Man in the Blue Moon (15 page)

“Is that so?” Clive smiled and then took a drag on the cigar.

Narsissa put the pail of red root stems down on the ground next to the palmetto bush. Before rising up, she casually lifted the silver knife out from her boot and hid it behind her back.

Clive stepped forward but Narsissa didn’t move.

“We had a fire. A fire that wiped out our timber last night.”

“Our?”
Clive coughed out the word. “You’re one step away from being down there with the others helping a pitiful white woman.” Clive nodded his head back toward the colored women who were assisting Priscilla.

“I’m not scared of you,” Narsissa said. “No, sir.” She exposed the knife to him. The sun flickered off of the tip.

Clive flicked an ash from the cigar and laughed. He moved so close that when he exhaled, his breath caused the ends of Narsissa’s hair to flutter. “Now let me give it to you straight, gal. I’ll take my pistol and whip you bloody with it. Who will help you then? Ella?”

“Who says I need helping?”

Clive looked sideways at Narsissa. A nose hair twisted and turned as he breathed. “What am I thinking? Having a conversation with a gal who probably can’t even sign her own name. Get on back to your shack before I knock you back there.”

Narsissa didn’t turn away. “You’re trespassing. The law’s on our side.”

“Our . . .
our
?” Sunlight cracked through the canopy of vines and made Clive’s waxed hair seem even slicker. “You poor old thing. Ella has manipulated you but good. You really do think that you have a stake in all of this.”

“I know what I know,” Narsissa said, gathering the pail before walking away.

“So sue me. Courthouse opens at eight in the morning,” Clive said. His laughter could be heard long after he had tromped over the blooms of the red root and returned to the uninvited guests. The jagged sound of his amusement followed Narsissa like a haint, tormenting her all the way through the sand littered with pine stumps and to the dust that had accumulated underneath the bed where Ella mourned her loss.

The report of Clive’s appearance jolted back Ella’s determination as much as the raspberry-colored liquid that Narsissa drained from the skillet after frying the red roots. “It is time,” Narsissa said as she forced Ella to drink the bitter concoction.

The next morning, while Narsissa hitched up the wagon, Ella gathered the breakfast plates in the sink and told her oldest son a lie. “Narsissa and I are going to town to try one more time to plead mercy with Clive.” Today of all days, she didn’t need a boy who thought he was a man getting into her business. After the fire, Samuel had stomped about the house, rearing and carrying on about how Clive Gillespie was to blame for all their troubles since the beginning of time. He had declared vengeance, and that night, after he had gone to bed, Ella locked the gun cabinet and hid the key in the teapot that she seldom used.

“You can’t handle him by yourself,” Samuel said, walking toward his bedroom to change. “I better go with you.”

“No,” Ella said, blocking the passageway next to the oven. “I mean it, Samuel. You are not going. Don’t make me tell you again.”

At the city limits of Apalachicola, Narsissa popped the reins and turned left through the outskirts of town. The shrill sound of wood meeting electric saw blades caused the mule to pin his ears back. When they came to a stop at the long wooden warehouse that served as the headquarters for Herndon Lumber, both women paused to look at the stacks of wood that covered the side yard next to the sawmill. The ground looked as if it were covered in dark-brown carpet. Colored women dressed in garments the color of pine needles stacked the lumber two at a time. Hats that reminded Ella of the ones she had seen for safaris tilted on their oily foreheads. Gloves, thick and stained with tar, protected their hands. Only a few gave a curious glance toward Ella and Narsissa.

A passel of men came out of the office doors crafted to resemble pinecones. They scattered in front of the wagon and went back to their proper places of operation.

Avery Herndon, the mill owner and a man whose waist size matched his age of forty-two, followed behind the men. He stood on the wooden step that was gnarled and peeling. Ella never noticed him. She kept her gaze toward the women and thought if only she could hire them for a week, then maybe she would have a chance.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Avery shouted above the roar of the saw.

Ella and Narsissa jumped in their seats.

Avery, with his hands propped on his back and his stomach protruding forward, said, “Don’t hate me for hiring them.” He pointed to the colored women with his knobby chin. “It’s only for the time being. Until this war is over. I got twenty-seven men over in what-ya-ma-call-it fighting for Uncle Sam. Not enough men to go around if you ask me. Don’t blame me for working women like they were men. Blame that sorry President Wilson.”

“Mr. Herndon,” Ella said, climbing down from the wagon, “may I have a word with you?”

He scratched the side of his chin. Red streaks marked the spot where his fingernails had raked. “I don’t have long. I got a man from Pensacola coming by to try and sell me one of those new tractors.”

