“Yes,” I said.
“Of course, I don't meanâ¦well, he was always ready to share his ideas at church business meetings or with the deacon board, and he always got things done, that's for sure. Most organized man I ever saw. His notes at deacons' meetings included everything down to the last detail. Had a real head for money, too. Pastor Gibson used to call him his right-hand man.”
“A pillar of the church,” I said. Lester looked at me quickly as if searching for a concealed interpretation, but I returned his gaze without expression.
“Would youâ¦I mean, I don't know what you've got planned, but I just thought maybe you'd like some coffee,” he said. “Or there's a good place for ice cream a couple of blocks from here. We could talk if you wanted to.”
“I do not drink coffee, and talk is something I generally avoid,” I said, though not unkindly.
“Well, now, I can understand that, I guess,” Lester replied. “Maybe you'd just rather go back and finish listening to the concert,” he said with a slight swivel of his head. When I did not answer, he added, “I won't bother you. I could sit somewhere else.”
When first I had set eyes upon Lester Kirby just minutes earlier, my heart was filled with fear and dread at the thought of his offering me unsolicited information about my grandparents. How was it then that I suddenly opened my own lips and voluntarily asked, “Is my grandfather still alive?” I can truthfully say that I had no intention of asking such a question, and after the words fell from my lips I fervently hoped that they had been only imagined and not uttered aloud. I knew in an instant that I had indeed spoken, however, for Lester answered promptly.
“Yes, but he was very sick the last I heard.”
Somehow I had expected this news. I had been awakened three or four times in recent months by troubling dreams, during which I heard my name called in a voice I both knew and hated. I had set it down to the power of suggestion, howeverâto the strange origin of dreams in the distortion of common occurrencesâfor I had recently sat with Mrs. DuBois as she watched a filmed version of
Jane Eyre
on a televised matinee and had heard, with Jane, the calling of her name across many miles by Mr. Rochester following his unfortunate accident. Whereas Jane responded with warm and ready sympathy to Mr. Rochester's call, however, I shrank from the memory of my grandfather's voice and had awakened each time with a cold stab of panic.
“When did you last hear this?” I asked.
“Pastor Gibson sends me a packet of bulletins every couple of months and writes a note sometimes,” he said. “I think it was probably back in January or February when he mentioned your grandfather being sick.”
Neither of us spoke for a long moment, and I remember two distinct sensory impressions during this interval: First, the band began another piece with a decided Latino flavor; between the notes of a pulsating bass figure I heard the chattering of tambourines. Second, I saw a green oak leaf float from a low-hanging branch behind Lester and land upon the sidewalk two feet from him. I remember wondering why a green leaf would fall.
I took my leave of Lester Kirby only minutes later and have not seen him again since that time. We did not go together to buy ice cream, nor did I return to the band concert. I walked about the streets for over an hour after our encounter, taking careful note of the way the roots of great trees caused the sidewalks to heave and crack. I did not stumble, however, for I kept my eyes upon my feet. I was filled with amazement at the knowledge of my grandfather's illness. My thoughts scattered, I recall, and I even found myself at one point reviewing Lester's question concerning graduate study and musing over what he might have said had I told him that I had not graduated from high school, let alone college.
I cannot deny that among the many regrets of my life is that of not completing my formal education. I am quite sure that I could have lost myself as an academic, not in the sense of escaping my past but perhaps of pushing beyond it by way of scholarly achievement. Even as I write this, however, I doubt its truth, for one is forever inextricably linked to his past. Any “pushing beyond” is only fleeting. Always he must be ensnared and dragged back by the insidious tentacles of memory.
The idea of a college education, however, consumed only a very small portion of my thoughts during that hour. My mind was awhirl with the revelation that my grandfather was at last reaping his well-earned harvest. Before I reached the place where I had parked Mrs. DuBois' car, I knew that I must go to Marshland. As I drove from Urbana back to Monticello, I began to lay my plans for the upcoming journey to New York, a journey that, at the time, seemed to me imperative. I nevertheless felt a brewing uneasiness at the thought of looking once more upon my grandfather's face. What purpose would be served by doing so? Would it not be safer and wiser to keep my distance?
