Man in the Blue Moon (34 page)

When the light from the sun hit him, Lanier raised his arm up as a shield. At first he thought that the end was at hand and that hell was about to burn him. When he looked up the door swung open with a squeaking noise and for a second he was unable to see anything but forms of bodies.

Standing at the forefront, Ella, still dressed in her damp nightgown, wrapped her arms across her chest. Sunlight illuminated the curve of her thighs through the thin material. Her hair was matted and her face gaunt, but there was life in her eyes. She blinked and said his name in a graveled, weak voice. “Lanier.”

Behind Ella, her sons and Neva Clarkson formed a semicircle that made Lanier think of the shape of a cloud, ready to cushion her and prevent a fall. Without caring what the others might think, Lanier jumped up and grabbed Ella with the force that he had wanted to use before he left. Her body, light and fragile to the touch, folded into him. There were no words of condemnation or curses. He just stood there, holding her, smelling her, memorizing her as if memory itself was a form of art.

The school burned on a Friday. It was a controlled burn that some had tried to turn into a party with stalks of sugarcane passed out to the children and bottles of whiskey passed around to the men. Those left in Dead Lakes gathered at the crossroads across from Ella’s store and watched as members of the school board stuck blazing torches under the foundation.

“It’s for the best,” the beekeeper said. “We can’t have any germs left in that place coming back to haunt us.”

Neva sat on the end of the store porch with her feet dangling like a schoolgirl herself. A few of the horses hitched to wagons darted and snorted when the roof began to blaze. The children cheered and pranced in the street.

Samuel kept watch over the customers inside the store and even wore the black-and-white striped apron that had remained hanging in the coat closet after his father left. He had become good at reading customer needs and at ordering on speculation what he thought he could sell.

A fresh coat of blue paint covered the walls of Lanier’s new home. He had moved into Narsissa’s cabin only after settling on a fair rent to pay. “I’m not staying here like a freeloader,” he protested. In honor of the original occupant, he painted a white letter
N
over the front door. Ella dressed it up by painting lavender-colored blazing star, Narsissa’s favorite wildflower, around the corners.

Painting had become something more than a hobby for Ella. She began selling her paintings, weathered farmhouses set on landscapes covered in Indian grass and marshes dotted with palmettos and sand pines. Guests arriving at the Franklin Inn found her work greeting them in the lobby and hanging on the walls of the dining room.

Macon came running into the store and ignored Samuel’s order to slow down. “Mama, come quick. The school roof just caved in two.”

She leaned down to him, and her long, feathered earrings brushed against his cheek. “I don’t care to see that school destroyed. And you shouldn’t either. I’ll tell you like Aunt Katherine used to tell me. People can take your house, your money, all your belongings, but they can’t take away your education.”

If Macon ever heard her, she wouldn’t know it. He ran back outside and joined the other children parading down the road.

By early November, the charred remains of the school had been cleared. No one thought to wear a mask. The only masks they were now concerned with were gas masks and the effects of the mustard gas that had ravaged the soldiers in the war.

On November 11, church bells chimed, and people cheered in front of Ella’s store. Reverend Simpson had just returned from Apalachicola with official word that the war to end all wars had finally come to a close. “Peace,” he declared out in the street while standing on the bumper of his car. “There’s peace in the world.”

A week after she had recovered from the flu, Ella rocked in the porch chair that Harlan had special ordered for her and stared at the sunflowers. She listened as Lanier shared the details of Harlan’s death.

“I want you to know I did everything that I could but it just didn’t take,” Lanier mumbled. His words buzzed around her like bees to a new bloom. Lanier sat on the porch step and stared up at her as if expecting Ella to cry, scream, or question. Creaking filled the space in the air as Ella rocked in the chair. Her eyes never ventured away from the flowers she had planted long ago to block the view of Harlan’s store from their home.

After Lanier retreated back to the cabin, Ella slowly got up and walked into her bedroom. She pulled Harlan’s tailor-made white shirt out from the bottom dresser drawer and wadded it into a ball, cussing the material and the man who wore it. For days afterward whenever she would boil over with emotion for all that Harlan had cost her and himself, she would take the shirt out and cover her mouth, muffling her screams.

The following Sunday the church was filled as if it were Easter. Everyone but Lanier occupied a pew. “I think I’d better stay close to home,” he said when Ella asked him to join them.

