The Future Has a Past (13 page)

The Eagle Flies

Life, oh, life. Oh wonderful life. Oh pitiful life. The sun is heading down at the same time it is coming up. A beginning and an end . . . in sight. Every moment in a life has within it the joy or pain of your thoughts, your experiences, all leading toward a future, your future. All leading to roads we cross, just like the crossing of the sun in the sky. Some paths leading to forks in the road, a path to choose toward a future.

Closely, look closely; think carefully, and long. One of those choices, roads, may lead to somewhere you want to be; or somewhere you never did want to be.

This is a story of a few people in a small neighborhood, as neighborhoods go, that are neither rich nor poor nor all middle class. Just everyday people trying to live every day. Each of these people are going to speak for themselfs in their own way. Not as a chorus, because they are individual neighbors; together, but apart.

One of them, Vinnie, was a nice-looking woman. Clean. Neat in her mind, which was sensible, and in her appearance. Her clothes were almost all from the secondhand stores, now, but she was always clean and neat. She did her own hair, once a week, and after the first few days of curls, she tied a turban or attractive kerchief around her head to keep her hair from showing when she hadn’t had time or energy to fix it. She worked too hard at her jobs to be a night-person, and wasn’t really interested in bars, nightclubs nor alcohol. She worked too hard. She had a healthy, but tired body. She was one of those women who just kept “going on.”

She had taken the day off from all her jobs. She just didn’t feel well at all. She sat in her living room looking out of a window at the sky full of light rain, thinking of her family, her life. Vinnie sat at this particular window often. Through that window she saw bright, shining days full of promise. Cloudy days and rainy days can be promising also, but Vinnie didn’t think she had a promise, personally. Her chair and this window was her thinking place.

Today, as usual, she was thinking of her family and her life. Vinnie looked around the warm, worn room at signs of her life’s work. A shabby, tired room. Her eyes moved over the pictures and mottos on the walls. HOME SWEET HOME, PEACE, THE GREATEST THING IS LOVE, GOD BLESS THIS HOME. She turned back to the window and thought, “Oh, God, I’m so tired. So tired.”

Her tired eyes caught a movement in the sky and she turned her face to see better, catching the sight of a beautiful young eagle-looking bird gliding through the air on wings of the wind, so smooth, so beautiful as it dove and swooped, curving with the wind. Its wings spread, open wide and grand, playing with the wind. She thought, “You ain’t tired, Mister Eagle. But there ain’t nothin round here for you less you after that layin hen of Wynona’s. You musta come out them hills. Fly on, fly on away . . . and I wish you could take me with you.”

It wasn’t really what was outside the window that drew her, it was what was inside her feelings, her heart, that held her at the window looking at the trees, the bird and the distant hills and space. Just space. She watched the bird again, high up in the sky. “Are you a eagle . . . or a hawk? Just a big bird flyin, seein things in all that space.” As she watched closer she could tell from the bird’s flying it had been hurt. A wing slightly drooped, didn’t seem as strong as the other wing. But it kept going, kept flying through the sphere. It swooped and swerved, dipped, dived, then soared again, it seemed, to the top of the sky.

Over time, Vinnie would begin to love the faulty-winged eagle-hawk-bird as she watched it fly through its life and her own life. She loved its strength, its power to keep flying, keep trying, even with a weakened wing.

Then her mind returned to thoughts of herself. “I been had a broken-wing life! And I been tryin to keep on goin. I had to.”

Vinnie had been married eight years when her husband left. Just left. It wasn’t a smooth, easy move, but she had slipped, somehow, into his place and found another part-time job in order to support her family. At that time, she had a son, Richard, eight years old, and a daughter, Delores, seven years old. She found three part-time jobs, two hours three times a week, cleaning up, doing domestic work to hedge her full-time job as a file clerk at a bank downtown.

Naturally they all had to learn to make do on less . . . much less. But she had taken care of her children, kept her house and herself together. “Lord, I’m so glad I made my husband start usin that sex protection after the second child.” Because she already had had to work during both pregnancies. “Enough of this,” she had said to herself. “He might not’a liked it, but he wasn’t afraid of hisself gettin pregnant.” He had stayed those first eight years, but had been gone now for fourteen years. “Fourteen long, haaard years of tryin to hold on to this house.” She had worried him to death to buy the house. He hadn’t wanted to. “That ole piddly little house?! Let’s wait til we can do somthin better’n that!” he had said.

