All Things Bright and Strange

by James Markert

  Alfred said, “Gonna have to find the perfect spot so this will work regular.”

  “Maybe it was a flaw in the building of it,” said Ellsworth.

  “Looks better than that painting you attempted over there.” Alfred pointed in the wrong direction. “Van Gogh, Monet . . . should we now add Newberry to that list?”

  Ellsworth said, “Go dangle.”

  Omar chuckled, then stood and left the house without warning. Just stood from his chair, grabbed his hat, and walked out the door. Through the window they watched him enter the woods. Alfred left a minute later, as if he’d become suddenly nervous about something. He put on his hat and felt his way to the door. Before going out he said, “Linda May lays with me now.” He tipped his hat and walked outside. He, too, entered the woods. Max Lehane, the town’s volunteer fire chief, escorted him.

  Linda May lays with me now. Ellsworth fought back envy, not because he carried a torch for Linda May—although, like Anna Belle, she was a striking woman—but because it made him realize how long it had been since his lips touched anything so soft as a woman’s.

  He and Gabriel sat with each other for a minute. What had never been uncomfortable before was suddenly awkward now, and they both looked to the floorboards. Seemed like ever since the woods took on all that color, their colors had turned brighter as well. Colors he might have noticed faintly before but now were unavoidable to his eye. Maybe she noticed it, too, but like him was afraid to bring up something so strange.

  “Where’d you go last night, Ellsworth?”

  “Nowhere. Why? You spying on me?”

  “No.” She stood, straightened her overalls. “Just be careful is all.”

  Then she left.

  Ellsworth ate a butter sandwich for lunch. Anna Belle had become so preoccupied with the woods that she’d stopped cooking for him.

  As the afternoon wore on, Eliza’s image began to fade from his mind again, and he missed his pals. He promised himself he wouldn’t go into the woods again. But he did.

  And he went the next day too.

  Ellsworth hurried through his coffee, but it did little to settle the nerves he’d begun to develop, the shaking that would start the moment he’d swing his legs from the bedsheets and promise himself that last night would be just that—the last.

  But each time he stepped inside the chapel at night, her voice would become closer, the caress of air more penetrating and real, to the point where he wouldn’t want to leave. And what made it harder was her begging him to stay. And he would, getting up only after the line of people outside the chapel grew, their chatter audible. “How can a person be so selfish? Sheriff Lecroy should put a time limit inside those walls.” Everyone seemed to think that those inside were taking too long.

  Raphael’s voice, of course, would accompany him back home, real enough to make him look around to make sure the boy wasn’t shadowing him.

  “It’s bad medicine, Ellsworth.”

  Ellsworth finished his coffee and placed the mug on the kitchen table. It’s too good to be bad. My wife’s in there. Till death do us part.

  He hurled the coffee mug into the wall and felt better after watching the pieces dance like dice across the hardwood. His tension oozed much like the coffee remnants down his wall, and his hands stopped shaking. Smashing that mug had flashed through his head and he’d done it without thought of having to clean up a mess. He flexed his fingers and wondered if Anna Belle was home. Wondered if she’d ever gone dancing with that boob Eddington. Wondered why she’d stopped coming by every day to check on him.

  He had a sudden urge to see that chess set, the one with him and Calvin as pawns. He holstered his gun and walked across the street.

  Behind the town hall, Alfred and Linda May walked hand in hand toward the trees. The woods were busy, crowded with people walking to and from. None of them talking or looking at one another in passing. All of them too on edge for conversation.

  Up the hill, Lou Eddington’s house stood sunflower yellow against the blue-sky backdrop. In front of the house, a swath of yellow goldenrods bloomed beside cherry red bougainvillea and a row of violet oleander. The oleander and goldenrods had never bloomed so early—a garden never grown so quickly. Bellhaven dripped with color that conjured visions of Van Gogh, Renoir, or Monet.

  In contrast, massive black birds clustered on the trees around Eddington’s yellow house.

  Vultures, Ellsworth realized. Two dozen, at least. As if they’d flown in to combat the arrival of all the cardinals and the dozens of other colorful birds flying around that chapel.

