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Pretty Redbird

Redbird was on the porch twisting the laundry, then laying it across the washboard and bantling it with the baton, rubbing the kitchen soap into the weave of it, weft and warp, rinsing, scrubbing again. Her monthlies had taken her by surprise, and now the stain held on like a scorch.

The song she wanted was in her head, but she couldn’t get the words right. Something to do with electing never to marry. I’ll be no man’s wife? That was part of it, but the tune ran on in her without its words.

Unmarried herself, Redbird had yet wanted a child, and she thought Ricks might have given her one, till the sheets told their red truth. She’d two of his linsey shirts in her pile, and she was of a mind to toss them in the water and let it bleed into him . . . no, them, but it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t chap. By her reckoning, he did all a man can in that department.

She had been a teacher some dozen years but finally gave it up to be free of the brats. At first they cozied up to her, savoring her odd name and her red billow of hair, but as she got older they bantered a bitterness behind her back. Shirkers and smirkers, she thought. They’d heard people talk, how a school-ma’am ought not stay unwed. Grown-ups’d say she was dauncy and fittified. Parents’d say she was just plain uppity. And the children would mimic, bird-chirp, and say it served her right.

It was coming dusk, and the click beetles had started their complaint about the heat. She knew they hatched out just briefly, singing their music in waves, desperate for a mate before they died. She followed that feeling. Nobody wants to be alone, even if a husband seems a burden, always wanted to be bowed down to, lord of the castle and all that guff.

Last time she thought sure to be the charm. On the scramble quilt like a raft on the cool grass in a stand of fire cherry. They’d bucked together at the end, finally in the same dance, but now it had come to nothing but blood the color of cherry meat. Before he took his leave, he held her chin in his palm and wiped where there were no tears then but where now little rivulets ran. Are ye bereft? he’d asked, and when she smiled and shook her head, he’d lit a rag for home, the moonlight sparse and the rough road dark as sorghum on the spoon.