Man in the Blue Moon (2 page)

“I’ve decided to go ahead and pick up that shipment from the clock company.”

Keaton jumped up from the wooden chair and shuffled his feet in a playful way that made Macon laugh and then grimace in pain. Before Ella could touch Macon’s forehead again, her youngest son sighed, expressing the frustration they all felt toward the illness that not even Narsissa with her herbs and chants could eradicate.

“Where has Samuel run off to now?” Ella asked. Since the day the doctor had prescribed him the role of head of the household, Samuel had taken the responsibility with a seriousness that at first made Ella proud. Now his arrogance was irritating. It was, she realized, the same overconfidence that had first attracted her to his father.

“Samuel is still out squirrel hunting,” Keaton said. His eyes were green like her father’s had been. Of the three boys, Keaton was the one who felt most like hers, seemingly untainted by the troubled blood of her husband.

“Please get him. Ask him to hitch the wagon. And ask Narsissa to come inside. She can stay with Macon until we get back from town.”

Inside her bedroom, Ella looked into the spider-veined mirror above her dresser. Pulling her hair into a twist against the nape of her neck, she snatched out a gray strand. She put on the earrings Narsissa had made for her out of baby mockingbird feathers and oyster shells. Fingering the dangling earrings, she felt that by wearing them she somehow paid homage to the young woman she used to be. That young woman, who had been sent to attend finishing school in Apalachicola by the aunt with dreams, had become nothing more than a mist that sprinkled her memories. For some odd reason, Ella could still recite bits and pieces of a poem from English class. A verse about the eyes being the mirror to the soul. Pulling back the skin around her forehead and causing the wrinkles to momentarily disappear, Ella studied her eyes. There was dullness now that resembled the marbles her sons played with in the dirt. She snatched up a doily that her aunt had knit years ago and flung it over the mirror.

After she had dressed in the last gift her husband had given her, a dropped-waist lilac-colored dress shipped from Atlanta, Ella kissed Macon on the forehead and tried not to look at the open sores lining his swollen lips. Narsissa sat in the chair next to the bed. She had brought the butter churn inside and with a steady rhythm pumped the wooden handle.

As Ella rose up from kissing her son, loose ends of Narsissa’s hair tickled her arm. Narsissa leaned close and whispered in that graveled voice that always made Ella think she was part man, “Don’t pay that steamboat company one cent until you see what you are getting because—”

“Narsissa, please don’t.” Ella pulled away and straightened the top of her dress. “Don’t patronize. Not today.”

Narsissa leaned back in the chair and made a mulish huffing sound. She flung her coarse braid and continued churning the butter.

“When I come back, I’ll have that taffy for you, and a surprise,” Ella told Macon. “I’ll have a surprise waiting.”

Macon tried to smile, but his chin quivered. Kissing her finger, Ella pointed at her son and then kissed it once more and pointed at Narsissa, who pretended not to notice.

Outside, Samuel was squinting as he jerked the halter on the draft mule and led the wagon closer to the back of the store. Ella saw her oldest son watching her, studying her through the gaps in the tall sunflowers she had planted years ago for beauty as much as for a border between their family life and the life meant for income.

“Mama, can I go to the picture show?” Keaton asked as he climbed into the back of the wagon.

“We’ll see.”

Samuel climbed up on the wagon, and Ella felt his leg brush against hers. At least he didn’t pull away. Keaton leaned in from behind and jabbed Samuel. “Clayton Carson says there’s one playing about a preacher . . . I mean a priest. See, he protects these people over there in the war. The people over in France. He protects them from the Germans.”

Samuel shrugged Keaton away. “We won’t have time to go to no picture. We need to just get this package that we’re probably paying too much money for and get back to the store.”

“You’re beginning to sound as crotchety as Narsissa,” Ella said.

“As it is, we’re missing out on the busiest time of the day.” Samuel popped the reins, and the mule bobbed his head.

