A Redbird Christmas

by Fannie Flagg

  When they reached Mobile late that afternoon, the moment he stepped off the train, a tall thin man with a small head, who looked to Oswald exactly like a praying mantis wearing a baseball cap, stepped up. “Are you Mr. Campbell?” He said he was, and the man took his bag and said, “Welcome to Alabama! I’m Butch Mannich, but you can call me Stick; everybody else does.” As they walked along he added, “Yeah, I’m so skinny that when I was a child my parents wouldn’t let me have a dog because it would keep burying me in the yard.” Then he laughed uproariously at his own joke.

  When they came out of the station, the warm air of Mobile was moist and fragrant and a surprise to Oswald. To see it from the train was one thing; to feel it and smell it was another. Their mode of transportation was a truck that Butch apologized for. “It ain’t pretty, but it’ll get us there.” Butch was a cheery soul and talked the entire hour and a half it took them to drive down to Lost River. He handed Mr. Campbell his business card, which had a drawing of a big eye in the middle. Underneath was printed:

  BUTCH (STICK) MANNICH

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  AND PROCESS SERVER

  Oswald was surprised. “Is there a lot of call for private detective work here?”

  “No, not yet,” said Butch, a little disappointed. “But I’m available, ready, willing, and able, just in case.” It was just getting dark as they went over the long Mobile Bay causeway, and they were able to see the last of the sunset. There was nothing but miles of water on both sides and the sun that was now dipping into the bay was so large and orange it almost scared Oswald.

  “Is that normal?” he asked Butch.

  Butch glanced out the window. “Yeah, we get a nice sunset most of the time.”

  By the time they turned off the highway to Lost River it was pitch-black outside. “There’s the store,” said Butch, as they whizzed by. Oswald looked out but saw nothing. They drove about a block and stopped in front of a large house. “Here we are, safe and sound.”

  Oswald took out his wallet. “What do I owe you?”

  Butch’s reaction was one of genuine surprise. “Why, you don’t owe me a thing, Mr. Campbell.”

  Just as Oswald reached out to knock on the door, it was flung open by a huge woman, standing at least six feet tall. “Come on in!” she said, in a booming voice, and snatched his suitcase away from him before he could stop her. “I’m Betty Kitchen, glad to have you.” She grabbed his hand, shook it, and almost broke it. “Breakfast is at seven, lunch at twelve, and dinner at six. And if you see a little funny-looking woman spooking around don’t let it bother you; it’s only Mother. She doesn’t know where she is half the time, so if she wanders in your room just chase her out. Let me show you around.”

  The house had a long hallway down the middle, and he trailed behind her. She walked to the back of the house, pointing as she went: “Living room, dining room, and this is the kitchen.” She switched the lights on and then off. She turned around, headed back to the front, and pointed to a small door under the stairs. “And this is where I sleep,” she said. She opened the door, and inside was a closet just big enough for a single bed. “I like to be close to the kitchen where I can keep an eye on Mother. It’s small but I like it; it reminds me of being on a train. I always slept well on a train, and I was on a lot of them in my day. Come on upstairs. I’ll show you your room.”

  As he followed her up the stairs, Oswald felt that there was something familiar about her manner and her way of speaking. It was almost as if he had met her before, but he was sure he had not; she was a person you would not forget.

  “Mother used to be a baker in Milwaukee, specialized in petits fours and fancy cakes, but that was before she slipped on a cigar wrapper.” She turned around and looked at him. “You don’t smoke cigars, do you?”

  Oswald quickly said no. Even if he had, from the tone of her voice he would have quit on the spot. “No, I have emphysema; that’s why I’m here. For my health.”

  She sighed. “Yes, we get a lot of that. Most of the people that come down here have something or another the matter with them . . . but not me. I’m as healthy as a horse.” That was evident as they walked into his room and she heaved his suitcase onto the bed with one arm. “Well, here it is, the sunniest room in the house. It used to be mine before I moved downstairs. I hope you like it.”

