Man in the Blue Moon (7 page)

Lanier walked deeper into the brush, jerking the branches and vines as hard as he wanted to snatch away the torment that he pictured as vines around his brain.

A palmetto shrub tangled around his ankles. A thick layer of vines partly shielded his view of the water and cypress that lay ahead. Out in the dark lake that held knee-deep water, tall weathered trees rose up from the mud. Their twisted gray limbs made Lanier think of a witch with pointy fingers, buried deep below the lake’s surface and reaching up, trying to claw her way back out again. A chill ran down to his core, and he pulled back a hickory limb that tried to block him from moving ahead. Ella’s property seemed far away now, and for an instant he wondered if he had left Dead Lakes far behind him.

When he walked into a spider’s web, Lanier stopped to peel away the layers. It was then that he heard their voices. Beyond a curtain of kudzu, Lanier could make out Narsissa sitting on the edge of the water. Her hair was free and the leg of her pants was rolled up to a fat knee.

“You haven’t used that ointment I made for you, have you?”

“I used it some,” Ella said.

When Lanier stepped closer he could make out Ella’s back as she stood in a pool of water. The edges of the water were lined with palmetto bushes and a magnolia tree whose blooms fought to break free of the wild vines that tried to suffocate them.

Lanier stepped closer and crushed a moss-covered branch. The popping sound ricocheted down to the water, and Narsissa stopped massaging Ella’s shoulder long enough to look in his direction. Lanier held his breath and stood frozen behind the branches of a pine sapling.

“Your shoulders are going to be as big as Samuel’s before we are through with all this cutting.”

“Please don’t mention that boy’s name. I was just beginning to feel some peace.”

Narsissa playfully slapped Ella on the shoulder. “You hush. Besides, what would you have done without him?”

“Samuel might be sixteen, but he’s still a boy—don’t forget it. A boy can do heavy lifting but not heavy thinking. Besides, there’s Lanier. You’re forgetting Lanier. . . . He would have shown up to help me.”

Narsissa sighed and shook her head.

“He was meant to pass this way. He was.”

Narsissa laughed. “You’re acting like a foolish schoolgirl.”

“What? You can’t possibly still think I’m a fool for letting him stay. Now you just can’t.”

“That man is up to something. I can sense it,” Narsissa said. “Argue with me all you want.”

“And you call me the fool? Now I want you to hush with all that.”

“I’m telling you, I sense something, and it ain’t good.”

Ella balled her fist and hit the water. “You and your senses. I wish you could have sensed when Harlan was fixing to run off. Or maybe when he took out that loan? That would have been a good time to have your senses. Or how about when your own husband took off to Brazil? So I guess we see how good your senses work.”

Bubbling water and the cry of a blue jay broke the silence. Ella never looked up from the water. She reached up and tried to squeeze Narsissa’s hand.

Narsissa pulled her fingers out from her grip. “And I did sense it when my husband left. I felt it in my chest like an itch that couldn’t be scratched. I knew it was the way he felt. His family didn’t want him on account of marrying me. The town didn’t want him on account of marrying me. He couldn’t stand it. He opted to run off to a make-believe world. . . . I know what I know.”

Lanier stood watching them long after Narsissa had stopped massaging Ella’s glistening back. He couldn’t turn away when Ella climbed out from the water and wrapped herself in a towel. A burning from the grip on his neck ran down his body. Fear and temptation tangled together. He closed his eyes and felt the racing pulse in the vein of his neck. He was tired of fighting the curses thrown at his father’s generation. Evil was pumping through his body, he was sure of it. It was the fury of his bloodline that scared him. A tortured beast he could no longer harness.

The calendar with a sketch of a redheaded girl holding a bottle of Coca-Cola hung from a nail on the wall behind the store cash register. Ella began each morning by drawing an
X
through yesterday’s date, signifying another day completed with the timber cut. There were eleven blank dates remaining on the calendar before the thirty-first was circled, indicating the last date before the bank would take ownership of the store and farm. With the help of Keaton and Samuel, they were making progress. Pine bark and tar-tipped stumps now marked the path they had made across the land. The low-lying bed of water and the cypress trees were now visible through the gaps in the pine trees that remained to be harvested.

