Man in the Blue Moon (33 page)

The taxi wagon Keaton and Ivey rode in was driven by a Chinaman. The man at first pretended not to understand English until Ivey slapped him against the back of the head. At the edge of the French Quarter they passed a pharmacy. A poster board with an illustration of a lamp-sized silver fumigator hung from the store window.
Stop Influenza Infections with Sanitas Fumigators
, the sign read. Keaton made a mental note of the name of the equipment and for good measure closed his eyes and etched out the letters in his mind.

At the gate of Miss Prideaux’s courtyard, dead leaves from a banana tree scattered the chipped walkway. Ivey told Keaton she’d wait at the corner by the street post. “If she sees me then that whore won’t tell you a thing. She’s always been jealous of me.”

The woman who answered the door wore a short silk robe that was probably new five years ago. The top portion was stained, and the color was the same as the red mole on her forehead.

“I’m looking for Lanier,” Keaton said in a stammer and rose up on his tiptoes to appear taller.

Miss Prideaux dressed him up and down with her eyes. “The question is, is he looking for you?”

“I know he is, ma’am,” Keaton said with a confidence that would even impress Ivey.

Keaton found him in the courtyard of St. Louis Cathedral where during normal times Lanier would sell his carved dolls and puppets. Now the spaces for artists and street vendors had been taken up with khaki-colored tents. A carnival, Keaton first thought. Then a nun dressed all in white walked out one of the tents. She tossed a pan of urine out into the briar patch and palmettos that grew near the corner. Inside the tents, gurgled coughs and moans caused Keaton to lift the top of his shirt up over his nose.

He walked through the passageway lined by tents. Nurses with hollow eyes glanced at him but never questioned. The chimes on the cathedral rang ten times, and a new shift emerged from the cathedral doors. Keaton could make out the flames from candles inside and the shadows of the faithful who lined the nave waiting for confession.

A young man wearing a loose shirt with a brown patch sewn to the pocket came out behind several nuns. When the man put his cap back on his head, he stepped away from the line of caregivers, and Keaton’s heart felt like it had momentarily stopped. Lanier shuffled around the young man and then broke from the group. He walked toward the last tent and then circled the bushes where the bedpan had been emptied. Trotting toward him, Keaton bumped into a nun carrying fresh towels and mumbled apologies. At the end of the line he looked both ways but saw nothing other than a funeral home carriage making its way down the street and a dog whose coat was ravaged with mange darting underneath the covered sidewalk.

A cough rang out from the last tent, and then Keaton froze at the sound of the voice that had called to him all those times in the woods. The buzzing rang in his ears like the sound of a hive being disturbed. Keaton started to open the tent flap but was stopped by a nun with skin that clumped on the sides of her eyes like handlebars on a bike. “Young man, this is off-limits,” she said.

“I know that man,” he said.

“I don’t care who you know. This is as good as a hospital and we follow hospital orders. This is quarantined. Do you want to go and get yourself a case of the flu?” She folded her arms and moved close enough for him to smell the scent of stale coffee on her breath. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

Before she could pull his arm away, Keaton jerked open the tent flap. Inside, the scent of death almost knocked him backward. Lines of bodies filled the tent that seemed to run for a street block. The sisters who were wearing white habits fluttered about the area with stained skirts. They moved about like doves that had been bloodied and dazed in crossfire. A young girl, about his age, stared up at him from the cot where she lay. Her blue eyes were only made brighter by the dark stripes that spread out over her cheeks, broken blood vessels that had turned black.

Lanier rose from the side of the cot containing the silhouette drawer, Mr. Pelham. “Keaton . . . Keaton?”

Keaton stammered before realizing that his mother might already be like these people by now. She might even be dead.

“Where did you . . . ? What are you doing here?” Lanier said, jerking Keaton’s arm as he led him outside.

The nun who had cautioned Keaton now reprimanded him. “It’s because of such carelessness that we’re in the state we’re in with this influenza. People like you who have no common sense about them.” She stomped off toward the tent.

“Son, what are you doing here? This is no place . . .”

“I don’t care what you did. . . . I don’t care about none of that from the past.” Keaton flung the words out of his mouth so fast that Lanier grabbed his arms.

“Now get ahold of yourself. What are you talking about?”

“I don’t care why you left, but I need for you to come back.”

“Now settle down.” Lanier tried to level his hand on Keaton’s shoulder but Keaton brushed him away.

