Waiting on the Lord

FORTY years ago I heard the fable of the Turkey Buzzard and the Sparrow Hawk told inimitably by a man whose name I have forgotten; but it was in a clamorous city of the Middle West lying along a slow brown river whose name is drowsy and caressing. Twenty years later I heard it again, to my recollection not so well told, although by a master of the art, the late Hopkinson Smith. Where did it come from? ‘Hop’ Smith rather thought it belonged to him. Internal evidence points to Negro folklore in the South. There is something of Uncle Remus in it, but something of Æsop, and something of the latterday Caucasian. The Remusian fable is not so definitely pointed. Briefly and baldly, without the warm intonations and glamorous dialectical gillyflowers that belong there, it runs like this: —

Mr. Turkey Buzzard sat on a rail fence meditating. Mr. Sparrow Hawk come lit on the rail beside him. ‘Howdo, Mr. Turkey Buzzard,’ he says, says he.

‘Howdo, Mr. Sparrow Hawk.’

‘If it ain’t unpolite,’ says Mr. Sparrow Hawk, ‘ I’d like to ask you how you gets your living. Jus’ like that. How does you get your living?’

Mr. Turkey Buzzard meditated. ‘I gets my living waiting on the Lord,’ he says, says he.

‘That’s no way to get a living,’ says Mr. Sparrow Hawk, says he. ‘I gets my living by hustle and pep.’ Yonder he see a chipmunk come scitter-scatter along the fence.

‘ You watch me! ’ says Mr. Sparrow Hawk. ‘Hi! You watch me!’ he says, says he.

And up he goes with a flip, and down he comes with a slap. And little Miss Chipmunk she went into a hollow rail. And Mr. Sparrow Hawk he hit the end of that there rail with his head. Blam! And he busted his neck. And he fell down dead.

And Mr. Turkey Buzzard he meditated. Then he cocked his head on one side and looked up. Then he cocked his head on the other side and looked down. Then he loosed up one wing. Then he loosed up the other. Then he flopped down beside Mr. Sparrow Hawk. And he meditated. ‘This here waiting on the Lord ain’t so bad,’ he says, says he. And he took Mr. Sparrow Hawk right into his midst.

In the Æsopian or Remusian fable, animals act and speak more or less in the character of each his species, but the characters are infused with humanity. Each is apt to stand for a social type or point of view. Hence it creates two pictures, one looking out through the other. The hoary antiquity of the thing is impressive. Æsop and Reynard and Remus are but little islands of a submerged continent. Under them lies the psychology of totemistic tribes gone these unimaginable ages.

In the matter of those pictures, here sit two birds on a zigzag Virginia rail fence, and all about them are the sunshine and the corn. One of them is large, slow, elderly, wrinkled, scrawny, bald-headed, unkempt, unshapely of feet, his long black coat somewhat dingy and frayed; and somewhere behind his red-lidded eyes there is knowledge of the world both realistic and extensive, from evil-smelling carrion to the floating spaces of the upper air. The other is a brisk young bird, sharp eyes, slightly rotund, very dapper with his polka-dot chest and trim extremities, a cheerful extrovert and frankly rapacious. In the matter of benevolent altruism there is not much to be said for either of them.

Through this picture there magically emerges another. One seems to have seen the types sitting on piazzas and sidewalks, in smoking cars and other human places, and heard similar conversations where two social and political philosophies meet and clash, one of them to some such effect as ‘What this country needs is more zip,’ and the other, ‘What this country needs is more time.’ Age-old maxims on the issue fall about our ears like autumn leaves, not all of them on one side of it, some of them as recently green as ‘All things will come about to them that wait,’ ‘Why so hot, little man?’ or Cecil Rhodes to the Kaiser, ‘Why don’t you try doing nothing?’

The Sparrow Hawk has with him the early bird and the busy bee. Most of the maxims are addressed to success rather than to happiness. Whether the Buzzard or the Hawk is the happier I don’t know, or which is the more useful or useless to society; but among conversations on hotel piazzas in Main Street, Gopher Prairie, or suchlike places, as preserved in romantic amber of memory, I find no hesitation of choice. I would rather talk with the Buzzard. I would rather fish for the denizens of his taciturnity — queer crabbed creatures with claws and mysterious dispositions lurking in dark and scummy pools — than for anything in Mr. Sparrow Hawk his Rotarian shallows; which ripple pleasantly enough, but there is nothing except minnows to be fished out of them, all lively, shiny, and about the same size.