Man in the Blue Moon (23 page)

Ella shifted her weight and then slid down against the stall door until she was resting on her knees. The ends of her skirt ballooned over the bits of hay that covered the ground.

“Rosie made it back in the house carrying her groceries. She made it back just in time to look in the door and see me holding the pistol. . . . I was just sitting on the floor looking at the gun the same way I would if the gun could talk and tell me that I’d failed to stop all this. Naturally she went to screaming and then ran out of the house. But not me. I just kept squatting there over them . . . holding that gun and staring over at the woman who loved my wife in a way I never could. None of them believed what Octavia wrote about her and Camilla in that note she left on the dresser. ‘There’s such a thing as being driven to the point of crazy,’ J.D. told me when he struck a match and lit that note right in front of me in jail.”

“Jail? So there was a trial?” Ella whispered.

“If you can call it that. I had the sense to hire a lawyer from Columbus. He said I had the good favor of having a new medical doctor do the autopsy—a fella straight out of Emory who was still too fresh to be bought. He declared it was a murder-suicide. Murder-suicide, pure and simple. But all the Troxlers heard was murder.”

Neither of them said any more. They just sat there staring off in different directions. At the barn door, Ella whispered the words with the same force that she might have if she were yelling them. “I’m so sorry.”

He only nodded and then reached down for a blade of straw. He drew rows of lines in the dirt.

“The truth.” She brushed the dirt from her skirt. “The truth is what matters here. Truth about your wife . . . the truth about this healing business. As long as you’re telling me the truth, then we’ll be fine.”

Ella eased out of the barn door with a reverence she would have shown if she were leaving in the middle of a church service. Before she could close the door behind her she pretended not to hear Lanier say, “Don’t be so confident in the truth making things right.” She walked back to the house without ever putting the coat back over her head.

Before he left town, Mr. Busby once again stood in front of the marble desk in the lobby of the Blue Moon Clock Company in Bainbridge, Georgia. The young woman who wore red lipstick too strong for her fair face told him twice that Mr. Troxler was not in the building. A mural of a blue moon was painted on the wall behind her, and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner echoed.

When Mr. Busby’s charm gave way to frustration, the young woman met the volume of his voice. “For the last time. He is not here.”

Straightening the tie that he had put on special for the occasion, Mr. Busby pushed his weight against the iron door of the building, crossed the street to where the café owner was assembling her roasted peanuts, and made his way to the sheriff’s office.

A lanky deputy with imitation snakeskin boots greeted him. The man kept saying “Yes, sir” to Mr. Busby’s story about meeting the man he thought would offer a corporate contract but then took the photograph with Ella Wallace and her sons standing in front of the pile of cut timber.

“It is a piece of art,” Mr. Busby said. “I can fetch my price for it at any gallery in Atlanta.”

“Yes, sir,” the deputy said and sat on the edge of a wooden desk cluttered with discolored files.

“It has a blur in the corner that makes it gallery worthy. That man stole that piece of art from me.”

“He stole it?” the deputy asked and lowered his head. “You’re talking about Mr. Troxler?”

“Yes,” Mr. Busby said.

“I see,” the deputy said with folded arms and pouty lips. “You’re saying Mr. Troxler stole one of your pictures.”

“He asked if he could take the photograph with him. It was that man in the corner of the picture. A regular bum if you ask me . . . a no-count with hair as long as a woman’s.”

The sheriff, an older man with pointed ears and thinning gray hair slicked down on the side and a wine-colored birthmark on his temple, stepped from out of his opened office door.

Mr. Busby looked at his audience and adjusted the knot of his tie. “The older one—J.D. Troxler they said his name is—he kept staring at the smudge. He asked his brother if he recognized the man. The younger brother went about cussing in a manner that probably ran off my customers. I should get payment for that offense too.”

“Yes, sir. I see,” the deputy whispered.

“I told the gentleman—and I use that term loosely—that I didn’t even consider the man in the picture a model for my work. He was just a mistake. Just a smudge that scurried away from being photographed. On the shy disposition. The type who runs away when the camera comes out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then the older Troxler, the one who runs that business, he just walked off as good as you please with the picture in hand. Walked right across the street with that brother cussing and carrying on behind him. They walked into their big warehouse as pretty as you please and never once paid me a cent. I work with people on consignment. Naturally I knew he was good for it. But it’s been two days, and I’m thinking that he skipped town without paying me. Now I know he can afford my prices.”

The sheriff squinted and cocked his head sideways so that the birthmark pointed directly at Mr. Busby. “Come again,” the sheriff said. He motioned for the deputy to quiet the inmates who yelled behind the iron gate framing a row of cells. “Tell me again about the woman who owns the place.”