“Need I remind you, the letter said that the package was paid in full? If we have to pay the freight, so be it,” Ella said, trying to convince herself as much as Samuel. “And another thing . . . we work at that store six days a week from sunup to sundown. It won’t kill anybody to have an afternoon off.”

“
The Cross Bearer
—that’s the name of the picture.
The Cross Bearer
,” Keaton said.

The rocking motion of the wagon seemed to pacify everyone but Ella. She kept toying at her wedding ring, flicking it around her finger until it threatened to rub the skin raw. Her thoughts and fears alternated back and forth between her son’s disease and her husband’s desertion. No one spoke for the remainder of the thirty-five-minute ride to Apalachicola.

Along the way they passed the few buildings that made up the Dead Lakes community. A church with a weathered cemetery and a schoolhouse that rested on cinder blocks marked the official spot where Dead Lakes was noted on the Florida map. The store, like Ella herself, was distant from the center of the village. Ella enjoyed the wide porch that swept around the side of her clapboard house and the acreage of timber that obstructed her view from neighbors on either side. There were the occasional visitors to the aquifer spring that the Creek Indians vowed had healing properties. Sometimes during summer evenings when Ella sat on the porch rocking in the chair that Harlan had ordered for her special from North Carolina, she could hear muffled voices and splashing water from the hidden pool. Even Harlan had heeded Narsissa’s warning that calamity would fall on his family if he barred access to those he deemed superstitious fools.

Although Ella had privacy on either side of her, the front of her house was clearly visible to the neighbors who lived across the road. When times were good and her worries fewer, Ella used to pity her neighbors for their lack of privacy. Their houses were built so close to one another that Mrs. Pomeroy, the doughy-cheeked woman who lived with her middle-aged husband in the house with the red door, routinely came into the store complaining about the eavesdropping Myer Simpson, who lived with the reverend in the parsonage next door.

When the wagon passed the gray-shingled house that belonged to the woman who had once been Ella’s confidante at finishing school, the mule bowed his head and chewed harder at the bit. Neva Clarkson was now the teacher in Dead Lakes. Washtubs filled with pansies covered the front lawn. Neva had been Ella’s best friend until Harlan redirected his affections from Neva to Ella. Behind her back, the townspeople called Neva a certified old maid. There was a time when Ella had felt sorry for Neva. Now she envied her. A chill snaked down Ella’s system and settled so deep that not even the spring sun could thaw it.

They made their way around the low-lying lakes and cypress trees draped in Spanish moss and headed toward the red clay fields, plowed and ready for planting. An island of trees and kudzu sat in the middle of the beekeeper’s farm. Ella shaded her eyes and looked out at the land, wondering if Harlan had taken refuge in a place like this and was weaning himself off the opium. Maybe he had been hired on as a laborer at such a property and would come to his right mind when the poison cleared his system.

Harlan might have surrendered himself to the powdered substance, but Ella had not. Her emotions tilted back and forth between anger, despondency, and love for her husband. The only thing she knew for certain was that a part of her felt sorted through and broken, just like the field they passed.

The mule’s hooves kept an uneven pace against the clay-dirt road. The wagon rocked and chains rattled. A hush settled over Ella and her sons.

Ella clasped her hands and pictured her husband passed out on a red velvet sofa stained with human liquids in one of the Chicago opium dens she read about in the newspaper.

Keaton leaned against the backboard of the wagon and pictured a dramatic priest pulling a sword from beneath his robe and defending people in a land unknown to him before the war.

Samuel gripped the reins tighter and pictured their store windows covered with plywood, a foreclosure notice dangling from the front door.

But none of them could fully picture the box with the logo of the Blue Moon Clock Company that awaited them or the ways in which opening that crate would forever change the direction of their lives.

