Man in the Blue Moon (12 page)

“People been saying a lot of things lately,” Samuel said. “Ain’t much that trash can do but breathe on people.”

“Whatever he did, it took to that mule and that brother of yours. Look, I can pay whatever the man say . . .”

Lanier stepped out from the barn and tossed the axe at Samuel. It landed blade first, a foot from where he stood. Jumping to the side, Samuel yelled a high-pitched squeal.

“Where’s the girl?” Lanier asked.

As Lanier climbed onto the wagon, the horse moved to the side and blocked Samuel from stepping in front of them. “We’re a day late on the cut as it is,” Samuel said. “You ain’t no doctor, you know.”

Bonaparte Ruston popped the reins and then shook Lanier’s hand. With foxtails dancing from the roof, the wagon turned at the fork in the road past Ella’s store and bounced over the ruts in a red clay road that ended up at the south end of the county. The wagon flew past palmetto bushes that lined the edge of the narrow road. Green leafy branches became tangled inside the spokes of the wagon wheels, and the sound of the branches shredding by the force of the wheels made Lanier think of a pit of hissing snakes.

Lanier ducked to keep a low-hanging oak limb from hitting his head. Moss fell from the tree and draped one side of his shoulder. As he flung it to the ground, he saw the morning sun casting a pink glow against a camp of weathered cabins. At the end of the road a small fishing boat with peeling green paint rocked at the edge of the river. Cypress trees, their branches dressed in layers of moss, guarded the boat and the small shanty that stood out over the river on battered stilts. A shirtless boy, no more than ten, ran out of the house and up to the wagon. As he grabbed the horse’s halter, he looked up at Bonaparte, wild-eyed and nervous.

“Come this way,” Bonaparte said. He motioned for Lanier to follow him past a clothesline decorated with the drying furs of foxes and rabbits. A rusted horseshoe was nailed above the front door of the house.

A woman with cornrow-braided pigtails, wearing an apron stained with lard and blood, met them at the door. There was an urgency in her eyes that was as unmanageable as that of the boy who had taken control of the horse. “Help my baby,” she said, pulling Lanier into the house by his arm.

The house was all of two rooms. A lifeless fireplace and a rusted oven sat across from each other. The woman led Lanier by the shirtsleeve into a room with yellowed pages from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue pasted on the walls. She stood in front of a cracked page advertising a modular home and closed her eyes like she might be struggling to recite a poem in school. “I had a pot out in the yard, fixing to blanch some clothes. . . .” The woman’s voice trailed off. She moved to the side, never opening her eyes. Her wide hips blocked a full view of the young girl who lay on the bed covered in mismatched colorful quilts. The woman only moved when Bonaparte put his hand on her shoulder and nudged her closer to the catalogue picture.

Lanier felt once more the burning sensation he had felt when he saw Samuel that morning. He tried not to look away from the little girl lying on the bed, shaking with a fever so forceful it caused the bedsprings to moan. She gripped the edges of the quilt that was made of red-and-white cloth. The tips of her fingers were squeezing so tightly that her skin had gone from black to the color of warm milk. The girl looked up at Lanier and then at her father. She moaned in a throaty, deep sound more fitting a grown man.

“It gonna be all right now,” Bonaparte said. “This the man who fixing to make you better.” He turned and looked at Lanier, and so too did the girl. The smell of cinnamon and aged grease hung in the air.

“Jesus, help my baby,” the woman called out. The sway of her apron as she walked back and forth in prayer kept Lanier distracted from the half-dollar-sized boils that covered the girl’s legs. The skin, tight and discolored, shimmered with the lard that the mother had placed on the burns.

“Go on and get in the other room,” Bonaparte shouted to the woman walking back and forth.

“Jesus, come on now. Heal this baby,” the woman said louder, continuing to clutch her hands and walk back and forth at the foot of the bed. A rocking chair placed at the other side of the room slightly swayed whenever she brushed past it.

Lanier placed his hands over the girl’s legs, and she flinched. “Easy, now,” Lanier whispered. “I’m not here to hurt you. You believe me?”

Sweat ran from the girl’s temples. She bit her lip, moaned, and then nodded her head in agreement.

“Come, Jesus,” the woman murmured from behind them.

“Quit with your foolishness!” Bonaparte said in a stage whisper.

