Man in the Blue Moon (10 page)

“That’s just it,” Ella said and leaned sideways. “If I were a man, I wouldn’t have to be so concerned with the impressions of others. I could run around God’s creation at will, run up gambling debts, and people would say I was just being a man . . . a sorry man, mind you, but a man all the same.”

A chimney swift swooped down low through the barn door and then back out again. Ella never flinched.

“I have been running this place for months whether anybody knows it or not. Harlan left this place long before he walked away.”

Lanier held up the biscuit in the air. Crumbs fell from his mouth and the mule raised his head from the bale of hay. “I’m starting to feel like one of us is saying the wrong things again. This time I think it’s me,” Lanier said and wiped his hands on his trousers.

“It’s different for you than it is for me. And don’t get it in your mind that I’m seeking sympathy. I am certainly not. I’m just explaining it to you. I have children. Whether it is justified or not, what is said about me in this community affects them. I have obligations beyond myself.” Ella walked to the barn door and looked out at the orange colors that were beginning to spread in the sky over the oak trees. Frogs were still calling out from beyond the swamp. “And another thing. I cannot have you eating out here like some hobo drifter. You are going to get a cut of this timber. The way I see it, that makes us partners.”

“Partners?”

“Business partners, don’t you think? In fact, that’s what I told the timberman when he asked about you.”

“I thought you told him I was a hired man.”

“He said no man works that hard unless he’s getting a cut.” Ella stopped at the barn door and halfway turned. She pulled a red handkerchief from her pants pocket and tied it around her neck. “Plan on coming inside for supper tonight.”

“Is that an invite or an order?” Lanier licked his lips and took another sip of coffee.

The mule brayed and Ella offered a smile before turning to go.

“All right. But what will Samuel say about all this?”

Ella spun around. One eyebrow was arched higher than the other. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Stillis, that I still sit at the head of the dining room table.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Lanier said, but Ella never heard him. She had already made it past the sunflowers and was halfway back to her home.

At the close of the workday, after Brother Mabry and Priscilla were tucked away in the suite at the inn, Clive Gillespie sat on the front porch of his home down by the dock in Apalachicola. The soft clanging noise of the boats rocking on the water swept through the city park across from Clive’s house and rolled up the porch steps to pacify him. Clive struck a match against the stone on the pillar closest to him and lit a Cuban cigar. The porch ran down the front of the clapboard building and was held up by four stone columns that had been specially crafted by Clive’s father to resemble the pyramids of Egypt. Inside were five bedrooms, all empty except the main one that Clive occupied. His wife had died giving birth to their last son, who was now eleven and like the other three sons was in a military school in Alabama.

A man wearing suspenders, a drifter who had once worked for Clive’s bookie in New Orleans, meandered up the stone pathway to the home. He had his hands in his pockets and whistled as he walked. His boyish posture would never indicate to anyone that he had slashed the throats of an insurance executive and a whore—who just by happenstance had been picked up by a man who failed to make good on his bets.

“Evening,” the man with suspenders called out.

“Evening,” Clive said. “What you got for me, Roy?”

Roy wasn’t the man’s real name. It was Gunther, but Clive’s bookie had been stingy with details. The bookie simply promised that his man would do the job and then disappear, and that was good enough for Clive.

The man pulled at his suspenders and laughed. “It looks like you had yourself a day of it. Hauling that preacher all around. Did you find religion yet?”

“No,” Clive said and blew cigar smoke right at the man. “But he thinks that he’s found the Garden of Eden, and that’s good enough for me.”

“It won’t be long now,” the man said and planted his hands back inside his pants. “I was down there the other day. Me and my partner . . . you know, checking the scenery out and so forth. They’re fixing to have that place cut clean.”

“Yeah, and who knew she’d have a boyfriend to help her out.”

The man licked his lips and twisted his hands inside his pockets. “That man ain’t right.”

“Is he going to be trouble for you?”

“No, I don’t figure he will.” The man glanced up at the frosted glass above the front door of Clive’s home. “I’ve seen a lot in this world. I ain’t but thirty-six. Some say I’ve seen enough to be seventy-six. But one thing I’ve never seen me is a man who could make a lame mule walk again just by laying hands on him.”

Clive leaned up from the rocking chair and held his cigar up like a torch. “What are you carrying on about?”

“We was down there the other day when they all came out of the woods with this crippled mule they work with. The leg was pouring blood. Blood all over the hind leg. Blood all over the grass.”

“I didn’t think a jackass would give you this much trepidation.”