  He looked around and saw it was a spacious open room with yellow floral wallpaper and a small yellow sofa in the corner. The brown spindle bed was made up with a crisp white chenille spread, and above it hung a framed embroidered plaque that read HOME SWEET HOME.

  She pointed at two doors. “Closet to the left, bathroom on the right, and if you need anything just holler. If not, see you at oh-seven-hundred.”

  He went in the bathroom and was surprised to see it was almost as big as the bedroom, with a green sink and tub. Another surprise: It had a window. He had never seen a bathroom with a window. He was so tired he just wanted to go lie down, but he felt grimy from the train ride so he took a bath and put his pajamas on and got into the soft bed with its clean sweet-smelling sheets. He lay there and looked around his new room once more before he turned off his lamp and fell into a deep peaceful sleep.

  After Oswald had gone upstairs to bed, the phone rang. It was Frances calling Betty to inquire if Mr. Campbell had arrived safe and sound. After she was told yes, Frances’s next question was, “Well?”

  Betty laughed. “Well . . . he’s a cute little man, with crinkly blue eyes and red hair. He sort of looks like an elf.”

  Frances said, “An elf?”

  “Yes, but a nice elf.”

  Somewhat disappointed that Mr. Campbell was not as handsome as she had hoped for—Mildred was so picky where men were concerned—nonetheless Frances looked on the bright side. An elf, she thought. Oh, well, it is close to Christmas. Maybe it was some kind of sign. After all, hope springs eternal.

  Oswald opened his eyes at six-thirty the next morning to a room filled with sunlight and with the sound of those same birds chirping he had heard over the phone, only twice as loud. To a man used to waking up for the past eight years in a dark hotel room around nine-thirty or ten to the sounds of traffic, this was unsettling. He tried to go back to sleep but the birds were relentless and he started coughing, so he got up. As he was dressing, he noticed an advertisement on the wall that Betty Kitchen had obviously cut out of a magazine. It was a picture of a ladies’ dressing table and alongside a compact, lipstick, comb, and a pack of Lucky Strike Green cigarettes was a WAC dress uniform hat. The caption underneath said SHE MAY BE A WAC—BUT SHE’S A WOMAN TOO!

  Then it dawned on him. That’s what had seemed so familiar. The old gal must have been in the service, probably as an army nurse. God knows he had been around enough army nurses, in and out of so many VA hospitals. He had even married one, for God’s sake. Downstairs in the kitchen, while eating a breakfast of eggs, biscuits, grits, and ham, he found out he was right. Not only had she been an army nurse, she was a retired lieutenant colonel, supervisor of nurses, and had run several big hospitals in the Philippines.

  He informed her that he had been in the army as well.

  She looked up. “Somehow, Mr. Campbell, I wouldn’t have pegged you for a military man.”

  He laughed. “Neither did they. I never got out of Illinois.”

  “Ah, that’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, I guess, but I don’t have any complaints. I got a nice medical discharge and went to school, thanks to the old U S of A Army.”

  About that time, the mother, who was half as tall as her daughter and looked like a dried-up little apple doll, appeared in the doorway. She ignored Oswald and seemed highly agitated. “Betty, the elephants are out in the yard again. Go see what they want.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Betty. “I’ll go find out in just a minute. Go on back upstairs now.”

  “Well, hurry up. They’re stepping all over my camellia bushes.”

  After she left, Betty turned to him. “See wh
at I mean? She thinks she sees all kinds of things out in the yard. Last week it was flying turtles.” She walked over and picked up his dishes. “I’m not sure if it was that fall she took a while ago or just her age; she’s older than God.” She sighed. “But that’s the Kitchen curse, longevity—on both sides. How about yourself, Mr. Campbell? Do you have longevity in your family?”

  Not having any information about his real family, but considering his own current condition, he said, “I sincerely doubt it.”

  After breakfast, Oswald went back to his room and finished unpacking, and a few minutes later he heard Betty call up the stairs, “Yoo-hoo! Mr. Campbell! You have a visitor!”