“I don’t have long either,” Ella said.

On Avery’s office desk were littered a disorganized pile of yellowing trade journals, stacks of invoices, and packages of cigarettes. He propped his hands on top of the current edition of
Southern Lumberman
. Avery nodded to each detail that Ella shared about bank notes, unexpected setbacks, and arson. He only widened his eyes and raised an eyebrow when Ella said she knew who had set the blaze.

“You know who did it just as well as I do,” she said. “So I have to sell cypress. I have to cut it and sell it fast.”

Avery ran his hand over the cover of the trade magazine and then looked down while flipping through the pages. A breeze from the rotating fan propped above Ella’s head on the corner of a ceiling beam caused what hair Avery had left to rise. “I hate it. I really, really do.” Avery shook his head, and a roll of fat that gathered above his shirt collar jiggled. “You had some good timber.”

“I still do. . . . I mean, I still have good cypress. Cypress is in demand, I hear.”

He shook his head again, this time faster. “Not like you might hear.” He sighed and bent sideways. “Excuse me. I’m just keeping watch for that man who’s bringing the tractor.”

Ella leaned slightly away in the chair, giving Avery a better view of the window. Then she shifted the other way to block him. “Now, I know that cypress can be sold in Millville. Mr. Busby told me they are hiring men hand over fist to work at that new shipbuilding plant.”

“Now I don’t know what Mr. What-Ya-Ma-Call-Him is saying, but you take it from me. The government needs pine. Loblolly if they can get it.” Avery stood up, adjusted his pants, and glanced out toward the main doors beyond his office.

Standing and looking at Avery Herndon’s gray, sunken eyes, Ella never blinked. “I am not asking for favors. I’m just asking for a chance. You and I both know that I can give you some of the best cypress around here, so—”

“It’s dwarf cypress, Ella. Now, I don’t expect you to know the difference, but dwarf cypress just ain’t in demand,” Avery snorted.

“With all due respect, Avery Herndon,” Ella said, “I hear otherwise.”

Avery exhaled hard enough to ruffle two of the invoices stacked upon his desk. “I don’t want to get into all that. . . . It’s just more trouble than it’s worth, all right?”

“What does that mean? I won’t be any trouble to work with.”

“Not you, Ella. I’m talking about the situation with Clive and the loan you got with his bank,” Avery said, smiling at her sideways the way he might to a child who had tried unsuccessfully to win a game of hopscotch. “Look, Ella, like it or not Clive Gillespie carries a big stick around here. All I’m saying is I got a business to run and I’d rather not rattle that cage, if you know what I mean.”

A roar and a backfire caused both of them to turn toward the entrance doors. Avery jumped up, landing his nubby fingers on the desk. “Yonder he is,” he said. Avery moved faster than he had all day, bounded around the side of the desk, bumped against Ella, and trotted outside.

A stack of invoices and the edition of
Southern Lumberman
that he’d been flipping through fell to the floor at Ella’s feet. Her first instinct was to stomp on them until the grime of her shoe left a permanent tattoo of her visit. When she picked the papers up like a properly trained lady, she noticed a crinkled page in the magazine. “Uncle Sam Calls on Lumbermen to Fulfill Timber and Cypress Needs.”

Scanning the article, Ella could hear the cry of the tractor engine outside and the clipped pieces of male conversation. “You say it has the ground pressure of an eighty-pound boy?” Avery asked the salesman.

After reading just three paragraphs that described the new battleship
War Mystery
and the tons of cypress needed to build it, Ella used the tip of what remained of her chipped pinky nail and sliced the inside seam of the magazine. She folded the article in half and stuffed it down the front of her blouse.

Outside, Narsissa sat on the wagon and worked the reins to keep the nervous mule from running away. “The steel mule,” the salesman with gray britches that were too short called the machine that sputtered and spun around the office building as Avery’s foreman, a man shaped liked a square, gave it a trial run. “Take it for a run over the logs, fella,” the salesman shouted. “She might look like a car, but she’s got the guts of a locomotive.”

The front wheels that were the size of a car’s struggled over the pine log nearest the group of colored women who paused from their work only long enough to glance at the smoke that was brewing from the box-sized engine. Then the steel wheels of the back end buoyed over the log with little effort.

Before Narsissa and Ella pulled away, they heard the salesman make one last pitch to Avery. “She’s the newest and greatest thing on the market. She’s good for the lowlands. I guarantee you. Cypress and tupelo trees are no match for this one.”

By the time the afternoon sun had cast a shadow over the store, which now had the Closed sign dangling from the window, word had made its way through the currents of Dead Lakes that Ella and her children were in the swamp, slicing at cypress trees.

