Butterfly Sunday Page 13

  Averill was the youngest of these. He was courteous, attractive and especially attentive to Viola, who soon took a shine to him. Leona didn’t always stay with her mother’s callers throughout their visits.

  By the time Leona finally realized that he was one of the “untouchable” Sayres, he had already earned her esteem with his kindness to her mother. So his unfortunate background added rather than detracted from her regard for him. The young man had overcome a great deal of adversity. If you looked at Averill one way, he was a very attractive man. He was tall and long-boned, with a strong jaw and emaciated cheeks. He wore his thick curly hair parted at the side in a Princeton cut. He took pains with his clothes. His one obvious Sayres attribute had been a pronounced overbite corrected by braces, which he had somehow managed to pay for himself. Now he had a wide, straight, toothy grin.

  That was one way. The other way to see Averill required a certain worldliness or intuitive discernment. It meant looking through his unremarkable, decent looks and seeing the broken, resentful, self-entitled criminal lurking there. Strange, looking back on it now. Ty had somehow seen through him. Once when Ty came to pick up Leona he commented on the way Averill looked at her.

  “It’s not right, him being a man of God.”

  “What’s not right?”

  “The way that snaky Bible wiggler undresses you with his eyes.”

  How she had laughed at that. She had never felt Averill look at her any way at all. He was a regular and much appreciated visitor at Viola’s sickbed during her last weeks—one of the few who seemed to do her heart good. He brought her communion and read to her from the Bible and listened to her as she inventoried her life. To this day Leona couldn’t deny her gratitude for his kindness to her dying mother.

  At that time she had allowed herself to believe Ty was so chained to her, so desperately afraid of life without her, that he had invented it. She was far too naïve to understand that jealousy is never touching, never cute and never an expression of genuine affection.

  She had no memory of Averill during the wake and the funeral. The longtime friends of her parents, whom she had called aunt and uncle from the days when they towered over her, crowded in and decided everything, dwarfing her once again.

  It had comforted her that there were still so many older and wiser people left in the world who knew just what to do. She was young then and unaccustomed to death. It seemed freakish and cruel and it made all of life seem meaningless. Yet these bustling gray-haired people who had loved her mother could smile and talk about her as a blessing. None of them retched or cried out in protest. They gave her a sustaining particle of hope that she might one day understand and accept it.

  It wasn’t until she walked out of the bank with the image of Mr. Crockett and his pistol burned into her mind’s eye that the shock of things began to recede and she became aware of her sorrow and her solitude.

  People were puffed-up images of what they thought the world expected them to be. They wouldn’t accept you as anything less. Wasn’t that what Mr. Crockett meant by killing himself? He wasn’t a man. His weakness and failure and fear weren’t acceptable. So he tried to please, to measure up by playing a role that cost too much money. In the end he had succeeded by turning himself into something he couldn’t bear to be. There was no way out.

  She might have succumbed to a similar despair except for her unwillingness to hurt the child she carried. It was a gathering light in the midst of utter chaos. She wanted it with ferocious longing. She dreamed about it, talked to it and saw its life open like a great glowing flower on a dark blue landscape. She watched it stumble and grow and helped it up, and when it was grown and flying off, its brightness flooded the world.

  What odious scripture had poisoned those decent ladies into believing she would actually birth this miracle inside of her and then hand it new and helpless into the unknown dominion of strangers? Where was the meaning in her life if she wasn’t the mother of this child, unless she nourished and protected it and helped it find its way in the world? Why didn’t they understand that she could manage to do that much good without a husband or much financial means? She could endow it with the courage to place its heart in the palm of another human being, unafraid to bear the consequences.

  Yet all that was half-focused, half-experienced within the gathering cloud of sorrow as the terrible emptiness created by her mother’s death intensified. If Ty had left her an everlasting heartache, it was at least possible to imagine some distant future realm of existence in which life in its exacerbating, slow processes would lead her to its deeper meaning. Not so with Viola’s death.

  It angered her beyond expression to be alone. It flooded her with rage to think of how life had cheated both her and Viola out of her father. Worse than that was her mother’s long-suffering widowhood, her agonizing descent into the grave. These weren’t conditions to change like hearts and minds with the seasons. These were life’s raw, inexplicable and cruel terms. In light of them, hope itself seemed fatuous. As she contemplated the new being inside of her, she began to question her role in its existence. What kind of monster would bring an innocent creature into such a world?

  As the first few days became a week after her mother’s death, Leona began to consider the peaceful alternative of taking her own life and sparing the child-to-be all the agony of human existence. Then one night she found herself at the front door, staring into the determined eyes of three women, the most efficacious of the larger deputation who had lingered the evening after her mother’s funeral.

  They rushed in with an air of officious intent. It was past time to get on with practical matters. A space had been reserved for her at a home for unfortunate young ladies in Pascagoula. She had to vacate the premises anyway. Her mother had signed something; there was a bank lien on the house. The thing to do was sell the contents, pay the interest, stave off the bank and sell the house. It was one of those miraculous plans of financial salvation that would rescue the bank’s interests, reinforce a few lawyers, give the state and federal governments their due and leave her a virtually impoverished unwed mother without a roof over her child’s head.