“Mama’s sick. She needs you.”

A bat swooped down before flying up and hiding inside the bell tower. The cries from a woman in the tent behind them overpowered the coughs of the other patients.

“Now, son, just calm down.”

“You can make her better.” Keaton grabbed Lanier by the shirt and pulled him closer. “I didn’t come all this way to watch you make these people better. I know all about you and her and everything. Just make her better. Please. You can’t let her wind up like that.” Keaton pointed to the tent where the woman was retching and coughing. Silhouettes of the nuns moved about inside, gathering around the cot and trying to hold the woman down. The woman’s thrashing legs were illuminated against the side of the tent. She kicked the air the same way she might if the nuns had been trying to amputate her.

Lanier looked away from the tent and up at the top of the cathedral. Keaton felt the glare of the nun who had lectured him. She tossed bloodstained towels into a wicker basket and stood with her feet wide apart and her arms held out as if she were about to hold a baby. With the resilience of a grown man, Keaton stood face-to-face with Lanier. “I’m not asking you, Lanier. I’m begging you. Please come back and help her.”

Ella’s aunt Katherine sat on the edge of the bed. It was the first time since she had been visiting that Aunt Katherine had been that close to Ella. The light from the lantern on the bedroom dresser cast a soft glow behind Aunt Katherine’s head. She looked more beautiful than Ella had ever seen her. Her hair was not gray but thicker and blacker. The coal-colored eyes that always made Ella think her aunt could look right through her were so rested, so serene. Over Aunt Katherine’s shoulder, Ella could see Neva, slouched sideways in the high-backed chair that Aunt Katherine’s father had made for a future wedding day that never arrived. Trying to touch the hem of her gold embroidered dress, Ella could only manage to scratch the sheet. Breathing had become a harder chore than cutting the timber, and at times she dreamed she was tossing deep in the spring that supposedly had no end. She would look up and see the surface bubbling above her and the evergreens that surrounded it, but no matter how hard she kicked she could never reach the top and find air.

Aunt Katherine seemed to know that Ella was struggling. She put her hand on top of the sheet and squeezed Ella’s hand underneath it. “You’re tired,” Aunt Katherine whispered. The voice, high-pitched, almost better suited for a little girl, gave Ella comfort. She said the words the same way she would whenever she admonished Ella to take afternoon naps. “A lady needs rest to keep her skin firm and rosy,” she would say. Ella tried to smile, but the cracked and chapped lips caused her too much pain.

“You need to come along with me,” Aunt Katherine said. “There’s something better than this waiting for you.”

“My boys.” Ella forced the words out in a wheeze.

Her aunt patted her hand. The touch was light and cool. “They’ll be fine. They’ll be watched over.”

“Where will we go? Back to your house?” The home had been ravaged by a fire the year after Ella wed Harlan. But in her mind the home’s smell of licorice and gardenia perfume still thickened the air. Ella gasped, but her aunt didn’t seem alarmed like the others.

Aunt Katherine closed her eyes and smiled. Her lips were the color of rubies. Ella wheezed and tried to reach up and touch them.

“Come now,” Ella’s aunt whispered. “Don’t dally.” When she stood up, the gold brocade dress with an A-line skirt fanned out across the room. Ella thought it was the most beautiful garment she had ever seen. She wanted to rub her fingers against the dress and once again feel the outline of the tiny woman inside of it. For the first time since her childhood, there was only light inside her mind. The darkness that ushered fear and unease had been washed away by the wave of peace that settled over her.

“It’s time to go home,” Aunt Katherine announced. She held out both hands and leaned back as if she might be ready to dance. Forcing her hands free from the sheet that held her down, Ella clasped her aunt’s hands. The skin that she had remembered as dry and cold was now smooth and welcoming. Ella glanced at Neva, who seemed like she was in a stupor. Neva’s mouth was gaping, and her chest rose and sank like a baby pacified from warm milk.

The curtain flew up and welcomed the breeze. Her aunt smiled and waved her hand like she might be welcoming a visitor. “We’ll go this way, as not to disturb the others.” Aunt Katherine pointed toward Neva, who slept in the chair.

