Some Wildflower In My Heart by Jamie Langston Turner Page B

arrival. I nevertheless watched for the boy each day. I learned from the lunchroom roster that Bennet was his first name, Caldwell being his last, and I wonder even today what became of young Bennet Caldwell. I am certain that he stands tall among his peers.
    I must stop here. Once again I am aware of the inadequacies of my story as I hold it against professional standards of writing, for I know that it is riddled with flaws of implausibility. The coincidental timing of my arrival at Emma Weldy Elementary School at the very moment that Mrs. Edgecombe was faced with the sudden loss of a cafeteria worker and the prospect of an unattended class during the last hour of the school day seems unlikely even to me, to whom it happened. Had my bus arrived ten minutes earlier, my inquiry concerning a position at the school might have played out quite differently, and I might never have secured employment among the tutors and governors of children. Consequently, I might never have met Birdie Freeman.

6
The Voice of Doves
    Had Birdie Freeman been a flintier woman, producing friction within her small world, her story would more actively and instantly spark the reader’s interest. If I could report that Birdie’s quiet, religious fervor and virtuous conduct rankled us all, that Algeria held out against her first friendly overtures with her usual wary cynicism, that Francine found her primness laughable, that I hated the very sight of her, then my story would hold the valued appeal of conflict that lies at the heart of drama.
    Such claims about Birdie Freeman, however, would be patently false. I cannot alter the truth, and the truth is that we all regarded her favorably, though for the first three months of our acquaintance my own regard took the outward form of hostility, and that most convincingly. And perhaps I was not pretending altogether. As I recall, my feelings during those early months were dichotomous. On the one hand, I was powerfully drawn to Birdie, while on the other, I resisted her intensely.
    At the end of Birdie’s first week, it seemed that she had been with us for years. On Wednesday morning of the following week, after school had officially begun, I was on my way to work at 6:10. The sky was dark yet, with a faint glow of sherbet orange seeping over the eastern horizon. I was sitting in my Ford Fairlane at the stoplight on the outskirts of Filbert, at an intersection anchored by a Winn Dixie Grocery Store, the Mirror Brite Car Wash, Sonny’s Pizza Shack, and Lackey’s Grass-Is-Greener Nursery.
    At the sight of the nursery, Birdie’s earnest face came to mind, for she had presented me with a tiny bonsai the day before, a plant that she had nurtured from a cutting that Mervin Lackey, the owner of the Grass-Is-Greener Nursery, had given her. Mervin Lackey was Birdie’s neighbor. “His yard looks like the Garden of Eden!” she had told me. She did not know the name of the little tree, which struck me as careless. I learned later its name is Serissa, and it is also known as Tree of a Thousand Stars.
    Though I had accepted her gift without comment other than the requisite thank-you and had asked Birdie to set it on top of my file cabinet so that it would be out of my way, I had taken the bonsai home that afternoon and examined it at length. Including its jade green four-inch square ceramic planter, the miniature tree stood only seven inches high, its tiny trunk the girth of a pencil, its branches fanned out to one side in the asymmetrical contour of a candle flame near an open window. Upon the branches sprouted a delicate profusion of emerald leaves the shape of teardrops, and interspersed among these were fourteen—I counted them three times—pearl white blossoms, no larger than the buttons on a baby’s dress, and as many unopened buds.
    â€œI just trimmed its roots a couple of months ago,” Birdie had said when she gave it to me, “and I was fixing to shape up the