Butterfly Sunday (38 page)

“She fled?”

“Shot him dead and herself next.”

“Chased him all the way to hell, did she?”

“You pretty funny.”

“She went crazy thinking he kill the baby.”

“I didn’t know Mrs. Churchill had a baby.”

“She ain’t.”

“Whose baby did he kill?”

“Nobody baby killed.”

“I don’t understand.”

Darthula turned around and grabbed the bundle of rags. He thought she was leaving, but she turned toward him, lifting a blanket and revealing the sleeping visage and gossamer curls of the most beautiful baby he had ever seen.

“Where did you get that baby?”

“Found her in the snow.”

“When?”

“Last January.”

“Where?”

“Where the devil laid her down.”

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

“ ’Fraid the devil would find out and snatch her.”

“We have to talk to the sheriff.”

“You have to give me something to eat first.”

SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2000

10:00 A.M.

It was the first hot, sticky day of the year. Averill’s sister Audena and her husband, Winky, led the parade from the church to the cemetery where his fervid flock laid their slain angel to rest. Leona and Blue watched from the front porch. It was all very sad, yet there was an undeniable circuslike edge to it. They had to smile at the silhouette of Leelinda Spakes’s silicone breasts as she pranced through the mud in her formfitting choir robe and spiked heels. She couldn’t have seen them from this distance, but Leelinda looked over at them and turned to step out of the line of mourners and cross the road.

“Hey there, Leelinda.”

She just stood there, beaming her disapproval at them through her false eyelashes.

“Need something, sugar?” Blue asked.

“A harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread …” she said, quoting scripture, “but an adulteress stalks a man’s very life.” Then she drew in a long breath that made her already enormous breasts seem to inflate and lift as if she were about to float away. She was all unmitigated satisfaction as she turned slowly toward the cemetery.

“Leelinda?” Blue called in a subdued tone.

“Yes?” she inquired with a haughty glare.

“If you crash in water, can those things be used for flotation?”

Blue had no sooner fired off his remark than a sudden streak of lightning and an immediate peal of thunder aborted the ceremony at the grave, and mourners raced for the parking lot beside the church while Blue and Leona dove inside the house. The air was copper. Then a sea-green wall of water fell like a tidal wave out of the sky. Suddenly Leona was exhausted. Her fragile hilarity gave way to a weary sense of gloom. She went into the bedroom and tried to sleep.

There was something he wasn’t telling her. Blue had been acting strange since last night. Father Timon, the Episcopal priest, had called him. He’d gone into the bedroom and whispered into the receiver for half an hour. After that he was downright silly.

“What was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

It was late afternoon by the time Leona woke from her nap. The rain had stopped and the sky was pewter blue above the trees outside the bedroom window. Blue was in the front yard arguing with someone. It
was Audena and Winky. Their voices grew louder. She peered through the dusty screen over the bedroom window. Winky and Audena were barreling down the driveway toward the road. Blue swirled around toward the house. He was doubled over, laughing.

“What?”

“I caught Winky trying to hot-wire Averill’s Cutlass.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him I was sheriff and he was under arrest for car theft.”

She showered and changed and then went out on the front porch, where Blue was watching the shadows spread over the green hills. Her nap had given her some ballast. The world didn’t seem as frayed and tattered.

“You have something on your mind.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “There are some things better shown than told.”

“Then show me.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Is it bad?”

“No.”

“Please tell me.”

“It’s not bad,” he countered. Then he went in and took a shower.

“Ready?”

“I’ll get my purse.”

“You don’t need it.”

He let her walk down the porch steps in front of him. She moved to get into his car.

“We’re walking.”

He took her hand. They crossed the road and stepped over the low iron fence at the front of the cemetery. He went straight to the flower-covered mound, but he didn’t
stop there. Instead they moved up the path into the woods for about a hundred yards. In another three or four minutes, however, Blue turned down a side trail toward the swamp.

“There’s snakes down there.”

“I hope you understand why I did it this way,” he said, making less sense as the black surface of the swamp came into view. To this point she was on familiar ground. Now Blue was guiding her to the left, where another path she had never noticed descended the hillside. In another minute Leona had to admit that she was completely turned around. Blue had taken them down into a gorge she had never seen. In another minute, she saw the shack. So this was where Darthula lived. It wasn’t through the swamp, as she had led people to believe.

“Darthula?” Leona called, so they wouldn’t startle her.

“She’s not home.”

“What’s going on, Blue?”

“I’ll give you the details later.”

Then he sat her down on the rocky hillside and took both of her hands. There was something he was having a hard time telling her. She might just brace for a shock, a good shock, but a shock nonetheless. She took her cue from him. She waited for him to tell her whatever it was. She was sure he was doing it the best possible way.

“Leona, I have wonderful news.”