  Ellsworth crossed the street and stopped on Anna Belle’s front lawn, looking around. Outside the jailhouse, in the shadows facing Maddie Horn’s garden, he spotted Sheriff Lecroy. The sheriff—of all things to do on a bright spring day—stood urinating on Maddie’s cucumber patch, humming while he watched the golden stream arc over her picket fence.

  He spotted Ellsworth, turned away, and finished peeing in the gravel next to the jailhouse. He zipped up quickly, then ducked inside where Tanner was still locked in the cell.

  What in the world was the sheriff doing?

  And then a past conversation flashed into Ellsworth’s head from back when Lecroy was still a deputy. Miss Horn’s cucumbers were the largest in town, and she’d defeated Lecroy’s mother’s cucumbers in a local competition. Mrs. Lecroy had cried on her son’s shoulder, claiming she’d never won anything in her life. The next day, Deputy Lecroy had jokingly told Ellsworth that he was going to urinate all over Miss Horn’s cucumbers and see how they grew then. “What if it makes them grow bigger?” Ellsworth had asked. “I don’t think it would,” Deputy Lecroy had said after some thought. But his foolish words had never amounted to any action.

  Until now.

  Sheriff Lecroy had gone and peed all over Miss Horn’s cucumber patch. Had he felt the same lack of control Ellsworth had experienced before hurling his coffee mug into the wall? Ellsworth laughed, even though the widow Horn was a nice lady and didn’t deserve to have her cucumbers vandalized.

  Ellsworth didn’t deserve to have his leg blown off either.

  Sometimes life ain’t a bed of roses. Sometimes life ain’t duck soup.

  He grinned all the way up to Anna Belle’s front porch and didn’t bother knocking. The door was unlocked. Raphael stood against the living room wall, two paces from the piano bench he’d just vacated.

  The boy glanced toward the kitchen, where pieces of something crashed to the floor. “You don’t look good, Mr. Newberry. You’ve got to stop going to the woods. Please. Both of you.” He tried to block entry to the kitchen. “Don’t go in there. You shouldn’t see her like this.”

  Ellsworth gently nudged the boy aside and entered the kitchen anyway. Anna Belle wore an untied nightgown that showed glimpse of a naked chest and a bare leg as she twirled away from the counter. His heart rate sped up. He should have looked the other way, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He’d always wondered what her getaway sticks looked like unhampered by those long dresses. Calvin had been a lucky man.

  Anna Belle tried to hide what she’d been doing before his sudden arrival. Her hair was disheveled, and she looked older. Her face was unmade, her lips a pale natural color he found alluring. There was something about the plainness; he’d never seen her look prettier.

  Or maybe he was just tired.

  Maybe they both were.

  She held a roll of tape in her right hand. She trembled like Ellsworth had done before he’d smashed that mug into the wall.

  To ease the pressure.

  Ellsworth stepped toward her. His forehead was clammy, and he wanted nothing more than to hug her tight and smell her hair and then possibly ask for her hand in marriage. But that was crazy talk. They’d fight from sunup to sundown.

  But that smile, and those legs . . .

  She hid the tape behind her back.

  “What are you doing, Anna Belle?”

  “Go away.” She bit her plump bottom lip.
Chess pieces were scattered across the kitchen table as well as the floor beneath it. Two pieces remained on the board—Ellsworth and Calvin face-to-face in the middle. She pointed. “You going to explain that?”

  “Explain what?”

  “You’ve got secrets about Calvin. About how he died.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Alfred told me this morning. Told me I should talk to you about how Calvin died.”

  Ellsworth clenched his jaw. Alfred had promised he’d never tell. And Alfred didn’t even know the full truth.

  “What happened, Ellsworth?” She approached slowly, her nightgown flowing back against her hips. She pushed him against the wall. Stood inches from his face, her chest heaving. She kissed him on the lips and then stepped back, as confused as he was. Her eyes were watery, tired, and reddened from lack of all kinds of necessary things.

  She pounded her fist into his chest. “Why did Lou give us that chess set?”

