Morning Glory (18 page)

At school shortly thereafter, a group of children were exchanging boasts. A little girl with black pigtails and an overbite said, “I can do thirty-seven cartwheels without getting dizzy.” Another, with the fattest belly in class, boasted, “I can eat fourteen pancakes at one time!” A third, the most notorious liar in class, claimed, “My daddy is going on a safari hunt to Africa next year and he’s taking me with him.”

Eleanor edged close to their exclusive circle and offered timidly, “I can call the birds and make them eat off my hand.”

They gaped at her as if she were a lunatic, then tittered and closed their ranks once again. After that the taunts were whispered loudly enough so they wouldn’t fail to reach her ears— Crazy Elly See, talks to birds and lives in that house with the shades pulled down, she and her batty mother and her battier grandma and grandpa.

It was during one of her truancies from school that she first spoke to Glendon Dinsmore. She was late heading home and came bursting from the woods, clattering down a steep embankment, sending rocks tumbling to the road below, startling a mule that brayed and sidestepped, nearly overturning Dinsmore’s wagon.

“Whoa!” he barked, while the animal nearly splintered the singletree with a powerful kick. When he’d gotten the beast under control, he took off his dusty felt hat and whacked it on the wagon seat in agitation. “Lord a-mighty, girl, what you mean by stormin’ outa the woods that way!”

“I’m in a hurry. Gotta get home before the schoolkids walk by.”

“Well, you scared poor Madam out of her last-year’s hair! You ought to be more careful around animals.”

“Sorry,” she replied, mollified.

“Aww...” He thumped his hat back on and seemed to mellow. “Guess you didn’t stop to think. But you be more careful next time, you hear?” He glanced speculatively at the woods, then back at her. “So you’re playin’ hooky, huh?” When she didn’t answer, his look grew shrewder and he thrust his head forward. “Hey, don’t I know you?”

She crossed her arms behind her back, rocked left to right twice. “You used to deliver ice to our house when I was little.”

“I did?” She nodded while he scratched his temple, pushing the hat askew. “What’s your name again?”

“Elly See.”

“Elly See...” He paused to recall. “Why, of course. I remember now. And mine’s Glendon Dinsmore.”

“I know.”

“You know?” He gave a crooked smile of surprise. “Well, how about that? Don’t come to your house no more, though.”

Elly scuffed the dirt with her toe. “I know. Grampa bought an electric refrigerator so we wouldn’t have to have ice delivered no more. They don’t like people comin’ in.”

“Oh... so... I wondered.” He motioned along the road with a thumb and offered, “I’m goin’ your way. Can I give you a lift?”

She shook her head, clasping her hands more tightly behind her back, making her dress front appear as if she’d tucked two acorns inside. He was a grown-up man by now, a good seventeen, eighteen years old, she figured. If Grandma saw her coming home in his wagon she’d end up doing hours on her knees.

“Well, why not? Madam don’t mind pullin’ two.”

“I’d get in trouble. I’m s’posed to come straight home from school and I ain’t supposed to talk to strangers.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble. You come up this way often?”

She studied him warily. “Just... sometimes.”

“What you do up there in the woods?”

“I study birds.” As an afterthought, she added, “For school, you know?”

He raised his chin and nodded wisely, as if to say, Ah, I see.

“Birds is nice,” he offered, then picked up the reins. “Well, maybe I’ll run into you again someday, but I better not keep you now. So long, Elly.”

She watched him drive away, mystified. He was the first person in her twelve-year experience who’d ever treated her as if she weren’t either crazy or a child of shame. She thought about him during prayers after that, to take her mind off her aching knees. He was a rather scruffy-looking fellow, dressed in overalls and thick boots, with only enough beard to make him look prickly. But she didn’t care about his looks, only that he treated her as if she weren’t some oddity.

The next time she escaped to the woods she found a spot high above the rocky bank behind a juniper bush where she could watch the road and remain hidden. From her secret perch she waited for him to reappear. When he didn’t, she was surprised to find herself disappointed. She watched for three days before giving up, never fully understanding what she’d expected had he come along the road as before. Talk, she supposed. It had felt good to simply talk to someone.

