Some Wildflower In My Heart (32 page)

It occurred on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving as I was gathering my books after my piano lesson with Birdie. By this time I was playing songs in the third book of The Music Tree series. Though Birdie had suggested from time to time that we omit certain songs, for it was her opinion that I could move far more quickly into more difficult music, I insisted upon studying the books methodically, page by page, even writing in my answers for every notation review, clapping out the practice rhythms, and playing each warm-up exercise on my piano at home. On this particular Tuesday I had performed four simple numbers: “Irish Tune,” “If Kangaroos Danced,” “Grasshoppers,” and “Cobbler, Cobbler.” As always, Birdie had poured upon me undiluted praise. “You've got so much talent!” she told me. “And what's more, you
practice
! I wish all my other pupils were as faithful as you.”

No doubt Birdie had observed me at each piano lesson studying the cross-stitched poem on the wall, and very likely she understood that my interest was in the poem itself, or perhaps in poetry in general, more than in the design and craftsmanship of Mickey's handiwork. As she had informed us earlier, Mickey had used no pattern but had merely begun stitching the poem in a script of his own devising, after which he had begun creating a border and a complementary scene of trees and flowers. Although neatly—perhaps even admirably—executed, it was no artistic masterpiece. The poem was not a profound statement nor a lengthy one:

Gifts From the Wildwood

I know not how to capture

This fragrant wildwood's rapture,

The magic of these dells

Where silent beauty dwells,

Where noble strength and power

In oak and pine tree tower.

But when from these I come,

I hope to carry home

Some spirit not yet had

To keep me strong and glad,

Something from oak and pine

To be forever mine;

When from these woods I part,

Some wildflower in my heart.

I was taken by the poem. Beneath its measured plainness vibrated something that struck me as intimately
familiar
, as if I had read it before, although I knew that I had never in my reading so much as come across the name of the poet, Archibald Rutledge, much less the poem itself. By now I had come to believe that it was a simple thought dwelling within the quiet center of the lines, perhaps concealed from the casual eye, that drew from me such a convincing sensation of having known the poem from an earlier time.

I have often over the course of my fifty-one years felt impressed with an idea that I do not recall putting into words. The idea is this:
Something within me cannot die
. This
something
, I have always known, is positive and strong, far bigger than the bitterness, fear, and hatred that thrives so rampantly in the human heart. Life for me, then, was not disposable. Though I did not give verbal expression to the idea, I know now that I have always felt it at the core of my soul, even during the years I was so mercilessly trodden upon by my grandfather.

I suppose this is the reason that I was never tempted to take my life and end my misery. Life simply was not expendable. If taken, it would resume somehow, for there was
something within me that could not die
. Perhaps it was this belief in the immortal—the conviction that there was something inextinguishable within all human life from inception—that emboldened me to protect the life of the only child I ever carried within me, even when my love for it was uncertain. In short, then, I have always held a deep respect for life.

My mother, of course, had spoken often of eternal life and had guided me in my youth to embrace the concept on a spiritual plane. As a child I considered the idea of a heaven and a hell to be a reasonable and fair conclusion to life on earth. The fact that my mother believed in such made it irrefutable, that is until the four-year interlude in my grandfather's house when all of my mother's well-laid theories of life and its orderliness were reduced in my mind to religious flimflam.

Within a short while, during my early teens, I had chopped and winnowed the fields of my mother's religion. Carried away as chaff was the simple belief in a divine God who arranged with loving attention to detail each step of my destiny. The sole surviving seed of my mother's crop of ideals, I suppose, was the irradicable belief that I have alluded to: Something within me cannot die.

As I read the poem above Birdie's piano each week, I began to delve into another level of meaning besides that of a visitor who fondly remembers a literal wildwood. Whether the poet intended this alternate message I know not. My condensed paraphrase of the lines might read thus:
I cannot express what resides within the deepest recesses of my soul, but I know that it is beautiful and enduring, and when I emerge from the dimness of temporal sight, I shall look within and behold a lovely, imperishable bloom
.

