Butterfly Sunday Page 4

Averill’s eyes held on to their decorous spirituality while his torso slipped through the doorway for a second brush with Leelinda Spakes’s resurrected breasts that day. He was the Old Testament ram’s horn and the windblown enemy of sin. Unless of course he happened to be the sinner; then he wriggled his way around the Ten Commandments by hating not the transgressor but the all-too-human sin within him. Blue Hudson said Averill acted like he had a “Get Out of Hell Free” card in his vest pocket.

  No. No, she wasn’t going around any bends with thoughts of Blue today. Blue was gone, he was in California with his kids. She wasn’t going to get bogged down in all that. She couldn’t squeeze anything else into her head. Blue was a fragile little candle in the dark. She snuffed it out. Then for the last time she played the gregarious and smiling preacher’s wife, greeting her husband’s flock.

  “You sounded like a little angel bird this morning, Leelinda.”

  “Thank ya, Leona.”

  “Johnnie Nell, how’s Miss Leticia?”

  “We’ve put her in God’s hands, Miz Sayres.”

  “Mister Johnson, sir, hand that silly cane to Miz Johnson and give me my hug.…”

  Meanwhile Chester Spakes, Leelinda’s red-faced husband, had watched his wife’s breasts brush Averill’s shirt and tie. Now he tugged at her sleeve and she moved toward his parked pickup truck. As he opened the passenger door for her, Leelinda turned back around and gave Averill a wistful pout. Her husband, who had seen her, twisted one finger around her hair and tugged hard. He gave her a quick shove up into the cab, slamming the door. As he stepped around the front grille, he flicked a dozen or so strands of blond hair onto the ground. Then he glanced across the churchyard to see how much of his point Averill had taken.

  Averill had already turned his back on Leelinda and her husband. He was holding eighty-eight-year-old Ella Stone’s hand and listening with an earnest expression while she told him tearfully for the hundredth time that her brother Amos had been killed while fighting in the Philippines on Easter Sunday, 1944.

  Meanwhile, Leona had faced down Audena and Winky with all the welcome she had left in her, and introduced them to everyone who walked past. They weren’t going to inconvenience themselves trying to make polite conversations.

  “Soames, I want you to meet my sister-in-law Audena.”

  “Winky says he’s hungry, Leona.”

  Soames had heard all about them from Leona. Audena emitted a faint odor of Dial soap and perspiration. Soames, who never missed a cue, asked Audena with a dead-earnest expression if she was wearing Chanel No. 5 and then left Leona to keep a straight face.

  She was entering a ludicrous twilight by now. People were crowding around, eager to devour the two new faces like fresh-killed meat. She hoped she wasn’t a snob, but she had observed that country people sometimes showed raw edges in situations, while town people regarded such behavior as inappropriate. Averill was lingering over every pair of eyes that walked out of the church, avoiding his sister and brother-in-law. Audena embarrassed him. Winky was a walking offense. Leona was jumpy as a tick trying to preplan how to get the last dose down Averill without killing her in-laws.

  There was nothing to do but escort them a hundred yards up the road to the house, hand them both big glasses of tea and listen to them snort at each other.

  Later, after Averill showed up and she had run Audena out of the kitchen, their visit was beginning to feel like some plan. Audena hated to be alone with Leona. She was up to something. Then, when she went back into the living room, Winky fell silent. It seemed rehearsed. Winky had been pressing some point with Averill, repeatedly drawing him back onto a subject Averill didn’t like. With Audena yakking at her, Leona hadn’t been able to catch Winky’s drift. Now she realized that had been the whole idea. They wanted something from Averill. They were afraid Leona might object. Winky had been elected to open the volatile subject with Averill while Audena distracted Leona.

