of our spring break, Birdie and I fell into conversation about unrealized talents. I had ended my lesson by playing “To a Wild Rose” by Edward MacDowell, and Birdie had, as always, grown immoderately laudatory in her commendation of what she referred to as my “perfect styling of each phrase.”
My lesson over, she had invited me to stay for some light refreshments. “I wonder how you would’ve found out about your gift for music if we’d never met each other,” she said as she poured for me a glass of grapefruit juice in the kitchen.
We sat down at the table together with a plate of sugar cookies between us. I ate only one, although they were delicious. “You seem to assume a false premise,” I said, “namely that I would have discovered my ability without your aid.”
“Oh, but of course you would have!” she cried. “Talent can’t be buried forever.”
“It can, and it often is,” I stated.
“Oh no, not talent like yours. I just know that someday, somewhere you would’ve stumbled across a piano or some other instrument and learned it by trial and error if nothing else,” she said. Still, her talk was always focused upon me. When I tried to turn it to her, as you will see in the following exchange, she resisted as she always did.
“Perhaps I would have,” I said, “but the possession of potential in a given field in no way guarantees opportunity for development. None of us knows what he might have been in a different environment and under different influences. I believe, for instance, that you possess talents that have never been brought to fruition,” and I looked at Birdie almost sternly.
“No, no,” she said, laughing, “I’ve gone as far as I can go, but you, Margaret, you could really do something in music. I think you ought to look into private voice lessons, too. Why, you could get into one of the chorales over in Greenville. I’m sure of it!”
A few weeks earlier, Thomas and Mickey had begun singing “Down in the Valley” one evening after we had played a game of Rook. Thomas took the melody and Mickey harmonized. “Come on, gals, join us!” Mickey had urged, and Birdie had entered on the melody, at which point Thomas had shifted to bass. At last I filled in the alto line, and when we had finished, Birdie had turned upon me as if stunned. “I had no idea you could sing like that!” she exclaimed, to which Thomas had added, “Well, I’ve lived with her going on sixteen years, and I didn’t know it, either!”
“You would be a better teacher than any teacher at Emma Weldy,” I said to Birdie now.
“Oh, heavens!” she said, fanning her face. “I love children, but I couldn’t teach! I didn’t go to college a single day!”
“People of all ages pursue college degrees,” I said.
“Well, I don’t believe I’m up to that,” she said. I detected a wistfulness of tone, however, even as she protested, but the moment passed. “Now, you’re the one who should be looking into college courses!” she said. “You really ought to think about going further with your music, Margaret, and I mean it!” Clearly, she was determined to talk about me and not herself.
The following Saturday evening, April 15, we met Birdie and Mickey, along with Joan and Virgil, at C. C.’s Barbecue, located on the main street of Filbert between The Golden Toe Shoe Repair Shop and Sparky’s Office Supply. Short on decor but long on taste, C. C.’s Barbecue attracts a multitude of customers from all parts of the state and was even featured several years ago in a regional book titled Southern Spice: Barbecue in the Southeast. To secure seating, it is necessary to arrive early, and this we did. By five o’clock the six of us were seated in a large booth next to the front window. I noticed that although the blinds were free from dust and the window glass was wiped to a sheen, a dead spider lay curled up in the corner of the sill.
C. C.’s was named after its original owner, a man whose full name had been Christopher Columbus Boatwright and whose recipe for barbecue had purportedly been a family secret for over one hundred years. C. C. Boatwright had moved his family to South Carolina from Kentucky in the early 1950s and had opened C. C.’s Barbecue in 1955. By all appearances no changes had been made in the furnishings of the interior since its opening. Aside from the spider, however, it was clean. The present proprietor is a grandson of C. C., with the curious name of Wooster Sneed Boatwright.
Joan and Virgil were by now seeing each other quite regularly, and together they had visited the Church of the Open Door in Derby three or four times, although Virgil was still actively involved in
his own church in Filbert. Joan had attended his church several times, also.
It had been Birdie’s idea to invite them to meet us at C. C.’s. She had inquired about them repeatedly since our evening at the Field Pea Restaurant in November and, according to Joan, had welcomed them enthusiastically, almost embarrassingly so, each time she had seen them together at church. Since Christmas Joan had not sought my counsel concerning her relationship with Virgil but had told me twice that “things were looking pretty good,” which I took to mean either that she was moving closer to the acceptance of Virgil’s theological ideals or that he was slowly removing himself from the tentacles of his religion. I felt the former to be the more likely of the two. I did not interrogate her, nor did she offer details.
As C. C.’s Barbecue offers only a buffet-style meal—serving pork, chicken, beef, mutton, and a dozen vegetables—there was considerable shuffling about and a great deal of coming and going among the six of us as we ate our dinner. Though the continuity of our conversation suffered somewhat, there was no lack of volume, both in the sense of quantity and loudness, most of it being light banter and casual observations.
I hold in my mind three memories of Birdie from this night. First, I recall that Virgil spoke at length about the mysterious stone colossi on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean, and when he had finished, Birdie said, “How fascinating. I’ve never even heard of Easter Island before!” She shook her head and added, “Margaret’s been putting ideas about college in my head, but if I ever did try to get in, I’m afraid they’d just laugh and say I had to start all over in first grade.”
Mickey objected promptly and loudly, declaring Birdie to be “smarter than a whip” and telling her to remember her own advice that “you never know till you try it.” She quickly tried to change the subject, but Mickey was not to be put off. Holding his napkin in front of her face as if to silence her, he held forth, his words sounding of repetition, as if he had rehearsed the matter many times to her in private. “Now that we’re both working, we’ve got more money than we need,” he said, “and I could help her study—as if that would do any good.” Apparently, then, Birdie had kept our earlier conversation about college in her heart and had not only pondered my words but had even told Mickey about them.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 42