Winter Birds (7 page)

What time does to “the world and all her fading sweets” is a common theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets. How time touches the body can be seen with the eye. What it does to the spirit may be hidden from sight but be more cruel by far. I have heard it said that a woman never really knows a man until she marries him. This much is true. Yet sometimes a woman may marry a man and live with him for many years, may learn many things about him during that time, yet still not truly know him.

As a teacher of freshman grammar and composition, and content to remain so, I felt none of Eliot’s compulsion to be published but rather gave myself to helping him prepare his manuscripts and lecture notes. I had come to university teaching late, having spent almost twenty years in elementary school classrooms. It was Eliot who urged me to take summer courses in English Education, then apply for an entry-level position at the college where he taught Shakespeare and Seventeenth-Century Literature.

Teaching university students was not the grand, uplifting experience I had imagined. It was tedious and only rarely rewarding. In the areas of attention span and ability to follow directions, I found little difference between ten-year-olds and college freshmen, who saw no glory to be gained from learning rules of grammar and composing a research paper. To say that their efforts were halfhearted would be an exaggeration.

Yet I dutifully drilled the rules and graded their papers for ten years at South Wesleyan in Hillcrest, Kentucky, and another ten at Tri-Community College in Carlton, Kentucky, before retiring from teaching. During that time I often wished I had remained in the elementary classroom, but having already fallen into the habit of university teaching, meeting students only three hours a week instead of six or seven hours a day, I found it was a habit not easily broken. Recalling, furthermore, the great outlay of physical energy required to teach children, I never went back.

I want to tell Patrick that his job at the office supply store is eminently more interesting than grading workbook exercises on subject-verb agreement, marking comma splices and fused sentences in essays, checking sources in the library for plagiarism. I want to tell him of the emotional battering he will experience if he insists on trying to write for publication. I want to describe the lonely valleys of discouragement the writer must walk, the long hours of toiling in the field for only a handful of fruit. Sometimes there comes a drought and there is no crop at all.

Or I could take a different tack. I could tell him that writing in itself is harmless, may even be deeply, personally gratifying. I could encourage him to write reams of pages out of the abundance of his desire, to collect these treasures into large notebooks, to build bookshelves to house them all, to add a room onto his house if necessary. “Empty your heart,” I could tell him. “Get it all out on paper.” Then I could fix him with a stern gaze. “But don’t expect an editor on the face of God’s green earth to care in the least about what you have written. And don’t expect to be paid a red cent for any of it. And don’t pawn it off on friends and family to read.”

From hearing Patrick’s spoken words, I know what his writing would be like: bombastic, self-important soapboxing. I have read some of his letters to the editor printed in the
Delta Democrat Times
. The words
clear
,
direct
, and
understated
do not describe Patrick’s style of communication.

I put the writing magazine at the bottom of the stack and see that there are also a few old issues of
Time
magazine on the table. I find the Milestones page in one of them. “DIED. SIDNEY JAMES, 97, founding editor of
Sports Illustrated
.” I wonder if Sidney James included a swimsuit issue in the early years. Pictures flash into my mind as I think of the different ways women try to please men and of the degrading uses to which the human body can be put.

I look at my hands and think of the many hours I typed for Eliot, of the suitcases I packed and the meals I cooked for him, the trips we took together. I think of the thirteen years we spent as husband and wife, years that I considered to be good until the very end. I think of Eliot’s son, locked away for life in a Kentucky prison, of his daughter, living on a sheep farm in New Zealand, a woman I have never met. I think of her two boys, Eliot’s only grandchildren, whom he never saw. Nor did he know their names.

The lawyer’s office across the street is closed. The sign in the yard reads
SAMUEL F. GRAHAM, ATTORNEY AT LAW
. I wonder what kinds of cases Samuel F. Graham specializes in. Would he accept the defense in a murder case? If the defendant were a shiftless thirty-year-old who never called his father except to ask for money, who never visited except to follow up on a phone call, would he believe the claim that the gun had fired accidentally?

