The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  Levi tends the fire and Mama pulls Grandma’s suitcase from her lap as soon as she falls asleep, handing it to Willow-May to unpack. Pa and Mr. Massey have put aside their discussion, and Socall is regaling them with funny stories about the husband she chased off.

  “Are you married?” Willow-May asks Mr. Massey.

  “Me? Gosh no, nobody will have me, but Havens here has a sweetheart. He’s the man to ask about romance and things of that nature.”

  What lightness Jubilee felt only moments ago now has the quality of ash.

  Mr. Havens acts deaf when Willow-May asks if his lady friend is pretty.

  “She sure is,” Mr. Massey answers for him. “Ask him to show you the picture in his wallet.”

  Willow-May pesters Mr. Havens until Jubilee snaps at her to quit, and that’s when Mr. Massey says, “He’s going to marry her,” looking straight at Jubilee.

  Pa is congratulating Mr. Havens and Socall is filling glasses with shine and Mama is asking if a date’s been set, and Mr. Havens doesn’t seem to know whether to keep glaring at Mr. Massey or shake Pa’s hand or make a dash for the door. He glances at Jubilee and opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, she grabs a lantern and storms out the back door. She marches over to the barn. How could she have been so stupid! Why had she permitted herself to think of him in that way, allowing herself to believe he could’ve felt something for her? Had the cruelties of others taught her nothing? To him, she was a novelty, nothing more. She’d made a fool of herself! Charging into the barn, she locates Thomas’s cage on the stool beside his cot and snatches it and thunders back outside. “Don’t you get yourself in a flap!” she rebukes the startled bird, even though water and seed are flying through the slats, and when the bird keeps fluttering about, she flings open the cage and grabs the bird and says, “You want to fly so bad, just go! Go on, fly away, you stupid bird!” From her palm, Thomas looks up at the night sky. Never has it been so empty. Jubilee slumps to the ground with her back against the wash shed, darkens the lantern, and sets Thomas down beside her. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

  Being alone is what she’s good at, what she’s meant for. Hurt is what happens when a person forgets that.

  Thomas flutters up onto her lap. She makes her finger a perch.

  HAVENS

  So impenetrable is the dark that Havens can see nothing beyond the two-foot circle of jaundiced light from his lantern. His head seems to graze the overcast sky, a vast caved basement ceiling with a blown lightbulb, and every footfall seems at risk of stepping off an edge or landing in a hole or a steel-jaw trap, but he must find Jubilee. What exactly he’ll say he doesn’t know. Perhaps he’ll start by explaining about that awful photograph of Betty.

  Five months Havens and Betty have been going steady, after having become acquainted through Massey. For a month or so, Betty had been Massey’s gal, though she was in every conceivable way the opposite of his usual fare. Massey typically goes for musical or artistic types, foxy girls with erratic temperaments, and Betty, with a homespun way about her, is in the typing pool—a believer in checklists, five-year plans, and coupons. It irked Havens the way Massey would bring her to a soiree only to leave her sitting on a divan all evening, and one night he told her she could do better, not expecting she would find him to be a suitable substitute. Having always felt at a disadvantage with women, especially on those occasions that have involved disrobement, Havens felt comfortable with Betty, competent even. She recently outlined the terms by which she would permit him to go all the way, and to his surprise, he’d already met them, though neither of them would chalk up the amorous enterprise as earth-shattering, he’s sure. In learning of his assignment to Kentucky, she’d suggested Havens take her picture so he’d have something to put in his wallet, but he kept coming up with excuses—the lighting was wrong, the lens needed cleaning, he’d run out of film. If he could sleep with her, why could he not take her picture? Determined, he’d set up his Graflex, propped her on a stool, and was horrified to hear himself instruct her to say “cheese,” before firing off three shots he knew were overexposed. He never even bothered to develop them. On the station platform, Betty gave him an unflattering photograph she had paid someone else to take. The least he could do was put it in his wallet.

