The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  Massey puts the portfolio down, insisting, “It’s a slump, that’s all. Happens to the best of us.”

  “It’s more than a slump.” Each night in his dreams Havens develops grainy images of uninhabitable landscapes he has never visited and formless people without faces, and every morning he wakes up to see his camera zoomed in on him from the top of the bureau as though he has some explaining to do. “I don’t feel anything when I take pictures anymore,” he confesses.

  “When that happens to me with an article, the subject matter’s the issue. You’ve got to take pictures of what interests you.”

  “And what if I don’t know what interests me?”

  “Then get back into your element.” Massey makes it sound so easy. “Pomeroy was going to send Stanley out here with me, but I told him you needed to do this. So here you go, your great outdoors you love so much.” Massey yanks open the window and leans out. “It does go on and on, doesn’t it?” He slams the window shut.

  “And if I don’t succeed here?”

  Clapping Havens’s forearms as though beating dust from cushions, Massey says, “Then we’ll go to some other wilderness. Hell, we’ll go to Antarctica if we have to. But first you have to get ol’ ray of sunshine downstairs to smile for the birdy.”

  Three other boarders are sitting at small card tables in the front room when Massey and Havens go downstairs. Like a benevolent landowner out visiting his tenants, Massey has a chat with each of them while Havens slides into a chair at the far end of the room, hoping he won’t be conscripted into taking pictures of anyone else.

  After a less than inspired dinner of brisket, potatoes, and runny cherry pie, Sylvia Fullhart shoos the boarders back to their rooms and asks Havens if he prefers her to sit or stand. Massey is the one to arrange her in the wingback chair beside the dark fireplace.

  As much as Massey’s work is characterized by volume, a process that churns out page after page, Havens’s is a study in economy. Rather than shoot a subject multiple times from many different angles and in varying lighting conditions, he prefers to observe a subject over a long period of time before pressing the shutter. This has always been his method, right from the age of fourteen, when his father spent two dollars and bought him his first camera, a cardboard Kodak Brownie Number 2, as a way to give a sickly kid something to do on his good days. That’s when Havens would venture out to the backyard on pale skinny legs and use the lens to examine some beetle carcass or duck feather or half-buried bottle top. Scrutiny, however, works less well with human subjects. People don’t want Havens waiting for some change in their expression or shift in posture to reveal something about their inner landscape—what he has come to think of as their tell. They want a portrait that flatters them.

  While Havens observes Sylvia Fullhart through his 135mm viewfinder, deciding whether to do a simple head-and-shoulders or a full-length shot with more setting, she begins to run off the names and pedigrees of everyone in town. “But you’d be wise to obtain the blessing of Urnamy Gault first before trying to talk to folks. Get on the mayor’s good side and you’ll have everyone telling you their woebegones, but mind, that business about being on assignment for the president won’t work on him either.”

  As is now customary, Havens sees nothing through the viewfinder that interests him and the light from the floor lamp seems to cleave Sylvia Fullhart’s body in two. “The conditions are not ideal. I suggest we do this in the morning when we can take advantage of natural light.”

  “Just take the picture!” Massey and Sylvia Fullhart say in unison.

  As though his shirtsleeves were made of cast iron, he lifts his Contax and attaches it to the tripod while Massey keeps throwing him a thumbs-up.

  As soon as she hears the click of the shutter, the woman says, “I think I’d prefer a standing one.”

  Massey arranges her arms.

  “Be sure to talk to Reverend Tuttle. He can tell you the history of Chance going back to 1830. Anything about the Chesapeake and Ohio you want to know, he’ll tell you, and everything about the mines, too. He’s the most learned of any of us.”

  “Would he happen to know anything about blue coon hunting?”

  She gapes at Massey, one hand on her knee, the other on her hip, in a most unnatural pose. “You can’t come right out with a question like that!”

  Havens notices the woman’s tell—a patch of eczema on her neck suddenly inflamed.

