Winter Birds (12 page)

And yet I did feel one emotion: anger. I felt it intensely and aggressively. I had been deceived, and the culprit had gotten away. It wasn’t hard to track him down, but he was beyond the judgment bar. I could pronounce him guilty but had no power to sentence him, to see him pay for his crime. Yet while there was time, I would do what I could.

I went to the hospital that very night. The nurses knew me, disregarded the posted visiting hours, and allowed me to come and go as I pleased. They must have known that Eliot would never leave his room alive. They would permit a grieving widow-to-be unlimited access to her beloved.

When I bent to Eliot’s face that night, I spoke as softly “as the gentle rain from heaven,” but unlike the unstrained mercy spoken of in
The Merchant of Venice
, my words were curses rather than blessings. This rain was hot acid rising from the pit of hell. As mercy is “twice blest” to both giver and receiver, I suppose it is also true that hatred is twice cursed. As I cursed Eliot with my soft words that night, I was cursing myself. A day earlier I could not have believed myself capable of the things I said that night.

I longed to see some sign to show me that he heard my words—the flicker of an eyelid or the twitch of a muscle—but he lay in his bed as still as a wax dummy. I went to the hospital every day during the next four weeks, and every day I repeated my curses in his ear, revising them each time, expanding on the theme, striving for higher excellence. He died at two o’clock one morning, and I was both sorrowful and glad when I received the phone call. Sorrowful because all hope of revenge had ended and glad because the waiting was over and he had died alone in the darkest part of night.

Chapter 9

Against the Stormy Gusts of Winter’s Day

A “shy and hidden bird,” the hermit thrush sings “the carol of death” in Walt Whitman’s poem
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.
In a nest close to the ground, the thrush incubates its eggs for thirteen days, and thirteen days after hatching the young birds fly away
.

Supper tonight is from a place called Steak in a Shake. This is the name stamped on the paper napkin folded beside my plate. Rachel comes to my apartment at six-fifteen, apologizing as she carries the tray in. “I’m sorry we’re running a little late tonight. Hope you’re not starving.” I say nothing. I am by no means starving.

It is not a typical fast-food meal. There are small bits of steak, which Rachel identifies as sirloin tips, a baked potato, a plump roll, a tossed salad, and a glass of tea. I have not eaten steak in months. As soon as Rachel empties the tray and leaves, I walk to the round table and sit down. I hear Patrick in the kitchen on the other side of the door. He is talking loudly, as always, this time about someone named Potts at work. I spear a cube of steak and put it into my mouth. I chew it slowly, savoring the taste.

I piece together the information Patrick relates to Rachel. Potts is evidently a new employee at the Main Office Supply. Today was Potts’ “orientation day,” which consisted of his filling out paperwork, viewing two safety videos, and listening to the standard new employees’ lecture, delivered by Patrick. I pity Potts for having to sit through this. His first regular day of work will be Monday. In my opinion, any new employee who reports for work after orientation day with Patrick has already earned his first week’s salary.

I can hear in his voice that Patrick is proud of himself for hiring Potts, who is a black man in his thirties “with a record.” He pauses to allow Rachel to ask about the record, but when she doesn’t, he proceeds to tell her about it. Potts has served time in jail twice, once on burglary and drug charges when he was nineteen and five years later for kidnapping. It was his own little boy he had kidnapped, Patrick tells Rachel, and he did it because he heard the boy’s mother was going off and leaving him unattended all night while she went out. Still, he had broken the law, for he had been ordered by the court not to come near the house where they lived and to stay away from the child. He took the boy from school on a Friday afternoon and kept him for a week until the boy was spotted buying milk at a convenience store in Jackson. An off-duty policeman recognized him from the picture that was circulating all over the Southeast by then. This happened seven years ago.

I wonder how such a story affects Rachel. I wonder if she is standing in the kitchen with her eyes shut tight, remembering her two babies who were kidnapped but were never spotted by a policeman or anyone else until they were dead.

