Butterfly Sunday (16 page)

Years came and went. Darthula kept watch, but she never saw a sign of his presence. It must have been Honey Sweet he’d wanted. Honey Sweet was resting safe this fine September morning—as she had for nine years now—sleeping dreamless in the arms of Abraham.

Just the same, Darthula got around. Sometimes she listened from the darkness under the open window behind the crossroads store. Sometimes she hid in the crook of a tree above a house down on the blacktop and watched somebody’s television. Certain cellar doors and kitchen windows became well acquainted with Darthula.
She came to know more than must be told observing people and things, but she never saw the devil.

Though Honey’s voice came back to her on hot nights.

Her heavy whispers crossed the black dampness of the house and woke Darthula. She didn’t even open her eyes, much less pretend to sit forward. She knew it all by heart.

It was hot. Darthula wanted sleep.

“Shade of night, be gone!”

“You done tole me that.”

“Hush! You dead!”

Darthula threw off her sheet and shouted at the dark, “I’m gittin’ tired of that!”

“I ain’t been with no mens and I ain’t goin’ with none; so you lay your nasty head back down on that pillow and die in peace!”

Darthula had garnered enough stares here and there to know that Honey Sweet had made her a freak. She had no way to deal with people except to keep her head low and avoid them as much as she could.

“Nobody want me, Old Bag, not from this world or the next.”

Honey Sweet was dead. Darthula was wrestling her in the lonely dark.

“Go away!”

“Satan.”

“Beelzebub.”

“Scratch.”

“He say, ‘Girl, you look fine.’ ”

“Bring me a big Hershey and he touch me soft.”

“Climb up on me in the bed.”

“Ol’ Bitch, you long dead, now why don’t you get away!”

Time had slowly faded the voice in the dark. With the years Darthula took a measure of worldliness. Darthula had run up on the world as it were, cleaning houses and churches in town. She had not inherited Honey Sweet’s calling. She was as mortal as a dog. She was no angel. No, Darthula didn’t believe it all straight out the barn door no more.

Yet she could not shake her exasperating belief that Satan was destined to cross her mortal path. Darthula knew that was true. She knew it because Honey Sweet spared her no mercy when she beat her for stealing quarters. She knew it because Honey Sweet threw her half-naked and barefoot into the ice storm when she peed the bed. Darthula knew it with that perfected faith that has been cut and burned and beaten into a child’s soft bones and baked by time.

That was done and gone and behind Darthula this fine September morning. She had her cleaning money and she was intent on yeast and a banana and one or
two other things from town. She waited, and directly the sun was melting her and she was torn between a half-mile walk home, or two and a half more miles into town. Then she heard the truck engine in the distance.

Averill clutched the steering wheel but he hardly saw the road or noticed the sudden incline. He was seized by a boding terror of his weakness and Soames’s apparent power over him. Hadn’t he prayed that it wouldn’t happen this time? If he prayed and it happened, then heaven had failed him to some extent. God had said no. That made Averill think of the old country song that said God’s greatest blessings came when He said no to a prayer. Still, he just didn’t want this to happen again. The thrill came and went, but there could be longer-lasting effects. Suppose the Churchills divorced and old Henri got wise? He’d haul Averill into court, make him a public disgrace and take his church away from him.

“Lord, I’m counting on you,” he prayed.

Then he drifted into a reverie as he remembered her scent and her red hair tickling his chest and how she bore down on him and goaded him into a bucking frenzy as she nibbled his ears and whispered hot, sweet, dirty come-ons. And here he caught himself. Here he realized he was sliding his backside around on the worn leather seat, enjoying the rising sensations there and, worse, he was precariously close to letting the truck sink into the soft silt shoulder.

“Lord, my God, cast this demon out!” he shouted.

At the same time, Darthula saw a curl of dust a good ways up the road, and it was moving this way. Now she could make out a truck, an old truck, but none she could call to mind. She knew all the hill people, Spakes,
McFayes, McAlexanders and on. Try as she would, Darthula couldn’t match a single one of them up with that truck. Now it got into the straight slope that ran into the crook, and that’s what the fool was fixing to do if he didn’t slow down.

Then she saw the man and felt herself turn to stone. Oh, terrible that beauty and thrilling the dread that shot through her. And she prayed.

“Lord, undo his evil!”

Averill saw her too, or thought he saw a strange figure standing on top of a high ridge of eroded red clay from which tree roots hung in a bearded fuzz beside the truck. Whether it was man or woman, he couldn’t say. It seemed to be a person covered head to toe in layers of ragged clothes of every description with a white veil on its head. The figure startled and distracted him from the road, which took a sharp downward curve just ahead. By the time Averill looked back to his path, he realized he was going much too fast to avoid crashing into the clay bank on the outside of the curve.

He slammed on his brakes and the truck spun three times in the road, raising so much sand and dust that it obliterated his vision in a pale orange fog that choked him as he slid to a stop, though gently, against the crumbling clay. Through the dissolving fog he heard a voice from the ridge fifteen feet above him. Whether it was man or woman, song or chant, curse or prayer, Averill had no idea. The best he could make of it was some kind of muttering growl.