“She’s still got fire in her,” Lanier said, half turning his head toward Bonaparte. “The fire is still burning in her.”

“Unhhh,” the girl cried.

“Jesus,” the woman said.

“You expect you can do something about it, can’t you?” Bonaparte asked. He put his hand on Lanier’s shoulder. “You can do something, can’t you?”

Lanier never answered. He bowed down next to the bed and smiled at the girl. Her teeth rattled, and she closed her eyes whenever Lanier placed his hand on her brow. The skin was as hot as the boiling water he imagined her falling into. The tingling sensation ran down to his core again, and he shook until Bonaparte steadied him by placing his palm on Lanier’s shoulder. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back.

“Jesus, You healed the lepers from their sores,” the woman sang out. “Heal this baby.”

“Woman, I done told you to get in the other room.”

Lanier moved his hands down over the girl’s body, careful not to touch her. When his hands were over the top portion of her legs, he began to tremble again. Heat ran all over him, and he tried to picture the water that lined Ella’s property. He pictured the glassy surface of the water and how the living things of nature surrounded the edge.

“Jesus, You the great doctor,” the woman said in her deep, throaty voice.

“Quit your carrying on before I give you something to really carry on about,” Bonaparte yelled.

“Unhhh,” the girl said. “It burning me bad.”

“What you doing to her?” Bonaparte asked.

Lanier didn’t answer. He just shook with a rage that caused Bonaparte to grip him with both hands.

“Jesus. My precious Jesus. Come on,” the woman hollered.

Lanier heard her words and felt them as much as he felt the burns of the skin. Sweat ran down his face and caused the shirt he wore to press against his back. He shook harder and repeated the words that had alleviated suffering in the past. He murmured the words first in his mind and then through his lips. The woman stomped harder and shouted with gripped fists in the air, fighting and praising something unseen. Lanier felt himself shrinking as he repeated in his mind the words he had been taught long ago. As the verses scrolled through his mind and grew larger in the size of their letters, the burning intensified against his hands. Balling his fists, he envisioned himself shrinking into the fire that raged in hellish flames beneath the girl’s skin. He felt the words rolling off his tongue and pictured them spewing out of his mouth on a twisted, heated fork. Falling backward to the floor, his foot knocked the rocking chair over, and the woman screamed. The girl sat up and shook one last time before crying, “Daddy.”

Bonaparte ran to his daughter and looked at her legs and then down at the floor at Lanier, who was lying prostrate with balled fists. “Lord have mercy,” he said.

Outside the cabin, the boy, who had tied the horse to a railroad post by the river, stood with the others out by the clothesline and was the first to hear the girl’s final scream. Bottles in pastel colors tied to the branches of a dogwood tree chimed in the morning breeze. A woman wearing a dress held at the breast with a safety pin put her hands on the boy. He pulled away from her.

“Jesus, heal my baby.” The words rolled from inside the house and out into the yard.

As if in a chorus, the women standing outside by the clothesline replied, “Yes, Jesus.” The one wearing an alabaster turban jumped in a circle.

A man spat a line of tobacco juice toward the lowest hanging bottle on the tree.

Some hummed hymns, others called out in prayer, and some just waited to see what the white man who had healed the mule could do. But none of them said a word when Lanier walked out of the house.

When Lanier came outside, he used his forearm to brush away sweat that caused his hair to stick to his forehead. He pulled at the wet shirt that chilled his skin. A pair of blue jays swooped down, seemed to spar with one another, and then squawked as they flew away. Bonaparte followed Lanier out the door. He raised his arm in victory but no one in the crowd cheered. They shifted across the yard as if the misfortune that had fallen upon the house was contagious and settled at the riverbank. The green boat sloshed in the current and lightly banged against a cypress tree.

“Thank You, Jesus,” the woman said when she ran out the door. She raised her hands and shuffled her feet in some sort of dance. “Thank You, Jesus. My baby’s sores done dried up,” the woman proclaimed. “Dried up, I say!”

The boy ran and untied the horse. Lanier climbed onto the wagon. Bonaparte followed suit and then took the reins from the boy. The woman shouted her praises again, and the crowd moved on, some walking toward the house to see the girl for themselves and others off down the road, going about earning their daily fare, debating whether the white man was an apostle. Whether silent or opinionated, none of them took their eyes off the wagon carrying Lanier Stillis. They kept watch over him long after the wagon had turned the corner and disappeared from view.

