Butterfly Sunday (19 page)

It made her the slightest bit uneasy. She didn’t find the bad boy type at all appealing. She knew that girls
who did always wound up in a lot of pain. Of course, Averill hadn’t done or said anything she could interpret as suggestive.

Later the sky was powder blue. The ground was dry here. They were on a narrow blacktop that twisted and climbed and dove into eroding banks of red clay from which the gnarled roots of trees hung in tornadolike swirls.

“This is hill country,” he said.

She had been turning his confessional words over and over, examining their implications for her. He wanted to take her in. What would his church members say? What would their relationship to each other be? Was he expecting her to bed down with him? Though he didn’t seem to realize it, Averill was a young man whose body language communicated an almost constant need for a woman. It was too intense for Leona. It made her nervous. Although she trusted him completely.

“You’re far too decent for me to take advantage of you.”

“I’m not asking you to love me.”

“You deserve to be loved.”

In future moments of anger, Averill would say that Leona had deceived him. She didn’t have the guts to tell Averill she was using him for a port in a storm. She wouldn’t propose the nonsexual, public façade she wanted. Rather than embrace the fact that she was desperately terrified of facing the world alone in her predicament, she played a high-handed game of moral and emotional chess. It added up to a pretense of affection and concern she had manufactured to disguise her terror of physical intimacy with him.

Leona had never made anything like a formidable objection to his charges because the truth in them always
made her burn with shame. In the end, and not without deep gratitude and, at first, great affection, Leona married Averill (for the benefit of his congregation) and tried to give a believable performance as a young country preacher’s expectant bride.

They passed through Orpheus, a small county seat town like Fredonia, but obviously built by a far more prosperous class of plantation owners. It was hard to imagine so many hulking, antebellum dinosaurs, several occupying large estates surrounded by tall, elaborate iron fences. As they left the edge of town behind them, the paved street gave way to a gravel road as the town ended abruptly. They descended through soy fields interspersed with stands of hardwoods and cedars. After a mile, they crossed a wide creek dotted with sandbars. Now the road inclined sharply upward and a dark forest loomed.

Now the gravel road forked right, skirting a small mountain while the left branch, which Averill took, was little more than two clay ruts that climbed it. Cotton fields became rocky woods and the shoulder disappeared as clay banks rose on either side—ten, sometimes twenty, feet above them where soaring oaks leaned off the forest floor. It was the steepest road she had ever traveled. The truck engine protested its battle with gravity. Banked by the dark silhouettes of the towering trees, the view straight ahead was endless pewter sky.

“Wouldn’t want to be on this road in a rainstorm,” she said, talking to dispel her inexplicable boding. How stupid that must have sounded to him, knowing as he did that her fate was sealed, that she would indeed travel this road in rain and snow and hail and blinding lightning with tree limbs crashing. They were moving
up a steep incline now. The engine was grinding and clattering now, straining against the steep road.

“When we get to the church. I’ll introduce you as my wife,” he said. The way he said it made her feel a little conspiratorial, like kids late for supper and deciding what excuse to give. She didn’t delve into it. It was something he had to do to protect himself. She saw no harm in following his lead.

Besides, the long ride, the intensity of the situation and her condition had conspired to make her a little nauseous. She was just glad he didn’t expect her to wait in a hot truck while he taught his Sunday school class and preached a sermon afterward. She’d figured out enough life for one day. It was no small relief to be with someone she could trust who, for the moment anyway, seemed to know what she should do.

Just when it seemed to Leona that something under the hood of the truck would have to explode or crack in two, they crested the hill and the road flattened and curved through dense forest. Daylight darted between the trunks of hardwoods on the horizon in front of them. Above the trees, a pale scrap of moon hung behind the pallid morning sky. It seemed used up and as dead as a dry leaf.

