The Hummingbird's Cage (12 page)

Since
sleep wouldn't come, I decided to get up early to make my second trip to the café. This time the dog, Pal, wasn't dozing in his corner but sitting just inside the door as if expecting me. Simon came from the kitchen to hand me a mug of hot coffee, already flavored with cream and sweetener.

“How'd you know?” I asked, unable to hide a note of suspicion.

He shrugged. “I've seen how you take your coffee.”

“No, I meant how'd you know I'd be here this morning?” It had been well over a week since I'd first helped out.

He nodded toward the back. “There's a window. I could see you heading down the path. Didn't think I was psychic, did you?”

His explanation came as a relief, and I smiled. “Not psychic. Just . . . nosy.”

“I prefer ‘observant.'”

“Most nosy people would.”

He laughed and turned back to his work. He was dressed in a red plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows; his forearms were tanned.

He gestured toward a radio on a stool. “Mind if I turn this on?”

Soon a piano was playing in the background—classical, which surprised me. Chopin, I think. Apparently Simon wasn't such a country-western fan after all.

I took a deep breath and dove in, setting to work as I had the first day, wiping down surfaces, refilling canisters. I slid trays of loaves and biscuits in and out of the oven, setting them on racks to cool. Now and then I glanced at Simon, moving so easily, so confidently, about his work. I would take my cue from him.

There weren't as many customers this morning. One was a plump and pensive woman who said she was the town librarian, although she hardly fit the type.

Jean Toliver wore a skirt to her ankles, a long-sleeved velour blouse cinched at the waist with a silver concho belt. Hanging low on her chest was a magnificent squash blossom necklace of silver and turquoise.

I learned she was from a small town in upstate New York near the Adirondack mountains, but had a lifelong interest in Southwestern Indians, so I imagined she meant it as an homage to dress like many traditional Navajo women. I'd also seen very traditional ones wear their hair twisted at the nape into a sort of stiff, vertical double twist, but Jean wore hers in a simple braid down the back.

Her skin was so milky I suspected she rarely made it
beyond the library stacks. Her eyes were the color of nougat behind round-rimmed glasses.

“You're the new one,” she said.

I wasn't sure how to answer her.

“You like books—I can tell. Not everyone does,” she continued, glancing around the café with disapproval. “A few of us started a monthly book club. You should come.”

She opened a canvas tote, drew out a flyer and handed it to me. “Our next meeting.” Then she smiled, and two deep dimples gave her a girlish look.

I slid the flyer into my apron pocket. As I turned to leave, Jean tapped my arm.

“We have monthly poetry workshops, too,” she murmured. “At the library. You should bring some of your work.”

I hadn't told Jean I wrote poetry. Or rather, that I used to, eons ago. In fact, I hadn't told anyone.

“I wouldn't be good enough,” I said. “But I might sit in one day, if that's all right.”

Jean nodded. “Anytime.”

*   *   *

By late morning the breakfast shift had eased up, and it was my first chance for a break. I poured a glass of lemonade and took a seat on a stool. Simon turned off the grill and leaned on the counter, a dish towel slung over his shoulder.

“This is the speed most days,” he said, nodding at the tables, most of them empty. “Second gear. Occasional shifts into fourth.”

He struck me as a curiosity. A short-order cook who liked
Yeats and classical music. Served in the military. Traveled. Had even, as Jessie said, fought in a war.

“Don't you ever get bored here?” I asked.

He paused. “There's a saying: ‘May you live in interesting times.' That happens to be a Chinese curse. There's a lot to be said for the simple life.”

“That's funny—I said the same thing once to a college friend about a hundred years ago. But interesting times have a way of ambushing you, don't they?”

“They do.”

Simon had a frankness about him. An easiness that invited conversation. Even, to an extent, confidences. But just how far did that extend?

I bent over my lemonade, unable to look him in the eye.

“You're from Morro originally, aren't you?” I asked.

“Third generation. My people are from Maryland and Virginia, but my grandparents settled here before the Civil War.”

“Then you left.”

“Not strictly by choice. Sometimes there's a job to do, and you're called to do it. A lot of men were.”

“Jessie said you were in the war. Iraq was it?”

He drew a deep breath and turned away. His strained expression made me regret probing the subject. Roadside bombs, snipers, multiple deployments, post-traumatic stress—not every veteran could reassimilate easily or quickly after trauma like that.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I shouldn't have asked.”

