Hummingbird, page 13
The door flung open.
And Luther Frye glared at us with such fury you’d think we’d rolled his yard with toilet paper. Tufts of thin white hair fluttered like chicken feathers atop his shiny head. “I ain’t buying anything you kids are selling.”
“Miss Rosie Snow is our librarian,” I said quickly, so he wouldn’t shut the door in our face. “She was supposed to call and tell you we were coming?”
“Hmm” was his only answer. “She might’ve left a message on my answering machine, I suppose. I ain’t checked that thing in years.” He squinted his eyes at Grace and cocked his head. “You bring me groceries sometimes.” Then he looked at me. “And I go to church with you.”
“You do!” I said brightly. “My mama loves your pet ferret. But she refuses to let me have one. One of life’s great mysteries.”
Gustav must have heard me talking about him because he leaped onto Luther’s shoulder, fluffing his tail around the old man’s wrinkly neck.
“Hmm,” Luther said again. “Your mama’s a nice lady. Your grandpa, too. We went to school together, me and Merlin. I was good at finding four-leaf clovers. And he was good at spottin’ birds. But you know that already. What do y’all want?”
Grace cleared her throat. The high school marching band rounded the corner at exactly the moment she tried to talk. So she had to yell. “We’re seeking the hummingbird and we wonder if you found it, too, years ago? I know you must be sick of people bugging you, asking for info. But we really, really need to crack that riddle.”
“We’re serious seekers,” I said to him. “Please help us out? We just have a few questions. First one’s easy: Is your real name Marvin Frye?”
“No,” Luther said flatly, dashing my dreams with one simple word.
“Oh,” I said, unable to hide the disappointment in my voice. “I guess you don’t know him, either?”
Luther tucked his hands into the pocket of his overalls. He squinted his eyes at Grace. Then at me. I thought he’d shut the door in our faces again. But Gustav started chattering in his ear, like he was telling him a marvelous secret.
Or like he was having a ferret tantrum.
Or maybe just telling him not to be so hateful.
“Y’all promise you ain’t little vandals?” Luther asked. “You ain’t here to spray-paint my house or mess up my grass?”
We shook our heads. “No, sir.”
“Why would we mess up grass?” Grace asked.
With a resigned sigh, Luther opened the door wide enough for us to move inside. “All right,” he said. “Come in, if you’re gonna. And I’ll tell you about Marvin Frye.”
I thought Luther’s house would smell old and dusty, but I was most mistaken. His house was clean and simple, with a folded blanket on the couch and a fireplace that looked kind of lonely with no fire inside it. On the hearth, there was an old black-and-white picture of a young couple on their wedding day. An apple-scented candle flickered on top of his TV where Wheel of Fortune was paused.
Luther led us into his green-apple-colored kitchen. His table sat in front of a big window framing his garden. Spring sunshine had finally broken through the storm clouds, casting the whole room in a light I can only describe as memory-golden. When Luther sat down, the light even made him look more like a fancy painting than a grouchy old man.
Gustav jumped from his shoulder into Grace’s lap.
“Hey, you,” she said. Gustav chattered like they were friends.
“Last time I had a bunch of kids around my table,” Luther said, “they was trying to steal my garden gnome. And I told ’em that I’d have given it to them if they’d asked. It’s just that stealing somebody’s private property is a big deal.”
“Yes, it is!” Grace agreed. “My brother’s always trying to steal my Dungeons and Dragons set. It’s vintage! All original pieces. Do you have any snacks, sir?”
“Grace,” I said under my breath.
“I’m starving,” she whispered.
Luther seemed delighted, in his grumpy way. He bounded up out of his seat, disappeared briefly, and put a bowl of big red apple slices on the table. Grace raised her eyebrows at me like, Told you so.
“Now tell me something,” Luther said. “If both of y’all are seekers of this magical bird we got floating around, how you gonna decide who gets the wish?”
“We made a contract,” I said. “And the two of us will just be happy for each other no matter what.”
