Buried Champagne

 

Helmeted strangers, smoke and the roar of huge engines were the clearest signs of a world ending. Strips of muddy sod gouged from a yard more loved and lived in than maintained lapped like a polluted tide against the piles of shattered timbers, pipes, wires and glass that had been a ramshackle, rambling bungalow. A dank breeze waved small, severed roots in the torn clumps of bulldozed soil. Chemical, nerve and muscle reaction did the same for halved earthworms, showing more organic empathy than forgiveness for the plow. The mimosas and willows out front were already being chainsawed into convenient lengths for removal and stacked against the curb. As a new car passed by, it reflected sunlight from several aluminum pie plates still crudely twined to branches from the mimosa. These sudden flashes of light heliographed a clear, final signal to Little Red, and he prepared to leave.

Little Red was a cardinal. He had been born in the uppermost branches of that mimosa, first nourished on soft insects sticky with the thick scent of the flowers, the humidity of an April in north Louisiana, and his mother's body-heated breath. His family had nested in that tree for fifty years, relying on Dollye's daily attention for food and company since about the time Merton Hotchkiss, her one true love, faltered at the altar.

The routine had changed over the years. The first feeders, store-bought like the bird seed with which they had been filled, had suffered the fate of all finished wood in that climate. Swollen with moisture, then dried and shrunken by the sun, thrown down repeatedly by tornadoes and unsuccessfully patched by the yardman, they were eventually consigned in the time of Little Red's grandma ten times removed to a storage shed in back of the house. That was about the time the yardman was let go, when Dollye realized that her five-year hiatus from her work as Shreveport's most popular dj, "waiting for that goddam television fad to go away so that radio can get back to normal," was likely to be permanent. Her savings account was dwindling, her father's railroad pension was based on his income at the time of his death in '36, she wouldn't be able to draw social security on her own for almost two more decades, and it was time to cut back.

For 37 years, a four-foot, bird shit speckled Christmas angel stared with the eye the neighborhood kids had missed with their bb guns at the bird feeders, which were shelved haphazardly in the shed behind a cedar bed frame.  Should want have arisen for the dryrotted, splintery feeders, a long-legged, sure-footed man could have reached them by stepping over unlabelled crates of empty peanut butter jars, rusty, mismatched nuts and bolts, torn wrapping paper, mildewed ribbons, and dried stage make-up from the building the Marjorie Lyons players had replaced in 1952.

The man probably would have been my father, and he would have made a day of it. He would have started before seven, hacking with a cane knife at the underbrush from around the '34 Plymouth that faced the shed, sunk to its axles in decades of decayed vegetation. His plan would have been ambitiously two-fold, involving both thorough yard maintenance and temporary installation of a battery in the car, so that its headlights could pierce the shed's cobwebbed gloom. At eight, Dollye would have yelled out a back window.  

"What the hell are you doing? I didn't expect you 'til cocktail time."  "Good morning to you, too. I've got to see to get in that shed, and your yard looks like hell. That kudzu's come twenty feet into your back lot from the bayou bank."

"That yard looked good enough for your parents to have been back there picking fresh mint day before yesterday. Don't disturb the garter snakes under that car. They keep the mice out of the yard. And have you been in to get the keys to the shed and the cars? And look out for my night blooming cirrus. Have you had coffee yet? Oh hell, just give me a minute to put a scarf on and I'll be right out."

My father would have then unintentionally sped Dollye up by continuing with his labors. Rationed rubber tires from the war years would have given way as he levered loose a stump from under the Plymouth's front bumper. The scraping of mounds of vines and rubbish being dragged through the flower beds would have unnerved Dollye, and a box of hair pins would have spilled from atop a varnish-peeling armoire in the house. Finally, just as the battered percolator began to gurgle hesitantly on the stove, my father would have found a hornet's nest on the corner of the shed and retreated to the kitchen, knocking loudly before entering as Dollye gathered a torn, quilted housecoat around herself.

"There are some hornets on that shed. I can fix up a smudge pot with one of those old clay flower pots and some leaves and smoke them out as soon as they calm down."

"You damn fool; you'll set fire to the shed. I've got a spray can and some DDT around here someplace. I hope it's not in the shed. You aren't dragging those vines and weeds through my flower beds, are you?"

