Butterfly Sunday Read online

  Viola was in her sixties, well liked and certified as a schoolteacher, but she had lost more than her husband had when her son died. The ancient wound left by that loss had never really healed. Viola and Lloyd William had been conservative Christian people who believed in the tenet “my country right or wrong,” when Henson was killed. However, the intervening years revealed a great many facts, slowly convincing Viola that Henson had died for the profit of a military-industrial complex that had staged the war like a multibillion-dollar flea market for its military goods.

  By the time her husband died, Viola was already suffering dark periods lasting several weeks. The futility of her son’s death had overpowered her former faith in life. She had once been a strong woman. However, these difficult losses seemed more affronts than bad luck. Her despair had become a formidable opponent before she lost her husband. Her grief afterward, coupled with her inability to save the business, seemed to draw the life out of her as well.

  More and more she sat at home all day while judges and lawyers and bankers cut up her late husband’s assets. When Leona came home from high school, she would often find her mother seated in the same chair that she had been in when Leona left for class in the morning. Gradually Viola became a semi-invalid, managing only to get herself to church in good weather. By the time Leona was sixteen, all her mother’s duties had fallen on her shoulders. Viola had caved in to despair. She not only ceased taking care of Leona’s needs, but she neglected herself completely. Her nourishment, her hygiene, the small business dealings and income left her—everything became Leona’s responsibility.

  One by one Leona had to give up her outside activities. She had worked for the school newspaper and played a series of comic parts in the school drama club productions, which won her a reputation as a cut-up. The special fund her father had created to fulfill his dream of sending her up north to a good girls’ college went to pay estate taxes.

  She wasn’t going to college. She wasn’t going anywhere except maybe to type and answer the telephone for some lawyer.

  Then one June night Tyler Crockett stood looking at her through the front door, his eyes red, his hands shaking and his trembling lips begging her for help. After that everything changed.

  She was miserable and afraid that her mother would keep her from having a life. From her shadowy vantage, Ty Crockett seemed like a sudden angel of mercy. She and Ty had always been buddies. He was her first boy pal when they were children. Even then they just saw things the same way. Later, in high school, they continued their easygoing friendship. Leona had never thought about Ty as a boyfriend. It just never occurred to her. Everyone knew that he was going to marry Gloria London one day.

  Even when Ty came to her devastated by his breakup with Gloria, Leona hadn’t attached any romantic significance to it. She was merely returning the same shoulder to cry on that he had lent to her when her father died. She was just helping out a good friend. Even when they began to do things together in public—the picture show, church, summer parties—they were always surprised when people considered them a couple.

  They had always liked each other. They had always understood things in a similar manner. They shared a delicious, sardonic sense of humor and an indomitable passion for dreaming up all kinds of future adventures, like backpacking through Europe. Neither could say when the friendship turned into something more. It just evolved. It seemed the most natural thing in the world when they started loving each other. When they slept together, it seemed right that Ty was her first lover. Hadn’t she always loved him in one way or another? He was dear and familiar and it all made perfect sense. It was as neat as any movie. Life had come through with her happy ending just when it had seemed impossible.

  Looking back, the memory of her naiveté turned Leona beet red. She laughed nervously as she recalled it for Blue. He didn’t comment or wince or smile. He just waited with inscrutable interest for her to continue.

  6

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 1998

  11:08 P.M.

  They’d had everything planned. Ty would go to the university one hundred miles away in Oxford. She’d stay in Fredonia to work and live at home and attend secretarial courses at the local junior college. When Ty graduated, they would be married. They would live in Oxford while he went to law school and she worked in an office.

  Six weeks before Ty was scheduled to enter the university as a freshman, Leona began to suspect that she was pregnant. In the first week of August, with her second period overdue, she and Ty took a train to Grenada, where a doctor confirmed that she was expecting a baby. A terrible irony of fate had been working that summer in the weeks between her first suspicions and the proven fact. Viola’s doctor had finally revealed that she had been suffering terminal cancer for several months and now she was running out of time. On the train ride back to Fredonia Leona and Ty amended their earlier plans. They would marry right away, as soon as their parents were informed of Leona’s condition. Ty would go to the university and Leona would stay in Fredonia to see Viola through to the end.

  Ty went home to tell his parents the news. He’d come over to the Clays’ house after supper to be with Leona when she shared the news with Viola. The lovers embraced and parted, certain their devotion would see them through. Leona couldn’t help her happiness at the prospect of the new life to come. The being that was growing inside of her was a promise of all the life ahead, a tonic and a balm that gave her the perspective she needed to face her mother’s illness and the past that was now lost forever.

  Leona waited until eleven o’clock before she switched out the porch light and gave up on seeing Ty that evening. She went to bed worried that his mother and daddy were giving him a hard time. Ty’s parents had the highest expectations for him. She was confident that nothing could stand in the way of their deep bonds. Leona believed that she and Ty had been linked in their spirits back when they were still just friends.

  When she hadn’t heard from him by the following afternoon at four o’clock, she made several attempts to reach him by telephone, but there was no answer. Fighting panic all that night, Leona went to Ty’s house around nine o’clock the next morning.

