“Flea markets are a blight on society,” I replied. “They are often nothing but dens of thieves peddling their stolen wares.”
“You know good and well that's not always the case,” Thomas remonstrated teasingly. Then his eyes brightened. “Say, I'll tell you what, though. You ride along with me, and I'll drop you off at that library in Derby you like so much, and then I'll go and hobnob with the thieves and robbers all by myself.”
“Some of the vendors have been arrested and their goods confiscated,” I said with asperity. The mention of the library made the offer tempting, however. I generally visited the Derby Public Library on Tuesdays after my piano lesson at Birdie's house, but if I went today I could return the books that I had already finished and check out more. I was particularly wanting to look for a copy of a book by Tobias Wolff called
This Boy's Life
, of which I had read several favorable reviews. I had known of the book for perhaps four years but for some reason had never secured a copy. Only recently I had once again seen it cited on a list of “Contemporary Memoirs Worth Reading.” Though I prefer novels, I also read biographies, historical works, adventure sagas, and collections of essays. In this way I am able to mollify my literary conscience.
I do not live altogether in a fantasy world
, I can tell myself.
I have one foot firmly planted in reality
.
“The library closes at six on Sundays,” I said, with a glance at the clock upon the wall.
“Well, then, that's perfect,” said Thomas. “It's all set. We can be there in twelve minutes, and that'll leave us both forty-five minutes or so to look around. Let's go!” He bowed in the kitchen doorway with an absurdly exaggerated flourish of the hand toward the front door, in the fashion of an Elizabethan courtier.
Without reply I hastened to gather my library books and purse from my bedroom, then put on my coat and followed Thomas to the car. The trip to Derby passed quickly, with Thomas telling me a story I had heard before. It was a story his aunt Prissy had loved to recite concerning her father, who had purportedly driven his 1928 Ford down into the Grand Canyon on a mule trail and forded the Colorado River in the car.
“Come to think of it, betcha that was one of them urban legends, too!” he said when he finished. “Nobody could've done that. Betcha there's grown people all over the country claimin' their uncles and grandpas did the same thing.” A few moments later, as we passed Shepherd's Valley Cemetery and the Freemans' house, Thomas chuckled. “I'll have to ask Mickey if he's ever heard any of these crazy stories. He'll get a kick out of 'em.”
I found myself wondering, as I cast my gaze upon Birdie's house, how the icing of the cupcakes had gone the night before. Had Mickey helped her as he had promised? And in spite of myself, another thought crossed my mind. I wondered if the Christmas program at their church had been well received that morning. Had Birdie played an organ solo at some point? It came to me that Birdie and Mickey would soon be preparing to leave their house, frosted cupcakes in hand, for the Sunday evening service and the fellowship of which they had spoken.
I did, in fact, find
This Boy's Life
at the library that day, along with several other books that interested me, and as I stood in the glass-enclosed lobby a few minutes before six o'clock waiting for Thomas to return for me, I riffled through the pages of Tobias Wolff's book, sensing the familiar swell of anticipation that every avid reader knows. My eyes lighted upon an account of Tobias Wolff's mother, who was an active listener to the woes of others, responding readily, as he described it, “with intense concentration and partisan outbursts of sympathy.” A picture of Birdie sprang to my mind. I saw her brown eyes agleam with feeling as she listened to a stranger in a supermarket line. I heard her prompt words of comfort, of encouragement, of goodwill. And, oddly, I felt the touch of her hand, as if I were the stranger.
It was at this juncture that a most unexpected encounter occurred. A station wagon pulled to a stop in front of the entrance. Behind me I heard a voice from inside the library. “Here's our ride, Willard! I'll go on out and tell Jewel you'll be along directly, soon as you get all the lights out and things locked up nice and tight.” Even though spoken from the other side of the glass door, I heard the words distinctly.
The door behind me opened, and I heard the voice again. “Oh, my stars, I didn't know somebody was out here waiting in the vestibule!” I believe it was at that instant that I identified the woman's voice, though I did not turn around. Deep and throaty with a muffled resonance, it was not a voice that one could easily forget. “Just set your mind at ease, honey,” she said, and as I heard her slow steps shuffling toward me from behind, I stiffened with dread. “We won't go off and leave you all by your lonesome. No, sir, not a bit of it! Willard and me will wait right here with you till your ride shows up.”