  As quickly as the thought entered Ellsworth’s mind, he acted on it. He grabbed the tape from Anna Belle’s hand, ripped off a six-inch piece, and stuck it across her mouth, pressed it nice and tight too. She backed away and tore at it, but before she could he’d taped another piece across her lips, sealing the first one down good and hard.

  “Been wanting to do that for years now, Anna Belle.”

  She screamed something that was muffled by the tape and then ripped it off her mouth, crumbled it, and threw it at him. “Eliza was mad,” she screamed. “A lunatic. She heard voices and saw things. Yet you loved her still. And so did he.”

  “So did who?”

  “Calvin. And all the men here in Bellhaven. I think they all secretly carried a torch for her.”

  Ellsworth shook his head, started to tell her she was wrong, but then spotted what Anna Belle had been doing at the counter with the tape when he’d walked in. Eliza’s picture had been ripped into a dozen pieces and she’d been trying to tape it back together.

  “You took that picture off the piano? My only picture.”

  She was crying, mouthing the words “I don’t know” as a stream of saliva and tears stretched from top lip to bottom.

  She knew why she’d done it. Her so-called best friend. The thought had popped into her head, and she’d acted on it without thought of right and wrong. But that was no excuse. She had no right . . .

  He approached her, clenching his fist like a man never should toward a woman.

  “Don’t do it, Mr. Newberry.” Raphael stood in the doorway, tears dripping from his emerald eyes. “It’s that place. It’s bad medicine.”

  He stopped. Bad medicine—why did people keep saying that?

  “You the devil?” Ellsworth asked, wishing he hadn’t.

  Raphael teared up, shook his head no.

  Anna Belle cowered at his feet. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ellsworth.”

  He looked down at her, unclenched his fist. They watched one another. He helped her up from the floor. She tied the folds of her nightgown together, suddenly modest, and hurried from the kitchen.

  Ellsworth reached down and began picking up the scattered chess pieces, but then remembered the picture of Eliza that Anna Belle had been taping back together. He found it on the counter, mostly put back together, yet still ruined.

  Raphael was on the floor gathering the chess pieces. Ellsworth helped him. Neither spoke until every piece was back on the board, and then Raphael said, “She visits him at night.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Eddington. The house with the vultures. She goes there every night now.”

  Ambulances sounded in the distance. Smoke belched from pockets of fire. Wreckage smoldered over sun-caked mud and twisted rails.

  Their train car was smashed like an accordion. No one moaned or cried.

  “Mother?” Ellsworth blinked, tried to get up but couldn’t move. Sunlight blinded him. “Mother?”

  “She’s gone.”

  There she was again, a beautiful face in shimmering halo. She’d saved him. Protected him. Embraced him right before the car derailed. Bright embers floated over her shoulder. Her cheeks were blackened by smoke.

  “Are you hurt?” Her voice was angelic and her eyes a brilliant blue, a cloudless azure eerily similar to his own.

  “A little sore.” He wiggled his fingers, moved his arm, then his legs.

  I’m alive. I can move. But can I still pitch?

  “Is your name Michael?”

  How does she know? Who are you? “My name is Ellsworth now.”

  She rubbed her hand over his brow. “I can still see your color.”

  “Are you real?”

  She’d looked down at her dress, felt her hips, patted her arms and chest, and gave him the kindest smile he’d ever known. “I reckon so.”

  He smiled.

  Knew right then he loved her.

  CHAPTER 15

  Ellsworth woke with half his face numb, his cheek pressed against a cold mosaic floor.

  Birds twittered; flapping wings echoed. Sunlight beamed through the hole in the roof. He got up weak kneed and fell into the frescoed wall. The door creaked on its broken hinge, and he stumbled out into the clearing, into swirls of color and blooms and butterfly wings. A yellow warbler landed atop the swaying chapel door. He dropped to the ground, closed his eyes, and recalled what Raphael had told him yesterday.

  “Wagons arrived the other night, Mr. Newberry. At Eddington’s house.”

  “What wagons?”

  “Wagons filled with heavy crates. Covered with tarp. Men in dark suits unloaded them into his house.”

