The Hummingbird War

by Joan Shott

  But my offer was lost in their single-mindedness. I knew they had been battling each other forever, and nothing I could say would change their minds. Hummingbirds will always fight their miniature wars.

  I worked until I was tired of bending and reaching across the beds and stood up, ready to call it a morning. But Lilly was still on her knees, gently pulling weeds, covering the bottom of a basket with starts of blackberry and red clover. She hadn’t accomplished much, but she seemed content to keep working, looking as if she were deep in thought.

  “Lilly, time to quit.” I helped her get back on her feet. She was as light as a feather. Her clothes hung on her. It was hard to tell how much she weighed.

  We pulled our gloves off and walked towards the house just as my father’s car rumbled up the dirt drive. My heart twisted in my chest. I wondered if I’d made a mistake by stopping at his garage to let him know I was here. But I was making his problems my fears, and there had to come a time when I stopped worrying about what he thought. Today was as good a time as any. I tucked my gloves into my jeans’ back pocket and stood as straight as I could manage as he stepped out of his car and glared at me.

  “Lilly, it’s my…father,” I said. How could she help but read the uneasiness in my voice?

  “It’ll be good to finally meet him.” She placed her hand firmly on my arm.

  I jammed my hands into my pockets to keep them from shaking and walked towards him.

  “Danny told me you’d be here,” he said, “since I had no idea you was in Chicago last week until I heard you was on the TV. Maybe all this makes us even. I know you were miffed at me, but running off without telling me. That ain’t like you.”

  “I’m sorry. I knew how you felt about the SDS.”

  “What I feel about somethin’ don’t matter if you are in some trouble. Is that boy gonna be all right?”

  “He’s going to be okay,” I said.

  He reached inside his car and pulled out a package. “I came to bring you a little somethin’ for your birthday.” He handed me a small, crudely-wrapped present. I could tell by the shape it was another bottle of perfume he’d picked up at the drug store as he always did. He had no idea I didn’t wear perfume.

  “Thanks for remembering.” I waved at Lilly to come join us. “Daddy, I’d like you to meet Lilly Bluestone.”

  My father offered his hand to Lilly. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Lilly Hughes. I use my maiden name now, Mr. Miller. Call me Lilly,” she said.

  “Bluestone. Never heard that name except that army general. You related?”

  “My ex-husband, yes.”

  “Well, looks like Diane met a celebrity.” He grinned, tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans, and leaned back on his heels.

  “Hardly a celebrity.” Lilly clucked. “My ex-husband is well-known, but I prefer to live a quiet life.”

  “Seems to me I read about him in the paper a few days ago sayin’ he’s gone soft on the Commies. I don’t believe half a what I read, though. Those reporters will twist your words until you can’t even recognize ‘em. Had you a couple of sons got killed in the war, if I remember right.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Miller.”

  “Call me Ed.”

  “My son, James, passed away last year…from cancer,” Lilly said. Her chin quivered. She pushed the hair out of her eyes only to have the wind blow it back.

  My father looked confused. “I thought they said he was a victim of the war. Guess I got my facts wrong.”

  “No, his cancer was from exposure to agent orange. It was the chemical used for defoliation in the jungles of Vietnam. The order to use it was given by his father, and I know it’s what caused Jim’s cancer. No one will ever convince me otherwise.” She didn’t flinch, but her breathing slowed, her eyes closed, and I swore I could see a lump of pain move through her veins.

  “I see,” he said. “A sad thing to happen to a family. I was wrong about there being two sons.” He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. Despite the breeze off the water, he was beginning to sweat. He tugged at the collar of his tee-shirt.

  “No, you were right, Ed. My oldest son is missing in Southeast Asia. He’s an army colonel.”

  “This is a real bad thing to happen. Two sons. I’m very sorry, Miss…Lilly.”

  “Actually, I have three sons.” She drove her story around again like a racehorse on a muddy track, wanting to make it to the finish line even if the conditions were deteriorating.

