When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  “Gray it is, then,” the man said as he performed an illegal U-turn in the middle of the street. “You want a beer? They’s a cooler of Iron City in the back. My Pa fought in the great war. Him and Uncle John kilt a passel of Japs in…”

  Grayson listened with the practiced ease of a man who’d tuned out untold hundreds of pointless conversations about high school and sex and baseball and sex and hot cars and sex. He put his elbow out the window, felt the warm breeze in his face and wallowed a single word around in his mind, the way you suck on a peppermint to get out all the flavor, until it’s such a little sliver it disappears altogether.

  Home.

  He must have dozed off. When he awoke, Lester had stopped talking and was happily humming “Stand By Your Man.” The fat man noticed that he was awake. “You’s overseas, in ’Nam, wasn’t you?”

  Grayson thought about what the black ex-soldier on the bus had said to him. But he didn’t need the admonition. His every memory was covered in razor blades. No way to get near any of them without being cut to the bone.

  “Uh-huh,” Grayson said.

  “You kill many gooks?”

  Grayson considered getting out of the question by playing the chaplain card. Cite the manual about noncombatants. But regulations didn’t matter the night almost half the company was wiped out at Fire Base Eagle’s Nest, which the Tennessee soldiers from the 195th Field Artillery who carved it out of the jungle had dubbed “The Birdhouse.”

  Gray hadn’t picked up the rifle that night. Haystack had shoved one at him, grabbed it when that gunner from the 195th dropped it after a bullet stabbed through his neck. He’d just stood there, looking surprised and confused, and then his fingers had opened up and the rifle fell to the ground. Fell in slow motion, the way Gray remembered it, as twin geysers of blood squirted out of his neck, one on the left where the bullet entered and one on the right where it exited. Squirt, squirt, squirt. The kid slowly sank to his knees and then pitched over in the dirt.

  Gray had started to refuse the M16, to shake his head. But Haystack didn’t have to say anything to convince him. Bullets zipping through the air and thunking into mud and sandbags and bodies, shrieks of agony and the smell of blood and urine and feces and death—they’d made the case Haystack didn’t have to make. Gooks had gotten inside the perimeter of the compound! Forty or fifty of them, naked, cut up and bloody. They’d stripped to slither through the razor wire so their clothes wouldn’t get caught on it and shake the pieces of Sergeant Hotchner’s red underwear he’d hung on the concertina coils to announce their presence. They were firing rocket-propelled grenades and tossing satchel charges—small bags of TNT that weighed about a pound with five-second timers.

  Haystack held out the rifle. Grayson took it. As easy as that. He was a crack shot from years of squirrel hunting. Shooting men was easier; the targets were bigger. He’d tried not to count, but he couldn’t help it. The gooks were like swarming bees; shoot one and three more appeared to take his place. They were everywhere at once. It would have been hard to shoot and not hit somebody.

  One. The guy who stood up from behind the burning jeep. Took two shots before he stayed down. That was the trouble with the M16. It would drop a man but not necessarily kill him. The army figured wounded soldiers drained the enemy’s resources, taking more time and energy than dead ones. So sometimes you had to shoot one of those zipperheads two, three times.

  Two, the one on the end when the three came charging out between. Five. Nine. Eleven. Firing in the weird half-light of flares, shooting shadows as often as real men. Grotesque, misshapen, elongated black shadow monsters in the squinty-bright then rapidly fading light. But he kept track of the shadows, too. They counted. You kill a shadow, it counted.

  “I killed…some,” Grayson said.

  “It as bad over there as folks say?”

  “Worse.”

  “But you went. You didn’t run off like some commie coward to Canada. You done your duty.” The man patted Grayson’s shoulder. “You be proud of that, hear? You earned being proud.”

  Grayson didn’t feel proud. He felt nauseated. The black man had been right, of course. You couldn’t tell anybody what you’d seen. You couldn’t tell people like the girl in the airport because she’d never understand how you could have killed anybody. And you couldn’t tell people like this mountaineer because he’d never understand how you couldn’t seem to save anybody either.

