Butterfly Sunday (8 page)

“Blue!” she cried out, frayed edges showing in her voice.

“Ma’am?”

“It doesn’t hurt forever. It won’t kill you either.”

She had mortally wounded him. He just stood there, his back to her, his shoulders bunched, shaking head to toe.

“Blue, you got a hole in your heart the size of Texas.…”

He turned toward her, his face beet red and creased. He was trying to talk, but his lips were quivering and he was afraid if he opened his mouth, he’d start crying.

“Go on, let it out; it’s just feeling.”

“Aw, hell,” he said. Then the tears flowed and he was a blubbering mess. He cried for a long time.

She had wanted company. She’d manipulated him into this for the sake of some company. Now she had no idea what to do or say to help him. What did she know?

“Come up on the porch and sit down.”

She brought him lemonade and a towel. It was grief. One minute they talked about any- and everything. The next they sat without words and watched the thunder-heads blanket the evening sky. Then he’d cry again, heaving and raining tears down the front of his white cotton shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he sniffed.

“For feelings?”

After an hour he seemed to be all right again. He went into the house and washed his face. When he came
back outside it was almost as if his earlier sorrow had been a dream.

“Better run.”

“Why?”

“Things to do.”

His distant, polite self-possession insulted her. She felt like some stupid girl who’d lured a sailor home and regretted it later. Why shouldn’t Blue leave? What did she have to say about it? This sudden rush of resentment caught her off guard.

“I’m glad you came by.”

“We’ll see y’all.”

It felt like, “I’ll call ya, babe.” Was she losing it? He had come up on the porch at her insistence, sated his tears on a kitchen towel and voraciously helped himself to the intimacy of two glasses of lemonade.

Blue walked across the front yard toward the road. The sky wouldn’t fall. Nothing would jump out of the woods and gobble her up. She’d been through an eternity of lonely nights in this house since the baby. She’d endure this one and more. Eventually she’d pick up and go on living. This would all be some blurry memory of a strange sojourn in the wilderness one day.

When he reached the road, Blue stopped and leaned against a tree, thinking about something a minute. He was too deep in his miasma to peer over the edge of it and see hers. Well, no one could take on another person’s happiness. She had to find her own and he had to find his. Maybe growing up was understanding that love wasn’t the answer. At least not just one kind of love. She had things to do and be that would somehow absorb her immediate sorrows and make her life good again.

Blue turned around and walked slowly across the muddy stubble and peered up at Leona.

“Please forgive my rudeness for not telling you right away how very sorry I am to know about your terrible loss.…”

His unexpected kindness elevated her. The ominous black forest turned silver under the rising moon.

“That really helps.”

“Nothing helps. Nothing people say.”

The unembellished truth violated her a little. It was as if he knew a secret she had never told anyone. Now he seemed a little dangerous. She didn’t want company if that required her to open feelings she had stored because they were too intense to control.

“Well, as you say, you have things to do.…”

A shadow crossed his face, no more than a half blink, but Leona saw that she had insulted him.

“Where are my manners?” she cried with alarm. “Where is my common decency?” She rattled on for a minute, explaining that solitude made people a little quirky and egocentric.

Blue hadn’t reached the steps before a deafening peal of thunder shook the house. Every towel she owned was on the back clothesline. She shot through the living room and kitchen and out the door and reached the clothesline just as the first drops began. She gathered one whole line in her arms, letting the clothespins fall where they may. Then she turned and saw that Blue had been working behind her, clearing the other one.

They were standing opposite each other, folding linens at the kitchen table when the first hard rain hammered the roof.

“You’re pretty good at that, Blue.”

“I’m getting better, I reckon.”

“How long have you been divorced now?”

“Divorced, three days. Separated, nearly half a year. It’s the worst.”

“No, there’s worse,” she let slip without meaning to.