  Now Audena started slicing into Averill’s high moral banter. Leona had to concentrate on the lethal version of Easter Sunday dinner. She did hear Audena say, “… our mother’s wishes,” which even at her young age, Leona knew to be a certain sign of an attempted larceny. In a few more minutes, they were too loud to understand. It was a long-standing argument between Audena and Averill. Beyond that Leona couldn’t make it out. While they made accusations and denials, Leona managed to get the food reorganized. She took the plates off the dining room table so she could fill them herself in the kitchen.

  She had to get them fed and on the road. Averill’s symptoms were overdue by now. Audena was screaming: they had had streets in hell lined with thieves and hypocrites trying to hide their sins behind a pulpit. Averill didn’t miss the opportunity. He told Audena she was right indeed, they did have streets down in hell and they had bloated hags like Audena scrubbing them! Audena responded with a wail that hung over his rage like a descant. Winky had seen two lawyers. Audena was cut through the heart. Averill was innocent. Leona let them scream and holler for five minutes. Then she clanged a spoon on a pot lid and shouted, “Dinner!” When a silence ensued, she stepped into the dining room and called out as pleasantly as possible, “Take your seats; I’ll serve your plates from the kitchen.” She was going to add that it was because she didn’t have any decent serving dishes, but, surveying her audience, she decided not to waste the amends.

  Within ten seconds the cannon-fire in the living room resumed. They ignored Leona’s second round of banging. Leona stormed through the kitchen and down the back steps. The world was a blue-green blur.

  Wouldn’t it be a delicious irony if Audena pulled out a gun and shot Averill between the eyes? Wouldn’t it be sheer heaven if the three of them somehow choked each other to death? What misery and deprivation had nurtured the two of them? What kind of hideous monster was their mother? It was strange how little she really knew about Averill’s family. The name Sayres was well known around Fredonia, though it was by and large more notorious than acclaimed. From what she had known and forgotten from adult gossip, Averill and Audena had come back to town as teenagers to live with their grandmother. Rumor had it their mother was a prostitute.

  Once, when Leona was still fairly small, Averill had walked past the house while she was on the porch swing between her mother and father. After he was out of earshot, her mother asked which one of the Sayres families he belonged to.

  “Darcy Lou.”

  “Sidney’s wife?”

  “She’s no kind of wife.”

  “Who is that boy’s father?”

  “A line from here to the courthouse.”

  “Where is Darcy Lou living?”

  “She died of a heroin overdose.”

  “Hush before the baby hears you.”

  It was sad. What good could grow out of that? Still, it justified nothing, no matter how much it might explain. There was talk in Fredonia that Darcy Lou had sold Averill to men when he was a boy. If that was true, had it broken his ability to stop himself? Was this all just an eye for an eye? Would it bring Tess back to life? Maybe Leona could still save him. She had to try. She’d feed him raw egg and mustard. He might still vomit the lethal portion. Then she could have his stomach pumped. She could invent some stupid explanation. No one would believe it, but as long as he was all right, they wouldn’t bother trying to prove otherwise. Then her mother’s voice repeated in her mind, reverberating with wider significance.

  “Hush before the baby hears you.”

  The clouds of doubt and hesitation lifted like veils of illusion and she saw Averill’s hands squeeze the throat of an innocent newborn. Compassion was cowardice, morality, an extravagance. Her spirit was bankrupted. She couldn’t afford loftier sentiment.

  Her eye caught something still and purple and gold just above the tall grass where the yard gave over to woods. It might have been a butterfly, but this was April. Whatever it was, she felt a coolness rushing toward her, an inexplicable calm that overspread the surreal afternoon. A moment ago, she was shak
ing, hyperventilating and muttering to herself. She had begun to slide away from reality. Now things made sense again.

  She wanted to investigate the source of this unexpected rationality. She hadn’t taken ten steps before she understood it all. It was her mother’s Siberian iris. She had pulled a handful of stalks the morning she left home. She had thrown them there in the crook of those tree roots the way she could remember her mother and grandmother pitching them around the bases of trees in cemeteries.