  When he came out, a pretty woman in a white blouse and a blue skirt looked up and said, “Good morning!” He recognized the voice at once and went downstairs to meet Frances Cleverdon. Although her hair was white, he was surprised to see that up close she had a youthful-looking face, with blue eyes and a lovely smile. She handed him a large welcome basket filled with pecans, a cranberry cream-cheese coffee cake, little satsuma oranges, and several jars of something. “I hope you like jelly,” she said. “I made you some green pepper and scuppernong jelly.”

  “I do,” he said, wondering what in hell a scuppernong was.

  “Well, I won’t stay, I know you must be busy. I just wanted to run in for a second and say hello, but as soon as you get settled in and feel like it, I want you to come over for dinner.”

  “Well, thank you, Mrs. Cleverdon, I will,” he said.

  As she got to the door, she turned and asked if he had been down to the store and met Roy yet. “Not yet,” he said.

  “No?” She smiled as if she knew a secret. “You need to go and see what’s down there. I think you’re in for a treat.”

  After she left, Oswald guessed he should take a walk and at least see the place, and he asked Betty how to find the store. She instructed him to go out the front door, take a left, and it was four houses past the post office at the end of the street.

  When he opened the door and walked out onto the porch, the temperature was the same outside as it was inside. He still could not believe how warm it was. Just two days ago he was in an overcoat and icy rain, and today the sun was shining and he was in a short-sleeve shirt. He went out, took a left, and saw what he had not been able to see last night.

  The street was lined on both sides by fat oak trees, with long gray Spanish moss hanging from each one. The limbs of the oaks were so large that they met in the middle and formed a canopy of shade in each direction for as far as he could see. The houses he passed on both sides of the street were neat little well-kept bungalows, and in every yard the bushes were full of large red flowers that looked like roses. As he walked along toward the store, the fattest squirrels he had ever seen ran up and down the trees. He could hear birds chirping and rustling around in the bushes, but the undergrowth of shrubs and palms was so thick he couldn’t see them. He soon passed a white house with two front doors and an orange cat sitting on the steps. One side of the house had POST OFFICE written above the door.

  As he went by, the door opened and a thin willowy woman with stick-straight bangs came out and waved at him. “Hello, Mr. Campbell. Glad you’re here!”

  He waved back, although he had no idea who she was or how she knew his name. When he got to the end of the street he saw a redbrick grocery store building with two gas pumps in front and went in. A clean-cut man with brown hair, wearing khaki pants and a plaid shirt, was at the cash register.

  “Are you Roy?” Oswald asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the man said, “and you must be Mr. Campbell. How do you do.” He reached over and shook his hand.

  “How did you know who I was?”

  Roy chuckled. “From the ladies, Mr. Campbell. They’ve all been waiting on you. You don’t know how happy I am you are here.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah, now they have another single man to pester to get married besides me.”

  Oswald put his hands up. “Oh, Lord, they don’t want me.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Mr. Campbell. If you’re still breathing they want you.”

  “Well”—Oswald laughed—“I’m still breathing, at least for the moment.”

  “Now that you’re here we have to stick together and not let any of those gals catch us off guard. Unless, of course, you’re in the market for a wife.”

  “Noooo, not me,” said Oswald. “I’ve already made one poor woman miserable. That’s enough.”

  Roy liked this little guy right away. “Come on back to the office and let me get you a cup of coffee, and I’ll introduce you to my partner.”

  As they walked back, Roy whistled and called out, “Hey, Jack!”

  Jack, who had been busy all morning running up and down the round plastic bird wheel with bells that Roy had ordered through the mail, heard the whistle, flew out of the office, and landed on Roy’s finger.

  Oswald stopped dead in his tracks. “Whoa. What’s that?”

  “This is Jack, my partner,” Roy said, looking at the bird. “He really owns the place. I just run it for him.”

  “My God,” said Oswald, still amazed at what he saw. “That’s a cardinal, isn’t it?”

  Roy held Jack away from him so he could not hear and confided, “Yes, officially he’s a cardinal, but we don’t tell him that; we just tell him he’s just a plain old redbird. He’s too big for his britches as it is.” Then he spoke to the bird. “Hey, Jack, tell the man where you live.”

