The Man Who Loved Birds (3 page)

He gave her a sly, conspiratorial glance. “Promise not to tell a soul.”

“As your doctor I am sworn to confidentiality.”

He cupped his hand at her ear and whispered, “I was burying a golf cart.”

She felt as if she were interrogating a child. “And what were the circumstances that led to your burying a golf cart?”

He grinned, showing big horse teeth with a wide gap. The front center tooth was chipped, making him look a little crazed. “It’s a good one but this time you got to cross your heart.”

“Mr. Faye. You may be certain—”

“
Johnny
Faye. Go on, do it.”

She pantomimed a cross over her heart—a gesture she had last performed late in her one year at the Loretine Sisters boarding school in Calcutta, where an English classmate with ruddy cheeks and flaxen hair had decided to teach the heathen how to keep their word.

He told her then how he had decided to play a little joke on Harry Vetch, the county attorney, to get back at him for building his mess of a subdivision right next to Johnny Faye’s mother’s woods. “No great harm done,” he said, since he had taken care to bury the cart so that once dug up it would have suffered only a few permanent stains on its green-and-white striped upholstery—“a little reminder, might teach him a lesson, not likely but anything is possible, right? But I guess it was the teacher that got taught.” He pointed to the scrape down his side.

She bent to look more closely. “Unless you object, I had best provide your tetanus booster now.” She removed a vial from a small refrigerator, swabbed its top, stuck in the hypodermic and withdrew
its contents. She swabbed his arm with disinfectant. “This will sting.” She thrust in the needle.

“
Ow! Damn!
”

“I am so
very
sorry.”

“I aint. I’m glad to see you get riled up. That’s a good sign.”

“Sign of what?” She pulled out the needle and swabbed the bright drop of blood, then picked up his right thumb and pressed it over the ball of cotton.

“How much you’d enjoy a little walk in the woods. I built this little shack where I go when I want to keep myself out of
real trouble
. Sort of a blind except I don’t use it for hunting, just for watching birds and such. Not too far from here, neither, over by the monastery.”

“There is a monastery nearby?” She applied a Band-Aid and gave it a pat.

“Sure, a big one. Well, used to be big. A lot of the monks are gone now, to the grave or married or whatever. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of it. That’s what usually brings strangers to these parts.”

“I must say I know very little about
these parts
.”

“I could show it to you sometime. The blind, that is, not the monastery, even if the blind’s on monastery land so I guess it
is
the monastery, sort of, but it’s outside the wall so women can go there, no problem. A afternoon walk before it gets too hot.”

“I do not socialize with patients.”

“And I do not go to the doctor.”

“Well, then, there we have it.” She handed him his shirt.

“Anyways I’m not your patient.”

“For the last fifteen minutes you have been sitting in my office.”

“Show me the paperwork. If it aint been writ down it aint happened.”

“Which is why you must now complete this form.” She handed him the clipboard and form and opened the examination
room door. “There is really nothing you can do about a cracked rib except to return home and suffer. I could write you a prescription for something stronger than aspirin—”

“I don’t take nothing stronger than aspirin except whiskey and a certain not-so-secret little vice. Matter of fact I don’t take aspirin.”

“Then I am at a loss as to why you paid me a visit.” She moved to the door and made a pointed gesture of holding it open. “Ring me or ring
somebody
immediately if that scrape gets red or swollen. I assume you have a family member whom you may ring up to drive you home?”

“We got no need for a chaperone.”

She placed her hands on her hips. “You bring to mind a phrase I learned from a medical school colleague but that I never thought would have professional application.
When hell freezes over
.”

He stood but paused in the doorway, pensive. “Just try and stop the light from changing.”

She handed him his stick. “You may find your cane useful.”

“I aint telling a living soul about burying that golf cart, not even my mamma. Better for her to be ignorant. So I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that story to yourself. Though I do understand how a good story wants to be told. Later,” he said, and he was gone.