I hear Patrick’s voice move toward the kitchen table. I hear sounds of the chairs against the floor, then a hearty prayer recited by Patrick, followed by clinks and scrapes of silverware against plates. Patrick resumes his report on Potts, each word resonating with virtuous pride over his being such a fair-minded white man—to hire someone on parole, to hire a
black
man on parole. Potts will work in the stock room, he tells Rachel. He will unload and unpack shipments, and when a customer wants a large item such as a file cabinet or desk, he will get it from the back and roll it to the customer’s car on a dolly.

Patrick goes on to declare his belief that Potts is smart, telling Rachel that he speaks remarkably well, that he used the words
prerogative
,
apportion
, and
equitable
during their conversation three days ago. Potts used his most recent jail time to improve himself by reading, Patrick says. “And guess what he said when I asked him what his favorite book was!” Rachel doesn’t guess, but Patrick tells her anyway. “The Bible! He said he reads it cover to cover once a year!

“Hey, this steak is good,” he breaks off to say. “Chip says the chicken is good, too, but he said try the steak first. I think the place is going to make a go of it. You should have seen the line waiting to pick up orders, and the phone was ringing off the hook the whole time. Of course, it’s not cheap.” Silence for a few seconds, then, “You like it?”

Rachel says something, brief and indistinguishable, then something else. I hear the name Veronica.

“Oh yeah?” Patrick says. “Did Teri say why?”

Evidently Teri hadn’t said why because Rachel says nothing else. Patrick takes up the reins of the conversation again and gallops off in a different direction, this time relating the details of an evening course he is hoping to take at Mississippi Delta Community College starting in January. It is a course called Elements of Literature. He describes it as an introductory course. I wonder if such a course will open up the cramped quarters of his mind or if it will only make him more insufferable. I feel no pleasure at the thought of hearing him expound upon works of literature at the supper table.

Though my knowledge of literature is spotty compared to that of my former colleagues at South Wesleyan State College, and vastly inferior to Eliot’s, I am quite certain that I will not be enlightened by any literary interpretations and applications trotted forth by my nephew. I can imagine arguing with him through the door: “Listen to what the piece is saying! Stop imposing your silly religion and conservative politics on everything you read!”

I understand by what he says now that this course is the beginning of a journey he has set for himself. He will take a few literature courses “to get a foundation,” he tells Rachel, and then he will take a writing course. Or possibly he will try taking a writing course concurrent with the first literature course. This is the word he uses—
concurrent
. It is Patrick’s delight to use big words whenever possible. He will see how the first writing course goes, he says. He may take another one if he feels that the professor of the first has “something to offer.” No mention of his own capability, only that of the professor.

And then—though he doesn’t say this, his intention is clear—he will appear on the horizon as a messiah in the heathen world of publishing. I can see his hopes like a banner unfurling in a stiff wind:
BEST-SELLING AUTHOR!
He no doubt dreams of large posters in the windows of major bookstores:
PATRICK MARTIN FELBER’S NEWEST BOOK!
Perhaps he imagines jaunty little airplanes skywriting their way across the continent:
READ FELBER!

Patrick’s ambitions will fail, surely. He will work no miracle to feed the masses. His writing will amount to only a few broken loaves, if that. Ten years from now he will still be working as manager of the Main Office Supply. He will have spent untold hours laboring over his writing to no avail, with no book to show for his effort, unless he finally, in desperation, spends his own money to publish his work. I feel no sympathy for Patrick, only for Rachel, having to put up with him. But then, perhaps she needs no sympathy. Perhaps she hears Patrick’s words as the ceaseless tides beating against the shores of her life, coming in and going out into the forgotten sea of all his past words. Perhaps after each surge she knows that this, too, will pass.

I look at my plate and see that half of the sirloin tips are gone. One does not expect such succulence from food that comes in a sack. I cut open the baked potato. Packets of salt and pepper, salad dressing, sour cream, and butter are sitting beside my plate. Steak in a Shake has thought of everything—even a dinner mint. I butter the roll and potato, then open the salad dressing.