“Hm,” he said. “That’s what you think now.”
“But we’re not even going to get close to it if we can’t crack the riddle,” said Grace. “We heard it for the first time this week. And we have two big questions, specifically: What’s the place where fear and wonder both collide and—”
“What are the missing words?” I finished for her. “I know it’s been a long time, but we hope you remember them. Or some of them.”
Maybe it was just my imagination, but the light in the room seemed to settle all around us, warming our shoulders like a fuzzy blanket, as Luther Frye sank into his chair. “I don’t know if I can answer ye’r questions exactly,” he said. “But I can tell you a thing or two.”
Luther cleared his throat. “I first overheard the legend of the hummingbird when I was eleven years old. I heard it at Ruth’s, a bar on the edge of town,” he said.
“You went to a bar when you were eleven?” Grace asked.
He rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t drinking in the bar,” he clarified. “I was a kid! But me and my brother—Marvin—liked to go sit by Ruth’s door every afternoon before the bar opened. She had a jukebox inside, see. And she’d crank it up for us to hear the music while she cleaned for the night’s customers. We’d dance on the porch and sing into broomsticks and pretend it was a big concert. She didn’t mind.”
I nodded for him to continue.
“So we was listening to the jukebox—me and Marvin—but we also just happened to overhear Ruth talking to some stranger about a very unusual bird. The feathers had been flying all over the mountain, same as they are now. A blue moon was rising soon, according to the Farmer’s Almanac.”
“Same as now,” I said.
Luther nodded. “This feller’d heard rumors about an old legend in the mountains. He’d come all the way from Bristol trying to find out if it was true, once he saw the signs in nature. He hoped a local like Ruth would help him crack the riddle. The feathers are falling! the Bristol man told her. And the blue moon is rising! And on and on … he was tossing out words like puzzle pieces. And the more me and Marvin put together, the more excited we got.”
“I felt that way when Mr. Watson told the story!” I said. “Then what?”
“Well …” Luther said. “For some reason, Ruth wouldn’t help him at all. Even though we had a hunch she knew all about the bird. The man must have, too. We heard that man holler, ‘I’ll find that bird if it’s the last thing I do.’ He was getting real, real hostile, see. But Ruth wouldn’t have it. She was a tiny little lady, now. But she could stare a man down. Send ’im running for the hills.”
Luther made a hmm, hmm sound, which I assumed was the closest he came to laughing.
“Then,” he continued, “Ruth flung open the door and Marvin and I came tumbling down onto the hardwoods. ’Cause we’d been spying, you see.”
“I get that,” I said. “I love to eavesdrop. It’s a terrible habit.”
“But it’s how you find the best stories,” Luther confirmed. I’d always known this in my soul. “We told the same thing to Ruth: If somebody is talking about magic, we’re gonna listen. I guess she liked the sound of that. Because she sat down there on the dusty hardwoods. And she told us the legend that changed our world. Changed everything …
“When bone-white feathers start to fall,
When the blue moon rises tall,
Where fear and wonder both collide,
That is where a creature hides.”
Luther’s grumpy exterior melted like candle wax as he spoke. His wrinkles seemed to soften. His eyes sparkled like tear-studded stars. There was a gentleness about him that made me want to hug him tight. I didn’t. But I wanted to.
“We didn’t know what the missing words meant,” said Luther.
Grace sighed. “Neither do we.”
“But,” he said, “as soon as we knew the legend, we knew exactly where that bird would come shining. If there’s any place in the world where fear and wonder both collide, it’s the woods. Those dark, creepy-lookin’ Piney Woods just north of here.”
“I live there!”
“Mm-hmm.” Luther nodded. “Then you know what I mean. Scary as heck.”
I nodded out of politeness. But I really had no clue what he meant. The woods weren’t scary at all to me. They were beautiful and deep, with twisty paths and furry evergreens. But I knew this was a time to listen, not argue.
