The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  “Please don’t go in there and make an issue of it again.”

  As Havens is leaving the kitchen, Ronny is bending so his mother can hug him. “You’re all I’ve got, Mama. I can’t have anything happen to you.”

  Instead of greeting his son when he comes in from the kitchen, Gault keeps his eyes on his plate. “You arrive late and expect to eat at my table without washing up?”

  “I’m not eating,” Ronny grumbles.

  “Your mother’s gone to the trouble of cooking a meal that I went to the trouble of paying for that the Good Lord went to the trouble of providing, and it’s too much trouble for you to eat it?”

  Estil Gault gives her son a beseeching look, so he slumps into the empty chair, clipping the ear of the boy beside him before picking up his fork and stabbing at the food his mother puts in front of him.

  “Your mother says I’m to loan you money for an engagement ring, but I wonder what kind of courtship it is if a suitor can’t be bothered to escort his girl to church, especially when her daddy’s the preacher and it’s Baptism Sunday.”

  “Young people do things different than how we did them, Urnamy,” Estil Gault inserts.

  “I don’t need your money,” Ronny fires back.

  Gault puts down his fork, daubs his mouth with his napkin, and takes a long sip of water. He turns to Massey. “Would you call it a particular kind of pride that makes a boy turn down a man’s charity even though he’s got no employment prospects, or would you call it just plain old mule-headedness?”

  “Urnamy, please,” says his wife.

  “We Kentuckians are a proud people—that’s one thing you boys can write in that report of yours.”

  Uncharacteristically quiet until now, Massey says suddenly, “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me what you know about blue coon hunting.”

  Gault does not break eye contact with Massey, not even with his wife gasping. “Now, I don’t know where you would hear a thing like that, but I’ll say this, if you’ve come here to depict us as ignorant snake-handlers, moonshiners, and superstitious hillbillies who’ve got nothing better to do than be at daggers with one another, you’d best get on the next train.”

  Havens glares at Massey, who must piss pure vinegar because he says, “Actually, it was Ronny and his pals who raised the subject.”

  “I said no such thing!” Ronny bellows, rising to his feet so fast his chair tips backward.

  “We’ve been given to understand that coons don’t refer to colored folk,” Massey presses on. “So who are we talking about here?”

  Estil Gault snaps at Massey, “The devil himself, that’s who!”

  Rising, the mayor demands an immediate end to the subject by saying, “Take the children upstairs, Estil.” But she is fired up on the subject and turns to her husband.

  “Why don’t you tell them how the devil about burned down this town? Why don’t you tell them how they make it miserable for everyone else?” She faces Massey, the only one still seated, still, in fact, eating. “Unless you want your life to become a living hell, you best steer clear of Spooklight Holler.”

  “Shut up about Blues! I’m sick of hearing about them!” Ronny thunders out of the room, with his mother in close pursuit.

  Havens picks up his camera equipment and signals Massey to keep his mouth shut. “We are sorry for raising a subject that has caused Mrs. Gault such distress.”

  The mayor escorts them to the front door. “I don’t know what all Ronny and Faro told you or what you’ve heard from anyone else, but I’ll have you keep in mind that those folk quarantined themselves. Nobody forced them up that holler. My wife’s prone to excitability, but she’s right—best keep clear of that lot.”

  Havens shakes hands with him. “We sure will.”

  “Appreciate the warning,” adds Massey.

  As they cross the street, Havens checks over his shoulder—Estil Gault and Ronny are watching them from the upstairs window.

  “Who the hell is quarantined these days except lepers?”

  A block down Main Street, Havens waves over a kid on a bicycle and fishes out a quarter from his pocket. “Can you show us the way to Spooklight Holler?”

  The kid shakes his head, so Havens offers another coin. Still the kid refuses, so Havens peels a dollar from his billfold. “Come on now, that’s enough to replace those worn tires.”

  The kid snatches the money and pedals to the end of the street.

  As soon as they catch up to him, he pedals a bit farther. The next time they catch up to him, Massey asks, “The people up the holler, are they sick?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “Are you afraid of them?” Havens asks.

