The Man Who Loved Birds (20 page)

“People are always trying to make their lives easy, but the fact is that nothing good ever come of the silver spoon. This little bottom land is paradise for these plants—lots of sun, water even in a dry year, you and me to come and plump their pillows. They get lazy, they give us all leaf and no bud or maybe only a few buds here and there. And what we want is bud. So we tie ’em down—I have a friend that works for a dental supply company and we got a little exchange going, that’s where the floss come from. We tie ’em down and then they got to work for the sun. The lower limbs think their top has been cut off and so they reach up and produce their own buds. So instead of having a single top with a few buds you have fifteen or twenty tops on one plant, all of ’em reaching for the sun and all of ’em budding out. Scrodding, ’swhat I call it. Also keeps the plants down in the corn where they caint be seen by some plane snooping overhead.”

After an hour of scrodding no plant was visible above the cornstalks, even as floss ran like guy wires holding the patch from levitating into the sky. Johnny Faye hid his tools in the crevice. Flavian climbed to the sycamore throne and pointed to one of its arms.

“Climb up here.” He opened the Bible. “‘The stone the builders rejected . . .’”

Johnny Faye climbed up and laid back against the sycamore limb, shut his eyes, and made a show of snoring loudly—it was that kind of dozy afternoon—but Flavian took up the paper and pens he’d brought and thwacked Johnny Faye with them until he sat up. Flavian smoothed flat the pages of the illustrated Bible and pointed. “OK, let’s start by writing out that sentence.
The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone
. Don’t worry about how good it looks. Just write what you see—make the letters one by one.”

“My mamma told me many times never write down nothing you don’t want nobody to read. And I am—”

“—in the habit of obeying your mamma. Well, you write something down and then you can take it back to her to read.”

Johnny Faye took up the pencil, wrapping his thick, dirt-lined fingers around it as if it were a cue stick. Flavian crouched in the hollow formed by the sycamore’s three branches so that he could peer over Johnny Faye’s shoulder. “Relax your hand. Loosen your fingers. The idea is to make fine gestures, not big broad ones. You need to hold the pencil so you can make small movements. Don’t worry about making letters. The idea is to get your right hand in the habit of wrapping itself around a long, skinny, small object.”

“My right hand is already in the habit of wrapping itself around a long skinny object. But it aint that small nor even that skinny.”

A small silence, which they broke at the same moment.

“Sorry, Brother.” “Oh, I get it, it’s a joke.”

Johnny Faye sighed. “No shit, Sherlock.”

He set about making shaky imitations of the letters but what he wrote was not very good at all. If Flavian had not known the letters Johnny Faye was trying to form he could never have deciphered them. The capital “T” was acceptable, but after that the letters disintegrated into scribbles.

“It’s no good, right?”

“No, no. It’s my mistake. I’ve never tried to teach anybody how to write. I should have started with all capital letters.”

“Capital letters? Oh, you mean the big ones.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Don’t treat me like a first grader. Teach me to write like a grownup or forget it.”

And so it went. Months later Flavian would remember this day and others like it as a summer idyll: The student seated, the teacher crouched at his side in the mottled embrace of the old water-loving
tree that filtered the hot summer sun into a green translucence, with JC’s panting and the creek’s trickle overwhelmed by the hot still silence of the midday woods, broken from time to time by the liquid warble of a red-winged blackbird seeking refuge from the heat of the open fields. Above them, at the lip of the little ravine ’Sweet waited in a copse of sumac and wild honeysuckle, making himself known only by an occasional snuffle or the stamp of a hoof as he shook off a horsefly.

Months later, in the sunless gorge of despair, that is how Flavian would remember these days and the remembering was a knife to the heart because it came paired with the knowledge of paradise lost, the inarguable reality that however beautiful the opera of memory, at the time, immersed in those particular moments, what he felt was not wonder at their beauty and his good fortune but frustration and something nigh on to anger. Looking over Johnny Faye’s shoulder Flavian reminded himself silently, constantly, that his pupil was more frustrated than he, that Johnny Faye picked up and magnified his teacher’s emotions, that the key was to keep it light and relaxed because tension fed on itself and only made their work harder. But Johnny Faye rang like a tuning fork with the vibration of Flavian’s growing impatience, and though Flavian was impatient not with Johnny Faye but with his own inability to teach, the result was the same. Johnny Faye never said
I told you so
but Flavian felt the words hanging between them, an enclosure wall, high and blank and
DO NOT ENTER
.