Ella shielded her eyes from the rising sun and counted the timber stacked along the edge of her property the same as she did every morning. The muscles in her shoulders, neck, and back still ached, but there was lightness in her bearing that she hadn’t felt in some time. Avery Herndon, a wide-faced man with a potato-shaped nose, came by from the lumber mill. He scratched figures and ran his finger across the lines in the tree trunk.

“I beg apologies for coming so early. Hope I didn’t get you out of bed,” Avery said as he looked down at the palm-sized pad where he did his figuring.

Ella cocked her head to the side and stopped short of asking if he was joking.

“Good wood,” the lumberman said and ripped out the ticket with his figures. “The Army is after us for more yellow wood like you got. Pine is treasured right now with all the building of training camps and so forth. I want to work with you.”

Ella grabbed the ticket and breathed deeper than she had in ages.

After he had driven off with pine straw and tree bark raining down from the flat bed of his truck, Ella quickly tucked the estimate inside her hat. A piece of the paper broke away and stuck to the gluey pine tar that she could never completely remove from her hands. Fear whispered to her that if she held the dollar amount too long between her fingers, the deal might evaporate. So with her fingernail she scraped the sliver of paper off her index finger and quickly stuck it in her pocket.

When Ella looked up, the schoolteacher, her once close friend Neva Clarkson, was making her way along the side of the road to the one-room schoolhouse. Neva’s cheeks seemed plump and pristine, her complexion milky like those illustrated in advertisements for beauty products. Pulling the collar of her work shirt up against the side of her face, Ella hoped to hide the tanned, leathered evidence of her work out in the sun. She stared at Neva’s rounded, porcelain-colored face. She had never noticed her skin being so perfect, so dainty. She wondered whether Neva’s skin would still be so taut if she had ended up marrying Harlan like all had thought.

If only for an instant, the women who had once shared secrets and a room at Miss Wayne’s school locked eyes. Ella could feel Neva’s reprimand for having allowed Keaton and Samuel to miss the last weeks of school. It was a severe gaze offered with a tilt of the chin and a quick bat of the eyelashes.

“Morning, Ella,” Neva muttered before adjusting the books she carried and rotating on her heels. With the back of her fair neck facing Ella, the woman walked up the road in the direction of her life’s work.

Ella opened her mouth and let go of the shirt collar. Words she had meant to compose in a letter to Neva explaining the circumstances and pledging her commitment to educate her sons became tangled on her tongue. “Morning,” she finally stammered. Right then she wished that the pine tar on her hands would cover her entire body, shellacking her like an amateur painting, creating a glossy shield behind which all of her shortcomings would be disguised.

The sound of a tambourine provided Ella an excuse to look the other way. From the opposite end of the road came the village eccentric. High-stepping in front of the beekeeper’s home, wearing white shoes, was Ruby Tucker, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a man who stayed drunk half the time and trapped fish the other half, when he was sober. Ruby held the tambourine high in one hand and used her baton like a walking stick in the other hand. She wore a green turban with red sequins shaped like cherries. If she had been any other girl, Ella would have thought she was glamorous.

Ruby stopped and looked at the timber. She brushed the sweat from her brow with her forearm, and the tambourine chimed. “That sure is a lot of wood, Miss Ella.” The girl’s teeth were bucked, and the words sounded slurred.

“How are you making it today, Ruby?” Ella rubbed her index finger against the side of her denim pants.

“Fine. I told Daddy I was late with the parade. I know y’all been thinking I wouldn’t come this month.” Ruby toyed with a thread of cloth dangling from the tambourine.

Giving up on trying to remove the tar on her finger, Ella looked at the girl and smiled. “You’re a welcome distraction.” Ruby made it to town at the end of every month, pretending that she was leading a parade down the dirt road of Dead Lakes. “But it’s not the last Friday yet,” Ella said with a lift to her voice, trying to sound playful.

Ruby turned her head and studied Ella. Fury overtook her narrow eyes. Mrs. Pomeroy was coming out of the store and just about to walk over and speak to Ella when Ruby screamed, “It is so Friday!”

