Some Wildflower In My Heart (21 page)

“I never said that one could forget.”

Thomas began removing items from the paper bag and setting them on the countertop.

“Well, thanks for calling,” Joan said.

“Yes, well, I wanted to …” I groped for words. “I wanted you to finish what you began.”

“And I appreciate that a lot, Margaret. I really do.” Joan's voice was calm and steady. “Maybe I will sometime. Maybe we can both do that sometime…when the time's right.”

It was a few minutes after eight o'clock when I hung up the receiver. The conversation itself was not important for its substance except to document the fact that it was Joan who first planted the idea in my mind of the value of writing my story on paper. Of course, she would have me focus on the four years with my grandfather, while it is my purpose to divine the effect of Birdie Freeman upon my life and the lives of others.

Of greater consequence than the content of the telephone call, however, is the stimulus behind it. Never before in my recollection had I ventured to this level of personal interaction, initiating a conversation in which I expressed an interest in the affairs of another. I cannot account for my arousal, but as it occurred at the same time as my expanding familiarity—it was not yet truly friendship—with Birdie, I feel certain that much of the credit somehow belongs to her. Her influence upon me was warm and constant, like an ocean current.

As I write this, the calendar tells me that it is now June 30. Though I have been writing every weekday since June 8, I have not completed even a dozen chapters of my narrative. I must therefore urge myself forward. Certain details must be sacrificed, I acknowledge, though I feel every particular to be pertinent to the telling of Birdie's story.

From the moment I met Birdie she was
with me
, truly an omnipresent complication in my life. Before she came I had drifted, or rather fled, into a dim corner of life, backed myself tightly against the walls, and kept the world at bay. Nursing my conviction that no one could be fully trusted, I took no risks.

October was a critical month in the timeline of my story, for as I have stated, several events of import took place. As Birdie daily interjected herself into my life, I could actually feel my resistance weakening against my will. I began to behave, at times, in an uncharacteristic manner.

For example, one day in late October I brought a dozen homemade doughnuts to the school kitchen and placed them on the stainless steel worktable. When Birdie came to my office door and said, “Do you know anything about these doughnuts out here, Margaret?” I replied stiffly, “Yes, I know about them. I made them and brought them to…share with you and the others.” She, of course, effervesced to an embarrassing degree about my act of generosity and went flittering from my office into the kitchen to continue her laudatory remarks to Algeria and Francine, both of whom cast skeptical sidelong glances toward my office. Francine's lower jaw appeared to be unhinged, and Algeria's eyes had contracted to slits.

On October 26, 1995, a Wednesday, a strange thing happened. I was driving home from work at 2:40 in the afternoon, listening to an audiocassette recording of Annie Dillard's
An American Childhood
. The day before, on my monthly visit to the Derby Public Library, I had examined the shelf of new acquisitions in the audiovisual room and had discovered the set of cassette tapes. Having already read Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, I readily checked out the set of tapes of
An American Childhood
.

Since Thomas had recently installed a tape player in my car, I had begun to consider the drive to and from work a pleasurable experience, often decreasing my speed as I neared my destination and once even taking a deliberate detour in order to finish a tape. I listened to both music and literature as I traveled, grateful to be relieved of the inferior early morning and afternoon radio fare. At times I sang along softly, adding my voice to the Cambridge Singers or harmonizing with some of the best: Beverly Sills, Kiri Te Kanawa, Frederica Von Stade, and the like.

On this October afternoon I recall being struck by the remarkable sense of place exuding from Annie Dillard's work. Her American childhood was rooted in Pittsburgh, and every chapter of her book bears the signature of that locale. Indeed, in the prologue of her work, she declares topology to be the last thought of a dying man: “The dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” If this is so, I shall envision in my dying moments a vast, disorderly montage of hills and valleys, plateaus and shores, for my childhood was spent in more than a dozen cities, hundreds of miles apart.

I had just finished listening to the chapter in which Annie Dillard extols the virtues of baseball and had just begun the next chapter, which describes a broken power line spitting fireworks along Penn Avenue following a tornado, when simultaneously I came to a stoplight and I heard a siren.

