Butterfly Sunday (18 page)

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 daughter.

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 of 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.

It was a long, strange night. Hope and doubt and confusion dominated everything. She couldn’t stay there. He had no idea where to take her. They were drawn together like magnets, yet they were for the most part strangers.
Something assured them both that their pairing-off was inevitable. Yet neither could begin to broach such a preposterous intuition. Hours passed and Averill had no choice, he had to leave. She didn’t know how she could let him do that alone.

Somehow they reached a tenuous compromise. She would get into the truck with him. They would discuss the next step on the road. It was crazy. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. The journey might conclude with her waiting in his truck in the church parking lot for his service to be over so that he could drive her to the nearest train station. This still didn’t mean that Pascagoula wasn’t her final destination.

He tossed her suitcases into the back of his truck and they took off. She would never forget her last look at the Fredonia Court Square and commercial district. They stopped at a red light. The pale sky glowed blue gray with muddled clouds behind the charcoal silhouette of the stucco courthouse. All her life she had believed it was an inviolable fortress of justice. Now its row of twelve long, bleak upper-floor windows became six pairs of eyes witnessing her departure. They seemed immutable and guilty.

She thought, when at last they crossed the city limits and moved into the open country under a moonless canopy of night, she might just as well have ridden in an open cart along some seascape of hell, letting her bare feet drag across the smoldering sand. She pressed her shoulders into the back of the seat and closed her eyes, drifting in and out of consciousness until she floated into warm, moist oblivion.

She opened her eyes once for a few seconds when rain slapped the metal and glass surfaces of the truck. From her vantage his hands seemed enormous as they
held on to the steering wheel, and the meager tufts of hair below his knuckles bristled when there was a flash of lightning. When it was dim in the cab again, she noticed a gathering pink in the rearview mirror and glanced back at a shining web of silver trailing into the rising sun. Then she saw him look at her and smile. She couldn’t decide whether or not he was handsome.

“Know what I was just thinking?”

“No, sir.”

“I should come clean here and now.”

“Please do.”

“I’ve been in love with you for a long time,” he blurted, and his voice cracked as tears burst down his cheeks like a flash flood. (She had no idea how often she would see him weep on a dime to disarm a woman.)

He seemed so earnest, so harmless and well meaning, and she couldn’t overcome her need to believe him. He’d had an eye on her. Leona’s failure to pay more than polite attention to him when he called on her dying mother had cut him to the quick. He didn’t ask her to love him or stay with him forever. However, for the next year or so, she was going to need a great deal he would consider it an honor to provide.

He seemed honest. He fascinated her. He was an unusual combination of long masculine angles and unexpected feminine touches like his thick, dark eyelashes and porcelain skin. He was at once bold and shy, innocent and seductive. She couldn’t help her inexplicable suspicion that he was, or at least had once been, a little dangerous or wild. She couldn’t pin it down, but she read something rakish or bad his seminary training hadn’t quite erased.