'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