“Don't look so distressed, Joanna. I made it home just fine.”

“I see.”

“Besides,
simple
isn't the same as simplistic. Don't get me
wrong—some days all I want to do is drop everything and head out for some far corner of the earth.”

“Why don't you, then?”

He grinned. “Who says I don't?”

I looked at him then, full on. There was humor in his eyes, but there was earnestness there, too. Did he really get a wild hair some days and strike out for far-flung places? And if he did, did he book a plane ticket or just click his heels together like Dorothy and let out something like,
There's no place like Nepal
?

All at once Simon broke into a laugh that made me blush. Then he turned to head back to the grill.

*   *   *

I was ringing up a customer when the man muttered, “Oh, my Lord.” He was gaping over my shoulder through the front windows, and I turned to look, too.

The
prettiest
car I'd ever seen had just pulled up—a two-tone convertible, powder blue and white, stretching from a chrome hood ornament to what looked like chrome missiles mounted on the rear fender. It had whitewall tires with polished rims. The soft top was down, and the noon sun set the white leather seats to shimmer.

Simon came out front to look, too, and gave a long whistle.
“That,”
he said, “is a 1956 Cadillac Eldorado.”

The car door swung open and the driver stepped out—a tiny black woman in a lavender suit and red kid gloves. A red silk scarf was wrapped around her head, its ends dangling down her back like two giant rose petals. She removed oversized white sunglasses to glance at the café sign, then headed
inside. She took a seat, stripped off her gloves and untied her scarf to reveal a cap of smooth, marcelled hair.

“Honey, you got sweet tea?” she asked, picking up a menu. Her voice was high-pitched and Deep South.

I brought the tea, and the woman ordered pork chops and fried apples. When I gave Simon the order, I asked if she'd been in before.

“Nope,” he said. “I'd remember the car.”

Simon brought her plate without waiting for me to retrieve it. Then he stood beside me for a better view of the convertible.

From what I could see, it had no dents, no scratches, no markings of any kind. As pristine as if it were still sitting on a showroom floor.

“Not a speck of dirt,” I murmured.

The woman gave me a puzzled look.

“Take a load off, honey,” she said, nodding at an empty chair at her table. “I know how it is, on your feet all day. My name's Lula. You had lunch yet?”

Soon Simon was back at the grill, frying up more pork chops and apples while Lula told me about her home in Mississippi.

“Natchez—on a bluff over the river, up from New Orleans,” she said. “I was a hotel maid there from fifteen on—and they
worked
you. Big white house, portico two stories high, big ol' columns, acres of lawn.”

“Like a plantation,” I said.

“Used to be, long time since,” said Lula. “Family fell on hard times and sold it for a hotel. One night a car pulled up like what I got now, and out they stepped—him in black tails and her in yellow satin—lookin' like
somebody
. Swore to God one
day I'd get me a car like that. See what there was to see in this world. Stay in fine places, too.”

Simon arrived with two more plates and joined us.

“What if you break down out there on the road?” I asked.

Lula leveled her eyes at me over her tea glass. “What if I don't?”

And in a flash of certainty I knew that the Eldorado outside would never break down on her. It would take Lula wherever she wanted to go, with never a blown tire or a boiling radiator. It would never run out of gas. And should she ever want to drive to China one day, or whatever destination she might fancy, somehow it would get her there.

“You still have people back in Natchez?” I asked.

“Not for ages,” said Lula. “My grandmother, she raised me. We lived in a shotgun shack outside Dunleith till she passed. I took on my two brothers and went to work. Otis, he up and died—wasn't but seven at the time. Been seizin' up all his life, and one day he just grabbed ahold of his head and dropped. My brother Lester, he took to the bottle. Gone a long time. Heart give out.”

She shook her head. “I'd say wasn't nothin' of family left in Dunleith but what they planted in the old Baptist cemetery, but even that ain't there no more. A few years ago, they up and moved it.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “They moved the cemetery?”

“The church house, anyway—loaded it on flatbeds and drove down the gravel road to Long Switch. Wasn't no congregation no more—folks died off or left. So a big company come and turned the land to crops.”

“What'd they do with the people buried there?” I asked.

“Not a blessed thing.”

I wasn't sure she understood me. “I mean, before they started plowing—what did they do with the bodies in the cemetery?”

