Morning Glory

'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.