Ella stood at the window and felt her head swimming at the ease with which her aunt, a woman who had once refused to walk through a freshly painted store door for fear of staining her clothing, climbed out of the window. Aunt Katherine stood on the porch on the other side and laughed. The swirling curtains framed her like she was an actress on a stage. She giggled lighter than Ella knew she could and motioned for Ella to follow. “Ella, for goodness’ sake. I raised you to be a lady. And a lady knows when it’s time to excuse herself and leave.”

Brushing the curtain aside, Ella stepped forward and stuck her hand out of the window. She waited for her aunt to grab it and was comforted once again by the soft, dewy touch of Aunt Katherine’s fingers. She led Ella the same way she had all those times before when Ella, the orphaned girl, could not take care of herself. Bending her head down, Ella leaned out through the window and took the final climb toward freedom.

The morning Lanier paid for their passage back to Apalachicola, he took Keaton to Holt Cemetery at the edge of the city. Broken clouds hung over the only place in New Orleans where bodies were buried below the ground. Lanier never told Keaton that it was a pauper’s graveyard.

At a mound of dirt marked with the paw prints of either a small dog or a cat, Keaton stared at the wooden cross that Lanier had hand-carved for Keaton’s father. Keaton knelt down at the edge of the damp dirt and ran his finger over the
W
on the wood like he might have been carving the word Wallace himself. The passing roar of a train vibrated the earth. Afterward Keaton glanced up at Lanier. “When you saw him, did he ask anything about us?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lanier said. “Sure. He wanted to know all about y’all. He especially wanted you to know how sorry he was. He said he wished he’d never started taking that opium. He cried just like a baby over it.” Lanier presented the story the way he’d hoped it would be, not as it was. He would never tell Ella or her sons how Harlan had cursed him, God, and life itself. He would never let on that Harlan lost his faith long before he stumbled into the tent of death on Jackson Square.

Keaton thumped the marker with his thumb and forefinger. He stood up, but dirt remained on the knee of his britches.

“He told me something else, too,” Lanier said. “He said he was sure proud of you. He told me that you’ve always been there for your mama. He told me you could do anything you made your mind up to do. He told me that you—”

“We need to go if we’re going to make the boat,” Keaton said, brushing past Lanier. He stepped over a rusted angel figurine that sat lopsided on the grave next to his father’s. A broken necklace of cut glass hung from the angel’s neck. Keaton looked down at the decoration like he might examine it but then hurried down the ragged path that led to the street corner. He didn’t say another word until the boat was far from the port of New Orleans.

Lanier didn’t pressure Keaton to talk. He respected him more than that. He left the boy staring out into the Gulf through a boat window that was layered with salt and black soot from the smokestack. Lanier stayed at the stern of the boat for most of the trip. He leaned against a rust-covered piling and stared out at the paddleboards that clipped the water. The movements seemed so slow and fatigued. He closed his eyes and stepped forward so the sun could cover him. Images of Ella in various stages of influenza like those he had witnessed in the tent flashed through his mind. Panic boiled up inside him, and he wondered if he was making a mistake. He didn’t want to bear another loss. Could her boys stand losing both of their parents? He couldn’t finish raising them by himself; there was no use even considering such a notion. Lanier stared down at the wheel of the steamboat. The paddles circled and churned the water, over and over.

Lanier watched the water foam and splash at the slap of the paddles. He stared until his head swam with dizziness. He barely knew Ella. She had been right, they were nothing alike. But Lanier bought his own lie about as much as Keaton had accepted the story that Lanier made up about Harlan’s deathbed confession. The time for lies had come and gone.

Lanier stood upright and looked out into the wide-open space of the Gulf. Momentarily blinded by the sunlight, he saw nothing but dots jumping on the horizon. “I never wanted this . . . this gift. Never asked for it. Take it from me. Go on, take it. Just don’t take her,” he shouted at the choppy, endless waters. Looking up into nothing but brightness, Lanier stretched his arms out wide and breathed deeper than he had since running away from his past in the middle of the night.

When the boat blew its whistle and eased into Apalachicola Bay, Lanier was once again at the stern with his hands dug into his pants pockets. He could make out Wefing’s hardware store and the colored boys who emptied wheelbarrows full of sponges that they collected from the boats. The sponges cascaded onto a ship anchor that was propped against the corner of the store. As the muffled sounds from broken conversations on the dock drifted closer, Lanier felt a wave of nausea and wanted to turn right back around toward New Orleans.