“Memphi … Memphi … Memphi …”

Now the dust had settled enough that he could see the ragged figure standing just above, stomping its brown bare feet and rocking as it chanted. A red one had replaced the white veil.

“Memphistopheles, be gone!”

Now a gloved hand raised and pointed something down at him. He took it to be a gun. He floored the engine, jerking the wheel left and, careening almost on its side, the truck rumbled and sputtered onto the road and roared downward into the woods.

The ragged figure kept the instrument pointed in the direction of the truck until the woods had swallowed it sight and sound.

“Satan, go back to hell,” she said by way of completing her first crude exorcism. Now she waited for the last dust of her boiling spell to settle back onto the road.

Satisfied at last that the devil had been momentarily driven out, she let the hand holding the weapon of glory drop to one side and laid it on the ground. Then she removed the red veil that she wore to signal all living things and heaven above that Satan was afoot in these woods. Well pleased that the environs were safe once more, Darthula covered her head in the white veil of sanctity she had worn earlier. She lifted the weapon, which was no more or less potent than a worn copper-and-silver-plate crucifix, and tucked it into one of a dozen pockets. Then, holding her head erect so the breathing world could read its propitious message, she descended into the dry amber shadows of September Woods.

EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 23, 2000

1:16 P.M.

For a moment, as Leona drifted out of her crowded reverie and let her tired mind readjust to the present situation, everything in her immediate vision was yellow-throated irises and new green shadows and sunshine. It seemed a fragmented vestige of long-lost Eden, but it was only the back corner of the unkempt yard, seen at a momentary angle of the sun in the temporary glory of later April. In a matter of weeks these tender, opaque vines that laced the grass would erupt and swell and smother the ground. They would circle and climb the trunks of these hardwood trees, choking the leaves, spreading across the upper limbs, sucking the strength out of the forest and blocking out the sky.

Summer, fall, winter or spring—in the end it was all just one long season of the witch.

Inside the house the yelling had died away. The quiet unnerved her, but for a moment she lost track of why. Then she remembered the deadly feast on the kitchen counter.

From the kitchen she could see the three of them sitting at the dining room table waiting in a kind of stupor or trance. It was that wary silence of people forced by unwieldy circumstances into a truce neither side wanted. They were hungry.

“Looks good,” Winky observed after Leona had served each of them a full plate and returned with one of her own. Audena picked up her fork.

“Let us bow our heads!” Averill snarled at her. She let the hand holding the fork drop into her lap. Then she bowed her head. Leona gave Winky one hand and laid the other one on Audena’s shoulder.

“He is risen!” Averill began.

“I could still save his life,”
Leona said to herself.

He prayed for a long time. He never did that when it was just the two of them. This was showing off—and not his religion, but her own deceased mother’s sterling flatware and Irish linens and Wedgwood plates.

It wasn’t two more minutes before their argument resumed. From the large amount of food Averill had consumed, Leona was convinced that her mission had been accomplished. She had to get rid of Audena and Winky.

“A fine Christian family, you all are!” Leona exploded with genuine contempt.

Averill looked thrilled. He wanted the pair of them out of his face. Audena and Winky exchanged mortified stares. Then Audena glared at Leona as if she were about to bite off her head at the neck. Seeing their departure in sight, Winky lifted his plate and started shoveling.

“I won’t have it,” Leona hissed.

“He’s a thief!” Audena spat.

“Don’t insult my husband at his own table on Easter Sunday!”

“You’re living almighty damn high on what he stole from me!”

“Get out before I have the law throw you out!”

“You took the Sayres name down lower than mud.”

“That’s not possible!”

Winky burst out laughing and spit a mouthful of mashed potatoes over Averill’s head and onto the flowered wall behind him. It had no discernible effect on Audena; he probably did it all the time at home.

“Oh, yes, it’s possible,” Audena hollered, standing up to leave, “considering how you ruined a good family in Fredonia and drove a poor man to suicide with your accusations. Then you turned around and tricked this fool into giving our name to your bastard.”

Now Averill was laughing as hard as Winky. That cured Leona of any misgiving she had about poisoning him. Because even Averill knew that Leona had swum rivers of pure burning sulfur in an effort to find her way out of hell after she lost the baby. And Audena well knew that Leona had crossed hell on bare hands and knees accepting what she had believed at the time was a stillbirth. Leona took no pride in winning a verbal scrimmage with a swayback mule. Nor was she later pleased to recall that she had dismissed Audena by comparing her to a bloodhound and calling her husband a grabby little Chihuahua.

It got rid of Audena and Winky, though. And it put Averill in grand humor. He could barely quiet himself before he’d start giggling all over again. After that, all she had to do was wait Averill out while he drank coffee and ate two slices of triple chocolate cake, enriched of
course with a pinch of her secret ingredient. Averill snickered and choked and belched his way through two slices of that special mix. It was his favorite cake recipe. However, that wasn’t why Leona had chosen it. Leona had gone to no short lengths with that particular cake because of its name, “Devil’s Last Wish.” That tickled her cornball funny bone. Now, as Averill walked out the front door snickering, she just had to smile, thinking that the fool was going to literally die laughing.