Butterfly Sunday (7 page)

Had Averill been seized by uncontrollable revulsion when he saw the newborn infant for the first time?

How could that be true if Leona had never even suspected such a thing? Even now, looking back from that perspective, she didn’t remember much to support the idea. Yet questions only lead to questions. What had compelled Averill to confess these things to Soames? Surely he knew that Soames, a woman whose proclivity for gossip had raised his ire many times, would never keep his terrible secret. Yet he had turned up at her door in the middle of the night and tearfully confessed to his crime as if she were some mother superior sworn and entitled to keep his secret.

Of course, Soames had come to her with everything.
They were best friends. The poor woman was traumatized. He had frightened her. His guilt had driven him insane. He wanted to be caught. He didn’t have the guts to kill himself, but he wanted to die. Why else would he provide her with information that could destroy him? What would he do next? Did Leona feel safe alone in the house with him? What would Averill do if he found out Soames had told her everything? Did Leona have a clue why he had come to Soames? Soames had long had the feeling Averill neither liked nor trusted her. Was he setting a trap? Was he simply out of his mind?

More questions leading to more questions. Yet Leona’s whole being was now focused on only one. How would she do it? How would she avenge her child?

Over and over Soames begged her to let the law bring him to justice. And how would that be, Leona demanded of her trembling friend. With all those extenuating circumstances that watered down the charges? With his devoted congregation swearing under oath that each had seen a one-armed man, or some such, running through the woods that night? And how much proof would they furnish? Questions leading to more disturbing questions and then at last Leona had the answer to all of them: Averill Sayres had to die.

For the next week or so Soames was an almost constant companion, begging her to be careful, to move slowly, and not to do anything crazy. Yet her good friend’s counsel only seemed to convince Leona a little more each time that there was no alternative. Finally, even Soames seemed to reach an uneasy truce with the inevitability of it. Right down to the first dose of arsenic, Soames tried to talk her out if it. By then, however, both women knew the thing was happening; by then it seemed to have a life all its own. Nothing was going to
stop it—unless she caved in to her sorrow over its effect on Blue.

It seemed to her that Blue rose out of the mist that gray March afternoon. Looking for Averill, he said, and he kept his distance at first, talking up the porch steps at her from the yard the way Darthula did.

Blue and his wife, Lucy, had been Sunday regulars until about six months earlier. According to Soames, Lucy had dumped Blue for a surgeon out of Memphis. Blue had come in from a three-day duck-hunting trip last October and found their house stripped bare to the woodwork. Lucy and their two little ones had disappeared without a trace. Blue had no idea Lucy was carrying on with the surgeon and no expectation whatsoever of finding himself in an empty house with nothing but the clothes on his back.

According to Soames, Blue had worshipped the ground beneath Lucy’s feet. They said the poor man was close to suicide. Leona had taken all that with a grain of salt. She didn’t join Soames in condemning Lucy as a double-fanged harlot—not right off like that. Women were always ready to think the worst of other women—especially one who had broken out of local ranks and gone off into the wider world. Besides, Lucy was an exquisitely beautiful woman, one who could throw a moth-eaten cotton sack over her shoulder and make it look like a silk stole.

She had never looked comfortable on an old pine pew in a country church. Leona had also observed that she didn’t look right sitting next to a sunburnt kid of a husband. Of course, Leona saw their initial attraction. In his own way Blue was as pretty as his wife. It wasn’t
hard to imagine them a couple years back, two starry-eyed teens joined at the hip. Yet it struck Leona from her vantage in the choir loft that Lucy had a worldly enervation, a look on her face that told you she had peered up the road ahead. There was none of that anywhere on Blue. He looked like any other kid who was content with the things he could get being cute and always on the lookout for some fun. Thinking back on it, Leona realized that Lucy had already begun to look and act like a surgeon’s wife.

