Butterfly Sunday Read online

  He thought of her there alone, closing her window and slipping on something to keep her warm while she slept. Was it true? Had she married Averill to give his name to another man’s child? What a desperate thing in this day and time. It made him feel very sad for her. Did she know where Averill went at night? Did she know it had been going on before she came to these parts? Was it betrayal or an understanding? Why did she stay there with him, dying of loneliness?

  Now an idea took over his mind, an idea so big it smothered all other thoughts. He should rescue her. He should save her from her dark existence. How he’d go about it, he wouldn’t dare dream he knew. It was just a powerful inclination at the moment. She was finer than people around here seemed to know. Did other people already know the depth of her honesty? Did they appreciate her candor as sincere and second nature? Or did they think she was rude? Did they also see how beautiful she was? Did they realize she played it down because she had the gift of self-possession?

  Not these people, not his cousins and his neighbors and lifelong friends. They were good people. They meant well. They just didn’t always look close enough to see all the details that drew your careful attention. What was he thinking? Not these people? No. Not him. That was what he meant. He referred to his own blindness. The woods were so lovely just then that he almost had to retch at their exquisite isolation. Earlier he thought they had never been like this.

  Now he felt his heart release a heavy burden. The woods had always been this lovely. He’d covered every square foot of them in much worse weather than this. It wasn’t the rain. He’d easily be at the house in another fifteen minutes if he kept up his pace. It was Leona. He wanted to see her again. As he turned around on the path, the toe of his right boot jammed in a gnarled tree root. He lurched forward, trying to avoid twisting his ankle. He barely had time to see the limb before his forehead smashed into it. Pain burst, searing yellow and splintering into cascading stars that extinguished in the blackness as he fell forward.

  5

  THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 1999

  1:12 A.M.

  Alone in the darkness, Leona was grateful for the rain. It muffled the usual creaking and moaning of the trees and wild dogs barking and owls and such. The showering quiet overspread her thoughts like a luxuriant blanket of peace. She didn’t sleep much since the baby. Though part of that was Averill lumbering in at all hours, startling her. She had never quite settled her mind on what he might or might not do. Tonight, though, there were no thoughts of loneliness and dying to keep her burning eyes peering into the boding blackness until sunrise. Tonight as she had climbed into bed, she had felt a swirling rightness about things, as if a band of gentle spirits hovered close.

  Blue’s boot on the porch woke her. She knew it before he knocked. She hadn’t expected Blue to come back, and not after one A.M., yet she couldn’t say that when she switched on the yellow porch light she was surprised to see him standing there. They had already entered that tender country where inchoate lovers dwell in the same hopeful mystery.

  “What’s that welt on your forehead?”

  “I hit a tree limb. It knocked me out.”

  “Oh, boy … Come on in. I’ll get an ice pack.” She might just as well have said, “I’m so glad you hit your head.”

  “I’m fine. I just came back …” He took her hand to prevent her from leaving him there alone. He held on to it. “I just came back.”

  “I know.… Let me give you an ice rag.”

  He stepped into the living room and waited while she pulled a tray of ice cubes from the ancient Frigidaire. He heard the back door slam, then the hammer. It was a good-sized room, probably the only one of any consequence in the house. The furniture and rugs looked old and expensive. There was a shining black baby grand piano in one corner. It was as if he had stumbled against a door in the night and opened it into an unexpected elegant lair.

  Like the woman, the furnishings didn’t go with the house. He read her in the solid, old things in the room, lace-curtain Methodist, merchant types. Solid.

  “Sit down, Blue.”

  It was too late to call someone for a ride. Though he couldn’t ask her to take him at this hour. Several inches of rain had already fallen. The county hadn’t laid fresh gravel on this section of the road in years. There would be twenty-foot-long mud puddles by now.

  She gave him Averill’s best robe and he took a hot bath while she ran his clothes through the washer and threw them into the dryer. Then she sat in the living room sipping hot tea while she waited for him.

  “I feel like one of the wise men in this thing.” His enormous hand dwarfed her mother’s delicate china cup when he took it. “Trying to make a gentleman of me?”

  “I don’t know what to make of you.”

  If Averill walked in right now, would it look like they had just slept together? It didn’t feel anything like that. There was too much trust and budding affection. Love, she thought, before she had time to consider the implications, isn’t lurid or sensational. From her fragmented experiences of it, she had always imbued the real thing with lurid sensation.

  “If it wasn’t so late, I’d light a fire.”

  “It’s never too late,” Blue observed, setting down his cup. In less than two minutes Blue had a log on a bed of small flames. The kindling was damp. It hissed and crackled as the fire slowly filled the hearth box. Something rattled near the top of the chimney and a delicate shower of leaves drifted into the blaze. In a minute they heard a squirrel scratch lightly across the tin roof.

  “We’ve never laid a fire,” Leona explained. She had battled an odor of mildew in the house since her arrival six months ago. Obviously it had come from the unused fireplace. Blue reached over and switched off the lamp. Now the room was bathed in pink and gray shadows. She had entertained hopes for this room in the first week or two. It needed new windows, the plaster had been repaired too many times, the floor sagged at one end. Still, by design it was an airy room. Painted beams crossed the high ceiling. There were long, narrow alcoves for bookcases on either side of the fireplace. A row of French doors, their glass panes long painted over, separated the dining room.

