Butterfly Sunday (5 page)

The saddest part to Leona was that Tilly went screaming and crying her innocence all the way to the
penitentiary, and her children believed her. Old Mrs. Crowe took them to raise, but they never forgave her for “framing” their mother. It was too much for the elderly woman, who suffered a series of strokes before they were teenagers. By the time they were sixteen, both girls had dropped out of school and left town, each to pursue her own self-destructive fate.

Meanwhile, Averill’s voice betrayed no suspicion of his approaching fate. He was using his sincere tone now, playing bashful, unabashed and self-effacing. It was so empty, so false and conceited, she couldn’t begin to imagine what went on inside all those spellbound heads with eyes glued to him.

Odd how a life could come home to roost. Odd and menacing, Audena turning up for Averill’s last supper—even though it would be served at midday. It rattled Leona inside out and backwards. What did it mean? Well, there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about any of it now. She had laced several casseroles that morning. Then she finished off the arsenic, dumping the last bit into the chocolate pie filling.

Of course, she had carefully prepared two versions of each dish. That was for her and the likely happenstance of an extra mouth or two. People beat anything she had ever seen with their sense of entitlement. She couldn’t count the number who had managed to inveigle their way from the church steps to her dining room table for a free Sunday dinner.

Leona wasn’t stingy to those in need. In fact, she more than welcomed anyone who earned a plate by making himself good company. These were the threadbare, sanctimonious takers whose frayed cuffs belied savings accounts and whose dinner conversations began and ended with the words “Please pass.” Audena
would fit nicely into that category. Audena’s visit was timed to guarantee her a big meal.

She ought to kill off the whole damned bunch of them. She didn’t mean that, not even in thought. Yet the thought amused her to the point that she had to swallow a giggle.

Well, God was merciful after all. Averill’s sermon had finally come to an end. Everyone stood up for the hymn.

From the choir loft the congregation looked like a sea of flowered hats. Now, that irritated her. That made her itch between the ears. Choir members never got to wear new hats to church on Easter Sunday.

EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

12:23 P.M.

His sermon had made a big impression. They had all fallen in love with him one more time. Averill was glowing with pride at all the compliments he took while shaking hands at the door. Strange how a smile transformed his small, brittle features. His general demeanor was sullen. He held himself in pretty tight. He didn’t say much, unless he was mad, then he said way too much, erupting with volcanic rage. So most of the time he wore a downtrodden wince that only made him look all the more like a beady little rodent.

Of what could anyone with half a brain accuse her, other than poisoning a two-legged rat? He kept a rat’s habits, slithering around in the dark, carrying God only knew what plagues home at all hours. Not that she even bothered to wonder. Not that Averill ever burdened his
seamy mind with anything like guilt or shame. Averill never felt he deceived anyone. Yet there was no one Averill wouldn’t deceive. He was oblivious to his own amorality because he was the most ardent believer of all his own lies.

Averill’s eyes held on to their decorous spirituality while his torso slipped through the doorway for a second brush with Leelinda Spakes’s resurrected breasts that day. He was the Old Testament ram’s horn and the windblown enemy of sin. Unless of course he happened to be the sinner; then he wriggled his way around the Ten Commandments by hating not the transgressor but the all-too-human sin within him. Blue Hudson said Averill acted like he had a “Get Out of Hell Free” card in his vest pocket.

No. No, she wasn’t going around any bends with thoughts of Blue today. Blue was gone, he was in California with his kids. She wasn’t going to get bogged down in all that. She couldn’t squeeze anything else into her head. Blue was a fragile little candle in the dark. She snuffed it out. Then for the last time she played the gregarious and smiling preacher’s wife, greeting her husband’s flock.

“You sounded like a little angel bird this morning, Leelinda.”

“Thank ya, Leona.”

“Johnnie Nell, how’s Miss Leticia?”

“We’ve put her in God’s hands, Miz Sayres.”