  “I’m hoping he’s safe and in good health.” My father squirmed under the restraints of carrying on such a careful and polite conversation. I imagined he was hoping the third son she’d mentioned wouldn’t put him deeper in the hole he was digging for himself.

  “He’s fine except for that concussion. You’ve met him.”

  “I have?’ His eyebrows arched. He swallowed hard and looked at me.

  “Matthew is my son.”

  My father was a man of few words, but I seldom saw him speechless. He was silent as those old timing gears in his mind slowly turned, putting together what had happened between him and the son of this unfortunate woman.

  “Oh gee, I suppose I might a gotten off on the wrong foot with the boy when we met, but I just don’t put stock in the anti-war stuff. No ma’am. If your country needs you, you’ve got to go. Just like I did. Just like my friends. But I might a been a bit too hard on him.”

  She hesitated, looked at me. “Matthew disagrees with this war. As do I.”

  “Well, ma’am, I respect what you’ve gone through. I’m sorry.” He turned to me. “Diane, I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Daddy, don’t leave. I’d like you to get to know Lilly better.”

  “Don’t think that’s a good idea.” He opened his car door.

  “Daddy, this is important.”

  “Why’s it so important, little girl?” He slid behind the steering wheel and anxiously put the key in the ignition, waiting to turn it and get the hell away from me and Lilly.

  “Because I love Matthew, and he and Lilly are part of my life now.”

  “Are you tellin’ me you are gonna marry that boy? Marry a draft dodger?”

  “He’s a good man. He’s fighting for his country, for his family. Don’t you see?” I needed my father to stand by me, but he couldn’t get past his own fear of change. If I could have slit my wrists to show him how the blood that ran through me ran through him, too, I would have. But it seemed he’d rather lose me altogether than lose his control over me.

  “I see, little girl. I see you’ve gone and lost your mind.” He slammed the door, started the car, and turned towards the road, sending stones flying from his tires.

  “I’m not your little girl anymore,” I said, but he had already driven around the thick hedge of evergreens.

  “He doesn’t want to admit that you’ve become a woman with her own opinion. I think he’ll come around. He’s a perceptive man,” Lilly said.

  I tore open the package he’d given me for the physical proof of his obstinacy, peeling away layers of tissue paper. He didn’t usually wrap my perfume bottles in tissue, but what I found under the last thin layer wasn’t perfume. It was a hand-blown, glass hummingbird. I held it up to catch the refraction of the sun’s rays, and the shadow of the green glass shimmered against my hand like an exotic bird’s mating dance.

  “Maybe he is perceptive,” I said, as a small troupe of white, dandelion seed heads flew across the side yard, side-swiped the lilac bush, and settled in my hair.

  “That he is,” Lilly said. “He knows you’re going to marry my son.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I was buried under the fall semester which included my first photography class. Too many hours of homework and mounting duties at the SDS office left a kink in my neck, but my camera provided relief from an overloaded schedule. After hours of memorizing math formulas and Latin names of botanical species, reading
classics and poetry in my sophomore English text, I often drove to a park or a lake or a quiet stretch of woods to photograph birds and scenery, slogging across marshes and creeping silently through meadows to catch a Canada goose or a goldfinch posed unsuspectingly against a backdrop of weedy purple loosestrife.

  The daily walks through the rain from school to work and back again seeped through the soles of my old shoes. The winter rains had begun in earnest. I faithfully kept the hummingbird feeder in my backyard at the duplex filled to help my little friends through the tough times ahead. And my father, trying, I was sure, to make up for the rift that had grown between us, had started filling my bird feeders again when I couldn’t get back to Useless Bay. As often as I could, I called him and thanked him, told him I’d spend more time with him soon. He always said the same thing, Sure thing, little girl. Maybe you could bring your friend Lilly. Give it another chance. He couldn’t come right out and apologize, but I accepted what little he offered.