  “It’s a good house,” Blue observed.

  “Nothing wrong here but neglect,” Leona amended.

  “It’d be fun to put it right.”

  “I’ve considered taking a match to it.”

  They sat on the sofa and watched the fire and talked and talked and talked. Leona was like an enchanted flower that kept opening and revealing more and more layers.

  “Try as I might, I can’t put you and Averill Sayres together.”

  “It’s not a marriage, Blue.”

  “You don’t love him?”

  “Never pretended to.”

  It was a well-made black cotton robe with buttons on the pockets. The fabric was smooth. The collar was made almost like a suit. It was made for smaller shoulders than his, and longer legs. She had never seen a robe like it, except in movies with English lords and Russian princes. The hem lay on the floor under his bare feet. His long, slender toes and narrow heels fascinated her. The masculine refinement of the robe highlighted his animal grace.

  Clean bare feet, she kept thinking. Long, lovely fingers and clean cotton and the honest aroma of a hickory fire. Why did people make it so neon bright?

  “Why did you marry Averill?” His voice reminded her that she had drifted away into her thoughts.

  “I was pregnant.”

  “A lot of girls today don’t see that as a reason.”

  “Life and death hit me over the head all at once. I couldn’t think.”

  Everyone knew Leona’s story in more detail than she probably even remembered at this point. Though Blue sensed that she was unaware of that. The last thing he wanted to do was upset or humiliate or embarrass her. They were sitting very close. Somehow they had crept comfortably onto tender ground. Yet neither felt the slightest fear of the other. Both understood that whatever happened would be all right. They had rea
ched that velvet plateau of mutual accommodation. Each felt his needs and desires would be best served by facilitating the other’s.

  Then he kissed her and the kindness of his lips sent her soaring. Tenderness swallowed every ache and sorrow in her crowded young life. She took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom. Before they lay down on the bed, she opened the closet door and showed him which boot to reach down into.

  His guileless need and intuitive understanding of hers disarmed her. She had never before experienced this friendly passion. It was impossible to discern conversation from lovemaking. There was as much laughter as there were sighs. It was charming and innocent and pleasant for a long time. Then they were jolted by a climbing need that took them both a little by surprise. There was nothing sordid or secret in it, none of the painful pleasure she had experienced with Tyler and Averill. Blue’s eyes never left hers. His body never imposed a separate agenda on hers. When they burst together, it was thrilling. Yet the hours of soft conversation and comforting flesh that followed were wonderful too.

  It all seemed connected, all part of the same thing: love and touch, sleep and talking, moonlight and shadow and dawn. She drifted to sleep with her head on his shoulder and, dreamless, she breathed the opiate balm of his affectionate flesh. Then it was morning and yellow sun flooded the room.

  She opened her eyes and sat forward. Blue was sitting on a small wooden chair next to the bureau with his feet propped up on the footboard. He was so deep into his thoughts that at first he didn’t seem to notice that she was awake. His manner gave her the impression that he had been there for some time.

  “Are you painting me?” She smiled.

  “I don’t need a painting. I have the real thing.”

  She smiled. Tears poured down her face. He smiled at her. Neither of them spoke. Tears came hard for Leona and almost always without warning. They were the private language of her inarticulate depths. She never meant them for the rest of the world’s sympathy. She rarely wanted to discuss the things they addressed with whoever happened to see them. Yet people meant well and she didn’t want to be rude. She waited for Blue to notice them and comment or presume to offer unsolicited comfort. Yet his smile didn’t seem to take them into account. It was extraordinary. It was exquisite to draw in his already beloved outline, to embrace her deliverance from that now ancient wretchedness that yesterday was her waking and sleeping fate.

  It was impossible to believe when he kissed her that this wasn’t all some yellow image of an ideal love painted in thick oils on canvas. Or a film or a moving dream. Life was a layered series of illusions. Innocence, passion, sorrow, despair, and now this sunny new awakening of bliss. Would it ever take a discernible shape? Could she believe in this wondrous solid ground? Yet these arms around her were more than canvas. She wasn’t a painter. This moment—which she already knew in her heart was what people meant by glory—was not to be observed or sketched or even doubted. It was for embracing. This was happiness, heaving and tumbling through her. This was singing flesh and trust and warm giggling in her ear. This was new, impossible good. She had stepped on too many of life’s rusty nails, she had cradled too much everlasting sorrow to take the clear blue sky above the new green hills for granted. If love wasn’t eternal, then neither was sorrow, but here and now Blue’s relentless affection was enough meaning for her.

  Later, when the sun had dried the shining leaves and the warm wind had chased last evening’s chill, she and Blue walked up the hill into the woods, leaving the path where it veered and skirted a steep incline of boulders in front of them. Climbing another ten minutes, they stood at the edge of the flat, grassy plain that stretched a quarter of a mile across the top of the hill. On the far side they found a broad, flat, mossy stone, which jutted several feet over a bowl of farmland below. Three miles away, at the top of the next wooded hill, they could make out the west face of the courthouse clock in town. Blue had discovered the place when he was a boy. He said half his memories were here.