Nearly a full year passed before she ran into him again. It was autumn but warm, a day of bright leaves and dusky sky. Elly was stalking bobwhites, the little lords of the fencerows whose voices she loved. Unable to flush any along the fenceline, she headed into the woods to search in heavier cover where they roosted in bevies on the ground, facing outward. She was calling in a clear whistle:
quoi-lee, quoi-lee,
when she flushed not a quail from the sumac bushes, but Glendon Dinsmore from over the next hill. She stopped in her tracks and watched him approach, cradling a gun in one arm. He raised the other, waved, and called, “Hey, Elly!”

She stood sober, awaiting his arrival. Stopping in front of her, he repeated, “Hey, Elly.”

“Hey, Glendon,” she returned.

“How you doin’?”

“Doin’ all right, I reckon.”

They stood for a moment in a void. She appraised him smilelessly, while he appeared pleased at having run into her. He looked exactly as he had last time: same overalls, same scruffy beard, same dusty hat. Finally he shifted his stance, rubbed his nose and inquired, “So, how’s them birds of yours?”

“What birds?” Her birds were her business, nobody else’s.

“You said you was studyin’ birds. What you learnin’?”

He’d remembered for a whole year that she studied birds? Elly softened. “I’m tryin’ to call the bobwhites outa hiding.”

“You can
call
‘em? Golly.” He sounded impressed, unlike the girls at school.

“Sometimes. Sometimes it don’t work. What you doin’ with that there gun?”

“Huntin’.”

“Huntin’! You mean you shoot critters?”

“Deer, I do.”

“I couldn’t never shoot no critter.”

“My daddy and me, we eat the deer.”

“Well, I hope you don’t get one.”

He reared back and laughed, one brief hoot, then said, “Girlie, you’re somethin’. I ‘membered, you was somethin’. So, did you see any bobwhites?”

“Nope. Not yet. You see any deer?”

“Nope, not yet.”

“I seen one, but I won’t tell you where. I see him almost every day.”

“You come out here every day?”

“Pret’ near.”

“Me too, during huntin’ season.”

She pondered that momentarily, but any suggestion of meeting again seemed ludicrous. After all, she was only thirteen and he was five years older.

Frightened by the mere thought, she spun away abruptly. “I gotta go.” She trotted off.

“Hey, Elly, wait!”

“What?”

She halted twenty feet away, facing him.

“Maybe I’ll see y’ out here sometime. I mean, well, huntin’ season’s on a couple more weeks.”

“Maybe.” She studied him in silence, then repeated, “I gotta go. If I ain’t home by five after four they make me pray an extra half hour.”

Again she spun and ran as fast as her legs would carry her, amazed by his friendliness and the fact that he seemed to care not a whit about her craziness. After all, he’d been inside that house; he knew where she came from, knew her people. Yet he wanted to be her friend.

She went back to the same spot the next day but hid where he couldn’t see her. She watched him approach over the same hill, the gun again on one arm, a fat cloth sack in his other. He sat down beneath a tree, laid the gun across his lap and the sack at his hip. He pushed back his dusty hat, fished a corncob pipe from his bib, filled it from a drawstring sack and lit it with a wooden match. She thought she had never in her life seen anyone so content.

He smoked the entire pipe, his lumpy boots crossed, one arm resting over his stomach. When he knocked the dottle from his pipe and ground it dead with his boot, she grew panicky. In a minute he would leave!

She stepped out of hiding and stood still, waiting for him to spot her. When he did, his face lit in a smile.

“Well, howdy!”

“Howdy yourself.”

“Fine day, id’n’t it?”

One day was pretty much like the next to her. She squinted at the sky and remained silent.

“Brought you somethin’,” he said, getting to his feet.

“For me?” Her eyes grew suspicious. Where she came from nobody did anything nice for anybody.

“For your birds.” He leaned down and picked up the fat sack tied with twine.

She stared at it, speechless.

“How’s your bird studyin’ comin’?”

“Oh... fine. Just fine.”

“Last year you was studyin’ them for school. What you doin’ it for this year?”

“Just for fun. I like birds.”

“Me too.” He set the sack near her toes. “What grade you in?”

“Seventh.”

“You like it?”

“Not as much as last year. Last year I had Miss Natwick.”