As they approached Apalachicola, the county seat, salt air tickled Ella’s senses and caused her to canonize the past, the same way it did every time she came upon the white pine Episcopal church at the edge of the city limits. Tucked alongside a bay on the Florida panhandle, the town marked the spot where the Apalachicola River emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. One of the largest export centers of cotton before the Civil War, the city of two thousand now drowsed in a state of neither sleep nor vigor. Empty lots tangled in overgrown weeds, sandspurs, and vines were lingering imprints of a fire that had ravaged the city eighteen years before. The cavities competed with the surviving Georgian structures that still beckoned for the days when the French government housed a consulate in a brick building overlooking a saw-grass island in the bay. Wide streets edged the bay where pieces of cotton once sprinkled the banks like fresh snow. Now there were only four warehouses that guarded the waters. They stood like oversized mausoleums with sun-bleached walls bearing the faintest of letters that spelled out the names of cotton brokers from long ago. Oyster shells piled high as sand dunes filled the vacant spaces.

Women of color, dressed all in white, sat on the porches of the Victorian homes the wagon passed. The women fanned, gossiped, and guarded the children in their hired care. A trio of white men in black bowler hats glided across the sidewalk in front of the J. E. Grady hardware store.

Ella took it all in and longed for the days when she lived in the dormitory at Miss Wayne’s School for Women. An automobile blared its horn, and she flinched. Ella turned and watched as the car rattled and then gained traction past their wagon. At the corner, massive oak trees lined the park where she had first met her husband at a town dance. Harlan’s black mustache had glimmered underneath the gas lanterns that hung from bamboo poles that night.

Two weeks after the dance, Ella became intoxicated by Harlan’s ability to fan money across the table to pay for oysters and French champagne. Childhood promises made to her father and the cautions of Aunt Katherine, the spinster who had raised her, became nothing more than nuisances that competed with her infatuation. Before she knew it, she had caused her aunt to take to the sickbed when she decided to marry Harlan and cancel her plans to attend art school.

Two children later, she was living in a home next to a store that she was forced to manage. By the time there was a third son to care for, Harlan had shaved his mustache and was sipping whiskey, first only at night and then every morning, to help soothe the back pain caused when a filly he had tried to break threw him against the side of a fence.

Harlan knocked the drinking problem and the back pain thanks to a doctor’s suggestion that he take opium. “Miracle worker,” he declared, and gave the doctor a gold-tipped walking stick. Within three weeks, Harlan began ordering mass quantities of the miracle drug, and within four months he no longer pretended to function. He sat shirtless on the steps of the store, spat tobacco at the cat, and watched the crossroads community of Dead Lakes, Florida, pass him by. Then, a month before Easter, when the air was still cool, he slipped away with the fog of early dawn. If not for his debts and the sons he left behind, a visitor would never have guessed that he had ever really existed.

When their wagon passed the brick building with the words
Gillespie Savings and Loan
above the archway, Ella felt a knot tie her stomach. She wondered how many times she had passed the brick building as a young girl in town, never once guessing that one day she would be groveling for her future with a man who pasted thinning hair to his scalp.

“Mama, can we get cherry lemonades?” Keaton asked as Samuel tied the wagon to the post in front of the drugstore. A little girl in a pink linen dress stood on the sidewalk and looked up at them before a woman put her arm around the little girl and shepherded her away.

“We’re broke. Flat broke,” Samuel said between locked teeth. “What is it about that that you don’t understand, Keaton?”

Ella pulled Samuel away from Keaton and handed the younger boy two coins.

“Mama,” Samuel protested.

“There’s money enough for you, too,” Ella said. “I’ll be in to get you directly.”

Samuel stood in the doorway of the pharmacy and looked at Ella and then at the savings and loan building across the street. A man wearing suspenders with one brace broken and dangling at his protruding belly shuffled around him and slipped inside the pharmacy. Ella waved to her son, turned her back so he couldn’t see the anxiety she knew she wore on her face, and walked across the street. Unlike her husband, she never had a poker face.

Clive Gillespie was leaning against the marble counter of the teller station when Ella walked into his bank. A white-and-red framed print with a sketch of a freckle-faced boy holding a dollar hung on the wall behind the teller:
Raise Your Children Right. Teach Your Son to Save.
Clive glanced her way before finishing with the teller.