Vinnie spoke out loud to herself, “Fourteen hard years of payin bills, buyin food, buyin clothes; I don’t care if they do mostly come from the secondhand shop. I was sewin, cookin, knittin. I learned everything I could to make somethin to put on my children’s backs.”

She looked down at her hands; calloused, dry, red and rough . . . working hands. Vinnie used lotions she bought out of the ten-cent trays in secondhand stores on her hands, but they were soon back, had to be, in water washing or cleaning and even being slashed by paper cuts. Her fingernails never got a chance to grow. “I love pretty hands. Like the hands of the ladies I see at the bank and the ladies I work for. Everybody but me. My daughter has pretty hands. Even my son has pretty man’s hands.”

Vinnie had raised her children to adults laying hard on them to study, study, study. “Get them good grades so you can go on to college. Be somethin! Be somebody someday! We ain’t got no college money right now, but we’ll make it.”

All by herself.

Her son, Richard, had a paper route once but was fired when his boss got so many complaints about people not receiving their papers he began to check up on Richard. Finally he found Richard burning them in an old barrel used for trash. Vinnie wanted to argue with the boss, as she had been doing the past month or so, but she happened to be home and eyes don’t lie. Least hers didn’t. There wasn’t much of anything else Richard, then twelve years old, could do, or wanted to do, except hang around girls and you don’t get paid for that, at least he didn’t. If he ran upon any spare change, he spent it before he got home or hid it away.

Richard did like one thing: music. He studied the drums at school and became pretty good at it. He knew his mother had no “extra” money, but he pleaded and begged his mother to buy him a set. She didn’t have enough money for just all the food she would have liked to feed her children, much less for drums. But Richard wore her down until she went to the small music store and pleaded with the shyster-owner there to let her work filing his papers or cleaning his store on Saturday nights to pay for the drums. The shyster let her get almost finished begging as he kept saying “Maybe” for almost two weeks. Then when he saw she might find another way, another store, he told her “Okay” to both filing his papers, papers he usually left for weeks, and cleaning the store on Saturday nights. Richard got his drums. Not any cheap set either, because Richard and the shyster had a lot in common; they understood each other.

Richard didn’t get bored with his drums as he usually did with things. He practiced until sometimes Vinnie, on the little time she had off from work and needed to lie down for a moment and have some peace, would go into her closet, sit on the floor and press her hands to her ears, uselessly.

Vinnie saw to it that Richard graduated from high school. He left home almost immediately afterward. “I’m going to New York where musicians mean something! I’m gonna make it, Ma! Big!”

Still, every time he wrote home, he asked for money. Vinnie, who never seemed to get finished paying Mr. Shyster, just quit one day. Said, “It’s been five years. I know you are paid off by now.” Mr. Shyster didn’t want to agree, but he knew Vinnie was a hard worker and an honest one. He wanted to keep her on so now she got paid a small sum for continuing the Saturday work. Vinnie just sent the money straight on to Richard to help him get on his twenty-two-going-on-twenty-three-year-old feet.

Delores had stayed out of their business. She didn’t want to be asked to get any kind of job, part-time or otherwise. She just wanted to look good and get to college. She learned how to sew so she could have more fashionable things to wear her mother didn’t have time to make. Just for herself. She stole money from her mother’s hidden jar to buy lipsticks, body lotions, hair curlers and such. When she graduated from high school she had to wait a year for college money, until her mother diverted some money from other needs like keeping the house repaired.

Delores graduated and her grades were good enough so she was able to get a small scholarship from a small college near New York. “I’m going to college, Mama . . . and be a doctor . . . or a model. Maybe a fashion designer.” She had good grades from school because she was serious as she thought about “getting out of this house and away from a mother who does domestic work and has a raggedy little bank job and is always broke.” Tuition was still expensive though, and Vinnie had to keep working all of her jobs. She even thought she needed another part-timer, but there just was not enough time in the day. So she worked her jobs and still had nothing to show for it but money-order receipts stacked in an overflowing drawer.

