Some Wildflower In My Heart (2 page)

I watched the preacher shake Thomas's hand at the door and then approach me with a look of sympathy. I was sitting in my rocking chair, where I had been reading the last chapter of a book titled
Beloved
by Toni Morrison, an eerie story in which the ghost of a dead baby girl comes back as a young woman to live with her mother. I did not rise or extend my hand for shaking, and Mr. Hawthorne was not the pressuring, grinning kind, for which I was grateful. He spoke to me briefly, saying, “I'm sorry about your husband's uncle, Mrs. Tuttle,” and I replied with a nod.

Theodore Hawthorne was not a tall man, perhaps five feet seven. Thomas showed him Mayfield's sheet of instructions, and the two of them sat down on the sofa to talk. They were a study in contrasts: Thomas, seventy years old, tall and straight-haired, dressed in paint-stained overalls, and the young preacher, small and curly-haired, wearing a very white, very starched shirt, dark trousers, and a deep maroon paisley necktie. As they talked, Mr. Hawthorne wrote on a note pad. He stayed only fifteen minutes, during which time I pretended to read. As he took his leave, he apologized for his haste, informing us that he was to officiate at a wedding that afternoon and would contact Thomas the next day.

On the following Monday evening, Thomas felt that he should be in attendance during the entire three-hour visitation at the funeral home and again during the painfully long funeral ceremony on Tuesday. Since Mayfield's family had rejected him in his lifetime, Thomas feared that they would not be gracious enough to rise above their grudges and rally around their father in his death. I suppose he saw himself in the role of mediator, though the dead hardly need a representative. As it turned out, Mayfield's children were all present and behaved themselves with reasonable decorum.

Both the viewing on Monday and the funeral on Tuesday took place at Mortland Funeral Home on Holcombe Avenue in Derby. I doubt that anyone else in Filbert or Derby realizes the irony of a funeral home bearing the name of Mortland, the root of which is the Latin
mors
, meaning death. The owners and operators of the funeral home for the past three decades have been the Haskins brothers. I do not know who originally named it Mortland, but perhaps it was the same wag who named our local newspaper the Filbert
Nutshell
.

I was present only during the first five minutes of the viewing. Thomas had driven over earlier in his truck, but I waited until precisely five o'clock and then walked into the viewing parlor, as they call it. I stopped about eight feet from Mayfield's casket, an inexpensive gray model that he himself had selected, and seeing Mayfield's gaunt, waxy face clearly enough from my vantage, I had no desire to move nearer. I caught Thomas's eye momentarily, then left and drove back home, where I spent the rest of the evening reading.

By now I had started
Bailey's Cafe
by Gloria Naylor and was deeply moved that night when I read the story of Sadie and Iceman Jones. After one of my cafeteria workers at school, Algeria, had declared in my hearing—for my benefit largely—that white people had no idea what black people were “forced to go through,” I had set out to read all I could about what is referred to as “the African-American experience.” After I finished
Bailey's Cafe
, I sat in my rocker and considered writing to Gloria Naylor and telling her another story to include in her next book. I would not tell her that I was a white woman and that the story of sorrow was my own. But I am getting ahead of myself. And I did admire the book, you must understand that.

The funeral on Tuesday was “something else,” to borrow the words of Francine, another one of my cafeteria workers. Whatever deviates in the smallest degree from the ordinary is, in Francine's way of thinking, “something else.” The service was set for three o'clock, a convenient time for me since my lunchroom duties are finished by then.

For several years before his death, Mayfield had been attending a so-called “independent” church over in Derby—the Church of the Open Door—pastored by Mr. Hawthorne. During that time Mayfield had often attempted to proselytize Thomas and me, but without success. I had seen firsthand the dark underside of religion as a teenager, and even now I feel a churning of physical revulsion at the memory of certain phrases repeatedly intoned by my grandfather—“he that refraineth his lips is wise” being among those I heard most often. But I was a child. How could I have known the emptiness of my grandfather's implied threats? By securing my lips, I granted him an awful freedom.