But there was his warm summer-caramel flesh and blood and though Flavian had not yet learned the lessons of loss he knew enough of desire that he prolonged the agony of their lesson until long after it became clear that he was not getting through. And for all his smart-mouthing Johnny Faye stuck with it, stayed with the pen, listened and repeated and drew the letters as best he could, pausing between each letter to study the next as if it held all the secrets of a rune.
THE STONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED
 . . .

Finally Flavian’s knees could handle his half-crouch no longer
and he stood and stretched. “You have your homework. Do you remember the alphabet?”

“A B C D E-F-G. H I J K L-M-N-O-P. Q-R-S and T-U-V, W, X and Y and Z. Now I know my A B Cs—”

“OK, enough, right. Take this primer with you, and between now and next Sunday I want you to print the capital letters of the alphabet until you can write them without looking at the book. And bring that notebook with you when you come back.”

“Yes,
sir
.” Johnny Faye snapped his hand in a soldier’s salute so crisp and instinctive that it recalled a war-torn world very far removed from this small creek, this lingering summer sun, this peaceful place. Flavian regretted his impatience then but Johnny Faye had already set aside his notebook with the exhilaration of a child released from school—already he was down among his scrodded plants.

But he did not take up his hoe. Instead he climbed past Flavian to the lip of the bank. “Come on, Brother, we’ve got a lake to break!” Before he could think Flavian was out of his seat and up to the top of the bank and hoisted onto the haunches of ’Sweet and they were off like a rocket, JC nipping at their heels.

While they were at the oxbow bend Johnny Faye had worn his usual ratty white cotton singlet but somewhere between the creek bottom and mounting ’Sweet he had put on a long-sleeved tan shirt spun from some synthetic material that had not seen sunlight in a few million years and that when they dismounted showed not so much as a wrinkle. Johnny Faye unbuttoned it and hung it on his walking stick, propped against a rock outcrop.

“Nice shirt.”

“Some threads, huh. Looks even better with the badge.”

Johnny Faye pulled the shirt back on. From a pocket he pulled a silver badge and a nameplate, which he pinned to the shirt. Flavian leaned closer. “
STATE POLICE. SMITH
. Is that your real last name? What’s so mysterious about that?”

Johnny Faye took off the shirt and hung it back on his walking
stick. “Not my last name
now
. But will be when the right time comes.”

“What’s this business about
STATE POLICE
? And
SMITH
. Who is Smith? Do I want to know about this?”

“Officer Smith. He’s the state policeman ragging my ass. But that’s enough. Bad luck to tell a story before you get through to the other side. Don’t worry, you’ll hear about it quick enough from me or somebody else.”

“I don’t know. News reaches us pretty slowly inside the enclosure.”

“Then you’ll hear about it from me. If you hear about it from somebody else, just remember the hillbilly’s famous last words.”

“And what might those be?”

“Watch this!”
Johnny Faye roared, even as he was out of his pants and into the lake and Flavian following and for yet another time Flavian missed an office for no good reason at all. He was lazing in the lake, now a warm summer-comfort bath, treading water to stay with the occasional cold spot where a spring welled up from the deep, when Johnny Faye called from the limestone ledge. “We better get a move on or you’re going to miss Benediction.”

And Flavian turned and swam farther from the shore, out to the middle of the lake where he lay on his back staring up at the deep blue sky of drought. Three turtles sunning themselves on a snag—their beaked heads swiveled as one as Flavian drifted by, then
plop! plop, plop!
they were gone, and he dawdled and doodled so that by the time Johnny Faye dropped him at the back entrance to the enclosure he could smell the incense and hear the hymns already underway. A shame-faced late entrance was out of the question—better to miss the service outright than draw attention to himself by showing up late—and so Flavian slipped through the vestibule and into the enclosure and up to his cell from whose open window he could hear his brothers in prayer. The thought came to him a second time, now with a different, lighter valence:
I’ll go to hell
.

