[Section opener]
Birdie
July 1933
Chapter 4
I was standing with Mama and Meemaw beside the train tracks when Mama handed me a little
pillow. The train was to take me to Oxford to see my sister for several reasons, all of which were
awful. On the front of the little pillow Mama had stitched HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS in blood-
colored thread.
“Give that to Frances and tell her to please write us back,” Mama said.
I took the thing from her and said I would, but I reminded her, “Let the record show I still
don’t want to do this.”
The Footely train stop wasn’t a station or even a platform, it was one of those situations
where you stood in the weeds and waved your arms and prayed the train slowed down long
enough to let you on. We’d feel the train coming before we saw it, hear it before we felt it.
Sound, I’d read, moved faster in the Delta’s alluvial soil than most other places. Mamas,
meemaws, and time itself moved slower. Who knew better than me, twenty-four years old and
still living at home?
“Probably best not to ask Frances right out the gate,” Meemaw said. “Give her a day or
two to get over the surprise visit.” She bent her thin frame forward to peer down the tracks,
defying gravity. Even at eighty, she hardly fell over. I’d had a proper grandmother who’d died
gently at seventy-five on ironed bedsheets with her hair done and had never spoken a cross word,
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