by Ninie Hammon
The air around them slowly filled with butterflies.
* * *
The protocol for escorting the body of a soldier killed in combat home from Vietnam was as detailed as the assembly instructions for a M102 Howitzer, with rules about what to wear, where to stand, how to stand, what to say, what not to say, how to act, and when to breathe.
But there was no protocol for the snafu that happened with Haystack’s body.
Grayson never got the whole story, though he pieced much of it together from the tirade he could hear through the door of the CO’s office hours later. It involved a Tennessee soldier from the 195th Field Artillery who’d been seriously injured at the Birdcage—where he must have struck up a friendship with Haystack. That was no surprise; the big blond kid was so likeable, everyone who met him became his new best friend. Just released on a thirty-day leave from a San Francisco hospital, the Nashville soldier called Six Pack heard about Haystack’s death from a friend who worked at the GR point at Travis Air Force Base. The Graves Registration point was a building where dead soldiers’ bodies were processed before they were shipped out for burial. Six Pack had shown up at the GR point in his Class A uniform—dress greens. Why was unclear, though Six Pack’s friend maintained it was his way of paying his respects to Haystack. The story got even more sketchy after that. For reasons hotly disputed by the GR soldiers involved, they had mistakenly believed Six Pack was the body escort assigned to accompany Haystack to Spindle Rock and had turned over to him the paperwork—which included two commercial airline tickets to Louisville, Kentucky. Whereupon Six Pack had drawn himself up tall, executed a snappy salute and accepted both the tickets and the body. Within the hour, Haystack was on a flight home, and Six Pack was on a flight that would cut the two-thousand-mile journey to his home down to a hundred and fifty.
It took the CO quite a while to unravel what had happened. When he did, he was apoplectic. Waiting outside his office, Grayson marveled at the most colorful, creative use of profanity he’d heard since boot camp. Gratefully, by the time Grayson finally stood in front of the Full Bird Colonel, the man’s anger had been spent.
“You came all this way for nothing, chaplain,” the CO said, shaking his head. “And that was the army’s screw-up, not yours. We owe you an apology.” He looked long at Grayson’s haggard face. “In fact, we owe you more than an apology. I’m signing off on a thirty-day pass.”
Grayson’s jaw dropped.
“I’ll work out the paperwork so you can report to Fort Knox, Kentucky, at 0800 hours September fifteenth.” He smiled at the look of shock on Grayson’s face. “In fact, if you haul butt, I can get you at least part of the way home. There’s a daily round-trip supply flight from Chicago, and you’ve got”—he looked at his watch—“twenty-seven minutes to catch it.”
Grayson focused on nothing but making that flight, wouldn’t let his mind go off down any other rabbit trails until he was safely aboard and the wheels lifted off the tarmac.
Only then did he let it hit him.
Thirty days. By the time the leave was up, his tour of duty in-country would be over. Grayson Addington would not be going back to Vietnam. He’d made it home alive.
Chapter 11
Saturday was chore day. Piper did the weekly change of linens, three loads of laundry—washed, hung on the line to dry, brought in and folded. She cleaned the bathroom and mopped the kitchen floor. Then she and Carter assembled the “big girl” bed in Sadie’s room. It was time the toddler learned to sleep by herself. Piper didn’t realize the whole afternoon had slipped away until she paused for a cup of coffee before she tackled the ironing.
Sinking down in a kitchen chair, she slipped behind her ear a strand of hair that had escaped from her ponytail and glanced out the window at the lengthening afternoon shadows and the children playing in the yard. The shadows were there; the children weren’t. The yard was empty.
The coffee cup slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor. Piper was already out the screen door before all the coffee in it had formed a brown puddle beside the chair leg.
“Maggie…” she said, not calling her. She didn’t have enough air to call out.