In a heartbeat, he could see her beginning to hope against hope and dread that she might be wrong at the same time.

“She’s alive. Tess is alive and she’s here.” He was trembling and crying. He was going to pieces.

She was by some inexplicable quirk of human nature as calm as the moss-covered rocks. “Where is she, Blue?”

“There in that crib on the porch.”

Leona floated through the surreal purple and gold haze. Yet it wasn’t surreal or dreamlike. She could smell the pines and hear the birds. The past two years were the dream. She had somehow fled her own being and moved off, leaving the rest of herself behind in that nightmare just past. This wasn’t to be confused with that dim place. This was where she had somehow overtaken and stepped into her own lost being once more.

Now she was moving up the porch steps. No, nothing fantastic here. An old crib. She crept toward it and peered down at the sum of it all. Tess sat cross-legged, sucking her thumb. She was a cherub, a peach, a perfect, freckled angel with swirls of curly silver-white baby hair and ice blue eyes that danced when she looked up at Leona. Yet she was no dream or angel. She was altogether tangible, here and now.

“Hey,” Leona said in a soft, hoarse voice. Then, leaning toward the curious baby, she wrapped her hand around a wooden side rail and let her fingers flutter slowly. In another minute Tess touched her knuckle and Blue saw Leona’s color deepen, but she didn’t move or make a sound.

“Hey,” Leona repeated, smiling at Tess.

“Hey,” Tess shouted, clapping both of her hands.

“Come?” Leona asked after Tess had shown her an earless stuffed cotton bunny.

“Yeah!” Tess shouted, jumping up and down.

Then she lifted the dancing baby with both arms, resisting the urge to hug, for fear of frightening her. Sitting
her up under one arm, Leona swung Tess around so she could see Blue, who was trying to stem his tears with his handkerchief.

“Hush, baby,” Leona commanded.

When it was full dark and Tess had fallen asleep on the bed, Leona went out to the front porch, where Blue sat looking at the stars.

“Whatcha know?” he asked.

“Less by the minute,” she said.

Across the road the moon had plated the flowers on Averill’s grave silver blue. A breeze stirred the tops of the pines. It was clear, but she could smell more rain coming from the opposite side of the hill. She drank the soft scent. Far up the hill an owl hooted. They sat in the quiet splendor, leaving each other to the dreams and battles and reflections that lie within. Slowly the cloud continent appeared over the trees, and after a while they could feel the first scattered drops of rain.

“Coming in?” she asked Blue, who seemed to be asleep with his eyes open. He stirred himself fully awake and stood next to her, watching the jade green tops of trees bristle in the gathering wind.

“I love these old woods,” he said.

She was falling asleep. The shivering limbs of the trees seemed to echo the breathing in the darkness on either side of her. Husband and child, partner and promise, breathing in and out, their chests lifting and falling with the floating pines. Was it a pattern or an accident?

Did it matter if she understood that it was lovely?
It was life, and she could feel her own breathing with theirs; life, and now a muted drumming on the roof. There, in the little house under the sighing trees, she pressed her shoulders into the pillow and imagined the Earth curving all the way around from the head of her bed through town and the ocean and Asia and back to the foot of the bed. For now she understood that she was at this place on that curve for this time.

Happiness was a here-and-now, breathing thing.

It was enough, all this warm breathing and creaking and holding on to the curve of the Earth. It was magnificent, the slight swell of moonlit curtains, the comfortable squeak of tired bedsprings, the far-off wail of a wild dog. She was tired. Sleep was tugging at her. Tomorrow with all its cloying improbabilities and toil was lurking in the darkness, waiting like a snare in the tall grass near the empty grave across the road. Tomorrow and dying, and bending time could wait.

She slept. She woke. Blue got up in the night to close the window. He kissed her, and soon he was breathing in deep sleep again. The storm had passed. The room was silver. This, she thought, drawing the moment into her breast, probing it with her eyes, this sensing moment of bliss is mine. Then her eyes caressed the sleeping baby. She touched Blue’s shoulder. She let her cheek graze his upper arm.

It was earthbound enchantment. She peered through the thin veil of curtains over the window into the moonlit woods. Closer in the yard there was a catbird in the sweet gum tree. Then something flashed and disappeared. She waited. It was gone. Then something else fluttered. She slipped quietly out of bed so as not to disrupt their perfect breathing. She slipped into her robe and went out onto the front porch.

It was cool now. She watched in the stillness. There, across the road out of the feathered mist, rising here and there from the blackness between the silver tombstones, as lovely and ephemeral as all living things, a hundred or else a thousand flickering white butterflies rose and drifted like holy snow among the trees.

DAVID HILL divides his time between Los Angeles, where he writes for the stage and screen, and Mississippi. His first novel,
Sacred Dust
, won the Commonwealth Club of California First Work of Fiction Award.