Mrs. Pomeroy stopped, and two men who were sitting on the porch steps stood up. Ella reached over to pat Ruby’s arm but was pushed away. Ella looked at those staring and tried to whisper. “I just meant it’s not the last Friday of the month. No need to get upset.”

“I always have my parade on the last Friday of the month.” For good measure, Ruby stomped her foot, and a rock hit Ella’s leg.

“Ruby, now there’s no need for all that.”

Ruby bolted toward Ella and poked her chest with the baton. “My parade is the last Friday of the month. It is the last Friday of the month,” she screamed.

Ella tried to push the baton away.

Spit flung from Ruby’s mouth. “You and Daddy. Neither one of you want me to lead my parades. But Mr. Clive does. Mr. Clive likes my parades. He likes how high I can lift my legs.” As if to prove her point, Ruby yanked her dress up to her knees and kicked out her legs. The ends of her faded red dress unfurled to reveal torn beige underwear.

Ella took a step backward and suddenly felt more vulnerable. When she had spoken to Ruby’s father about her frightening customers with the flamboyant way she led her make-believe parades around the store, she never guessed that he would reveal it to his daughter, who had the curvy body of a woman but the underdeveloped mind of an eight-year-old.

“Mercy,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. She leaned over the store railing and peered down at Ella. “Should I go get the law?”

Ella shook her head and then smiled at Ruby. “You’re right, Ruby. You’re exactly right. Today is your parade day.”

Ruby gradually moved the baton away and straightened the turban on her head. As Ruby marched on, shaking the tambourine and pumping the baton higher in the air, Ella tried to reassure Mrs. Pomeroy that no harm was done.

“She’s like a stick of dynamite just waiting to explode,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “Juanita told me she found that girl plundering around in her garden shed last week. Looking for something to steal, I have all idea.” Mrs. Pomeroy fumbled with her wicker basket of shopping goods. “I don’t care what her daddy says about not being able to control her; he ought to keep her locked inside the house. Nothing but white trash.”

“It’s difficult to raise them on your own . . . let alone raise a child who is touched in the head like her.”

Mrs. Pomeroy swung the wicker basket across her forearm. “That might be the case, but with all of your trials and tribulations, we don’t see your boys running wild that way.” Mrs. Pomeroy turned to leave and then glanced back at Ella. “Bless your heart.”

Watching Mrs. Pomeroy walk away toward her house, Ella didn’t know whether to be honored or insulted.

“Now that girl with the stick was a sight,” Lanier said as he put on his work gloves. He had appeared from behind Ella, and as usual she had not heard him walk up.

Ella fanned her hand across her bosom. “I declare. I didn’t know you were standing there.”

He began pulling out the tools from a steel box. In the distance the mule honked at the sound of the tools being jostled. “I was thinking I was going to have to break the two of you apart. That ole gal looked like she was ready to jump you.”

“You mean Ruby. She means no harm. Just a little touched in the head. At the end of every month she marches up and down this road and sometimes all through the store, pretending that she’s leading a parade. She has it in her mind that today’s the last Friday of the month. So much for me setting her straight. I don’t know who’s sillier, me or her.” Ella laughed.

Lanier stopped working and looked at her. His eyes narrowed and seemed even softer. “I don’t think I’ve heard you laugh once since I’ve been here. You’ve got a nice laugh.”

Ella felt a streak of fire run up her neck. She massaged the place where her embarrassment had shown and looked away from Lanier.

Narsissa plodded forward with chains balanced on both shoulders. “Samuel is bridling up the mule. That animal is acting more ornery than usual today. He kicked at me twice.”

Lanier never looked away from Ella as Narsissa unfurled the chains across the ground. Narsissa looked at him and then at Ella. “What did I miss?”

Ella put on her work gloves and grabbed the end of the chain, pulling it out straight. “Ruby. She’s come to town today for her parade. She’s a week early, but she wouldn’t believe me.” Ella laughed again, but Narsissa only shook her head the same way she did whenever she thought Ella was acting childish. “I wouldn’t play with her if I was you,” Narsissa said and then tucked her coarse ponytail underneath the collar of a plaid work shirt. “Say what you will, but that girl’s got the devil in her.”

