The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  She pauses in front of Rakestraw’s store to read the signs. CHEW COPENHAGEN, IT’S A PLEASURE. NEW LARGE POTATOES 6lbs/23c. APPLES DELICIOUS 4lb/25c. ORANGES/TANGERINES 1c.

  Mr. Rakestraw comes out with a bucket of apples and sets them on the wooden shelf. “Enjoying the cooler weather?”

  He shines an apple and offers it to her. Refusing her coin, he remarks on her suitcase. “We don’t often get visitors to Chance. You the new schoolteacher?”

  “No.”

  “Visiting kin?”

  “Thank you for the apple,” she replies.

  “You take care now, miss.”

  She can feel him watching her and decides to cross the street again, careful not to go the speed at which Blues usually move from place to place. Her return deserves a slower pace, a sure foot.

  It has rained recently, and everything is turned to mirrors—the puddles in the street, the chrome bumpers on the parked cars, even the air has a gleam to it. Steering around those gathered in front of Caldon Enterprise, Jubilee catches a glimpse of the news posted in its window: PRINCE GRILLS ROOSEVELT, ITALIANS URGED TO OUST MUSSOLINI. A little girl in a blue dress is out on the sidewalk with a jump rope, her father standing to the side so she can skip back and forth. She comes Jubilee’s way, pigtails flying behind her, tongue hooked at the corner of her mouth, and instinct is like a hand yanking the scruff of Jubilee’s collar. Though she swerves to one side, turning her face away, the child keeps leaping through her loops, saying, “Excuse me, thank you.” Half a block later in front of the town hall, it is the same way. Five boys are playing with stick guns, and not one thinks to raise one at her. It’s the most peculiar feeling—wanting someone to notice her.

  And then she spies Chappy in his usual parking spot at the end of the block outside the post office, reading that same newspaper page. She steps up her pace.

  “Hi, Chappy!”

  He looks up. Chappy’s grin takes up most of his face and he waves his arm as though she’s clear across town and not right in front of him. You’d think he was barefoot on hot rocks. “Juby!”

  She puts her suitcase down so they can do their old crosswise-handshake-and-elbow-knot greeting.

  “You’re different!” He touches her cheek as though to check if Jell-O has set.

  “I cut my hair, too.”

  His inspection goes on a while. “And those ain’t your clothes.”

  She sways her pleated skirt. “They used to belong to a very pretty lady. She gave them to me.”

  He points at her shoes. “Them’s yours.”

  She laughs. “I’ve got a fancy pair in my suitcase, but I can’t hardly walk in them.”

  Chappy grows shy all of a sudden, looking at her from the corner of his eye. “Don’t worry, Juby—you’re still fine-looking.”

  “Hey.” She swats his arm. “I’m still me.” Which is only partway true. It’ll take her a while yet to figure what size portion of her has changed and what has a ways yet to change. “You still you?”

  He frowns at what he reckons is a silly question, so she asks a better one. “Have you been working on your car lately?”

  “She’s got new brakes, and I gave her a tune-up last week.” He asks where she’s been.

  She’d arrived in Louisville and departed from Louisville, and there doesn’t seem much point in listing the in-between places where she only ever spent a week or two so she just says, “Louisville.”

  He slaps the newspaper against his thigh. “Louisville! They’ve got all kinds of automobiles out there.”

  Jubilee doesn’t tell him about the day she stumbled out of Union Station onto Preston Street, where a hundred cars raced one way and another hundred the other, making the city such a screeching place that she fell into a crouch and covered her ears with her hands and stayed that way till someone threw a coin at her feet. “Your set of wheels is better than all of those by far,” she says.

  Chappy touches her forearm with the backs of his fingers. “Say, I bet you’ll be needing a ride home.”

  “I sure am.”

  He wiggles his cap, and says, “Good thing I got her all gassed up this morning.” He picks up his hub cap in one hand and her suitcase in the other, and nods at the fresh air beside him. “Hop in front.”

  As they start down the road, Chappy says, “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  It might as well have been years, but now that she’s back, four months has a fleeting feel.