  Again, he shakes his head, but half a mile later, he pulls off to the side of the dirt road and points to a path that leads into the woods, then pedals like crazy back to town.

  * * *

  Havens hears the sound again. Some kind of birdcall, perhaps. He’s already identified several species—mockingbirds, cardinals, chickadees, towhee, and two summer residents come early, the Kentucky warbler and yellow warbler. Massey has grown impatient with him for stopping every few minutes. “You’re not on assignment for Audubon, for god’s sake.”

  He and Massey have clocked several miles. As instructed by a tenant farmer, they followed the dirt path until it came to a stand of cottonwoods, and just as they’d been told, another footpath lay beyond, but less than two hundred yards into the holler, the path curved to the right and became unnavigable. When they had to crash through dense underbrush, Havens, sweaty, itchy, and irritable, suggested they might have strayed from the path, but now he isn’t even sure they are in the right holler. Proposing they turn back only makes Massey more insistent on soldiering through the tangle.

  Havens’s sleeve rips on a thorny branch and he feels a gash open up on his forearm. Small bushy twigs keep reaching into his hair and roots knot instantly at his feet to form tripwires. Much of this environment is unfamiliar to him. The trees seem unnaturally tall, and apart from bluebells, bloodroot, and pink lady’s-slipper, he’s never seen the other flowering shrubs. Even the spiky odor in the air is foreign to him. Vines drape down from tree branches like nooses.

  When they began their hike, the air was cool, but now it is thick and cloying. They’ve been at it more than two hours, and the stream that gave them fresh hope ten minutes ago seems to have given them the slip. He can’t imagine anyone living up here, and yet they push on, Massey as if he is tracking some lost tribe, and Havens tussling with branches that seem to want to dispossess him of his camera.

  Massey suddenly points to the ground, claiming to have found the path, but it seems too narrow to be anything but an animal trail. Havens tries not to think what kind of animal. He is about to insist they turn back when he hears the noise again. It is closer this time, but too brief and too indistinct for him to identify.

  “Do you hear that?” Massey asks, cocking his head.

  Rounding a collection of boulders, they come up alongside the stream again. Massey takes this as a good sign. “See, I told you we weren’t lost.”

  Havens wets his handkerchief and applies it to the back of his neck, and then hears the sound again. Not a birdcall; rather, the unmistakable melody of human song.

  Massey gestures upstream, where their view is obscured by trees. He puts a finger to his lips before flapping his hand in the direction they are to proceed, and they keep to the edge of the stream, where the spongy moss absorbs the sound of their footsteps. Distracted by the call of a whip-poor-will, Havens does not see the branch that Massey bent out of his way come flying back, and it strikes Havens on the side of the head, causing him to gasp. Massey swings around and fires him a stern look as though Havens has just driven off their prey. He sets a brisk pace while Havens stumbles and trips and does a poor job of keeping up. As they duck beneath low branches, the melody drifts toward them like a tease. Havens has to stop to free his tripod from another errant creeper, and Massey, having
seen something, beckons him to hurry.

  Havens pulls up next to him and peeks through the gap in the brush. Beside the stream, a young woman is struggling to wedge her heel into her shoe while using a glistening rock as ballast. Obscuring her face is a sheet of wet dark-red hair, and even though she is deep in the shadow, what Havens sees stuns him. It can’t be. His body freezes the way a lesser animal’s might do in the presence of a predator. Rigor mortis notwithstanding, his senses do not yield: her skin color is an unambiguous blue.

  Havens thinks they should make themselves known with a greeting, and yet he keeps silent. He watches the water drip from the ends of her hair, allows his eyes to follow her exposed lithe arms to the curvature of her hips, where her damp dress clings to her. She twists her hair over one shoulder to wring out the water, and he wills her to move into the sunlight. It feels like a violation of her, this watching, but still Havens fails to do the decent thing. At the intersection of shadow and curve and color is his bewitching, and there arises in him an intense desire both to approach her and to turn back and forget he ever saw her.

  Massey is jabbing him in the ribs, mouthing something. Havens has no idea what is required of him. He goes back to watching her. She’s petite, slight, sylphlike, and she is about to step into the light. He wants to see her face. Massey hits him on the arm, frowns fiercely, and makes the sign for him to take a photograph. Havens raises the Contax. Step into the sunlight, he urges her silently. Step and turn. Let me see you.