On the other side of the door Patrick has evidently circled back to the subject of his new employee, Potts. “He hasn’t laid eyes on his kid in over five years. The mother picked up and moved to Little Rock while he was in jail. The boy is thirteen now.”

Suddenly I find myself out of the waiting room and in the corridor again. One night Eliot brought home a piece of steak and grilled it over charcoal for our supper. In the months since we were married, I had typed new copies of all his lecture notes in addition to three lengthy papers, two of them revised from former manuscripts. One paper concerned the subject of money in Shakespeare’s day, another the disqualification of
Romeo and Juliet
as a true tragedy in the classic sense, and the third the concept of fatherhood in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

From typing the first paper, I learned the names of coins: the angel, noble, groat, and half-groat. I have forgotten the comparative values of these coins. The mark, I learned, was a sum referred to in business dealings but not an actual coin. For some reason I remember this bit of useless information: The mark equaled thirteen shillings.

From the second paper I learned that Juliet was thirteen years old. Having read very little Shakespeare before I married Eliot, I had always assumed Romeo and Juliet to be star-crossed lovers in their teens or early twenties. I had made the common man’s mistake of seeing all things in light of what he has experienced in his little bubble of time and space. I broke off typing the paper, I recall, to ask Eliot if the phrase “a girl of thirteen” was in error. He must have thought me foolish, though he merely smiled, opened a book at hand, and showed me the opening lines of the third scene of act 1, in which it is affirmed four times that Juliet has not yet turned fourteen.

In typing the third paper, I learned that Shakespeare was a father himself, that he apparently thought a great deal about one’s leaving himself behind, so to speak, in the lives of his children. I cannot explain why I remember so clearly Eliot’s reference to sonnet 13. Children, Shakespeare says in this sonnet, will keep a man’s house from falling to decay, will uphold him “against the stormy gusts of winter’s day,” will buy the most reliable form of life insurance.

I wanted to talk with Eliot this particular night about a matter close to my heart. He had not known this when he brought the steak home, but I saw it as a friendly sign that he would listen to me and understand my wishes. It was my hope, of course, that he would agree with my request. I recall my nervousness as I prepared the other food to be served with the steak that night.

I marvel at the power of something as neutral as a numeral to call up disturbing associations. Why does the mention of Potts’ thirteen-year-old son, whom I have never met, call to mind a certain night almost forty years ago? I cannot answer this. Thirteen is spoken of as an unlucky number, but I do not hold to suspicions, hexes, jinxes, magic tricks, rabbits’ feet, and such. What happens happens, regardless of our feeble attempts to influence chance.

Thirteen—it is one greater than twelve, one fewer than fourteen. That is all. It is a baker’s dozen, the number of stripes on the American flag, the number of letters in Steak in a Shake. It is a curious fact that the incubation time for many of the smaller woodland birds is thirteen days. “DIED: ROOSEVELT BROWN, 71, Hall of Fame offensive tackle,” who played for the New York Giants for thirteen years. This was most likely a good thirteen years for Roosevelt Brown. “DIED: FRANCES SCHREUDER, 65, onetime New York City socialite who served thirteen years in prison” for pressuring her teenaged son to kill her wealthy father before he disinherited her. These thirteen years could not have been good ones in the life of Frances Schreuder. I was married thirteen years. I cannot call them good years or bad years. They were both good and bad. Good at first, or so I thought, but bad at last.

The number thirteen means nothing except to send me back in time. Or perhaps the steak on my plate is more responsible for triggering the memory of that night. Who can tell? Why I am remembering that night is of no consequence. Nor is the memory itself of any consequence. For an old woman whose life has very nearly played itself out, what is to be gained from looking back?

Though not at home in the kitchen, Eliot fancied himself skilled in outdoor grilling. I allowed him this misconception. Concerning doneness, “rare” hardly describes his preference. He was never happier at the dinner table than when he sat before a large slab of bloody beef. As he preferred to eat his meat straight off the grill, he had no patience for cooking mine longer. When he began eating, I was generally waiting for my portion to finish cooking in the oven. He chided me, gently but insistently, for “robbing the meat of its flavor.”