She wiped her grimy hands on her apron and sighed.
A streak of black muck greased the cotton fabric where her hands swept over it and she looked out into an unrelenting Mississippi Delta morning. The apricot sky blanketed bulbous cotton bolls that spread like infinite white hot stars among a dirt floor galaxy.
It was a morning that she had witnessed for 72 years straight.
She’d seen it more times than she’d seen her kids, or her bosses, or her husband, who currently lay beneath her feet as his body transmogrified itself back into the dust of Creation from whence it came. She’d watched the sun peel back the sky and ingratiate itself upon this particular patch of the world since before she owned a pair of shoes. It would never stop mesmerizing her, if she ever had time to be mesmerized.
The galvanized tin tub was out and the iron pot was boiling. She was about to wash somebody else’s clothes again. It was a ritual she’d done more times than she could count, and it wasn’t because she couldn’t count. She was smarter than everyone thought she was, and she knew it, too. It’s what made her smile that bright smile and heave that heavy sigh when the bank teller started talking to her like she was a kindergartner who was lost in the hallway before her first day of school.
She washed clothes nearly every day, save for Sunday, which was reserved for the white paneled church with the small tower which held a rusting bell that croaked more than rang. If somebody wanted her to wash clothes on the Sabbath they could go to Hell, and they were going there anyway if they asked such a heretic thing in the first place.
She washed clothes so much that the wrinkles on her pruney fingers ran cavernous and interminable, the channeled lines undulating across her stems like the deep and steep-sided canyons of America’s greatest natural wonder. Beyond the narrowed blood vessels constricting her extremities were palms caked in callouses and nipped with burns. The service ribbons she boasted from living the life in which she lived. Those hands had held her dying baby and her first dollar bill.
She paused her work to squint at the dogwood tree whose white flowers exploded into life from crooked branches that reached out to God Itself as if in praise. She didn’t see her first bird in that tree, but it’s where she fell in love with their superpower. The way they soared high above the Mississippi sky and pirouetted in glory above her. The graceful beating of their great wings pushing them ever closer to Heaven. The bird could go anywhere it wanted, and often did. But it had the ability to always come back.
That was true freedom in her mind.
It was why she envied them so much, why she respected them and yearned for them more than any of the other animals that she sometimes fawned over and sometimes killed for meat.
Indigo buntings the color of a noon summer sky skittered past her during the daytimes, and she’d watch in awe while her hands rotely moved up and down the wash bin of her desolate front yard. Robins whose tuxedo tail wings wrapped around a chest of fire stared at her in haunting judgment before taking off into the unknown yet again. Migrating pelicans whose freakish bills poked downward in mock admonishment ruled a sky painted in violet and streaked with cirrus clouds.
These were the objects of her jealousy and her awe.
When she was washing clothes as a little girl she’d take breaks and play bird with her older sisters, and they’d run around the yard flapping their emaciated arms while they ran down the red dirt hills and kicked dirt clods up in their faux flying path.
But their feet never left the ground.
The bird inspired her passion for aeronautics. They made it worth having eyes, eyes that had seen her family leave her one by one, for college or war or a trip across the mortal plane and into the mysterious ether beyond, all while she sat steadfastly inside a tarpaper shack that smelled always of smoke.
But the birds never left.
When her eyes weren’t worth having around she’d close them and lift her head in the air and spread her arms out wide and let the wind take her to another universe where she’d be ascending into a cosmos unlike any she could consciously comprehend. She’d let out a hefty exhale and spin until the brilliant dots in her head lit up the blackness and she was forced to open her eyes because they were worth having again.
Her best friend Ruth always wanted a radio. Her pappy coveted an ivory walking cane. But she didn’t want anything of the sort and never had. She hadn’t ever been a passenger in a nice luxury car. She’d never even driven one herself. But that didn’t bother her none.
She didn’t want to ride in a Packard Twin 6 Roadster.
She wanted to fly.
To see the world from a height witnessed only by God Itself would almost be like cheating life. To feel the world around you recede until it resembles a tiny terrarium housing all flora and fauna to ever exist both living and dead.
To smell the sky.
Humans could fly now, too. She’d heard it for the first time on the radio at Al’s Grocery in town. But a plane ticket cost more than what she had made in her entire life. How would she even get to Atlanta anyway? She’d heard about people who’d flown before, but she didn’t know any herself. She’d listen to Magpie and Bear at The Catfish Cabin talk about some so and so who’d paid $268 for a flight from New York City to San Francisco. The guy was one of those businessman types who always wanted to make a good impression and never had a lick of hair out of place. But it got so miserable and turbulent at such an altitude on board that he ended up blowing chunks all over his three piece suit and the guy’s suit next to him, too. The story made her laugh, even if it was a little crass, but it didn’t kill her daydreams or her desire.
