Some Wildflower In My Heart (9 page)

Six days later, having acquired a position in the school cafeteria, I borrowed
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
from Mrs. Gardner, who had recovered and returned to her duties in the library, and I read the remaining chapters one evening, not only because the thought of the book weighed upon me as unfinished business but also because I truly desired to know the conclusion of Mr. Roald Dahl's clever morality tale. I recall that when I read of the glass elevator bearing Charlie's entire family upward through the roof of the Buckets' house and out into a clear winter sky, I felt that Mr. Dahl had hit upon a very suitable ending.

But I have jumped ahead of my story and must return to the events of that first day at Emma Weldy Elementary School.

“Line up at the door, children,” Mrs. Edgecombe said briskly, clapping her hands again. I was to discover in the months to follow that Mrs. Edgecombe clapped her hands habitually, oftentimes even when addressing teachers and parents. The children rose obediently and straggled toward the door.

“You gonna finish it next time?” a boy asked me. His hair was a tangle of blond curls, and his cheeks were cherry red.

Mrs. Edgecombe answered for me. “We'll tell Mrs. Gardner where the story left off so she can pick up there next week. Now, let's all give a big thank-you to your substitute for today.”

All the children chorused a loud, drawn-out “Thank you!”

I nodded and said, “You are most welcome,” then stood and watched them as they departed the room.

The pale boy who had almost upset his chair earlier said to no one in particular, “She reads lots better'n Miz Gardner,” and another boy said, “I betcha Charlie gets a ticket.” As the last child exited—a tiny girl with an ethereal face—she turned and waved to me, her fingers bunched together in a half fist, just the tips of them moving ever so slightly. I nodded to her and said, “Good-bye.” As the sound of the children's footsteps grew fainter, I realized that neither I nor Mrs. Edgecombe had told them my name.

In my subsequent conversation with Mrs. Edgecombe in her office that afternoon, I noted that she appeared to be quite distracted, yet having been in her presence only briefly by this time, I was not certain whether this was her usual state or whether the events of the afternoon had overtaxed her. She asked me a number of questions that day about my past employment, my education, and my interests and seemed to be putting forth considerable effort to listen to my answers, which were succinct and unembellished. Before I left, she told me somewhat apologetically that she could offer me no monetary compensation for the assistance I had given that day, but that she would be happy to recommend me for a position in the lunchroom, to replace, I presumed, the distraught young woman whom I had encountered at the office door earlier.

“Of course everyone has to be approved officially through the superintendent's office,” she said, “but Mr. Parker has always taken my recommendations before. You'll have to fill out an application, then go to the county office for an interview, but really, I don't foresee any problems.” She gave me a feeble smile, lifted her eyeglasses with one hand, and pinched the bridge of her nose with the other.

The processing of my application was amazingly simple and my interview with Mr. Parker satisfactory. Though he seemed to me inordinately, but I must admit understandably, curious about my reasons for coming to Filbert, he waived the requirement of personal references after a prolonged silence, which had been preceded by my statement that for private reasons I sincerely wished all ties with my former life to remain severed. “We will hire you on a provisionary basis,” he said at last, and I merely nodded, choosing not to press him concerning the exact nature of the provisions.

Within a week—an exceedingly busy week, during which I made arrangements to purchase a duplex in a neighborhood outside the city limits of Filbert—I was employed in the lunchroom of Emma Weldy Elementary School under the supervision of an aging woman named Mrs. Lola Tyler, whose hands shook so badly that she could not operate the meat slicer, pour liquids, or write legibly. She spent most of her time watching the others of us perform our work while she circled the kitchen, conversing with herself. Mrs. Tyler was relieved of her duties the following January.

Mrs. Edgecombe remained grateful to me for my small contribution in her time of need and never failed to greet me courteously during the ensuing months. Our acquaintance was limited, however, not only in depth but also in length, for she resigned at the close of that school year. It was rumored that a certain parent had complained about her treatment of his son, a boy with severe learning disabilities, and had circulated a petition among other parents, finally taking his grievances to the board of education. I wondered later if the meeting in her office on the afternoon of my service in the library was in any way related to the trouble that led to her resignation. I do not know the particulars of Mrs. Edgecombe's reassignment to another school and her eventual departure from South Carolina, but I shall always remember her warmly. She extended to me her trust at a time in my life when mistrust could have been especially damaging.