“What I’m saying is the man that’s been helping your lady friend cut all that timber put his hands on that mule. Next thing you know, the skin—skin that was ripped near to the bone—was made new.”

Clive glared at the man, blew smoke from the side of his mouth, and snorted.

“Laugh all you want, but we seen it. Some old lady saw it too. She and this silly girl with her went to gawking and carrying on.” The man pulled his hands out of his pockets long enough to take the money that Clive had removed from his shirt pocket.

“See if this won’t help take care of your haints,” Clive said. “You’re still man enough for the job, aren’t you?”

The man tucked the wad of bills inside his pants and grinned like a shy boy. “If you don’t know the answer to that by now, then you ain’t as smart as you think you are.”

Clive blew a fresh ring of smoke, and it danced around the man’s shoulder. He drew the cigar from his mouth and stared at the growing ash. “Just see to it that you don’t kill her.”

Five days before the timber cut was to be completed, a late-afternoon storm broke the humidity as much as it did the productivity. With the progress they had made, Lanier promised them that they would finish on the lumber mill’s deadline. “We don’t need to get somebody killed from lightning,” he screamed as he pulled the oxen into the pen. A clap of thunder caused the mule to dart to the side.

Samuel stood holding the chains and raised them up as if in defiance to God as much as in protest to Lanier. “They tell me lightning don’t strike the same place twice. I hope that’s the case. We don’t need another drifter showing up.” They all ignored him and scattered, carrying the saws and tools back into the barn. One by one they headed into shelter, Narsissa into her cabin and Keaton running toward the house.

As drops of rain dripped from the brim of Ella’s hat, she watched from inside the barn while Lanier finished penning up the oxen. Samuel flung the chains against the side of the house, cussed with words that caused her to turn her head, and stomped toward the porch.

The mule tossed his head and took a clump from the hay that Ella had put inside the animal’s stall. He looked up at Ella and smacked his mouth. Strands of hay fell from his mouth, and he appeared to be smiling at Ella, as if to tell her that God was on his side and knew that the animal needed rest. Ella fought the urge to pick up the shovel and knock the mule on the side of the head.

The pressure had mounted on Ella in a loaded weight worse than the one she imagined the mule thought he was bearing for her cause. Sleep had become nothing but intervals of dreaming. Images of her family living in a makeshift tent in the public park in Apalachicola played in her mind the same as if she were viewing a horror picture at the Dixie Theatre. And each time she dreamed, Ella would awake in a spasm of twitching muscles. The torment had become such that Ella would climb out of bed, tearing and clawing at her chest, trying to free herself from the nervousness that pressed against her. Red claw marks lined her chest the same way scratches from the pine tree limbs appeared along her cheeks and wrists. She envisioned the winged demons illustrated in her aunt’s family Bible as living creatures who had taken up residence in her mind. They hid in dark corners and whipped sections of her brain with the same leather whips as shown in the Old Testament illustrations. It was no wonder Harlan had turned to opium. She feared that if she ever found a hidden stash from his collection, she might break down and do the same.

Lanier came into the barn and tossed his gloves into the broken crate that he used as his wardrobe drawer. Ella tried not to look at him. She ran her hand against the brim of her hat, and water ran down the side of her shoulder.

“It’s pouring out there,” Lanier said.

“Of all the times . . .” Ella took the hat off and beat it against the side of the stall. The mule stepped away. “I’ll go on and start washing. At least this won’t be a total waste of the day.” Ella looked down at the wooden dolls that lined the ground next to the barn wall. The doll at the end had eyes marked in chalk, and its hand was touching a torn and aged spiderweb at the edge of the wall. Ella thought that it resembled a small child with an eternal look of wonder coming from its eyes. “How do you have the energy to make these things? At the end of the day I’m so tired I can’t think straight.”

Lanier wiped bark from his pants. “That right there is what keeps my mind balanced.”

Ella picked up the doll with the chalk eyes and replayed in her mind what Lanier had just said. “You mean, what you find relaxing?”

A clanking noise rang out as Lanier tossed a chain into a pile with the others. Ella flinched and put the doll back on the ground.

“No, I mean balanced.” Lanier rotated his neck, and his joints made a popping sound. He ran his hand through his wet hair. Ella felt flushed with a sensation that scared and enticed her.

“Sleep quit being my friend,” Lanier said. “My mind seems to be my undoing. I mean, well, when I whittle these dolls it frees up my thinking somehow. Sounds crazy, I reckon.”

“No,” Ella whispered. “Painting used to do the same for me.”