The birds had taught her that flying was the only type of sovereignty worth truly having. It was what separated mere mortals from angels and what kept her head in the cotton swab clouds while her tired and bunioned feet were planted firmly on the ground.
She was stirring the clothes in the iron pot like a witch creating a ghastly brew of snakes’ heads and children’s toes. She’d finish the wash and scrub the stains on the board and hang the garments to dry with weathered clothespins on a wire rod that stretched out across the yard. The routine was ingrained in her soul. She could do it without even pretending to try, which gave her more time to watch her feathered friends dot the sky.
At her age it was impossible not to feel the weight of her life’s work starting to crack her degenerating bones. Her husband had lost his leg in the trenches and she always wished she could invent some contraption that could make him fly across the yard so he didn’t have to struggle with the porch steps or get tired and embarrassed and start yelling at her because he knew he was no longer her husband but yet another needy child.
She could use that contraption today.
A prothonotary warbler glided from beyond the universe and into the dogwood tree. She dropped her broom on the browning grass and limped over to the elderly plant. The bird was in its highest branches and talking as if it had something to say. A sharp chirping sound kept erupting from its tiny beak.
She wasn’t jealous of the song. It was only their flight that mattered to her. But she appreciated its beauty nonetheless. She crept closer to the trunk of the tree as her fantasy slowly shifted into hallucination. She pictured a pack of the little electric yellow feather balls firing out into the sky and careening into it like it was a flat wall, bursting into a cloud of smoke and turning into stars. They pounded into the horizon and lit up like one of those long cigarettes Mrs. Henson smokes, bright and fast. She imagined that they all became the universe.
Her fantasy was broken by the warbler chittering its way into the next branch and flying out of sight. It must have recognized what was coming a lot faster than she had. She gave a desultory chuckle and walked toward the tarpaper shack.
She finally heard it with her back to the vast expanse of rolling Delta. The puttering sound punctured the quiet mid-morning air and enveloped the sky.
It was the biggest bird she’d ever seen.
Its parallel double wings were attached grotesquely by a jutting straight line of metal. This particular bird was a dull gray, the color of cigar ash, and on its body shone the words “Huff Daland Duster.” It sprayed a ghastly foreign liquid into the everlasting sky and onto the dirt floor galaxy of cotton boll stars below. Its sound a deep whir that disturbed the peaceful nature of her patch of home. The plane flew over the cotton fields adjacent to the tarpaper shack and whizzed past her from a safe distance as its nose propeller spun with vigor.
She gasped.
It was like an apparition. Was it real? It had to be real.
The weight of her desire dropped from her shoulders and buried deep into her heart. She watched as the plane skirted and turned and made another round. Her mouth was agape as she stared in pure wonder.
The duster gyrated across the field with such precision that she pondered if it could fly all the way to the moon. The shaking hunk of metal in the sky dropped her jaw and she herself began to mimic its rattle with her shaking arms. The duster made a final pass and flew back into the great beyond from where it originated, falling out of sight before she stopped hearing its noise pollute the air.
She stood completely still and contemplated what she had just witnessed. The feeling she got mirrored the one she had when her surviving daughter told her that she was marrying a man who made honest work and didn’t have a pension for dice or tricks.
It was like her entire chest was thumping out of her corporeal body and into the sky.
She saw it. She got to witness it with her own eyes worth having. A human being bird. A man, no doubt a man, flying over God’s creation. Her smile almost flew off of her face it was so large and so forceful. An honest-to-God flight. Flying. The world as it never was before.
The prothonotary warbler careened back into the yard and landed back on the branch of the dogwood tree. She had no way to prove it was the same one.
But she knew it was.
The chittering had ceased. They stared at each other for a long time. She left the clothes to hang and placed some damp tea towels on the grass at her feet. Her chest was still swollen with unfiltered joy. The warbler jumped from the tree and its wings jutted out in tasteful dignity as it sailed into the abyss.
Maybe it was heading to become a star.
She walked into the tarpaper shack and sat down in the cracked green chair in the front of the tiny enclosure which was both her entire world and meaningless to her in every way.
Chirping sounds filtered through the small holes in the thin walls.
It was not her in the sky.
It would never be her in the sky.
But it would have do.
It would do.
She closed her eyes for the last time.