“I had her, too. Didn’t care much for school, though. I dropped out after eighth. Took the ice route then and help my daddy around the place.” He gestured with his head. “Me and him, we live back there, up on Rock Creek Road.”

She glanced in that direction but her eyes dropped quickly to the sack lying on the forest floor.

“What’s in it?”

“Corn.”

The shy blue grosbeaks might like corn. Maybe with it she could get closer to them. She should thank him, but she’d never learned how. Instead she gave him the second-best thing, a tidbit of her precious knowledge of birds.

“The orioles are my favorite. They don’t eat corn, though. Only bugs and grapes. The grosbeaks, though, they’ll prob’ly love it.”

He nodded, and she saw that her reply was all the thanks he needed. He asked more questions about school and she told him she studied the birds sometimes in library books. Sometimes she brought those books to the woods. Other times she came with only a tablet and crayons and drew pictures which she took back to the library to identify the birds.

Out at his place, he told her, he’d put up gourds for bird-houses.

“Gourds?”

“The birds love ‘em. Just drill ‘em a hole and they move right in.”

“How big of a hole?”

“Depends on the size o’ the bird. And the gourd.”

In time he pulled out a watch and said, “It’s goin’ on four. You best be gittin’.”

She got only as far as the deadfall beyond the nearby hill
before dropping to her knees and untying the twine with trembling fingers. She stared into the sack and her heart raced. She plunged her hands into the dry golden kernels and ran them through her fingers. Excitement was something new for Elly. She’d never before had something to look forward to.

The next day he didn’t show up. But near the sumac bushes where they’d met twice before he left three lumpy green and yellow striped gourds, each drilled with a different-sized hole and equipped with a wire by which to hang it.

A gift. He had given her another gift!

All of the hunting season passed before she saw him again on the last day. He sauntered over the hill with his shotgun and she stood waiting in plain sight, straight as a needle, a flat, unattractive girl whose eyes appeared darker than they really were in her pale, freckled face. She neither smiled nor quavered, but invited him straight-out, “Wanna see where I hung the gourds?” Never in her life had Elly placed that much trust in anyone.

They met often after that. He was easy to be with, for he understood the woods and its creatures as she did, and whenever they walked through it he kept a respectable distance, walking with his thumbs in his rear overall pockets, slightly bent.

She showed him the orioles, and the blue grosbeaks, and the indigo buntings. And together they watched the birds who came to take up residence in the three striped gourds—two families of sparrows and, in the spring, a lone bluebird. Only after they’d been meeting for many months did she lift a palmful of corn and show him how she could call the birds and entice them to eat from her hand.

The following year, when she was fourteen, she met him one day with a glum expression on her face. They sat on a fallen log, watching the cavity in a nearby tree where an opossum was nesting.

“I can’t see you no more, Glendon.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m sick. I’m prob’ly gonna die.”

Alarmed, he turned toward her. “Die? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, but it’s bad.”

“Well... did they take you to the doctor?”

“Don’t have to. I’m already bleedin’—what could he do?”

“Bleeding?”

She nodded, tight-lipped, resigned, eyes fixed on the opossum hole.

His eyes made one furtive sweep down her dress front, where the acorns had grown to the size of plums.

“You tell your mother about it?”

She shook her head. “Wouldn’t do any good. She’s tetched. It’s like she don’t even know I’m there anymore.”

“How ‘bout your grandma?”

“I’m scared to tell her.”

“Why?”

Elly’s eyes dropped. “Because.”

“Because why?”

She shrugged abjectly, sensing vaguely that this had something to do with being a child of shame.

“You bleedin’ from your girl-place?” he asked. She nodded silently and blushed. “They didn’t tell you, did they?”

“Tell me what?” She flicked him one glance that quickly shied away.

“All females do that. If they don’t, they can’t have babies.”

Her head snapped around and he shifted his attention to the sun peeking around the trunk of an old live-oak tree. “They shoulda told you so you’da known to expect it. Now you go on home and tell your grandma about it and she’ll tell you what to do.”

But Eleanor didn’t. She accepted Glendon’s word that it was something natural. When it happened at regular intervals, she began keeping track of the length of time between the spells, in order to be prepared.