"Nag, nag, nag. No, thank you. I've already had my coffee this morning, and the red light was on at Southern Maid on the way over here, so I got us some donuts. They're in the car. I'll get them."

"Dear, dear Arthur. You always were the kindest, most thoughtful man in your family. Now you know I love Mary Willis, but it wasn't right the way Big Arthur did you over that insurance agency when he retired. That should have gone to you, and it was just jealousy that came from your brothers ..."

"Well, that can't be helped now."

We Southerners still do that dance every chance we get. You exhibit your care for a close friend by siding with him or her on family questions, and that friend lets you go until you hesitate before actually slighting anyone's kin, then takes your cue and delicately interrupts with a soothing, final statement or change of subject. Subtle tones show that the issue isn't really settled, and the small wound of a disappointment is kept open and encouraged to fester.

Eventually, a huge boil bursts, spewing forth poisons that the whiskey doesn't cauterize at all.  "Are you sure you won't have coffee? It's French Market, and I've already got a cup scalded for you. Little Red and the rest of the birds are waiting for breakfast, and they don't know you. They sure will be glad to have their normal cafe' set back up. I'll get the donuts while I'm out there." Herding my father to the dining room table, Dollye would then have more or less tucked waist-length red hair into a frayed scarf and backed out the kitchen screen door with two pie plates. One would have been full of stale bread crumbs from the day-old place behind the Sunbeam bakery. The other would have held corn flakes from dented and rat-gnawed boxes the Kroger stock boy knew to save for Dollye. Clucking to herself while affixing the pie plates to loops of twine tossed over low branches in the mimosa, my godmother would have torn up one of those fresh Southern Maid donuts and scattered it over the cereal as an extra treat for the birds before going back in the house.

By this time, my father would have been down the hall talking to Dollye's mother, calling down the hallway that led to what was referred to as the spinsters' annex. "I'm sorry I scared you with the noise first thing in the morning, Ethel, but you didn't have a thing to worry about. I couldn't help but see your granddaddy's horse pistol out on the window ledge in Dollye's room. If she hadn't recognized me, I guess she would have either blown my head or her hand off with that old LeMat. Either way, somebody would have heard the noise and come running." Ethel's faint response would have been something to the effect that she was glad none of those terrible things had come to pass, and then Dollye would have steered my father back to the dining room. "Oh boy, these donuts are good! They're just what I wanted, and do you know that I didn't even know I wanted them until you mentioned them? I guess great minds do run in the same channels."

By about the time Dollye had originally expected my father to arrive, her grass would have been mown, along with a goodly percentage of her flower beds, the hornets would have been chased away and the Christmas angel's remaining eye smudged with smoke, two quarts of wine would have been consumed, the hooks and chains from the old bird feeders would have been attached to replacement slats made from scrap wood found around the property, and my father would have damn near crucified himself putting the new feeders up in the mimosa. He would have come back a couple of days later to lower them so that Dollye could reach them, and Little Red's world would have gone on.

As far as Dollye was concerned, there was only one Little Red. Intellectually, she knew that cardinals only lived three or four years, and she'd heard the chirping of babies in the treetop each spring a few weeks after she'd put out straw and rags for nest building, but there are aspects other than the intellectual to change in the Deep South. The only "change" that is politely acknowledged occurs when something in the past recedes far enough to be gilded by kindly memory. I saw Ethel age, and then Dollye. In their minds, typical of our tribe, the farm outside Vicksburg that their ancestor had somehow salvaged after Grant had returned that LeMat Dollye always swore she'd leave to me to him after Pemberton's surrender had expanded more than his descendants' prospects had dwindled by the mid-1960s. Dollye never saw the upholstery fade in her Shreveport home, but the cream on the milk from her great-grandfather's cows became thicker in the telling with each passing year. Generation after generation, the cardinals flew to her hand when she called for Little Red.

Dollye peaked in 1939, and it was a good year for it. The Great Depression had been a great leveler for the country, forcing Yankees to live as Southerners had lived since Grant took Vicksburg. That was the experience that made the whole country start thinking about social programs that would keep anyone from having to live like that ever again. As part of the new commonality, the whole country shared two great fantasies that year. One was "The Wizard of Oz," and the other was "Gone With The Wind." Both sugarcoated our world, but it was recognizable, particularly in the standards of feminine beauty. That was the year Dollye was second runner-up for the title of Miss Louisiana and auditioned for the movie role of Scarlett O'Hara.