  A bundle is wedged in the fork of a nearby tree, and this is where she heads, where the shadow of the forest is pulled back like a curtain and the sunlight reveals her blue skin, silky and as luminescent as the speculum of a mallard. She turns just enough that he can make out her pensive expression. Her mouth is large for so delicate a face, and her full lips are the color of midnight during a full moon. Havens might as well be socked in the gut. Something inside him is turning. Some loosening is taking place, something that makes him aware that till now he has been a constricted man, a man with limbs and gut and mind screwed too tightly in place. This great unwinding is stripping the threads of all those bolts that hold him together, so magnificent a sight is she.

  “Take it!” Massey hisses in his ear.

  JUBILEE

  Sunday morning. Every once in a while when the breeze is light and comes from just the right direction you can hear the church bells. Soon folks will be making their way to Reverend Tuttle’s church, and though that’s just one more place where the Bufords aren’t welcome, Pa still expects each of his offspring to stay on speaking terms with the Lord and spend a while in the Word, which is why Jubilee is sitting at the kitchen table with the family Bible. She opens the cover and gets stuck where she usually does, on the first page. Birth records, marriage registers, and death notices are for those who live in town, but for the Bufords of Spooklight Holler, this page and memory serve as the only archives, neither of which is too reliable. Some of the names written here have partial dates, a few no dates at all, and about a dozen names are marked with little ink dots to indicate Blue. Jubilee runs her finger across her paternal grandmother’s name, Opal, the first to have been born blue. It’s to her that Jubilee most often directs her prayers—petitions, mostly, that always begin with “Help.” Of all the dotted names, none but Jubilee and her brother, Levi, remain. They are the last of the Blues. Help keep us safe, she prays once again. Watch over Levi. Mend Thomas’s wing that he might fly soon. Send a companion for little Willow-May that she might not be so lonesome. After she whispers her amen, she tacks on, Spare one for me, too. Then, thinking better of it, she prays, Never mind.

  Mama comes in through the back door and tells her the bath is ready. Sunday is also bathing day. As the oldest, Levi is entitled to bathe first, but since he’s off someplace again, she has the rare treat of clean hot water. Mama busies Jubilee’s little sister, Willow-May, with kneading dough, which means Jubilee has the wash hut to herself, another indulgence. She slips off her nightgown, pulls her auburn hair from its pins, and tests the water before getting in. The heat darkens her skin by several shades. Her blue skin—peel it off and fold it up, and it would be no bigger than a pillowcase, hardly enough to warrant the big fuss it causes.

  She is washing her hair when she hears Chappy honking outside and yelling for her to come.

  “I’m busy right now,” she yells back. Chappy’s kin came to these mountains from the Deep South as freed people to work on the railroads seventy-some years ago. A few work in the mine at Smoke Hole now, and some, like Chappy’s grandma, are sharecroppers, and when Blues were run up this holler, they were the first to lend a hand. Jubilee and Chappy have been friends since they were babies. Chappy’s grandma says the Lord made it so they’d be friends on account of their trials, meaning her blue skin and his different way of comprehending, but she knows they’d be friends, trials or no trials.

  Chappy keeps pestering her. “Come out, Juby, hurry!”

  There’ll be no end to this till she agrees, so she climbs out, towels off, and puts on her clothes.

  “You done yet, Juby?”

  “Hold your horses!”

  “But I came by car,” he says. When she opens the door, Chappy has his hub cap steering wheel raised in front of him and is wound up about something. “You’ve got to come on a ride with me right now, Juby!”

  Though folks in town say he’s simple because he’ll never learn to write his name, Chappy is always the first to notice something out of the ordinary, trouble especially.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Two newcomers in town.”

  “Revenuers?” she asks, in which case she ought to get word to Socall, whose still produces stump liquor strong enough to take a stain out of a shirt. It wouldn’t be the first time a jealous rival ratted her out.

  Chappy shakes his head. “No. These’uns are going around asking for stories.”