  Yesterday, while Raphael was telling Ellsworth about Anna Belle’s visits to Eddington’s house, they’d heard her leave through the front door, and moments later they saw her enter the woods. Raphael had pleaded for Ellsworth not to go back to the chapel. Made him promise. Ellsworth had looked the boy in the eyes and said he’d not go in, but after he’d awoken from the dream about his mother’s death and meeting Eliza, he’d had to. Not only had he gone into the woods, in fact, but evidently he’d spent the night.

  Even now as he lay in the clearing, barely able to move, he already craved a return back inside. He made it up to his elbow, then knee, and then started crawling toward the chapel as a trio of redbirds swooped inches from the ground, stirring up a patch of leaves.

  Had he told his mother he was sorry for what he said on the train? He couldn’t remember. Forgiveness was only feet away.

  He wobbled toward the chapel door, and then a large hand clutched his forearm.

  Gabriel blotted out the sun. She hoisted his weight over her shoulder, and he was too drained to fight her. His prosthesis had fallen off. She bent down under his weight and grabbed it too. “Let’s get you home. Town can’t see you like this.”

  “Leave me, please.”

  “Close your head, Ellsworth.” She stepped out of the clearing and entered the woods. Four deer watched. Voices sounded in the distance. Early visitors. Gabriel moved away from them on a quick tangent in the opposite direction so they wouldn’t be seen.

  Put me down. I have to tell my mother I’m sorry.

  He couldn’t muster the strength to form words.

  Deep breaths expanded Gabriel’s chest and the muscles of her back as she walked. Her boots crunched against deadfall, the cadence soporific, soothing. She was so strong. Always had been. Strength of God. Remember Blue Fire? I used it to help free the slaves. Me and you.

  She looked back at him and smiled as if she’d just read his mind.

  He closed his eyes and allowed himself to fall limp.

  Ellsworth awoke in his bed, warmed by daylight.

  Across the bedroom, Gabriel and Raphael sat in wooden chairs brought up from the kitchen. They stood when his eyes opened. Gabriel’s head reached nearly to the ceiling, while Raphael was just tall enough to prop his elbows on the footboard.

  “What are you two doing in here?”

  “Doin’ what needed to be done,” said Gabriel
.

  He grunted, got out of bed. They followed him from the bedroom and down the stairs, giving him space but not so much that he could slip out the backdoor.

  “Might as well throw me in the cell with Tanner,” he said at the kitchen table, eating rice and beans that Gabriel had made. She was no cook.

  “No jail cells left.”

  “What do you mean there’s no cells left?”

  Raphael ate like he hadn’t eaten in days, so Gabriel did the talking. “Tanner is still in the one. Last night Sheriff Lecroy filled the other two with John Stone and Beverly Adams.”

  “What did they do?”

  “John Stone blew Ned Gleeson’s shed up.”

  “Tried to burn it down,” Raphael said, chewing.

  “Don’t speak with a full mouth,” Gabriel told the boy. She’d apparently taken over the motherly role for Raphael. She looked back to Ellsworth. “You know how Ned doesn’t sleep but a few hours at night. Then he goes out to his shed and makes those birdhouses?”

  “I’ve got three of them,” said Ellsworth. There wasn’t a house in Bellhaven that didn’t have one of Ned’s colorful birdhouses on their porch. “Eliza liked them. The whole town likes them.”

  “Well, as Ned’s neighbor, John Stone wasn’t so fond of all that hammering and sawing in the night, right outside John’s window. And you know he gets up before the roosters. Must have had enough. So he set the shed on fire and watched it burn. All those birdhouses gone, along with Ned’s tools.”

  Ellsworth shook his head. “Had John been visiting that chapel?”

  “Like everyone else,” said Gabriel.

  “Except the two of you.”

  Gabriel and Raphael shared a glance, and she said, “And now you. You’re not going back there.”

  “Why do you not feel the pull?”

  Raphael said, “Because once was enough. What seems good can also be bad.”

  “The town is falling apart, Ellsworth. We need you before it crumbles.”

  “Why me?”

  “It was always meant to be you.” Gabriel blushed. “I’ve known since we were kids. Saw that color.”