Her eyes darted from the yard to the fence to the dirt driveway in the kind of herky-jerky motion that made it almost impossible to see anything clearly. A thousand horrible thoughts elbowed each other around in her head, all of them slathered with the black tar of guilt. What kind of mother hands over the care of her baby to a little girl she’s only known for three days? Just because the child was sweet and likeable didn’t mean—
She felt Carter’s hand on her shoulder. He didn’t speak but merely pointed. Down the mountain about a quarter of a mile away, she could make out the form of the two children sitting in the middle of the only flat space of any size on the mountainside—the butterfly meadow, at least that’s what Piper called it. She often took Sadie there to watch them.
Piper loved butterflies. They had come to symbolize for her all that was good and pure—and fragile in life. The Campbells lived at the top of Cricket Hollow on the other side of Chicken Gizzard Mountain from Sadler Hollow. Every morning, Piper woke to the spectacular beauty of mist on purple mountains that marched row after row toward the horizon. And to the ugliness of poverty that bred hopelessness and anger like a fly breeds maggots. No shoes. No coat in the winter. Carrying water in buckets from the well, the stench of pigpens out back and flies buzzing in a nauseating hum inside the outhouse in the summer heat.
Her family had little. And that might not have been the source of such distress if the McCulloughs down in Sadler Hollow had not had more.
Jeremiah McCullough had been a bootlegger and made cash when there was no cash to be had anywhere. Her father had kept food on the table by raising pigs and digging coal. He came home from the mine coughing up black spit, his fingers mashed, his clothes filthy. And he’d get drunk then, beat her mother and older brother. Her, too, when she didn’t dodge out of his way fast enough. Quick and agile, she’d often escape the worst of her father’s wrath to hide in the woods behind the house. Next to the woods was a small clearing alive with butterflies, and it became her favorite place in all the world. She’d sit on a log, sometimes nursing a split lip or black eye, and watch the butterflies cavort effortlessly on the breeze. Free. Untroubled and beautiful. But if you caught one, even touched it, the fairy dust on its wings would come off on your fingers, and it couldn’t fly anymore. It would drop to the ground, flop around and then be still.
“They’re fine,” Carter said, and Piper resisted the urge to relax back against his big frame as relief washed over her. “Are you all right?”
“Sure,” she croaked. But she didn’t feel all right. The dagger of terror that had impaled her heart when she couldn’t see the children in the yard had left her weak and breathless. It wasn’t the only thing, though. Carter’s presence, the warmth of him near, the comfort of him towering over her, felt so…normal…that she almost shuddered.
What was she thinking?
No, the question wasn’t what was she thinking. The question was what wasn’t she thinking. And she wasn’t thinking about Grayson. Just his name in her head clanged around in some empty, hollow place. Carter was here. And Grayson was…
“You’re not all right. What’s wrong? They’re right there. Maggie should have asked, but—”
“It’s not that. It’s Grayson.”
She felt Carter instantly stiffen. She hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant to call up Grayson’s presence between them. Only that was all wrong, too! She shouldn’t feel guilty, as if she shouldn’t even mention the name of Carter’s brother. Of her husband! Oh, it was all so mixed up and crazy. None of it made sense. All she knew for certain at this very moment was that she was glad Carter was here when she needed him. That might not be right and might in fact, be very wrong, indeed. But that’s what she felt, and there was nothing she could do about her feelings.
Except not share them.
&n
bsp; “I thought…you know, how Grayson must miss…Sadie. How he’d want to be here to take care of her.”
That came out awkwardly, but it was the best she could do.
“You think about him a lot—miss him a lot?”
“Of course I do.” She was determined to get past this, or get away from it. “Come on, let’s go drag our runaway girls back home.” Without looking at him, she strode with purpose out toward the dirt road.
* * *
As Piper and Carter set off down the road toward the meadow, Carter’s telephone in Charleston was ringing. Grayson let it ring a dozen times, then hung up and waited for the pay phone in the Chicago bus terminal to give him his dime back.
He’d already tried Uncle Jim, whose maid had haughtily informed him that Mr. Addington would be out of town until the end of the month.