An inmate down the hall of the jail cussed, and the deputy hollered back at him.

“Ella Wallace?” Mr. Busby’s voice was laced with disdain. “What does she have to do with the Troxler man stealing my photograph?”

The sheriff closed his eyes and raised his head, chin up. He had handled threats against his life, a shotgun blast through his front door, and even a burning cross on his front yard for stopping a lynching. Mr. Busby’s outrage was nothing more than child’s play. “Pacify me a little bit.”

Against the clanging noise of a billy club running down the iron cages and the shouts of the deputy from behind the gate, Mr. Busby talked of Ella Wallace in terms of an artist, painting her in the best light possible.

The sheriff grabbed a writing tablet from the desk. “And spell the name of the place where this picture was made?”

Mr. Busby walked around the desk. He faced off with the sheriff and didn’t seem bothered when the inmates down the hall cried out. “Is my friend in some sort of danger?”

The sheriff touched the end of the pencil to his long tongue and steadied his hand on the paper. “Depends on how fast you can spell.”

Brother Mabry wanted to meet Clive away from the prying eyes of the skeptics and the faithful. Gil, the local newspaperman, drove Brother Mabry along the street that ran down the river and emptied into a dirt road dotted with broken shells and crushed pinecones. As the car came into the marsh pasture where Clive kept three horses he raced, the pine limb that hung out over the road scraped against the top of the car.

A colored man, not more than thirty, cracked a whip in the air as younger boys rode the backs of the horses in the marsh where sable palms and saw grass lined the banks. Water came halfway up the hind legs of the animals, and the boys rocked back and forth as they sloshed through the marsh in a trot.

Clive stood on top of a massive stump, all that was left of an oak struck down by lightning the summer before. The hot, sticky afternoon breeze swept across the field and caught the ends of the pieces of his hair that weren’t waxed flat to his scalp. He called out when Brother Mabry opened the car door. The preacher’s low-hanging belly poured out in front of him. The automobile tilted and swayed as he struggled to get out.

The man with the whip glanced back at them and then popped the frayed ends in the air. One of the horses threw its head up, sniffed the air, and whinnied.

“Beautiful horses,” Gil said. He put his hands in his pockets before settling on folding them in front of his waist. “Beautiful piece of property.”

“I come out here practically every Saturday. Even in winter.”

The chestnut-colored horse shook and whinnied again. Water flew from his mane, and the rider leaned down over the horse’s neck.

“The water strengthens their legs,” Clive said, offering a cigar to Gil before striking his own match. “It’s just a hobby, more or less.” Clive looked at Brother Mabry as if there was an explanation needed for the horse racing.

“I’m not Catholic,” Brother Mabry said in a clipped tone. “There’s no call for confession.”

Clive laughed and Gil joined in. A horse whip cracked the air, and Brother Mabry pulled at the front of his baby-blue shirt, trying to ventilate himself.

“Mr. Gillespie, if there is one thing I pride myself on, it is having answers to questions most other people can’t figure out. That said, I’m growing rather agitated at not being able to answer the simplest of questions. My wife is asking me daily, if not hourly, when will the spring be hers?”

Clive drew in the tobacco and blew the smoke in the direction of the horses. “How is Mrs. Mabry holding up with all of the commotion over the revival?”

“I’ll tell you how she’s doing. She’s all to pieces.” Brother Mabry’s voice grew into a boom, and the horses jerked sideways in the water. “Hear me. . . . I have no answers for my wife. I do not delight in handing my wife empty promises.”

“The matter of the deeds will be settled in no time. Now, I know for a fact the woman doesn’t have the money to fight it out in court.”

“Court draws drama,” Brother Mabry yelled. “Drama draws scrutiny. I’ve never seen any good come of having more than two lawyers in the same room.”

Clive tried to stand taller. “It won’t come to all that. It’s just idle threats.”

“And if anybody should be suing around here, it’s me,” Brother Mabry roared. His face was reddened by anger and the heat. His breathing became haggard. “You brought me down here under false pretense. Claiming that you owned that land outright.”

“I do,” Clive answered, rising on the tips of his shoes. “Sir, make no mistake . . . the land is mine.”

“I’m not going to stand here in the blazing sun and argue the particulars for the umpteenth time with you. You told me you’d correct the matter, and that’s exactly what I expect you to do.” Unfurling a burgundy handkerchief from his pocket, Brother Mabry dabbed at the perspiration that gathered in between the folds of his neck. “I don’t like confusion. You hear me? The devil’s in the middle of confusion. You get that land so the deal is ironclad, or be done with it altogether.”