  Having circumvented the house, Havens searches the length of the backyard, calling softly through the doorways of the tool shed and wash shed, both of which might as well be black holes, and hearing only the high-pitched siren of a thousand insects warning of a night that has turned feral. Jubilee could be within arm’s reach and he wouldn’t be any the wiser.

  Lighting a second lantern in the barn, Havens notices the flicker is gone. He does not want to get ready for bed. Instead, he waits in the doorway, imagining every sound signals her approach. Right up until the last moment, he hopes the advancing lantern belongs to her.

  “I shouldn’t have brought up your private life, I’m sorry,” Massey says, breezing past Havens. “But it’s probably good that it came out, don’t you think? It would be a shame if Jubilee got the wrong idea.”

  “What wrong idea?”

  Massey puts his lantern on the desk, unbuttons his collar, his cuffs, and surveys his notes. “Nice guy from a big city being so attentive—here’s your pie, let me wash your dishes; it just seems to me that a girl who’s been a target all her life might start to see you as some kind of savior.”

  “You can’t talk about her like that; you don’t know how she thinks. You don’t know anything about her! And you’re the one acting like everyone’s savior!”

  Massey swings around.

  “What was that business about Levi moving to the city and pursuing a music career? How far-fetched was that?” Havens accuses. “Except nobody bought it, so best you get your head around the fact that we’re going back with what Pomeroy asked for, and maybe you can write an article about needing to preserve the Appalachian culture, or whatever it is the publishing highbrows are likely to get excited about, but that’s it.”

  “Whoa. All this because I brought up Betty?”

  Havens rips the photograph from his wallet and shoves it at Massey. “Here. You’re so concerned about her all of a sudden, you have it!”

  “Ah, this is about Jubilee. That’s what’s eating you.” Massey heaves a big sigh and suggests they’re both getting too involved with the Bufords, him being especially fond of Willow-May, and that they have to keep their feelings out of the matter if they’re to do right by them.

  Havens is in no mood for a lecture. “Don’t you get it? Buford’s not going to agree to your story.”

  Meeting Havens’s ire is Massey’s infuriating self-assuredness. “I don’t need him to. Levi will.”

  “Were we even sitting at the same table?”

  “Sarah Tuttle’s going to get him on board.” Massey recounts having bumped into her outside the post office, where she solicited his help and gave a little more context about the banishment of the Bufords and the other families. “Want to know how young innocent Opal was kept from marrying Boyd Gault? By being forced to marry her uncle. Forced. Imagine being dragged out of your house in the middle of the night, marched to a meadow, and then roped to your next of kin by the mayor, for god’s sake, while law enforcement looks the other way.” Massey relays that anyone related to Opal, whether blue or not, was forbidden from having contact with townsfolk unless they were ready to suffer the consequences, and that even rumors of contact could lead to consequences. “According to Sarah, there were raids to see if everyone was sleeping in their assigned beds. Those three young men Jubilee told you about, who went missing—maybe it was just because they were blue or maybe it was because they were eligible bachelors who went fishing outside the family pond. So, where does that leave you today if you’re blue? Either you marry your despicable Uncle Eddie or you disappear mysteriously, which is what Sarah’s afraid will happen to Levi if no one intervenes.”

  Inbreeding and blue people—Havens can only imagine
how the story will come across to Midwesterners, people like his mother. “You can’t write about them intermarrying. It would humiliate them.”

  “If Jubilee and Levi are to have a third alternative, I don’t see how I can’t write about it.” Massey spreads out on his cot. “It’s not the exposure that causes damage to people’s lives; it’s the cover-up.”

  After a while, Havens says, “They’ll have to watch out for more than just Ronny; everyone with a camera will come up here and hound these people.”

  “Maybe,” Massey concedes. “On the other hand, more focus on the family from the outside means better protection for them.”

  Havens kills the light, gets under the sheet, then kicks it off again. Some creature too large to be a mouse scurries along the outside wall. After a long silence, he says, “If Levi agrees to the story, we don’t need a picture of Jubilee.”

  Massey doesn’t respond.