  There was no one at home. In fact, the drapes were drawn across the downstairs windows and the shades on the second floor were pulled down. Still, whatever it meant, she didn’t doubt Ty for a second. She knew this inexplicable absence was unavoidable. Destiny had brought them together. His love was the inextinguishable torch illumining her darkness. Ty would never fail her.

  “Something’s happened, child.”

  It had been ten days since the doctor told Leona and Ty they were expecting a baby. She had gone by his house every afternoon, hoping against dwindling hope she would find him there. She was almost to the third month. The puffiness at her middle wouldn’t wait for Ty or anyone else. So far it wasn’t showing as long as she wore a loose dress. But her ideas about any kind of wedding with guests and a reception were useless. It was probably her imagination, but people in general were taking an odd, inquisitive step backward when she walked into a store. Was it her, or was it odd no one ever said, “Leona, where’s Ty?” Now Viola was about to ask her that very question.

  Viola’s condition had deteriorated. She was bedridden. She’d lost her color, and her dry, gray flesh hung off her chin and arms. Her eyes were two tragic ovals sunken in wrinkled holes. They were yellow. They had given up all their hopes for this world.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Mama.”

  “I’m not dead yet, child.”

  “Rest. Get better.”

  Viola began to cry. It was terrible to think her mother knew about her predicament. Her cruel disease already tormented the poor woman. Worse than that was her knowledge of its approaching, inevitable outcome. It seemed awful enough to Leona that people lived with general knowledge of their own mortality. In her mother’s case, she had been compelled to lie in pain and watch her death make its slow, steady progress like a ship with black sails moving into harbor.
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br />   She couldn’t bear the idea that her stupidity had created another source of pain for her mother. So she denied all reason for it, though her denial was as much to protect herself as well. The future, though immediate and inescapable, was imponderable and impossible to face. Leona didn’t know, looking back, what might have transpired if she had shared her dilemma with her mother. However, she was certain that other, more sensible arrangements would have been made.

  After two desperate weeks of calling and knocking and mailing notes to Ty’s house, she saw his father’s Oldsmobile in its familiar place in the driveway on Sunday morning.

  “Hey, Leona.”

  “Morning, Mr. Crockett.”

  “What can we do for you this morning?”

  “I just came by to see Ty, sir.”

  “He’ll be sorry he missed you.”

  “When do you expect him?”

  “I couldn’t say, sweetheart. He’s touring the Continent with his mother.”

  “But he has to start classes at the university in two weeks, right?”

  “His mother and I felt he should travel for six months or a year while he decides where to attend college.”

  Mr. Crockett excused himself, explaining that he had to teach the Presbyterian Men’s Sunday School Class in half an hour.

  It rained that afternoon, a torrential harbinger of an eternal season descending. Viola slipped into a final lethargy and Leona sat holding her hand while her mother drifted in and out of the withered shell of the life she had completed in this world.

  “I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine, Mama.”

  The dying woman summoned her last strength and placed her hand against Leona’s stomach. Her eyes flooded with joy and sadness.

  “I love it so,” she whispered. Leona bristled with shock. She didn’t mean—she couldn’t know. Then Viola’s withered hand rose slowly and she brushed Leona’s tummy with the tip of her index finger in a gesture that could only mean one thing.

  “Tell it I loved it.”

  “I will, Mama.”

  “You were my delivering angel,” she said in a barely audible tone.

  “And I’ll have mine,” Leona heard herself say, experiencing the notion as she imparted it. Viola’s lips drew back into a heavy smile. Leona saw her mother abandon her eyes, and she felt her drift away.

  She was dead. Love was dead. Days and nights became indistinguishable.

  For the next several days the house was filled with women who kept cleaning the house and wrapping food in aluminum foil and keening every time another hideous red-and-orange flower arrangement arrived. They told Leona what to wear and instructed the minister which hymns to sing. It relieved her to know that her mother was no longer in pain. Yet the loss was astounding, and the sadness sat on her shoulders like a mountain of stone. It made Ty seem trivial, and the baby, who was still not in evidence, feel distant and remote. Everything and every moment was saturated with the terrible emptiness, the unbearable longing for her mother.

  There was an edge of autumn coming in the breeze as she stood listening to the minister recite the dreadful rhetoric of dust and eternity over Viola’s casket. There was an echo of life dying in the shuddering bursts of falling leaves on the faded grass. All around her the worn granite tombstones stood like a mournful tribe of headless phantoms, their shoulders stooped and useless against the crushing weight of time.

  That night a small circle of women who had known Viola from early childhood lingered after the condolence crowd was gone. Bit by bit Leona found herself penned in by a group who already knew about her predicament. In fact, they knew several things she hadn’t discovered. The first of them was that Ty hadn’t left the country at all. Ty was in South Carolina playing football for the university at Columbia. He’d been awarded a scholarship during his senior year. Leona had known all about that, but Ty had insisted he didn’t want to go that far away from her. He’d wanted to attend the University of Mississippi like his father and grandfather.