  Theirs flourished. Hers had withered—all but one. She had forgotten it. Now it seemed impossible and significant. Why? Because such beauty still existed? Was it a sign that the Creator still had better plans for the world? Or a remnant of Eden? Maybe it was just a flower and it really didn’t mean anything or matter. Maybe nothing did. She had lost all direction and meaning so long ago that when she leaned down to breathe in the exquisite perfume of the floating purple wonder with its brilliant gold throat, she half expected it to disappear like a mirage in the desert. Instead she drew in the essence of her childhood.

  How could it be the same excessive sweetness? How had that survived when all the rest was gone?

  She began to drift back to a world she had inhabited until a few years ago. It was a world where an iris was a small wonder and people meant what they said. She felt a strange hope blending with light green shadows mingling with overwhelming sorrow for all she had lost. This impossible loveliness reminded her of that striving happiness people back in that believing world took for granted. Somehow there you could get aches and pains balled up with happiness. You could shrug, or smile with irony at all but the very occasional worst things. Now her head began to flow with a great river of people and things she had somehow forgotten or misplaced in this bleak present tense existence where there was neither humor nor hope to sustain you.

  It wasn’t the memories that stunned her, but the contrast between life then and now. How had she become habituated to this unfeeling hell where she touched no one or nothing real? When had she become this cunning wretch? Worst of all, what was the source of this driving obsession to carry out Averill’s death? She had to think. Yet she couldn’t. The woods had become a meaningless void, an alien terrain or island where fate had rolled her off its inexplicable tide. What was this murderous impulse that blinded her?

  There was a light breeze. It was humid and there was a gathering haze from the woods. It was going to rain. She felt an inexplicable urge to pray—something she hadn’t done since she married the preacher. It wasn’t the desire to bow her head and attempt to communicate with God. It was a deep longing for the faith to attempt it. Aside from the necessity of seeing this careful, homicidal passion through, Leona didn’t believe in anything. Not for herself. Of course, she knew that life still held a great deal of joy and meaning for other people. She didn’t see any point debating whether they were more foolish or wiser than her.

  Leona had to live by what was in her heart. She didn’t know any other way. It didn’t matter how much she hated her situation. It didn’t matter what the rest of the world had to say about her actions. She couldn’t be the rest of the world. She could only be herself, looking into the eyes of intolerable circumstances and doing what she understood to be necessary and moral—even if she was aware no one else shared her view. She didn’t like the consequences of those actions. She just didn’t see any bearable alternative.

  What proof did she have? She had none. All she had was her absolute certainty. What good was that? What evidence was there, for that matter? It said “stillbirth” on the death certificate. Arlen, the county coroner, had obviously decided she was a hysteric when she questioned him on it. He was very polite, sympathetic even, but he’d taken slight umbrage when she asked him if he’d actually examined the baby. He obviously considered her a grieving mother who hadn’t accepted the difficult fact of her loss.

  The only material evidence lay across the road from the house, six feet under the ground. If her information was right, and she didn’t doubt it, Averill had buried it in a cardboard box. Even if Leona could somehow manage it, what would even be left to find after fifteen months in wet ground? There was only one way. Even if time revealed that she had miscalculated everything, if she lived to see that she had done the wrong thing, she would never suffer the bleeding conscience of willful ignorance. She’d never say she regretted her choice. She could only say that there hadn’t been one. All the winding roads of her life had converged into one narrow path that seemed to dissolve into nothing behind her as it stretched into a similar bleak horizon.

  There was no room on the path for second guesses or regrets—except for one heavy uncertainty she still carried in her heart. And while it slowed her progress and burdened her with its constant torment, it hadn’t and wouldn’t stop her. It was part of the price. It had to be sacrificed with the rest of her luxuriant notions of happiness. It was a pain to be endured with the rest, a throbbing wound that would never heal, only die with her as the narrowing path descended into a sudden spiral that released her into floating oblivion.

  His name was Blue. He was the sum of all her regret for this world, which was already beginning to seem like a fable out of the past. She was still here and alive, yet she had separated from this time and place. Blue was the only thing that prevented her from floating off or dissolving into the perfumed air.

