Butterfly Sunday (10 page)

“Are you painting me?” She smiled.

“I don’t need a painting. I have the real thing.”

She smiled. Tears poured down her face. He smiled at her. Neither of them spoke. Tears came hard for Leona and almost always without warning. They were the private language of her inarticulate depths. She never meant them for the rest of the world’s sympathy. She rarely wanted to discuss the things they addressed with whoever happened to see them. Yet people meant well and she didn’t want to be rude. She waited for Blue to notice them and comment or presume to offer unsolicited comfort. Yet his smile didn’t seem to take them into account. It was extraordinary. It was exquisite to draw in his already beloved outline, to embrace her deliverance from that now ancient wretchedness that yesterday was her waking and sleeping fate.

It was impossible to believe when he kissed her that this wasn’t all some yellow image of an ideal love painted in thick oils on canvas. Or a film or a moving dream. Life was a layered series of illusions. Innocence, passion, sorrow, despair, and now this sunny new awakening of bliss. Would it ever take a discernible shape? Could she believe in this wondrous solid ground? Yet these arms around her were more than canvas. She wasn’t a painter. This moment—which she already knew in her
heart was what people meant by glory—was not to be observed or sketched or even doubted. It was for embracing. This was happiness, heaving and tumbling through her. This was singing flesh and trust and warm giggling in her ear. This was new, impossible good. She had stepped on too many of life’s rusty nails, she had cradled too much everlasting sorrow to take the clear blue sky above the new green hills for granted. If love wasn’t eternal, then neither was sorrow, but here and now Blue’s relentless affection was enough meaning for her.

Later, when the sun had dried the shining leaves and the warm wind had chased last evening’s chill, she and Blue walked up the hill into the woods, leaving the path where it veered and skirted a steep incline of boulders in front of them. Climbing another ten minutes, they stood at the edge of the flat, grassy plain that stretched a quarter of a mile across the top of the hill. On the far side they found a broad, flat, mossy stone, which jutted several feet over a bowl of farmland below. Three miles away, at the top of the next wooded hill, they could make out the west face of the courthouse clock in town. Blue had discovered the place when he was a boy. He said half his memories were here.

“Why did you marry Averill?”

“I told you last night. I was pregnant.”

“You haven’t told me anything.”

“I might have done differently if …” She didn’t want to tell him. She had been blissfully free of all those ghosts since last night. She was afraid it would bring them back. She changed the subject, but he wouldn’t let it go that quickly.

“They’ll kill you, Leona.”

“Who?”

“Your secrets.”

If she closed him off, she’d lose him. Yet it frightened her. The idea that she might overcome the dark influences of the last few years was very new. Hope was a precious commodity. She wanted time. He was waiting for her to tell him about it. How much did he already know? He read her mind.

“The more you hide, the more people see, Leona.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because it’s eating you alive.”

They drifted into an almost wordless quiet, napping while a vast hoard of gray-and-white sheep swam slowly westward on the pale blue sea above them. By two o’clock the clouds were scattered threads and the day was white. It was warm, almost hot, the sort of mid-March afternoon that had brought a steady trickle of old ladies into her father’s drugstore to declare they just didn’t know when they had ever been so warm a solid week before, sure enough, spring arrived.

Why not tell Blue? Why not share that world? Did she think it would bore him? Did she fear his judgment? Why not? Didn’t it ennoble her when he shared so much with her? What did he mean? What was eating her alive? She was crying, not that exquisite pain that had engulfed her with tears this morning. This was more terrible and overwhelming and heavier than that. This was the fear of telling him everything; this embodied eating her alive. This was the unmitigated mortification that overwhelmed her every time she looked back.

Now his arms were holding her. Yet their kindness was unbearable. She didn’t deserve kindness.

“What is it, Leona?”

“They gave me everything, Blue.…”

“I know.…”

“And look what I came to.…”

“Leona, I told you, I know.”

“I’m …”

He gently loosened his arms and let his hands slide up to her shoulders. Then he lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

“You’re ashamed, Leona.…”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.”

“Then why do I feel so bad?”

“Evidently you did a lot to feel bad about.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“About as easy as you telling me to forgive myself.”

They sat down in an ocean of tall grass and watched the fleecy sky ravel and drift away like a white iceberg dissolving into a silver blue ocean. When they kissed and lay down, the grass waved, and when he was inside her she felt the earth sigh. There on the glistening, heaving flesh of his shoulder she saw a white butterfly drying its perfect wings. When it rose, it seemed to draw them into the sky with it as peace burst within her. Then, as they lay in the still grass, she watched it climb higher and higher until it was tiny and shining and indistinguishable from the first spray of evening stars.

That was when she knew she could tell him.

Facing down the years, it was strange how her memory had kept details she had missed altogether when she was there in the flesh. As she told Blue about her girlhood in Fredonia, Mississippi, Leona saw for the first time that hers had been a very privileged childhood. Her father was a prosperous druggist and her mother
taught elementary school music. Both of her parents had used their comfortable income to smooth a lot of rough edges for Leona.

They were pillars of the First Presbyterian Church, but they had a more tolerant approach to other people and certainly to child rearing than most of their friends. People said they couldn’t help spoiling her. Leona was their only daughter, but not their only child. Lloyd William and Viola Clay raised two children, each a generation apart. Her brother Henson had been born while her daddy was still in pharmacy school. Henson was drafted into the army in 1970, the summer after he graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. He was killed in Vietnam two years later.