They were folding a sheet. He held it while she turned one half into the other. The rain had brought a cool breeze with it. The air was alive with wild, moist scents. As she handed him the corners, her finger grazed his palm and they felt a jolt of static electricity so powerful it lifted the damp strands of hair plastered to his forehead.

The silence that dropped between them made the rain seem surreal and loud. Now that the initial cloudburst had turned into a steady downpour, the air seemed warmer. It was suddenly very close in the little house. The lull in their conversation was by mutual agreement. It should have felt awkward; or if not, indecent; or then strange. Yet it wasn’t at all strange or indecent. It was lovely. Something hidden away, something tightly rolled and stowed and almost forgotten—though living—some breathing blade of grass bent through its captive gate and eternity was new.

Now they were back on the front porch, watching the silver veil of falling water. Now and then the sky would ignite with yellow and then it would hiss and crackle before the sonorous thunder rolled out of the woods.

“What did you want to see Averill about, Blue?”

He now got out of the wicker rocker and sat down beside her on the glider swing. Then he lifted her hand, sliding his long fingers in between hers. There were no wild hearts beating, no lunging passions, and no furious needful flesh. He released her hand and slid almost
out of reach, defining that necessary country between speaker and hearer.

“I’m trying to find some meaning in my life.”

The rain, which had been a steady drizzle for half an hour, became a torrent. They followed their instinct to move ever so slightly closer.

“Leona, do you think God punishes people?”

That stopped her cold. Not because she had any definite opinion on the subject; rather, because he had obviously meant to take it up with Averill.

“Say it.”

“Is that what you wanted to ask Averill?”

“Kinda.”

“Now you say.”

“Well, now, I’m embarrassed to.”

“In that case, the answer is no, I do not.”

Slowly, he spit it out. He just didn’t think he could take much more of his heartache over Lucy. People kept telling him to let go and he wanted to, he really did. Only, no matter how many ways he tried to get away from the terrible emptiness, it sneaked up on him and pulled him into a pit of despair.

“How do you quit wanting something that’s taken complete hold of you?”

“You don’t.”

She said that she believed some hurts never went away. People talked about getting over things and “letting go,” but the truth was you couldn’t and you were a fool to try. You had to embrace what you couldn’t overcome. You had to go on. Eventually time taught you how to pick up your hurts and carry them with you as you went forward.

“Life has to make more sense than that.” He said that he had talked to Averill about Nancy, his little
handicapped girl. Was she a happenstance or did Averill believe God had created her that way for a reason?

Leona shuddered. She already knew Averill’s answer.

“He said she was the price of our sin.”

Lucy had been pregnant with Nancy when she married Blue.

“Which sin was that?”

“Fornication.”

“That’s what he called it?”

“Yeah.”

Averill was a snake. He used his church members’ greatest vulnerabilities as a way to shake them like money trees.

“So, anyway, Leona, I’ve combed my Bible for weeks, now, and I can’t find what he’s talking about.”

“It’s not there.”

She might have slapped him, from the look on his face.

“There’s not a solitary word in the Bible against unmarried people having sexual intercourse.”

“What about ‘Thou shall not commit adultery’?”

“That’s married people—cheaters.”

He didn’t like that. He wanted her to turn water into wine. He wanted some magical penance or charm that would bring his family back. His was the sort of vulnerability and despair on which Averill thrived. Averill would get hold of someone like Blue and convince him he had God’s answer. All a sinner had to do was write him a check or paint the church or bring Averill a cord of wood. Presto! Wrong was right, down was up, and Blue was going to drive his reunited family to heaven in a sky blue pink Cadillac convertible. She had bruised him. He got up to leave.

“I don’t reckon this rain will kill me.…”

“Didn’t mean to sting you, Blue.”

“Nah …”

But she had stung him. People weren’t much interested in what was real if it got in between them and what they wanted. Everybody had his or her own shield of lies to hold up against life. That was how they protected themselves from it and each other.

