Man in the Blue Moon (17 page)

“He was the expert of his time like Professor Listerman is the expert botanist of ours.” Brother Mabry moved closer to Professor Listerman, almost eclipsing the academic with his broad shoulder and elephant-sized arm.

Sweetwater Jim’s gaunt cheeks were stained with age spots, but his grip was as tight as a young man’s. He reached up and spread his long, thin fingers across the shoulder of Brother Mabry. His hand looked as tiny as a child’s propped on Brother Mabry’s massive body. “Just when do you expect to tell people where this Eden of yours is located?”

A group formed a semicircle around Brother Mabry and Sweetwater Jim. Clive Gillespie moved to the side to let Reverend Simpson and Myer step closer. He motioned with his chin for the server to take the platter away.

“Sweetwater . . . if I may call you Sweetwater,” Brother Mabry said, never looking at Sweetwater for his approval, “as a man wise in the ways of public opinion, I am sure you’ll agree with me that a campaign is best launched in phases.”

Sweetwater closed his eyes and nodded. “Phases.”

“Hear me now,” Brother Mabry said and waved his hand across the room. Cocktail sauce still marked the spot on his fingers where the shrimp had been clasped. “Eden is at your doorstep. Beauty is something to be held here in your fair port, but mysteries beyond human reasoning abound.”

“Mysteries?” Reverend Simpson said.

Clive Gillespie stepped forward. “Brother Mabry, this is Reverend Simpson from the Dead Lakes community. In our county but just down the road a piece.”

“Oh, Dead Lakes,” Brother Mabry said and rose taller. The buttons on his pressed baby-blue shirt pulled tighter against his stomach.

“Pleasure to know you,” Reverend Simpson said. “Mysteries of what order, might I ask?” Dust cast from the swirling ceiling fan danced around the crown of his head.

“The first book in the Bible tells all who believe that a river forks in four places.” Brother Mabry repeated the pitch from his press conference. His powerful voice engulfed the crowd. A clanging noise rang out from the kitchen, and a horn honked out on Main Street. Myer Simpson gasped as Brother Mabry described the flora uncommon to any other spot in the world except for the basins of the Apalachicola River.

“Flora and forks in a river? But that could be anywhere,” Reverend Simpson said just slow enough to reveal his lack of authority.

“Tell me, Reverend, another spot in the world where a river forks in four places?” Brother Mabry rose up on his toes and towered over the reverend.

Reverend Simpson sipped from the glass of tea. The ice in the glass had melted into slivers.

“Well, hear me when I tell you that the only other place is in Siberia.”

“Siberia?” Reverend Simpson repeated, dumbfounded.

“And tell me, Reverend, what sort of exotic plants might you think grow in ice?”

The crowd chuckled, and the reverend’s face grew as crimson as Brother Mabry’s jacket.

“Can you believe this?” Myer Simpson whispered first to Lovey and then to Jasper Rugue, the owner of both an oyster cannery and the largest account in Clive’s bank. “Can you believe what we’re standing here hearing, Mr. Rugue?”

“Amazing,” Jasper Rugue said and pointed to the wood. His voice was as crisp as the pressed handkerchief in his suit pocket. “Do you notice how the wood swirls with gold there in the middle? It sort of looks like a cross to me.”

“You know, the Ark of the Covenant was gold,” Lovey said.

The smell of Jasper’s hair tonic tickled the senses of all who gathered around him. Myer Simpson squinted, looking deeper into the wood. “Amazing,” she said with the same inflection as Jasper.

“Who would ever have thought that we were living right here in Eden?” Lovey asked. “Who would ever imagine?”

“Amazing,” Myer Simpson said again, her word now gaining momentum.

After Brother Mabry finished delivering the words he had scripted for two days, the crowd began to talk among themselves. The sound of their voices buzzed like the electric lights on the walls.

“You know, I always said that the ferns grow bigger in my backyard than in any other spot in the county,” Lovey said with a nod.