She wanted to ask him if it had been his plan to bring her here. She wanted to know his expectations. There was a great deal of room for the answers to a thousand questions any reasonable person in her shoes would ask. She was afraid to know any more. Everything past had been obliterated. Nothing about the future was clear. Had she been honest with herself, Leona would have admitted more suspicion from the beginning.

However, she had handed her fate to fear, as even
the strongest people will when they’re overwhelmed by a great loss. She had chosen the passive course of willful ignorance.

How smart Averill had been, how brilliant, she now thought. He had convinced her that he was smitten, that he would take her under any conditions. He knew she had no option but to take advantage of his feelings for her, to use him as long as she deemed it necessary. He let her think that she would one day take her infant and his best wishes when she left him.

In some respects Leona would come to see herself as a victim of her own narrow attitudes. She had no idea that Averill understood people and society better than anyone did. Not that first day she spent on Whitsunday Hill. She knew that he had come from the bottom rung. Yet she couldn’t have imagined that even then he was using the unique perspective it gave him as his chief means of climbing toward a tolerable existence. She didn’t even suspect that he had learned to play the affable innocent who lived in eternal awe of his betters. He was already adept at keeping quiet and making small moves. He had trained himself to put people at ease by adopting a subordinate and supportive posture around them. He had crafted a mask of goodwill and contentment, which reassured all who looked affectionately down on him that he was too simple to experience their superior complexities and tribulations.

People let their guard down. They confided things. How many times would she watch with resentful regard as he manipulated far better-educated men, blinding them with their own arrogance, and gaining whatever dispensation their positions could offer? He had hidden his agenda for her behind a thick fog of fumbling adoration. He knew all about her lace-curtain Protestant
strain. He understood its moral murkiness. He knew that she would have to convince herself that she wasn’t taking advantage of him. He was counting on the fact that she would blind herself to her basic intentions. It would also prevent her from seeing his own dishonest purposes.

He knew that she was the product of a particular tribe, an insulated little fortress that held itself apart from poor, ignorant people like his. She had been weaned on her innate superiority to trash like Averill Sayres. Strange, he would inadvertently teach her what potent secrets could fester in such people.

Had it not been for his act of inhuman savagery upon the baby, Leona had often mused, she might have called the rest of it a draw and walked quietly away.

People must have their intuition educated out of them. She remembered an almost suffocating sense of boding on that first Sunday morning when she saw the cemetery from the road. It was ancient and it seemed as if the woods from which it had been cleared and sanctified by a now badly rusted iron fence had almost succeeded in reclaiming it. Though, on closer inspection, she could see that some of the graves were still maintained. Several mounds of grass-covered earth indicated it was still in use.

She was glad when it gave way to a thicket of cedars. She was nauseous from the acute sensation of dread. Then the church appeared through the trees and she fixed her mind on its decorous and haunted formality. It was an old plantation house of worship. It was small, probably just one room, and in poor condition. The brick needed pointing and the paint was peeling from the long windows and the wooden shutters beside them. Still, it had an unexpected elegance, a sophistication
owing to its careful proportions. Many of its architectural details had obviously come from far away. There wouldn’t have been anywhere within five hundred miles to obtain them when it was built in the nineteenth century.

The roof was weathered copper; the stained glass windows were set deep; the eaves overhung elaborate molded trim. Climbing roses arched the paneled wood front door and a pair of eight brick steps curved left and right along a wrought iron railing to the packed clay remnants of a circle driveway. He drove on another hundred yards before he veered hard to the left and they followed the rough, grass-covered driveway seventy feet and stopped where it petered out beside the house.

Half an hour later she found herself being introduced to a church full of smiling country people as Mrs. Averill Sayres. It made more sense than she had begun to think her life ever would. Mrs. Averill Sayres was a disguise, a hiding place from the miserable past. It was a tolerable niche and a part she was more than grateful to play in exchange for the safety it afforded her.