“Sorry I was so little help.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Blue was the silly one. He felt sorry himself, so he felt he deserved her empathy. He was condescending to her views. He’d failed to extort her pity with his watery good looks and sighs. Now he was miffed, now he was going to leave her to the warm, suffocating solitude.

“Don’t try to make the Book of Isaiah out of it, Blue.”

“I best be going.”

“It’s not such a spiritual matter, really.”

“I reckon not. Well then …”

“She just doesn’t want you.”

That silenced his fancy farewells.

“You don’t have what she wants, Blue.”

The volcano inside of her was going to blow. It was already sending up blasts of boiling air. It was unstoppable now and it was going to consume them both. She was no longer merely in this situation, she was observing it from a distance. Blue didn’t even suspect the gathering liquid fury.

“Maybe Lucy didn’t think you were enough reason to throw her life away.”

“Throw her life away? On me!?”

“Yeah.”

“No. It was always going to be Lucy and me, from way back in high school.”

“Well, Blue, I guess she graduated.”

The only thing that kept his anger in check was the shock that came with it.

“I could have had a hundred girls, but I chose her.”

“You knocked her up.”

“She had a choice.”

“With you pressuring her?”

The look on his face told her that she was right. She just knew she had to be right. Maybe it hadn’t taken much. Maybe Lucy just wasn’t a girl who would go and have an abortion without suffering for it.

“What do you know about it?”

“I know how you knights in shining armor think.”

“Do tell.”

“Making a baby makes you a manly man.”

“Horse shit.”

“Horses’ asses! You trapped her. She stood it as long as she could and then she went and found a man who treated her like she had two legs instead of four.”

He was one more suit of armor that had turned out to be hollow on the inside. He reminded her a lot of Tyler Crockett. He didn’t understand himself at all. He was scared to death, terrified because Lucy had shattered his idea of who he was. When it came to women, he was still a kid.

“Say, Blue, on what basis was Lucy obligated to stay with you?”

“On the basis of loving and needing me.”

Leona eyed him, stunned by his sincerity. He didn’t have a clue.

“Like she did when you were both seventeen?”

“What do you know?”

“I know about seventeen. I know about giving in to him in order to keep him.”

“Do you know about her telling me she felt God inside of her our first time?” Blue turned beet red with embarrassment. Leona was suddenly very uncomfortable. Blue looked at her a long time, sizing her up.

She was lovely. That was obvious a mile away. Put a hundred women in a room and the one you’d see was Leona. She was a willowy beauty with thick chestnut hair, a long, oval face and almond-shaped eyes that shifted from emerald to jade green in the sunlight. She had high, round, raspberry cheeks sprinkled with brown sugar freckles. The rest of her made him think of some breathing alabaster sculpture. Beyond all that, Leona had an aura, a grace that came from within.

Blue had noticed it even before he had met Leona, back in the days when he and Lucy had attended Averill’s church. Many times he had stood in the churchyard after the service and watched Leona move through the crowd, talking and shaking hands with people. There was no one in the world but you when Leona tapped your shoulder to say hello. There was no sound but your voice when she gave you her ear in a noisy throng. It was as if she pulled an invisible cord and left a light on in every living soul she met.

Though now he saw something in Leona he had never noticed. She was lonely. There was a long, sad story in her eyes. He almost wanted to tell her everything would be all right. Yet she hadn’t exactly comforted him just now. Where did she get her license to act so damned sanctimonious? And what made her think she knew what had happened between him and Lucy seven years ago?

“Forgive me, Blue. I talked out of turn.”

“Fuck you.”

“I meant no harm, I apologize.”

“I worked two jobs so she could go to nursing school.”

“I misjudged you and I apologize.”

He had more to say, though, a lot more, and it made her feel even worse. She hadn’t guessed it all wrong. Blue had talked Lucy out of an abortion. They were seniors in high school. They kept her condition a secret until after graduation. She was four months by then. By the time their parents knew and calmed down a little, she was almost five months. That was when her mother finally took her to the Memphis doctor who told them there was something wrong with the baby.