After college, she taught history at the high school, and used to remind yours truly, whenever he got too full of himself, that no one through history remembered the lowly scribes but by the quality of their words, and that he was after all just a small-time hack. This was about as true as words could be.
Well, you can imagine. You fight your way into town from a hardscrabble cattle farm way up in the sticks, fight your way through college on an athletic scholarship in the days when (especially for women) that didn’t amount to more than room and board, fight for your independence every step of the way, get the man you want, and it all turns to manure, after all. Marriage, a tough business. It wasn’t happy for Miss Avis, that’s for sure. Yours truly had no small role in that. And yours truly was never forgiven. Add that to the list, as there’s plenty yours truly has never forgiven himself for, too. We tell ourselves, after they’re gone, I should have been a better father, husband, friend, brother, sister, daughter, son. But truth is most of us do the best we can, just have a hard time accepting our limitations — accepting that we dealt with things according to our best lights and capacities for dealing. Disappointments flock to us like crows and mock us from their perches on buildings or the flimsy swaying tips of pines, or flying over, a glimpse of black wing and parted beak, or in dreams, caustic, ephemeral. You love someone, you hate them. The major crime, as has been said: indifference. The two-headed monster, love and hate, accompanies our halcyon days. Much love to Miss Avis, my estranged embittered bride. I ask her forgiveness for all inadequacies and wrongs. May she rest in peace.
Survivor: Finus Ulysses Bates, husband.
He’d wanted to add long-suffering after his name, but thought better of it. Let her have the last harsh words. On her deathbed, he’d been there, holding her hand. She’d looked at him, her red-rimmed eyes brimming with tears. -You ruined my life, she said in her strained and halting voice. He’d only nodded, squeezed and patted her hand. And later that night, she’d passed on. That was just Avis, she’d needed to say it. He never for a moment thought that, in her heart, she believed it was all that simple.
II
Her Remembrance of Awakened Birds
CARS CLACKITY-CLACKING by out on the old highway, tires slapping the tar dividers, always put her to sleep, and Earl, it would wake him up in the middle of the night, he’d have to get up and go in the kitchen, make a pot of coffee and smoke before coming back to bed. His heart racing. The man had to be going all-out even sleeping, when he could sleep. It was all that, killed him. They could say all they wanted about her but it was that what killed him, cigarettes and no rest and womanizing, and work all the time, and just that temper, all pent up and not enough chances to steam it out. She gave him every chance she could and then some, let him rant and rave all he wanted, but it wasn’t enough. The man had plenty of poison in his own glands, keeping that backed up in him for want of putting it into her, but it just wasn’t in her to do that all the time, rutting away like he wanted, and she reckoned he didn’t let it build up too much, with Ann and all the girls at the store as wanton and willing vessels.
The old mockingbird with the nest in the camellia was singing in through the window screen again. She’d had Finus’s radio show on earlier though she missed whatever he’d said about her, he’d said he was going to say something and she’d said not to tell people she was out here about to die, they’d come and wear her out visiting and kill her for sure, and she didn’t want to go that way, with people all around gawking. But when she turned on the radio and heard Finus that bird was out there, cocking his head, and when she turned him off in a little bit sounded like the bird was mocking Finus, singing a waw-waw-waw song made her laugh out loud, it had to be Finus’s old sawing drawl he was after. She wondered sometimes if that crazy bird wasn’t mocking her, nobody knew better than she did how she yammered on, when she was feeling good anyway, when she was on the telephone, talk talk talk, and suddenly in the middle of yapping-on hear that bird trilling some loud funny song didn’t sound like any other bird, and she’d think My lands, that’s me!
Now there he was, bouncing on that little camellia branch and cocking his head in and making some rrrack! rickety sound like a crow.
Out back of the house the old junk cars from her son-in-law’s junklot across the road had accumulated over the years, spreading into her back lot where there was once just the little field laced with honeysuckle and hanging oak boughs and Creasie’s cabin — now fallen in on itself and vines — gathering like the empty husks of giant cicadas, all through the ruined apple orchard. She used to make the best pies of those tart green and brown speckled apples. She couldn’t look out the window on the east side of the house or go in the backyard without seeing all those empty rusted car bodies sitting there. Like a joke on Earl, who had loved the automobile second only to other women.
— I don’t mean anything by that, now, your papa was so good to me and took care of me all these years, and had to live with me to boot, but you know it’s the truth!
Her granddaughter said nothing, but her chin jutted out a little more and she looked away. That Mosby chin, like pictures you see of those old kings and such that inbred so much, though she didn’t think that’d been the case with the Mosbys, just bad luck. They say you’re attracted to yourself in your mate. You’d think they’d not liked the chin so much, though. Ruthie’d had a normal chin, but this child had come down through her Papa’s line. Edsel’s boy Robert had looked more like the Urquharts, before he’d died in the car wreck. He’d be grown now like Laura, here, if he’d lived.
Her granddaughter sighed.
— I’ve got to take Lindy to dance lessons and Chaz to baseball practice, and Dan’s on the road again. I probably won’t be back by today but I can check in around dinner to make sure everything’s okay.
— No, hon, Creasie’s got some peas and greens and we’ll just eat vegetables. I don’t have an appetite, anyway. She coughed dryly into a tissue. -I got some cream in the freezer, maybe I’ll just eat some of that later, to settle my stomach.
— Okay, her granddaughter said with another sigh, and kind of, it seemed to Birdie, huffed in a tired way out of the room.
ONE LATE AFTERNOON at Pappy and Mamaw’s house, she was just about seven years old, she and Lucy’d been sent over to stay with them, and Pappy took her out into his garden. Gardening was his passion, then, and his garden was lush and beautiful. It was dusk. The light faintly blue, and graying. Pappy had taught her the names of the flowering bushes, the pink camellias and wild azaleas with their yellow blooms, his roses and on down the little slope in back the tall sunflowers like Uncle Will would grow himself one day. Pappy knelt down beside her. Little Lucy was in the house asleep. And in the light becoming so faint she was afraid they were disappearing into it, like with the lessening vision they would both just sift into the gray and disappear, so she gripped his empty coat sleeve with her small hand, the thin wool fabric weightless between her fingers where he’d lost his arm in the war. His long white beard and hair looked silver and luminous in the spare light. He covered her hand with his own and said softly, — Listen, Birdie, can you tell it’s something special? She looked at him, afraid. He whispered, — Something has happened. Can you tell?