  As though he’s picked up the spoor of some animal, Massey presses her. “It’s got nothing to do with raccoons, does it?”

  Sylvia’s eyes flick from Massey to the camera. She motions for Havens to stop pointing it at her. “Best you leave that business aside.”

  She won’t be coaxed into saying more on the subject, and the men return to their room. Massey tells Havens that he tried researching race relations in eastern Kentucky, and what little he’d gleaned was from the whites’ perspective only, which is to say, things aren’t as bad as they are farther south. “But get this—the coal companies around here ran huge ad campaigns in the South recruiting Negro laborers and offering to pay black miners the same as white miners, and pretty soon the workforce was about half black and half white. On the surface that strikes a person as reasonable, doesn’t it?”

  Havens guesses where Massey is going. “But the white miners don’t want to have anything to do with the black miners.”

  “Bingo,” Massey says. “Which means working conditions that make hell look inviting. Except there’s no way white miners are going to join ranks with black miners because they’re too busy worrying Negro men are taking their jobs. Therefore, a weak union and a fat corporation patting itself on the back.”

  “So, if it’s a racial reference, why the ‘blue’?”

  Massey shrugs and starts making notes, and Havens stretches out on his bed and wonders what they are getting themselves into.

  * * *

  Reverend Arlen Tuttle is a frowning man with a tight-lipped way about him, which gives the impression that every word Massey utters will be stored and used against him one day. He holds his lapels and waits for Massey to get through apologizing for interrupting his preparations for the Sunday service and explaining about the good work being done by the FSA before saying, “You paid a visit to the drinking establishment, I hear.”

  “The only way to depict a town with any accuracy is to visit as many places and speak to as many people as we can.”

  “If you want an accurate depiction of our town, you would do better talking to my parishioners than entertaining the likes of Ronny Gault.”

  A young woman with heavily applied makeup and a head full of ringlets rushes down the aisle. “Sorry I’m late, Pa.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere.”

  He gives her his handkerchief and tells her to wipe off her lipstick.

  She gathers the pile of song sheets from the altar and tosses a few on each bench while Massey asks the preacher about the church’s views on the coal industry and the labor movement.

  “In the Lord’s house, there are no picket lines or any other means used to divide people. In the waters of baptism, we are all one.”

  Finishing her task, his daughter begins trimming the altar candles, and Havens drifts over and introduces himself.

  “Sarah,” she responds.

  “We met your boyfriend yesterday—Ronny Gault.”

  “Ronny’s not my boyfriend, and you’d do well not to believe anything he tells you.” She writes hymn numbers on the chalkboard.

  “Does that apply to blue coon hunting?”

  At the question, Sarah Tuttle behaves like someone who’s hypothermic. She wraps her arms across herself and through clenched teeth says, “Ronny ought to be locked up for talking that way!”

  Havens would question her further, but something has caught his attention on the shelf built into the back of the pulpit. “Is that a gun?”

  “That’s a snake repellent,” says Reverend Tuttle, who remov
es the revolver. “A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.” He shows where a snake is carved in the mahogany handle. “A couple years back, one of Pastor Wrightley’s parishioners came in here with a rattler in each hand, ready to set us straight on how worship ought to be conducted, and one of them got loose and delivered a fatal strike to Mrs. O’Dell’s ankle.”

  Having a man of God in front of his pulpit with a handgun is too good an opportunity to pass up. “Do you mind if I take your picture?” Havens asks, and to his surprise, Reverend Tuttle agrees, striking a pose more befitting a bounty hunter than a man ordained to save souls.

  Churchgoers with a slightly malnourished way about them start filing in and taking their places, and a man who is a good many dinners past fitting into his three-piece wool suit ambles to the front to join Massey, Havens, and Reverend Tuttle. “These the ones asking all the questions?” Reeking of cigars, he peers out from under the brim of his homburg with small blue eyes that give the impression cigar smoke is still rising up into them, and pulls his chin toward his neck as if to stifle a belch. “Name’s Urnamy Gault, but you fellas can call me Mayor.” He doesn’t introduce the brittle-looking woman behind him who has a child on her hip, four in tow, and one on the way, though she appears to be a good deal past childbearing age.