Though vague and incipient, the thought took root, and something began to stir within me. I began to wonder whether the concept of eternality might be a promise rather than a threat, whether it might be more than an extended period during which to suffer. The idea of the
bloom
being that of a wildflower—that hardy, widespread diversity of species that springs up uncultivated—appealed to me, for it meant that the seed could be largely ignored and yet in its time bring forth life.

I cannot call the poem a true sonnet, for in spite of its fourteen lines, its truncated meter renders it technically ineligible. Nevertheless, its form is appealing, and it was because of this simple poem by a South Carolinian poet, of whom I knew nothing at the time, that I began to hope once again. Perhaps that was the name of the wildflower within my heart: Hope. And perhaps the flower of hope may yield the fruit of faith and love.

On that Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Birdie laid a hand upon my shoulder while I was still seated upon the piano stool and said to me, “You must like poetry, Margaret. Every week I see you reading that poem on the wall. Do you? Like poetry, I mean?”

I did not answer at once. “I find that it incites deep thought,” I said at last.

“He's written lots of poems,” she said, by whom she meant, I assumed, Archibald Rutledge.

“Most poets have written many poems,” I replied.

“Well, that's true enough,” she said pleasantly, then added, “I wish I knew more about poetry. So much of it seems so hard to understand—at least the kind that sounds worthwhile. And then the poems that are clear as day a lot of times just sound too…well,
shallow
, I guess I'd call it.” She removed her hand from my shoulder as I rose from the stool. “Not that I'm a great thinker by any stretch!” she said, laughing.

“I, too, wish that I knew more about poetry,” I said, looking down into her brown eyes. “I do read a great deal of it, but I feel that my understanding of poetry as an artistic discipline is tangential at best. At times it is as though I hear the engine running and observe that I am being transported, yet I cannot describe how the vehicle operates.”

Birdie sighed as I moved toward the door. “You sure have a way with words, Margaret. I just love to hear you talk.” She paused a moment, then laid her hand upon my arm as if to stay me. Though I still flinched inwardly at these uninvited advances, I was becoming somewhat accustomed to her touch.

“You remind me of a wildflower in a lot of ways yourself, did you know that, Margaret?” she asked, and when I did not answer, she continued. “I read once, or maybe Mickey told me, that when a wildflower's natural home gets destroyed, maybe by fire or by bulldozers coming through and tearing everything up—no, I think Mervin Lackey told me this—anyway, the plant will die out unless one of the seeds happens to be carried to a place that's
like
the other place that got ruined. Say if it's a marshy area that gets drained and dried out and turned into a shopping center—if they'd ever pick a place like that for a shopping center—then a wildflower seed from the marsh might get picked up by the wind or get stuck in a dog's fur or on somebody's jacket and then maybe get dropped next to a pond miles away and start up a whole new patch of flowers there. But if that same seed got dropped in a dry spot somewhere, it would just die because the conditions wouldn't be right for it to grow.”

The principle was simple enough that it could have come from the mouth of a first grader; however, I saw in the body of Birdie's little speech no connection to her introduction: “
You remind me of a wildflower in a lot of ways yourself, did you know that, Margaret?
”

“I must go,” I said. Her hand fell from my arm as I bent to retrieve my purse from the rocking chair. Slipping the wide strap across my shoulder, I walked toward the door. I was beginning to weary of the thought of flowers, seeds, and the like. I had business to get about. I wanted to drive to the library in Derby and then stop at a grocery store on the way home to buy a turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.

“I think your natural home inside you must have somehow been destroyed by something a long time ago,” Birdie said behind me.

I grasped the doorknob and turned it.

“But there's a seed sticking in your heart just waiting for the right time and place to start growing again,” she added.

I pulled the doorknob so forcefully that I lost my grip on it; the door flew open, swinging one hundred eighty degrees and hitting the wall with a dull heavy thump. I must have looked surprised, perhaps verging on apologetic, for she said, “Oh, don't worry about that old door. It has a mind of its own sometimes. Mickey put a little stopper down by the baseboard so it wouldn't hurt itself. See?” And she closed the door partway to point it out to me.