So it was Carter, then. Grayson would call back. He did a quick calculation—Chicago to Pittsburgh, twenty hours. It’d be right after lunchtime Sunday when Grayson got to Pittsburgh. Carter’d be home. Where else would he be—church?
Grayson settled into his seat on the big Greyhound, flipped through the newspaper the previous occupant had left behind, then stared out the window and watched America fly by.
* * *
Carter and Piper could hear Maggie humming as they approached. She sat unmoving, perfectly still, with her head tilted slightly back, as if she were admiring the puffy white clouds tethered to the mountaintops like hot air balloons. She might have had her eyes closed; they couldn’t see that from the back.
What they could see was butterflies, dozens of them, all around the children. A few had even landed on the girls.
A monarch and a yellow-and-black tiger swallowtail, the tips of its wings jutting out below its body like a bird’s tail feathers, were perched in Maggie’s flaming hair. Pale gray gossamer-wings, gold-and-brown skippers and lemon-yellow sulphurs fluttered in the air above the nearby flowers and weeds that were liberally sprinkled with black-and-red American ladies and yellow-and-brown brushfoots. As they watched, a lone pearl crescent with purple-edged wings fluttered over to Maggie and lit on her shoulder, flapping its wings slowly in and out, in a motion Piper had thought as a child looked like the gills of a fish breathing underwater.
Piper took a couple of quiet steps to the side so she could see, and it was as she’d suspected. Sadie was asleep in Maggie’s arms. No possible way would a single butterfly have come near that wiggle-worm, certainly not a whole flock of them.
Then Sadie opened her eyes. But when she saw the butterflies, she didn’t snatch at them. In fact, she sat remarkably still.
“B’flies,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost reverent. Her red lips parted in a wide smile that planted twin dimples in her chubby cheeks. Then she burped out a little giggle, and a few of the butterflies took flight at the movement.
“They make me laugh, too.” Maggie whispered. “It’s like they’ve got so much happy inside they float up in the air from the warmth of it.”
“Can b’flies laugh?” Sadie asked.
Maggie thought for a moment, then giggled, too. “Maybe they’re always laughing, but they’re so little we can’t hear them.”
“Can they cry?”
“Well…if they can laugh, I guess they can cry, too. But I can’t think of anything sad enough to make butterflies cry.”
When she began to speak, the motion stirred the butterflies. By ones and twos they took flight and gradually disbursed. Sadie made to reach for them then, but Maggie murmured “Uh-uh,” and the child stopped, her hand frozen in mid-grab.
“Bye-bye, b’flies,” she said and offered a sad gnat-snatcher wave. “Mabie, why won’t b’flies play wif Sabie?” Then she inexplicably started to cry.
Maggie turned the toddler around and hugged her. When she did, Sadie saw her mother.
“Mommy!” She held out her chubby arms. “Hold you.”
Maggie turned around in surprise as Piper lifted the toddler. Sadie popped her thumb into her mouth and stopped crying.
“Maggie, you scared us half to death,” Piper said. “You can’t run off with Sadie and not tell anyone where you’re going.”
“I’m sorry!” She looked so stricken Piper wondered if she feared someone was going to hit her. “I didn’t mean…I…but I never let her out of my sight, watched her careful.”
“I’m sure you did,” Piper said. She smiled reassuringly, and the child seemed to relax, though her face remained serious and earnest.
“If you turn your back even for a minute with a little one,” she said, “something awful can happen.”
Carter looked like a mule had kicked him in the stomach, and Piper knew his mind had gone to Grayson and Becky.
“Did something bad happen to a little one in your life?” she asked Maggie.
Maggie stood and dusted the dirt off her coveralls. “Maybe,” she said and didn’t seem to be evading so much as trying to puzzle it out.