The two wicker rocking chairs on the wide front porch of the lawyer’s office are likely intended as a touch of domestic comfort, of assurance that Samuel F. Graham is just one of the common townsfolk: “Come on up and sit a spell. Tell me your troubles and we’ll talk it over.” People in the South have a great fondness for front porches. Surely no one with rocking chairs on his front porch would fleece you of your life savings. Surely he just wants to help.

The house next to the lawyer’s office has a discouraged look. Its high-pitched roof gives the effect of an old hat that is too large. The windows appear to have blankets or sheets over them, and rain is pouring from a misaligned gutter at the corner of the house. There are slats missing from one of the shutters, and the shrubs in front of the porch look beaten down, as if a large grazing animal has been tramping through them.

November can be a changeable month in the Mississippi Delta. Though it is forty-five degrees and raining today, two days ago it was a warm, sunny day in the sixties. On that day there was a great flurry of coming and going across the street as people arrived in shifts to help the family move in. The woman dressed as a man was in and out, doing a man’s work. The man did his share, also.

At one point the man appeared on the front porch with cups on a tray, and a half dozen other people came out to take a break. The teenage girl was among them, hunched over, looking down into her cup. They sat on boxes and drank whatever was in the cups, then got up and went inside again. Later the man came back out carrying the little girl. He was talking to a man and woman, and when they got in a car and left, he waved good-bye from the front step. He lifted the little girl’s hand to make her wave. All this I watched for an hour while Rachel was at the Department of Motor Vehicles renewing her driver’s license.

It must have been the woman dressed as a man who came to Rachel’s door on Friday, the one who spoke of a false alarm, whose mother’s name was Veronica. She and the man came again that night for dessert. I didn’t see either of them, but by muting the television I heard much of the conversation.

They sat at the kitchen table to eat Rachel’s apple cobbler, and they patiently answered Patrick’s questions, which he fired rapidly, interspersing the questions with bits of advice about landscaping, which he knew they were eager to start on considering the former owners’ neglect, and repaving, which he likewise knew they had already thought about since the driveway was so badly cracked. He told them that one of his employees at the office supply store had a brother who did driveways and sidewalks, and he would be glad to give them his name and phone number; in fact, he would look it up and write it down right now while he was thinking about it.

The man, whose name is Steve, said he worked at the catfish processing plant. Teri, the woman, didn’t work, he said, “except at home, and she does plenty of that.” Teri interjected that it was a full-time job just keeping ahead of Steve’s smelly work clothes. They had two girls, Mindy the teenager and Veronica, who was almost four. Steve volunteered the fact that they had lost a boy, Jody, eleven years ago when he was only a baby.

I wondered if the mention of the boy’s death and the names Jody and Mindy, so close to Toby and Mandy, suddenly made Rachel feel that there was a noose around her neck. And did she feel that someone had kicked the chair out from under her and left her hanging when Patrick said, “We lost two children ourselves, so we know what that’s like”?

But Rachel’s voice was low and calm. “How many days a week does Veronica have therapy?” she asked.

Teri answered in her quick, light way. “Mondays and Thursdays,” she said. She laughed, a nickering sound such as a young horse might make, and said that Veronica had begun tracking bright objects with her eyes the week before, at which time I understood that Veronica wasn’t like other children. I remembered how Steve had lifted her hand on the porch to make her wave.

Patrick, ever curious about any deviation from the norm, began at once to quiz Steve and Teri concerning Veronica’s disabilities, asking if she could walk, talk, sit up, feed herself, and so forth. The answer to each question was no. Was the condition genetic, Patrick wanted to know. Yes. Though Mindy had been spared, the disorder had played a role in Jody’s early death and had appeared full-blown in Veronica. She had seizures, sometimes a dozen a day, sometimes none. Doctors had advised them against having more children.

“We thought she was deaf for a long time,” Teri said, “but last week she turned her head when I dropped a pan on the kitchen floor.” She gave another whinnying laugh and added, “The doctor thinks she might eventually get back fifty percent of her hearing.” Patrick didn’t question how one could get back something she had never lost, that had simply been undetected.

