Butterfly Sunday (21 page)

He was putty, soft taffy in her fingers. She had been absolutely right about him. He was living in a frenzy of excitation exacerbated by fundamentalist Christian denial. Denial had so overstrained his ability to suppress his human appetites that he had absolutely no control over them. He was also ignorant, greedy and ego-driven. The fool didn’t have a clue. He was hers. He had no chance against her persuasive manipulations. She had netted and bagged and twisted him.

She had guessed from the first day he came to see
Henri about the church that Averill was her man. He had that greasy weasel look about him, the shifting eyes and insidious sensuality of the abused. It took one to know one, didn’t it? Something familiar smoldered in him, something tightly wound and inevitable seeped through his toothy grins and enervated laughs.

He was always aware of his flesh. He assumed the rest of the world was as well. His clothing was always a little tight here, a little loose there; there was always something shiny or flimsy or opaque about it. He was in a perpetual state of seduction—the way those whose innocence has been stolen always are. He was overwrought with sensing, trapped in his futile pursuit of those who had robbed him. Yet he was ignorant of all that, and worse, mortified by his physical impulses, ashamed and terrified—so distraught with his quivering need that he had turned in desperation to the constraints of hard-shell Puritanism.

If Henri was the dull and sexless lover, thrashing about for a few insensate minutes with his ego, Averill would be that driven animal, that wildly dominant paramour, helpless once aroused to moderate his lust until he and his partner were numb, depleted and bruised.

She was right. From their first time back in September, Averill had been that tender and terrible husband she dreaded and craved. He was insatiable. She was something less than human with him, she was depraved and monstrous and she horrified herself, but she was, from the moment he touched her until he withdrew—sometimes hours later—alive.

Nor was she so devastated by it all to play her part. It was Averill’s mind she pleasured with sighs and promises. It was his abuse she molded with her whimpers, his sickness she nurtured with her cries of delight. He
came to her against his will. She knew, if he never figured it out, that his lust was a mask for his darker need to violate his own morality, to shame himself with increasing frequency, to drive himself lower and lower into an abyss of self-loathing until he could no longer bear the pain of his disgusting nature, and kill himself.

By now Averill Sayres was deep into the fog and shadows of the thrilling fur-lined trap she had set for him.

“Henri’s not coming home for Thanksgiving,” she had told him a little over a week ago. They were riding around in the new Cutlass she had given him as an early Christmas present.

“So we’ll spend it together.” Averill grinned.

“I don’t need Henri’s money,” she lied. “I have my own.”

“Money don’t matter to me,” he said flatly.

“You’re a man of God,” she concurred, ripping the twenty-six-thousand-dollar price tag off the passenger-side window. Then she told him about her dream. She wanted to live on the Pacific Coast in a modern house set on a tall cliff with every room open toward the ocean. She wanted to spend her whole life with Averill, and—who knew?—maybe, God willing, their children too.

She told him, knowing he was pretending to go along with it, knowing she had no such dream, not for him, though they would have a future, a long golden slide into the lake of fire after he had helped her do what had to be done.

SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

5:17 P.M.

She heard a car.

The afternoon had passed like the Dark Ages. She went half-crazy—running to the front porch every time a green persimmon plopped on the roof. She couldn’t stop herself. She was out the door at every thud or scrape or fluttering in the trees. Of course, it was guilt—that pernicious dread of getting caught. Though it didn’t make sense. Getting caught was the point. She had full intentions of facing justice. She had no plans to flee, attempt to cover her tracks or otherwise circumvent her inevitable trial and conviction.

It was by those means, and only by those means, that Tess would exist—if only in the past tense.

She had checked the kitchen clock at ten-minute intervals. At seventeen minutes past five she was standing
in the kitchen and she heard a car engine whine as it climbed the hill. She had hardly heard a soul on the road since Averill had gotten up from the table and walked out the front door at fourteen minutes before two.

He had inhaled two slices of the chocolate cake while she cleared the dining room table. She had set the rest of the poisoned cake on top of the clothes extractor. Yet it wasn’t there when he asked for his dessert. It wasn’t anywhere. She had to slice the harmless version that was sitting on the kitchen table. Earlier she had watched Winky open the car door for Audena because her hands were full. Leona had given her a dish, a porcelain casserole that had belonged to Averill’s mother. It was a cheap glass baking dish and the rim was chipped. Audena had somehow managed to set it on the stove and abscond with the deadly torte instead.

Not dreaming there was a remote chance that anyone but Averill would consume the heavy chocolate pastry, Leona had emptied the carton of Rat Zap into the filling, rendering her dessert lethal enough to wipe out a platoon.

She had watched Averill cross the road and move another hundred yards uphill to his church. She had counted on that. It was his habit to spend Sunday afternoons in his study behind the sanctuary. It was a country church, way up an old clay logging road that wound through the woods another half a mile before it petered out. Odds were very strong that there wouldn’t be another soul on that road until Wednesday evening when the choir practiced. She had counted very heavily on all of that.

As soon as Averill was out of earshot, she had ransacked her desk in an effort to locate Audena’s phone number. Failing that, she tried calling information. As
it happened, she learned that there were two Winky Hodges listed in Calhoun County. Both had answering machines, so both were warned that her chocolate cake would be the last dessert either might ever eat. She didn’t waste money on long-distance explanations either.