I cannot explain why I felt impelled to travel to Marshland. I would not like to think that I wanted to see for myself that my grandfather had at last been made to suffer for his sins upon me, but I can think of no other reason that I should wish to see the man who had destroyed my innocence and had plunged me into hell. Indeed, I must be honest; to say that “I cannot explain why I felt impelled to travel to Marshland” is dissemblance, to put it gentlyâor falsehood, to state it frankly.
Thus it was that I found myself five days later, in June of 1973, making my way slowly yet inexorably toward the front door of my grandparents' house. I had told Mrs. DuBois that a family emergency necessitated a hasty journey eastward, that I had been summoned quite unexpectedly. In the strictest sense, I suppose my words held some grain of truth.
I have read of the returning of victims to the scenes of their misfortunes as a stepping-stone to restoration. Facing one's persecutor and revisiting the venue of crime are said by some to be essential components of emotional healing. I was not concerned with healing at this time, however, at least not consciously. Whether one can be unconsciously working out a means of healing I do not know. I know only that my desire in the summer of 1973 was to see with my eyes the physical wreckage of my grandfather.
And this I did. I had not counted on double vengeance, for I saw not only my grandfather, wasted to a shell of suffering, but also my grandmother, teetering on the rim of insanity. A licensed practical nurse had been employed to care for them; she came for eight hours each day. It is a marvel to me now that my grandmother had labored so arduously to follow the nurse's instructions for the dispensing of medication during the night, for my grandfather's bed care, and so forthâit must have taken unimaginable effortâwhen ending his life, and her own, might have been so easy for her to accomplish. Whether the thought never crossed her mind or whether her scruples would not allow such speedy delivery, I shall never know.
By my reckoning, my grandfather was at this time around eighty years of age. I wondered, as I gazed upon him for the first time in more than twelve years, what name to put to my feelings for this man, once so strong and hardy, now eaten from within by cancer. It was not pity, yet it was not the hatred that I had so long nurtured. I had no word for what I felt.
My arrival was fortuitouslyâif such a word may be used in such a circumstanceâtimed, for my grandfather could still recognize faces and speak intelligibly, though only in weak gasps. A week later he had lost these powers. The first words that he spoke when I stood above his bed that day were these: “Is it you, Margaret? Is it?” And when I affirmed that it was, he closed his eyes and cried out hoarsely in anguished tones, “Oh, Margaret, forgive me.”
I did not reply, and the nurse, whose face went slack with incredulity, suggested that I let him rest. I turned to leave, but he opened his eyes and cried out again, reaching toward me with one hand. I could not bear the thought of his skeletal hand upon mine and did not step nearer. “Will youâ¦will you forgive me, Margaret?” he gasped. But I did not answer. My grandmother, hunched in fright outside the bedroom door, fled from me as I exited, casting fearful glances at me over her shoulder and pronouncing curious curses, or so I supposed they were, upon me. “The devil and beast!” she said. “The seven vials of wrath poured outâ¦the harlot of Babylon!”
I stayed in my grandparents' house for almost three months. My grandfather died one morning between midnight and six o'clock ten days after my arrival. My grandmother awakened me by pounding and shouting upon the door of the bedroom where I slept. I could not distinguish her words, but I guessed their import. A week later, three days after my grandfather's funeral, she, too, was dead. In September I boarded a Greyhound bus and journeyed from New York to Filbert, South Carolina, having chosen it at random from an atlas, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter.
