Some Wildflower In My Heart (27 page)

And finally, “These are little squares of raspberry jam cake, and I've got some Cool Whip for the top if anybody wants it. Here, Margaret, take a bigger one than that. You don't have enough on your plate to even
taste
. One of our neighbors behind us started trying to grow some raspberries in his yard a few summers ago, and he had a real nice little crop this past summer and gave us several pints. You might know who he is—Mervin Lackey, the owner of the plant nursery. That man can make anything grow! Mickey keeps telling him he needs to work on developing a money tree so we can all quit work.”

Algeria was the only one who drank coffee, and we all watched as Birdie poured it from a green ceramic teapot into a pale pink china cup. Birdie, Francine, and I drank iced tea poured into small cobalt blue glasses from a clear glass pitcher. In spite of the fact that few of Birdie's dishes seemed to match, the appearance of the tea cart and Birdie's dainty ministrations had created an ambiance of elegance far removed from the lunchroom kitchen at Emma Weldy. Even Francine, the only guest who appeared to be capable of speech, had now shed her jester's guise and was behaving somewhat decorously.

“I'd sure like to hear you play something for us on your piano before we have to go,” Francine said to Birdie. “I took lessons when I was a little girl but hated 'em like everything. Never could keep the notes straight and about made my teacher pull her hair out. I think she must've begged my mother to let me quit.” Francine opened her mouth and inserted an entire cream wafer as if it were a large coin in a wide slot.

“Well, I guess I can play something in a little bit,” Birdie said. She took a small bite of the praline candy and chewed quietly for a moment, as if lost in speculation. “But maybe somebody else would like to play, too,” she suggested, smiling innocently at all three of us. “Or sing?”

“Not me!” stated Francine. “Not on your life! I already told you how bad I was. I don't want to make a fool out of myself!” Francine looked over at Algeria, who was staring into her cup of coffee. “You don't play the piano, do you, Algeria?”

Algeria jerked her head sideways and said, “Nuh-uh!”

“How 'bout you, Margaret?” asked Francine, addressing me. “You play the piano any?”

I spoke with even tones, looking straight at Birdie. “I am certain that Birdie is the only proficient recitalist among us,” I said.

“We could all sing something,” Birdie said brightly. “I have a little book of favorite songs that's a lot of fun. Mickey and I sing straight through it sometimes.”

Francine forgot her manners and laughed in a braying sort of way, her mouth full of jam cake. “Now
that
would be a sight, for all four of us to
sing
something together!” How characteristic of Francine to confuse the senses; though I feel confident in asserting that she had never heard the term
synesthesia
, she often inadvertently put the poetic technique to use in her speech with such ejaculations as “That color of orange stinks to high heaven!” or “Mr. Solomon was yellin' like a hot pepper!” or, as just mentioned, describing the singing of a song as a “sight.”

“Do you sing, Algeria?” Birdie asked. “I imagine you have one of those real low, smooth singing voices. I don't know what it is about women like Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson and that woman who used to sing ‘When the Moon Comes over the Mountain,' but they're just so rich and full of
feeling
. White people can't usually hold a candle to them.”

No one responded immediately, for I believe we were stunned, living as we do in an era in which racial differences are minimized. Algeria took a long sip of coffee and then said, “Lots of ways white people can't hold a candle to us.”

Though Algeria's face was empty of expression, somehow Birdie knew that the remark was undergirded with humor, and she boldly picked up the challenge and shot back a playful rejoinder. “Well, now, just listen to you cutting down white people, and here all this time I thought you were so nice and fair minded.” She laughed and shook her finger at Algeria. “But I'll tell you one thing, Algeria. I sure wouldn't want to get into any contests with
you
. You could show me up in almost everything!”

Turning to me, she said, “Margaret, I don't think we ever told you, did we, about that day last week when everything just stopped all of a sudden. I was using the meat slicer, and Francine was heating up soup, I believe, and we had rolls in the warmer, and all kinds of things going. You were standing out back talking to one of the deliverymen about that late order, and Algeria went to run something through the dishwasher when all of a sudden…pop! Everything shut down. And without so much as an uh-oh, Algeria walks over to the fuse box just as calm as if she was strolling to the park and opens it up and takes care of the problem like it was one plus one equals two.” Francine was nodding in agreement as she bit into a praline candy and then examined it appreciatively.