  The pickup truck that races up beside them is Ronny’s, but only Faro is inside. He leans out the window and whistles a catcall, mistaking Jubilee for a newcomer. Her knees lock up and she turns her face the other way, and hides behind airs. Faro jabbers something to Chappy, but her ears are stuffed again with Ronny’s threat that she never return, and her eyes become pulpy at the memory of Levi. She needs to get home. She needs to lie down in Mama’s embrace.

  “Mind if I floor it, Juby?” Chappy asks as soon as the pickup has sped off, and the two of them sprint out of town, racing past the old filling station, where Ronny and Faro found her, and around the bend that leads to coal miners’ houses. At a hard run, she and Chappy pass Willy and his two sisters on their cart.

  Chappy waves furiously and yells out, “Juby’s come home!”

  “Jubilee?” Willy whoas his mule to a standstill.

  She waves and keeps running. “Maybe we don’t tell folks just yet.”

  “Sure thing, Juby.”

  They speed past the tenant farmer’s place, those same three scraggly children still hanging on the gate, and tear along the dirt path that rounds the millpond, where the Wrightley brothers are fishing for crappie. The boys do a double-take as Chappy and Jubilee whisk around the bend.

  They slow a little on the uphill and a little more when they cut across the graveyard, and by the time they reach Spooklight Holler, she’s tuckered out. Chappy says the flat tire will give her time to rest and points to a nearby log to serve as a bench. She watches as he takes out the wrench from his back pocket, gets on his haunches, and starts twisting air.

  “Have you seen my folks lately?”

  With his back to her, he says, “You’ll find your pa a little on the changed side.” He brings up the time his grandma learned her son, Leroy, wasn’t coming back from the war. “He’s got that look about him.”

  “And my mama?”

  Chappy purses his lips.

  Every morning that she was away, Jubilee would startle awake with a plea for Levi’s safety on her lips, and she’d remember where she was and how she came to be there and had to go through his dying all over again, cup after cup of maggots, until daybreak would seep through the cracks of the trailer and her breath would no longer come in fits and starts, and the weight on her chest would lift enough that she could get up and go to that tent. If this was what grief did to her, she can’t imagine its toll on Mama.

  After all these weeks, the air finally sounds right again, thick with bird chatter and insects nattering away and trees shifting as though to find a more comfortable position.

  “Say, you ever heard from that mister who got bit by the viper?”

  Just the mention of him, and she can feel Havens’s touch on her cheek, hear his voice promising to wait for her at the shack. “No, why would I?”

  Chappy wipes his hands with the oil rag, stands, and kicks the invisible tire. “He sure was taken with you. I ain’t never seen a man as struck by a lady, not even when Otis come for my sister.”

  “Maybe he was just struck by blue.”

  “You always had a special way about you, blue or no blue, and he was one who could tell that.”

  He mops his forehead and looks off to the east, where the mountains form a heaven-high hedge between her and Havens.

  “When we were out looking for you and Levi that morning, he said you were the most caring person he ever met and how you didn’t deserve nothing but the best kind of treatment. The rain sent everyone for cover, but he wanted to keep going. He about wore himself
out. Then the sun comes up and he sits on a big old rock and starts to cry, and says how everything is his fault. I never seen a happier man than when we come upon you, Juby.”

  She picks up her suitcase and takes her place beside Chappy. “Do you mind if we don’t talk about that again, Chappy, and I’d really rather not talk about him, either.”

  “Sure, Juby.” He picks up his hub cap and makes engine sounds, and they take off again.

  Not twenty yards later, Chappy says, “Like I said, he was real taken with you.”

  “Chappy, please.”

  They fall into an easy silence that lasts a minute. “He was first-rate.”

  “Chappy!”

  “Sorry.” He glances at her and shrugs, then makes so many honking noises he scares a flock of blackbirds from the dogwood tree.

  Way down past the end of his field, where the land leaves off being level and turns into a slope, stands a crooked old man with his hand shielding his eyes as though he’s awaiting the arrival of someone whose delay has gone on too long, as if he’s trained his eyes for disturbances caused even by insects and tuned his ears all the way to Tennessee.

  Jubilee waves her arm.

  Nothing.