Reverend Simpson reached out to pull Myer away, but she slipped through his fingers. She stepped closer, inching her way through the men who stood like guardrails around Brother Mabry. Fingering the edges of the scarf that had protected her curled hair from the elements during the drive to town, Myer Simpson spoke as loud as the celebrated evangelist. “What do you make of healings, Brother Mabry?” Myer asked, interrupting Mayor Cox, who was asking whether Howard’s Creek might be the spot where time began.

“I certainly believe in God’s power to heal,” Brother Mabry said as authoritatively as he would if he were standing in the pulpit. “It takes faith. Hear me now, faith that can move mountains.”

“What about a man being able to heal a bleeding mule by the mere touch of a hand?” Myer ran the edges of the scarf through her fingers and tilted her chin down as if tantalizing Brother Mabry.

“A bleeding mule?” Brother Mabry asked.

“Mrs. Pomeroy saw it,” Lovey said. She fanned herself with one of the cardboard fans that the funeral home had printed special for Brother Mabry’s upcoming revival.

“And then there was that boy of Ella’s,” Myer Simpson said.

“Mrs. Simpson, we must go now,” the reverend said.

“Neva Clarkson,” Myer Simpson said first to Lovey and then to Brother Mabry. “She’s our schoolmarm. Anyway, she said Ella Wallace’s boy was sick as could be. Deathly ill, you might as well say. And then this man
kissed
him—kissed him square on the mouth—and then the boy was as healthy as you or me.”

“Mrs. Simpson,” Reverend Simpson said in a reprimand that Myer never heard.

Brother Mabry laughed and then seemed to search the crowd to see if it were all a joke. Clive Gillespie moved back to his spot next to Brother Mabry. “What the lady says is true,” Clive said.

Reverend Simpson sputtered out the words, “Now, there’s no evidence to substantiate such talk.”

“And Neva Clarkson said the boy was so taken with sores in his mouth that he couldn’t even eat, couldn’t even breathe hardly,” Myer said. “Then this man . . . this
mysterious
man . . . just showed up out of the blue, put his mouth on the boy, and kissed—”

“There was never any mention of kissing,” Reverend Simpson said.

Myer Simpson raised her voice until she drowned out her husband. “The man put his mouth on the boy’s mouth, and the sores were gone by sundown.” She twirled her scarf across the air, seeming to demonstrate the magic of it all.

“And don’t forget about that nigra girl down at the bend in the river,” Lovey added with a point of the fan in Myer’s direction.

“Where did this all take place again?” Brother Mabry asked, bowing down closer to the women.

“Dead Lakes,” Clive answered with raised eyebrows that glistened with the same wax that plastered his hair. “Just down the road a piece.”

“A knockabout place, really,” Lovey said. “A quiet little community.”

“Huh,” Myer Simpson said and then reached for a shrimp as the waiter passed with a fresh platter. “Not so quiet after this drifter showed up and Ella Wallace took a liking to him. Just the same as if he’d cast a spell on the woman. Everything in my spirit tells me something is not right there.” She pointed her chin down lower and twisted her mouth to the side. The flesh-colored mole next to her lip shifted to the left.

Reverend Simpson shook his head and chuckled. “I’m sure Brother Mabry has more important matters at hand than idle front-porch gossip.” He gripped harder this time and jerked Myer away by the sleeve of her dress.

Just as Reverend Simpson was leading his wife away from the group, Brother Mabry reached out and blocked them with a hand big enough to belong to a giant. “Who did you say this man was again?”

Saw grass rose up and unfurled on the shore of the Wimpcoo River that ran to Millville. A white crane with a splash of fuchsia on top of its head turned and looked in the direction of the log raft before flying away.

Tall pines and patches of low-lying swamp stretched out in the distance. The side of the raft dipped down to the water, and Bonaparte pushed away from shore with the long pole he maneuvered. “Whoa now,” Bonaparte said the same way he would if he were riding an agitated horse.

“We’re just like Tom Sawyer and them, riding that raft,” Keaton said.

“This ain’t no time for dream world.” Samuel stopped retying the laces of his boot long enough to roll his eyes at Keaton.

“Keaton,” Ella said without taking her eyes away from the rail she was gripping. “Pay attention, now.”