Never formally acknowledging Ella, he motioned for her to follow him inside an office with a frosted glass door. Blades from a wicker ceiling fan sliced the thick air. The edges of a newspaper on his desk lifted with the breeze.

He tossed a pad onto his desk. “Ella, have you come to your senses and banished that deadbeat husband’s mistakes by letting me buy your land?”

“Good afternoon to you too, Mr. Gillespie.”

“Good afternoon.” Clive sighed and massaged his chin. Scars from youthful acne still lined his middle-aged face. “I hate that we’ve come to this. I really hate it.”

“
Hate
is such a strong word.”

He fingered the handle of the adding machine that sat on his desk. “I’m sure you didn’t travel all this way to town just to talk semantics with me.”

Ella pulled an envelope from her purse and slid it across his desk. “I was hoping to leave this out front with the teller. But there you were, and so . . .”

He flipped open the envelope and smiled at her in a way that made her shift her weight in the chair. “Ella . . .”

“See, I have this delivery I’m picking up today, and when I sell it I will . . .”

He sighed again but in a way that caused Ella to think that maybe he really did have sympathy for her cause. “This is not even a quarter of the month’s payment.”

“It’s coming. Really. Summer is right around the corner, and there will be a crop.”

“If I recall, the crop last summer was supposed to come in too, but it didn’t. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s when your husband lost his automobile.”

Ella leaned forward and touched the edge of Clive’s polished desk. “That was . . .” She fingered the desk like she might have been inspecting it for dust and then leaned back against the chair. No matter how challenging life with Harlan might have been, Ella never talked about her marital troubles in public. It was not becoming.

Clive sighed once more. When he shifted his weight, the springs in his chair creaked. “We both know who got you into this mess, precious. Now I want to help you, but I’m beginning to get offended. You don’t seem to want my help.”

“That land is all I have left of my daddy . . . all I have that is outright mine. I want to exhaust all possibilities before—”

“I applaud your persistence. Really, I do.” Clive picked up an unlit cigar and ran the tip across his pouting lips.

Ella wondered if he was making fun of her. Her racing heart kept beat with the clicking sounds of the adding machines out in the lobby.

“Ella, precious Ella . . . nostalgia is fine and good as long as there’s money to back it up.”

Ella glanced around the room and settled her eyes on an amber-colored water pitcher near the corner of his desk. Clive Gillespie picked up the newspaper and gestured with it toward the pitcher. The middle section containing the society page cascaded to the floor.

“Look at these,” Clive said, holding up the front page. “This entire column is filled with foreclosures I’ve had to make. Do you see these? Now, I have been patient with you. I’ve been more than patient. Under your circumstances, I know how hard this must be.”

“I have a clock coming.”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s a clock . . . a grandfather clock that I’m picking up at the dock today. It’s paid for and everything. I can sell it and give you the rest of the month’s payment.”

Clive laughed and Ella’s desperation turned into a flash of anger. “Please don’t make this personal, Clive.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“No one made you take Harlan up on that bet, you know. No one put a gun to your head. Please don’t take your vengeance out on me.”

It was the first time Ella had acknowledged what everyone in town knew and whispered about behind Clive’s back. Harlan had lost ten acres of the land that Ella’s father had left for her, and then, in showman style, he won it back for all the town to see. The first time Harlan lost the land to Clive was at the Mardi Gras horse race while holding a Mason jar filled up to the ring with bourbon and molasses. Never acknowledging that the land was his wife’s inheritance, Harlan had signed the deed over to Clive against the stirrup of a sweat-stained horse saddle. Harlan’s silver tie, blemished from one too many mint julep spills, was twisted to the side as he walked into the house that afternoon. He never slurred in delivering the news. He shared the misfortune in a matter-of-fact style, the same way he might if a shipment of insured merchandise had been lost with a sinking steamboat. Ella had stood at the doorway of the kitchen and then leaned against the wooden frame, still gripping the knife she had used to cut collard greens. For the first time that day, the pungent smell of the collards simmering on the stove made her want to vomit. But all she could do was stare at the stains of liquor on Harlan’s tie and watch as he tore it from his neck in one yank.