Ella had pondered how she would feel the day they finished their work. She imagined the day while pulling the end of the jagged cross saw or carrying the buckets of water to the group while the blazing sun, so strong that she thought it was riding her back, pounded down on her. Naturally relief came the day the last pine fell and green pine needles fanned out in submission on the ground, but still, Ella did not feel as satisfied as she thought she should. The sun still beat down upon her, and damp undergarments still clung to folds of her skin.

She and Lanier stood there looking at the stumps that rose up from the earth like crude sores on infected hide.

“A lot of timber,” he said, surveying the work with his hands on his hips, his tall body slightly leaning to the right.

“I can’t take it all in,” she said. And since she couldn’t, she repeated her declaration twice. She pictured her nerves just as prickly as the ends of the pine needles on the ground. Joy, no matter how abundant that day in August, only danced around her like the little dots she would see whenever she closed her burning, tired eyes at the end of the workday. Jubilation that was so easily recognizable on the faces of her boys, on Narsissa, even on Lanier, was a mere mask on Ella.

No matter how hard she smiled that day, or laughed, or even raised her arms in victory, she could not escape the unsteady feeling that caused her to want to vomit, much as she had during the early days when suffering heatstroke. Darkness stretched out across her mind to keep her guessing when the next disaster would strike. Somehow it was easier to stay in the shade of doubt rather than give way to the momentary light of wishful thinking.

With eleven days and twelve hours to spare before the bank note was due, the calls of celebration from the others could be heard past the store and to the fork in the road. Myer Simpson, awoken from her afternoon nap, cracked her door open, grimaced at them, and then disappeared back inside her home, pulling the shade down over her parlor window. Mrs. Pomeroy, from across the road, came outside and pretended to check on a dying tomato plant on her porch. She fanned herself with the purple satin fan she had purchased from Mr. Busby the peddler. Circling the plant three times, she finally waved the fan at Ella.

Mr. Busby, a photographer as well as a peddler, later claimed that even he could hear whoops of their cheer as he came across the fork in the road. He snapped the reins against his wagon, instructing Old Blue and Miss Maggie to take his portable shop faster to Wallace Commissary.

The only picture taker to grace Dead Lakes, Mr. Busby traveled South Georgia, Alabama, and the northernmost corners of Florida. He was not only the recorder of people’s profiles but also the collector of their possessions. Copper pots originally given to a man and wife in Elba, Alabama, as wedding gifts had been secured for a price less than wholesale when the man’s crop of peanuts didn’t make. The freshly polished pots, as good as new, dangled and rattled from the top of Mr. Busby’s wagon. The feet of an emerald-colored wingback chair, purchased from a woman in Blountstown, Florida, whose husband had suffered a stroke while sitting in the very same chair reading the newspaper, stuck out over the tailgate.

Mr. Busby wiped a drop of bourbon from his chapped lips and smeared the whiskey across a cheek lined with purplish veins. Tucking the genuine silver flask with another’s initials back into the pocket of his vest that was missing a button, he popped the reins and guided the wagon toward the piles of timber. The pines looked like five stacks of giant, worn pencils. Shavings of bark, pine straw, and crushed pinecones carpeted the ground.

Macon ran up to the wagon, jumping up to the breast of the horses. “We did it, Mr. Busby. We did it.” One of the horses snorted, shook sweat from its head, and champed at its bit before trying to bite Macon, who darted away.

Mr. Busby pulled the wagon to a full stop right in front of the highest stack of timber. The copper pots made a clanging sound. “Did what?” Mr. Busby inquired.

Narsissa, pretending not to notice Mr. Busby’s arrival, licked her thumb and then proceeded to wipe a stain of pine tar from Keaton’s cheek.

Ella plopped, if not collapsed, right down on the ground. “Saved the store,” she yelled.

“We saved the store. We saved the store. We don’t owe the bank no more,” Macon repeated in song as he danced a jig around the wagon, farther away from the reach of the horses.