A perfect opening. Piper leaped at it. Shifting Sadie to her other hip, Piper turned and started back toward the house. When Maggie fell in beside her, she said casually, “You’re so good with children you must have little brothers and sisters. How old are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how old they are?”
“I don’t know if I have any.” She peered up at Piper. “I should know that—and my whole name, where I live. But I just…don’t.”
She paused, stopped still in the road. “I do know I ran away, though. I remember that. Running hard as I can and being so scared I wanted to vomit. But I don’t know who blacked my eye and split my lip, and I don’t know why I don’t. It’s like”—her brow wrinkled in studied concentration—“it’s like I’m a checkerboard. The red squares are what I know, but the black squares are holes, windows into…nowhere.”
“Have you looked in the windows?”
“Uh-huh. But it’s too dark to see anything. It’s all…gone, the before. There’s only now.”
Sadie looked back over Piper’s shoulder into the meadow and said wistfully, “I see-ed b’flies.” She turned to her mother. “Dis many b’flies, Mommy.” She held up both hands, showed all her fingers, then pushed the strands of hair dancing in the wind away from her face, using her flat palms. “An a labby-bug. It hab little feet on my finger.”
“Maggie, did you do something besides sitting still to…is there a reason why all those butterflies landed around you?” Carter asked.
“I guess they wanted to,” she said.
Chapter 12
A screeching wail launched Grayson into awareness from a fitful sleep. Bright light blinded him, and he tried to hunker down into the darkness, feeling around frantically for his rifle.
“Hey, man, cut it out. Quit pawing me!” The voice came out of the glare, muffled by the ringing in Grayson’s ears. “What’s your problem? You drop some bad acid?”
Gray tried to focus, but sensory perceptions came at him so fast he couldn’t process them. Cold metal. Bright lights.
A man, not a soldier, bearded, with scraggly long hair down past his shoulders was shoving him away.
The screeching wail cried out again, and Grayson cringed back.
“Airbrakes, it’s just airbrakes,” the man said and got to his feet in the swaying bus. “Take both seats, pal. I’m moving.”
The man reached up into the luggage rack and dragged down a duffel bag almost as scuffed and worn as Grayson’s. Then he marched up the aisle and started to sit down beside a big black man reading a newspaper, but the man glared at him so he went forward one more seat and settled carefully next to an old woman on the other side of the aisle who leaned against the window with her mouth open, sound asleep. The big black man who’d glared at Grayson’s seatmate turned and looked back at Grayson. Grayson couldn’t read the look. Then the man faced forward again and went back to his newspaper.
Grayson forced himself to relax against the upholstered seat of the bus—something itche
d in that spot between his shoulder blades where it’s impossible to scratch. He made himself watch the passing street lights outside the windows. The rhythmic, blinking white lights had a soothing effect, like the shiny watch of a hypnotist, back and forth, back and forth.
His mind was muddy, foggy. The past fifty…sixty hours was a blur of scenes, jumbled together in no particular order, like a handful of snapshots tossed on a table. The images, some of them, were clear, but the sequence, the connective tissue was gone.
As the bus passed beneath the last streetlight and out into the darkness beyond, Grayson thought about Becky. One good thing he could say about Vietnam, the only good thing he could say about it, was that when he was there, he hadn’t thought about his little sister.
Her small hand is warm in his, and the bright July sunshine is hot on his back. He can smell the wildflowers and hear the raucous caw of blue jays and the cries of cicadas that sound like dull saws cutting through tin. As they get near the creek, he can hear the bees buzzing in the hollow of the shagbark hickory tree.
“You be careful of those bees,” Ma’d said when he picked up the broom and headed out across the yard with Becky in tow. She always said that, like maybe he’d forget not to go near it!
Becky hears the bees and points a pudgy finger toward the tree.
“Dose bees!” she says, in the same scolding voice Ma’d used. Grayson laughs.
Once past the tree, Becky sees the creek, lets go of his hand and races toward it. He barely cuts her off and scoops her into his arms before she splashes in with all her clothes on.