  Chappy cups his mouth and hollers into the wind, “Jubilee’s—come—home,” but she doesn’t know what of it reaches Pa intact, because he keeps standing like he’s expecting the three Magi, not the two of them. She hitches her skirt and climbs the hill, and suddenly Pa’s caught on and comes barreling hatless toward her. Five feet in front of her, though, his feet act like they’ve hit a patch of ice. His hands clasp his head as if it’s got tangled in a thorn bush. He opens his mouth, but no words come out, just one big sob.

  She knows from treating wounded animals to step carefully. “Hi, Pa.”

  Pa reaches for her hands and cries and falls to his knees, and when she bends down with him, he sits in the dirt with his knees bent, pulling her into his shoulder. “My girl, my girl.” They rock awhile.

  “How can it be?” he keeps saying. Eventually, Pa looks sideways at her. “I thought you were—” He rocks her some more. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “Louisville, mostly.” She wonders if everything she says is going to take a good deal of rocking for the meaning to sink in.

  He smiles through his tears. “You found a doctor?”

  “A doctor found me.”

  The long walk up to the house gives her time to explain some about her coloring. She keeps insisting it’s a treatment, but Pa keeps repeating everything she says, substituting with the word “cure,” though cure it is not. She tells him what Dr. Fordsworth told her boss. “I’m a patient receiving medical attention, Pa.” She takes out the bottle and hands it to Pa, who unscrews the lid and treats the small blue pills the way he does scat when he’s hunting game, emptying a few in his hand so he can smell them and roll them between his fingers.

  “I’ll be gold-darned,” he says, as if they were Jack’s magic beans.

  JUBILEE

  Mama’s room smells like food starting to spoil. Daylight makes its way past the shutters only as far as the foot of the bed, as if it knows better than to venture any farther.

  It’s a rolled-up blanket on the bed that Jubilee addresses. “Hello, Mama.”

  The shape stirs.

  “Gladden, look who’s come,” says Pa, himself not yet fully recovered from the thunderbolt of her return. With the same shaking hands that held her, Pa now reaches for Mama. He seems to be making a bed more than getting a person upright, and as simple as his task is, it takes him a long time to make even a little progress. It scares Jubilee that her mother has to be dealt with in this manner.

  “Up you get. There you go.”

  A small frail woman who looks like a distant relative of Mama’s sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the floor.

  Jubilee approaches the bed, her feet coming to rest right below Mama’s gaze, and looks down on the top of Mama’s head. Her scalp is showing. Jubilee digs her nails into her hands to stop herself from crying out. “Hello, Mama,” she tries again.

  Pa keeps talking real loud in her ear. “See, it’s Jubilee.”

  “Mama?” She is desperate for her mother to see her. “It’s me. I’ve come home.”

  Like pipe cleaners, Mama’s skinny arms wind around Jubilee’s knees. She draws her closer without making any sound and presses her head against Jubilee’s legs, those scrawny arms somehow keeping Jubilee from falling to pieces. She doesn’t talk and she doesn’t lift her head. All she’s seen of Jubilee are shoes, brown nylons and the hem of her costly hand-me-down, and this is enough for her.

  Pa all but yells, “Jubilee’s got a surprise for you, Gladden. Take a look.”

  Mama’s arms loosen a little and she lifts her eyes. So she doesn’t get a crick in her neck on top of everything else, Jubilee gets on her haunches.

  Mama sucks in a breath so big it’s a wonder there’s any air left in the room for anyone. The creek might as well be flowing with molasses the way Mama stares at her, as if the field is sprung up with maypoles instead of corn, a veined membrane instead of a sky.

  “It’s fixed, Mama.” Well, one part. Others are broken past fixing.

  Mama pushes the hair from Jubilee’s forehead, cups her face with bony hands, and peers at her with a brow so creased, Jubilee half-expects to be asked who she is. Mama’s eyes dart to Jubilee’s hands—pale pink nails, fingertips the color of Mama’s after she’s brought them out of a basin of warm water. Mama’s gaze travels along Jubilee’s wrists, pale as a sheet of paper, up her arms, and back again to her face, and she knows what Mama sees: the whole of Jubilee drained of blue and filled with the nectar of peaches.

