Morning Glory

Chapter 8

Falling into bed that night, Eleanor lay wide-awake, thinking of the day past, the day to come, the years ahead. Would she and Will live peaceably or fight often? Fighting was something new to her. In the years she’d been married to Glendon, they’d never fought-perhaps because Glendon was just too lazy.

In the place where she’d grown up there was no fighting either. And no laughter. Instead, there had been tension, never-ending tension. From her earliest memories it was there, always hovering like a monster threatening to swoop down and scoop her up with its black wings. It was there in the way Grandmother carried herself, as if to let her shoulders wilt would displease the Lord. It was there in her mother’s careful attempts to walk quietly, carry out orders without complaint, and never meet Grandmother’s eyes. But it was greatest when Grandfather came home. Then the praying would intensify. Then the "purifying" would begin.

Eleanor would kneel on the hard parlor floor, as ordered, while Grandfather raised his hands toward the ceiling and, with his scraggly gray beard trembling and his eyes rolled back in his head, would call down forgiveness from God. Beside her, Grandmother would moan and carry on like a dog having fits, then start talking gibberish as her body trembled. And Mother-the sinner-would squeeze her eyes shut and interlace her fingers so tightly the knuckles turned white, and rock pitifully on her knees while her lips moved silently. And she, Eleanor-the child of shame-would lower her forehead to her folded hands and peek out with one eye at the spectacle, wondering what it was she and her mother had done.

It seemed impossible that Mother could have done anything bad. Mother was meek as a violet, hardly ever spoke at all, except when Grandfather demanded that she pray aloud and ask forgiveness for her depravity. What was depravity? the child, Eleanor, wondered. And why was she a child of shame?

While Eleanor was small Mother sometimes talked to her, quietly, in the privacy of the bedroom they shared. But as time went on, Mother grew more tacit and withdrawn. She worked hard-Grandmother saw to that. She did all the gardening, while Grandmother pulled back the edge of the shade and stood sentinel. If anyone passed on the road, Grandmother would hasten to the back door and hiss through a crack, "Ssst! Get in here, Chloe!" until in time, Chloe no longer waited for the order, but scuttled inside at the first glimpse of anyone approaching.

Three were allowed near, only three, and these out of necessity: the milkman, who left his bottles on the back step; the Raleigh man from whom they bought their pantry stock; and an old man named Dinsmore who delivered ice for their icebox until his son, Glendon, took over. If anyone else knocked on their door-the school principal, an occasional tramp looking for a free meal, the census taker-they saw no more than a front shade being bent stealthily from inside.

Eventually the truant officer began coming, pounding on the door authoritatively, demanding that it be opened. Did they have a child in there? If so, she had to attend school: it was the law.

Grandmother would stand well away from the drawn shades, her face a deadly mask, and whisper, "Silence, Eleanor, don’t say a word!"

Then one time the truant officer came when Grandfather was home. This time he shouted, "Albert See? We know you have a child in there who’s school age. If you don’t open this door I’ll get a court order that’ll give me the right to break it down and take her! You want me to do that, See?"

And so Eleanor’s schooldays began. But they were painful for the colorless child already a year older and a head taller than the others in her first grade class. The other children treated her like the oddity she was-a gawky, silent eccentric who was ignorant of the most basic games, didn’t know how to function in a group, and stared at everything and everybody with big green eyes. She was hesitant at everything and when she occasionally showed moments of glee, jumping and clapping at some amusement, she did so with disquieting abruptness, then fell still as if someone had turned off her switch. When teachers tried to be kind, she backed away as if threatened. When children snickered, she stuck out her tongue at them. And the children snickered with cruel regularity.

School, to Eleanor, seemed like exchanging one prison for another. So she began playing hooky. The first time she did it she feared God would find out and tell Grandmother. But when He didn’t, she tried it again, spending the day in the woods and fields, discovering the wonder of true freedom at last. She knew well how to sit still and silent-in that house behind the green shades she did a lot of that-and for the first time, it reaped rewards. The creatures learned to trust her, to go about their daily routine as if she were one of them-snakes and spiders and squirrels and birds. Most of all the birds. To Eleanor, those wonderful creatures, the only ones not restrained to earth, had the greatest freedom at all.