Birdie exhaled a sigh of admiration and looked at Francine. “Remember how
we
just froze in our tracks when everything stopped working? I thought it was some big catastrophe and was wondering how we'd ever get lunch ready on time. I never even thought of it being just a
fuse
! But Algeria had it fixed before we even had time to say, ‘Oh, my goodness.'”

Though Algeria grunted and said, “Wadn't nothin',” it was plain to me that Birdie had won yet another crumb of Algeria's hoarded affections.

An odd assortment we were in our white uniforms that day, seated around Birdie's tea cart in her living room, partaking of her cream wafers, praline candy, and jam cake, all of us but Birdie feeling removed from our element while she labored with felicity toward her self-appointed goal, not only of drawing us one by one to her heart but also of fusing the four of us into a unit, like the leaves of a lucky clover.

Before we left, Birdie seated herself at the piano, first adjusting the height of the stool, for I suppose she had not sat upon it since my lesson the previous afternoon, and Francine, Algeria, and I stood behind her as she played for us Beethoven's “Für Elise,” a piece so common that I was at first disappointed at her selection. Because it is not a technically advanced piece (I myself have begun playing it this summer with some success), it is often played sloppily or with a glib facility that renders it trite, as if trilled out by the mechanical gears of a music box.

Birdie, however, performed the piece for us that day with a simple grace that evidenced her respect for both the art and form of the piece itself and for music as a whole. I shall never again hear “Für Elise” without imagining the small, agile fingers of Birdie Freeman upon the keyboard. And I shall never hear its final chord without remembering Francine's vapid exclamation, accompanied by an awkward parody of a ballroom waltz, during which she bumped against the serving cart and nearly upset it, thus shattering the mood of silent beauty. “Man alive, that makes me want to dance!” she cried. “You can really tear it up to beat the band, Birdie!”

Birdie laughed at Francine's antics and waved off her praise with a motion as if swatting at flies. “Oh, honey,” she said, “my playing is nothing compared to somebody who's really good. I sure do like music, but I didn't take lessons very long.” I had not known this. Although she had once told me that she wished she could take her students “further along,” it was my assumption that Birdie had studied piano at some length in her past.

“Huh!” said Algeria. “Sounds like to me you plenty good.” She raised her own broad hands and studied them with a scowl. “Couldn't never get
my
old fingers to learn somethin' like that.”

Pointing to the wall above the piano, Francine asked suddenly, “Do you cross-stitch, Birdie?” She indicated the cross-stitched poem titled “Gifts from the Wildwood,” which I mentioned in an earlier chapter.

“Well, you're not going to believe it,” Birdie said, “but Mickey did that one. He's got a real eye for art, Mickey does.” She had told us this before. “A couple of years ago,” she continued, “a friend of mine at church—he's our choir director, actually—gave me a book of poems by a Carolina poet. That's his name there at the bottom of the poem—Archibald Rutledge. Doesn't that sound like a real gentleman? Anyway, I didn't know much about poetry, and I still don't, but I just fell in love with this little poem and showed it to Mickey, and we talked about it and read it out loud and what have you, and then the next thing I know he's gone and started working it up and adding the trees and flowers and all that without a pattern or anything! I guess it's not a real masculine thing to do, but it doesn't bother Mickey. He's got a real artistic streak in him. People kid him about it, but he just lets it roll right off.”

She motioned to the recliners and added, “Sometimes the two of us sit here in the evenings and do needlepoint or cross-stitch together.” Frankly, although Francine and Algeria seemed to lap up every detail about the multitudinous quirks of Birdie's husband, I had long since begun to weary of them. The little man seemed far too jaunty and unconventional, and Birdie's undisguised fondness for him grated upon my nerves. We all studied the cross-stitched picture quietly before Algeria released what I took to be a disbelieving grunt. “Mmm, mmm! Can't feature no man doin' that,” she said.

