Butterfly Sunday (17 page)

EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

1:46 P.M.

Watching Averill’s narrow torso dissolve into the undergrowth on the opposite side of the road, Leona sensed a circle completing its strange returning path. Seeing him move off into the shadows now, she was overwhelmed with the desire to follow him, to hide and watch the sickness come over him, and then see him die. It wasn’t the vengeance. She wanted to see it for herself, so that she could creep up to him while he was still warm and shake and slap and otherwise assure herself that he was really dead.

Audena had no idea how right she was to say that Leona had taken her family’s name down low. Or how much further it would sink when the world knew what he had done. Audena’s resentments toward Averill were
within her family. In a wider context, Leona knew that Audena not only coveted his comparatively elevated lifestyle, but bragged about it to the rest of her squalid world. So these pitiful souls who had listened until their ears burned with Audena’s bragging would take no little pleasure in media accounts of her brother’s hideous acts. She had no less doubt that Audena would waste no tears on her when they killed Leona. However, it would be a cause of deep mourning to endure a second wave of notoriety as one with the family name was punished for capital murder.

Though she was dead wrong to say Leona had tricked Averill into marrying her. Averill knew better than that. He should have said something and Leona would have forced some acknowledgment of the truth out of him, except of course he was full of poison and she had to get rid of her sister-in-law and husband before it became obvious. Now, this was an irony, resenting a man you had just finished murdering because he wouldn’t defend your honor. Still, it flew all over Leona every time she thought about it. She hoped and prayed Audena would turn up for the trial. She wanted her to hear in person just exactly how it had been the opposite. Averill had tricked her. And when indeed he made a contract with her to give her baby his name, he omitted one clause. He left out the one stating his right to choke it to death.

Low? There was no question. Leona was lower than she had ever imagined when she made her bargain with the devil. Obviously, Averill had heard that timing is everything in life. At that point she was willing to follow anyone’s lead. She was blinded by pain. She would have done anything to relieve it. If he’d suggested shooting
herself, she would have gone along with it. She couldn’t help thinking that it would be a better world now if she had.

Leona married Averill a month after her mother’s funeral, when she was at the bottom of her grief. The immediate rituals of flowers and kindnesses were over. Her mother’s death hadn’t begun to turn brown and dissolve with the mound of flowers on her grave. Instead, it had taken on a life of its own, its impact had grown to an unexpected and frightening degree. Then of course the unhappy finale with Ty and his father’s suicide had added their unbearable weight. And she was by then almost four months pregnant.

He had come back to Fredonia late the previous spring. The local Church of Christ minister was going away for the summer and Averill was going to take over his duties until September. Averill had always floated on the periphery of Leona’s world. He was one of the Sayres who lived near the bottom of a squalid downhill street where poor people lived. In spite of the fact that Fredonia was a small town and the inevitable paths always crossed, Leona had grown up believing that there was an impenetrable border between herself and people like the Sayreses. It wasn’t her creation or an affect of snobbism, but something that she accepted as the natural order of things. And something she assumed the extended Sayres tribe accepted as well.

She had gone through school with plenty of Sayres children, at least through junior high, when it almost seemed unwritten law that Sayres girls got pregnant, got married and took cashiers’ jobs at the Big Star while the boys went to prison or the army. Not every single one of them, though. They were a huge family. A few had drifted upward over the course of several generations. If
they wanted to do or be anything in the world, they always left town. It would have been easier to dance barefoot on top of a flagpole than it would be for a Sayres to overcome the name in Fredonia, Mississippi.

If there was ever going to be one Sayres who had what it would take to cross over into the realm of ordinary, decent people, it was Averill. Leona had heard her father remark to that effect as well. She was more than ten years younger than Averill Sayres and wouldn’t have known him from any of his four brothers or umpteen cousins. Or so she had always believed. In that regard she had been very mistaken. For Averill Sayres had passed by her house a thousand times and exchanged polite greetings with her all her life. Leona had mistaken him for one of the Baptist minister’s adopted nephews.

Why wouldn’t she? He didn’t look anything like a Sayres. No freckles, frizzy red hair or anemic eyes. He evidenced none of their benchmark enervation. He wasn’t loud. He didn’t have a nervous bray. You never saw him at the wheel of some throbbing old jalopy that was destined to rust among half a dozen others on concrete blocks beside little shacks that had planks where the front steps should be.

Like so many evils, Averill had entered her world as a seemingly inconsequential shape, a familiar smile among the steady parade of visitors hovering over her mother’s sickbed that summer. Viola’s friends came and went almost like round-the-clock nurses. There were others as well, some curious, some distant relatives carrying out familial duty, and there were clergymen. Apart from the Methodist, Episcopalian and Baptist ministers, there were at least a dozen from other denominations who called on a regular basis. Leona didn’t know
them. She let them into the house because their visits seemed to touch her mother.

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.