“She’ll wind up hospitalized and homeless, mark my word,” Myer Simpson said.

“Poor thing. Never could face reality,” Mrs. Pomeroy added.

“That’s what you get when you let a woman run a business,” Elroy Purvis, the beekeeper, said before pulling the veil down over his face.

But Neva Clarkson watched from a distance and ignored their predictions. “A survivor,” she said only to herself.

At the southern end of the county, past a fork in the road, Bonaparte and the daughter who had been spared from pain said nothing. They just stood by the boat with peeling green paint that rocked on the river and listened. Their neighbor Royal cuddled a jug he had just picked up at the juke joint and leaned against the dogwood tree with the colored bottles hanging from its branches. The clinking noise caused Royal to speak louder, and the effort caused his words to slur even more. He told about a fire at the place where the healer stayed.

The troubles of the woman he knew only as a delicate figure that glided behind a store window shadowed Bonaparte’s heart long after the evening lamp was turned low.

Earl Tucker, a man known to nurse a bottle and to disappear for long stretches of time, leaving his daughter, Ruby, to run free, showed up at Ella’s doorstep with a rusted axe and a leather thermos that he claimed held only water.

“Now, Earl, I appreciate you coming out here,” Ella said, swatting away sand gnats. “But I am not in a position to pay. At least not until I get the cypress up to Millville.”

Tossing the axe into the ground blade first, Earl massaged the worn and broken leather on the bottle. His potato-shaped nose was covered with blisters, and the ends of his carrot-red hair hung like strands of hay at his neck. “I ain’t worrying about all that,” he said. “I’m here on account of Ruby. Now I ain’t claiming my girl set that fire—”

“Earl, nobody here is saying such,” Ella said.

Earl raised his hands and tucked his head down. “I’m not saying whether she did or didn’t. I’m just here to right a wrong that’s been done to my neighbor.”

Stunned, Ella talked the rest of the day about how grateful she was to find at least one helpful neighbor. Narsissa reminded her how people had once come together to build barns. Samuel showed Earl how to position the gator tail saw so it could dig deeper into the cypress. “There you go, neighbor,” Samuel said when Earl got it right.

But the neighborly concern didn’t register with Lanier. Whether it was the way Earl nervously rubbed his mole whenever Lanier caught Earl looking at him or the questions Earl would ask three and four times in a row, Lanier wanted to keep away from this man who was only as tall as Keaton.

“Where did you say you was from again?” Earl asked the question two times before Lanier licked the remnants of water from the side of his mouth and tossed the ladle back into the bucket of fresh water.

“Georgia,” he mumbled and returned to work.

“Georgia, where?” Earl took a swig out of a can that had once sat on the store shelf filled with pinto beans.

“I expect we can cut at least four more before lunch break,” Lanier said, walking away from Earl.

During lunch, a crane pranced at the water’s edge. Lanier could see the tail of an alligator as a splash of water called out in the distance.
If the visitor gets too nosy, there are options,
he thought.

“How come you to wind up here?” Earl said while reaching for the biscuit that Ella offered him.

Lanier sighed, and Ella looked in his direction. He smiled and this time she smiled back.

“He’s family, Earl,” she said. “I thought I’d told you.”

“You might’ve. Who’s to say? When you live with a girl that’s slow like mine, you go half-crazy yourself.” Earl laughed, but no one followed. “Just joshing a little bit,” he said. “How long you reckon you’ll stay in Dead Lakes?”

Keaton stopped wringing the sweat out of his shirt and turned to face Lanier. Narsissa stopped pouring water into a tin cup, and Samuel moved closer from the water’s edge, dropping the wax paper still stained with mustard. Locusts buzzed the air, and no one moved, not even to strike at the mosquitoes.

They all stared until Lanier felt the back of his sunburned neck flame even stronger. When he turned to look back toward the barn, hoping for time to script a believable response, he saw them walking across the skinned field that was dotted with stumps. “Did you bring company with you, Earl?” Lanier asked.

Bonaparte led the group, carrying a rusty saw and a wooden spike as big as a rake. The others who had witnessed the disappearance of the burns on his daughter followed behind him. They fanned out across the field and for an instant looked like trees that were still sturdy and resolute.

When Lanier stood, Ella and the others followed.

“What on earth?” Ella asked.

Bonaparte kept his eyes on Lanier but answered Ella. “Miss Ella, we heard about your predicament. I expect you might not know this, but back when I was a single man, I rode the log rafts, taking the cut wood up and down to Millville.”