Deputy Ronnie, who had been appointed sheriff until a special election could be held, was leaning against the hood of the sheriff’s car that still had a spray of bullet holes across the top. A picture of the latest battle surge in France was plastered on the front page of the newspaper that Ronnie read. When he popped the paper and turned the page, Keaton and Lanier walked straight toward him. Ronnie jumped from the car the same as if electricity had run through him. A section of the paper fell to the ground and got swept up in the breeze. The page with the obituaries wound up stuck to a piling at the edge of the dock.

“What the . . . ?” Ronnie said, standing upright. “You got some gall running off. Folks have been looking for you. Boy, you shouldn’t worry your brothers that way.”

“I went to find Lanier. He’s gonna help Mama,” Keaton said, tossing the croaker sack of clothes onto the oyster shells that scattered the sand.

“Boy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for running away.” Ronnie didn’t wait for him to explain. “Especially with all your family is going through right now. Dead Lakes is hit hard. It was a loss . . . for everybody.”

Panic snipped at Lanier. His heart pounded until the pulse seemed to roar in his ears. All he could hear was the word
loss
.

Keaton’s voice cracked the way of a boy transitioning into being a man. “Is Mama dead too?”

Looking crossways toward the boats docked, Ronnie spat a stream of tobacco that landed next to one of the sponges that had rolled away from the pile. “Bunches of them gone. . . . Myer Simpson, the Pomeroy boy. Just a shame.”

“Mama?”

Shaking his head, Ronnie wiped his mouth. “No, not your mama.” Then he folded the paper and lightly tapped it on Keaton’s shoulder. “But they tell me she’s in bad shape. I ain’t going to lie to you.”

“We need a ride out there right now,” Lanier said. When Ronnie stared at the trunk of goods that Lanier carried, he added, “I can pay you. I got money.”

“I ain’t running a taxi service.” Ronnie ran his thick finger inside his mouth and pulled out a plug of tobacco. He tossed it to the ground and motioned for Keaton to pick up his bag. “Now this is just between you and me. I can’t just haul every tomcat there is around the county.”

Putting the trunk into the back of the car, Lanier felt Ronnie standing behind him, breathing heavy on his back. “And I want to tell you right now, I don’t need another carnival. Fact of the matter, I won’t put up with a carnival with your healings and so forth.”

Turning to face him, Lanier said, “I never aimed to put one on the first time.”

On the drive out to Dead Lakes, little was said. Lanier was lost in his thoughts, and Keaton sat in the front passenger seat, leaning against the open window as the cool autumn breeze swept his hair up in sections.

Passing the pastures along the way, Lanier found comfort in the signs of life that dotted the road. A batch of cattle made Ronnie stop so they could freely cross over to a field blanketed with amber-colored Indian grass and goldenrod. But when the car came to the first sign of human existence, Lanier had the same panic that he had when his friend nailed him into the Blue Moon Clock Company box. Past the house where Neva Clarkson lived, the schoolhouse was still surrounded by wagons and a couple of trucks. If anyone unfamiliar would have wandered into the community, the person would have thought that there was a town celebration. Through the side door of the school that students would exit to make their way to the outhouse, two men wearing gauze masks and work gloves carried a dead body that was wrapped in a sheet, rust-colored with dried blood.

When they pulled up in front of Ella’s place, the beekeeper’s wife met Keaton at the car door. “When in the world is the store going to open?”

Ignoring her, Keaton ran with the sack on his back toward the house.

While Lanier struggled to get the trunk out, Mr. Pomeroy bolted from his house across the road. He had three days’ worth of beard on his face and liquor on his breath.

Tapping Lanier on the shoulder, Mr. Pomeroy folded his arms across a shirt stained with lard. “Where have you been?”

Ronnie stepped in front of them and tossed his head back. “All right, Pomeroy. None of that.”

“With folks dropping like flies around here, you decide to run off. When you could really help some people, you run away.”

Lanier felt the sting of his words and wanted to run once more. Gripping the handles on the trunk, he looked toward the house and debated where to place his belongings. He ended up walking toward the barn.

Mr. Pomeroy yelled, “My boy died, you know. He fought for his country but died from what? A cold . . . a flu bug.” Mr. Pomeroy’s words were shrill and sharper. “You saved a mule but you didn’t save my boy.”

“All right, Pomeroy,” Ronnie said. “We don’t need more trouble.”

Mr. Pomeroy’s last words sent a chill down Lanier. It was the impression he feared most.

“If you’d been here, my boy would still be living.”