“There’s this poet I like,” he said, “a feller named Wendell Berry. And he writes about how his soul feels settled when he’s among the wild things. Woods can bring you that kind of peace: the peace of wild things. Woods can settle a person. Inspire them. The way branches crisscross can be prettier than any stained-glass window you’ve ever seen. The sound of rain on the leaf-covered ground? Better than any church choir you’ll ever hear.”
Amen is what I said in my heart.
“There’s hope in the woods. And there’s always monsters, too.”
“Real monsters?” Grace asked over a mouthful of apple.
“Depends on how you define a monster,” Luther said. “Woods are so dark that they’ll test your courage. It’s easy to think any place is haunted when you walk through it alone. Even if it’s just a memory that haunts you.”
Luther’s sentence trailed off into silence. He cleared his throat. “So that’s why Marvin and I went into the woods on the night of the blue moon. We were determined to find the bird, just like you girls, even if it meant walking into a place where we were terrified. And by golly, we did.”
“So it really is real?” Even though I’d made a promise to Grace to always believe, the confirmation of this truth burned like hope inside my heart. “You saw it with your own eyes? You’re not just telling us this because it’s a good story?”
“Oh, it’s real,” he said sincerely. “Terrible things happen in this world. And exist in this world. But the absolute most wonderful things you can imagine—they also exist. The hummingbird is one of the wonderfuls.”
“So do you remember where you found it in the woods?” Grace asked. “And what you said?”
With a trembling hand, he reached to rub his tired eyes. “I’ve forgotten so many things. I’m old as dirt, see. And it’s been, what, sixty years since we saw that bird? I remember the moment like it happened a second ago. But … I don’t remember exactly where I saw it. There was a sound, maybe, kind of a shhhhh. And the feathers were falling like snow, just like the legend says. The bright moon shone above us. It was Marvin the bird took a liking to. I watched it flutter right up to his nose. He glanced sideways at me. Say something, I told him! He didn’t know what to do, so he belted out one of our favorite songs from Ruth’s jukebox.”
I grabbed my lucky purple pen and my notebook and flung it open to a clean sheet of paper. “Do you remember any words to the song?”
“I remember the whole thing,” said Luther. “It was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ I reckon the bird likes folk music.”
This was definitely not what I expected to hear. I glanced at Grace. She also looked confused.
“Yep,” he said. “Those were the words that rose up in his soul. And that little thing appeared, no bigger than a baby fist. Bright as a star. Marvin was braver than me, always. He made his wish.”
Golden silence filled the room. I let it surround us for a while. I liked imagining Luther as a little guy with a squirrel in his pocket, walking into the woods to touch the light of a magical bird. “What did you wish for, Mr. Frye?”
“You might as well call me Luther,” he said. His mouth flattened in what I’d come to see as a Luther smile. “As for my wish … the bird has no power over life and death, as you know. Life and death aren’t in its grasp, the riddle says. But there’s still plenty to wish for beyond that which’d make life all the sweeter. Marvin always said he probably should have wished for money, see. For our family. We were dirt poor. But happy as we could be, so it didn’t even cross his mind. My dad worked in the coal mines but never complained. We didn’t even think of wishing him out. I should have, I know. But the bird will only grant the most honest wish of your heart. And Marvin and I already knew what we’d wish for, if the bird found us. And he kept his promise: He wished for a tree house.”
“And you got it?” I asked. “It just appeared?”
“It was a wonder!” Luther said. “We’d dreamed of one for years, a place just for the two of us. We never fit in at school, see. We weren’t athletic.”
“Neither are we,” Grace said, biting into an apple.
“Well, we weren’t smart, either,” said Luther. “I can tell you girls are bright, but not Marvin and me. We didn’t have a place to belong, except with each other. We thought a tree house would feel like our own wonderful little kingdom, away from everybody, away from the whole world.”
“Like Terabithia,” I said.
Grace beamed. “I love that book.”
“And sure enough,” Luther continued, “the next day we found a unique trail in the woods—it shimmered somehow, all dreamlike and bright. A skeptic would say it was just the sun, the way it shone over a dewy path into the woods. But that trail sparkled in such a way we knew it had to be the work of the hummingbird. We followed that path and found enough wood to build a tree house ten stories tall.”
