The Day of Small Things (22 page)

(Birdie)

I
like the sound of that—a tree by the rivers of water bringing forth fruit. And I’ll not …

I hold the little cardboard-backed book in my hands, feeling the covers wore soft with age and handling, and them times all come rushing back. Not but seventeen years of age, new-married and new-born into a different life, when I wrote them words.

Closing my eyes, I can see the girl I was back then, feet twisted round the legs of the kitchen chair, head bent over the page, the tip of my tongue caught betwixt my teeth, and my dark hair—“like the river by night” he called it that first time—slipping out from the pins and falling across my face. I see that girl push the hair back behind her ears and go on with her writing, printing careful as can be with her shiny yellow-painted pencil in this very book.

My printing was getting better by then, not like in them other books where it run all crooked like the words was trying to jump off the page. I surely weren’t no hand to spell either—back in those days. Considering what my
schooling was, it ain’t no wonder. But it had come to where the pencil didn’t feel all thick and clumsy in my fingers no more and I remember how I fairly marveled to see the letters springing up so quick—marching neat and straight along the thin blue lines of each page.

Reading these words wrote so long ago, it seems like hardly no time at all has passed; seems like iffen I was to look up, I’d see Luther, setting there across the table from me, his finger lining along the verses of the Bible chapter he’s studying. In my mind I see the glow from the oil lamp, spreading soft across the pages of our books and touching Luther’s hair with copper light.

Back then his hair was the deep dark brown of a horse chestnut, and he kept it shining clean, the prettiest hair I ever saw. Remembering back, seems like I can smell the lamp oil and hear the fluttering of the flame and the lonesome night sounds just beyond the window.

Remembering so clear the writing of these words, the careful forming of each letter the way I had learned them—the swoop of the small
f
with the little dash crossing to slow it down, the round open mouth the
O
makes, old hissing coppersnake
S
, fork-in-the-road
Y
, and big-bottom
B
—it seems I am right there, back in that time and place, and I could raise my head up from this selfsame copybook and just feast my eyes upon him—Luther, young and handsome and kind as he was—and afore long he would feel my gaze and a smile would start to come across his lips. He would fight down that smile and go on studying his Bible and I would go on studying him.

He
was my Bible and I read the way his thick dark eyelashes brushed down like a moth’s wing on his sun-touched cheeks, the fine straight line of his nose, the softness of his lips, the set of his ears, so neat and close
against his head, and the place there at his throat, where he’d undone his old blue work shirt in the evening heat to show that soft hollow where I could see the pulsing of his heart’s blood. I’d watch him close, not saying a word, and at last he would look up with them fine dark eyes of hisn and say, “Well, Miss Birdie, reckon we best go to bed.”

But the pages of my copybook is all yellow and brickle with age. And when I see my hand, the pointer finger, tracing along the page, just like Luther used to do, hit ain’t the fine smooth hand that wrote these words, nor the hand that traced every part of Luther’s body, hard and smooth and soft and rough, till I had learned it all by heart. No, this here’s an old woman’s hand, the joints all gnarled and swole and the skin as wrinkled and spotted as any toad frog’s.

“A tree by the water, bringing forth fruit …”
The girl what wrote them words is turned into an old, old woman, long past the three-score-and-ten mark. And the fruit that she bore, that’s gone, and Luther’s gone too, these twenty years. But I had Luther and I had Cletus and I had my angels. And, though tempted and tried, I have kept to my promise.

Hit weren’t easy. But I read through this book ever year, just to put me in mind of those times and my vow. Those times … and the times before … and the Threefold Law and its bitter workings.

Now I’ve gone and lost my place. I’m right bad to wander off in memories, good and bad alike. I reckon it’s natural when you get to my age … where was I now?

Here ’tis … 
bringing forth fruit and I’ll not be sorry to ferget that poor crazy girl and what she done—but
 … And there’s the place where I scribbled out what I wrote—my head so full of them dark deeds
that just wanted to spill out but even then, young as I was, I could bridle my hand, if not my thoughts.

There, I like to brok my solum promis alredy. So insted Ill write of the fine new house Luther is naming to build for us down near the road where the sun shines all day and ther aint all these old dark hemlocks that cries ever time the night wind stirs. Luther has already cut and hauled the timber for the house—

It’s that very house I’m setting in as I read the words and I am wandering somewheres betwixt then and now and all the years between when the hateful old telephone sets in to ringing. I lay the book on top of the others I have there on the kitchen table, push back my chair, and stand up. At first I feel a little swimmie-headed, but after I steady myself, I make for the phone. I have been so far back in them long-ago times that it surprises me to find that I’m an old, old woman with arthritis that just now won’t hardly let me go no faster than a snail pace.

“No, Dor’thy, I tell you I can’t do it. I made a solemn promise and I’ve held to it, all these years. You know I have—even when Cletus …”

I close my eyes and pray for help, remembering the battle fought and the temptation overcome. Me and Dorothy has never even spoke of this though I had suspicioned she knew …

Then I take a deep breath, steady my voice, and try to speak firm and convicted. “Dor’thy, outside of that, I’ll help you any way I can. Tell me, does the young un want to go back to live with her?”