  “Would you be offended if I said I didn’t want to talk about it, that I can’t talk about it, not yet?”

  “You don’t owe me no explanation.” He paused. “Whatever it was you done over there, you had to. You’d might want to remember that.”

  Grayson looked at the man, surprised. He was obviously sharper than he appeared.

  “My daddy only talked about the great war when he was drunk. When he was sober, we all lied, said he’d never breathed a word about it. But he had. He said stuff…stuff it was no wonder he had to get drunk to say.”

  As the truck bumped along, every sight that greeted Grayson’s eyes was more achingly familiar than the last. The mountains rose up protectively around him, hugging him snug and safe beneath a slice of bright blue sky that was sandwiched between green ridges like the white stuff in the middle of an Oreo cookie. In many places the valleys were so narrow, there was only room enough for the potholed road, a creek, a railroad track, and shabby, defeated coal-camp towns where dilapidated houses clung to the mountainsides like the dried skins of spring cicadas.

  Finally, the pickup truck rattled over a metal one-lane bridge and made a sharp turn around a stand of cottonwood and birch trees. Grayson’s heart began to beat like the wings of a frantic, caged bird.

  “This is it,” he said. “That road right there—Turtle Road.” Actually the road’s proper name was Naked Turtle Road, just like Turtle Creek was actually Naked Turtle Creek. But Grayson’s father had steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the road that terminated at his church and the creek a stone’s throw from his back door might be in an “unsuitable state of undress.”

  “Stop here,” Grayson said. “Pull off. I can walk from here.”

  Lester protested. “We don’t mind to carry you all the way,” he said.

  “Thanks, but I want to walk from here,” Grayson said. “I need to walk from here. You know, get used to it…slowly.”

  Lester pulled to a stop at the dirt road that wound through the trees, then up the side of the mountain. Tugg handed him his duffel bag out of the back and climbed down to get into the front seat with Lester.

  “Thank you for your service,” Tugg said, a little awkwardly. Grayson suspected he’d been figuring out what to say for half the trip up into the mountains and screwing himself up to actually saying it for the other half.

  “Thank you fellas for the ride.” Grayson heard unexpected emotion in the words so he turned quickly and headed up the road. His army boots kicked up little puffs of dust as he walked back into his world and his life.

  It was about two and a half miles from the highway, Northfield Road, to his mother’s house along a winding strip of dirt through the woods that switched north, then back south, again and again as it climbed the side of the mountain.

  It was early evening, still, the in-between time before the owls and possums and raccoons ventured out but after the day creatures, the chickadees, the blue jays, woodpeckers, rabbits and squirrels had gone back to their burrows for the night. He could smell pine and spruce, but the sound of the trees creaking like gates on rusty hinges was muffled by the explosion rumbling in his ears, thundering in heartbeat bursts. The shadow of the western mountain reaching out its long, dark fingers across the valley felt like a warm balm on his scuffed and tortured soul, and he peered into the purple shadows and mysterious green depths of the forest as he walked along.

  Grayson pictured Piper’s face. And he could see it here! No film covering everything, like it was wrapped in that sticky plastic stuff you put over the top of leftovers in the
refrigerator. Here, he could conjure her face in front of him. And Sadie, like a moth captured in amber in his memory, forever eighteen months old. He’d seen pictures of the toddler, so stunningly beautiful she looked like a porcelain doll, but the pictures had been almost like looking at someone else’s child. Now, the image he conjured up of the little girl seemed real.

  He could see the house now, a car parked out front. Then the road curved around, and it was gone from view. Gloom closed over the road, but the house was ablaze with light. The house where his family was waiting for him.

  * * *

  As soon as the sun dipped down behind the mountain and the long arm of shadow stretched out to claim the house, Piper began to feel melancholy. Carter was leaving. She didn’t like how much she had come to look forward to his presence or how his leaving seemed to take the light and life out of the house. She watched him slip his few belongings efficiently into the gym bag he always brought with him.