An American flag was draped from corner to corner behind the pulpit and underneath the cross that hung on the front wall. Reverend Simpson lifted his arms high toward the congregation and smiled. “Armistice Day. Let us give thanks to God.”

“What does
armistice
mean?” Keaton whispered and pulled at his shirt collar.

“The end of hostilities,” Ella said. She felt her words.

That morning before the armistice service and after the breakfast dishes had been cleared, Ella took Harlan’s shirt and eased outside. Wearing her best lavender dress, she picked up a shovel and walked until she reached the base of the spring. There between a cedar tree and a pine stump, she had buried the shirt and with it dreams better suited for a girl.

At the church altar Reverend Simpson stood before the congregation wearing a coat that was too big for the thinner man he now was. He seemed hopeful though somber. His voice, just as majestic as before, was more tempered. “We celebrate the end.” His words echoed, and a few in the church were heard crying. “This year gave us end of life and end of war. We’ve seen destruction. And now we hear of peace.”

At the back, Lanier slipped in through the church door. The man standing closest raised an eyebrow and motioned with a felt hat for him to move away from the door. Ignoring the instruction, Lanier licked his lips and searched the crowd.

Turning his neck side to side and stretching his arm out into the aisle, Samuel looked back and saw Lanier. Without saying a word to Ella, he stood up, turned his back to the altar, and faced him. Samuel nodded and then motioned for Lanier to come forward. At first, Lanier looked over his shoulder at the church door, but there was an urgency in Samuel’s eyes, one Lanier had not fully recognized before, that called him to take one step and then another. Slowly moving forward, Lanier tried not to look at those who filled the church pews, staring at him, still trying to place him in their individual boxes of expectations. Easing into the pew next to Ella, Lanier turned to thank Samuel, but Samuel had already made his way to the back of the church, occupying the spot next to the door.

“I’ve long said we are not human beings having spiritual experiences,” Reverend Simpson said. The beekeeper shifted his weight against the front pew, and a baby cried. Mrs. Pomeroy nudged a sleeping Mr. Pomeroy with her elbow. He snorted, opened one eye, and then ignored her reprimand. “We are more or less spiritual beings who have a human experience. I can’t explain the events of this year or the events of life for that matter. And I can’t deny the grief we’ve all shared or the bickering that could have torn us apart. But I know for certain that I can find hope in the darkest hour. Our little village might be called Dead Lakes, but make no mistake, there’s certainly nothing dead about our faith.”

At the end of that year, Brother Mabry, vowing to never again step foot on land that he now cursed, had the gates to the Eden retreat bolted and the doors sealed. Eventually presented with an opportunity for publicity that he couldn’t refuse, he sold the retreat facility to the county for the sum of one dollar. He gave a two-paragraph quote to newspapermen who recorded his generosity and marveled that a building meant for spiritual enlightenment would now be a school. There was never any mention in the press release that Ella Wallace owned the land or that the county would be taking over Brother Mabry’s lease on the property.

When Miss Wayne’s school for girls closed upon her death in the epidemic, many of her students became full-time boarders at the new school in Dead Lakes. After two semesters none of the students even seemed to remember the evangelist who had built the building which now served as their school. With the additional students, two more teachers from the women’s college in Tallahassee joined the faculty, and by Easter break, Neva Clarkson was named principal.

During the break, Mrs. Pomeroy came into the store while Ella was opening up a supply of oil paints and a box of canvases. The basket on Mrs. Pomeroy’s arm dangled, and she dropped a bag of sugar into it. “They tell me,” she said in a singsong voice, “that our dear reverend has been bit with the love bug.”

Samuel dropped a crate of hammers on the floor in the back of the store, and Mrs. Pomeroy jumped.

“They tell me,” she continued, “that he met some rich widow woman at a church conference in Panama City. And to think, poor Myer hasn’t been gone a year. Reverend Simpson is making a fool out of himself, acting like a silly schoolboy. Can you imagine?”

Never looking away from the tins of pastel paints spread out on the counter before her, Ella said, “I can imagine it perfectly.”

Ella and Lanier sat on her front porch and watched the sun cast an orange glow over the marsh where cypress still grew in patches. Lanier chirped about business proposals with the same steady rhythm as the locusts that called out from the field.