  “Why did you marry Averill?”

  “I told you last night. I was pregnant.”

  “You haven’t told me anything.”

  “I might have done differently if …” She didn’t want to tell him. She had been blissfully free of all those ghosts since last night. She was afraid it would bring them back. She changed the subject, but he wouldn’t let it go that quickly.

  “They’ll kill you, Leona.”

  “Who?”

  “Your secrets.”

  If she closed him off, she’d lose him. Yet it frightened her. The idea that she might overcome the dark influences of the last few years was very new. Hope was a precious commodity. She wanted time. He was waiting for her to tell him about it. How much did he already know? He read her mind.

  “The more you hide, the more people see, Leona.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because it’s eating you alive.”

  They drifted into an almost wordless quiet, napping while a vast hoard of gray-and-white sheep swam slowly westward on the pale blue sea above them. By two o’clock the clouds were scattered threads and the day was white. It was warm, almost hot, the sort of mid-March afternoon that had brought a steady trickle of old ladies into her father’s drugstore to declare they just didn’t know when they had ever been so warm a solid week before, sure enough, spring arrived.

  Why not tell Blue? Why not share that world? Did she think it would bore him? Did she fear his judgment? Why not? Didn’t it ennoble her when he shared so much with her? What did he mean? What was eating her alive? She was crying, not that exquisite pain that had engulfed her with tears this morning. This was more terrible and overwhelming and heavier than that. This was the fear of telling him everything; this embodied eating her alive. This was the unmitigated mortification that overwhelmed her every time she looked back.

  Now his arms were holding her. Yet their kindness was unbearable. She didn’t deserve kindness.

  “What is it, Leona?”

  “They gave me everything, Blue.…”

  “I know.…”

  “And look what I came to.…”

  “Leona, I told you, I know.”

  “I’m …”

  He gently loosened his arms and let his hands slide up to her shoulders. Then he lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

  “You’re ashamed, Leona.…”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Then why do I feel so bad?”

  “Evidently you did a lot to feel bad about.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “About as easy as you telling me to forgive myself.”

  They sat down in an ocean of tall grass and watched the fleecy sky ravel and drift away like a white iceberg dissolving into a silver blue ocean. When they kissed and lay down, the grass waved, and when he was inside her she felt the earth sigh. There on the glistening, heaving flesh of his shoulder she saw a white butterfly drying its perfect wings. When it rose, it seemed to draw them into the sky with it as peace burst within her. Then, as they lay in the still grass, she watched it climb higher and higher until it was tiny and shining and indistinguishable from the first spray of evening stars.

  That was when she knew she could tell him.

  Facing down the years, it was strange how her memory had kept details she had missed altogether when she was there in the flesh. As she told Blue about her girlhood in Fredonia, Mississippi, Leona saw for the first time that hers had been a very privileged childhood. Her father was a prosperous druggist and her mother taught elementary school music. Both of her parents had used their comfortable income to smooth a lot of rough edges for Leona.

  They were pillars of the First Presbyterian Church, but they had a more tolerant approach to other people and certainly to child rearing than most of their friends. People said they couldn’t help spoiling her. Leona was their only daughter, but not their only child. Lloyd William and Viola Clay raised two children, each a g
eneration apart. Her brother Henson had been born while her daddy was still in pharmacy school. Henson was drafted into the army in 1970, the summer after he graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. He was killed in Vietnam two years later.

  Leona was born in 1980, a complete surprise, and to their dying days her parents never failed to seize the opportunity to tell her she had come like a miracle. They coddled and protected and adored Leona, raising her in a home where everything revolved around her happiness. Lloyd William Clay made a very solid living as a pharmacist. Leona’s world was comfortable and pretty and soft and sunlit. She had everything she wanted all through her childhood, and she had never doubted that she always would.

  Maybe that was her parents’ one big mistake. She had too little awareness of life’s darker potential. It created a false sense of security and left her vulnerable to people and situations. She was blinded by her self-importance. She had little practice with looking at other people’s needs and motives. She had come to the opinion that selfish people were the easiest to manipulate. Or maybe her mother and father meant to postpone some of life’s lessons until they felt she was old enough to accept them. In any event, Leona’s childhood came to an abrupt and permanent end two weeks after her fifteenth birthday. After winning second place in the Fourth of July Five Mile Run, Lloyd William bent over to tie his shoelace and fell dead at age sixty-nine.

  It was as if fate had decided that Leona had experienced too much light and laughter. The skies would never be as blue again. In the wake of her father’s death, Leona helped Viola struggle to keep the drugstore open. However, without a pharmacist it quickly deteriorated into a high-priced sundries store. It limped along for a little over a year. Then Wal-Mart appeared at the center of a parking lot on the north edge of town and Clay’s Drug Store succumbed with half of the other businesses on Court Square.