Winter Birds by Jamie Langston Turner Read Free Book Online

on the screen now, talking to a man who is milking a cow. He says, “Aw, Daddy’s not that way at all, Mr. Logan.” Mr. Logan grunts and the cow shifts restlessly.
    In the afternoon Carol Burnett comes on. I watch her every day, hoping to see the scene in which she wears the green velvet draperies as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind . Hope has sunk to this—waiting for a television rerun.
    The white electrician makes a few attempts at conversation. He speaks into the fuse box on the wall, however, so I feel no obligation to answer. Rachel stands in the doorway for a minute, then disappears. “Might get a little dusty in here,” the electrician says. “That plaster dust, you know—no matter what you do, it’ll find a way to get in.” He knocks on the wall that separates my apartment from Rachel’s kitchen. “Solid as a fort,” he says. “Far piece from how they build ’em today.” He moves around the room, counting electrical sockets. He writes something in a small notebook he takes out of his hip pocket. His boots are old, the leather crusty and cracked like a dirt yard in a drought.
    He goes back into the kitchen, and I hear him tell Rachel that he’ll start the job on Monday, that he wants to move the location of the fuse box while he’s at it and change over to circuit breakers, that he’ll bring a helper with him and it will be a three-day job. He’ll try to be as neat as he can and will cover the floor with plastic.
    After he leaves, Rachel stands in my doorway. John-Boy is back at home now, talking to his granny, who is pouring water from a bucket over the front porch steps and sweeping them. I can’t make out the words John-Boy says to his grandmother, but I wonder why he doesn’t pick up the bucket of water and help her, or take the broom out of her hands and tell her to go sit in the swing while he finishes up.
    “Not as polite as they would like us to think he is,” I say.
    “Well, I thought he . . .” Rachel pauses, frowning. “I’ve heard he’s good to clean up after himself.”
    I decide that nothing is to be gained by explaining that we are talking about two different people. Rachel starts to say something else but doesn’t. She leaves, closing my door behind her.
    Later MacGyver will come on and then Love Boat , followed by Bewitched and The Cosby Show . At one-thirty in the afternoon a courtroom program called Judge Jack comes on another channel. People sue each other over various offenses—ruined wedding cakes, crooked driveways, faulty transmission repairs. The judge sees through people’s lies and refuses to allow speculation as evidence. When somebody says something like “Well, if she’d of paid me on time,” or “If he hadn’t gone and busted my mailbox,” or “If he coulda give me some warning,” the judge replies with “Yes, and if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their rumps when they jump.” This is one of his trademark witticisms. The judge is a large man with a mustache.
    “DIED. PETER USTINOV, 82,” who “earned his greatest movie renown as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, as in the film Death on the Nile .” Time magazine goes on to say that Mr. Ustinov spoke six real languages “and a few others of his own comic invention.” His talents were many. He was a writer, a film director, and an actor, both on screen and stage, skilled in depicting both tragedy and comedy. Besides short stories and an autobiography, he wrote a hit play titled Romanoff and Juliet .
    I have not read or seen Mr. Ustinov’s play Romanoff and Juliet , but I take it to be a comedy, unlike the play on which its plot is based. To write a play, one needs a good ear for the spoken word. Without this, the playwright may inadvertently turn his tragedy into a comedy.
    Romeo and Juliet is one of the few Shakespearean plays I have both read and seen. It is a story of ill-fated love. The last paper I typed for Eliot was to be read by him at a meeting of Shakespeare