By lunchtime, Lanier had led them deep into the woods by the water’s edge. He had taught all of them how to scout out and avoid cutting the diseased pines until most of the path back to the house was nothing but pine-straw-scattered sand dotted with decayed and rotting trees. While Ella handed out biscuits and Narsissa opened up a jar of honey, Lanier and Keaton sat against what remained of a beetle-infested tree with half of its top missing.

Samuel busied himself with watering the mule that stood with one leg half propped up. “His left leg is acting up again. See how he’s giving on it,” Samuel said.

“He’ll be all right,” Ella said. “Come have a biscuit. You need to eat.”

Narsissa stood leaning against a pine. She looked out toward the cypress trees lining the low-lying water. “We don’t need to get much closer to the water.”

Lanier looked at her and then at the water’s edge. “I don’t expect we’ll have to. With the progress we’ve made, I think we’re doing good.”

“Why, Narsissa?” Keaton asked, licking a drop of honey that was wedged between dirt and a piece of bark glued with tar to his thumb.

“Because she’s scared of the bougars that will come out of the water and eat her,” Samuel yelled over his shoulder. The chain on the mule rattled.

“Samuel, hush,” Ella said. “Lanier will be scared of his own shadow.”

“Yeah, I might decide to quit,” he said and then smiled at Ella.

In frustration Ella spat out her words. “What she means is that there’s a wives’ tale about the water down there.”

Narsissa looked Lanier up and down. She spoke her words cautiously, the same way she might if they were coming out of her mouth with pine needles attached. “No wives’ tale to it.”

“What’s a wives’ tale?” Keaton asked and pulled at the bark that was stuck to his thumb.

Narsissa threw the chain into a pile with the others. “It’s not the time for us to work down there.”

Ella yanked the belt tighter on her work pants. “Well, what time of day does your sixth sense tell you that I’ll be moving into the poorhouse, Narsissa?”

Keaton looked up at Ella with surprise. Bits of biscuit fell from his bottom lip.

“Come look at the mule,” Samuel called out. “I think we might need to dress his hind leg. It’s swelled.”

Just as Lanier was getting up, the sound of a whip cracking rang out in the distance. Keaton jumped up and pointed. Out from the brush a snake with its head raised high was moving so fast that it appeared to be running. Lanier stumbled trying to get up, and Ella knocked over a jug of turpentine. The mule darted to the side and the wagon tilted. The animal then kicked with its hind leg and twisted it in the chains used to pull the wood. Just as the mule cried out in pain, Narsissa screamed. The snake had wrapped around her leg, biting at her pants and whipping her leg with its tail.

Lanier grabbed a machete and ran toward her. Narsissa pulled at the snake, which kept twisting its head and snapping at her. Lanier pulled her hand away and then grabbed the snake by the back of its head. With a swipe of the blade, the snake’s triangle-shaped head fell to the ground and blood splattered across Lanier’s hand. The body of the snake still gripped Narsissa’s leg. Out of reflex, its coarse tail whipped her once more before finally breaking free.

While the boys stood over the headless snake that still flailed and switched, Lanier examined Narsissa’s leg. The mule called out and pranced to the side, farther away from the snake. A trio of crows cried out from one of the trees. The sound of their cawing grew louder as Lanier moved closer to Narsissa. Jagged marks ran down the side of her calf and ankle. Beads of blood began bubbling at the surface of the broken skin. Narsissa flinched whenever Lanier brushed his finger down the markings left by the snake’s platted tail.

“Narsissa, are you all right?” Ella eased toward her as if another snake might be hiding and ready to strike.

“Coachwhip,” Samuel said, leaning over the decapitated serpent. “It’s a coachwhip snake.”

Lanier seemed to envelop his torso over Narsissa’s leg. His breathing was deep, and he mumbled something that was muted by the crows’ cries and the boys’ chatter over the dead snake.

“I’ve never seen one move that fast,” Keaton yelled and kicked at the tail of the lifeless snake. “It just came out of nowhere.”