Lula braced her forearms on the table and leaned toward me, her smile indulgent.

“Honey, they left 'em. Said they wasn't no bodies. I know for a fact that cemetery started out back in the slave days. Wasn't much used after that but by a few old families. When I was young, they was a boy sweet on me—he's there. His great-grandmother, too—she had the
sugar
. By the time the company come, grave markers was mostly gone. Onliest thing left was that ol' beat-down church, and land turnin' wild like it was back when the Indians had it.”

“You mean . . . they're
farming
the graveyard?”

Lula nodded. “Soybeans mostly. Some cotton.”

It was a horrifying image—furrows dug, seeds planted, then roots growing down, down toward bones lying six feet under, smooth as those stones Olin pulls from his fields every spring.

Lula leaned toward me again. “Don't you fret none—they's more to eternal rest than where your bones are planted. It don't make the situation less despisable to me, but ain't a thing to be done but get on with life.”

She sat back with a smile and asked if we had chocolate cake for dessert. She had a thick slice and a cup of coffee before wrapping her scarf back around her head and picking up her gloves. She paid her bill and turned to leave, but before she got to the door she stopped to throw her arms around my neck.

“You take care of yourself,” she said. “Your little daughter, too.”

Her earnestness startled me. But it wasn't until the café
had closed for the day, the farmhouse chores were finished, Laurel was tucked in and I was back in my room readying for bed that it struck me:

I hadn't told Lula I had a daughter.

I'd
been working in the vegetable garden for a good hour when I stood to give my back a stretch. The air was listless and hot. We'd gone nearly two weeks without a good soaking, and the plants weren't the only things feeling it. I fingered the wilting butterhead lettuce in my basket, then looked up, eager for signs of weather. But the clouds were as thick and dry as cotton batting, and stalled out.

I licked at my parched lips as sweat slid down my back. I was about to head inside for a drink of water when a notion struck that stopped me short.

I turned toward the same field where Olin had stood the morning of the quilting bee—so motionless and unyielding he might have been carved from his own fieldstone, looking for all the world like a man with a purpose. And when he was done, a thunderstorm had swept through this valley.

Olin was a man of many skills; was rainmaking one of them?

Tentatively I looked around, but no one was in sight. I closed my eyes.

So . . . what does a rainmaker say? What does a rainmaker
think
?

Does she think
rain
and the clouds come? Can thoughts get caught in an updraft, pulling in water vapor, seeding the atmosphere until they're plumped up and ready to fall as raindrops?

Suddenly the absurdity of the moment—standing in a garden, trying to catalyze a downpour—cut me to the quick. I felt like a grown woman caught playing hopscotch. I opened my eyes.

But there was more to it than mere discomfiture. While a part of me knew, all evidence to the contrary, that conjuring up a storm was a load of hocus-pocus, still another was sure that even if it
were
possible, it wasn't child's play. It couldn't be.

And yet . . .

I turned toward the Mountain. A prickle ran up my spine as I sensed it looking back, as if taking my measure. Curious to see what I could do.

Skepticism? Or a challenge?

I set my basket at my feet and shut my eyes again.

This time I didn't think—not in words, anyway. Instead, I pictured the sky overhead just as it was—a palette of white and blue, the sun a brilliant ball radiating ferocious heat and light. The images clicked into place almost willfully, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Then I added a rain cloud. Just one.

I concentrated with all I had to shape it, sculpt it. To make it realer than real. I made it darker than the others—gray as granite, and swelling with moisture. I placed it just at the sharp arête of the Mountain. Heavier and heavier it grew—until it was so swollen, so heavy, it couldn't keep its altitude anymore. It began to sink . . . skimming lower and lower . . . whipping down the Mountain slope . . . out of control now and picking up speed . . . making for the garden . . . for me . . .

My eyes flew open and I was startled to find I was panting, struggling to catch my breath. Sweat was running down my
face, the salt of it stinging my eyes. I used my shirttail to wipe it away.

I glanced up again, and the sky was just as it had been. The Mountain . . . still vigilant.

But what was that hugging the ridge?

It was a cloud like the others—only this one was not quite so white, not quite so high. Its underbelly was a pigeon gray, as if a charcoal pencil had only begun to shade it in.

Even as I watched, the cloud began to shred and dissipate. Fainter and fainter, until finally it dissolved into the same thin air it was made of.

As if it had never been there at all.