  Every so often a Northerner will happen into town wanting something nobody here thought to give—the last one went holler to holler asking everyone to sing him songs, and the one before that bought up dulcimers and fiddles even though he professed not to be able to play a lick. Jubilee doesn’t see why newcomers are causing Chappy to fret so until he says, “They’ve already heard about Blues.”

  This gets her attention.

  “You wanna get a good look at them so you know who to watch out for?” Chappy reports that one of the men is out on Folgers Hill. Although that’s where the church is, there are plenty of places where she can keep from being seen, so she hurries back to the house for her veil, telling Mama that she’s going out with Chappy. Chappy doesn’t even bother to check over his shoulder for oncoming traffic the way he usually does, but has them take off down the path at full speed.

  “Who is it that told them?”

  Chappy makes a lot of engine sounds so he doesn’t have to say.

  “Was it Ronny?”

  Chappy keeps his eyes fixed ahead. “I don’t know why he’s always so mean to you and Levi.”

  A mind poisoned against Blue can be passed to offspring every bit as easily as a crooked nose or a keenness with numbers, and Ronny got himself a double dose. Even before Urnamy was elected mayor, Ronny took it upon himself to police everyone he considered lower, Bufords especially. Pa’s said a thousand times for Levi to ignore Ronny’s provocations, but Levi doesn’t always listen to sense, so whenever Ronny and his cohorts pay a visit to Spooklight Holler, afterward the Gaults will find damage to their property. Pa’s crops are tampered with; the Gaults’ automobile’s tires are slashed. Pa’s fence gets torn down; the Gaults’ store windows get smashed. As with the way of grudge-keeping, things build up, and it wasn’t that long ago that the Gaults’ shed got torched and people ran around with buckets in fear that the whole town was going to burn to the ground. Though it couldn’t be proved, everyone knew it was Levi. So did Pa. Levi was too old for a licking by that stage, but Pa made him swear to stay clear of Ronny, a pledge Levi, so far, has k
ept.

  Avoiding the wide-open spaces, she and Chappy find a bush to hide behind, and watch the man on the grassy rise. He’s very tall and not what you hear of city-dwellers, all spruced—his shirt is untucked, his pant cuffs drag in the dirt, and his hair is a messy wave that falls in his eyes. Some miners are better kept.

  “What’s he got with him?” Chappy asks.

  Jubilee explains what little she knows of cameras, but Chappy can’t seem to grasp the notion of a contraption that can make pictures of a person’s likeness. The man looks skyward, shielding his eyes, as a red-tailed hawk glides on a high draft, late in returning from its southerly home. With his head tipped almost all the way back, the man stumbles over clods of dirt and uneven ground out to the middle of the field so he can track the hawk’s path till it disappears from sight over the tree line, and then the tree that lightning struck years ago catches his attention. There’s nothing to see but a rack of scorched limbs, and yet the man hurries to set up his contraption twenty yards from it.

  “He wants to make a picture of that?” Chappy asks.

  After a while, Chappy says he has to go, and she tells him not to worry about seeing her home, that she’ll make her own way presently. She watches the newcomer, though there is not much to see beyond a man enchanted by a tree no one else would give a second glance. Except for her, folks in these parts study nature only for the purposes of its utility. The afternoon sun slips behind a dark cloud and the man considers the sky again and then moves his camera a few paces to the left before bending to put his eye against it. He straightens up, runs his fingers through his hair, and seems so pleased with his find that she has the urge to go out to him and tell him that she, too, has always considered that very same tree a beauty. As if finding common ground with a Right-colored was a thing a Blue could do.

  She wonders what Ronny might have told him about Blues. Nothing but filth, likely, and there are others sitting in that church dressed up in their Sunday best, goodness leaking out of them like tree sap, who won’t have one nice thing to say on the matter either. Some call her and Levi the Tainted, forgetting Blues and their kin once lived alongside Right-colored back when there wasn’t much to these parts except a general store and farmlands. The epidemic of 1899 put an end to that when someone went around proposing that the reason a third of the town had succumbed but not one of the dozen or so Blues was because Blues had made those folk sick, not influenza. Up cropped all manner of superstitions, and suddenly Blues were forced up the holler and told to keep to themselves.