Soames knew all the details. Lucy had come from lower, less educated and looser origins than Blue. They had begun their marriage as teenagers with a baby coming. Typical country kids, they’d been high school sweethearts. It was easy to imagine that they had been the prettiest couple in high school. There was nothing effeminate in Blue’s manner, and his attraction to the opposite sex was almost comically obvious. All the same, inch for square inch, Leona would have had a devil of a time deciding who was more beautiful. She could just see them at seventeen, stuck on each other like sweat bees on a raspberry jam cake.

About once a month Lucy and Blue brought their little handicapped daughter to church services. She lived at the Home for Incurables in Memphis. No one knew what was wrong with the child, not precisely, only that she had severe birth defects. She was terribly misshapen and virtually paralyzed. She couldn’t talk and she had limited mental faculties. Blue always held her on his lap, stroking her baby fine platinum hair and wiping her mouth with a handkerchief. Now and then he’d whisper something in her ear that always drew a little half smile and a sigh from the pitiful thing.

Lucy always sat straight-backed and solemn with the
other two normal kids on her far side. If she moved at all, it was to warn them into behaving themselves with an upraised finger or a meaningful glare. She never had much to say afterward in the churchyard. She was a tight-lipped woman who rubbed her forehead and looked over your shoulder when she was talking to you. Leona never made much of that. Not with Lucy’s wretched freak of nature looking up at the world from her canvas stroller. People had no call to judge the poor woman harshly.

Yet they took it upon themselves to disapprove of the fact that she had placed her daughter in an institution. So when Lucy left Blue, her Christian neighbors demonized her immediately. They had a tremendous love for plucking out eyes and rotten apples, a passion for a sacrificial woman at the well. Of course, she was gone and doubtless impervious to the fact that she was being crucified on the cross of respectable opinion.

Leona wasn’t devoted to Lucy. She was hardly ready to take up the woman’s cause. She had barely known her. All the same, she had to admire any woman from this backwater who could unshackle herself from a husband and a badly misformed child and land herself in five bedrooms overlooking a beautiful East Memphis golf course. No, there was nothing noble in it. It probably indicated some moral weakness. Yet, all that aside, she had an empathetic regard for her accomplishment. Though she wasn’t sure how she regarded Lucy’s ex-husband when he showed up late that Saint Patrick’s Day afternoon.

“Is that Blue?”

“Yessum.”

Blue lived on the far side of the hill on a three-hundred-acre cotton farm he had inherited from his
father. He was on his way to becoming one of those grinning young men of many enterprises. He’d acquired half interest in a video store and a drive-in grocery. She had also heard that for some unknown reason he’d recently hired on as a part-time deputy sheriff. He later admitted he went into law enforcement to avoid staying home alone at night.

Averill had been gone since early that morning, called away to Senatobia to preach a funeral. A little boy had drowned. That had set her own mind drifting over her recent loss. Strange to say, at the time she still believed her daughter had been delivered as a stillbirth. Aside from grief, she was half-crazy from loneliness. She was trying to stir herself a little, pressing herself to make some plans. As deep as her sorrow lay inside of her, she was beginning to understand that she would get up and go on from here—even if that only meant carrying the pain wherever she went.

Blue came on foot. She had spotted him as he emerged from a vine-covered ravine behind the cemetery. Above him, the path he had walked rose sharply to a wide, grassy plateau that rolled back for about an acre before it slanted higher into a hardwood forest.

“Scare a nervous ol’ ninny to death.”

“Don’t wanna do that, now.”

He slipped into the ravine and out of sight for a moment. During the few seconds it took him to reappear, she felt an inexplicable delight of panic, a half-forgotten rush of blood she had experienced as an adolescent whenever a boy she liked walked past her father’s house while she was on the front porch. It was an exquisite angst of hope that he would stop and speak with her combined with an absolute dread that he might really do it.

Blue was crossing the road now.

“Reverend Sayres home?”

“Naw, I’m sorry to say, he’s not,” she said. “Gone to Senatobia to preach a little boy’s funeral.”

“A little boy, I’ll say …”

“Terrible thing. It was his uncle that came for Averill.”

