Icertainly hope there are not ticks,” said Hilma, trying to keep her feet on the rungs of her chair. Her suggestion for the new adventurous Thursdays in May Evenings had been to eat chilled food in her backyard, where her night-blooming garden was just coming into flower—Datura, four-o'clocks, Nicotiana, and moonvine in a round bed. But Meade had taken Ethel's suggestion about the rising sap literally. “The smell of pine sap will open your mind,” she had said.
And so there they were on a cool late May evening, two old women sitting in chairs in the middle of a thousand acres of longleaf pine woods. Meade had not wanted to bring anything but the chairs—“The idea is to be unencumbered”—but Hilma had brought dishes of custard in a canvas bag. “You can't enjoy being unencumbered if you are hungry,” she said. They would stay until dark, breathing the piney air and watching the lightning bugs come out.
• • •
He stood on a little rill and looked across at them through his binoculars. It seemed odd, two women sitting in the middle of the woods in rocking chairs. But then, he spent so much time in the woods himself, studying the intricate and complex behavior of one rare and elusive little bird, that almost everything about people seemed odd to him, the things they said and did, the clothes they wore, the shoes they put on their feet.
Two rocking chairs, not matched. One had a cushion, one had a straight ladder back. They were eating something white with spoons. Two old women in the middle of the woods in rocking chairs. He would have to ask Gawain about it.
“Must be Meade and Hilma” said Gawain. He and the ornithologist were looking at a map of a large tract of woods, Gawain's 600 acres of mixed loblolly, longleaf, and slash pine, and Roger's neighboring 350 acres of almost pure longleaf. Tiny circles indicated the biggest redheart trees, irregular loops enclosed areas of extensive longleaf reseeding, and dots marked the location of woodpecker activity—blue for an inactive roost cavity, red for a roost in use this season. Gawain was an expert on controlled burning, and these endangered woodpeckers were a fire-dependent species.
“They go and sit in the woods every Thursday afternoon?” the ornithologist asked.
But it was hard to get any conversation with Gawain off the subject of fire in the woods. “Take this area of young longleaf, February of the year 1978, those seedlings hadn't been sprouted four months, Roger put a cool fire through there, now that's the finest stand of young longleaf in the county. We just have one word for it, ‘fire,’ but fire is a billion things, Lewis, and in the hands of a knowledgeable forester, it can be a delicate and precise tool.” “These old ladies, they—”
“Two old-lady retired schoolteachers,” said Ga-wain, “but they understand the uses of fire, both of them.”
“Here comes a man through the woods,” said Meade, “with a pair of spyglasses around his neck.” It was the last Thursday in May; the bracken fern was almost four feet high, and sitting in their rocking chairs, Hilma and Meade were almost concealed by greenery.
“Maybe we should call out,” said Hilma, “so he won't come upon us unexpectedly and be startled.”
Meade raised a hand above the ferns. “Hello! Hello!” she called out. But the man was not surprised. He walked right up to them and stood there for a minute, clutching his binoculars with both hands, his head thrust slightly forward.
“We can't offer you a seat,” said Meade. “We didn't expect you, and we only have these two chairs.”
But even in the middle of a thousand acres of open woodland Hilma felt the responsibilities of a hostess, as if this strange young man in his worn canvas boots were an uncomfortable guest needing to be put at ease. “My name is Hilma and this is my friend Meade” she said. There was a pause. “What is your name?” Hilma prompted.
“Oh,” he said, adjusting the focus on his binoculars with convulsive little thrusts of both thumbs. “Lewis.”
“And,” Hilma went on, “with those field glasses you must be making a close observation of something. I would be interested to know what that might be.”
“Oh,” said the young man, and as if he had just been given life, he began to move and speak. He squatted down at their feet and then stood back up and looked up into the trees and pointed in the distance to things they could not see, talking all the while about red-cockaded woodpeckers: their nesting habits, their complicated social structure, their need for open longleaf woods, and his own cooperative-behavior study showing the role of helper males from previous generations in raising each year's new fledglings. “… the healthiest RCW population outside of the Apalachicola Forest,” he concluded.