“I could tell when I came up on you drawing that evening,” Lanier said.

A bolt of lightning struck beyond the pen of oxen. Ella flinched and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“When I first saw you, I figured you to be somebody who liked to do such,” he added.

Ella looked up at a weathered brown wasp’s nest hanging on the beam of the barn and laughed nervously. “The manure is thick enough in the stall. We don’t need any more.” Ella turned her head and before she could stop it, a smile formed.

“You notice things that the others don’t. I can tell when you notice them too . . . like when you noticed a hummingbird dart past the other day when none of the rest of us saw it. You pointed straight at it, and your eyes just went to dancing. You’ve got nice eyes, if you don’t mind me saying. Forgiving eyes.”

“Now you’re just telling me what you think I want to hear.”

“No, I mean it,” he said. “I see the way even when we’re out there working to the bone you look up and tell us to notice a pair of redbirds. And how when we stop to eat, you reach down and touch the bloom on one of those wild lilies out there.”

Ella pulled at the collar of the coat and looked around the barn, searching for another topic for conversation. Her mind told her to leave, to run out into the driving rain, but her heart wouldn’t cooperate.

“Take it,” Lanier said and motioned with his chin toward the doll. “Go on. I want you to have it.”

When she hesitated, Lanier walked over and picked up the doll. He brushed against Ella’s shoulder, and she did not bother to step aside. There was weariness in his green eyes that she recognized and appreciated. She saw the heaviness in her own eyes each night when she looked in the bedroom mirror on her chest of drawers. Looking at him now, she felt as if she was seeing a fraction of herself, a tired and frightened part that she could not reveal to anyone, least of all to this man, whom she pictured as layered with complications, if not lies.

“I don’t know . . . ,” she stammered.

“There’s nothing to know,” Lanier said and opened her hands. He placed the doll in her palms. The legs and head dangled over the sides. “If you can’t paint right now, then keep on painting in your mind. Don’t let all this mess stop you from that. . . . Don’t let it win.”

Ella cradled the doll against her stomach. Her breathing became shallow, and she reminded herself that she was the one in control.

Drips of water still fell from the ends of his hair that curled tighter from the rain. She saw a crack on his lip. A bloody spot that reminded her that this man who could heal boys and mules was human after all, the same blood as her husband. A shiver ran over her, and she pulled the coat tighter. Ella turned and saw the calico cat, its fur wet and matted, dart across the yard and under the store. The cat pierced its ears back as if angered by the inconvenience of the rain.

“Thank you,” Ella said. She sighed and reached down for the pile of clothes wadded into a ball on the workbench next to the barn door.

“I see how this works. I give you a gift and you take my clothes,” he said with a laugh.

Ella thought it intriguing how this man could find any humor in their circumstance. It was another dimension of him that interested and confused her.

“What’s one more pile to add to the wash?” Ella never turned back to face him. “My aunt always told me to return kind gestures. Since you’ve been so helpful it’s the least—”

“Partners, remember?” Lanier lowered his chin and stared at her, seeming to dare her to blink away from his gaze.

Ella shuffled the clothes from hand to hand and finally looked away. “Partners,” Ella murmured, hating once again the circumstance that required her to partner with a man who caused her such confusion.

She put the hat back on her head, stuffed the doll into the big pocket of the work coat that had once been worn by Harlan, and cursed under her breath. Lanier was of the same dangerous bloodline as her husband, and the darkness in her mind would not let her forget it. She ran out into the rain, feeling the pellets beat against her head and picturing the demons being jolted, unlocking their grip on her mind.

On the porch Ella found Keaton and Macon playing marbles. A round circle had been drawn on the porch floor with chalk. Macon picked up the piece of chalk and hid it behind his back. His eyes were wide as he held her gaze. Ella never mentioned the chalk or the ring that had been drawn on the boards of the porch. Her body was on the porch, but her mind was still back at the barn.

Pulling the coat off, Ella placed it on the back of a high-top wooden chair that she had not too long ago sat in and watched the sun set over the trees that were quickly being chopped down. She dismissed the memory and placed Lanier’s soiled shirts and undergarments into a small mound of clothes by the wash pump at the other end of the porch.

Samuel came out of the house, pinching morsels of snuff from a red tin can. He motioned toward the pile of clothes with his chin. “What? You’re now his washwoman on top of it?”

“Don’t start,” Ella said. She tossed the wet hat against the butter churn that was by the door.

“Wait till people hear about this. It’s bad enough he’s sitting in our house, eating at our table.”