“Ella’s being disagreeable. She’s a typical woman. She’s high-strung. Let me work it my way. Her hand will be forced soon enough.” Clive looked at Gil, smiled, and then drew on the cigar.

“There’s something about to happen,” Gil said, his voice growing in confidence as he spoke. “Now, Clive and I have about got it figured out.”

“Figured it out, huh!” Brother Mabry said in a snort.

“The community is having what you might say is a hearing . . . a meeting.”

“A town hall,” Clive corrected.

“A town hall,” Gil repeated and folded his hands back across his waist. “The pressure of running a place that size will turn her head around. I’m betting Reverend Simpson will help us too. Folks listen to him.”

“He’ll help when he sees a dollar or two,” Clive said, brushing away a piece of lint from the leg of his pants. “There’s always a collection plate that needs filling.”

The horses strained against the water. The riders hunched down, wrapping their arms over the wet manes. Sounds of sloshing water and the baritone voices of the riders rose up to the dry land where Clive and the others stood.

“Gil’s article painted the perfect picture. And of course, you’ve painted a scary picture yourself. I mean with all this talk of the Antichrist and end times.” Clive laughed.

Brother Mabry spun around and towered over Clive. “You find God’s Word humorous, Gillespie?”

A hot breeze swept over the marsh, and the smell of salt grew stronger. “Absolutely not,” Clive said, chopping his hands at the air.

“I speak the truth,” Brother Mabry said with even more conviction than he had on the stage. “This is more than a business deal to me and certainly to God.”

“Certainly,” Clive said and tucked his head. “It’s a calling.”

Brother Mabry looked at Gil, who looked over his shoulder at the horses being unsaddled.

“I’ll have you know I didn’t walk away from civilization and meander down all this way to the backwoods for a dollar,” Brother Mabry yelled.

“Certainly not,” Clive said.

“When I say it’s God’s work, that’s what it is,” Brother Mabry shouted. “It’s a conviction, not a religion.”

“Not a religion?” Gil asked.

“A conviction,” Clive repeated.

“A conviction that this is sacred ground.” Brother Mabry held his fist higher than the horse trainer’s whip. “A conviction that my wife doesn’t take lightly either.”

Out in the thick oaks and cypress that lined the marsh, a crane flew out and landed a few feet away from the horses that were being led in a circle by the riders. The sweat and water on their coats glistened.

Brother Mabry shook his head. “I might as well be speaking Greek.” He turned to walk back to the car but then stopped. “Gillespie, mark my word. God won’t be mocked. He told me to build this retreat and to make His land known to His people. The healing powers of the water on that land have no ownership other than that of God.”

Standing back on the tree stump, Clive watched them drive away. He didn’t move, hardly breathed, until they had made it through the open gate that was usually chained shut. Then he tossed his head back and stomped his foot and howled with a guttural laugh that rolled up over his body like a wave. His roar swept down to the marsh bank, and the crane took flight back into the woods.

The crane landed next to a rotting log that was tangled in thorny vines. The bird turned in the direction of Earl, who was hunched in the position of a warrior or an ape.

Hidden in the woods tucked adjacent to the marsh where the prized horses exercised, Earl watched through a curtain of vines. The colored man popped his whip as the horses trotted off away from the marsh in a prance of freedom.

Behind Earl, a snake slithered across the damp ground that was carpeted in gray dead moss and brittle leaves. Earl pulled from inside his pants waist a long-barreled pistol from an earlier generation and stretched his arm out, pointing the gun in Clive’s direction. Crumpled leaves rustled as the snake slid across them. Distracted, Earl looked down at the three-foot-long snake that now was inches from his boot. The head was round. It was just a blacksnake, not a moccasin. He lifted the heel of his boot and waited until the snake was perfectly aligned before slamming his foot down, crushing the snake’s head. While the body of the snake flailed and flapped around Earl’s ankle, he set his sight back toward his real target. But the tree stump where Clive Gillespie had stood was now bare. The riders were teasing each other with boyish taunts and beating the horse blankets dry against the sides of the corral that held the horses. “Keep your mind on your business,” the colored man yelled at the boys and twisted the frayed end of the whip before tucking it into a storage bin by the feed trough.

The engine of Clive’s car came to life. When the car passed through the gate of the pasture, it took up speed on the main road. Only the scent of cigars and a faint puff of exhaust fumes proved that he had ever really been there.

J.D. Troxler sat in the first-class section of the train with his legs crossed and his hat balanced on one knee. He had grown weary of his brother’s descriptions of how he would take Lanier Stillis bone by bone and serve his skin to the buzzards. He set his sights out toward the dense timber that lined the edges of the track like rows of bars in a jail cell.