“Mister Johnson, sir, hand that silly cane to Miz Johnson and give me my hug.…”

Meanwhile Chester Spakes, Leelinda’s red-faced husband, had watched his wife’s breasts brush Averill’s shirt and tie. Now he tugged at her sleeve and she moved toward his parked pickup truck. As he opened the
passenger door for her, Leelinda turned back around and gave Averill a wistful pout. Her husband, who had seen her, twisted one finger around her hair and tugged hard. He gave her a quick shove up into the cab, slamming the door. As he stepped around the front grille, he flicked a dozen or so strands of blond hair onto the ground. Then he glanced across the churchyard to see how much of his point Averill had taken.

Averill had already turned his back on Leelinda and her husband. He was holding eighty-eight-year-old Ella Stone’s hand and listening with an earnest expression while she told him tearfully for the hundredth time that her brother Amos had been killed while fighting in the Philippines on Easter Sunday, 1944.

Meanwhile, Leona had faced down Audena and Winky with all the welcome she had left in her, and introduced them to everyone who walked past. They weren’t going to inconvenience themselves trying to make polite conversations.

“Soames, I want you to meet my sister-in-law Audena.”

“Winky says he’s hungry, Leona.”

Soames had heard all about them from Leona. Audena emitted a faint odor of Dial soap and perspiration. Soames, who never missed a cue, asked Audena with a dead-earnest expression if she was wearing Chanel No. 5 and then left Leona to keep a straight face.

She was entering a ludicrous twilight by now. People were crowding around, eager to devour the two new faces like fresh-killed meat. She hoped she wasn’t a snob, but she had observed that country people sometimes showed raw edges in situations, while town people regarded such behavior as inappropriate. Averill was lingering over every pair of eyes that walked out of the
church, avoiding his sister and brother-in-law. Audena embarrassed him. Winky was a walking offense. Leona was jumpy as a tick trying to preplan how to get the last dose down Averill without killing her in-laws.

There was nothing to do but escort them a hundred yards up the road to the house, hand them both big glasses of tea and listen to them snort at each other.

Later, after Averill showed up and she had run Audena out of the kitchen, their visit was beginning to feel like some plan. Audena hated to be alone with Leona. She was up to something. Then, when she went back into the living room, Winky fell silent. It seemed rehearsed. Winky had been pressing some point with Averill, repeatedly drawing him back onto a subject Averill didn’t like. With Audena yakking at her, Leona hadn’t been able to catch Winky’s drift. Now she realized that had been the whole idea. They wanted something from Averill. They were afraid Leona might object. Winky had been elected to open the volatile subject with Averill while Audena distracted Leona.

Now Audena started slicing into Averill’s high moral banter. Leona had to concentrate on the lethal version of Easter Sunday dinner. She did hear Audena say, “… our mother’s wishes,” which even at her young age, Leona knew to be a certain sign of an attempted larceny. In a few more minutes, they were too loud to understand. It was a long-standing argument between Audena and Averill. Beyond that Leona couldn’t make it out. While they made accusations and denials, Leona managed to get the food reorganized. She took the plates off the dining room table so she could fill them herself in the kitchen.

She had to get them fed and on the road. Averill’s symptoms were overdue by now. Audena was screaming:
they had had streets in hell lined with thieves and hypocrites trying to hide their sins behind a pulpit. Averill didn’t miss the opportunity. He told Audena she was right indeed, they did have streets down in hell and they had bloated hags like Audena scrubbing them! Audena responded with a wail that hung over his rage like a descant. Winky had seen two lawyers. Audena was cut through the heart. Averill was innocent. Leona let them scream and holler for five minutes. Then she clanged a spoon on a pot lid and shouted, “Dinner!” When a silence ensued, she stepped into the dining room and called out as pleasantly as possible, “Take your seats; I’ll serve your plates from the kitchen.” She was going to add that it was because she didn’t have any decent serving dishes, but, surveying her audience, she decided not to waste the amends.