  “I should have been a fireman,” he said. “In under thirty seconds, I could gather up everything I owned and shinny down a pole.”

  “Is that what you wanted to be when you were a little boy—a fireman?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I wanted to—”

  “He wanted to be a p-p-preacher, like his daddy,” Marian interrupted.

  They both turned and looked at her.

  “Thought you were taking a nap, Ma,” Carter said.

  “And you d-d-didn’t want to wake me up so you tiptoed into the room and k-k-kissed me on the forehead.”

  Her palsy had been pronounced all day.

  “You were playing opossum! Why didn’t you—?”

  “’Cause it was sweet. Now give your mama a real hug and be on your way. I don’t like you d-d-driving these roads at night.”

  Carter crossed the room and gently hugged his mother. Piper saw her brow crease in pain, but she didn’t wince and Carter didn’t see.

  Maggie had pleaded to be allowed to put Sadie to bed, and in the sudden silence, the sound of her voice singing a silly song about “puffy-tailed bunnies” floated into the room.

  The song wrenched at Piper, and she turned away so no one would see the tears that had sprung into her eyes.

  “I’ll walk you to your car, Carter,” Piper said, then went out the front door and down the steps. He followed. The shadows were long; the sky darkening.

  Carter opened the back driver’s side door, tossed his gym bag onto the back seat and closed the door. Piper leaned on the front door, staring unseeing across the valley.

  “You don’t want to go to the sheriff tomorrow.” It wasn’t a question.

  “You blame me? What if he says he knows who she is, that her family’s been looking for her?” She turned to face him. “What then?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “Do you want me to stay and go with you in the morning?”

  “No, of course not, I can—”

  “I don’t mind. I could—”

  “Go back to Charleston, Carter, I’ll be fine. It’s just…” her voice broke.

  She started to cry, and he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest. He held her there, tight, patting her back. She could feel his warm breath in her hair and wanted to let go, let it all out. She didn’t, though. She grabbed hold of her emotions and swallowed her tears, but remained in his arms, sniffling for a few more moments. Then she pulled back, with his arms still around her and looked up into his face. He reached down and tenderly cupped her cheek, using his thumb to wipe the tears from beneath her eye. The moment dragged out. She stood, staring up at him, and when his face slowly lowered, she closed her eyes and felt his warm lips on hers.

  Chapter 14

  That’s how Grayson found them.

  He came around the last bend in the road and could see the house in the gloom. Light shone out through the front door, a golden honey that flowed down the steps and out the walk. When he stepped around a stand of bushes, the golden light lit the side of the car parked in front of the gate. Lit the couple standing there, sparkled in Piper’s dark hair as his brother looked down into her face. And then kissed her.

  A gigantic hole opened under Grayson’s feet, and he felt himself teetering on the edge of it, the crumbling rim of an airless, black abyss in which there was no light and from which there was no return. Some part of him realized he’d felt that sensation before, when a little girl…then it was gone.

  The world slowed down. Seconds dragged out into an agonizingly long time during which images of his brother and his wife came to Grayson’s mind unbidden, the two of them together…

  Then Piper pushed away from Carter, stepped back shaking her head. Carter took a step toward her, said something. She shook her head again, turned away from him.

  And saw Grayson standing there fifteen feet away.

  Her face froze. Her body went just as rigid. Then her hands flew to her mouth, her face crumbled in an agonizing cramp of…of…he didn’t know what. And she began to scream.

  *

  For a moment, Piper had allowed herself to be swept away by a wave of loneliness and need—but only for a moment. She straightened then and stepped back out of Carter’s arms. Carter moved to embrace her again.

  “Piper, I’m not sorry. Please—”

  She shook her head and turned away to go back into the house.

  That’s when she saw him. The soldier in the gloom. The ghost from her dream. Grayson stood in the fading light as she had seen him so many times before. He had come to her, dead, his lifeless eyes staring, blind.

  She screamed, a high-pitched, keening wail. Shaking her head no, pleading with the ghost with her eyes, she screamed again and began to stumble backward.