His brother Parker sat next to him, caressing the pistol that was inside his jacket. The man they hired for the job—Jack-Ray, the one they always hired to take care of business too dirty for their hands—sat in the row across from them with his mouth open as he slept. With each turn and bump of the train, Jack-Ray’s head teetered.

“You reckon he tied one on?” Parker asked, motioning toward Jack-Ray with his chin.

“Makes no difference,” J.D. replied. “He can split a man like a hog and sleep like a baby. He’s loyal to a fault.”

J.D. stared at Parker long and hard. Parker once again stroked the shape of the pistol that protruded from his jacket. J.D. smiled and looked out the window. A shanty sat between pecan trees in the middle of a field. “Maybe I should’ve had Jack-Ray run for sheriff. He’d be more competent than the ignoramus we have in there now,” J.D. said.

“I don’t figure Jack-Ray made it past the fourth grade,” Parker said, stretching his arm across the top of the train seat.

J.D. shook his head and brushed lint from his shoulder. “Backbone counts for more than book sense. If I’d had my way when Lanier first showed up on Octavia’s arm, we wouldn’t be in this fix.” J.D. leaned down with his forearms pressed against his knees. He raised his eyebrows until one arched higher than the other. “Don’t you remember I wanted Jack-Ray to take care of him way back then? Eh, don’t you? But Daddy wouldn’t have any of it. Said we had to keep peace in the family. Said he was just glad Octavia found her a man. Said we’d dress Lanier up. I kept telling him, Daddy, you can polish cut glass till kingdom come but it won’t make a diamond. All he could say was he didn’t want a scandal.” J.D. huffed and flakes of dust floated away from the window. “Well, we got us a scandal all right.”

A boy not more than ten tried to make his way up to the front cabin. He gripped the edge of the seat where the hired hit man was stretched out. The boy slipped around the boot that had fallen from the seat and hung down in the aisle. The sun hit the side of Jack-Ray’s face, illuminating the rudimentary branding on his right cheek. It was the letter
J
and had been put there by his father when Jack-Ray was not much older than the passenger trying to pass by.

Parker laughed and J.D. looked at him, cross.

“It tickles me. All this time we can’t catch him, and some old, beat-down picture taker winds up leading us right to him,” Parker said. From his other coat pocket, he pulled out the folded picture of Ella in front of the pines and the blurred image of Lanier. Parker held the picture up to the window and stared at it. His laugh transformed into a sigh. “I reckon we shoulda paid the old man something for that picture. You know, a reward or something.”

Ignoring his brother, J.D. continued to look out the window at the pecan trees that lined a field where a two-story clapboard house sat. “Lanier would have to go and make this as inconvenient as possible. Who ever heard of a place you can’t even reach by train?” He pulled out the gold pocket watch his wife had given him on their first anniversary, back when he was confident theirs was a traditional marriage. J.D. stared as the second hand ticked away the hours to justice. “I’d just as soon stay on this train and not take that steamboat. I don’t care for water. Never have.”

By the last night of the revival, the crowd had grown until the benches buckled and the scent of clammy body odor laced the air. They fanned for relief, seeming to stir the contagious notion that they were living in original paradise. Clive Gillespie stood underneath a lamp at the back of the tent just as he had been doing for the past few nights. He scribbled down Brother Mabry’s words on a pocket pad the same way Myer Simpson, who had taken to sitting on the third pew—the position she took at her own husband’s church—marked notes in her Bible. Both pretended to verify, but only one came to believe.

Only a few of the people noticed Ruby. She sat on the end of the bench nearest to the middle. She had eased through the open tent flap right after the accordion player and pianist had led the congregation in a hymn. Mrs. Pomeroy was the first to notice her and stopped fanning long enough to nudge the woman who sat next to her. “Be ready to hightail it out of here. She’s a fire starter.”

The light from the lantern that hung on the tent hook over Ruby’s head caused the sequin cherries on her turban to glisten. Ruby sat cross-legged, Indian style, tapping her toe on the bench. Finally a man dressed in a tie that ended at his sternum motioned for her to quit.

“Eden was meant to be a perfect place,” Brother Mabry shouted. A large circle of sweat stained his crimson coat. It spread out so that the discoloration looked as if someone might have shot him in the back. “But man ruined it. Sinful man destroyed it. Well, hear me now. . . . I’m here to help restore it. I’m here to show all of God’s people how to find healing of the body and soul. I’m building this retreat so people can see the good God intended and flee from the sin of the mind that pollutes and destroys the body. Hear me now. . . .”