Meade and Hilma listened intently, leaning forward in their chairs. “Why,” said Hilma, “I never! I have only seen a red-cockaded woodpecker once in my life when Roger pointed, and you have learned all these things by—”
“By steady application and diligent study,” said Meade reverently. She admired thorough work of all kinds.
By now it was nearly dark, the lightning bugs were out, and the dew had begun to come down.
“Thank you so much for the education you have given us,” said Hilma. “You have distinguished our last Thursday in May.” It was difficult to walk through the tall ferns, and Hilma and Meade staggered along with their chairs. Lewis walked a little ahead of them with easy, practiced strides. It had not occurred to him to offer to help with the chairs, but Hilma and Meade didn't notice. On the way to the road he pointed out several nesting trees, marked by the apron of white sap on their trunks, and just as they reached the car they caught sight of a tiny bird darting into one of the holes.
“I feel as if I have been blessed,” said Hilma. “Thank you so much, Mr. Lewis.” She dragged his hand away from the binoculars and shook it warmly.
“You already know Gawain, and these are our friends Lucy and Ethel,” Hilma said to Lewis, with a simplicity that belied the difficulties that had gone into compiling this guest list. Meade had wanted to invite Roger; “I can't imagine such a gathering without Roger,” she had said.
“But if we have Roger, then we can't have Ethel,” said Hilma, “and if Gawain has Roger to listen to him, there will be nothing but talk of fire.”
So in the end they had settled on Gawain, Ethel, and Lucy. “Gawain will make him feel at home, Ethel will entertain him with flash and style, and Lucy will make everything go smoothly.” The party was outside, at Hilma's house—“We will hope that the angel's-trumpet will open”—and the food was all summer food: cucumber soup, sliced tomatoes, a Vidalia onion pie, and a triumphant gumbo Lucy had made out of the first crop of a new nematode -resistant okra.
Lewis stood stiff and uneasy in the shade of the crape myrtle, looking unnaturally clean. His neatly parted hair still retained the grooves of the comb teeth, and sharp folds in his shirt stood out like fins in odd places. On his chest a smooth, flat rectangle showed the position of the piece of cardboard that had been slipped out minutes earlier.
“New clothes?” Ethel asked, and she laughed at him. Lewis fumbled at his chest, missing the binoculars, and stepped into the Nicotiana.
“We found him in the woods,” Hilma said to Lucy. “We had been sitting there for three Thursdays, doing nothing more interesting than looking for ticks, and there he was. He told us about his study, and then, as if by magic, one of the birds flew by, right into its nest cavity. We heard its little squeak.”
Ethel pulled two chairs up to the edge of the garden. “We are all people here, Lewis,” she said. She was still laughing. “You are one too.”
“He's a fine old-fashioned naturalist as well as a good scientist,” said Gawain, “with an ability to see beyond isolated details to the great ecological processes at work.”
Ethel sat down on the edge of her chair and leaned forward intently. She had the tiniest kneecaps he had ever seen on a normal-sized person, each one no big ger than a fifty-cent piece, and her shiny brown hair slid against itself like feathers on a bird. “We are supposed to talk to each other, Lewis,” she said. “I say something to you. Then it's your turn.”
The night flowers began to open, and there was a mingling of the clean smell of the moonflower, the jasminelike Nicotiana, and the odd musky fragrance of the Datura, just now beginning to unfurl. It was a pleasant evening to be outside, eating the first Vidalia onions of the year. Lucy, Meade, Hilma, and Gawain sat under the moonflower trellis talking about nematodes, woodpeckers, fire, and this remarkable new friendship.
“I felt almost like Joan of Arc,” said Hilma, “and he was the archangel Michael striding up to us through the green.”
“The diminished population of red-cockaded woodpeckers is just one example of the eradication of fire-dependent ecosystems by the exclusion of fire—his work is making that clear,” said Gawain.
“He needs to watch out for Ethel,” said Lucy, and they all peered around the moonflowers into the garden.
“Oh,” said Hilma.
“Oh, Ethel!” said Meade.
“Well, time for me to go home,” said Gawain.
“That nice fan man, Jim Wade,” said Hilma. “So pleasant and cheerful. Why doesn't Ethel…”
“Because she likes to do the choosing,” said Lucy.
“I am reminded of mating insects,” said Meade.