During my first year at Emma Weldy, I saw the auburn-haired boy of the playground daily as he came through the cafeteria line with his classmates, and while I always felt an initial surge of delight at the sight of him, my pleasure was invariably clouded by a scrim of sadness as I imagined his life snuffed out and his mother bowed with grief. I had learned early in my life that conceiving of the worst was one means of preparing myself for its frequent arrival. I nevertheless watched for the boy each day. I learned from the lunchroom roster that Bennet was his first name, Caldwell being his last, and I wonder even today what became of young Bennet Caldwell. I am certain that he stands tall among his peers.

I must stop here. Once again I am aware of the inadequacies of my story as I hold it against professional standards of writing, for I know that it is riddled with flaws of implausibility. The coincidental timing of my arrival at Emma Weldy Elementary School at the very moment that Mrs. Edgecombe was faced with the sudden loss of a cafeteria worker and the prospect of an unattended class during the last hour of the school day seems unlikely even to me, to whom it happened. Had my bus arrived ten minutes earlier, my inquiry concerning a position at the school might have played out quite differently, and I might never have secured employment among the tutors and governors of children. Consequently, I might never have met Birdie Freeman.

Had Birdie Freeman been a flintier woman, producing friction within her small world, her story would more actively and instantly spark the reader's interest. If I could report that Birdie's quiet, religious fervor and virtuous conduct rankled us all, that Algeria held out against her first friendly overtures with her usual wary cynicism, that Francine found her primness laughable, that I hated the very sight of her, then my story would hold the valued appeal of conflict that lies at the heart of drama.

Such claims about Birdie Freeman, however, would be patently false. I cannot alter the truth, and the truth is that we all regarded her favorably, though for the first three months of our acquaintance my own regard took the outward form of hostility, and that most convincingly. And perhaps I was not pretending altogether. As I recall, my feelings during those early months were dichotomous. On the one hand, I was powerfully drawn to Birdie, while on the other, I resisted her intensely.

At the end of Birdie's first week, it seemed that she had been with us for years. On Wednesday morning of the following week, after school had officially begun, I was on my way to work at 6:10. The sky was dark yet, with a faint glow of sherbet orange seeping over the eastern horizon. I was sitting in my Ford Fairlane at the stoplight on the outskirts of Filbert, at an intersection anchored by a Winn Dixie Grocery Store, the Mirror Brite Car Wash, Sonny's Pizza Shack, and Lackey's Grass-Is-Greener Nursery.

At the sight of the nursery, Birdie's earnest face came to mind, for she had presented me with a tiny bonsai the day before, a plant that she had nurtured from a cutting that Mervin Lackey, the owner of the Grass-Is-Greener Nursery, had given her. Mervin Lackey was Birdie's neighbor. “His yard looks like the Garden of Eden!” she had told me. She did not know the name of the little tree, which struck me as careless. I learned later its name is Serissa, and it is also known as Tree of a Thousand Stars.

Though I had accepted her gift without comment other than the requisite thank-you and had asked Birdie to set it on top of my file cabinet so that it would be out of my way, I had taken the bonsai home that afternoon and examined it at length. Including its jade green four-inch square ceramic planter, the miniature tree stood only seven inches high, its tiny trunk the girth of a pencil, its branches fanned out to one side in the asymmetrical contour of a candle flame near an open window. Upon the branches sprouted a delicate profusion of emerald leaves the shape of teardrops, and interspersed among these were fourteen—I counted them three times—pearl white blossoms, no larger than the buttons on a baby's dress, and as many unopened buds.

“I just trimmed its roots a couple of months ago,” Birdie had said when she gave it to me, “and I was fixing to shape up the branches, but Mickey said to leave it out of balance like it was. Mickey's got a good eye for things like that, so I left it alone. I was going to cut it back a little over here”—she cupped her hands to form a canopy over one side of the bonsai—“but then when I stood back and looked at it, I could see Mickey's point. It's kind of interesting and…
Oriental-looking
the way it floats out sideways, isn't it?”