Keaton clung to the rail without being as obvious as Ella. He tried not to act scared. Ella had wanted him to stay with Macon at Mrs. Pomeroy’s house, but he had refused. “If I worked this hard, then I’m seeing it all the way through,” he’d argued until he had broken her down. Now he rocked on unsteady footing on the piece of plywood that had been secured with wooden spikes over the cypress logs.

Samuel licked his lips. He had tried to match Bonaparte’s expertise with the pole but had given up and taken to checking the ends of the wood to make sure the chains that grouped the two rafts together remained secured.

Bonaparte took a pack of tobacco from his back pocket and propped the long pole up on his shoulder like a resting baby. The sharp, muddy tip dangled over Keaton’s head until the raft drifted toward a low-hanging oak branch and Bonaparte lifted the pole back up. He shoved the pole down into a patch of lily pads that decorated the water like dots of green icing and grunted as he pushed the raft farther away from shore. “I used to ride these waters weeks on end, hauling wood back and forth for Mr. W. D. Moultrie. Paid next to slave wages, but he paid just the same.” Bonaparte laughed, and Ella tried to laugh too before being jostled by the river current and once more gripping the rail made from saplings nailed together.

“Yeah,” Bonaparte said, spitting a stream of tobacco in the oil-colored water, “we got us what they called bronzones so we could buy goods at the commissary. Met my wife in that commissary.”

“Why did you stop rafting then?” Keaton asked.

Bonaparte halfway turned. Narsissa gripped the rail and then settled on an upside-down washtub that sheltered their food and water. “They had no choice,” Narsissa said. “They raped the land until there was nothing but spokes of dried-up stumps left.”

“Narsissa,” Ella said.

“Is she making that up, Bonaparte?” Keaton asked. He studied the way Bonaparte stood erect with a confidence he didn’t seem to possess out in the field.

Ella pursed her lips, shook her head at Keaton, and mouthed, “Hush.”

Bonaparte ignored the question, kept his gaze straight ahead, and motioned for Lanier to check on the rope that secured the second raft of lumber. The wood swayed back and forth, sloshing the water like a toy boat being pulled in a tub.

A hawk flew out from a hickory limb and swooped down over two blue jays that pranced on the other side of the river. The bird plucked up the fattest blue jay and flew off with the other one chasing and squawking after them.

Keaton watched his mother grip the rail and try to get her footing. He wondered what Lanier would do when they had made it to Millville with the lumber and returned home on the steamboat after the sale. Would he pack back into a box and disappear? Keaton had always heard that the men gambled with cards in the back room of the steamboat. Maybe before Lanier left them, Keaton could get him to use whatever powers he seemed to have to read the cards the gamblers held in their hands and win them some more money.

The river sloshed over the sides of the raft and streamed across the floor. Watching the water rise up and then retreat, Keaton noticed two darker places in the wood. He turned his head, wondering if he was actually seeing the spot that he believed to be shaped like a heart with a line going through the middle as if Cupid had marked it as his territory. His first thought was to tease his mother, telling her that she was standing closest to the spot shaped like a Valentine heart and that the love bug was going to get her if she didn’t move away.

Then Samuel shouted, “Looks like a sandbar up there to me.”

“Ain’t nothing but a shadow.” Bonaparte spat a line of tobacco juice that discolored the wood.

Keaton looked toward the spot in the water that shimmered from the sun. Dark clouds rolled in over the low-lying water off to the right of the widening river. He watched the sunlight shift, causing the water to seem black. He looked up at the puffy clouds that began to be tinged with deep blue. A tiny thundercloud drifted over a stout white one. When they connected, the clouds took the shape of a finger pressed against pursed lips. Keaton decided that it was a sign not to mention the heart-shaped spot on the wood to anyone, especially not his mother.

Watching Lanier and his mother together was the same as looking at a picture show with two actors batting eyelashes at one another. At times Keaton would cast Lanier as the Canadian Rocky and the mule that he pulled with loads of logs as the white stallion from the moving pictures. He could see his mother jumping on the back of the horse and riding away, passing the store and the fork in the road until the screen faded to black. But that was nothing more than air castles. He kept trying to convince himself that his mother would never be swept away by a man who was not her husband.