  Mama consults Jubilee’s palms, where fortunes have changed just like that. No longer are they crossed with black lines, but embroidered with tiny pink stitches. Jubilee understands now why people call them lifelines. Mama turns Jubilee’s hands this way and that, as though they are gloves she might like to try on.

  “A doctor in Louisville found a cure for her, Gladden.”

  Mama doesn’t mind Pa. She just keeps her eyes on Jubilee.

  “Do you like it, Mama?”

  Hinges rusted shut is how she comes to think of Mama’s mouth. Why won’t she say anything? All Jubilee gets is this searching look, as though Mama’s trapped inside a glass bottle.

  “Pa, can she hear us?”

  Mama strokes Jubilee’s hand, then puts her cheek against it.

  “Her hearing’s fine,” he hollers. “Isn’t that so, Glad?” Turning to Jubilee, he drops his voice. “She doesn’t talk hardly at all anymore since you and your brother—” Pa doesn’t end the sentence. “Isn’t this something, Gladden? Jubilee coming home, and then cured on top of that? Isn’t she just a picture?”

  Mama smooths Jubilee’s hair before pressing her fingers against Jubilee’s cheeks.

  “Think you might want to come sit out in the front room with us? Jubilee’s got such a story, and I haven’t heard the half of it. I made her wait to tell it so you could hear, too.” Pa’s words trail away as Mama glances at her pillow. Her hands slip away like reeds in a stream.

  “Okay, then, we’ll let you have a little lie-down,” Pa says. “I’m going to rustle up something for Jubilee to eat and we’ll come get you and see if you won’t have a bite.”

  Pa covers her with the blanket and turns her back into a bedroll, and when they step out of the room, Jubilee turns around, and two gleaming eyes blink at her.

  Grandma is sitting by the fireplace with her suitcase on her lap, and she scowls at Jubilee as she did when Jubilee first walked through the front door. Grandma doesn’t know her at all.

  “This here’s Jubilee, Ma.” But Pa still can’t convince her.

  Jubilee follows him to the kitchen, where he appears to have forgotten where everything is kept, so she brings him the mixing bowl, and points him to the flour bin, and after every step, he stops to admire her again. Color has won him ove
r.

  Jubilee gets out the whisk and hands him an egg.

  “Shall I fix it, Pa?”

  “No, no, you sit.” He starts mixing up batter for the biscuits, looking at her again and again. “You’re glowing. Like there’s a lamp on inside you.”

  At this rate, they will never eat. Jubilee starts frying up the bacon. “So you said Willow-May is with Socall?”

  “This house has been no place for a child.” He explains that Mama, Grandma, and Willow-May moved in with Socall during the weeks he spent looking for Jubilee, and when Socall brought them all back, Willow-May refused to stay, and now comes to visit every other day or so. Pa talks of being gone for days at a time, long enough for Mama to have gotten the idea that Pa was dead somewhere, too. “I searched every bend and crease of those hills for you, and never once did I imagine you’d be so far away or I’d have gone there, too.” Pa is trying not to cry. “I’m sorry I didn’t find you, my girl.”

  “No, Pa. I’m sorry for not getting word to you.” She pats his back. Each day she was away, she’d aimed to finish her letter home, at least to let Mama and Pa know she was alive, but two or three lines in and she’d decide again that her being dead would hurt them less than knowing she was in that place. How exactly she spent her days is something she’s resolved never to tell, certainly not Pa.

  “What matters is that you’re home now,” he says, composing himself. “And tomorrow I’ll send for Willow-May.”

  On the subject of Mama’s condition, all he has to say is “Something with her wiring,” as if she’s an electric circuit instead of the flesh-and-blood mama who needs to get up and tell Jubilee color is going to make everything right.

  Pa cups her shoulder. “Don’t you worry none. Now that you’re home, she’ll be back to her old self before you can say Jack Robinson.” He says this at full volume, declarative-like, as if all it is going to take for them to be who they once were is loud sure-speaking.

  Jubilee sets the table and when she comes to Levi’s place, she can’t bear not putting anything out for him, so she goes down to the cellar and fetches a candle that’s never been burned, making it a point not to dwell on that line of twine where pictures of her once were pinned, and when she goes upstairs she checks the mantel, just in case the family portraits are still there. They aren’t.