Steve and Teri were glad to be relocating to Edison Street—“a real neighborhood,” as they put it. They had left a trailer park out off Highway 82, a place nicknamed Honeymoon Hole. “Our honeymoon stretched out to almost twenty years,” Steve said. He knew he had his work cut out for him, buying a fixer-upper like the one across the street, but it was the only way they could “swing the homeowner thing,” he said. They had big plans to “spruce it up,” but it would have to be “slow going because of time and money.” No doubt he wanted to make it clear to Patrick that the landscaping and new driveway wouldn’t be happening next week.

Before they left on Friday night, Teri thanked Rachel again for helping her out “in a pinch” earlier that day. What did she mean, Patrick wanted to know. “Oh, she didn’t tell you?” Teri said. “She kept Veronica for me today when I had to run over to see about something at Mindy’s school. That was nice enough, but then she turned around and asked us over for apple cobbler, too.”

Perhaps the false alarm had related to Mindy somehow, but no further details were offered, and Steve and Teri left shortly after. Patrick closed the door behind them and said, “That Steve sure is a talker. Nice guy.” I heard no reply from Rachel. I wondered if she knew how much Patrick talked before she married him. Or maybe he didn’t always talk so much. Maybe when they were first married she had been the talker. Maybe he had begun filling the void when she fell silent.

She came to my door and knocked a few minutes after they had left. “Aunt Sophie? I forgot to come get your dessert dish. Are you still up?” She must have wondered why I was sitting in my chair staring at the television with the sound muted. Or maybe she didn’t wonder. Maybe Rachel’s thinking is consumed with surviving each day. Perhaps there is no surplus to expend on wondering about an old woman watching television with no sound.

The rain is falling more heavily now. Several more cars have pulled into the parking lot of Wagner’s Mortuary. From the window where I sit, Edison Street looks like an old photograph, blurred by a photographer’s shaky hand and faded over time.

Chapter 6

Vowing More Than the Perfection of Ten

The feet of the fox sparrow are large, with elongated toes and claws, allowing it to dig longer and deeper. The male bird prefers solitude when he sings, retreating to a hidden perch in a dense thicket
.

It is not the front door of the mortuary that fills me with awe and horror but the back door. I have read about what goes on in the inner sanctum of a funeral home. When Eliot died, I was oblivious to the details of the funeral industry. It was years later that I read
The American Way of Death
by Jessica Mitford, a book that informed me of the procedures to which his body had been subjected—by that time, the same procedures already performed on my father, mother, and both of my sisters. Death American style is a gruesome prospect. In Eliot’s case, however, it was no more than he deserved.

I did not know, when I was responsible for planning the funerals of my husband and, later, my mother, that embalming is a custom common only to North America, but that even in the United States and Canada no law dictates the practice. This curious tradition is routinely carried out for one purpose: to prepare the body for yet another curious tradition, that of placing it in an ornate box for the living to “view.” At no time is the family consulted about whether they wish these procedures to be performed on the body of their loved one. The funeral director merely goes about his business, then collects from the family the standard fee. Apparently no one raises a protest.

The steps of “preparing the body” may be summarized briefly. First, it is interesting to know that a mortician learns the craft that is to earn him his fortune by attending an embalming school for a year at any point following high school graduation. Here the student, who may still be a teenager, handles the tools of his trade—the needles, scalpels, forceps, clamps, scissors, basins, pumps, tubes—and is instructed in the proper administering of the customary fluids, plasters, creams, oils, powders, pastes, paints, and waxes. As in medical school, the aspiring “doctor” practices on cadavers. Unlike genuine surgeons-in-training, however, he will never, thankfully, progress to performing his skills on living humans.

There is no way to be delicate about this. In the embalming room the mortician drains the body of blood, by means of a small incision in a major vein or artery, and injects a solution of formaldehyde, alcohol, borax, glycerin, phenol, and water. With needle and suture thread, the lips are literally sewn together and the eyes closed with small caps and a special cement. The body cavities are invaded by means of a long, hollow needle, then emptied with tube and pump and replaced with yet more chemical fluids.