By this time she had reached my side. As she turned slowly to face me, a most peculiar smile transformed her features into an expression of luminous pain, although, given her words, I was quite certain, as I had been upon our first meeting in Birdie's driveway, that she meant it for joy. Her face was prominently presented to the world with no softening frame of hair, for she wore a dark green woolen scarf wound and cinched tightly about her head, well off her brow. Indeed, she could have passed for an old Russian grandmother. Her eyebrows, extraordinarily thick, hung down over her eyes like bushy visors. She was a large woman, you may remember, and the copious gray cape that she wore today amplified her size.
“Why, I'll be if it's not Margaret Tuttle!” she cried. “Remember meâEldeen Rafferty? I met you at Birdie's that day when the Lord sent me out there to give away my prize turkey. And there you were in Birdie's driveway, just standin' there waitin' like you are right now! My, my, my. I'm glad I decided to come to the library today, else I wouldn't of seen you!” She laughed with delight and clapped her large, gloved hands together. Then she leaned forward a bit and raised the volume of her voice, as if my hearing were impaired. “Did he bake up nice and juicy and golden brown for you?”
I looked quickly toward the station wagon outside and saw that a woman had emerged from it and was hurrying toward the entrance with an umbrella, for a light pattering of rain had commenced. I wished earnestly for Thomas's arrival. My mind suddenly filled with uncharitable thoughts as I imagined him engaged in price haggling with some shady huckster at the flea market while I was forced to wait in the company of this woman of unparalleled verbosity.
Turning back to Eldeen Rafferty, I nodded. “Yes, the turkey was most satisfactory.”
“Oh, now, that tickles me good to hear that!” she said. “I keep asking Birdie about you every week at church. âHow's your pretty friend Margaret Tuttle?' I say to her, and she says, âOh, just as pretty as ever.' I told her there was something about you that I just couldn't put my finger on”âshe lifted a large forefinger and glared at it fiercelyâ“but it was something I liked, something I liked a
whole lot
.” With the last two words she jabbed her finger toward me and bestowed upon me another of her tortured smiles.
The other woman had made her way from outdoors into the lobby by now. “That's my daughter Jewel,” Eldeen said proudly, and the woman smiled cordially. “This here's my friend Margaret Tuttle,” Eldeen said to Jewel. “We're just waitin' till her ride comes.” Before I could assure her that I would wait outside alone, she cried out, “Oh, good, and here comes Willard now! You can meet him, too!” She pointed to the man now locking the interior door and said, as if announcing a dignitary, “That's my son-in-law, Willard Scoggins. He's Jewel's husband.” I knew the man by sight, of course, having frequented the Derby Public Library for many years. He looked up and spoke a friendly word of greeting.
“He works here,” Eldeen continued, “and I've spent the afternoon today with him here at the library like I do sometimes, and now we're on our way to church. Normally he doesn't work till closing time on Sundays because of choir practiceâhe leads the choir, you seeâbut there isn't any choir practice tonight. And even at that, he'd normally ride to church in his own car, except that it's in the shop gettin' the brakes fixed, so we're havin' to double up. He's felt the brakes slippin' for a while now. The pedal would go all the way to the floor!” She extended one arm, pressing the heel of her hand forward as if to demonstrate the faulty pedal. I was astounded, as I had been at our previous meeting, that the woman took for granted my interest in the mundane details of her life.
As Jewel turned to speak to Willard, Eldeen moved closer to me and said in a confiding tone, “Willard just got promoted to head librarian a little over two months ago. He moved into a new office, the one right off the big check-out desk, you know. That's where Miss Mabel Weatherby's office used to be. It has the big plaster of Paris penguin sittin' by the door and that great big globe clock on the wall, which is sure a sight to behold except that most all the countries of Africa has different names now, but I say hang on to it 'cause someday it'll be an antique!”