He would leave without paying, that was why he dodged the paperwork, she understood that, but that was why she sent him into the front room, so as to get rid of him. The singsong rhythm of an old and familiar prayer, learned from her grandmother, came to mind.

Cows in the cowshed and

Corn in the storehouse

Vermilion between the parting of my hair

Every year a son and

May not a single one die and

Never may a teardrop fall from my eye

“One hundred two weeks remaining,” she muttered. She heard the front door open and shut. In the waiting room she found the blank form, with five twenty-dollar bills clipped to its top.

On her first afternoon in her assigned post, delivered to her new office and home by the county judge executive, Dr. Chatterjee had to acknowledge that hers was not an auspicious beginning. The judge executive (so very American his title, with its seamless blend of government corruption and corporate inefficiency) had dropped her here, mumbled something about an appointment with the garbage collection agency, and vanished. In their one phone conversation before her arrival he’d told her only that, since the town had gone many years without a doctor, its men’s clubs (Optimists, Knights of Columbus, Fish & Game) had joined forces to acquire and refurbish “a former commercial site” into a medical office and living apartment. In the transparent light of a spring afternoon she could not escape the thought that she had risen to the bait in a trap.

In its first incarnation her office had been a gas station. The pipes and valves that had once serviced fuel pumps still protruded from the cement apron, a troubling sight, though she rather liked the weathered sign of the winged horse hanging from rusting hinges that creaked with every breeze. In the tiny waiting room with its speckled Formica countertop sat a telephone, a desk, and an oak office chair scarred with pocketknife carvings and cigarette burns. At the building’s other end: A small apartment cluttered with mismatched furniture. Here she would live for the two years of her term of service as specified in the contract under
which she had retrained in an American medical school. As she distributed her meager belongings around the rooms, she recalled the words Krishna spoke to Arjuna as he and his companions were banished from their forest home:
Profit from exile
.

She carried with her a hole in her heart. She would not describe it as a longing to return to the land of her birth—on this point she could not be more clear. Once, though, she had been whole and round—for better and worse she had belonged to a particular place, her family’s village situated on one of the many branching arms of the delta of the great mother Ganges. She lived in the assumption that the whole world resonated with her landscape of memory. Everyone knew and dreaded the brutal heat just before the monsoons came on; everyone knew the longing for rain and the joy of dancing in its first drops; everyone knew how tiresome it became, how troublesome to be confined in the village by flooded roads and turbulent rivers. Everyone knew the heart’s leap of anticipation at the news of guests and the crushing disappointment when some obstacle prevented their arrival.

She had not known then and could not have understood that in leaving she was cutting herself off from any possibility of knowing that kind of belonging. Now she was a wanderer, a planet, an exile, and as such one place was as good as another, though her experiences of cold and snow had persuaded her that she would trouble her wound less by living someplace warm.

On darker days she lived in envy. She did not envy them their big shiny cars or their brick houses or their television sets or even their plumbing—no. She envied their casual assumption of place. They walked on the land as if they knew the wide world in all its grandeur and heartache from these lumpy hills and snakey valleys. Having known no other place, they assumed—as she had once assumed—that all places were like their place. It was their unknowing that she envied—she who had grown up with the distant, palpable presence of the Himalayas presiding with calm majesty above the fertile plain; she who had walked the paths of the
living, breathing jungle, and had seen that same green labyrinth of shadow and light burst into flame, while jets screamed overhead and she stared, unable even to run, transfixed in awe and learning that this was the way the world is, the only way it could be because it was the only way she had ever known. A neighbor’s child, whom she’d been charged with watching while her mother worked the fields, was struck by flying, burning debris and fell to the earth. In that moment Meena felt herself chosen to seek a life in medicine.

Among her first local patients was a young, garrulous woman whose face was already creased from a lifetime of smoking. “You must feel mighty lucky to have got yourself here,” the woman said.

“Of course I am very fortunate.”

“Aint this the most beautiful spot on earth? You’ve been all over, you tell me.”