This, then, is the foundation upon which Thomas let fall his well-intended words on Thanksgiving Day concerning choices, forgiveness, and the like. In reporting what happened to me these many years ago, I have aimed at a neutral tone. It strikes me now, however, that I may have erred in the including of so many details concerning my grandfather's death. Perhaps I have imposed upon my narrative an emotional heaviness. I cannot recall what I felt upon his death and that of my grandmother's only days later. It certainly was not sadness, nor was it relief. Again, I have no word for what I felt. Perhaps if the truth be known, I felt nothing. I read recently the words of Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in his book
All Rivers Run to the Sea
. He explained why he could not cry when his father died at the hands of the Nazis at Buchenwald: “I had taken leave of myself.” I understood what he meant, for this had also happened to me many years ago when I had closed my heart.
This, then, is another chapter, to put it tritely, in the life of the woman named Margaret Bryce Tuttle, upon whom Birdie Freeman, many years later, began administering the ointment of her kindness. She came into my life bearing a little oil in a cruse and set about quietly sprinkling it upon me, then rubbing it gently. And like the widow of Zarephath, her oil was never depleted; rather, it appeared to replenish itself daily.
Returning to my grandparents' house had wrought no healing; indeed, it had likely opened my wounds anew. I certainly felt no sense of closure upon my misery, for I had seen, like the speaker in William Blake's poem “The Poison Tree,” my own moral perversion in viewing the ruin of those who had done me harm.
The summer days are passing more swiftly than my story is progressing. Already it is July 15. I cannot consider my life of a year ago, before the advent of Birdie Freeman, without great wonder at the many changes that have taken place. Even now, during this summer of recollection, I am seeing more changes. Last week, for instance, Thomas and I impulsively set off on a day trip to Hampton, north of Charleston, something that we had never before done. I will speak more of this later.
I made the journey to Marshland, then, and saw what I went to see. It is a strange irony to me that though I witnessed the death of my tormentor, his stranglehold on me did not diminish. The moderate sum of money to which I fell heir in no way mitigated my anger. I was still gripped by bitter memories, and futile regrets preyed upon me.
But enough of regrets, at least of mine. Birdie Freeman had regrets of her own, two of which I came to know shortly before what I have labeled “The Beginning of Our Friendship.” This turning point occurred in December of last year. I shall continue my progress toward it by resuming my earlier narrative.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving Birdie and I were not yet truly friends, not even after Thomas and I spent four hours that evening with Mickey and her in their home beside the Shepherd's Valley Cemetery. School was not in session on that Friday, but Birdie had told me on the previous Tuesday that she would be happy to continue our piano lessons uninterrupted if I would drive to her house on Friday.
By now I had finished the entire Music Tree series and was making my way through a book from the Frances Clark Library for Piano Students called
An Introduction to Piano Literature
, which included a number of folk songs and singing games such as “Clapping Song,” “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” “A-Hunting We Will Go,” and the like. After this I was to move to the second book in the series, which contained a selection of short pieces by master composersâsimple minuets by Bach and Mozart, dances by Haydn, a sonatina by Beethoven, and a march by Schumann. I practiced diligently each afternoon, for I was most eager to advance to this book, as well as to a companion volume of short pieces by contemporary composers such as Bartok and Kabalevsky.
At noon on that Friday the telephone rang. Thomas answered it, for I was working in the kitchen. I had just prepared a gelatin salad for that night and was setting it in the refrigerator. This is another way in which Thomas is still a young boy. He likes Jell-O, chocolate pudding, and peanut butter sandwiches.
From the tone of Thomas's voice and his playful ripostes, I believed the caller to be Norman Lang at the hardware store. Thomas had planned not to open his vacuum repair shop for the day, but I supposed that a customer had appeared, claiming to need immediate service, and knowing Thomas's inability to refuse a request for help, I expected him to be on his way to the store within minutes.
I was greatly surprised, therefore, to hear him say, “Yep, she sure is. She's right in here in the kitchen just bustlin' around busy as can be. Well, actually, she's stooped down in front of the icebox right now. Just a second and I'll get her on the phone for you.” He stepped toward me, extending the receiver and stretching the telephone cord from the hallway off the living room. “Here ya go, Rosie. It's for you.” I could not imagine why Norman Lang should want to speak with me. I moved through the kitchen doorway to relax the taut cord.