  “No!” she cried. “Oh, God, please no…”

  The gloom grew muddy, black smoke rolled in all around, obscuring everything, covering the ghost, muting the sound of her screaming until she could hear nothing. Then merciful darkness took her.

  *

  Piper kept screaming, crying out “no!” then backed away from him in … terror. If there was anything Grayson could recognize with absolute clarity, it was fear.

  She took two or three steps backward, wailing and crying, shaking her head and then her knees buckled under her and she fainted.

  Grayson dropped his duffel bag and covered the space between them in seconds. Carter was closer, got there first, knelt beside her and reached out to—

  Grayson grabbed his brother by the shoulder and shoved him aside. On one knee and off balance, Carter went sprawling on his back in the dirt. Grayson dropped to his knees beside Piper. He lifted her limp body off the ground and held her in his arms, rocking slowly back and forth, crooning her name softly. Then he leaned sideways, sat in the dirt and cradled her in his lap.

  “Piper. Piper, baby. It’s okay. I’m home.”

  He heard activity around him. His mother’s voice from the porch, crying out to Carter, “Carter, what’s wrong—why’s Piper screaming?”

  But Gray ignored the voices, couldn’t have paid them mind if he’d wanted to. The only thing that existed in the universe was the weight of the woman in his arms, her eyes closed, lips parted slightly as if she’d only drifted off to sleep. He could feel her warm breath on his face. It smelled of cinnamon and apples.

  He eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Then they snapped open so wide the whites looked like egg-white around a yolk. She was confused, struggling, and tried to push him away.

  “Piper. Honey, it’s me. Piper, I’m home.”

  When recognition finally registered on her face, her bottom lip began to tremble. She reached up tentatively and touched his cheek, then her eyes devoured his face.

  “Gray…? Grayson…is it really…?”

  He couldn’t speak. His eyes filled with tears, and when he blinked, they slid down both cheeks. All he could do was nod his head. Then her arms went around his neck in a hug of such strength and force it was impossible to draw a breath. She pulled back
out of the hug and began to kiss his face, crying his name, crying and laughing, tears on her cheeks and the most incredible smile, the most beautiful, loving smile he had ever seen. She kissed him then on the mouth, and he devoured hers, leaned into her, kissed her so hard and so long that when it was over they were both breathless and trembling.

  “I thought…” she whispered. “I thought you were a ghost. Dead and a ghost. I’ve dreamed it, the same dream over and over. You come to me before the men in dress uniforms in the black car. You’re dead. You have blood all over—”

  He put his finger to her lips.

  “It was a dream. I’m real.” He actually grinned. “I’ll prove it.” And he kissed her again, long and hard. He felt his heart kick into a gallop, and all at once he felt more alive than he had felt in…maybe more alive than he’d ever felt in his life. He had made it through hell! He had made it home.

  When he finally pulled back, gasping, he heard his mother’s voice from the porch.

  “Grayson! Grayson Allen Addington, are you really out there like Carter says? Grayson, you come here to me right this minute! Do you hear me? Don’t you make me come out there and snatch you bald-headed.”

  *

  Piper held onto Grayson’s arm, and he helped her to her feet. But she didn’t let go of his arm then. Couldn’t let go. She had to keep her hands on him, feel the warmth of him, touch him or she wouldn’t be able to believe he was actually here, that this wasn’t some dream she’d wake up from in the midnight dark, then reach over and feel the cold lonely side of the bed where he wasn’t, where he hadn’t been in so long.

  She felt the muscles in his arm—thin! He was so thin!—felt them ripple and bulge when he reached for the gate. He smiled up at his mother on the porch, and the pinched look, the tight set of his mouth relaxed. In the warm golden light spilling out the front door and down the porch steps, he was the Grayson who’d brought Piper flowers the night of his graduation from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, the Grayson who’d never left her side during the too-long labor that ended in a Caesarean section with Sadie, the young man in his dress uniform—a view of his face that was blurry because she’d stared at the picture through tears welling in her eyes so many times.