Richard came home very seldom, maybe once a year or so. He brought his clothes to be repaired and put his mother in more debt for the latest coat or suit and shirts. “It’s cold in New York, Ma, and I need something to keep me from freezing to death! C’mon, Maaaaaa.” Ma always did.

On this morning Vinnie sat looking out of her window for the eagle, but it was not in sight. As she looked at the other smaller birds, the gleaming wet trees with rustling leaves and the near houses, she felt her soul was out there screaming in the rain. Sad and tired.

Her children had been gone off to make their lifes several years, at this time. Four years for Richard in New York, three for Delores in college.

Vinnie rubbed her ragged hands over her knees and the skin snagged over the material. Now she looked at that old couch she had planned to replace once the children were gone. She listened a moment to her refrigerator as it moaned and groaned, begging for a rest in some junkyard. “Bless its heart,” Vinnie mused. “It’s been working fifteen years for me and who knows how long for somebody else before that.” She smiled sadly, “Go on, Florence (that’s the refrigerator’s name), go on, moan. I understand.”

Strange as it may seem, Vinnie felt lucky she had a family. She thought of her neighbors, Wynona and Josephine, who lived alone. “Least I got somebody of my own. I am not alone. Thank you, Jesus.”

She looked out of the window just in time to see the small speck that was her eagle flying away toward the hills. “Lord, I’m tired though. I could just drop dead. What am I to do? Help my babies hurry up so they can help me and I can rest just a little? Maybe Delores will be a doctor, but I don’t think so. She ain’t so serious anymore about her studies. She writes more about her ‘social’ life. Maybe she will marry a doctor and have a baby and I can go live with them and take care my first grandbaby for em.” Vinnie fell asleep praying and dreaming.

Next door, her friend Wynona was sitting up looking out her window also. But her thoughts were different. She was lonely. She didn’t hear from any of her three children. Maybe on Christmas . . . or maybe on Mother’s Day. Mostly she called them when their phone number wasn’t changed because they had moved. Wynona also had two living sisters that she didn’t hardly hear from. Sometimes for a year or two. Wynona was so lonely. Sometimes she cried when she prayed to God. Her little spirit was outside screaming in the rain.

Wynona was a woman with a heart full of love. She had a cat of her own but fed several of the hungry homeless cats in her neighborhood. She had two chickens she raised for eggs, but she never would kill them on a hungry day because she loved them too. She had a dog, old now, but a trusted friend. He slept beside her on her bed; warmth through the night. She hugged him often, and told him, “Bozo, if you was a man, I’d kiss you!” Everyone fussed at her about the dog’s hairs everywhere, but she just told them, “Hell on that! That is my dog under all the dog hair! He’s my friend. My best friend and I love him!” She said that to her church lady-friends when they came over for coffee or a beer.

Wynona went to church regularly. It was like having a family, since she couldn’t keep up with her real family at any given time. She went to church and she bought lottery tickets every week. Husband dead, years now. Children moved away years now. At sixty years old she was alone with her church and her cat and dog, goldfish, chickens and lottery tickets every week. And her friend Vinnie.

Sometimes when she was just sitting, thinking, she thought, “Oh, yes. My friend Vinnie. Poor thing. She just working herself to death for them useless grown kids of hers. She don’t even have a dog. Couldn’t afford to feed it, I guess. Next time I catch a litter of kittens I’m gonna give her one. She need a friend inside her house. Somethin movin and breathin. Specially sides that ole man, Twink, that keep tryin to court her! Cause he need a home!” She mused on about Vinnie. “That Fred Evans who courted her was a good man. He just got tired of waitin. She say he thought she was a fool. But a woman, a mother, got to love her children.”

Wynona shook her head in sadness for Vinnie as she reached over under the picture of Jesus on the cross and pulled out her latest lottery tickets, turning them over and over in her hands as she spoke to them. “You gonna be the ones? You gonna be the ones what win for me? Change my life? Please, Lord Jesus, let these be the ones! You know I’m broke and need everything.”

Fred Evans was a Real Estate man. This was a kind of small town, so houses didn’t move too fast. Had himself a nice home and his hand in a few businesses with his friends; The Clean Cleaners for clothes and a small shop named “EAT” that sold fried fish and chicken with a salad on the side. He wasn’t getting rich or anything, but he was doing alright. He had a good mind on him. Worked hard.