Chapter 4
Birdie
I was standing with Mama and Meemaw beside the train tracks when Mama handed me a little pillow. The train was to take me to Oxford to see my sister for several reasons, all of which were awful. On the front of the little pillow Mama had stitched HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS in blood-colored thread.
“Give that to Frances and tell her to please write us back,” Mama said.
I took the thing from her and said I would, but I reminded her, “Let the record show I still don’t want to do this.”
The Footely train stop wasn’t a station or even a platform, it was one of those situations where you stood in the weeds and waved your arms and prayed the train slowed down long enough to let you on.
We’d feel the train coming before we saw it, hear it before we felt it.
Sound, I’d read, moved faster in the Delta’s alluvial soil than most other places.
Mamas, meemaws, and time itself moved slower.
Who knew better than me, twenty-four years old and still living at home.
“Probably best not to ask Frances right out the gate,” Meemaw said.
“Give her a day or two to get over the surprise visit.” She bent her thin frame forward to peer down the tracks, defying gravity.
Even at eighty years old, she hardly fell over.
I’d had a proper grandmother who’d died gently at seventy-five on ironed bedsheets with her hair done and had never spoken a cross word, and I still had a tiny, fierce, smart-mouthed one and that was Meemaw.
“Your sister’n be a real pain in the ass, case you forgot,” she said.
“Now, Mama, that is your youngest grandchild you’re speaking of,” my own mama said.
“Well it’s true, Doris, and you know it, too,” Meemaw said. “I’s you, Birdie, I’d pretend you’re there to surprise her early for her birthday in a few weeks. She’ll eat that up.” Meemaw’d insisted on coming here with us today. She liked to be in on the action.
“Maybe the two of you ought to go up there and ask Frances and I’ll stay home,” I said, though I didn’t really mean it.
I was excited to see a place other than Footely, and I did miss my little sister.
But I was aware I tended to miss her more when she was gone than I enjoyed her company when she was here.
“Shoot, I ain’t going up there and asking her that,” Meemaw said. “Nothing worse than showing up somewhere uninvited. And who knows, maybe Frances’ll introduce you to some nice, eligible young men.”
“Mama, hush, she doesn’t need us nurturing high expectations.”
“Well she ain’t getting any younger,” Meemaw said. “See can you meet one with some money. Try and indicate we’re right well-off ourselves—”
“No. Birdie, you’re not to lie to anybody about our f’nances,” my mama said.
“I ain’t saying lie. Just indicate a little.
” Meemaw pulled a handkerchief out of her blue handbag and swabbed her neck on all sides.
The heat was damp, nearly unbreathable, even at eight in the morning.
“By the way, you see any drinking or gambling on the train, write and tell me about it,” she said and, lower, “I put something in your bag there, case there’s trouble. ”
“Lord, what is it, Meemaw?” I asked. Knowing her, there could be a stick of dynamite in there.
She’d been raised in West Texas in a time when you were as worried you’d get scalped by a Comanche Indian as get held up on a train.
Granddaddy had lured her to Mississippi, where his cotton family had brought up my mama gentler, with manners and schooling and riding sidesaddle on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Mama was more like my sister, Frances. But Meemaw still held tight to her Wild West side, and I was more like her.
“You’ll see. I hear it coming now, get ready.”
A second later, I saw the glimmering nose of the train barreling toward us and I picked my suitcase up and tucked the HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS pillow up under my arm.
Course what Mama hadn’t stitched on that pillow was home was also where the guilt was and the endless chores, the knowing it’s your job to look after your mama and meemaw for the rest of your twenty-four-year-old life.
Home is where the other sister up and left since evidently that is not where her heart is or ever was.
But Mama’d kept it short and simple. Anyway it was a very small pillow.
My trip to Oxford was planned only two days before this.
I was out back unclipping clothes off the clothesline as fast as I could before I lost a pint of blood to the mosquitoes.
Just beyond our sheets and nightgowns and a girdle resembling a legless, headless Meemaw lay our twenty-five acres of wooded land.
By some maps it was considered the Mississippi Delta, the most fertile soil in America, and by others it was not, but it didn’t matter because Daddy hadn’t been a cotton farmer.
He’d worked on the Mississippi River with the Corps of Engineers, designing water dams and channels and levees.
Come fall, our plot was usually surrounded by other people’s cotton, and I’d sneeze my way through the month of September.
But I wouldn’t be sneezing this year. This year the cotton fields around us sat fallow, covered in horseweed and thistle, because the government was desperately paying folks not to grow cotton to keep the price from bottoming out.
Looking around me that day, I felt it in my bones: There was something wrong with the world if the Delta wasn’t smothered in green cotton by July.
I’d made it as far as the girdle when Mama hollered from the porch.
“Come on inside, Birdie. We need to have a talk.” And so, grumbling, I toted the half-full basket back up to our house, I’d just do the rest in the dark, because even though I was a grown woman, I still did what my mama told me to, and she still did what her mama told her to, and sometimes I thought if people didn’t die, that cycle might never, ever stop.
Our house was sturdy, comfortable, and paid for.
Two white stories with a deep back porch, though the paint was starting to peel.
The old hammock that nobody lay in anymore still hung at one end of the porch.
A few years ago me and Frances had sewn six Gingham Girl flour sacks together and lain, feet in faces, listening to Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour on the radio.
The roof leaked and the furnace damper still stuck, but we didn’t have the money to fix such things, so we’d learned to jiggle the lever on the contraption and lean to the left when rain dripped from the kitchen ceiling, because living in a house was like living with your mother and meemaw: You learned to put up with each other’s ways.
Two years ago, my sister, Frances, left Footely to attend a finishing school outside Memphis.
A year in, she got engaged to a man we didn’t know and didn’t even invite us to her own wedding.
Just sent us a little printed cream-colored card: We are pleased to announce the marriage of Frances Begonia Calhoun to Roderick Beauregard Tartt.
In my opinion, she might as well’ve sent us a middle finger in an envelope, and recently, her letters had grown scarce.
If she did write us, she mostly just yapped about their big fancy house called Idlewilde, with a private telephone line and her vice president banker husband, which would’ve mortified our daddy.
Daddy detested banks and, worse, bankers.
Frances’s only complaint about her new life was they had to live with his “witch for a mother.”
I set the basket down on the back porch and followed Mama into Meemaw’s room, where Meemaw was already propped up in bed. Her little room was sparse—bed, small dresser, fireplace that I’d take the summer door off of come October.
“Come sit,” Meemaw said, patting the bed beside her and sliding her King James over, open to Judges. Meemaw always enjoyed the bloodier stories of the Bible.
Mama eased down in the rocking chair in the corner. A widow of two years, she had U-shaped bags hanging under her eyes. She’d gotten so thin, she looked more apron than woman lately. The year Daddy died was the year Mama had started to grow old.
Mama tilted her head and smiled at me. I was immediately suspicious. “What would you think about taking the train up to Oxford to see your sister, Birdie?” she asked.
“I’d think why spend money on a train ticket to see somebody who won’t even write us back.
” I leaned back on Meemaw’s headboard with the cupids painted on it.
I used to tell Frances those cupids would bite her if she got too close, that they favored the blood of pretty little girls.
It was not that I was jealous, exactly; I just thought there ought to be a price for being the prettier sister.
“Please, Bird, can’t you just go up there and see that she’s alright?”