“I’m not a savior. Never claimed to be,” Lanier said without turning back to face them. “I’m just a man.”

Ella’s three sons stood at the open door. Lanier tried to form his words as he walked up the porch steps. He had quit on them the same way he had quit on himself. Even though he wanted to run from them as much as he wanted to run from the gift that he had been given, he nodded and brushed against Samuel’s shoulder as he climbed up the last step.

Macon ran out of the door and hugged him around his waist. For the first time since his son died, emotions escaped Lanier’s control. Tears fell from his face as freely as sunflowers swayed against the cool evening wind. Keaton led Lanier by the finger and past Samuel, who looked embarrassed and nodded. Never saying a word, Keaton brought Lanier to Ella’s bedroom and pointed. Ella was propped on two pillows, her mouth was open, the black hair was matted to her scalp, and a gurgle rose up from her lungs. The long fingers that were draped on top of the sheet were beginning to darken into the color of fresh bruises.

Neva Clarkson appeared paler than usual. She stood to greet Lanier like he might be a dinner guest. “Let me go out to the water pump and get some fresh water,” she said before walking out with the ceramic bowl painted with cherubs.

The wind made a whistling sound as it seeped in through the open windows and tangled the curtains. When Lanier stepped into the room, the wood floor creaked against his weight. Keaton moved beside him.

“Miss Clarkson said Mama got out of bed night before last,” Macon said. “Must have been sleepwalking or something. Crazy from fever, they say. When Miss Clarkson woke up she found Mama trying to climb out of the window. ‘My boys.’” Macon looked up at Lanier. “That’s what she was a-saying. ‘My boys.’”

“You can make her better, can’t you?” Samuel said from the doorway. He stepped inside the room and never looked at Lanier, only at his mother. “Please.”

Lanier leaned down next to the bed. He gripped the fingers that he had held all the times before and pretended that they were wed to him. Tears fell from his face and landed on the sheet. He buried his head against the side of her leg that was tucked underneath the cover. Never asking the boys to leave, he prayed the words that he’d been given so long ago. He prayed them with a faith as if he were saying them for the first time. Ella coughed, and the bed shook. A rattling sound rose from her full lips that were outlined in dried blood. He prayed six times and then ten more. He prayed until he felt that every cell of life in him had been given up for her welfare.

By the time he had finished, each of Ella’s sons had taken different positions in the room. Keaton was across from him on the other side of the bed, his hands clasped in prayer. Macon stood behind the curtain closest to Ella’s head. The silhouette of his body behind the sheer yellow material resembled an apparition. Samuel was in the opposite corner of the room, staring at the bed, guarding it. Only Neva Clarkson went about her business. She skirted around Lanier and continued applying the cold compresses to her friend’s scalp. Each time she touched her hot skin, she prayed in her own way.

When Ella’s breathing became nothing more than gasps of gurgling noises—the death rattle, as Lanier knew it to be called—he moved back until the doorknob pressed into his lower back. The others in the room moved forward and took their places around her. Macon, without warning, threw his head back and screamed in a tortured grief that caused Neva to engulf him in her arms and Lanier to turn away.

Outside the house, he could still hear the boy’s cries. Lanier walked faster and then began running toward the barn. He swung the door open and then, trying to block the sounds from the house, he jerked the barn door closed. The mule whinnied, and a wood spider ran across a web that now hung over the spot where Lanier had slept.

His breathing was ragged, and he wrestled with the confusion, guilt, and torment of not being able to save the woman he had grown to love.
Why didn’t I fight harder before now?
he thought. He reached down and dug his hands into the hay-littered dirt. Rocking back and forth, he prayed once more and fought the disbelief that defeat was his to own and that God had turned His back on his prayers.
“It’s a gift. If you was ever to share the words, then you’re the same as cursed.”
His grandmother’s face, lined with wrinkles so deep they looked like scars, flashed through his mind. The cries of the witch from the creek who cursed him as a man after his father’s own evil heart switched his soul. He could hear her as loud as he had that day at the creek. Pulling clumps of dirt and hay, he covered his ears. Flashes of his past fluttered through his mind like a picture show flapping about on a broken machine. Octavia smiled and then screamed. Gunshots echoed. His son, dressed in the christening gown, took his first steps once more. The sound of pounding nails filled his ears and then he smelled damp, aged wood as he was pinned into the box and loaded onto the boat.