Imagine this for yourself. You marry a strong-willed man mostly because he is so strong-willed you can’t resist. You live nearly forty years with him, bear him two children, bear his somewhat difficult ways, make him a home, put up with his somewhat insane family, only to have him die on you before the age of sixty, and then these insane in-laws descend upon you with vengeance born of their not receiving any money from your husband in his will, and accuse you of murdering the man — for which reasons it is never really made clear, for which motive is never established by anyone, for which advantage does not exist. One such cut out letter says, Someone we know has murdered someone — POISON — and made it look like a natural death. Beware. THE TRUTH WILL OUT.
Imagine it in letters of motley colors, odd sizes.
Many of us old-timers know all about that business. But let us set the record straight. The story survives in this case because the charges were absurd, groundless — just as it would survive if it were true because of its truth — and were never taken seriously by the legal authorities, including the coroner at that time, as now, a then-youthful Parnell Grimes. And no one else ever took them seriously, either, not Miss Birdie’s in-laws who made them, not the old sick folks in the hospital who would joke with her when she came by as a Pink Lady, saying, — You ain’t going to p’ison me, now, are ye? and laugh like the wheezing geezers they were. She’d laugh right with them. And it was only out of her complete lack of desire for any sort of vengeance and great desire only for peace and quiet that Miss Birdie did not have her in-laws charged with slander.
There were many things that could not be said publicly and certainly not written about this odd and unfortunate moment in the long life of Birdie Wells Urquhart, but now that she is gone, and now that I am old enough not to care, things can be said. Because unlike her I don’t give a nether hoot about what other people think, including any descendants of the Urquharts.
He yanked the page out of the typewriter and slapped it facedown in his tray.
— Well what’s got into your craw? he heard Lovie say from her computer, eyes on the screen.
— I can’t get a handle on it just yet. Think I’ll walk over to Ivyloy’s for a shave.
— You could use one, Lovie said.
He looked at her a long moment, coming back to himself.
— Did you get breakfast, Lovie? Want me to pick you up a bite to eat?
Lovie patted a crinkled lump of foil on the desk beside her machine.
— I brought a sandwich, she said.
— What kind?
— Beg your pardon?
— What kind of sandwich.
She looked up at him with an expression as if he’d asked her the color of her dead husband’s eyes.
— Turkey, she said finally.
Finus considered this as if she’d said something of grave import.
— All right.
— You’re a queer one, she muttered to herself just loud enough for him to hear as he went out the door.
Through the Mockingbird
IN THE MOMENT just the other side of the mockingbird she drifted down the trail through the woods to the low and damp place where the little cabins sat like crooked tales of those who had once lived there in their way.
She knew she was in the ravine, a place she’d never seen except from the lip of it, and far back from that, from the car. It’d been like a hades the edge of which she was too scared to approach. Here was a little, old old house, a little bitty frame house with faded green shutters and porch that leaned away and down and had two old green wooden rockers on it.
I like green, Creasie said. Then she said, Nobody much lives down here anymore.
Inside the walls were papered with the funnies and looking close she could see one date was July 27, 1947—that would have been her funnies. So every Sunday paper Creasie took home ended up here on the walls, she thought some of them might have ended up in the outhouse. Maybe so. There was no natural color left to the funnies on the wall, they just glowed with their color again when she drew close to see them. Get out of my sight! Mr. Jiggs cried to his frumpy wife, Maggie. Oh, she used to like that one.
She said, I want you to forgive me, Creasie.
Creasie stood looking confused near the cabin’s door, her arms at her side, a look like a blind woman’s on her face, seeing nothing.
What for, Miss Birdie?
Well, I don’t know. I done the best for you I could. I guess for being white, and you black.
Nobody couldn’t help that, Creasie said.
I guess not. I know I was hard on you sometimes.
Well. Yes’m. She laughed uneasily. We done what we could.
Well, still.
All right, then, I forgive you, Creasie said. You can forgive me, too.
What for?
I don’t know, Creasie said. I can’t say.
Well, Birdie said, seeming distracted. All right then, I forgive you. And at that moment she diffused so thoroughly into the air her presence in this space was but a mote that Creasie could no longer see.
Creasie blinked her eyes, readjusting her sight to the dim light in the pantry. She cleared her throat. She was in the pantry in Miss Birdie’s house, still waiting on the ambulance. Her coffee’d gone cold. She looked at the cup in her hand. The hair on the back of her neck bristled up.
— For hatin you, she whispered.
SHE WALKED THROUGH the shorn corn stumps and furrows though mud would not cling to her long, thin, translucent feet. Out in the flat farmland, it was as if the earth were small, a ball no more than oh a hundred miles or so around, you could see the curve of the land so clearly, but surely she could not travel it round since she had never been around it in life and no spirit would travel into unknown lands where surely she would dissipate into the scattered bleak and deluded imaginations of a million strange and unknown souls, what hell those foreign tongues surrounding her, like some old madhouse from the days when they kept them in chains as if possessed by evil spirits. And such it would have seemed, to her. She would walk the lands she knew when awake.
She topped the little rise in the field and the homes of those who’d built out toward them north from town began to appear, drifting beneath her as if clouds skimming the surface of the earth. Ludlum’s barn with the fading paint on it, See Rock City, as if anyone around here knew what that was anymore. Skirting town and over the little subdivisions with toy houses and the graveyards, large and spread-out neatly, and some so forgotten and neglected they were just a faint and luminescent greenish glow through the brambly growth that had overtaken them. She skimmed up the tended grass plots to where she’d lain Earl more than thirty years before. And then she was there before his grave without another second having passed and she spoke to him.
Earl, it’s me, Birdie.
Only a murmuring from within. The particles of the earth hummed and spread apart like sand on vibrating glass so she could see him as through a grainy television screen. His old moldered body shivered, mushroomy eyelids blinked once or twice, a mossy old bone-stretched mummy he was, mustache grown long and flowing down into his armpits. His hands lay on his stitched and blackened chest. He coughed.