Within ten seconds the cannon-fire in the living room resumed. They ignored Leona’s second round of banging. Leona stormed through the kitchen and down the back steps. The world was a blue-green blur.

Wouldn’t it be a delicious irony if Audena pulled out a gun and shot Averill between the eyes? Wouldn’t it be sheer heaven if the three of them somehow choked each other to death? What misery and deprivation had nurtured the two of them? What kind of hideous monster was their mother? It was strange how little she really knew about Averill’s family. The name Sayres was well known around Fredonia, though it was by and large more notorious than acclaimed. From what she had known and forgotten from adult gossip, Averill and Audena had come back to town as teenagers to live with their grandmother. Rumor had it their mother was a prostitute.

Once, when Leona was still fairly small, Averill had walked past the house while she was on the porch
swing between her mother and father. After he was out of earshot, her mother asked which one of the Sayres families he belonged to.

“Darcy Lou.”

“Sidney’s wife?”

“She’s no kind of wife.”

“Who is that boy’s father?”

“A line from here to the courthouse.”

“Where is Darcy Lou living?”

“She died of a heroin overdose.”

“Hush before the baby hears you.”

It was sad. What good could grow out of that? Still, it justified nothing, no matter how much it might explain. There was talk in Fredonia that Darcy Lou had sold Averill to men when he was a boy. If that was true, had it broken his ability to stop himself? Was this all just an eye for an eye? Would it bring Tess back to life? Maybe Leona could still save him. She had to try. She’d feed him raw egg and mustard. He might still vomit the lethal portion. Then she could have his stomach pumped. She could invent some stupid explanation. No one would believe it, but as long as he was all right, they wouldn’t bother trying to prove otherwise. Then her mother’s voice repeated in her mind, reverberating with wider significance.

“Hush before the baby hears you.”

The clouds of doubt and hesitation lifted like veils of illusion and she saw Averill’s hands squeeze the throat of an innocent newborn. Compassion was cowardice, morality, an extravagance. Her spirit was bankrupted. She couldn’t afford loftier sentiment.

Her eye caught something still and purple and gold just above the tall grass where the yard gave over to woods. It might have been a butterfly, but this was April. Whatever it was, she felt a coolness rushing toward her,
an inexplicable calm that overspread the surreal afternoon. A moment ago, she was shaking, hyperventilating and muttering to herself. She had begun to slide away from reality. Now things made sense again.

She wanted to investigate the source of this unexpected rationality. She hadn’t taken ten steps before she understood it all. It was her mother’s Siberian iris. She had pulled a handful of stalks the morning she left home. She had thrown them there in the crook of those tree roots the way she could remember her mother and grandmother pitching them around the bases of trees in cemeteries.

Theirs flourished. Hers had withered—all but one. She had forgotten it. Now it seemed impossible and significant. Why? Because such beauty still existed? Was it a sign that the Creator still had better plans for the world? Or a remnant of Eden? Maybe it was just a flower and it really didn’t mean anything or matter. Maybe nothing did. She had lost all direction and meaning so long ago that when she leaned down to breathe in the exquisite perfume of the floating purple wonder with its brilliant gold throat, she half expected it to disappear like a mirage in the desert. Instead she drew in the essence of her childhood.

How could it be the same excessive sweetness? How had that survived when all the rest was gone?

She began to drift back to a world she had inhabited until a few years ago. It was a world where an iris was a small wonder and people meant what they said. She felt a strange hope blending with light green shadows mingling with overwhelming sorrow for all she had lost. This impossible loveliness reminded her of that striving happiness people back in that believing world took for granted. Somehow there you could get aches and pains
balled up with happiness. You could shrug, or smile with irony at all but the very occasional worst things. Now her head began to flow with a great river of people and things she had somehow forgotten or misplaced in this bleak present tense existence where there was neither humor nor hope to sustain you.