She began studying them. When Miss Buttry’s fifth grade class went to the library Eleanor found an Audubon book with colored plates and descriptions of birds’habitats, nests, eggs and voices. In the wilds, she began identifying them: the ruby-crowned kinglet, a spirited bundle of elfin music; the cedar waxwings, who appeared in flocks, seemed always affectionate and sometimes got drunk on overripe fruit; the blue jay, pompous and arrogant, but even more beautiful than the meek cardinals and tanagers.

She brought crumbs in her pockets and laid them in a circle around her, then sat as still as her friend, the barred owl, until a purple finch came and perched in a nearby pine bough, serenading with its mellifluous warble. In time it descended to a lower branch where it cocked its head to study her. She outwaited the finch until eventually he advanced and ate her bread. She found the finch a second day-she was convinced it was the same bird-and yet a third, and when she’d learned to imitate its call, summoned it as effortlessly as other children whistled up their dog. Then one day she stood like the Statue of Liberty, the crumbs in her palm, and the finch perched on her hand to eat.

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 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 which brayed and side-stepped, nearly overturning Dinsmore’s wagon.

"Whoa!" he barked, while the animal nearly splintered the single-tree 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 milk 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 widely, 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 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 birdhouses.

"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.

When she was fifteen she asked him what a child of shame meant.

"Why?"

"Because that’s what I am. They tell me all the time."

"They tell you!" His face grew taut and he picked up a stick, snapped it into four pieces and flung them away. "It’s nothin’," he said fiercely.

"It’s somethin’ wicked, isn’t it?"

"Now how could that be? You ain’t wicked, are you?"

"I disobey them and run away from school."

"That don’t make you a child of shame."

"Then what does?" When he remained silent, she appealed, "You’re my friend, Glendon. If you won’t tell me, who will?"

He sat on the forest floor with both elbows hooked over his knees, staring at the broken stick.

"All right, I’ll tell you. Remember when we saw the quails mating? Remember what happened when the male got on top of the female?" He gave her a quick glance and she nodded. "That’s how humans mate, too, but they’re only supposed to do it if they’re married. If they do it when they’re not, and they get a baby, people like your grandma call it a child of shame."

"Then I am one."

"No, you ain’t."

"But if-"

"No, you ain’t! Now that’s the last I wanna hear of it!"

"But I ain’t got no daddy."

"And it ain’t your fault neither, is it? So whose shame is it?"

She suddenly understood the cleansings, and why her mother was called the sinner. But who was her daddy? Would she ever know?

"Glendon?"

"What?"

"Am I a bastard?" She’d heard the word whispered behind her back at school.

"Elly, you got to learn not to worry about things that ain’t important. What’s important is you’re a good person inside."

They sat silently for a long time, listening to a flock of sparrows twittering in the buckthorn bushes where the gourds hung. Eleanor raised her eyes to the swatches of blue sky visible between the branches overhead.

"You ever wish somebody would die, Glendon?"

He considered soberly before answering. "No, guess I haven’t."

"Sometimes I wish my grandparents would die so my mother and me wouldn’t have to pray no more and I could pull up the shades in the house and let Mother outside. A person who’s good inside wouldn’t wish such a thing, I don’t think."

He reached out and laid a consoling hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he’d ever touched her deliberately.

Eleanor got her wish the year she turned sixteen. Albert See died while on circuit… in the bed of a woman named Mathilde King. Mathilde King, it turned out, was black and gave her favors only for money.

Elly reported his death to Glendon with no show of grief. When he touched her cheek she said, "It’s all right, Glendon. He was the real sinner."

The shock and shame of the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death rendered Lottie See incapable of facing even her daughter and granddaughter thereafter. She lived less than a year, most of that year spent sitting in a hard, spindle-backed chair facing one corner of the front parlor where the green shades had been sealed to the edges of the window casings with tape. She no longer spoke except to pray, or forced Chloe to repent, but simply sat staring at the wall until one day her head slumped over and her hands dropped to her sides.

When Elly reported her grandmother’s death to Glendon there were again no tears or mourning. He took her hand and held it while they sat silently on a log, listening to the woodlife around them.