Leona was born in 1980, a complete surprise, and to their dying days her parents never failed to seize the opportunity to tell her she had come like a miracle. They coddled and protected and adored Leona, raising her in a home where everything revolved around her happiness. Lloyd William Clay made a very solid living as a pharmacist. Leona’s world was comfortable and pretty and soft and sunlit. She had everything she wanted all through her childhood, and she had never doubted that she always would.

Maybe that was her parents’ one big mistake. She had too little awareness of life’s darker potential. It created a false sense of security and left her vulnerable to people and situations. She was blinded by her self-importance. She had little practice with looking at other people’s needs and motives. She had come to the opinion that selfish people were the easiest to manipulate. Or maybe her mother and father meant to postpone some of life’s lessons until they felt she was old enough to accept them. In any event, Leona’s childhood
came to an abrupt and permanent end two weeks after her fifteenth birthday. After winning second place in the Fourth of July Five Mile Run, Lloyd William bent over to tie his shoelace and fell dead at age sixty-nine.

It was as if fate had decided that Leona had experienced too much light and laughter. The skies would never be as blue again. In the wake of her father’s death, Leona helped Viola struggle to keep the drugstore open. However, without a pharmacist it quickly deteriorated into a high-priced sundries store. It limped along for a little over a year. Then Wal-Mart appeared at the center of a parking lot on the north edge of town and Clay’s Drug Store succumbed with half of the other businesses on Court Square.

Viola was in her sixties, well liked and certified as a schoolteacher, but she had lost more than her husband had when her son died. The ancient wound left by that loss had never really healed. Viola and Lloyd William had been conservative Christian people who believed in the tenet “my country right or wrong,” when Henson was killed. However, the intervening years revealed a great many facts, slowly convincing Viola that Henson had died for the profit of a military-industrial complex that had staged the war like a multibillion-dollar flea market for its military goods.

By the time her husband died, Viola was already suffering dark periods lasting several weeks. The futility of her son’s death had overpowered her former faith in life. She had once been a strong woman. However, these difficult losses seemed more affronts than bad luck. Her despair had become a formidable opponent before she lost her husband. Her grief afterward, coupled with her inability to save the business, seemed to draw the life out of her as well.

More and more she sat at home all day while judges and lawyers and bankers cut up her late husband’s assets. When Leona came home from high school, she would often find her mother seated in the same chair that she had been in when Leona left for class in the morning. Gradually Viola became a semi-invalid, managing only to get herself to church in good weather. By the time Leona was sixteen, all her mother’s duties had fallen on her shoulders. Viola had caved in to despair. She not only ceased taking care of Leona’s needs, but she neglected herself completely. Her nourishment, her hygiene, the small business dealings and income left her—everything became Leona’s responsibility.

One by one Leona had to give up her outside activities. She had worked for the school newspaper and played a series of comic parts in the school drama club productions, which won her a reputation as a cut-up. The special fund her father had created to fulfill his dream of sending her up north to a good girls’ college went to pay estate taxes.

She wasn’t going to college. She wasn’t going anywhere except maybe to type and answer the telephone for some lawyer.

Then one June night Tyler Crockett stood looking at her through the front door, his eyes red, his hands shaking and his trembling lips begging her for help. After that everything changed.

She was miserable and afraid that her mother would keep her from having a life. From her shadowy vantage, Ty Crockett seemed like a sudden angel of mercy. She and Ty had always been buddies. He was her first boy pal when they were children. Even then they just saw things the same way. Later, in high school, they continued their easygoing friendship. Leona had never thought
about Ty as a boyfriend. It just never occurred to her. Everyone knew that he was going to marry Gloria London one day.

Even when Ty came to her devastated by his breakup with Gloria, Leona hadn’t attached any romantic significance to it. She was merely returning the same shoulder to cry on that he had lent to her when her father died. She was just helping out a good friend. Even when they began to do things together in public—the picture show, church, summer parties—they were always surprised when people considered them a couple.

They had always liked each other. They had always understood things in a similar manner. They shared a delicious, sardonic sense of humor and an indomitable passion for dreaming up all kinds of future adventures, like backpacking through Europe. Neither could say when the friendship turned into something more. It just evolved. It seemed the most natural thing in the world when they started loving each other. When they slept together, it seemed right that Ty was her first lover. Hadn’t she always loved him in one way or another? He was dear and familiar and it all made perfect sense. It was as neat as any movie. Life had come through with her happy ending just when it had seemed impossible.

Looking back, the memory of her naiveté turned Leona beet red. She laughed nervously as she recalled it for Blue. He didn’t comment or wince or smile. He just waited with inscrutable interest for her to continue.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 1998

11:08 P.M.

They’d had everything planned. Ty would go to the university one hundred miles away in Oxford. She’d stay in Fredonia to work and live at home and attend secretarial courses at the local junior college. When Ty graduated, they would be married. They would live in Oxford while he went to law school and she worked in an office.

Six weeks before Ty was scheduled to enter the university as a freshman, Leona began to suspect that she was pregnant. In the first week of August, with her second period overdue, she and Ty took a train to Grenada, where a doctor confirmed that she was expecting a baby. A terrible irony of fate had been working that summer in the weeks between her first suspicions and the proven fact. Viola’s doctor had finally revealed that she had
been suffering terminal cancer for several months and now she was running out of time. On the train ride back to Fredonia Leona and Ty amended their earlier plans. They would marry right away, as soon as their parents were informed of Leona’s condition. Ty would go to the university and Leona would stay in Fredonia to see Viola through to the end.