Winter Birds (8 page)

In the morning both were sorry in a way you had never seen them sorry before. For the first time they became afraid of the bitterness that had taken root so deep between them. Mama held you children in her arms all at the same time, and apologized to you as seriously as if you were all adults. She swore she would never drink like that again. Of all the children only you and Amy Kay understood why she was upset. You watched each other carefully as she spoke.

Papa never said he was sorry for anything. But after that day he stopped drinking and a long calm time began.
At night Papa parked his truck in the wide cool shade under the sycamores, and stepped from the truck smiling. Mama met him at the door and talked to him tenderly as she pulled off his shoes. She washed his feet to cool them and led him by the hand to the supper table. Together they tended Grove and watched him grow plump and strong against his blood, till his strength became like a sign between them. For a long time he had no bleeding at all. Neither did you.

You started school. In the morning you waited beside the mailbox for the orange school bus to take you to Potter's Lake, where you sat in the old school building watching breezes stir cobwebs in the corners. Teachers told you about numbers and alphabets. You memorized.

Duck cut his teeth and wore out his first pair of shoes. When he could walk Allen took him everywhere, teaching him about things like mud puddles and dandelions and stepping on bees without getting stung. Grove, now a year old, learned to make elaborate gurgling noises. Papa said he was singing. Papa liked to hold Grove in his lap in the evenings. Mama watched them with a smile and some tension eased in her face, making her look younger than before. She said Grove would probably start talking early and never stop, like the rest of you. She said that whatever bad people might think about her and Papa, they'd had five smart younguns, and she meant to see you all in college one day, all doctors and lawyers in fine big houses.

A picture of Amy Kay from that time survives in your
piles of letters and papers, her face small, shell-pink and scrubbed, smiling a smile so fragile it seemed ready to dissolve in an instant, like frost in a blast of warm air. In her eyes is a look of waiting. Even after a year in this house, when you might have looked forward to another summer of this peace, you watched Papa carefully for signs of a change.

By then it had been more than a year since you saw Papa drunk. Amy Kay forgave him and sat on his lap in the evenings, telling him about her friends at school. Duck remembered nothing of the other houses and couldn't help it if he thought it fine to have a Papa to push him in the rope swing outside, suspended from the sycamore branch. Grove laughed in Papa's face and stuck small fingers in Papa's eyes, not caring about what had happened before he was born. Only you and Allen, in the middle, still held yourselves stiff when Papa touched you, never laughing around him, never feeling easy. Something would happen to change him back. Even Amy said that, though as far as she was concerned it didn't do a bit of good to worry about it while Papa was so much fun.

You never knew what happened to end the quiet time until many years later, when Mama told you a story about something that happened while the family lived in the Light House. Mama could tell a story richly and deeply when she wanted to, losing herself in the telling, so that all you saw in her face was the reflection of that morning years ago when a photographer stopped in front of the Light House, asking to take Mama's picture half an
hour before Papa was due home for lunch.

The photographer drove a convertible sports car with square white patches on the canvas hood. Mama thought the patches looked funny when the man parked the car at the side of the road. When he got out of his car there were more patches on the elbows of the photographer's jacket—black oval patches that Mama said were there for decoration, not for covering up holes. How odd, Mama thought, that a man would put patches on his clothes because he liked the way they looked. When the photographer lifted his camera out of the car, Mama drew back from the window, thinking it was a gun. The photographer watched the house from across the road, testing the weight of the camera in his hand. He flipped a match from his finger. When she saw how he stared at the house she backed further from the window, and held the curtains closed with her hand.

The photographer walked across the road as casually as if it were his own kitchen floor, caressing the camera with both hands. At first he took pictures of the house and the trees, now and then bending one knee to the ground, or turning the camera sideways, or doing both at once. She didn't think he would come to the house, until he straightened in a particularly self-conscious way, eyeing the porch. When he stepped forward a small sense of panic overcame her. She was alone, except for Allen, Duck and Grove, who were taking naps upstairs. You and Amy were in school. Heart beating, she ran to the door, listening for his footsteps on the porch—light and sharp, not
like Papa's heavy, measured tread. She didn't know why it seemed so important that he was coming to the door, except she remembered the foreign sound of his car, stopping beside her mailbox, and she remembered the dark camera and the patches for decoration on his elbows.

She opened the door only after he knocked the second time. He made an impatient humming sound that she could hear through the door. When she opened it he stopped the noise immediately, as if he hadn't really expected anyone to be home. An instant later—long enough to make it seem artificial—he smiled. “Good afternoon. I've been taking some pictures of your home and thought I'd see if anyone was here. You have a very interesting home.”

“We rent it from the people up the road,” Mama said.

He smiled, eyeing her thoroughly, up and down. The look made her self-conscious. She wondered if he thought she was pretty. He waved his arm elaborately in the air and she could see the patches again, a fabric like velvet. “The house looks the same whether you own it or the government owns it. I rent my house too.” He pushed past her into the living room. “May I come in? Sorry, I don't have much time. My name is Frank DeCapra. I take pictures of houses like yours.”

She closed the door slowly, smoothing her skirt. She watched the photographer without seeming to, while he explained that he was at work on a project for the university sociological resources center. He didn't say which university. He was taking pictures of rural people—and rural
houses too, he added at the end. She nodded politely to everything he said, and when he paused she nodded to show she understood. All the while he hardly seemed to notice her; he kept busy browsing the room, the furniture, the plastic curtains at the windows. Mama found herself wondering what his house looked like inside, and whether or not it was better than this one.

He tapped his finger on the camera. Mama moved to the window. “That little car belong to you? Don't you get scared driving around in something that little?”