Dr. Chatterjee acknowledged that this place was very beautiful indeed.

“’Course, it’s getting ruined, but I guess that’s probably true of every place. People, they see we got a good thing here and they want to get in. Oh, I don’t mean you—you’re bringing us something important, but all those others—I don’t blame ’em, mind, I’d do the same, but even so. Every bird protects its territory.”

To go through life without a place—she who had been raised in a family whose roots reached deeper than the mountains. Compared to her people, the mountains were young—that was how she’d once thought of herself and her family. And here she was, placeless on the land.

On long slow Sunday afternoons the bright spring weather called Meena to take her first steps toward becoming American: she took to the road. During her retraining she learned to drive and had acquired a monstrous, rusting Buick Electra from the graduate student whose apartment she had taken. Recalling her conversation with the wild man with the cracked ribs, she set out to find the monastery.

A lightly traveled country road led to its ornate, rusting gate—Meena slowed to a crawl and craned her neck but she could see little more than the abbey steeple poking through greening trees rising above a nubbled cement block wall with a rusting metal sign
WOMEN NOT PERMITTED INSIDE ENCLOSURE
. Not far down the road, she encountered a small graveled parking lot with a sign
TO THE STATUES
, from which she deduced that these, at least, were available to visitors.

At this time of year—high spring—the path made its way through delicately branching dogwoods and redbuds that lifted clouds of white and lavender against a budding spring green, with the last of the bright yellow daffodils underfoot. Along the way the monks had scattered fragments of a century of outmoded religious statuary—a grinning gargoyle peered from behind forsythia, a Virgin and Child poked from a clump of bleeding heart.

Meena climbed a small knoll to a copse of Virginia pines. In their midst a small glen sheltered a tableau in black stone—the apostles Peter, James, and John reclining in granite sleep, while a few steps up the path Jesus knelt in agony, hands clasped to his face.

Some years back a large pine had fallen near the sleeping Peter and the remains of its trunk bridged a protected hollow. The monks had placed a bench at the edge of the statues’ clearing, but Meena chose to sit on the trunk of the fallen pine—by edging sideways she could dangle her short legs above the sheltered hollow underneath. She kicked off her squat black pumps and warmed her feet in the spring sun and closed her eyes. Here and only here, she decided, would she permit herself nostalgia for the watery green countryside of her childhood.

As a result she visited the statues at every opportunity, until an evening came when she sat on the pine and edged sideways and kicked off her shoes only to see them land in the midst of a coiling mass of snakes, impossible to count how many because where one left off another began, twisting and rising and falling. She screamed, a high-pitched fright.

“I’ll be damned. I heard of such a thing but I never seen it.”

Meena looked up to see Johnny Faye, gravedigger for golf carts and one-time patient, looking on. She composed herself. “And what sort of thing might that be.”

“In winter a rattlesnake’ll hibernate—the young know their mother’s smell and they’ll follow it back to the den where they was born. Then they coil up together to sit out the winter and don’t much move til spring. You give them one more warm night and a hot day and they’ll be scattered far and wide. But I’d wait a day or two before I come back.”

He took his walking stick and thrust it gently into the coiling mass. “Greetings, brother snakes. Summer is coming but not here yet. Welcome, sister snakes. You’ll need another day of sun before you’re ready to rumble.” Using the stick he lifted the longest and thickest of the snakes, almost as thick as his bony wrist and a good deal longer than his arm. It twisted in the evening light, its dark diamonds beads against its brighter brown hide. “A good walking stick comes in handy. That must have been one powerful prayer you was saying. I’d like to learn that one someday if you’d be so kind.” He bowed from the waist and pointed with his homemade caduceus. “I’d walk back in that direction if I was you. And I’d think about wearing jeans if you’re taking your religion outdoors, especially in these woods.” He replaced the snake among its relatives. With the tip of the walking stick he plucked one of her shoes from the pit and extended it to her.