  Havens knows he’s awake. “Unless Jubilee consents, I’m not taking her photo, and that’s all there is to it.”

  * * *

  When Havens wakes up, Massey has left a note saying he’s gone to Chance to send a telegram to the FSA to request an extension on their trip. Havens dresses with haste and hurries his morning ablutions before doing a reconnaissance for Jubilee, but encounters only Buford and Willow-May. The girl is steering a clutch of chicks into a crude enclosure of rocks and twigs in the front yard, and Buford in his customary overalls is on the porch smoking his pipe and reading what appears to be Massey’s notes.

  “Won’t be long before you’re running around on that foot,” he says by way of a greeting.

  Noting that the birdcage is gone, Havens remarks on the weather, which prompts a lengthy response from Buford about seasons and farming and the toll both can take. “A man may hold the deed to the land, but it’s wrongheaded to ever think he owns it. Forty acres can whip you one year and reward you twenty-, sixty-, even a hundred-fold the next, and if you go through that cycle as many times as I have, you’ll wonder if the land doesn’t own you.”

  Buford references the conversation from the previous night. “You boys are concerned about us, and I know you mean well, but it’s not as simple as packing up. My pa always used to say, you can’t outrun trouble.” He pinches his lips and draws them to one side as though suffering from a toothache and stares at his field. “It’s true we don’t have much. Some years we have less than what we were born with, but in my view, a city’s where the poorest live. I went to Cleveland once. I seen able-bodied young fellas work in rabbit hutches, some knucklehead ordering them to work faster, and those were the lucky ones. The ones in the factories got nothing but one job, tightening a nut on a bolt. Now that’s poor. That’s a man yoked worse than my mule. Even if Levi was to hire on, he’d never survive something like that.”

  Havens says he’s not a fan of big cities either. “But a lot of displaced farmers from Oklahoma are starting over again out West.”

  “You tell me where a man can go in this world and not find people hating other people. If skin ain’t the reason, it’ll be what God they pray to or what side of the river is best to build a house.”

  How can Havens argue that?

  “Massey wants me to think on it more, but my mind’s made up,” Buford says. “You be sure he doesn’t get any notions of taking matters into his own hands.”

  Ending the subject, Buford offers to help Havens set up the darkroom. He runs a cable from a gasoline generator on the back porch down the cellar stairs and attaches it to Havens’s red lamp, saying he’s glad to hear they will be staying on a while longer. “Sure’s been good having another set of hands around here.”

  Havens pushes aside jars of canned goods to make space on the counter for three tubs—one for developer, another stop, and a third for fix.

  “Didn’t know pictures was laundry,” says Buford, watching Havens string twine from one corner to the next, before zeroing in on the box of Kodachrome. Buford reads the label. “Kodachrome daylight magazine. Sounds like something you’d load in a pistol.”

  Havens panics and snatches the box before Buford reads the word “color” emblazoned on the other side. He tosses it into his camera bag.

  Once everything is set up, Buford surveys the scene. “All this equipment must set a man back a penny or two.” He asks the going rate for a camera, and Havens tells him. “I could buy me a hog and half a dozen shoats for that!”

  “Maybe I should trade it all in; maybe I’ll make a better goatherd than a photographer.”

  Buford pats his arm. “I bet you do just fine. But it is curious to me that with all this expense, they send you out here. What kind of pictures are they wanting, exactly?”

  Havens explains that he’s expected to return with a representation of everyday life for Eastern Kentuckians, at which point Buford thrusts out his hands, palms up, showing the grime as if it has rewritten his fortunes. “Dirt’s our life.” Buford’s eyes suddenly light up. “I’ve got an idea for your picture. Grab that camera of yours.”

  Though his foot is still somewhat inflamed, it’s functional enough to hustle after Buford, who looks like he’s doing the two-step with the tripod. At the wash line, he stops to help his wife hang sheets. For two people who labor sunup to sundown, you’d think they would be nothing more than a summation of their functions, but even in this small task is affection. Filled with secrets and longings, they cast shadows more graceful than celestial beings.