As it was almost three o'clock, I moved toward the door, and Algeria followed me. Francine said, “Fiddlesticks, I guess this means the party's done!” and followed Algeria out the door, jabbering as if inebriated. “A tea party! I can't believe it! This was something else! I can't remember the last time I was at a tea party—probably when I was about eight years old! My cousin Rhonda Jo used to have a little set of dishes, and we'd spend all day dressin' up in our mamas' high heels and earbobs and playin' like we were grown-ups! And now me and Rhonda Jo are real grown-ups, and she even had a hysterectomy last year—a
complete
one.” And so forth.

Birdie trailed along at the rear of our line, following us down the sidewalk to our cars, offering snippets of conversation when Francine's flood tide of words at last subsided. I heard her tell Francine that Mickey helped to take care of the cemetery, trimming around the headstones with his weed-eater and discarding wilted flowers. She had never told me this. I heard her tell Algeria that she'd be praying for her brother Sahara. By this I surmised that Sahara was once again in jail. His intermittent incarceration was, I believe, a chief source of Algeria's grievances against government and society in general, for she had charged upon more than one occasion that Sahara had never been “given a chance” in life.

As I opened the door of my car, I glanced across to where Birdie stood at the edge of the sidewalk, nodded my head, and said stiffly, “Thank you for the refreshments.”

She waved at me most enthusiastically across the gravel driveway, as if my thanks had given rise within her to a great swell of emotion, and her mouth gaped with a sudden smile of immodest proportions. “Oh, I meant to tell you, Margaret, I'm going to bring you a book tomorrow!” she called. “I plan to finish it tonight, and I want to see how you like it. Thank you for coming! I sure do value your friendship.”

Suddenly resentful and perhaps fearful of her friendly, grasping manner, I got into my car and, with a violent twist of my key in the ignition, started the engine. After backing into the turn space, I depressed the accelerator and shot off down the driveway as though eager to remove myself to a far country. I decreased my speed almost immediately, however, when gravel began spewing from beneath the tires of my car. I could well imagine Francine in a fit of giggles behind me saying, “Man alive, look at Margaret put the pedal to the metal, would you?”

It was only two days after Birdie's tea party that Thomas offered a startling proposition. At half past four on Friday afternoon, November 18, I heard Thomas enter the kitchen door. He was whistling “Careless Love,” a mountain folk song of which he is fond. At the time I was kneeling beside the bathtub, scrubbing a panel of Venetian blinds. Though I dust my Venetian blinds each week, I feel it is important to wash them thoroughly at least twice a year. A solution of vinegar and ammonia works well. I was almost finished with the panel, lacking only two more slats.

I heard him stop at the bathroom door and heard his customary intake of air before broaching a matter of import. “Rosie,” he said, “we're going to eat supper over at the Field Pea tonight.”

I replied without turning my head. “I have made vegetable soup for our supper. It is simmering in the Crockpot.”

“I know it,” he said. “I saw it in the kitchen. Smells good, too. But it'll keep. We can have it tomorrow.”

I raised the intensity of my voice slightly. “There is no reason to waste money when our supper is already prepared for us here at home,” I said. I readjusted the towels that I had laid beneath the blinds in the bathtub so as not to scratch the porcelain.

“Joan called me at the hardware store a little bit ago,” Thomas said, “and she wants us to meet her at the Field Pea at six. Says she's bringin' a friend. I told her we'd do it.”

I set my sponge down, turned off the trickle of water, and stood up to face Thomas. “You accepted an invitation for us to eat at a restaurant without taking into consideration my wishes?” I asked. I cradled one upturned palm in the other, holding them close to my apron so that the water from my rubber gloves would not drip onto the bathroom floor.

“Aw, now,
considerin' you
is just exactly what I
was
doin', Rosie—thinkin' of all the cookin' you do day after day and decidin' you was due a treat,” Thomas said, averting his eyes from mine and craning his neck to see into the bathtub. “What's that you're cleanin' now? The inside of the furnace? Next thing I know, you'll be takin' my truck apart and totin' the pieces in here to scrub.”