Head Off & Split: Poems

Alice Butler

80 Alice Butler (for James T. Hill, Uncle Junior) We stand shoulder to waist in her backyard. I am leaving. Something, my grandmother says, I do very well. We have come from burying her favorite sister. Beulah Davenport has outlived them all. A white dove resembling a lost bird off a soapbox lands on the mean neighbor’s roof two hundred feet away. We rarely look that way unless we have to. We have to. The white bird, we both know, has never set foot in the air of South Carolina before. We know this without saying a word into that air. Never have we seen so white a bird before. In the middle of remembering the white and yellow flowers of the service, the white bird has landed, smack-dab in the middle of our sad-joy. She looked real good, grandmother had just pronounced. Right then the whiter-than-white bird, which had never before set wing or beak in the air of South Carolina, began his march down the cold lip of the mean neighbor’s tin roof, landing finally on the speckled rim of the washtub. Now, the whiter-than-white bird is as close as a kiss we both want to know. All sweet funerary talk has stopped. My grandmother is ninety-five. Nothing 81 on her trembles. But this, the whitest bird in the world, prancing about on a tin tub in South Carolina, does. In a voice borrowed from a diamond miner, carefully, she taps, breaking the air into baby blue shards, Alice, Sister, that you? I do not move, comfort, or join in this moment in any way. All around us, lavishly private. More private than a modest woman lifting her dress to a lover, for the first time. More delicate than the lace around this old woman’s favorite sitting chair, in the front room of the white clapboard house, leaning just behind us. For three days, the granddaughter, who by then has lived up to what she is best known for, is her usual four hundred miles away, when she gets her three o’clock call. The pearl-white-bird report comes in like regular, RCA Victor news, spoken from the crackling wired fabric of voice box & ears. On the fourth day the call arrives a little later. The diamond miner’s voice has dug down, a few feet deeper. I am the oldest granddaughter. It is a report given for only me to hear: She’s all the way across now, Child. Just wanted to let me know she made it free & clear. “Beulah,” she told me, “when you get here, remember, heaven will only let you out to pass back good news.” ...