  Buford leads Havens past the vegetable garden to a slight rise where the vista is unobstructed. To the left is a swath of chartreuse, the modest field of young corn, and to the right is a stand of scrubby gray-green oaks, leaves shimmering in the cool morning breeze. Directly ahead, bathed in lemon light, is an infinitely repeating pattern of minty hills, each with a hidden valley cobwebbed with mist.

  “Dirt will about break a man’s back and it won’t ever let you forget where you’re ultimately headed, but it also feeds you and humbles you, and from just the right spot, it’ll reward you with a glimpse of heaven.”

  Havens attaches the Contax to the tripod, aims it, and adjusts the focus, and when he turns around to invite Buford to look through the viewfinder, the man is headed for his field. Unlike portraiture, the natural landscape is never static, and it is easy to pass up one moment when it can be trumped by a moment of surpassing grandeur. Diffusing the light, a single cloud can pass in front of the sun and reverse the season, rewind an era even, and fool a man into thinking he’s years ahead of Daniel Boone. A high-altitude, breakneck wind can race weather across the sky in such a way that decades seem fast-forwarded to some desolate future. He’s thinking of Betty. Were he to marry her, she would tend him and help him and suffer him, and he would berate himself for not doing a better job of loving her. What’s wrong with you? is the question he would ask himself every day. Friends would recommend a new car, his boss a vacation, the doctor a tonic. His wife would suggest a second honeymoon, and he would make love to her with the diligence of a mechanic under the hood of a car. What is the remedy for the man at the feast with no appetite? Through all the birthday celebrations and milestones will come flash floods of longing to be the man behind the facsimile.

  Havens is repositioning his camera when a movement at the edge of the forest catches his eye. He pans to the right, focuses, and sees Jubilee stepping out of the woods. He waves at her, and she keeps walking. He abandons his equipment and races toward her, which only causes her to pick up the pace. “Jubilee,” he calls, waving again. Trying to keep from putting his full weight on his foot, he ignores the pain until he stumbles.

  She stops, and he raises his arm to signal he’s fine, that she’s to go on.

  “Do you need help, Mr. Havens?” she asks as she approaches, even with him doing his level best not to look the part of an invalid. And the “mister” part amplified like that, a bad sign.

  “Wasn’t looking where I was going.” He flashes her a sheepish grin. “I’m fine.”

  �
�I see Pa brought you to his favorite view.”

  “I’m sorry about last night. It should never have come up,” he blurts.

  This morning she is a vivid blue, the color of a robin’s egg. Whether temperature or mood affect the changing tone of her skin he cannot tell, but she has no less of an impact on him than the time-bending background behind her.

  “I didn’t take her picture and I’m not going to marry her.”

  Jubilee shifts her weight from one foot to another and keeps her gaze on those hills. “You don’t need to explain your private life to me.”

  He ought to leave it at that, but he wants her to look at him again. “I think we’ve just been keeping each other company, the way lonely people do. Until something better comes along.” He feels relief for having said it, for exposing at least one of the less honorable parts of himself. He surely won’t be leaving any false impression with her now.

  After a pause, she turns toward the house. “Well, I’ll let you get on with it.”

  “Actually, I thought I might take a break.”

  On the way to the house, he asks after Thomas and how her other birds are doing, which of them will soon fly off, whether the owlet has tested its wings again, and her answers become less dutiful. The conversation turns to migrating birds, and by the time they reach the porch steps, she’s offered to take him on an outing after lunch.

  He trips over his own feet to open the front door for her and follows her into the kitchen, where she rolls up her sleeves and lathers her hands with soap. She catches him staring. “Have you had breakfast?”

  “How about I cook for you this time? Do you like omelets?” He selects eggs from the basket and cracks them in a bowl, and she fetches the ham and slices off two thick pieces. Even the smallest movements fascinate him—how her wrist turns and reveals an even softer shade of blue underneath, the way her hair falls over one shoulder, that she bites her lip when she concentrates.