"People like them… they’re probably happier dead," he said. "They had no notion of what happiness is."

Elly stared straight ahead. "I can see you whenever I want from now on. Mother won’t stop me, and I’ll be quittin’ school to stay home and take care of her."

Eleanor removed the tape from the shades, but when she pulled them up Chloe screeched and huddled, protecting her head as if from a blow. Her manic fright no longer held any connection to reality. The death of her parents, instead of freeing Chloe, cast her deeper into her world of madness. She could do nothing for herself, so her care was left to Eleanor, who fed and clothed her and saw to her daily needs.

When Elly was eighteen Glendon’s father died. His grief was a sharp contrast to Elly’s own lack of emotions upon the deaths of her grandparents. They met in the woods and he cried pitifully. She opened her arms and held him for the first time. "Aw, Glendon, don’t cry… don’t cry." But secretly she thought it beautiful that anyone could cry for the death of a parent. She cradled him against her breast, and when his weeping stopped, he expunged his residual grief within her virgin body. For Elly it was an act not of carnal, but of spiritual love. She no longer prayed, nor would she, ever again. But to comfort one so bereaved in such a manner was a prayer more meaningful than any she’d ever been forced to say on her knees in that house of shadow.

When it was over, she lay on her back, studying the pale gold sky through the tender new shoots of spring buds, and said, "I don’t want no children of shame, Glendon."

He held her hand tightly. "You won’t have. You’ll marry me, won’t you, Elly?"

"I can’t. I have to take care of my mother."

"You could take care of her just as good at my house, couldn’t you? And it’s gonna be awful lonely there. Why, we could take care of her together. I wouldn’t mind having her live with us-and she remembers me, doesn’t she? From when I used to deliver ice to your house?"

"I never told her about you, Glendon. She wouldn’t understand anyway. She’s crazy, don’t you see? Scared of the daylight. She never goes out of our house anymore, and I’m afraid if I tried to take her out she’d just plain die of fright."

But Chloe died anyway, within a year of her parents, peacefully, in her sleep. The day she was buried, Elly packed her few meager possessions, closed the door on all those drawn shades, boarded Glendon’s wagon and never looked back. They drove to Calhoun, picked up a wedding license at the courthouse and were married within the hour. Their wedding was not so much the consummation of a courtship as a natural extension of two lonely lives that were less lonely when combined. Their married life was much the same: companionship, but no great passion.

And now Elly was marrying again, in a similar way, for similar reasons. She lay in her bed, thinking about tomorrow, a lump in her throat. How was it crazy Elly See never ended up making a marriage that was more than a commonsense agreement? She had feelings too-hurts, wishes, wants like anybody else. Had they been sealed inside her so long that they’d become dried up by all the years she’d been forced into submission and silence in that darkened house? Nobody had taught her a woman’s ways with a man. Loving the boys was easy, but letting a man know how you felt about him was another thing.

Why couldn’t she have said, Will, I’m scared you’ll get hurt out there with the bees? Instead she’d thrown an egg. An egg, for mercy sake, when he’d done so much for her and only wanted to do more. Tears of mortification stung her eyes and she covered them with an arm, remembering. Something strange had happened when he went away laughing instead of angry. Something strange in the pit of her stomach. It was still there when he returned to the house for supper, a feeling she hadn’t had before, not even with Glendon. A highness, sort of. A pushing against the bottom of her heart, a tightness in the throat.

It came again, strong and insistent as she pictured Will, all lank and lean and so different from Glendon. Shaved every morning, washed three times a day and put on clean britches each sunrise. Made her more dirty laundry in one week than Glendon had made in a month. But she didn’t mind. Not at all. Sometimes, ironing his clothes, she’d think of him in them, and the feeling would come again. A tumble in her stomach, a rise in her blood.

When he had come into the kitchen earlier, and had taken her arm, naked-chested, dark-skinned and still wet from washing at the well, she’d felt almost lightheaded from it. Crazy Elly, wishing Will Parker would kiss her. For a minute she’d thought he might, but he hadn’t after all, and common sense told her why. ’Cause she was pregnant, plain and dumb.

She curled into a ball on the bed, miserable, because tomorrow was her wedding and she’d been the one who’d had to do the asking.