Ella nodded the same way she might if she had been receiving Bonaparte and the men on the porch of her home.

“Folks talking about this and that and bills and so forth.” Bonaparte raised his hand and tucked his head. “Now I don’t mean to get in your business, but . . .”

“Six days,” Ella said. “I have six days.”

“Six days. All right now.” Bonaparte took the saw from his shoulder and placed it on the ground. The group of men, eighteen strong, followed suit.

Ella clutched her chest and stepped backward. She stared at the men as if they were tossing out gold coins. “I can’t let you . . . oh no, no, I can’t have you . . .” Ella stammered and then laughed. “How can I pay . . . I mean, I can’t pay right now.”

“For my part, that man right there done paid the bill for you.” Bonaparte pointed straight at Lanier. The men scattered down the water’s edge mumbling greetings to the group. All but Earl and Ella returned to their positions.

Lanier started laughing and shook his head. He felt Earl studying him the way people examined the dolls that he made. Lanier could see the man through the corner of his view, scratching the mole on his face. He imagined words of suspicion forming into questions inside the man’s scraggly head. “Well, now. Six days,” Lanier said. “They tell me the Good Lord made the world in six days.”

“And pray tell He sent reinforcement,” Ella said, but Bonaparte had already begun showing Samuel and Keaton how to strike the ring of the cypress so that it would float properly.

Lanier tossed Ella the work gloves that she had dropped on the ground, and to his surprise she caught them with one hand. He winked at her and said, “Time for lollygagging is over.”

After the sun had cast a blue streak across the horizon and the frogs had begun their steady calls from the swamp, Bonaparte rubbed his hands as if washing them. He promised Ella he would return the next day.

“I’ll pay you, you know that,” she said.

“We ain’t worrying with that right now,” Bonaparte said. His words trailed off as he looked up like there might be a script written on the tree branches.

Ella reached out and took Bonaparte’s thick, gritty palm in hers. His grip grew stronger as she shook his hand. “I’m not looking for charity,” Ella said. “I pay what is owed.” Forcing herself to look into his dark, bloodshot eyes, Ella realized that it was the first time she had ever gotten close enough to the man to touch his skin.

When Narsissa walked up next to her and brushed her arm, Ella stood with her shoulders squared back. “My aunt always told me that people were in the world not just to observe but to impact. Each and every one of you is impacting our lives. I can’t thank you enough.”

As the men walked away, each spoke a pledge to return the next day. But Earl made no such promises. He walked away in a hobbled gait, rubbing the tight muscles in his shoulder. At the fork in the road where lightning had split an oak tree in half, he reached inside the dead trunk and pulled out the bottle of whiskey he had placed there that morning. By the time he had made it to the house that sat on a field where he sharecropped tobacco for Sheriff Bissell, he was certified drunk.

Lightning bugs lit up the yard where tall strands of goldenrod weeds bloomed through the gaps in a stack of cinder blocks stacked haphazardly next to the broken porch step. Ruby ran barefoot, wearing her cherry-sequined turban and carrying a chipped Mason jar. “I got another one,” she said as she snatched an amber-colored bug.

“Keep at it,” Sheriff Bissell said from the side of the house. He had his foot propped on a washer turned sideways on the ground, the metal wringer long broken.

“A promise is a promise,” Clive Gillespie said. He walked from around the corner of the house, where he had just relieved himself. He was still zipping up his pants. “A nickel for every lightning bug caught.”

Earl tucked the whiskey bottle in his back pants pocket and ran his hand through hair that was matted with sweat. His puzzled gaze shifted from Clive to Ruby.

Ruby wrapped her hand around the crumpled wax paper that covered the jar. She threw her hips to the side with each word that she spoke. “That man promised he’d pay me to catch these. He likes the way they light up his bedroom at night.” Three buttons on the side of her skirt were undone, and two red blotches marked the spot on her chest where Clive’s hands had groped her moments earlier.

“She’s a spitfire,” Clive called out. He struck a match against the weathered porch rail and lit a cigar. “I can see she’s a handful.”

“Got another one,” Ruby yelled and jumped in the air.

“I told her to stay put,” Earl said. “I tried to lock that cellar, but I knew she’d most likely pick the lock.”

Sheriff Bissell kicked the piece of rotten wood on the washer and laughed. “That old rusty thing will barely hang on the door, let alone lock.”

Clive blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. Dried sweat made his shirt look as crumpled as the wax paper that Ruby used for a lid on the jar. “When we pulled up here she was running free out in the field.”

“She was swinging that baton like there was no tomorrow. Just a-swinging and a-singing.” The sheriff laughed again.