  Would he ever understand that she hadn’t merely chosen vengeance over him? Would he eventually see that she had spared him a restless existence plagued by the eternal cries of a child’s ghost? Would he take any comfort from knowing that she had kept it from him because he would have succeeded in stopping her? She was exhausted with the ever accruing chagrin she endured as life slapped her across the face with one discomfiting truth after another. Yet here was another one. For Leona suddenly felt herself drowning in the realization that their enormous and miraculous love was completely useless, even ludicrous when she considered its power to create unhappiness.

  She breathed the exquisite cool scent of her mother’s iris. It glistened in the sunlight, stirring an ephemeral shadow of her mother. It almost seemed an exquisite present sent to her out of an impossible, living past. Now it bent and fluttered on a sudden rush of wind like a magnificent butterfly separating its moist wings for the first time and summoning them into flight. In that dissolving moment of jeweled and breathing peace, she heard the scrape of her mother’s shoe against the iron shovel as she turned the fragrant earth in her iris beds. It stirred the inimitable comfort of undying nurture. In that moment she understood the power of a mother’s love to transcend not only time and place, but also all things real or imagined, including death itself.

  Now it was all pure and exquisitely simple. Now the intuitive course she had taken became something inevitable. All that had ever been would always be—including her slain infant and her all-consuming will to nurture its eternal essence with detailed public acknowledgment of her avenging deed.

  The argument inside the house was still building. Three outraged voices preached three hissing and popping sermons in a simultaneous din. It was one of those watershed wailing contests people stage when their general fury at life overwhelms them. They were lost in their own little riot. Leona had shifted her position toward the back of the yard, such as it was, in order to turn down their volume a few notches.

  She felt better than she had in several days now. She didn’t even suffer that gnawing need to have it done. It was already done. Her duties were all but finished. She steadied herself in the knowledge that so little could go wrong now. All those hundreds of frenzied “what ifs” had faded away.

  The only part she kept stumbling over was Blue. Why try to fight that? Didn’t the sadness pressing down on her deserve its due? Wasn’t he a real loss? Didn’t this all-consuming ache honor him by its degree? What was the point in pretending it could be any other way? What was the harm now in looking back? It wasn’t going to stop anything. It couldn’t interfere with things that had already been accom
plished.

  How could she stop remembering it? She would never stop loving him. She even allowed a guilty gratitude for the fact that he still loved her. She was sorry that it gave him so much pain. Yet she knew it wouldn’t kill him. He was strong and young and overflowing with all kinds of passions. He’d love someone else before too long. She had to believe that. She never would have found the strength to reject him if she hadn’t known it in her heart. It kept her from hating herself. (Though the truth was, it also broke her heart.)

  If she had to sum up Blue Hudson in a word, that word was “kindness.” Not that he’d agree or consider that a compliment. He’d much rather be regarded as strong and maybe honest. He was those things too. He took enormous pride in his physical stamina and he worked almost obsessively to maintain it. He walked and talked like a hard-shell redneck—unless you actually listened to him, which most people didn’t. And maybe he didn’t want them to. He carried himself in an almost menacing manner. There was a tension about him that seemed eternally about to explode.

  It was all left over from some kid he had long since determined he didn’t want to be. No, the one-word description was “kindness,” whether he liked it or not. What made Leona melt into his arms for the first time wasn’t his powerful good looks. Experience had long since taught her the folly in that. It was the fact that Blue seemed to know his own strength. He also knew in some essential way that its purpose wasn’t self-protection or physical supremacy. Strength was given to some so that they could use it on behalf of those who were weaker than they were.

  He’d never said that. He would have made fun of Leona if she had. Yet it was second nature to him. When she was with Blue she was safe. Funny, she had no idea he was any of those things the first time she found herself alone with him. In fact, at first, she smiled to recall, she had actually wished Averill would come home.

  4

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 1999