If Blue thought it was peculiar that a family from a big town of several thousand people had sent for a country preacher twenty-five miles away, he gave no indication whatsoever. She studied his long oval face and pale blue-green eyes. He was as blond as they come, but with a dark complexion. Leona figured him to be twenty-five or twenty-six. He moved up the driveway, absentmindedly kicking up clods of dust with the points of his yellowish leather boots.

“Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I never know what might come out of those woods.”

“Tell the Reverend I came by, please, ma’am.”

He tipped the front of his dirty white hat slightly, like in the movies. Its wide brim made a halo around his longish white-blond hair. His constant scowl and careful monotone gave him a comic edge, like that of a small boy trying to act like a man.

“Please don’t rush off.”

She was embarrassed by her unintentional plaintive tone. He didn’t respond. He just stood there looking at her a minute. Something flashed in his eyes, something meant for Averill, she guessed. Apparently, he wasn’t going to share it with her. For some idiot reason she blushed with jealousy. She pointed lightly toward a chair.

“I reckon you noticed there’s a storm coming.”

“All day long …”

She continued with a silly harangue, saying the storm,
if it was really going to make it there, would apt as not be a shower or several showers at most, certainly not torrential or menacing to any degree. He just looked at her. She wanted to chastise him for leaving without any consideration for her loneliness or extending his sympathies for her recent loss. She wanted him to stay, but she was afraid he might. She wanted no part of men, especially the good-looking kind like Blue Hudson.

Men loved to talk about the treacheries of women. Ha! Wasn’t this the dark side of that moon? Was she supposed to believe he didn’t have a clue as to his effect on a lonely young woman like her? She had to say something before she started acting weird and desperate or he got wise to her odd sense of longing.

“Was it a religious matter or a personal matter that brought you?”

He didn’t want to answer. His scowl deepened into consternation. He was country, but he was a country gentleman. He couldn’t ignore the question. Yet there was an undercurrent of something like resentment in his silence. Her query threatened his secret.

“A little of both and neither, really,” he said boldly, then he turned on his heels.

“If it’s religious, then I never interfere,” she said to his back. “Even though I know more Old Testament than Averill does,” she added, and instantly regretted her braggadocian editorial. Blue kept walking down the driveway toward the road. “However,” she added in a tone that revealed a little more desperation or tension than she had intended, “if it’s a matter of a personal nature, a question of morality or the heart—well, sir, it has been said I’m the one to ask.”

He stopped and turned around. She couldn’t tell
from this distance, but she would have almost sworn tears were welling in his eyes. He cleared his throat and spoke in a barely audible voice.

“It’s just man to man, I reckon.”

Man to man, he reckoned. Didn’t that usually mean there was a woman involved? Well, he’d been in turmoil over Lucy for weeks. That was no secret. He just stood there, his face getting longer. Any second he’d turn away again, and she’d be alone with the sun going down. She wouldn’t let that happen.

“I won’t have it said you came and went without me offering you a cold drink.”

He nodded. He almost seemed to half smile, as if he was glad for the invitation. She tapped the faded flowered cushion of a metal chair. Then she disappeared inside of the house.

“You need another one,” Leona said after Blue inhaled an entire can of Dr Pepper and crushed it in one smooth motion.

“I’m fine,” he said, stifling a burp.

“Well, it’s sure enough turning spring.…”

“Yessum.” He grinned, but he was already shifting his feet toward the driveway.

Already the despair was gathering around her, like it was a demon hiding in the woods, watching for the chance to overpower her again the minute Blue was gone.

“Much obliged,” he muttered. Then he was down all three porch steps in one leap.

He’d read her despair and he didn’t want to be saddled with it. She watched him move toward the road. There was something almost fluid about him, something unreal, as if he’d dissolve into the atmosphere if he turned sideways. She couldn’t begin to explain it,
but every step he took seemed to pull her down another foot into her dark mood. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t let him pass through in a wink. She didn’t know what he wanted, but she was pretty sure it had to do with his broken marriage.