“People won’t hear a thing unless we run our mouths,” Ella said.

“Oh, is that the fairyland you live in?” As Samuel walked past, his thigh brushed the edge of the chair. The tip of the head on the wooden doll hung slightly from the coat pocket. He sat on the porch step and stared at it, never seeming to care that he was exposed to the weather. Rain gathered at the tips of his boots, washing away the red clay of his work.

“Samuel,” Keaton said and then tossed a cat’s-eye marble into the ring.

“What? I’m just telling the truth. Somebody needs to face the truth around here.”

“The truth is we’re going to see that note paid off in full,” Ella said, trying to lift her words the way she was taught at the finishing school.

The attempt at optimism was wasted on Samuel. He stuck his leg farther out into the rain. Water covered the ankle of his pants leg. He motioned toward the coat with the doll in the pocket. “What? He giving you pretties now? Huh. . . . Paid off or not, our name is ruined around here.”

Ella took a bar of soap from the washer and began scrubbing one of Samuel’s shirts. “You’re just like your daddy. Never knowing when to stop.”

Macon struck two of Keaton’s marbles out of the circle and scooped them up. He held them up high as if they were trophies.

“Quit washing his shirt,” Samuel said with an authority that both startled and angered Ella.

“What?”

Macon pulled down his marbles and stuck the winnings in his pants pocket.

Samuel stood up, water still running down the side of his leg. “I said,
quit
washing his shirt.”

Ella stood with the shirt in her hand, as startled as if she had just noticed a water moccasin at the foot of her porch steps.

“Ain’t it bad enough the whole town is going behind your back, ruining your name on account of him? Now he’s got you taking care of him like he owns you.”

Keaton stood up. “If that snuff won’t fill your mouth long enough to shut you up, then I will.” Chalk stained his balled-up fist.

“It’s about time we had us a family meeting,” Samuel said, wiping pieces of the tobacco on his pants leg. “You can call that hobo your partner, your hired man, your whatever, but you need to know what folks are calling you.”

Keaton stepped closer. Lightning flashed in the yard and a clap of thunder called out beyond the sunflowers. “Shut up!”

Samuel paid no attention to Keaton. He kept his eyes locked on Ella. “You feed him, you wash his clothes. . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if you go in there and bed down with him. At least that’s what everybody says you’re doing. They say you’ve turned into a—”

Keaton ran across the porch and slammed into Samuel from the side. The tin of snuff flew up in the air and landed on the step. Samuel fell backward with Keaton on top of him, and they landed in a pool of mud in front of the porch step. Keaton managed to punch Samuel in the face before being blocked by Samuel’s grip.

“Get off me, you pissant,” Samuel yelled. He flipped Keaton onto the ground, pinning his chest and arms. Keaton thrashed his legs in the air and made gasping sounds as he struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked out of him.

Ella ran down the steps two at a time, still clinging to the bar of soap. She pulled Samuel by the shirt collar. “Get off me,” Samuel screamed louder.

When she finally managed to pull Samuel up by the back of his shirt collar, Ella spun him around and slapped him square in the face. The sound, as loud as thunder, ricocheted up to the porch, where Macon still hovered over his marbles. Ella shoved the bar of soap deep into Samuel’s mouth until he gagged.

Samuel spat out clumps of the soap, bent over, and vomited.

Ella balled up her fists, ready for Samuel to strike back. But there was no need. Samuel simply stood there, dazed, with a kernel of soap clinging to his upper lip and water running down his forehead and into the thick eyebrows that Ella used to say reminded her of her father’s.

Keaton heaved for air, and Ella helped lift him up. Keaton brushed away Macon’s attempt to help him back up the porch steps. Before going back into the house, Ella flung her arms, and flecks of water landed on the floor. She looked down at Samuel, who still stood in the rain. His drenched shirt clung to his barreled chest. “And it was your shirt,” she said. “It was your shirt that I was washing.”

That evening rain continued to tap the tin roof of Ella’s home, an unrelenting caller reminding her of timber deadlines yet to be met. Samuel managed to come out of his bedroom, mumble that he was sorry at the dinner table, wash his supper plate, and then excuse himself. Sitting at the desk where he’d once been forced by Ella to do school lessons, he let free all of his thoughts about the drifter and his mother’s lack of judgment in a letter addressed to his father. He licked the flap on the envelope, rearranged the pencil between his fingers, and finally flipped a coin. Heads, New Orleans; tails, Chicago. His father had visited both cities and had shared stories to prove it. The penny landed tails up on the notepad with an Indian chief on the cover.