Though I am not a person who looks for a crisis in every deviation from routine, I felt at that moment a distinct and palpable surge of live fear, as if the violent cable in Annie Dillard's book was thrashing about within me. I had read of such premonitions of danger and had even experienced one myself many years ago, of which I will speak later. I turned the tape player off and depressed the accelerator urgently as soon as the traffic light was green. I saw the ambulance speeding toward me, traveling in the opposite direction. The driver strained forward, and the vehicle passed in an instant, the caterwaul of its siren fading quickly.

“Thomas,” I said aloud. I cannot say why I thought that Thomas was inside the ambulance, but suddenly I strongly believed it to be so. I briefly considered turning around and following the ambulance to Dickson County Hospital but decided against it. Perhaps there was word awaiting me at home, although I knew that in the event of an emergency, Thomas would not have had opportunity to write a note, such as
Rosie, had me a silly old heart attack. Called 9–1-1. Sincerely, T. T
. or
Cut off my John-Brown arm with the new saw. Gone to hospital. Your clumsy, bleeding husband, T. T
.

I was now only four blocks from our duplex. Passing Pate's Barber Shop, I saw Lyle Pate sitting in a ladder-back chair by the front door staring down the road in the direction that the ambulance had taken, a newspaper spread across his lap and the stripes of the barber pole above his head spiraling lazily.

When I turned off Trident Street onto our street, Cadbury, I saw Thelma Purdue, Phyllis Jansen, and two other neighbors—an elderly man with the preposterous name of Ivan Zix, and Ruby Hamrick, a widow who occupies one side of the duplex next to ours—at the curb in front of the Jansens' house casting distraught glances across the street toward our duplex. I also noted that the Jansens' gate was open again and that Pedro was in the Beltons' yard, next door to the Jansens', investigating the trunk of a young apple tree.

Phyllis Jansen, upon seeing my car, began waving her arms in a hysterical fashion. She was wearing lime green knit slacks that clung unbecomingly to her ample hips and thighs. Thelma Purdue stood beside her, a look of consternation in her eyes, clutching the sleeve of Phyllis's sweat shirt.

I did not pull into our driveway but rolled down the window and spoke before Phyllis Jansen could seize the moment for herself. “Thomas was in the ambulance, was he not?”

Phyllis Jansen's mouth fell open, and she nodded blankly.

As I rolled up the window and sped off, a sharp shriek of tires punctuating my departure, I heard Phyllis Jansen shout something, whether to me, Thelma Purdue, Ruby Hamrick, Ivan Zix, or Pedro, I knew not. I made a hard turn from Cadbury onto Becker Street, honked my horn repeatedly at a brown UPS truck slowly wending its way down the middle of Becker, and finally circled back to Trident.

Dickson County Hospital is the only facility of its kind within a radius of twenty miles, and I felt certain Thomas would be taken there rather than to one of the hospitals in Greenville. As I look back on it, I realize that the drive from Cadbury Street to Dickson County Hospital was, in an elemental way, life changing. I have heard others speak of the distortion of time during critical moments, of the replaying of an entire lifetime in an instant, of the hallucinatory sensation of spinning off into an orbit separated from reality, of functioning as an automaton. All of these I experienced during my drive to the hospital.

Though panic had unsettled my mind, I can still recall with perfect clarity the startling comprehension that descended upon me that autumn day. The drive actually passed quite swiftly, unlike the movement in dreams in which one's feet turn to great blocks of lead or one is beset by numerous obstacles in the haste to flee. My car seemed to be racing to keep pace with my thoughts. The distortion of time in my case, therefore, was that of acceleration rather than deceleration.