“Whoa,” Grace and I both said at the same time.
Luther took a swig of his coffee. “It was a beauty. You could see clear to Knoxville from the rooftop. It was our kingdom deep in the woods. When we were boys, it was a castle and a clubhouse. And even when we were young men, it’s where we’d go hang out after school. It’s where we decided to go into service together.”
Luther paused. The light shifted in the room. The sun sank deep into one of the storm clouds overhead. Golden light gave way to shadows. Even Luther’s voice seemed to darken. “We went to boot camp at the same time, Marvin and me. Then we went to Vietnam. He left first. I followed a few weeks after. I was nervous about it all, not brave like my brother. He could tell I was worried. So on the day he left, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll meet at the tree house when it’s all over.’
“That’s what he told me. ‘You’ll go home. And I’ll go home. One of us will get there first, don’t be scared. Just wait a while. The other will come home whistling down the path.’ ”
Any hint of a smile tugging at the corners of Luther’s mouth faded away completely. His eyes turned stormy and sad.
“I’m still waiting,” he said, his voice crackled.
The sunlight didn’t seem golden at all now. If there was music and birdsong, I didn’t hear it. All I heard was the painful quiet that surrounds the sadness of loss.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Me too,” Grace said.
Gustav climbed out of her lap in a furry, fluid motion, curling around Luther’s neck in a hug.
“Wars are costly,” Luther said. “Many people never came whistling down the path. Nobody knows what happened to Marvin. Not to this day. I realize he probably … passed away. I know that’s true. But I used to imagine he had a whole other life somewhere. Thought maybe he was in Europe, ’cause we always wanted to go there together. I imagined him settling down. Maybe he found a pretty girl. Built a little house on the edge of the Black Forest. Maybe he can see the same stars I do. Maybe yellow leaves flutter down around his corner of the woods every year, and he remembers jumping in piles of them back when we were boys. Maybe he built a tree house with his son.”
Luther pressed his mouth into a firm line. He pulled the handkerchief from his overalls and dabbed quickly at his eyes, before stuffing it back in his pocket. After a while, he said, “Thinking back on it now, I’m just grateful, ya know? For one day, in my many years of days, there was magic in the world and I did not miss it. Every kid deserves a day like that, full of summer-shining trails and good friends and fun. So I hope y’all find the hummingbird. I hope you have a memory like that to keep.”
I didn’t tell Luther Frye how high the stakes were for me now. I would have more than just a memory. My wish—if the bird chose me—would drastically change my life.
“Mr. Frye,” Grace said as we headed toward the door. “You should hang out with us at school.”
“Pass,” he barked. “I hated school.”
“You don’t have to take tests and stuff,” she said. “Miss Rosie Snow is always looking for Storykeepers, old people who come and hang out and tell us stories. Gustav would be an amazing therapy animal.”
His shoulders softened a little. “This old person might be interested, then,” he said. I could have sworn I heard the tiniest hint of lightness in his voice. “And Gustav loves to read. I just can’t keep enough books around him, but golly he loves it. I’ll consider it.”
“Also,” I said, pulling my backpack around to fish through the notebooks, “we’d like to make you an honorary member of the BlumeBird Society. That’s what we’re calling this whole wish-bird operation.” I handed him a nectar ring. “The only rule is that we never stop looking for magic in the world.”
Luther’s cheek dimpled like a smile was hovering close by. It never quite showed up, but light slowly filled the room again: peaceful, warm, and golden.
“I’m sorry if we made you sad,” I said. “That’s definitely not why we came here.”
“Remembering doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. Missing him does. But remembering does not.”
Luther said he didn’t have much to share beyond that. And even though his story had been beautiful—and so helpful—I could feel the tiniest little zing of frustration deep inside. Something didn’t feel right. Luther had found the hummingbird in the woods. That, he said, was where fear and wonder both collide.
