I depressed the accelerator and raced the engine of my car, then reached out to close the door, thus constraining Birdie to take a step backward. I did not lower my window but merely nodded good-bye to her as I put my car into gear.
“Thank you again for my wonderful present!” she called as I backed away. “I love you, Margaret!” And I heard her say again, “Oh, I do love you, Margaret!”
Once I had turned my car around and begun to move down the long driveway, I looked into my rearview mirror and saw her childlike figure still standing at the end of the sidewalk. What a nondescript person God had chosen for his emissary, I thought. What a small, light vessel for the vanguard of his heavenly fleet, what an obscure tinderbox for his fires of revival, what a frail repairer of the breach.
Strangely, I recalled at that moment a line from a book that I had read three times as a young child: Frank Baum's
The Wizard of Oz
. The words were those of the Cowardly Lion, who exclaimed over the fact that “such small animals as mice have saved my life.”
And even as these thoughts crowded in upon my mind, I heard, as if spoken in my ear, the words of Gideon from the Bible: “Behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house.” And I remembered that God had delivered the hosts of the Midianites into Gideon's hands.
In mid-March Birdie took leave of her senses and patronized a beauty shop, the very one of which she had spoken to me scarcely four weeks earlier. It was operated by Dottie Puckett, a fellow church member, who lived in a blue house on Highway 11.
When Birdie arrived at school one Monday morning with her hair cut and curled tightly about her face, I wanted to weep. It was not so much that the new style was unbecoming, for, in truth, I doubt that any hairstyle could have offset the limitations of Birdie's homely face. It was simply the advent of
change
that I opposed. I had come to love her, and my regard for her included to some extent her plainness: her unfashionable homemade or secondhand clothing, her unpretentious ways, her unadorned face, her simple plaits of hair wound atop her head. Had she appeared one day wearing elaborate makeup or a stylish and expensive garment, I would have objected as strenuously as I did to the martyrdom of her hair. I was unwilling to let go any part of her.
Upon Birdie's arrival that morning, Algeria appeared to pause only momentarily, eyeing her rather casually, in fact, with merely the slightest lifting of her eyebrows. Francine, on the other hand, responded with a great flappable show of emotion, nearly swooning with what she called “the shock of it all.” She employed her favorite phrase, “something else,” six times during her hypercharged displayâI counted them. It was difficult to ascertain whether Francine approved of the new hairstyle or deemed it a failure, for her remarks possessed no coherence; indeed, few of them made little sense whatsoever, formed as they were of random bits of meaningless verbiage strung together. “Well, I never!” “What in the worldâ¦?” “You just up and did it!” “Why, you littleâ¦!” “If that doesn't beat all!” “How did you everâ¦?” “You're just something else, you know it?” and on and on.
When Birdie at last approached me, it was with an air of shyness. I had turned away from the spectacle of Francine's babbling and was opening two large boxes of paper goods that had been delivered the previous Friday and left beside my office door.
“Well, good morning, Margaret,” I heard her say behind me.
“Hello,” I answered without turning to face her.
“I guess you heard Francine carrying on about my new hairdo,” she said, stooping beside me to gather several packages of paper napkins from the box. “You want these in the pantry with the others I guess?”
“Yes,” I said, answering both questions at once.
She helped me empty the box and store the goods, neither of us speaking for several minutes. When we were finished, she carried the cardboard boxes to the delivery entrance and set them down, where Ed Silvester would pick them up later and dispose of them.
As if it were an ordinary day, Birdie then turned to me and said, “Did we decide to cut those apples into wedges for lunch or just give each child a whole apple like we did last time? I know we were talking about it yesterday before I left. They do waste a lot when they get a whole apple.”
I gave her a long look, beginning with her white Keds and moving up past her white socks, her white skirt with its gathered waist, her white collarless blouse, and the silver locket around her neck.