She was automatically given the lead in little theater productions, and she read the Sunday funnies to children during her airtime on KLUE. Her voice was the magical South, soft, sweet, gentle, patient and refined when she wanted it to be, boomingly oratorical enough to gather an angry mob to chase five station wagons full of Illinois tourists out of the Vicksburg battlefield park when we visited there in 1965. Her friends liked to have their dates pick them up at Dollye's house, because she always set the tone for joyous evenings. Even the most judgmental parents broke into grins and danced when she encouraged them to do so. It was small wonder that she wanted that time to remain. New paint, or at least the acknowledgement of its need, would have been toxic to her. When Centenary College built a new athletic facility across the street from her house in the early '80s to remind her daily of progress, she swore eternal vengeance on the institution.

Dollye was the difference between a party and an event. She made hot tamale pies for her own parties and sang both to and about the food while she was cooking. At eleven thirty each New Year's Eve, she passed out the shovels and we all staggered out into the yard to dig up the half dozen bottles of Andre' she'd deposited there on the first day of the year. Dollye's theory was that natural aging at ground temperature for a year was the best thing for the bubbly. She also dropped two Alka-Seltzers in her last scotch of the night, swearing that doing so would ward off hangovers. Though the house was falling apart and the yard was full of rusty cars and overflowing storage sheds, Shreveport society looked forward to invitations to her night blooming cirrus parties, at which we would watch the odd Mexican flowers open into bloom by moonlight, the hushed silence at Nature's mysterious workings disturbed by our slapping at the swarms of mosquitoes from the bayou that flanked her property on two sides.

She never got rid of a car. The '29 Dodge she'd driven in college was back there under a tarp, flanked by the '34 Plymouth, a '40 Buick she put the dogs in when company came over, a '52 Plymouth, and the '60 Dodge that limped along until a random act of kindness paid off for her in the late '70s.

That was a surprise to all of us. Right about the time my mother and I moved to Memphis in '67, when I was ten, Dollye noticed that a little old man's grocery shopping schedule coincided with hers. She saw him getting out of a cab at Kroger's just about every week, and one day she approached him and offered him regular weekly rides. He took her up on it, and she started picking him up and dropping him off at his crummy boarding house for Kroger runs every Thursday morning. This went on until 1978, at which point he died and left her three million dollars. What you read about those eccentric Texas oilmen is sometimes true.

Old habits, however, die hard. Three million or not, she had lived well below the poverty line for a long time. She continued to halve paper napkins and reuse tea bags even after the Texan's bequest. The Salvation Army and Goodwill people all knew her and, if she helped friends in need once she had the opportunity to do so, as she certainly did, she often helped with boxes of dented canned goods from those sources.

There had been lean times. The house was paid for, but that 1936-vintage railroad pension didn't stand up to inflation at all. When Ethel died, that social security income ended, and Dollye herself didn't pay anything into the system after television ruined radio. Each winter, she retreated further into the house, because she could afford to heat less and less of it. Her sister Roe's bedroom was sealed, then Ethel's. The living room was very rarely used, and the quiet in that part of the house made raccoons feel comfortable nesting in the attic above it, staining the ceiling terribly. Several times, knowing her loved ones' preferences so well, Dollye gave us Christmas and birthday gifts that we ourselves had donated to Goodwill.

I was there for her last birthday in February, 1999. Hugo, on whom she'd relied for various assistances after most of her loved ones had passed on or moved away, brought her to my mother's apartment for a party, which she, of course, transformed into an event. We made tentative plans to go to Vicksburg for a day trip, but weather prevented us from getting there. She wouldn't let us into her house, where only she and Hugo had set foot since 1994, but she called the birds down from the trees for us during a short visit in the driveway.

That wonderful, magical voice was stilled in November, 1999. After five decades, the birds were no longer fed. The will left everything to Hugo, and the property was sold immediately to Centenary College, which already owned all the adjoining lots. Bulldozers tore into the house and yard January 2nd, 2000. As Little Red flew away from the crashes and diesel fumes of a world ending, a sharp, sudden crack reached his ears, so much more sensitive than those of humans. A bulldozer had found those six bottles of Andre' that had been naturally aging by Dollye's method for a year and a day.