That Girl, Evelyn Gunderson (F)

Evie began building the birdhomes—that is what she called them—when she was five. Her grandfather taught her how to use the tools in the shed where he built furniture for private collectors. Evie, too, sold most of her work, but some of the one-of-a-kind creations ended up mounted on the walls of her yellow cottage sitting at the end of an unpaved lane that rose and fell through a meadow of blue Delphinium.

Her black hair is what at the beginning transfixed me because she took it in hand and brought it up and wound it round her neck and then let it hang down her chest to her waist like a scarf.

My first time out to her place Evie was waiting on her front porch as I pulled my six-year-old Pathfinder to a stop. As I got out of the car, after she did that hair thing, she reached behind her and took something from a rocking chair, which her grandfather built the day she was born, and held out a birdhouse about six inches square or thereabouts. The house was painted yellow with a green tin roof that had a chimney perched at the center of the ridge line.

“Uh, Miss Gunderson? Are you Miss Evelyn Gunderson?”

“You want to give her this one.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, I thought I might look at what you have. Are the ones on the tree for sale?”

She held it out for me to take. “Your sister will like this one.”

“Well, she might.  But…do you know my sister, Miss Gunderson?”

“She likes yellow. I like yellow too.”

“Well, true enough.  May I look at the others?”  I now was at the bottom of the porch steps.

“Twenty dollars.” Her brown eyes did not blink.

“Uh, okay.” I walked up the steps and held the bill out to her. She took the twenty with one hand and folded it neatly and slipped it into the pocket of her purple smock. I held out both hands for the birdhouse and when she gave it to me I gasped out loud. The structure was so light that it was if she had handed me nearly nothing.

“Wow, is this thing a real birdhouse for outside?”

“The tin roof will last forever.”

“I still want to look around, to see what else you have.”

“I am going to my workshop now.”

I didn’t know whether to follow her or go into the home or just take the yellow birdhouse and go away. I mumbled a “thank you” in her direction as she disappeared around the corner of the porch. Carrying—somehow that is not quite the right word—no, the birdhouse came with me as I went to the car and set it on the passenger seat. I would be back home in less than an hour.

Thinking I might find an interesting birdhouse for my mother’s baby sister down in Beaufort, I drove out to Evie’s a few weeks later. No rain had fallen and as I slowly drove down the lane, a great cloud of dust followed me along. I sort of knew somehow that she would be waiting, and sure enough there she was on the porch with a small birdhouse in each hand.

This time, I approached the steps with confidence. “Now, Miss Gunderson, I would like to take a look at some of the others if you would not mind.”

“Your aunt will like these very much.”

“But, Miss Gunderson, I want to see your other birdhouses.  And what about the ones on the tree?” I sort of gestured over my shoulder.

“Twenty dollars.”

“Miss Gunderson, you have a funny way of doing business. Did I say anything about my aunt?”  I waited.

So did she, blue eyes unblinking, and so I went up the steps and exchanged the money with her for the two houses, both painted green, with unpainted tin roofs.

“To your workshop?” No, of course, she did not answer, and with just a nod in Evie’s direction, I took my two houses for my aunt, and left without saying another word.

Over the course of the next eight months roughly, I drove out to that cottage and made my purchases—whatever she handed me, I bought.  Always, she was waiting and always the price was the same, twenty dollars. 

The seventh visit, however, was different.  Evie was not waiting on me.  I will admit I was more than surprised when I saw the empty porch, and I even left the car door open as I hurried around the house.

About 30 feet or so from the back of the cottage was Evie’s workshop—I could see her bending over a table through the open door. As I got to the door, she turned around and nodded to a large rocking chair. That was when she began to tell me some things.

Thus began my visits out to Evie’s two or three times a month. She was never on the front porch again. Sometimes I was out there just as the sun was coming up.  Sometimes in the mid-afternoon and sometimes in the early evening. Evie was always in the workshop.

When I wanted to buy a birdhome—now I use that word—she would say, “Go to the house and know which one you need”.  Know which one, that is how she would phrase it.

In October, late in the afternoons, we began walking together or sitting on a bench in front of the workshop. Sometimes she would bring her hair over the top of her head as she bent at her waist and then she would reach down with her fingers and lightly tousle her hair, working her way from the ends of her hair to nearly her scalp.

Suddenly she would gather the hair in her hands and bring it back over her head and let fall the whole of it unsettled down her back. And she gently would shake her head and laugh out loud as if she were watching herself.

I do remember the first time back in May how I found the lane to her home about half a mile below Mepkin as I was told I would by the clerk at the Stop-n-Shop just beyond the river.  “Oh yep,” she said, “Round here we all know that Gunderson place. That girl is some piece of work, just like her momma’s daddy.”

No mailbox was set by the side of the road, her mail instead placed in a birdhouse with a hinged roof attached to an old white oak just four or five feet back from the county road.  Another 15 boxes of various sizes were arranged up the trunk of the same tree.

The smallest of the houses would sit in my hand and had an opening the size of a quarter. The largest measured it seemed some three feet across and a foot deep. A porch ran the length of the front of that one, and flower boxes with white lilies growing were set under the windows.

The last time I went out there was December 21^st in 2006. I am sure of that date. The For Sale sign was mounted on 2 4x4s and advertised home, workshop, barn, pond and 11 acres. I drove a little faster to Evie’s cottage, and when I got out of the car I could nearly reach out and grab hold of the silence. The house was locked, of course, but through a window I could see that it was empty. I went around to the workshop, also locked, and it too was empty. 

When I checked the barn, there was a ladder, which I took and tied down to the top of my Pathfinder.  Why?  Because there were 16 birdhomes still out on that oak.

You want to see them? Come on by, and yep, maybe I will sell you one. Twenty dollars.  Ladson 2014