  The bird cocked his head and Oswald swore the bird chirped with the same southern accent Roy had. It sounded exactly like he was saying, “Rite cheer! . . . Rite cheer! . . . Rite cheer!”

  When Roy was busy waiting on some customers, Oswald wandered around the store, examining the mounted fish and stuffed animals that covered the walls. They looked almost alive. The red fox seemed so real Oswald jumped when he first saw him up on the counter. He later remarked to Roy, “That’s really nice stuff you have here. For a second I thought that damn fox was alive. And those fish up there are really great.”

  Roy glanced up at them. “Yeah, I guess so. My uncle put them up there. He won most of them in a poker game.”

  “Who did them, somebody local?”

  “Yeah, Julian LaPonde, an old Creole, lives across the river.”

  “A Creole? What’s that? Are they Indians?”

  Roy shook his head. “Who knows what they are—they claim to be French, Spanish, Indian, you name it.” He indicated the mounted animals. “And in that guy’s case, I’m sure there’s a little weasel thrown in.” He changed the subject. “All those fish you see up there were caught by our mailman, Claude Underwood. That speckled trout is a record holder. Do you fish? ’Cause if you do, he’s the man to see.”

  “No,” Oswald admitted, “I’m not much of a fisherman, or a hunter either, I’m afraid.” He wouldn’t have known a speckled trout from a mullet.

  Oswald had spent about an hour roaming around the store and watching that crazy redbird of Roy’s run around on his wheel when the phone rang. Roy put the phone down and called out, “Hey, Mr. Campbell, that was Betty. She said your lunch is ready.”

  Oswald looked at his watch. It was exactly twelve o’clock, on the dot. “Well, I guess I’d better go.”

  “Yep, you don’t want to get her riled. Hey, by the way, have you met the mother?”

  “Oh, yes,” Oswald said, rolling his eyes.

  “They say she’s harmless, but I’d lock my door at night if I were you.”

  “Really? Do you think she’s dangerous?”

  “Well,” said Roy, looking up at the ceiling, “far be it from me to spread rumors, but we don’t know what happened to the daddy, now, do we?” By the look on Oswald’s face, Roy could tell he was going to have a lot of fun kidding around with him. He would believe anything he told him.

  As he left the store and headed back, Oswald realized he had been so busy looking at Jack and talking he forgot to notice i
f the store sold beer.

  Oh, well, there was always tomorrow.

  When he got home he asked Betty about the woman with the bangs at the post office who had waved at him, twice now. “Oh, that’s Dottie Nivens, our postmistress. We got her from an ad we put in The New York Times. We were afraid when she got here that she’d see how small we were and leave, but she stayed and we sure are glad. She gives one wingding of a party and makes a mean highball; not only that, she can jitterbug like nobody’s business.” Oswald wondered if the postmistress might be a little off her rocker as well, to leave New York City for this place.

  Around twelve-thirty, while Oswald was having his lunch, Mildred, who had been in Mobile all morning buying Christmas decorations for the Mystery Tree with money from the Polka Dots’ jingle-bell fund, called Frances the minute she got home and said, “Well?”

  Frances, trying to be tactful, said, “Well . . . he’s a cute little man, with cute little teeth, and of course he has that funny accent and . . .”

  “And what?”

  Frances laughed in spite of herself. “He looks like an elf.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “But a nice elf,” she quickly added. Mildred was always one to make snap judgments, and Frances did not want her to make up her mind about Oswald before she even met him. She could be so cantankerous.

  As a rule, Oswald rarely ate three whole meals in one day, but on his first day, in Lost River, after a huge breakfast, for lunch he ate baked chicken, a bowl of big fat lima beans, mashed potatoes, three pieces of corn bread and honey with real butter (not the whipped margarine spread he usually bought), and two pieces of homemade red velvet cake. He had not had real home cooking since he had been married to Helen and since the divorce he had been eating out at greasy spoons or off a hot plate in his room. That night at dinner he finished everything on his plate, plus two servings of banana pudding, which pleased Betty no end. She liked a man with a big appetite.