The reader must forgive me for wandering. I shall tighten the reins. It surprises me to find that in the telling of my tale, my thoughts, which are usually quite orderly, run to and fro as the eyes of the Lord. Strangely,
that
verse from the Old Testament Chronicles was not among those that my grandfather quoted to me, though he would have done well for his own sake, and surely for mine, to do so. But again I digress from my course. I am not being deliberately cryptic. Everything will be set forth in its time. Should I succeed someday in getting my manuscript published, perhaps an editor will repair the disarray of thought.

The funeral chapel was crowded. I must admit my surprise at seeing so many in attendance, for Mayfield was not known as a genial, popular man. Before his religious transformation five years ago, he had endured many personal failures, the most devastating of which had occurred more than thirty years earlier when his young wife had taken her own life after having given birth to twin boys, thus leaving him a middle-aged man with a four-year-old daughter, a two-year-old son, and infant twin sons. Grief had stamped its indelible mark upon the face of Mayfield Spalding long before I had met him. Even when he had tried to evangelize Thomas and me in recent years, reciting the numerous rewards of being “born again,” his jowls and eyes sagged mournfully. It was always a marvel to me that so thin a man could have jowls.

My initial response was that perhaps it was his sad history that drew people to his funeral, as a final act of human sympathy for one so beset by misery. Once the funeral was underway, however, an unknowing observer would have deduced that Mayfield's life had been on an entirely different order, for the spirit of the service can be described only as abundantly joyous.

There were a number of testimonials from church members vouching for Mayfield's integrity and generosity—I heard his daughter, Joan, snort softly at the word
generous
—his love of truth and righteousness, his faithfulness, and his assurance of a “royal palace up in glory,” as one elderly woman described it. This large and homely woman, who introduced herself as Eldeen Rafferty, had all the hallmarks of a raconteur. She warmed up the audience with a story of Mayfield's anonymous donation of one thousand dollars to her family several years earlier at the death of her son-in-law and told, quite humorously, of the method by which she had divined his identity. When she had gone to Mayfield privately to confront him with the fact and to thank him for his gift, he had answered gruffly, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these” and had walked away.

Eldeen Rafferty ended her story with these words, which I remember well: “Mayfield Spalding wasn't one to laugh and cut up, but that doesn't matter one jot or whittle in the Book of the Lamb, 'cause I know as sure as I'm standing here on my own two feet”—here she pointed down to her large feet, over which she wore black rubber boots—“that that man yonder in that casket”—here she pointed with the other hand directly to Mayfield's lifeless form—”is a'sittin' at the blessed banquet table of Jesus right this very minute and has got hisself a royal palace up in glory that'll be for everlasting and everlasting, amen.” As she sat down, the chapel reverberated with a rousing chorus of her final word: “Amen!”

But I have not yet brought my main character into the scene. Birdie Freeman, though at the time I did not know her name, was playing the organ intermittently during the entire funeral. I had noticed her upon first entering the chapel, for she was playing a prelude of familiar gospel hymns that I had not heard for over thirty-four years, though I knew them all: “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Rock of Ages.”

The organ was in front, and Birdie sat at it somberly, wearing a brown dress and small brown hat. I had not seen such a hat since the early 1960s. My prompt assessment was that she was plain. The reader no doubt recalls my earlier description of her as beautiful, but my change of perception did not come until much later in our acquaintance. First she was plain. She immediately brought to my mind the image of the common sparrow, though I was unaware at this time that her name was Birdie. I watched her during the next hour and a half and wished that I could see her hands and feet as she played. In addition to books, music is another of my passions, and although I had taken no formal training at the time, I recognized that the woman had a gifted touch.

Besides the prelude, Birdie accompanied a vocal solo, a small choral ensemble, a vocal duet, and most peculiar of all, a tuba solo played by a young teenaged boy. These numbers were performed at varying levels of skill. The vocal duet—“I've Got a Mansion Just Over the Hilltop”—was comically mawkish, but the tubist proved to be quite proficient, I thought, for one so young. I also recognized the song that the young man played: “He Hideth My Soul.”