Dorothy just goes on yammering—louder and faster to
where I can’t get a word in edgewise. All I can do is listen and nod my head and listen some more.

They ain’t no use trying to stop her—when Dorothy’s got a bug in her bonnet, all a body can do is to let her run on till she gives out. She is a lot like her mama, who was Luther’s aunt, and a more determined somebody there never was. But good-hearted too, like all of Luther’s family.

I recollect how when at last me and Luther got married and went to tell his kin, the womenfolk questioned and worried at me like a dog with a bone till they could place who I was and how I come to be all alone in the world. There’s many a family would have bowed up and made a girl like me feel unwelcome but that wasn’t the way of the Gentrys.

“You be a good wife to my boy,” I mind old lady Gentry saying, “and we’ll every one of us be family to you.”

And she kissed me on the cheek and gave me a great old book that had been her daddy’s. It was called
The Royal Path of Life
and she said that if I would read it, along with my Bible and heed its lessons, I would do just fine.

I blink and in that blink of an eye the years pile back on me. I am not a new-made bride, standing in Luther’s mama’s house with a heavy green-backed book in my hands; I am an old woman and a widow, standing in my own living room and holding the phone with Dorothy’s voice buzzing in my ear.

But I can still smell the snuff on the old lady’s breath and feel the prickle of stiff hairs around her thin dry lips when she kissed me.

“… worried sick. There’s got to be some way … Birdie, are you listening to me?”

Dorothy has pretty well run out of things to say and at last I can get in a word.

“Dor’thy,” I say, “you and me both know Prin ain’t a fit mother. But if the Social Services lady ain’t going to … Now, don’t take on so.… We’ll find us a way.… I’ll think on it and pray on it too.… Yes, I’m naming to go up to the cemetery this evening long about one—soon’s I have my bite of dinner. I’m a-goin’ to pick up all them ol’ wore-out flower arrangements and such and make the place look nice afore Bernice’s boy comes to mow and weed round the stones.… Naw, they ain’t no need fer you to come.…”

When we have both said our say, I hang up the phone and try to think what to do. Not what I
could
do—drawing spells, warning dreams, ill wishes, and suchlike. Though Dorothy has turned my thoughts that way, I stomp them down like I was putting out the beginnings of a brushfire.

Then I see the Bible, setting on its doily right by the telephone. I pick it up and lay it on my lap and I spread my hands on the thin black leather cover before I make my prayer. “I can’t do it without You help me, Lord.… In Thy holy name, I ask it.”

I shut my eyes and wait—and listen. Then I crack the Bible—open it and, eyes still shut, jab down my finger to see what message the Lord will send. When I un-squinch my eyes, I keep my finger on the verse, there at the bottom of the right-hand page, and straighten my spectacles. I can remember how my granny looked, doing the same thing, and figger I must look just like her.

Hit’s Zechariah 4:10.
For who hath despised the day of small things?

I look up at the living room ceiling but I’m thinking far, far beyond the beadboard and the white paint and the spider guarding the web she’s just spun by the lightbulb. I’m thinking up into the clear blue sky, up to God’s own heaven, and I’m seeking an answer.

(Birdie)

T
he hickory walking stick digs little holes in the hard red earth as I make my way along the path that snakes up the tree-covered slope. Black plastic garbage bags hanging over my left arm rustle and swish in time with the huffing sounds of my breath and the steady thump of my footfalls, and the lighter tap of the stick. All them different sounds working together … they put me in mind of the one-man band in the Fourth of July parade, away back when Luther was yet living. Me and him took Cletus in to Ransom for the rodeo and the parade and, law, he had him a time! That boy played one-man band for the rest of the summer, rigged out with an old juice harp and some of my pot lids and a cowbell he took off of old Pet. Golden memories.

This trail ain’t used but seldom now and it’s growed narrow with the grass and the weeds reaching out into it. Most folks heading up to the top take the road that runs by the river—twice as long but any vehicle at all can Cadillac right up to the end. Hunters comes this way now
and again and I reckon deer and such use the trail. Right here it runs along a rusty barb wire fence that borders the upper edge of the old cornfield. The field’s going back to the wild too, like so much of these mountains. Where once there was corn growing, thick and tall and green, food for man and beast alike, now there’s young locust and poplar shooting up through the roses and blackberries. It’ll all be forest afore long, though I’ll not live to see it.

I spy the fire pinks in their old place by the leaning gray fence post and it lifts my heart to see them bright faces just a-smiling up at me like always at this time of year. They’re good as a calendar, the wild things are. Hummingbirds coming back mid-April, raspberries bearing fruit early June, and the fire pinks blooming just afore Decoration Day. Always has been so and I pray it always will.

The trail runs into the old woods now and in the cool shade beneath the new-leafed trees, there’s a world of those three-leafed flowers, the white and the pink too, making a pretty carpet over the ground. The branch is running bold after last night’s rain and all along its banks big old clumps of blue and light purple flowers look like lace against the solemn gray rocks. Over beyond the tumbling water, wild iris and larkspur climb the steep slope, reaching back into the trees far as the eye can see.