“I get good gas mileage,” he said, lifting a glass ashtray off the couch arm, holding it to the light and setting it down again. “It's not what you drive that matters, it's the way you drive.”

“A good strong wind would blow you right off the road.”

“A car is much too heavy for the wind to blow around. But this car is hard to find parts for, because it came from another country.”

Mama nodded pleasantly. In the kitchen she could see the clock. “My husband will be home soon. He doesn't like me to have strangers in the house, so I'll have to ask you to get all your pictures taken as quick as you can.”

DeCapra circled the room, inspecting the walls. “How old is this house?”

“Forty or fifty years old. An immigrant man built it, the lady told me, and they bought it off him before he died, for next to nothing. He said he didn't want the government to get it, and he didn't have any people in this
country. I can't remember what country he came from.” Mama walked to the kitchen. “I don't have a good memory for things like that.”

He raised the camera to his eye.

She found herself staring into a circle of black glass and turned away from it. “Don't be pointing that thing at me.”

He laughed. “It won't steal your soul, you know.”

“I look like a mess this morning,” Mama said.

“Not at all,” he said. “In fact I'd like to take a picture of you in front of your house. That's actually why I came to the door.”

“Oh I don't think I can let you do that.”

“You don't think a camera can hurt you. Here, I'll let you hold it.”

She shook her head. “I'm afraid I might drop it.”

“Then look at it. See? It can't hurt a thing. It's a box to collect light.”

“Oh, I'm not afraid of it.” She turned to the window and frowned where he couldn't see her. Papa would be home soon. She didn't want him to see this man here—especially she didn't want Papa to see a man like this one, young, with both his arms intact, dressed in clothes like these and driving a car like that, with that arrogant look in his eyes. But she kept her tone bright and was conscious, as she spoke, of trying to sound a little stupid. “I don't see why you want to take my picture. I'm not pretty. The only pictures I ever see are of pretty people, like movie stars.”

“I think you're pretty enough or else I wouldn't ask to take your picture. But pictures don't really have to be of pretty people.”

“They don't? But you want to take my picture because I'm pretty?” She laughed in earnest this time. “Which one is true?”

The photographer blushed. She liked him better then, the blush gave his face a softness. But he was too stubborn to laugh at himself. “They're both true,” he said. “In fact, these days people look at pictures of ugly people as much as they do at pretty ones.” He fumbled with a tiny dial on the camera. “Do you have a dress in a brighter color? For the picture. It's going to be full color.”

“You don't listen to anybody, do you?” Mama smiled into the sink. “I never told you I'd let you take my picture.”

“Hey now, that's not fair. The light's right under those trees, and I won't find another house like this one for miles and miles.”

“It's me the picture would be of, so I'm entitled to say no if I want to.”

“But what would it hurt to let me take your picture?”

“My hair's a mess, I haven't even washed it.”

“Your hair looks fine. It looks the way a country girl's hair should look.”

She smiled at his calling her a country girl as if those two words summed up everything about her. “How is a country girl's hair supposed to look?”

“Light and fluffy,” he said, “and a little too wild just to
hang down over your shoulders, the way city women's hair hangs down over their shoulders. You should be able to see the sunlight coming through it.”

“Sounds more like chicken feathers than hair,” Mama said.

“Come on now, you're being stubborn.”

“I've already said no once. Saying no again is not being stubborn.”

“Then I won't leave. I'll stand right here till your husband comes home. And then he'll be jealous.”

She stared at him open-mouthed. He saw the expression on her face and laughed himself. “I knew that would get to you! And I'll do it too, I swear I will. But if you let me take your picture I'll be out of your way in a jiffy. As soon as you change your dress.”

She studied the clock. In twenty minutes she could begin listening for the sound of Papa's truck. DeCapra went on talking, something about how pretty women were silly not to let other people enjoy their prettiness, and how all women like a man to beg to take their pictures—selfishness he called it—and she smiled again, politely, but the word “pretty” repeated caught at her throat, so that she could neither think clearly about whether she ought to say yes to DeCapra and have her picture made, or whether Bobjay would come home too soon even then, or whether anyone had ever really thought she was pretty. She tried to see herself in the window glass and in the chrome around the stove burners. DeCapra said, “If you would put on a brighter dress. Do
you have a yellow one? Or maybe even orange?”

She looked away from him. “I have to fix dinner. I have a chicken thawed in the refrigerator.”

“It won't take ten minutes,” DeCapra said. “Chicken won't rot in ten minutes. And the picture would look so pretty, all in color, you standing in the front of the house under that tower thing. It looks like a lighthouse, I think. Do you know what a lighthouse is?”

Mama smiled. “Even my children know what a lighthouse is, Mr. DeCapra.”

She walked past him to the door. He fiddled with the camera. After a moment she asked, “Will a red dress do?” He smiled and said a red dress would be fine.

Mama had a red dress, all right. You remember it from the times she wore it in the hospital, when you told her you liked it better than her other dresses because it made her look so bright. It had three big round red buttons spaced down each side. The skirt clung modestly to the knee. She put on a white blouse beneath it, zipping the dress as far as she could in the back, and flipping her hair free. She had lipstick in her purse. Twisting out the bright bar of red, she wondered if it would be too much. She touched a little to her lip. But a little wasn't enough to tell from, even when she screwed up her mouth and leaned close to the mirror. She smeared more on and pressed her lips together. With the color added, her face had a fullness it lacked otherwise, being pale. She brushed her hair with quick, vicious strokes. When she told the story she said she felt the most nervous descending from
her bedroom to the second floor, where Allen, Duck and Grove were sleeping. Allen woke at the sound of her descent, and called to her.

She crossed the little room and sat next to him on the bed. “You should be sleeping like Mama told you.”