But that night when Keaton had seen his mother in the barn, he confused the line between make-believe and reality. No matter how hard Keaton had rubbed his eyes, there was no denying what he witnessed the night he went outside to use the privy. The lantern inside the barn cast an amber light on the small space that separated his mother and Lanier where they sat on the workbench. Peering through the stalks of sunflowers, Keaton heard her giggle. He held his breath as he witnessed Lanier brushing strands of hair from his mother’s shoulder. His head became top-heavy as he watched his mother sit cross-legged next to Lanier, the tip of her shoe flirting with the cuff of his pants. Keaton’s breathing became ragged more from nervous shame than from anger.

Watching them there in real life made him feel just as uncomfortable as he did when sitting in the theater in Apalachicola listening to the pianist play love songs as the projector made tapping sounds, filling the screen with a Canadian lawman and a woman with hair so blonde that it looked like a heavenly light was over her. In those pictures the pieces always came together so easily that eventually he could predict the ending as much as he could the songs that the pianist played. At the picture show, Lillian Gish and the other women with lighted halos didn’t seem to have to worry about lost husbands or whispering neighbors.

Squatting on the raft, Keaton looked down again at the place where he thought he had seen the heart-shaped design. Water rolled up from the river and fanned out around the sides of the raft. There was nothing but a splintered gash of wood where an axe had left its mark.

Back in Dead Lakes, Ella’s youngest son, Macon, sat on Mrs. Pomeroy’s porch as instructed and pacified himself by playing marbles. “You’re still so puny. I can’t have you going out in the yard and playing,” Mrs. Pomeroy said as she swung a long swatter at an Oriental rug that was propped over a string connected to two sable palms. Dust flew around her and then drifted across the road to where Ella’s store stood with the Closed sign on the door.

“I’m fine now. I was out there helping girdle the cypress,” Macon said and grabbed the cat’s-eye marble that had rolled to the edge of the porch where a bird had left its mark.

“Do what? Girdle?” Mrs. Pomeroy swung the swatter again and coughed as dust scattered.

“Bonaparte taught us.”

“Who?” Mrs. Pomeroy turned around to face Macon. Strands of hair had escaped her hairnet. They veiled the side of her face like a spider’s web.

“The colored man that lives past the fork in the river. He showed us how to slice the tree just right so that the gum drains out of it. That’s so it can float on the river to the mill.”

“Mercy, me. I’m just glad that Ella’s aunt didn’t live long enough to witness all this.” Mrs. Pomeroy coughed and shook her head. “She’s spinning in her grave right now, I have all idea.”

“You know, Mama won’t care if I shoot these marbles in the dirt.” He stood up with the marbles and stepped on one porch step and then tentatively down another.

Mrs. Pomeroy hit the rug again, and the loose flesh on her forearms jiggled. “I don’t care what your mama will or will not allow. After all you’ve been through with your weakened constitution. And now you want me to let you fool around out here in my yard, out in my dirt? Next thing you know you’ll wind up with worms and all sorts of ailments. That man might not be able to jibber-jabber and make you better a second time. Then the next thing I know you’ll be laid out in your mama’s living room in a pine box. No, sir, I won’t have that on my conscience.” A cloud of dust enveloped Mrs. Pomeroy.

Next door, Myer Simpson came out of her house carrying a watering pail purchased from Ella’s store. Before Harlan ran away, Myer had paid extra for Ella to paint the red roses that were now fading on the side of the tin. As she watered the ferns that sat on white columns on her front porch, Sheriff Bissell’s automobile made its way around the bend next to the store and parked right in front of Mrs. Pomeroy’s house. Water dripped from the fern on the porch and gathered on Myer Simpson’s shoes. She leaned against the porch rail, peered down at Mrs. Pomeroy’s yard, and continued pouring water into the overflowing fern.

Sheriff Bissell’s hat was cocked to the side as he exited the car. He held the back door open, and Clive Gillespie stepped out. Clive held up his hand as if expecting to assist another passenger. Instead, Neva Clarkson made her way out the door on the opposite side of the automobile. She squinted, pulled at her skirt, and followed the sheriff and Clive through the front gate, which was shaped like a pineapple.