  Massey is in the process of stating their business when the mayor cuts him off. “You boys saved?”

  Massey doesn’t skip a beat. “I went to Methodist camp meetings in my youth.”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Urnamy Gault says. “Never met a Northerner who was saved, have you, Reverend? Well, you boys couldn’t have picked a better time to worship with us than Baptism Sunday.”

  Massey tries to make an ally of the mayor, following him to his pew; Reverend Tuttle takes a seat in the chair beside the pulpit and Havens slips outside, passing Sarah Tuttle, chewing her nails and eyeing him from the corner. He strolls the grounds to take in more of the surroundings. Along the slopes of the hunching hills are clusters of cabins, each with a rough field of corn, wheat, or tobacco, while the main river bullies its way through the valley below. Pastures give way to woodlands, which rise up to form an endless parade of mountains, the effect of which makes it hard to believe that elsewhere in the nation ships are leaving port, skyscrapers are being erected, and automobiles are rolling off factory lines.

  After a while, he returns to the church and positions his tripod and camera thirty feet from the building. He has in mind a straight-forward picture, one depicting the only well-maintained, if unadorned, structure in the area, standing resolute as if to keep at bay the primitive forces of both man and nature. For scenics, he prefers to shoot with his Graflex Speed Graphic rather than the smaller and more convenient Contax. He sets the f-stop at F6 and the shutter speed at 1/125 and assesses the church first through the prism range finder and then through the lens used to correct for parallax error. Just as he is about to press the shutter, the doors spring open and a phalanx of congregants files out behind Reverend Tuttle, who holds his Bible as if it were a lantern.

  Breaking ranks, Massey runs up to Havens. “Everyone’s going down to the river to get baptized. Come on, this is going to be something else.”

  Havens closes up his Graflex, unscrews it from the tripod, and hurries to catch up to Massey, who has merged again with the crowd, now singing and clapping and marching along a narrow spit of dirt into the forest. They thread around mulberry trees and yews and oaks, and their song is no longer swept away by the hillside breeze but swells beneath the humid leafy canopy and takes on an adhesive quality. After skidding down a treacherous embankment and clamoring over boulders, the congregation bunches at a stream. Sarah stands beside her father, and, at his cue, begins to sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” loud enough to be heard on the other side of the forest. Massey jostles Havens through the throng for a position closer to the action. With her hands resting on the back of her hips and her eyes locked ahead, Sarah Tuttle’s voice slides up to a note and holds it a long time in a high lonesome vibrato at the end of the phrase “I sing because I’m free.” Havens has never heard anything like it.

  Reverend Tuttle strolls into the water, makes an appeal to the heavens and an invitation to those assembled, and gestures to Sarah to start fitting white robes on those who come forward.

  Amidst “hallelujahs” and “amens,” the mayor is first to be yanked underwater. One after another, people make their way into the shallows, dressed as though for bed or surgery, each with a somnolent expression, and it does seem that some transformation takes place in the process of submersion, because each one returns to shore bright-eyed and smiling and a little shy, readying for an embrace as though having returned from a long trip.

  Havens sets up his tripod and notices Massey pull loose his tie and kick off his shoes.

  “What are you doing?”

  Massey peels off his socks. “I’m going in.”

  “You can’t do that.” Havens tries apprehending him, but Massey elbows his way to the front of the crowd and presents himself in front of a deacon, lifting his arms in the air for a robe. Shooting pictures is pointless now, so Havens retreats to a boulder, where, a moment later, he feels a tap on his shoulder.