In the garden Ethel held a branch of angel's trumpet aside and whispered something in Lewis's ear, then she stepped back, laughing. “Now,” she said, “your turn.”
“That Ethel!” snapped Meade, slapping a pair of yellow rubber gloves against the edge of the sink. “Carrying on like that before our very eyes in a bed of poisonous plants.”
“And what will happen to the poor man now?” Hilma sighed. “He doesn't have Roger's strength.”
“I told you we should have invited Roger,” said Meade, thrusting her hands into the rubber gloves. “Then what a nice party it would have been, Roger and Lewis and Gawain discussing the influence of fire on the lives of plants and animals like civilized people.”
“Well,” said Hilma, trying to look on the bright side, “the garden was lovely, the food was good, and it's always a pleasure to see Lucy.”
“I blame it all on the garden,” said Meade. “I have never trusted Datura.”
“I thought you said sex was best when you weren't having it,” said Lucy.
“But I have to check now and then to make sure I'm still right,” said Ethel. She had spent the day with Lewis in the woodpecker woods and she was looking for ticks. So far she had found four. “It was an interesting encounter,” she said. “He's so delightfully strange. He knows more about those birds than he knows about himself.”
“Meade says you remind her of a mating insect” said Lucy.
“Ha,” said Ethel. “Good old Meade. Probably a mantis. No, I always leave them alive, Lucy.”
“Barely,” said Lucy, remembering the Irish Potato Famine.
“He'll get over it,” said Ethel. “They always do.”
It was late at night and he couldn't make the distances work out. He kept losing count and having to begin again. Was this the sickness of love or was it the mothballs in the bird skins making him feel slightly nauseated and dizzy? “It was nice,” she had said. “I enjoyed it. And now I'm going home to my house and you must go home to yours.” They were standing at the edge of the woods. On one side, I-10 stretched all the way to California, and on the other side lay a thousand acres of virgin longleaf with five colonies of maybe the last red-cockaded woodpeckers that would live on earth.
“You have to understand,” she said, as the cars roared by, “I like a kind of fly-by-night love life. Here today, gone tomorrow.” But he did not understand. All he could think of were the thousands of migrating birds that were killed every night when they flew into the guy wires of TV towers.
“There is no hope of recovering the bodies,” said Meade, “in all that muck, so the mourners are tossing flowers into the swamp.” A small plane had crashed in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp, and television screens were filled with the sad faces of announcers talking about “human remains.” Meade had been taken with the idea of tossing flowers into the swamp.
“Maybe that's what we should do for Lewis” she said.
“It's not as bad as that” said Lucy reasonably. “He was not strapped into his seat hurtling helplessly through the night sky with one engine burned out.”
“Ethel is a good person, really, at heart—good company, an excellent teacher, a good gardener—she learned that from Roger. She just doesn't have tender feelings for the men she knows,” said Hilma.
“She doesn't like the constrictions of love,” said Lucy.
“Then why does she keep breaking the hearts of these nice men? The song writer from Nashville; poor Jim Wade, the fan man, always so eager for news of Ethel when he sees me; and now Lewis.”
“Sex,” said Lucy.
“Oh,” said Hilma.
“No body parts bigger than an elbow have been found,” said Meade.
It was June, but Hilma and Meade were reluctant to give up their May adventures, and they had invited Lewis to present a little program on the life and habits of the red-cockaded woodpecker. But Meade fidgeted in her chair and Hilma felt her mind begin to wander. In May he had come striding out of the green like an angel, with science, the new bracken fern, and all the promise of summer on his side. But now, in her living room, standing beside the portable chalkboard she had dragged down from the attic, he seemed like nothing more than an ordinary man. Hilma was irritated by the way he kept erasing his little sketches with the heel of his hand, leaving damp smudges on the chalkboard so that the blurred lines of a previous diagram showed through his current drawing, muddling his points. Lewis too seemed edgy and dispirited. He kept glancing furtively out into the garden, as if he expected to see Ethel step out of the bed of Datura in her little flowered dress. But no one could stand to be outside in this heat. In the white garden the blooms from the night before were drooping and spent. The Nicotiana hung in slimy wads from its stems, and the petals of the Datura sagged, battered and bruised by the wings of the hummingbird moths.