  His tough old heart might have softened a bit, too, when I told him Lilly’s doctors had diagnosed her with cirrhosis of the liver. They gave her a fifty-fifty chance, since they caught it early and were able to remove a small tumor, but I knew more depended on her attitude than the odds handed out by scientists. She had to believe she could beat it, had to believe she had something worth fighting for. Like a family.

  While Lilly followed the doctors’ orders, and I kept up my busy schedule, Matthew looked for a new job. Amelia had been deposed as the national secretary of the SDS, but Matthew still felt it was time to move on. He wanted to do work that would help him in his quest to find his brother, so I took over most of the work until someone else could be found to head up the office. The weeks passed in a blur of activity before I realized it was mid-November, and I hadn’t made any plans for Thanksgiving.

  Since I’d been a child, I’d handled the Thanksgiving dinner for my father and me. I’d learned at a young age how to make a pumpkin pie from scratch and gravy without lumps. I’d spent hours poring over the cookbooks my mother left behind, the two my father hadn’t thrown away because they’d been hidden in the back of a cupboard. I’d read them over and over, then gathered a few tips from Mae, the lady who ran the bar and grill across the street from my father’s garage. She taught me the difference between sautéing and frying, how to sift my dry ingredients, and how to check a cake to see if it was done. I’d become expert at juggling tasks, but the three people I wanted at my holiday table needed careful handling. A light touch, as if they would fall like soufflés if I didn’t tread lightly.

  “About Thanksgiving this year,” I said, while in the middle of tossing a salad in Lilly’s tiny apartment kitchen. “I’m making dinner at the house on the island. I’d like you both to be there.” Then I slipped in the best part, “and…I’m inviting my father, too.”

  Lilly hugged me. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Your father’s not so bad, Diane. Isn’t that right, Matthew?”

  “The things I do for you,” he said, pretending frustration with a shake of his head. His memory of my father’s tirade seemed to have healed along with his bruises, his head injury, and his broken nose. “You know I’ll be there.”

  I called my father the next morning.

  “How you doing, little girl?”

  “I’m working hard to make the Dean’s list this semester and maybe get another scholarship. And my photography class is a blast.”

  “Photography? Takin’ pictures? You tellin’ me they got a class in college to learn to take pictures?”

  “Yes, but that’s not why I called.” I crossed my fingers. “Can we do Thanksgiving at my house on the island this year?”

  “I suppose. You ain’t askin’ me to cook or anything ‘cause you’re too busy takin’ pictures and what not?”

  “Lilly and Matthew will be there. I’d like to have a civilized dinner. Please.”

  “Oh for Chrissakes, Diane. I don’t have nothin’ in common with him. Maybe I can get along with his mother, but how do you expect me to sit in a room and act all friendly?”

  “How do you know you have nothing in common? Why don’t you give him a chance?” My hand tightened on the phone enough to drain the blood from my knuckles, and I thought of that quality of patience Lilly and I had discussed a couple of months earlier. I tried to rope mine in, give it to my father.

  “Don’t think it’ll work between us.”

  At least he was using the word think. “Daddy, it has to. Lilly needs our help right now. I love Matthew, and that’s not going to change.”

  “You tellin’ me you are gonna marry him? Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes.”

  “I can’t rush into a marriage again. I’m not going to make a decision until I sort out what I want in my life.”

  “You ain’t doubting how you felt about Bobby, are you? I suppose since he died…” his words fell away, and he coughed as if something was stuck in his throat. “But you’d better be damned sure what you promise. When you marry someone, that’s forever.”

  I didn’t know why he was telling me something that no longer mattered since, like he said, Bobby had died. Maybe he was talking about his own past. Was there something I said or did that reminded him of his loss? My parents’ marriage hadn’t been forever, but that was because my mother had died, like Bobby.

  “So you’ll be there?” I asked.

  “Hmmmph. I’m not promisin’ to take none of that anti-war shit lying down.”