Months later, when Harlan mentioned to her that there would be a poker tournament on a steamboat docked at Apalachicola and that he would be spending the night in the port city, Ella folded his undergarments and placed them in the leather overnight bag. “Will Clive Gillespie be playing?” she asked.

Harlan never stopped shining his shoes from where he sat on the corner of their bed. “I imagine,” he said.

Ella stared into the insides of the bag that smelled of damp socks. “I’m not begging you, Harlan. I’m entrusting you. Entrusting you to stay sober long enough to get my daddy’s land back. That is the one thing I ask.” The land taken from her might be nothing but swamp with a spring that bubbled eternally at the surface, but it was hers alone to lose. In the end, when the last hand was dealt, Clive had to publicly sign the deed back over to Harlan on the torn green velvet that covered the steamboat poker table. Everyone said it was the repetitive public humiliation that hurt Clive the most. Once again Clive had lost to the charismatic man who first beat him all those years before when he stole Ella’s schoolgirl affections.

In his office, Clive leaned forward and rotated his head in a way that made Ella think of a reptile. He bit the cigar, spat the end to the floor, and laughed. “Do you really think I’d put so much energy into a piece of swampland for the sake of revenge? Ella . . . precious . . . you’re much brighter than that. It’s business. Pure and simple. Now if I let you pass, I’ll have to let all the others out of their debts too. And my shareholders wouldn’t be too pleased with me, now would they?”

“All I know is that shame has a way of festering.”

“Now let’s get something straight, Ella Wallace. You’re one of many . . . just an account with numbers.”

Ella got up from the chair and pulled her shoulders back the way she had learned to do all those years before at Miss Wayne’s school. Her back was turned to Clive Gillespie when he said the words that caused her to grip the door handle tighter.

“You know, when my father started this bank, your aunt was one of his best customers. Lord rest her soul. Miss Katherine was a good woman. A measured woman. And man alive, was she ever proud of you.” Clive tapped a pen against his desk. “If I had a half-dollar for every time she told me what a gifted young lady you were . . .” Clive’s words became a chuckle. “And what I’m sitting here trying to figure out is, what exactly happened to that young lady with so much potential?”

Ella opened the door. Her voice cracked, but she said the words loud enough for the tellers out front to hear. “You’ll get your money, mark my word.”

Outside on the sidewalk, Ella leaned against the brick wall of the bank and struggled to catch her breath. Across the way stood Miss Wayne’s school, the cold stone building where Ella had been polished into a lady. Shuffling through the people on the sidewalk, Ella cursed Harlan Wallace and Clive Gillespie all in the same breath.

At the drugstore she found her sons sitting on the burgundy stools by the soda fountain. Ella stood in the doorway watching them and refused to hurry them along. There was something about the way they both held their glasses and the way Samuel licked the rim of the glass that comforted her. They were still boys. When Keaton dropped his napkin on the black-and-white tiled floor and bent down to retrieve it, he saw her. “Are you about ready to pick up our surprise?” she asked.

Along the dock where the river met the sea, shrimp boats with tall skinny masts competed for space with steamboats. Black smoke drifted from the steam engines and created a haze over the workers who moved through an obstacle course of fish, blocks of ice, and crates stamped with the names of exotic ports of call. Boys the size of men gathered nets, and old, weathered sailors cussed them for not moving faster. The smell of rotting fish and urine caused Ella to cover her mouth, but then, fearing she might seem vulnerable, she quickly pulled her hand away.

The blue moon-shaped logo with the face of a smiling man was stamped on a seven-foot-tall crate. It sat in a warehouse that still had faded, peeling letters that read
Bailey’s Cotton Exchange
on the brick wall. A cast-iron cage separated the shipping clerks from the chaos of the dock.

A clerk with a crooked nose and wiry eyebrows flipped through a stack of receipts. “Parcel paid.”