Mrs. Pomeroy tucked strands of her hair back into the hairnet and fumbled around with the rug swatter before propping it against a sable palm tree. She folded her arms and shifted her weight as the sheriff explained the reason for the unscheduled visit.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Pomeroy said, rubbing her fingers against a frayed corner of the rug that hung on the line. “Can’t this wait until Ella gets back?” Her eyes scanned first the sheriff, then Clive, then Neva. She turned around and looked up at the Simpson home, where Myer Simpson waved.

“Is anything the matter?” Myer called out.

The sheriff never looked away from Macon, who was standing on the bottom porch step. “Everything’s fine. Go on back to your watering.”

“No,” Clive said. “It cannot wait.” He stepped forward and then stopped. “Can it, Sheriff?”

The sheriff pushed his hat back, wiped his brow, and moved past Clive and Mrs. Pomeroy. Neva Clarkson looked back at the pineapple-shaped gate when Sheriff Bissell picked Macon up. Macon, too big to be carried any longer, arched away from the sheriff’s stained shirt. His feet dangled at the sheriff’s bent knees, and the cat’s-eye marble slipped from his hand. Clive reached down and retrieved it. He twirled the marble between his fingers, playfully stuck it in his pocket, laughed, and then handed it back to Macon. “She’s a beauty. What you say, sport? How about we go inside for some lemonade and have a little chat?”

Inside the house, Macon sat cross-legged on the cool marble by the fireplace. The clock whose face was painted to resemble a sundial ticked and kept beat with the questions that the sheriff asked about the night Lanier had brought breath back into Macon’s lungs.

“Now, son, we want you to be honest and straightforward with us,” the sheriff said. He sat on a Victorian chair that was too small for him and pulled at the pants that gathered at his crotch. “Nobody’s in trouble or nothing like that.”

“Oh, no.” Clive sat and reached up for the glass of lemonade that Mrs. Pomeroy offered. “We’re just curious is all.”

“Curious,” Mrs. Pomeroy repeated. She looked at Clive and then at Macon. Her smile faded when she saw Neva Clarkson staring at the floor and fidgeting with the hem of her skirt.

Neva sat on the brocade love seat closest to Macon. “And why are we so curious?” Neva asked.

Macon looked up at Neva and then back at the sheriff. Sheriff Bissell fanned his hat as if erasing Neva’s question. “Now, son, what did the man do exactly when he bent down over you?”

Macon rubbed the marbles that bulked out in his pants pocket. “He just breathed on me.”

“Breathed like this?” The sheriff inhaled and then exhaled so deeply that the peacock feathers in the vase next to the fireplace swayed. Macon laughed, and then the others followed, even the sheriff. “Good gracious alive,” the sheriff said. “No, but Macon, I’m just trying to get me a picture of how this all took place. Did he do it that way?”

Macon shook his head. “No, he got up real close on me. It scared me at first.”

Clive Gillespie sat on the edge of his chair and placed the glass down on the floor. “It scared you?”

Sheriff Bissell halfway turned and gave Clive a disgusted look. “It scared you, you say?”

Macon nodded and rubbed the side of his pants pocket. “I sort of felt . . .”

“Nothing to be ashamed of, son,” the sheriff whispered. “We’re all friends. You felt what?”

“Lanier’s my friend.”

“Oh yeah,” the sheriff said. “He’s been a good friend. But what I’m wondering is, when he put his mouth on top of yours the way he did, did it . . . well, did it bother you?”

Macon looked up at Mrs. Pomeroy, who used her stumpy hand to fan her face. “I felt kinda scared,” he whispered.

“You felt scared. I bet you did. I would,” the sheriff mumbled. He leaned down closer to Macon before getting down on the floor where he was knee-to-knee with him. He groaned, and his back made a crackling sound. “Just me and you talking now. Man-to-man,” the sheriff whispered and motioned for Neva to move aside. She sighed and patted her shoe on the floor before getting up and moving to the other side of the room, where Mrs. Pomeroy stood next to an oval-shaped photograph of her taken last year in Ella’s store.