  Sarah Tuttle looks grave. “Can I talk to you?” She faces the baptism, indicating for Havens to do the same, and gives the impression of clapping along with the congregation as she speaks to Havens under her breath. “What else did Ronny tell you? Did he say he was planning something?”

  “You mean, blue coon—”

  She cuts him off by raising her hand. “Don’t call them that.”

  So they are people. “Was Ronny referring to Negroes?”

  She shakes her head. “You work for President Roosevelt?” Sarah asks.

  Havens clarifies, “We report to a department that collects information about people so that other government agencies can help those people. For example, if a town needs better schools or new roads—”

  “You seem like a nice man. Are you?”

  Havens hesitates. “Yes?”

  Bedraggled and grinning, Massey has waded to the shore and is shaking hands with people.

  “So, if I told you innocent people get hurt in this town and nobody does anything about it, could you help? Or your department?”

  “Does this have to do with what Ronny and his friends said?”

  Havens follows Sarah’s gaze—Gault is talking to Massey. “Forget I said anything,” she says, slipping away.

  “Gault’s just invited us to lunch,” Massey reports, returning to Havens. He tips his head to one side and thumps his ear.

  “I’m surprised he fell for it.”

  Massey rakes his fingers through his wet hair. “Do you think I just pulled a stunt to get in with folks?”

  “So what, you’re a convert?”

  “Remember that time we went out to cover the mill workers’ strike, the one that turned into a riot?”

  “You threw a rock at a policeman, as I recall.”

  “I picked up a sign.” Massey rolls his eyes. “The point is, going into the water felt like that. Don’t you ever want to give yourself to something larger than just yourself? Be part of some bigger transaction, whatever it is?”

  Havens changes the subject. “The preacher’s daughter wants our help.”

  “With what?”

  “ ‘Blue coons’ refers to people, but I don’t think Negroes, and my guess is the mayor’s son is involved in some kind of feud with them.” Havens explains that Sarah’s afraid for them, whoever they are, but that she clammed up as soon as she saw Gault approach Massey.

  “Just when I was saying I didn’t want to write about stereotypes, and I get the Hatfields and the McCoys.”

  “I think we must be very careful who we ask what,” Havens says, watching Sarah Tuttle dart through the trees.

  HAVENS

  Havens and Massey take their seats on either side of Urnamy Gault’s dining table, along with four scrubbed boys, the older of which
has the infant on his lap. Likening baptism to spring cleaning, Gault is advising Massey to get dunked in the waters of salvation once a year. The mayor doesn’t so much talk as proclaim, and Havens and Massey have already been subjected to his opinions on everything from national politics to local economics, and how big corporations lure from small towns young able-bodied men who fall for hopes of an easier life rather than taking up the honest one waiting in their own backyard.

  During Gault’s protracted blessing, Havens helps Estil Gault carry dishes to the table. She is a small-boned woman who appears to hold her breath much of the time, as though she ought not to take more than her share of anything, least of all air. When she is asked by her husband as to their son’s whereabouts, each word she speaks comes out pinched. “Gone to call on Sarah Tuttle, I expect.”

  Gault scoffs and explains that Sarah Tuttle is giving Ronny the runaround.

  Havens returns to the kitchen for another dish, and finds Estil doubled over with pain. Pressing her hand against her belly, she eases into the chair Havens hurries to retrieve for her.

  Havens pours her a glass of water. “Shall I call your husband?”

  “It’ll pass.”

  Havens is still deciding how long he should let it go before sounding the alarm when Ronny comes in through the back door and rushes to his mother’s side. “Mama, you’re ill.”

  “I’m fine.” She scoots to the edge of the chair and raises her hand so he can help her stand.

  “The doctor told you no more, and that was two babies ago, and now here’s another one on the way.”

  Havens fills the pitcher with water while Estil tells her son not to fret.

  “What’s taking you so long, Estil?” Gault calls.

  “You go on and start without me,” she hollers back, stifling a moan.

  Ronny’s face darkens. “Why can’t he lay off?”