  As young as she was, and as pretty, why, it wouldn’t be any time before Leona had her prince—somewhere else, of course—someplace where no one would ever be the wiser. They were almost giddy, a conspiring cabal, nothing to it, really.

  It was pointless to argue with them. They were in love with their combined ability to right so much wrong, to keep their Protestant sun in their Methodist sky, to whitewash her woes with Presbyterian platitudes like some old picket fence. By the next afternoon they were back with three cleaning women, sorting and pitching and packing up things she would want and need in her next life in a new town with her attorney prince.

  The rest of her mother’s belongings they polished and straightened and otherwise got ready to sell the following weekend. Their Christian zeal was strengthened by their awareness that Leona’s condition was now obvious even in her loosest dress. That meant, of course, she had to be gotten out of town before the sight of her swollen midsection desecrated her beloved mama’s memory.

  Leona chose the path of least resistance, keeping herself back and watching them sort, fold and dispose of life as she had always known it with astounding facility. She hated them, of course. She thought they were cold and uncaring hypocrites. She had been too morose and deep into her decision to take her own life to argue with them. Now, of course, she was glad for that. She couldn’t say that time had convinced her the women had done the right thing. However, she knew they had gone to great lengths to salvage her situation the best way they knew how to do it. They had done it as loyal friends of her mother.

  There was nothing more multifaceted or bizarre than the truth. She realized now that, as they dismantled everything she had desperately longed to hold on to, those women were stowing and organizing their own hard emotions at the loss of a beloved friend. They took comfort in honoring her memory by arranging things for her daug
hter.

  By the following Saturday evening three-fourths of the contents of the house had been sold. After the interest on the bank note was paid, she had several hundred dollars. The silver and china and linens and several antiques that Viola’s family had brought from Virginia to Mississippi in the early 1800s went into storage. Reverend Sayres had volunteered his own storage shed for safekeeping several less valuable items Leona had refused to sell.

  Leona didn’t own a car. Her father’s had deteriorated in the years since his death to the point that it was no longer safe to operate. Tomorrow she would take the five A.M. Sunday New Orleans bus. There she could transfer out to Pascagoula on a commuter train. She would leave the next morning and arrive in her new home “pro tem-pore” in time to wash her face before joining the other ladies for luncheon.

  Averill backed a small truck to the front porch that Saturday night. He and a helper loaded Leona’s things.

  Leona’s sorrow was laced with an odd tenderness for this kind young man. Ministers were supposed to be somewhat Christ-like, at least in her mind. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but she had always felt let down when one clergyman after another eventually turned out to be an ordinary mortal. Yet Averill had given a great deal of himself to her mother, and now to Leona, without any hint that he expected anything in return. It was an effort she felt obligated to acknowledge.

  No question her vision was clouded. Life had broken her that summer. She had no intentions of leaving town on the bus in the morning. She had gathered a bottle of painkillers from her mother’s room and she had her father’s pistol loaded and ready inside of her purse. The future was a black box of oblivion. She watched them lift the tailgate and rattle the steel chains and hooks.

  He made easy work of a considerable task and she couldn’t help but admire how he took pains not to overburden his helper. When his eyes had met hers to ask if a carton contained glass or if the drawers of a desk had been emptied, she couldn’t help smiling at his shyness.

  Leona stood inside the screen door. “Can I offer you some ice water or a Coke?”

  He was all appreciation as he nodded. When she opened the screen door to admit him, he waited to be asked. It was impossible for her to express how much it comforted her to leave this world knowing there was still some measure of humanity left in someone. She didn’t say that, of course.

  “Your sadness honors a real and irretrievable loss,” he told her in a soothing, almost hoarse voice. “Your mother was a great lady and I include myself among her many admirers.” It wasn’t the words. It was the kindness in his voice as he imparted them. “You gave her such immense comfort in her suffering,” he went on. “Let that comfort you now.”

  It did. His were the first sentiments that didn’t attempt to persuade her she should feel better.

  “Your sorrow is going to bend you for a long time to come.”

  His empathy flowed through her like a balm. It was as if she had suddenly been granted the right to exist. He put his arms around her and held her while she cried. There in that sad, empty house from which all life had fled, his comfort was like a benediction.

  Later, because there was no furniture left in the house, they sat on the front porch and she told him everything she felt, including the fact that she had been planning to kill herself. As the blue darkness fell and the streetlights came on, gathering intensity while the night settled in, she almost felt as if the normal world had returned. It was like visiting late on the porch with a high school friend while her mother and father slept upstairs behind the screened windows.