Here is the progression of my thoughts as I remember them: First, I tried to conceive of Thomas in an invalid state but could not do so. Though he was seventy years old at the time, I had never known him to be gravely ill. He still worked at Norman Lang's hardware store five days a week, repairing vacuum cleaners in his rented space at the rear of the store and frequently ringing up sales when Norm was unavailable. Thomas showed every sign of a strong constitution. Nothing beyond an occasional head cold or inflamed knee interrupted his otherwise excellent health. Both of his parents, though deceased now, had lived past the age of ninety. As I tried to grasp the concept of Thomas on a stretcher in an ambulance, I realized not only the extent to which I would miss his help at home in the event of serious illness, but more importantly, the degree to which his own enjoyment of life would be reduced. That is, I deplored the possibility of his physical impairment
for his own sake
, and for me this line of thought was a novelty.

Second, the images of his many gifts to me suddenly glutted my thoughts: the frequent kitchen items from the hardware store—the potato peelers, the canning jars, the sponge mops, the rubber gloves, the paring knives, the spatulas that were set upon the kitchen counter without comment—and the costlier items such as the recent tape player for my car, a compact disc player, and his grandest offering only three weeks earlier—a gleaming black studio piano. The knowledge, undeniably selfish, suddenly overwhelmed me that if he were truly sick, I would miss his gifts.

Third, I could not help considering the possible conclusion of such an emergency as we now faced. What if Thomas died? All at once the thoughts of utter solitude and silence at home, conditions that I had always imagined myself to covet, became undesirable to me. A dreadful vision of Shepherd's Valley Cemetery rose in my mind. I did not want to see Thomas's name engraved upon a white headstone. I did not want to lie awake at night and ponder the concept of eternal life.

I was only vaguely aware of passing familiar places along the route. However, when I came to the corner on which was located Two Guys Auto Parts, owned and operated by twin brothers named Winston and Churchill Guy, I realized I was only two blocks from Dickson County Hospital. In the two blocks between Two Guys Auto Parts and the hospital parking lot, two alarming realizations burst upon me: First, I was quite sure that Thomas
loved
me—though I had never heard him speak the words; indeed, I would not have stood for it—and second, though I could not take my feelings for him to such length at this time, something within me ached unbearably at the thought of losing him.

I parked my car and walked quickly toward a short flight of concrete steps. Though the temperature that October day was moderate, I felt my face aflush with heat. As I approached the entrance, I heard a solemn sound, that of the hospital doors parting, a high-pitched electronic whirring, as if the doors themselves were wailing empathetically for the human sufferers within.

Thomas had once told me of a puppy that had crept from under his family's front porch one day when he was nine years old. Its mother had apparently given birth in the cool darkness beneath the porch, and the pup had eventually sought daylight. Within a few days it was discovered that the mother had died under the house, along with four of her puppies. This event came as a disagreeable inconvenience, especially to Thomas's older brother, who was assigned the task of extracting the lifeless bodies from their birthplace.

The surviving pup miraculously thrived, being possessed of a feisty and indomitable nature, and attached himself to Thomas's family, and to Thomas in particular. Permitted to choose a name for the pup, Thomas immediately struck upon the name Flipster.

“That was the first name that popped into my head,” Thomas had told me. “He was the playfulest little rascal you ever seen, always turnin' flips and runnin' thisaway and thataway. There wasn't any stoppin' his shenanigans.” He had spoken often of Flipster, who became a loyal friend and fearless hunter, all the while retaining his penchant for mischief.

When Flipster had later become embroiled in a fight with two bulldogs, he had been so severely injured that Thomas's father had been forced to relieve the dog's misery by shooting him. “I cried like a baby,” Thomas said, describing the experience. “I was near 'bout sixteen years old by then, but I sobbed my heart out. I remember settin' on the ground holdin' Flipster in my lap after Daddy shot 'im. I knew he was dead, but I kept beggin', ‘Git up, Flipster! Git up!' His fur was all matted down with blood and tears; the blood was his, the tears was mine.”

As I entered Dickson County Hospital that October day, I could not account for the vividness of these memories of a dog that I never knew. I am not overly fond of animals in general. As I imagined a boyish Thomas cradling the dead body of his beloved Flipster, I heard the words clearly and repeatedly:
“The blood was his, the tears was mine.”
With each step my fear intensified. Was this vision a presage of disaster? Was I to find Thomas bleeding to death? Would it be I who would shed tears over a wounded and lifeless body?