“I see some changes around here,” Mr. Busby said. He looked down at Macon and then at Ella, who sat cross-legged in a dusting of wood. On his last venture through Dead Lakes, Mr. Busby had taken a photograph of the sheriff’s family and given Ella the split he’d made for selling the locks of Abraham Lincoln’s hair to an insurance man in Thomasville, Georgia. Trying to encourage Ella at the time, he kept his eye on the white china plates displayed on a glass shelf behind the store window. He had hoped to make her a price on the gold-trimmed plates with little red birds painted at the edges. It was the least he could do to help with the reversal in fortune.

Samuel tossed his head back and howled so loud that the horses twisted and pranced to the side. Mr. Busby put the brake on the wagon, groaned as he pulled himself down, and began to riffle through the wagon for his camera equipment.

“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you hand Clive Gillespie the money on that bank note,” Narsissa said.

“I never met a banker I could like, let alone trust,” Lanier added.

Mr. Busby stopped what he was doing and turned to Lanier. His pensive look said it all.

“This is . . . ,” Ella stammered, motioning toward Lanier.

“Just Lanier,” Keaton said.

Mr. Busby brushed his hand against his pin-striped gray pants. A marking of dust lined his thigh. “Well, pleased to know you . . . just Lanier.”

They laughed and Ruby Tucker marched toward them with her baton.

“Let’s have a parade,” she yelled and pumped her baton high into the air.

“What timing,” Ella said.

“Last Friday of the month,” Ruby said. “Last Friday is parade day.”

“Honey child, more than you know,” Ella said.

Mr. Busby pulled a bedpan from the wagon and then a child’s pink step stool shaped like a piglet. “Let me see now,” he said. “Here we go.” He lifted a tripod camera from the side. The body of the object was as big as the stool. The black flap that hung around the top of the camera was frayed at the ends. “A day of celebration deserves recording,” he said.

“Don’t start with that picture-taking around me,” Narsissa gruffed.

“Oh my, no. I look a mess,” Ella said and yanked off the sweat-stained work hat. The band of the hat left an indentation around her tanned, wet forehead.

“Ella Wallace,” Mr. Busby said with eyes closed. “I’ll have you know that I am more than some circuit photographer who goes around making pictures of fat women with even fatter babies propped on their laps. I am an artist.
We
are artists.” He raised his gray eyebrows and nodded. “So you of all people know artists thrive on capturing authentic moments. So put that hat back on your head.”

After he used more of the same cajoling and convincing that made him a more successful peddler than photographer, the group relented and let Mr. Busby take a photograph for their “family history.” Setting up his equipment at the edge of the road, Mr. Busby motioned for the group to move closer to the highest stack of timber.

Ruby marched back and forth behind Mr. Busby, swinging her baton and singing “Happy Timber Day to Ella” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.” Keaton and Samuel laughed while Ella pointed her finger at them to hush.

They bunched closer together. Everyone smiled, except for Lanier, who fidgeted with the brim of his hat, taking it off and then putting it back on. “Stand still, Mr. Just Lanier,” Mr. Busby directed as he stuck his head underneath the black drape and peered into the camera. When Mr. Busby said, “Three,” the camera flasher let off a bright light and a trail of smoke. Lanier jumped away from the group and moved closer to the store. None of them, not even Ella, noticed that his hands were shaking long after Mr. Busby put his equipment back into the wagon next to a table carved in the shape of a sundial.

An afternoon shadow fell over the side of the store, covering the piles of timber. Samuel sat on the store steps, attempting to smoke a cigar while Keaton and Macon played a round of marbles next to a barrel and counted the number of times that Samuel coughed. Inside the store, Narsissa helped Mr. Busby set up his makeshift studio, complete with a gray curtain that they nailed to the back wall next to the supply of paint. Ella watched Mr. Busby move his camera to the left and then shift it to the right. He had set up his studio in her store for the past two years, usually at the end of summer and during the two weeks before Christmas, just in time for the start of school and the celebration of a holiday. No one gave a second thought to Lanier, except for Sheriff Bissell, who walked in behind Ruby. He took off his hat and moved to the side to prevent getting hit with the baton that she still pumped. “Careful,” Ella called out, but Ruby paid her no attention. She just marched to the side of the store where a brass-colored birdcage hung.

“Afternoon, Sheriff,” Ella said, wanting to lead him outside and point to the side of the store where the land had been swept clean until almost nothing was left but a sandy floor with scatterings of palmetto bushes. She dared him to speak of Clive Gillespie or the pending foreclosure that his deputy had personally delivered. “I haven’t seen your deputy in a while. How’s Ronnie getting along?”