Before Mr. Hawthorne preached, a woman read a lengthy, amateurish poem from a large red book, which she held aloft in a theatrical pose so that the title stamped on the cover—
A Harvest of Inspirational Poems
—was plainly visible to the audience. The poem spoke often of “that blissful yonder shore,” and the last line of each stanza of the poem repeated the phrase “Crossing the raging Jordan 'twixt earth and heav'n.” Mr. Hawthorne's “charge,” as he called it—the portions of it that I heard—was quite eloquent in comparison to the speech of the others that day. I heard from him no grammatical gaffes, no ill-chosen diction. In contrast, a man who had delivered one of the brief eulogies earlier had spoken of the “tempestulent waters of life's sea that buffer and batter us” and of “crossing the portholes of heaven.”

As Mr. Hawthorne spoke, I tried to distance myself from his words. Thomas was seated in the front row with the other pallbearers, and from my seat in the sixth row, I stared at the wisps of hair on the back of his neck, noting that his latest visit to Pate's Barber Shop—another example of the creative nomenclature of our local businesses—had obviously been many weeks ago. I do not wish, however, to paint a picture of Thomas as a slovenly man. The stained overalls mentioned earlier had nevertheless been newly washed and pressed, and in spite of his untrimmed neck on the day of the funeral, Thomas looked properly dignified in his black suit. He has broad shoulders for a man of his age and a full head of thick gray hair.

To occupy my mind during the lengthy service, I began recalling books I had read that included funeral scenes. I believe I may have even smiled when I thought of the chapter in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
in which a dog raises a mighty disturbance in the basement while a funeral ceremony is underway in the parlor of the home of the deceased. If I remember correctly, the undertaker slithers out of the room to investigate and returns a few minutes later, having stilled the commotion. By way of explanation, he whispers loudly to the mourners, “He had a
rat
!” But between my mental diversions, I heard enough of Mr. Hawthorne's words to know that I did not want to hear more. Many of the words were agonizingly familiar, bringing back memories I had labored for many years to suppress.

As I studied the people around me, I noted their raptness of expression, their readiness to respond audibly to the preacher's words, their glances one to another by which they signified their concord.

My eyes kept returning to Birdie Freeman, still seated at the organ, her small face turned attentively to the preacher. I tried to recollect where I had seen a face like hers before, and near the end of the funeral service it suddenly came to me. It was in a book titled
Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier
, by Joanna L. Stratton, which I had read a few years earlier. I looked it up at home later and confirmed the fact. Should the reader want to see for himself what Birdie Freeman looked like, secure a copy of the book and find the photograph of a woman named Sarah Jayne Oliver. The brown hat that Birdie wore at the funeral, conforming snugly to her small head, gave the same effect as Sarah Jayne Oliver's closely combed, neatly pinned hair. As for the faces, the two women could have been twins had they not been separated in time by more than a hundred years. They had the same ordinary brown eyes, the same white forehead, the same high cheekbones, the same suggestion of an overbite around prim, cautious lips.

As I studied Birdie Freeman's face that day of the funeral, I could not rid myself of the idea that there existed within her a core of uncommon mettle, that she knew secrets I did not know, that she had witnessed great mysteries. While I was curious on the one hand about these secrets and mysteries, I nevertheless suspected that they were matters against which I would close my ears. It was strange to me that from my first sight of Birdie Freeman, I felt both desirous and unwilling to know her. As I seldom engage in idle speculation concerning the lives of others, I knew not what to think of my sudden arousal of interest in this woman whom I had never before seen. Perhaps some inchoate instinct suggested to me that she, like me, possessed a singular personal history that she would not readily yield.

My beginning chapter has grown more protracted than I had planned, and I find that writing is far more exhausting than I had imagined. Furthermore, though I had intended a more cheerful beginning, I see already the pall of death upon my book. And though I know that the time is right, I fear the thought of filling the empty pages that follow, for I know that to do so will demand the opening of my own secret chambers.