With barely a pause for breath, the woman pressed forward. “Miss Weatherby left lots of her things for Willard to use since she doesn't have any place for them at home in her little apartment, which to hear her tell it is no bigger'n a doll's house. You ought to see this pair of bookends she left Willard that's two halves of a unicorn. They're
heavy
, tooâmade out of real cast iron. I told him he sure better not drop the front half on his toe 'cause that horn could poke a hole right through a body's shoe, not to mention their foot! She's retired now, you knowâMiss Weatherby, that is. They gave her a going-away party back in September and had it right here in the library with streamers and party hats and whistles and all kinds of folderol. Had lots of refreshments, too. Jewel made some of the best little cream cheese cakes with a little dollop of raspberry sauce plopped on top and some pretty little rolled-up ham salad sandwiches and deviled eggs and this punch that had dabs of orange sherbet floatin' around in it and ⦔
“Mama, your friend might not be interested in the whole menu,” Jewel said, smiling at me from behind Eldeen. Her husband, I noticed, was moving about the small lobby, retrieving bits of paper and depositing them into the trash receptacle. He picked up two soft drink cans against the wall and shook them slightly.
At this point I saw Thomas pull up behind the station wagon, and with great relief I made ready to move toward the door.
“Oh, this must be your ride!” Eldeen said happily. “Be sure before you get in, though! I read in the paper about that woman over in Honea Path who jumped in the backseat of a car at a stoplight without lookin' good at the driver, and she was a'diggin' round in her pocketbook lookin' for some Rolaids and talkin' so much that she didn't find out till six blocks later that it wasn't her son at all but some man from Greenwood on his way home from a huntin' trip! Now, if that doesn't beat all! They reported it in the âFunny Tidbits' column, but nowadays it could of turned out to be a tragedy instead of a funny tidbit if that driver'd had the devil in his heart. You just know if he was out huntin', he must of had all kinds of guns and weapons with him that he could of put to evil use!”
Willard Scoggins was holding the door open for me, and Jewel came to my side to escort me to my car with her umbrella. I was suddenly reminded of a lovely poem by Archibald Rutledge in which the central image is that of a man walking his friend to the car in the rain. I had found a large volume of Mr. Rutledge's poems in the library a month earlier and had read many of them by now.
Thomas was leaning across the front seat, I noticed, and in a moment the passenger door swung open for me.
“I sure hope we get to see each other again sometime, Margaret!” Eldeen called after me. “The Lord's brought you to my mind over and over and over since I met you! I almost didn't come to the library with Willard this afternoon, but I'm sure thankful I did, else I would of missed you!” She was still talking when I closed the car door. Jewel stepped back from the curb and waved good-bye to me as Thomas pulled around the station wagon, behind the steering wheel of which sat a teenaged boy. As I recalled from our first meeting, Eldeen had a grandson with a driver's license.
“Who was that hollerin' at you?” Thomas asked.
“A woman who gives tongue to every thought that passes through her mind,” I said.
Thomas chuckled and said, “Sure sounded like she could talk the hind leg off a donkey.”
Had I known that more surprises were to be unfolded before we arrived home that Sunday evening, I might not have felt so grateful to be rescued from Eldeen Rafferty. Thomas took it into his mind to stop for a banana split at a place called Darlene's Kreamy Kones next to the Wal-Mart in Derby. He insisted that I choose something also and would not be persuaded otherwise. At last I told him that I would take a small dish of vanilla ice cream, and though he snorted with contempt, he ordered it for me.
We settled into a booth with our dishes before us. I recall the discomfort that I felt at sitting directly across from Thomas with a bright fluorescent light directly overhead. At home we took our meals at adjacent sides of the kitchen table rather than opposite each other, so when I raised my eyes and looked straight ahead, I saw the back door, and Thomas, when he did the same, saw a wall calendar from Norm's Hardware Store.
As we ate our ice cream in the red vinyl booth at Darlene's Kreamy Kones, Thomas talked of what he had seen at the flea market, concluding that “there sure was a bunch of junk for sale.” His only purchase had been a burlap bag of roasted peanuts, about which he now expressed doubts. “At that price, half of 'em's prob'ly rotten in the shell.”