By now I had learned of the contents of the locket: a curl of silver-white hair, which at Birdie's request the undertaker had clipped from the head of Mickey's deceased mother at a funeral home in Tuscaloosa fifteen years earlier. Of Mickey's mother Birdie had said simply, “I always thought of her as my real mother.” The locket had been a wedding gift to Birdie from her mother-in-law. It had been in the Freeman family for five generations. Mickey had spoken of his mother on a number of occasions, identifying her as the one from whom he had inherited his inclination for high jinks. “She used to crouch down by the window and do a great imitation of jungle birds whenever somebody walked by on the sidewalk in front of our house,” he had said. “She got the biggest kick out of seeing people look up in the big sycamore tree in the front yard.” In addition, she could yodel, crack her knuckles, whistle like a man, juggle dinner knives, and balance a broom on her nose.
At last I brought myself to draw my eyes upward past the locket to Birdie's face, and making a great effort at objectivity, I concluded after a few moments of silent study that the new hairstyle had the contradictory effect of making her appear both younger and older. I had seen toddlers with the same profusion of curls. To be truthful, the permanent itself had been artfully administered, without the seared and frizzed results one so often associates with such a procedure. The gray in her hair was more noticeable, however, resulting in an incongruous union of youthful curls and fading color. With her short hair, she put me in mind of a picture I had seen of Eudora Welty, whose hair at the time had been cropped and curled and whose horselike teeth precluded her being spoken of as a southern beauty, though the legacy of Miss Welty's writing certainly puts to rest any doubts concerning her interior loveliness.
“Wedges,” I said at length.
Birdie smiled and replied pleasantly. “Well, now, I was about to ask you if the cat had your tongue. All right, then,” she said, making ready to leave. “I think I'll wait a little while on that since we don't want them all turning brown before we serve them.”
“Why did you tamper with your hair?” I asked, and she wheeled around with a mingled expression of amusement and condolence.
“Oh, Margaret, honey, is
that
what's the matter?” she said tenderly, advancing toward me and laying her hand upon mine. She smiled up at me with motherly caution as if choosing and weighing her words to soothe a child. “It's just
hair
,” she said at last. “It doesn't change anything about me, except maybe my looks a little bit, and I can't go very far up or down in that department.”
She smiled and placed my hand between both of hers. “I've been thinking about doing this for a while now,” she said, “and Mickey told me to just go ahead and try it instead of talking about it. So I did. I went to my friend who has a shop in her house and told her what I wanted. To tell you the truth, ever since I met you I've wished I could wear my hair like yours. Of course, it turned out shorter and a whole lot curlier than yours, and I couldn't hold a candle to you anyway, but I guess I was just ready for a change. Who knows? I might get tired of it after a spell and let it get long again.” She patted my hand and then stepped back once again. “Now, then, I've got to go get my hairnet on and get busy!” I watched her cross the kitchen, calling out to Algeria, “Do I need to get more syrup packets for the waffles?”
As March progressed, Birdie and I, in the company of Mickey and Thomas, spent many hours together in a variety of activities Birdie referred to as “our little excursions.” To three of these, all of which occurred on successive Saturdays, I shall devote the remainder of the chapter.
The first was on March 18. Birdie and Mickey had joined Thomas and me for supper at our duplex. Since his success with the turkey at Thanksgiving, Thomas had begun to revive his forsaken talent at the grill, and on this particular night he had grilled to perfection four porterhouse steaks. Following the early meal, which we had finished by half past five, Thomas suggested taking a walk before eating dessert. We wore our jackets, for the temperature was in the low fifties.
Four blocks from our duplex is a poorly kept neighborhood park with a dirt baseball field. As we neared the park, Birdie and I walking together behind Mickey and Thomas, we saw a group of boys fanned out over the field under the supervision of a burly man who was barking orders from home plate. He was wielding a bat in his right hand, using it to point to various players as he flung out corrections. The boys looked to be between the ages of eight and ten.
“Oh, look, a ball practice!” said Birdie. Mickey started singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” quite loudly, and Thomas joined him. The man at home plate stopped midsentence and glared in our direction. Several of the boys laughed as if grateful for a break in the tension.