For the first few months Leona lived on gratitude. Averill had spared her the wretched penance of that house in Pascagoula where the months would pass in shame and dread of the unavoidable separation from her child. He had taken her out of a place where every pair of eyes saw her as fallen, a stain on a starched cotton society, a living insult to a decent family. It was good to be where everything she saw wasn’t a reminder of something else she had lost.

She tried to express her appreciation to Averill by making a considerable effort to organize and improve the old parsonage, which was precariously close to irretrievable ruin. She also stood beside him in groups of
people, using her skills to make him more comfortable. People liked her and that reflected well on him.

Averill worked hard at his calling. He apparently had inherited a church that was near its last gasp. People were already saying that he had turned it around. Leona first thought the place was called Whitsunday after Pentecost Sunday, the day of the Holy Spirit according to the New Testament. She soon found out that there was another explanation. According to local lore, on the morning the church was dedicated in the 1800s, the surrounding woods had filled with white butterflies.

Strange what she chose to believe and why. She was like a child, peering out through the evening haze for signs of the mythical butterflies in the woods. It gave her inexplicable peace. Or was that the new life stirring within her?

Averill was gone most of the time, day and night, calling on shut-ins, looking in on backsliders and making an effort to lure back former members who had drifted away.

Leona loved the simplicity of her days. She could accomplish a great deal with nothing to divert her attention but the peace of the woods. They spent relatively little time alone together. She made his supper; she kept his house; she lent him her support in public. Their conversations were pleasant, if a little more pragmatic than meaningful.

They slept in separate beds, rarely even lying down to sleep at the same time. Averill was usually asleep by the time she went to bed. More times than not, she’d wake up in the morning to find him gone, and two cups of warm coffee left for her on the stove.

One October Saturday he suggested they make a two-hour drive to Grand Junction, Tennessee, where they
could make their marriage legal. He said living the lie was bothering him. He also added that a child was always better off wearing its father’s last name. She hadn’t contemplated the future during recent months. The idea of giving birth occupied too much between her and that.

Averill hadn’t done or said anything in all that time to reiterate the deep affections he had expressed the night she left Fredonia with him. She could only assume that they had cooled.

“Averill, I can’t let you do this.”

“I’d do anything for you, Leona.”

“There will be a woman who loves you one day.”

“I’ll only love one woman the way I love you, Leona.”

“I won’t be here forever.”

“I know a marriage certificate won’t change that.”

She couldn’t have wished for a better solution than the one he’d provided for her. It was working very well. Besides, he was offering her baby a name. In exchange, she could certainly say a few words to a justice of the peace and relieve his shoulders from the burden of living a lie.

What made people believe in something for nothing? What convinced her that there wouldn’t be consequences? How did she manage to persuade her better nature that it wouldn’t be exploitation if Averill didn’t call it that?

Averill Sayres had taught her one very dear lesson. People didn’t forget things. Everything Averill did amounted to paying the world back for the indignity of his miserable childhood. People acted indifferent to insults; they smiled and said they had learned values by virtue of having done without. People acquired polish and power and dignified airs. All the same, Averill Sayres had demonstrated it for her: they kept their
scorecards. They hid all that past injury and pain way out of sight, where it smoldered like piled leaves or oily rags. They waited. Then they got even.

His spiritual path and compassionate personality were both façade and modus operandi. He was a well-oiled illusion, a brilliant actor playing himself every waking moment. She didn’t believe people were born evil. People became the total of their accrued suffering. Averill Sayres had lured her with false humility and disingenuous affection. By letting her think she was using him, he diverted her from his own usurious motives.

What a lie everything was, what a mean-spirited mirage. Yet she had succumbed herself to the ways of the world. She had descended into hell right here on earth. She didn’t need another act of this ludicrous comedy. She didn’t see the point of learning any more character lessons too late. Did it matter how many pairs of hands shared the collective guilt of her miserable fate? She was here now; she had reached the broken world, the bleak haunt of the jackals from which her dead soul would never escape. There was nothing to do now but wait for them to find him and arrest her.