Now the situation swallowed her last bit of sense. She’d poisoned the stupid bastard. She’d murdered him. Why? She hated this. Now she had lost the point, the reason why it had been so necessary. Now she couldn’t quite grasp the triumph of her execution. She was dangerous. She deserved to die. It was all turning against her now. The sky and the woods were laughing at her. She thought of him gagging on his own blood, his flesh on fire, the hopeless torment.

Maybe there was still time. Maybe. She was dizzy. She had to sit down. Maybe she had poisoned herself! Or Averill had caught on to her and switched the dishes. She could hear him laughing. Her flesh crawled. He was in the living room. She made herself go look. No. No, it wasn’t Averill. It was the television. Some jungle movie. She needed a drink. She found the bourbon under the back steps. She sat down on the wooden stairs and took several sips straight from the bottle. She sat there for ten minutes. Then she got up. She had to do something. Anything.

One of the McFayes had brought her two pints of raspberries from the farmers market down in Tupelo. She couldn’t bear to think of them covered with mold and tossed out by one of the churchwomen. She put a cobbler together and threw it in the oven. While it baked, she dragged a chair over to the chimney behind the stove, climbed up on it and found the bundle of papers tucked in a little hollow at the back. They were
letters she had written to Ty during her first six months here and then never mailed. She took them out back into the far end of the garden and burned them. Then she went back inside the house and pulled the cobbler out of the oven and left it on the burners to cool.

She ran a bath, digging out her last bar of lavender soap and holding it under the faucet to dissolve every bit of it. As she luxuriated in the warm, scented water, she made a mental list of the most important things. While the water was running she thought she heard the car. She turned it off and listened. Nope. Just the birds and creaking limbs of a billion hardwoods. She was the only person for miles. She didn’t count Averill stone dead on the floor of his study.

When she had dried and dressed herself, she cut a piece of cobbler. She was disappointed. The filling had a bitter metallic aftertaste. Somewhere between the produce farm and her kitchen those berries had spent time in a copper bowl.

Her mother’s octagon-shaped English porcelain dinnerware was packed and stored in the attic, all but the teapot, which she kept in the glass cabinet in the living room. It was an old set when her mother bought it at a flea market before Leona was born. She wanted to give it to a cute young couple she’d seen at church. She wrote a note describing all that and stuck it inside of an envelope with their names on it. She left it on the front hall table. She left another envelope in the same place. It contained a note to a neighbor’s boy about taking the gray tabby cat that had lived under the house since late winter.

She went out onto the front porch to enjoy the peace of the blue-gray twilight and sat down to wait for that car.

“The prosecutor will paint me as a woman scorned,” she thought. “He’ll have me an avenging wife.”

Well, let him. When he was finished, she’d get to have her say. She’d have a solid forum in which to tell the whole truth at last. No, that wouldn’t save her life. The jury wasn’t going to give her any out. No plea bargain. There was no dancing around that. Still, the inconceivable truth would be heard and written down as unalterable legal record.

Yes, it would be written down unproven, recorded as testimony, not fact. It would form her rationale for the crime of poisoning her husband. Some would say it was a lie or a delusion or a plea for sympathy. What did that matter? Not one whit—as long as it was said aloud in a public forum and recorded in perpetuity. It would go down as “alleged.” Yet someone would hear or read it sooner or later and believe it. It was the truth. Truth wound its way. Yes, it grew as slowly as imported boxwood. But it was inevitable. It got said, told, repeated and accepted at some point. Even her unsubstantiated truth, scribbled by a court reporter who would probably assume she was lying.

“They’ll execute me,” she said to herself with a shrug, “but I won’t die. They’ll come into my house. They’ll pitch my afghan and the photograph of Mama and Daddy at the New York World’s Fair and my high school graduation portrait on the trash. They’ll tear my clothes for rags. Yet they won’t rid this world of my meaning. Nor will they be able to pervert or misconstrue it.”

A life had to matter, even the briefest and least significant. No matter how small, or how quickly it was here and gone, no matter if it had no real effect on the world. No matter if it was tiny enough to hide inside
the hollow of a leaf. So she was going to let the world denounce her as a satanic hag all the way to the gas chamber.

She knew she well might avoid execution if she made a big show of remorse and pled temporary insanity. No jury was going to send a young woman to death row if they had any other option. However, she wasn’t sorry. She felt no remorse. If what she had done was reprehensible, then she was the reprehensible sort. Yes, she understood that holding on to her fury at Averill had infected her with his depravity. Taking his life was her initiation into his animal kind.

It didn’t make her regret what she had done.

If that meant she was insane, then it wasn’t temporary. Beyond that she had never lost sight of the consequences she would face. Sorry? Sorry was for cowards. Remorse would imply that there was some part of what Averill did that could be justified. Remorse was letting the world cover his evil with roses. Remorse made her more savage than Averill. It was asking a morally squeamish legal system to turn away from a slain innocent in exchange for sparing Leona’s life. As if she was willing to continue living, an amoral worm, caged and useless in a meaningless world.

No. Let them keep their justice. The terrible stone had been lifted off her heart and shoulders. It was all over. She had nothing else to add to this world. She had accomplished her dream. She was Tess’s mother. Tess was now created and part of this world. She wanted nothing else from it. She was done.

Leona had never even held her. She couldn’t say for sure that her hair was red or brown. She never saw her eyes. Tess hadn’t been there long enough to open them. Leona was naked and bleeding in the snow, a
dying animal set upon by predators while Tess was born. She lay there unconscious, seeping afterbirth, her forehead black and swollen from the fall. She had to take it on faith about Tess’s wavy yellow-red hair like queens of England. She had only seen a round filmy dark wetness. And that was all a flash.