She pressed an index finger gently into the loose, pebbly soil and smiled up at me. “I hope you'll get to liking it as much as we do, Margaret,” she said. “Mickey gets real attached to my plants. At night he'll pat their little branches and say, ‘Bedtime for Bonsai.'” She paused, then added, “It's real pretty in its blooming stage, isn't it?” Without waiting for me to answer, she continued, “But it doesn't bloom all the time, of course. That's the way it goes with everything, isn't it?” She went on to tell me the name of a soil treatment I could use to prevent the leaves from yellowing, and then she left my office, humming as always.

Sitting at the traffic light by Lackey's Grass-Is-Greener Nursery that Wednesday morning, I reminded myself to stop there on the way home. The thought of the bonsai leaves turning yellow was not a happy one. Looking back on Birdie's first gift to me—there were many others to follow—I realize now that it touched me far more deeply than I was capable of understanding or was willing to admit at the time. Thomas had given me gifts, of course, and even now frequently brings me things from the hardware store, which he leaves for me on the kitchen counter (household gadgets and supplies: a dust mop, a jar of silver polish, a watering can, a wire whisk, and so forth). But besides Thomas's offerings, Birdie's was the first gift I had received since my seventeenth birthday, when my grandmother had bought me a pair of new saddle oxfords at JCPenney's in Marshland, New York. She generally purchased my clothes and shoes secondhand from a Salvation Army store.

These thoughts were going through my mind as the light turned green, and I had just formed a picture of the prized saddle oxfords when, strangely, I saw an object hurled from the back window of the compact car in front of mine. I caught only a momentary glimpse of it flying through the air before it hit the pavement, bounced a few feet, and landed beside my car door. It was a child's rubber-soled sneaker. The car from which it had been launched sped off with a squeal of tires, and I saw the driver, a woman with long hair, leaning to the right as if groping inside the glove compartment. In the back seat I could see a small head above the top of a child's safety seat and two little hands waving erratically after the fashion of very young children.

A car had just pulled up behind me at the traffic light, and the driver honked his horn. I remained stationary, however, as I considered the situation. If I retrieved the shoe, would I not be accepting an obligation to try to locate its owner? Surely such a project was doomed to failure. To leave the shoe where it had fallen, however, would be irresponsible, for it would very likely be flattened and battered by the daily traffic. The car behind me honked again. The child's mother might discover the missing shoe within the next few minutes, deduce what had happened, and retrace her path in search of it. If I took it now, she would not find it and would be forced to buy the child a new pair of shoes or have him go barefoot.

It would be of no use to take it to the Berea Police Station, for locating the owner of a lost shoe would hardly be a priority for those charged with upholding the law. I looked into my rearview mirror. The driver in the car behind me, a large man whose silhouette dwarfed the steering wheel, backed up and, swerving around my car, cast me a look of undisguised contempt. No doubt he was muttering uncomplimentary remarks also, for his lips were moving.

I hit upon a compromise. Activating the emergency flashers, I got out of my car. By this time the stoplight had turned red again, and because there was very little traffic at this early hour, I had no fear of posing a traffic hazard. Picking up the little shoe, I studied it briefly. It showed signs of heavy play, the canvas having worn through at the toe, leaving a frayed hole the size of a nailhead. The broken lace had been secured with a makeshift knot. Clearly, the child needed a new pair of shoes. Would I not be doing him a service to leave the shoe in the road and thus complete its ruination?

It appeared to be a boy's shoe, for the faded blue canvas was imprinted with tiny pictures of footballs, football helmets, and goalposts. The rubber sole was wearing smooth but was still intact. The shoe felt warm as I held it in my palm, and the rubber strip around the edge of the sole was slightly sticky. I imagined the owner, right foot shoeless now, kicking and prattling happily in the backseat with no recollection of what he had so recently done. He was probably no more than two. I wondered how his mother would respond when she noticed the missing shoe. Perhaps she would vent her anger in a harmful way. I felt a sudden, tight pressure within me.