  The women shook their heads and clucked and, using as much grace as possible, they explained that Gloria London, the steady girlfriend who’d jilted him last year, was already enrolled in summer school there. Several weeks back Ty and his parents had gone to Columbia, where he and Gloria, who was expecting a baby next month, had been married. His mother had stayed on for a few weeks to help them settle and prepare a nursery.

  “You’ve proven yourself with Charmaine!” one woman pressed on. “You’re a genius at wedding decorations.” After the drugstore failed, Leona had worked part-time with a local florist, helping the inept fool plan and design weddings. “You get yourself straightened around and avail yourself of a good floral concern!” another chimed in. “This is all just a bad year, baby,” mused a third.

  Later Leona would look back at those women and see that she had been their sacrificial lamb. Almost all of them had or would shortly drive their own unmarried, pregnant daughters to the anonymous sanctity of distant cities for abortions. Therein lay the dangerous differences between individuals and groups.

  Of course, she wasn’t listening to them anyway. She didn’t hear a word. She was struck deaf and dumb by the cold, hard fact that Mr. Crockett had lied to her. Leona felt the fire die out of her passion and grief. Nothing grand had been lost, nothing mystical or destined or poetic was gone. She was one more stupid, sorry bad girl in a jam.

  Yet his abandonment and the insensitive indifference of the sanctimonious world around her were merely burdens beside her mother’s death. That was incomprehensible and cruel, as if life had waited for this difficult summer to bare its teeth with a haughty smirk.

  As she lay in bed that night, watching a moving armada of clouds sail past the moon, it seemed as if the army of death were surrounding her, seizing her future and tossing her along with it into prison. It seemed that her mother’s dying had permeated every cloud shape, every leaf on every tree. And when she slept, it was only to chase her mother, who outpaced her as she fled through the meaningless void.

  7

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 1998

  12:00 NOON

  Mr. Crockett’s office was at the back of the Bank of Fredonia, a gray marble temple of finance built in 1899 with NeoClassical faith in the impending twentieth century. The receptionist was at lunch. Mr. Crockett, who was the first vice president, didn’t go to lunch. He liked to work straight through from seven A.M. to three P.M., when he headed for the country club golf course. She slipped down the polished granite corridor, leaning one hand on a carved Corinthian pilaster beside his open door. He looked up before she could speak. He pasted on an affable smile and jumped to his feet, moving toward the door to prevent her from taking a seat. He was an unpleasant, fastidious man who always seemed about to fly into a rage. She had a childhood memory of her father leaning over her head in church to comment to her mother that Mr. Crockett was a man tormented by secrets.

  “Hey.” His smile shifted into a sympathetic look. “We’re all so devastated about poor Viola.”

  “Poor Viola’s troubles in this miserable world are over,” she replied with distant cool, raising her palms slightly to prevent him hugging her. He became as neutral and matter-of-fact as he could. “However, my troubles are growing by the minute,” she continued, choosing the tasteless expression in an effort to express her disdain by arousing his. He crossed his arms, tucking his hands into the crooks of his elbows, and waited for her to continue speaking. When she didn’t, he dropped his hands into his pockets and walked around behind his desk and leaned against the back of his chair.

  “What can we do for you, sugar?”

  He said it loud enough for anyone in the surrounding offices to hear him, and he used a tone of voice that might expect her to say she wanted a car loan.

  “Sir, I’m here to make an honest appeal.”

  He flashed a broad, mechanical grimace and leapt around her to shut the door.

  “Have a seat, precious.”

  She sat down on a
leather sofa. He leaned back, half sitting on the front edge of his desktop. It probably gave him some confidence because it positioned him above her.

  “All right, honey. Is this about Daddy’s time deposit account?”

  That disingenuous rhetoric delivered with a punch, he made several louder than necessary steps toward the door, which he opened a crack, and seeing that the corridor was empty, he closed it again.

  She was wrapped in a veil of unreality that protected her from condemning her effort with an angry overreaction. How could any of this be real? She was eighteen years old. This time yesterday she had stifled terrible nausea, hiding it from the whole town, while she watched her mother’s casket descend into the ground. She wouldn’t disgrace herself or insult her mother’s memory by allowing the swirling inferno in her stomach to erupt. When she wept she didn’t know if she was mourning her mother or Ty or expressing the terror she felt at surviving as a woman alone with a fatherless child.

  And this son of a bitch knew it. This empty bastard was well aware that she was carrying his grandchild. Was this really about his position at the bank? Was Mr. Crockett devoid of all human decency? Would he deny his son’s child and tear him away from a girl he loved—all for some job? Then, in the name of the brass plaque on the door, would he further force that son to marry a woman he despised and accept another man’s child as his own?

  No. No one was that cold. Were they? Had she missed the point? Were people in general far more devious and dangerous than she was willing to see? No. She wouldn’t believe that. The strain of the last weeks was catching up with her. She had stood by her dying mother to the end. She had planned and overseen the arrangements. She had carried her terrifying sadness with determined grace, greeting the onslaught of people, behaving as if she had one and not two losses to bear, as if she had any idea what to do or expect.