“Now, Lanier, I just don’t know about that,” Ella said, flicking a piece of dried paint from the side of her finger.

“Hear me out,” Lanier said. “I saw in the paper where that state chemist who passed through Apalachicola—the governor’s man, the one going around talking about new ways to work the land—”

“Mr. Rose, I believe the paper said his name was. I read the article. Something about a heat wave causing a shortage of wheat.”

“Well, did you notice what he said about this place being a natural fit for growing rice? I got an idea that we can plant rice right down there.” Lanier leaned over and pointed beyond the porch toward the low-lying water. “Right where we cut the cypress.” He stopped the chair in mid-rock and rubbed her hand. “What you think?”

It was not the first time that he had mentioned the proposition. Since the newspaper article about the prospects of new planting, Lanier had talked of little else. Ella listened to his words but up until now hadn’t engaged him. The details swirled in Ella’s head, and she struggled with the idea of it all being a risky gamble. She looked out across the land where saplings dotted the sand and down to the edge of the water where cypress stumps rose up like jagged thumbs. “Rice down here? Whoever heard of such hogwash?” she had heard the beekeeper say in the store the day the article appeared in the paper. “An ignoramus government man, if ever I heard one. Show me what sort of rice can grow past the Georgia line,” Mr. Pomeroy had added.

A storm of nervous energy rumbled inside the core of Ella’s being. She scraped her fingernail across a gnarled, weathered spot on the arm of the chair and then put her hand on top of Lanier’s. “At the end of the day, I hate to say that I never tried,” she said.

“We’ll make a pretty penny on this one, you just wait and see.” Lanier studied her with intense examination. The light that was left in the day caught the small amber circles in the center of his irises. They penetrated her like a fire melting the double-locked gate of fear—the fear of failure and the fear of public opinion about their unconventional arrangement. “We’re partners. Fifty-fifty,” Lanier said.

As the sun sank lower and the sky turned darker blue, a half-moon formed over the horizon. A strand of clouds illuminated pink by the setting sun hovered over the tops of the oak trees, the church steeple, and the tin roof of the store. What was left of the clouds on that day formed the shape of a spine, like the one that had once hung on a skeleton in the laboratory at Miss Wayne’s school. Toward the east, faint wisps of clouds scattered across the sky. To Ella they looked like thin ribs stretching out and then crumbling toward the evening star. The scent of Lanier clung to the crisp air of early evening, and for a moment, Ella breathed deep until her stomach stretched out wide. She purposely exhaled slowly, savoring the scene before her. The sounds of laughter rose up from the spring down in the woods and tickled her ears like wind chimes.

Girls who had transitioned from Miss Wayne’s school giggled as they frolicked along the edge of the spring that some in town still claimed was magical. But the girls added their own stories about the spring, about Indian princesses who frequented its bank at midnight and those who grew stronger by daring to bow down and brush their lips against the water’s surface. With school uniform dresses hiked up to their knees, the girls dipped their feet into the spring and sipped from the bottles of Coca-Cola they purchased from the commissary. They wished, hoped, and dreamed.

And all the while, Ella Wallace lived.

A fifth-generation native of Perry, Florida, Michael Morris knows Southern culture and characters. They are the foundation and inspiration for the stories and novels he writes.

Michael started his career as a pharmaceutical sales representative and began writing in the evenings. The first screenplay he penned is still someplace in the bottom of a desk drawer.

While studying under author Tim McLaurin, Michael started the story that would eventually become his first novel,
A Place Called Wiregrass
. The debut book won the Christy Award for Best First Novel.

Michael’s second novel,
Slow Way Home
, was compared to the work of Harper Lee and Flannery O’Connor by the
Washington Post
. It was nationally ranked as one of the top three recommended books by the American Booksellers Association and named one of the best novels of the year by the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
.

Michael is also the author of a novella based on the Grammy-nominated song “Live Like You Were Dying,” which became a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. His essays have appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Dallas Morning News
, and the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
. In addition, his short stories can be found in Sonny Brewer’s
Stories from the Blue Moon Café II
and in
Not Safe, but Good
volume 2, an anthology edited by Bret Lott.

A graduate of Auburn University, Michael also holds an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University. He lives in Alabama with his wife, Melanie. Visit him online at
www.michaelmorrisbooks.com
.