Earl wove a path to the porch. Ruby ran toward a pile of fungus-stained firewood that was left over from the cold. No one ever cautioned her to stop climbing onto the rotting wood.

A mattress stained with yellow blotches lay on the ground next to the flower box that had last been used when Earl’s wife was still alive. Horsehair from a tear down the side of the mattress invaded the flower box like gray weeds. Earl attempted to push the mattress underneath the porch with the side of his boot. But he soon grunted and gave up.

“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Clive said. “Ruby seems perfectly charming to me.”

“She was just a-swinging that baton and singing and laughing. She was putting on a big show for us,” Sheriff Bissell said.

“She don’t mean no harm,” Earl said.

“Oh no,” the sheriff said and wiped his chin. “I keep telling folks that. I keep telling them but they just don’t want to listen.”

“Speaking of commotions,” Clive said, “earlier today a man who works for me happened by the swamp, you know the piece of lowland I’m talking about, Earl. The one on the other side of the Wallace place? Just at the edge of her property?”

Earl stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked back at Ruby, who was talking to the lightning bugs she had captured. “Yes, sir.”

“It’s hard to see clearly through all that overgrowth, but I could have sworn there were a bunch of nigras bantering about with cross saws. My man could hear their commotion down at the edge of the property, you know, by that spring.” Clive smiled at Earl and then turned his head. “I think he might have mentioned seeing you among the group.”

Earl looked at the sheriff and nodded. “The sheriff probably told you. Folks is saying Ruby burnt up the timber at the Wallace place. Like I told the sheriff last night, I can manage her. I don’t want no trouble. The way I seen it, if I was to go over and help out for a day, it might make things right with the Wallace woman. Maybe she won’t press charges and all.”

Clive squinted, and the acne scars on his forehead bunched together. “Certainly.”

The sheriff used a stick to knock off mud from the corner of his boot. “Yeah, well, I want to be clear, Earl. Now I don’t think I made myself clear when we first talked it over. Just because Ella don’t press charges doesn’t mean Ruby won’t face charges.”

Earl ran his hands down the sides of his pants. “Come again, Sheriff?”

Sheriff Bissell sighed. His jowls tussled about when he shook his head back and forth. “The law is the law. I took an oath to uphold the law.”

“The law doesn’t have cataracts, they tell me.” Clive stumped out his cigarette against the peeling porch rail and tossed it at Earl’s feet.

“I got twelve,” Ruby said. The side of her skirt flapped in the air as she jumped.

“Folks can be so ornery,” the sheriff added. “They have been after me all day to do something with that girl of yours. Everybody is scared to death she’ll burn down their place next.”

“She was with me all night that night.” Earl shuffled his feet and placed his hand on the back pocket that hid the bottle.

“Hmmmm,” the sheriff said. “And where was it again that you happened to be? I don’t think being laid up drunk at the time in question will count much before the judge at the courthouse.”

“Say, Sheriff Bissell,” Clive said, “would it help the cause if Ruby had . . . oh, I don’t know . . . something along the lines of a benefactor? Someone to support her and ensure she wouldn’t do harm to the community? Someone to see after her, so to speak.”

The sheriff rose on his boot heels and looked up at the first stars of night. “I expect that’d help, all right.”

“Well, now,” Clive said and reached inside his pants pocket. He lifted the end of a silver monogrammed money clip and pulled forth a dollar. “Ruby . . . Ruby.”

Ruby ran up to the porch, still clutching the jar of lightning bugs. Greenish light from the insects flickered against the cracked, dirty glass. No words were spoken as the jar and money were exchanged. Ruby ran up the stairs and through the threshold that was missing a front door. Her giggling could be heard from inside the house. Clive held up the jar, examining his purchase. “Sheriff Bissell, if Earl is of a mind to it, then I’d be happy to serve as Ruby’s benefactor.”

“That’s mighty white of you,” the sheriff said. He stuck his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and his jowl expanded. “It sure would be a shame to lock a pretty little thing like her up in jail.”

“Jail?” Earl stepped forward.

“Worst case, naturally,” the sheriff added. “I expect Judge Kimball would take pity on her—her being simpleminded and all. Probably just send her over to Chattahoochee.”

“Crazy hospital?”

Sheriff Bissell shrugged his shoulders. “Out of my control, Earl.”

Earl kicked at a patch of sandspurs. The roots of the thorny weed finally broke free from the ground. “A doctor one time wanted us to put her in there. My wife wouldn’t sign the papers.” He looked Clive square in the eyes. “You hear what they do to girls like her in there?”