  “The subject will be avoided like the plague.” Especially since Matthew had just taken a job working for the state’s Office of Veteran Affairs and I was the one who was running the SDS office.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Matthew and I arrived at the house on the island the day before Thanksgiving. We walked into the kitchen, our arms overloaded with bags of food. We were grateful for an evening alone before my father and Lilly, and all the tensions they brought with them, showed up on my doorstep.

  “Are you sure you can cook a Thanksgiving dinner in this little kitchen?” Matthew asked, as he studied my tiny stove, the two feet total of counter space.

  “You’d be surprised at what I can do with so little,” I said. I had the to-do list for the holiday dinner memorized like a dance routine.

  “We’ll practice tonight. You cook and I’ll wash the dishes,” he said, grabbing a dishtowel and snapping it at me.

  After dinner we opened a bottle of wine, lit a pair of candles. We slipped our hands across the table and locked our fingers together. I knew he was thinking about how much he missed me, even though we’d been together almost every day. It was a different kind of missing. Since his return from Chicago, I’d been busy with homework, or he’d been laid down with headaches at the end of the day. The headaches were slowly fading, the bruises under his eyes were gone, and his nose had healed almost perfectly. His hair was long enough to fall over his collar. He was on his way back to where he wanted to be, and I knew he wanted to be in bed with me more often than just Saturday nights.

  Matthew washed and dried our dinner dishes. As I stacked the last plate on the shelf over the sink, he came up behind me and slid his arms around my waist. He kissed the side of my neck, pulled my shirt out of my jeans, and ran his hand up my back. I turned around and he fiddled with the tiny buttons of my blouse. I fought against the heat rising in my legs, making the hair on the back of my neck prickle. “Do you want to dance?” I asked.

  He let go of the last button, letting my blouse fall open, and took my face between his hands. “That’s sort of what I had in mind, but you mean to music, I suppose?”

  “My mother’s records.” I pointed to the stack of albums under the stereo. I was still hesitant to step over the boundary of the hazardous land of too much, too soon, too easy, and the music on the old records would take us back to the night the first time he’d held me. When things had been simpler.

  “No dancing. I want to make love,” he said.

  I did that thing wher
e I lock my fingers behind his neck and kiss his chin and his nose and his ears, and he usually agrees with whatever I want. “Just a little bit?” I whispered.

  He softened against me, closed his eyes, and sighed in resignation. Next thing I knew, he was staring at me. “What’s going on? Are you worried about sleeping with me in there?” He nodded towards the bedroom.

  My back stiffened. We’d never spent the night in the bed that had belonged to Bobby and me. “No, it’s not that. I’m just not really tired yet.”

  “What’s tired got to do with it? It’s him, it’s still him.” He grabbed his jacket, headed outside, and let the door slam as he stomped down the steps.

  He’d tried to write Bobby’s name across the invisible wall between us, but he was wrong. There was a murky secret of hurt inside him that drew us apart like a pulley. I watched out the window as he stalked off towards the meadow of tall grass that bordered the edge of the cliff. His frustration lit up the night air, rain shimmering around him like an aura. I grabbed my raincoat and headed out the door.

  I caught up with him, and he put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. A strong wind from the sound blew the rain horizontally. It stung my face like needles

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Taking it slow isn’t easy. I’ve waited so long to find you.”

  “It’s not what you think.” I had to shout, my voice carried by the gusts towards the bay.

  “And what do I think?”

  I leaned in closer. “You think this is about Bobby.”

  “Yeah, I want to get rid of his ghost,” he shouted into the sky, as if the ghost he was so sure was hovering over us could hear him.

  “That’s not the only thing between us,” I said. “What is it you haven’t told me? What is it Lilly says she hopes you can forgive in yourself?” I planted my feet firmly against the ground. I didn’t want to fall if what he was hiding could pull my world out from under me. “I’ve accepted what happened to Bobby. You’re the one who’s still mourning.” Bobby’s name floated over my shoulder and up towards heaven like a lost kite. I knew there had been a ring of truth to it when he’d said, it’s him, only he’d been talking about the wrong man. “Tell me why you can’t rest until you find your brother. He’s the missing piece.”