I proceeded forward, opening the screen door and stepping outside. As I descended the steps and walked quickly down the sidewalk, it came to me that my trek from Birdie's living room to my car was most often marked by a feeling of relief on my part, as if I were escaping a painful examination under a light of powerful wattage. I knew that Birdie was behind me, although her canvas-soled shoes made no sound.

“Margaret, if you ever want to talk about …”

At that moment an airplane passed overhead at an inordinately low altitude, it seemed to me, and her words were lost in the roar. As I turned abruptly to face her, she shaded her eyes and looked up.

“I have no idea how you completed that sentence.” I spoke with steady deliberation, clutching my piano books before me as a shield. Her gaze fell from the sky until it met my own. “But I assure you,” I continued, “that in the event I should want to talk with you about anything, I will be the one to initiate the conversation. Until I do, therefore, you may cease your ruminations concerning the
state of my heart
.”

The expression upon Birdie's face could not have been more injured had she been driven through the heart by a stake. She caught her breath and held it; her eyes grew wide as if feeling a sudden, shocking flash of intense pain; her lips opened in a soundless cry. She lifted a hand and laid it across her mouth.

I wheeled and marched toward my Ford, at which time I saw that another car, a station wagon, had pulled into the gravel driveway and was slowly approaching Birdie's house. The window on the passenger's side began to lower and a hand emerged. “Looka who's come to bring you something!” a voice called, a deep, thick, resonant voice clearly audible above the grinding of the gravel beneath the tires.

The car came to a rest directly behind my Ford, thus blocking my exit. Birdie had trailed me to the end of the sidewalk, one hand still covering her mouth, her eyes still filled with distress. “Oh, Margaret!” was all that she had managed—in a pitiful, kittenish tone—in reply to my rebuff.

Our conversation now terminated by the arrival of the visitor, we watched as the door of the station wagon slowly opened and two large feet, clad in a pair of exceedingly bright red sneakers, appeared beneath the door and tamped the gravel for a secure placement. The woman to whom they belonged was talking the entire time. “Just keep it idlin', Joe Leonard, just keep it idlin',” she said, addressing the driver, I assumed. “I'm not stayin' but a minute.”

Pitching her voice louder, she called in our direction. “Soon as I can feel solid ground underneath me, I'll get myself on up and outta here! You and Mickey ever think of pavin' your drive, Birdie? Isn't it a blessin' and a half that they finally got the parking lot at church fixed up so everybody's not always afraid of hurting theirself anymore? Bernie Paulson says his ankle still aches like all get-out on rainy days from that time he twisted it on that real windy day last March when he was carryin' his tuna fish salad out back to Fellowship Hall for the Sunday School social. He stepped on a chunk of rock that wasn't level and whoopsy…down he went!” She clapped her hands together with a resounding thwack.

Birdie came to herself and hastened forward to assist the woman, crying, “Here, honey, let me help you out!” The woman, however, had already found a handhold against the side of the car and was hauling herself upward. As she rose from behind the car door, I saw that she was of uncommon height and bulk. By the time Birdie reached her side, the woman was already on her feet, still talking. She had a voice unique in its timbre, low and honking like that of a bassoon. Though Birdie made a great pretense of aiding her as she stepped from behind the car door, it was plain to me that, given the vast difference in the sizes of the two women, Birdie's attentions were merely tokens of politeness.

“Marvella Gowdy was close by when he fell,” the woman was saying, reaching back to close the door with a mighty slam. “But she'd been havin' one of her spells with her back so she knew better than to try to help him up. She did holler at Harvey Gill, though, and got his attention to come tend to Bernie. Bernie dropped his Bible when he fell, too, and little pieces of scratch paper was just whippin' around in the wind like it was that stuff that floats around in parades. Bernie was laughin' about it later, after he got calmed down from the spill he took, and said he lost all his sermon notes to the four winds that day and that was what made him get hisself a regular notebook to write down his notes in instead of puttin' 'em on all those little bits of paper and stickin' 'em in his Bible thataway.”