Rosalee Smith’s apron reached to Meena’s knees. “You don’t work with flour without an apron,” she said, tying it behind Meena’s back. Matthew Mark sat at the table nearby. “That boy does love to be in the kitchen but at home I caint let him help, my husband won’t have no part of it.”

By now Matthew Mark had redeemed Meena’s promise of a story several times over, but on this particular evening mother and son arrived together, Rosalee lugging a basket of peaches. She disappeared and returned with another basket. “I do so love a ripe peach,” she said, setting it down with a heave. “But a hundred ripe peaches is
work
.”

Some discussion then, about how best to turn the ephemeral peach into something more enduring and the admission by Meena that though once she had prided herself on her cooking she had not been near a stove since leaving India. And so Rosalee went back across the road to return with sugar and flour and lard and butter and cinnamon and pie pans. “We’ll make ourselves a pie, won’t that be a good thing to do, we’ll put it together here and then take it over to my oven—if we turned the oven on in this little bitty place of yours we’d be cooked before the pie. That’ll use a handful of these peaches and the rest we’ll cut up for preserves.” She set about searching through the tiny kitchen’s cabinets until she found a measuring cup. “Pie crust has got a temper that you
got to pay heed to,” she said, sifting and measuring out the flour. “You got a day that’s wet and sticky, you use less water because the flour’s going to suck up some of that wet from the air and you got to be careful or the dough will turn gummy. You got a day that’s dry—they make the best pie days—you can ride herd on the dough pretty easy.”

She pinched off a chunk of lard and, using her fingers, mixed it with the flour until it grew crumbly, then pinched off another chunk and mixed some more. Then she sprinkled the dough with water, raked her fingers through the mix, and sprinkled a few drops more until she gathered it up into a neat round ball. This she stored in the refrigerator while they adjourned to the patio to peel and slice peaches.

Rosalee sat with a big brass kettle between her feet and gave a smaller bowl to Meena, with an old blue granite bucket between them for peelings and pits. “I pretty near grew up in a peach orchard,” Rosalee said. “We had a hundred peach trees and a thousand white Leghorns, and believe me when peach time come on and the hens was laying you didn’t have time to wipe your bottom. That was how we kept ourselves in shoes, though. This would have been your great-uncle’s farm”—this as an aside to Matthew Mark—“he was your mamma’s daddy’s brother, we called him Uncle Peach.”

“Better than Uncle Chicken.”

“You said it exactly right. He pretty much took the place of my daddy, beings as mine was already dead.”

“My parents died when I was young,” Meena said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Rosalee said. “Both of ’em at once?”

“Yes. At least I think so. I have never known what happened. There was a war, I was sent away to the house of
Thakurda
—the house of my father’s father. I never heard from my parents again.”

“Somebody that loses her mamma and daddy so young will always be looking for a home,” Rosalee said softly. “What was they like? Do you have anything to remember them by? Seems like it would be hard, so very far from home, to remember who you come
from, and I don’t know how you could carry much in the way of a remembrance.”

“I have very few things. My land was divided and I along with it. For many years I was not allowed to return. I returned to the village of my childhood only once. It was a difficult journey. I have tried to forget those times. I came here to leave all that behind. It has been a blessing to leave all that behind.”

A long silence, broken by the plop of peach slices into the bowl. “My daddy died in Vietnam, same week that eight other boys from this little bitty county was killed,” Rosalee said. “They sent us back dog tags and a coffin and they told us they knowed it was him but we would rest easier if we didn’t trouble to look for ourselves because they was nothing in there we wanted to see. And I don’t know that my mamma or his folks ever looked inside, I don’t think so, I never had the nerve to ask. I know they didn’t let me look, I was only a little girl ’bout the same age as Matthew Mark here and I know that not letting me look was the only thing to do, but I got to think sometimes that even the remembering of a bloody mess would be better than remembering nothing atall.”