  Telling Averill was the first good she had succeeded at in a very long time. Telling him told her how lonely she had been since Ty had deserted her. It made her aware that she hadn’t seen or heard from half a dozen friends who she would have expected to call after her mother died. Of course, everyone knew about her predicament. They had all backed away, not to shun her in shame; rather because, as Averill explained it that night, their families had financial entanglements with a certain banker who didn’t want Leona’s side to gain credibility.

  “You’re a preacher man, don’t you regard my situation a sin?”

  “Well, my Bible says to let the one without sin cast the first stone.”

  His answer touched her that night. In fact, the generous way he listened without judging had lifted her spirits more than she would have believed possible. She told him as much. He looked embarrassed for a minute. Then he said something that, when added to what he’d said about the first stone, told Leona that Averill Sayres was a man the world never saw.

  “Nowhere in the Old or New Testament does it say that a man and a woman must be husband and wife before they become intimate.” It was a statement the likes of which he would never risk in front of his congregation. Nor was he very likely to reveal that much worldly good sense to her after that. Later she would almost wish he hadn’t said it that night because it made his mask of ignorance harder to endure.

  To this day, even with the slow-acting poison she had fed him doing its secret work inside of him, Leona couldn’t deny the very high probability that Averill Sayres had saved her life that night. For, even while they were sitting there talking, Leona had decided on another course. She wouldn’t serve out her pregnancy like a sentence in a home for unwed mothers. Nor would she give her baby away—ever. She’d leave town on that bus, but she wouldn’t change for Pascagoula in New Orleans. She’d get a room and figure out the rest of her life from there.

  “People are cruel,” Averill observed after a long silence had drifted by. More than his sentiment, Leona was struck by the fact that she hadn’t felt the least bit awkward or compelled to clutter the quiet space between them with forced conversation. It indicated an underlying trust. He was a very decent, sensitive young man with an intuitive skill for reassuring her. It mortified her to think of the thousand past opportunities that she might have taken to get to know him. It was genuine mortification because she could see as clear as day that the reason she had missed out on him was snobbery. She had taken complete license to prejudge and avoid all but the most distant contact with Averill because his last name was Sayres.

  Now it was too late, too late to know him, and too late to help him gain a much-deserved foothold with all the other self-anointed ignoramuses in town. It gave her another reason to regret leaving town.

  Suddenly she hated to leave, though not because she felt any great affection for it just then. In fact, she felt betrayed by her own community. She had learned a terrible fact about people’s beliefs and friendships. Until recently she had assumed that an idea had a value of its own. You stood behind a principle in direct accordance with the good you saw in it. It was the same with people. Their intrinsic decency was the important thing.

  Now she saw that it wasn’t so. People attached themselves to whatever advanced their financial status and spurned whatever might have a negative impact on their pocketbooks. It bothered her to admit it, but she could recall any number of times when her mother and father had paid lip service to opinions they didn’t hold. There were hundreds of little injustices they accepted and perpetuated out of fear of alienating customers at her father’s pharmacy. In fact, Leona had been carefully instructed by her mother in the fine art of keeping your opinions to yourself. She hated to give in to the oppressive hypocrisy. She would have loved nothing better than to stay right there in Fredonia and raise her child on her own.

  The problem with that wasn’t people’s reactions. She was savvy enough to pressure their consciences into accepting her on those terms. She no longer questioned the morality of bringing a new life into the world, but she had an obligation to protect it from people’s ignorance and cruelty. If she stayed in Fredonia, her baby would grow up Ty Crockett’s unwanted bastard, the mistake of a summer night. She wanted it very much. It would come into this world an adored innocent. She would raise it where no one had ever heard of Ty Crockett or Leona Clay. It would be itself, free from all that, unharmed by the sharp tongues o
f fear-driven people.

  “It’s late,” he said. He had to drive a hundred miles that night. He had to teach Sunday school and preach in the morning. He was also going to stop at his sister’s on the way to stow Leona’s things.

  “It’s my fault you’re getting such a late start,” she said.

  “It was a privilege to spend the time with you, Leona.”

  “You’ve been a grace to me and I’ll never forget it.”

  “You’ll make it, I know,” he said, and his bottom lip quivered. He steadied himself with a breath and touched her shoulder. His eyes held hers for a few seconds, bathing her in a benediction of kindness. Then he turned and moved down the porch steps.

  She wanted to cry out and beg him not to go. He was only a few feet away and already the loneliness was weighing back in like before. She didn’t have the courage to face life on her own in a strange city with a baby. She had lost the will to take her own life. As his outline began to soften while he moved farther into the gray darkness, she felt the despair overtake her. She was going to give in to that coven of fear that had arranged her sensible and cruel future. She was going to surrender to the daily rituals of that house of shame where she would suffer her penance and, by letting them give her child to more deserving hands, she would redeem herself and regain the hope of heaven.

  “Averill, don’t go!”

  He turned around and looked at her, his eyes brimming with sadness. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what she meant by asking him not to leave her alone in the dark. It didn’t matter just as long as he stayed. She had no one and no idea what to do. She only understood that he cared very much what happened to her and he was willing to help any way that he could.