Read Online Some Wildflower In My Heart by Jamie Langston Turner - Free Book Online

Emma Weldy only four brief hours, something deep within me could not imagine our kitchen now without the presence of Birdie Freeman.
    On that first day, had I been granted the use of a single word to describe Birdie Freeman, I would most likely have chosen the word innocent . I realized, of course, that at her age, which I judged to be close to that of Algeria and myself—that is, around fifty—she had undoubtedly seen enough of life to have shattered any rosy ideals about human nature, hope, or the ultimate fulfillment of dreams. Nevertheless, her shining brown eyes were innocent.
    My earliest assumption was that from childhood Birdie Freeman had been shielded from all worldly corruption by protective, religious parents. Further, I could not imagine that she had borne children, for she was so childlike herself. If the relationship between Thomas and me excluded the usual conjugal practices, I reasoned, no doubt there were other couples who, for various reasons, lived under similar terms of cohabitation. Perhaps Birdie and her husband were such a couple.
    At the end of the day, a small, high-spirited man appeared at the kitchen doorway, produced a piercing series of whistles and trills such as one might hear in an aviary, and called to Birdie from the doorway, “Birdie, treasure, you about done?” He was wearing brown pants and a green plaid shirt, and though he was not a tall man, he held his shoulders erect. (I detest a drooping posture.) His ears, somewhat too large for his head, seemed to be angled forward as if to enhance his hearing. The effect was that of an adolescent boy.
    At the time of his arrival, I was posting sheets of safety regulations on the bulletin board beside the rear door. Algeria and Francine were finished for the day and were removing their aprons. Francine was telling Algeria of a serial killer featured on Unsolved Mysteries . Birdie, still scouring the knobs on our large grill with a Brillo pad, was the last to note her husband’s arrival, and by the time she saw him standing in the doorway, the other three of us were staring at him as though viewing a Martian. Perhaps we were all attempting to reconcile this small, nondescript man before us with the mischievous one who had packed two plain pieces of bread and eight cookies in Birdie’s lunch. For the benefit of those familiar with politics in the nineties, Mickey Freeman could be said to resemble Ross Perot.
    Mickey smiled at us, bowed comically as if ending a vaudeville act, then raised his voice and repeated his question. “Birdie, treasure, you about done?” His words brought to mind a book I had read soon after its publication in 1991. I had seen an interview of the author, Kaye Gibbons, on a television program featuring southern writers. Her voice had enchanted me, and I had immediately secured copies of her three novels: Ellen Foster, A Virtuous Woman , and A Cure for Dreams . She has since written others. In A Cure for Dreams , the young narrator and her mother discuss men and their manner of addressing their wives in public. The mother informs her daughter that the most polite mode of address includes the woman’s name, spoken in a respectful tone, and she warns the girl to reject a man who uses honeyed, insincere pet names such as dear or, even more detestable, one who merely commands “Come on!” without any accompanying noun of address.
    I believe that there is a great deal of truth in this mother’s observation. If such were possible, a woman would do well to listen to her prospective husband—without his knowing it, of course—for many years before marrying him in order to project his voice to a time when the newly spun threads of courtship have been anchored into the loom of marriage. During the television interview with Kaye Gibbons, she was asked why most of the positive characters in her books were women and why the men usually vanished from the plot through a variety of