“Good, good. I’m keeping him busy,” the sheriff said. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it. A sweat stain on his shirt revealed a protruding belly button. “I mean to tell you, you flat-sure are tough to be able to work out there in that heat. Many a man couldn’t have held up like you’ve been doing.”

Strands of Ella’s dark hair were glued to the side of her neck. She nervously picked at a dented spot on the wooden counter and smiled.

“Of course with all the men off over there fighting in the war, the ladyfolk are having to pick up the slack. I hate to see it, but I guess we all got to sacrifice.” The sheriff licked away a bead of perspiration from his upper lip. “At least that’s what President Wilson keeps telling the newspapermen. Keeps saying we all got to sacrifice.” Sheriff Bissell snorted his displeasure. “I’m sorry, but it’s not right to see natural-born ladies like you out there working like they’re on a chain gang.”

“Natural or not, I finished the job,” she said, trying not to sing the words. “We might have worked like dogs, but we finished.” She swept her hand to the side as if the sheriff could see through the curtain that Mr. Busby had hung in front of the store window.

“Ain’t that something,” Sheriff Bissell said in the way that he might say to a child who had just performed a somersault for the first time. “Well, now. I thought there was an extra sparkle to those pretty blue eyes of yours.”

The smell of damp talcum powder clouded the room. The sheriff unfurled a handkerchief from his back pocket, folded it in half, and dragged it across his brow. “How ’bout a slice of that cheese and maybe a couple of saltine crackers?”

Ella lifted the wax paper from the block of cheddar cheese. She felt the sheriff looking at her with the same pity as Deputy Ronnie had before she had cut the trees. “What is it with cheese and crackers and lawmen? Ronnie comes by here and practically makes his noontime meal out of them.”

Sheriff Bissell placed a cut of cheese onto a saltine and chomped down on it. He leaned over as crumbs tumbled to the sawdust-sprinkled floor. He ignored Ella’s attempt to chitchat and looked to the part of the store where Mr. Busby was busy setting up his studio.

“To the left,” Mr. Busby yelled. “Move the chair a little more to the left.” Narsissa, his impromptu assistant, slammed the chair against the wall and stormed out of the store.

“Mr. Busby,” Ella said, “would you please use your inside voice.”

Mr. Busby didn’t acknowledge the reprimand or Narsissa’s departure. He simply moved the chair back in front of his camera and adjusted the dark curtain that was his backdrop.

“Sheriff Bissell,” Ella said, “now, your wife asked me to let her know the next time Mr. Busby passed this way. I think she wants a new family portrait made with that grandbaby of yours. How old is he now? A year? Year and a half?”

“Some’rs around there,” the sheriff said, balancing another slice of cheese on a cracker. He chewed and talked at the same time. “Oh,” Sheriff Bissell said as if he might have forgotten the reason for his visit, “about that fella you got hanging around here like a stray looking for milk . . .”

Ella shifted her weight and leaned against the store counter. “Mmm-hmmm.” She wanted to shove the cheese farther down his throat and garble the words that she expected him to say. Doubts about Lanier that had tormented her now rose from the black corners of her mind. She didn’t bother to brush the thoughts away.

“What’s this business about him going around healing folks?”

“He just . . . he just helped a child. . . . Children get better. Like a doctor, I suppose.”

“Must be some kind of doctor. Must be some kind of animal doctor too. I heard how he stopped that mule of yours from bleeding to death. They tell me he laid hands on him.”

“He’s Harlan’s cousin from Georgia. From up in the mountains. He grew up cutting timber and knows how to work animals. I’m just so grateful for all he’s done.”

“Oh yeah.” Sheriff Bissell practically sang the words. “I mean to tell you. He has flat-sure been a help to you.” A flake of cheese collected at the tip of the sheriff’s dimpled chin. “But this doctoring business . . . sort of peculiar, don’t you think?”

“Beg your pardon?”

Sheriff Bissell motioned toward the door. “Folks been saying some awfully peculiar things. Saying how those sores the boy had cleared up in a day. Cleared up like a miracle or something.” The sheriff leaned closer over the cash register and in a stage whisper said, “Now, Ella, you know me. I speak my mind and the next man speaks his. So I might as well go on and say it. Folks are saying he kissed the boy in a way not fitting for public conversation.”