“Okay, now, listen up!” the man bellowed, turning back to the field. “You let your concentration down like that in a game and you're sunk! You'll be exactly the kind of players in a game that you are in practice!” Mickey and Thomas let the song die out, of course, and some of the boys cast uneasy glances toward us.
“Not exactly the Mr. Rogers type, is he?” Mickey said, and we continued along the sidewalk, Birdie never taking her eyes off the field. “Did you play ball as a kid?” Mickey asked Thomas.
“Ate, drank, and slept it,” Thomas said. “My dream was to someday break Babe Ruth's record.” It was difficult to tell whether he was reporting a fact or employing hyperbole. He had never told me of harboring such a dream as a child.
“How many times do I have to tell you to get your glove down!” the man on the field yelled. “That's the worst mistake a fielder can make! Don't let me see that kind of sloppy stuff again, Porter!” The shortstop, who had let the ball roll between his legs, hung his head as the center fielder trotted forward to retrieve the missed ball. The man then hit a fly ball to right field, and a unison moan rose from the field. “Aw, no, Hawkins'll never catch that,” we heard the first baseman say. All eyes turned toward the right fielder, whose head was thrown back, whose mouth hung open, whose hands dangled loosely at his side, and whose feet were firmly planted. Anyone could see that the ball was going to fall many feet behind him.
“Oh, back up, honey, back up!” Birdie was shouting, gesturing with large, sweeping motions. “You can do it! Get your glove up!”
The boy did take several timid steps backward but had waited too long to move, and the ball landed behind him.
The coach shook his head in disgust, and the boys all seemed to brace themselves for what was coming. “Hawkins! Look at me!” the man yelled, and the boy did. “Do you know what these are?” the coach said, pointing the bat to his own large feet. “They're called
feet
! And do you know what these are?” he continued, jabbing two fingers toward his own eyes. “They're called
eyes
! And this is a
hand
!” he said, waving his left hand dramatically. “The
eyes
and the
feet
and the
hands
work together, Hawkins! When your
eyes
see where the ball is going, you move your
feet
in that direction, and you raise your
hands
to catch the ball.”
The coach paused and filled his cheeks with air, then expelled it slowly, shaking his head all the while. “And there's another part of you that's got to be working, too, Hawkins, and that's your
brain
.” Here he tapped his head lightly with the bat, crossed his eyes, and wagged his tongue. “I know you got feet and hands and eyes, but I got to tell you I'm starting to wonder about the brain!” The other boys laughed, though I suspected that they were doing so not purely out of cruelty but also because they knew that it was what the coach wished them to do.
Birdie stood rooted to the sidewalk for a moment. I had heard her utter a small, choked cry at the beginning of the man's speech to the hapless right fielder, and she stood now with one hand to her face. Mickey and Thomas had continued walking, talking all the while, unaware that we were not following.
All at once Birdie sprang to action. She made her way quickly to the opening in the fence and directed her steps straightway toward the man standing at home plate, calling all the while, “Excuse me, sir, excuse me! May I have a word with you?” Mickey, hearing her, turned around in alarm. By the time he had taken it in, however, the scene was underway. Birdie had stationed herself only a few inches from the man and, her head lifted upward, was earnestly but quietly conversing with him. Her hands were crossed and placed under her neck as if to shield against a draft, or perhaps a blow.
Mickey, galvanized by the sight, leapt forward and ran toward the fence, waving his hands and crying, “Hold it there, sugar cake! He's not going to let a woman on his team! It's for boys! Here, sir, I'll try to explain it to her!” It was apparent to me, and maybe to the coach also, that Mickey was speaking with irony, using humor to avert a fracas.
Birdie scarcely paused, however, but continued to address the man entreatingly, though I could not hear her words. For his part, the coach appeared to be dazed, glancing back and forth between Birdie, positioned beneath his chin and delivering a seamless monologue, and Mickey, advancing toward him with comic comportment.