When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  “Dr. Rutherford.” She interrupted his spiel, and he looked piqued. But she didn’t care. This was getting old and apparently she didn’t have time for all this lollygagging.

  “You’re saying I’m gonna be dead ’fore the end of the month—that it?”

  “As I was telling your daughter-in-law, Mrs. Addington, it depends on several variables and on how you tolerate the new—”

  “But I’m dying and it ain’t gonna take long. If that’s what you mean, son, quit beating around the bush and spit it out.”

  Dr. Rutherford said nothing for a moment, seemed to consider, then merely nodded his head.

  “In essence, yes, that’s what I mean. Given your—”

  “How long?”

  “Well, it depends on—”

  “How long?”

  “A week would be a fair estimation, I’d say.” Marian saw the color drain so completely out of Piper’s face, even her red lips turned blue. “We need to get you admitted to—”

  “The hospital?” Marian was incredulous. “Young fella, did your mama have any kids that lived? You know I ain’t going into no hospital. Onliest place I’m going is home to my mountains, so you need to help me down off this here table. I got to get about the business of living what’s left of my life so I can commence to dying.”

  The nurse helped her to the floor and fussed around getting her sweater situated back on her shoulders. The doctor was talking in low tones to Piper—who had tears streaming down her cheeks, poor thing!—and Marian caught phrases like “pain medication” and “keep her comfortable” and things like that.

  “You need to blow your nose and wipe your face ’fore we go out in the waiting room and them little girls think something awful’s happened,” she told Piper tenderly. Wouldn’t do no good though. You could read that girl’s soul in them big brown eyes. And when her temper flared—and Piper did have a temper—she could pull them black eyebrows together to give you a look as would cause internal bleeding.

  Marian resolutely struggled to fix on her own face what she hoped looked like a smile on the outside—’cause it sure enough didn’t feel like one on the inside. Hard to pull off something simple as smiling when you had to remember which muscles to pull up and which ones not.

  She concentrated. There. That was probably a fair-to-middlin’ smile, seemed to fit where it was supposed to in all the right places on her face.

  Piper obediently wiped her cheeks, squared her jaw and draped a smile between her ears that hung limp as a broke clothesline.

  *

  Carter put his arms tenderly around Piper and let her cry. His own head was spinning. Of course, he knew his mother was terminally ill, but terminally ill and “a week to live” weren’t the same thing at all!

  Marian and the girls were seated at a table in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant that overlooked the Kanawha River near the doctor’s office. He could see them through the window. Marian had an untouched omelet in front of her, but she was smiling, feeding small pieces of blueberry pancakes to Sunshine, who smashed most of the sticky pieces into the high chair tray rather than eating them. Maggie sat beside Marian, looking up at her. The expression on the child’s face was unreadable. Piper said she hadn’t told Maggie what the doctor said, but he had the sense the little girl had figured it out.

  “How did Ma take it when he told her?” he asked Piper, and she pulled out of his arms and looked up into his face. She never wore makeup, so there was no mascara smeared down her cheeks—like he’d seen on every woman he’d ever broken up with, and there had been more than a fair number of those. She glanced in the window at the trio seated at the table inside, careful to keep her back turned so if they chanced to look up they wouldn’t see her face.

  “He didn’t tell her; she told him,” Piper said. “She just nailed him, asked him how long.” She stifled a sob. “And he…said…a week.”

  She buried her face in his chest again, and he couldn’t help the thrill that ran through him at the feeling of her in his arms. But this was all messed up, not like he’d planned. At this very moment, Jesse was probably somewhere in the woods taking a bead on Zeke. The playing out of that whole scenario—blaming Grayson, convincing Piper—he’d never intended that to happen as his mother was dying! If he could get in touch with Jesse…but, of course, he couldn’t. It would happen today, whether it was convenient or not.

  “I’m coming home,” he said into Piper’s hair.

  She drew back and looked up at him in surprise.

  “If Ma’s only got…I’m coming home after work tomorrow, staying with her until…”

  “What about…?”

  “Grayson? Don’t worry about that. He and I, we’ll be fine.”

  But they wouldn’t. As soon as Piper heard about Zeke, and Carter blamed it on Grayson, oh, no, they most certainly wouldn’t be fine at all.

  For the first time since Carter conceived the plan he hoped would drive a wedge between Grayson and Piper so deep it would split their marriage apart, he questioned whether he actually should go through with it. Whether he could go through with it. His mother, their mother was dying.

  ***

  The two-hour drive from Charleston back to Sadler Hollow was quiet and that was good because Maggie needed to think. Sadie had fallen asleep next to her on the back seat with her thumb in her mouth and her head in Maggie’s lap, and Maggie idly brushed the little girl’s hair back from her forehead as she watched the mountains outside the car windows grow steeper and steeper.

  Nan Marian and Miss Piper had said little since they came out of the doctor’s office, but Maggie had seen the looks the grownups exchanged, heard the whispers. She knew. Nan Marian’s time was drawing to a close, and like water circling the drain in the sink, the time would spin faster and faster until it was gone.

  Though the light in Nan Marian’s eyes was fading, that’s not what was stealing the light and color from Maggie’s world. It was something else. Something terrible that filled her with such foreboding she sometimes couldn’t quite draw a breath.

  It had come to her in a nightmare as she slept on her pallet on the back porch the night Mr. Grayson came home. The thing in the dream rumbled and roared and then was silent. She had awakened panting, sweating and afraid. And cold. The kind of cold that wrapping up in a warm blanket or sitting in a tub of hot water wouldn’t fix. It wasn’t a cold that came from the outside in, feeling snow slide down your collar when you lay on the ground in it and flapped your arms to make snow angels. It was cold from the inside out. That cold didn’t leave when she woke up. She’d moved her pallet into the house then, not wanting to sleep outside by herself in the dark anymore. That didn’t help, though. Every night since, she’d had the same dream. Every night, the cold sent out icicles into her blood that didn’t thaw.

  Since she couldn’t remember her past and didn’t know what her future might hold, she pictured in her mind that she lived in the space between tall, thick oak doors with brass doorknobs and no keyholes. She didn’t know what lay on the other side of either one. She had come through one once, running away from the people Miss Piper’d said had beaten her. She would go out through the other into the future eventually, though she was terrified of living in a place where grownups hit children. And Sadie! How could she bear to leave Sadie? That’s why every moment between the two doors was such a precious gift, and she treasured every breath, every touch of Sadie’s hand—every bird call, note of fiddle music, titter of laughter and smell of honeysuckle.

  But the darkness, the rumbling dark Thing was now stealing the joy from her small world “in-between.” She wanted to ask somebody about what it might be but knew no one would understand.

  When they rounded a curve into the far end of Sadler Hollow, she saw a bright-red light on the road ahead. It was a flashing light that grew brighter and brighter as it approached until an ambulance passed in a roar of siren and was gone. Maggie turned to look out the back window and watched until it was out of sight.


  Chapter 21

  The morning had gradually warmed as the sun marched up into the sky, finally cleared the mountain and shone down into Sadler Hollow. Then it turned hot. August-in-West-Virginia hot. Grayson was a long way from the church by then, and when the sun hit him, he stripped down to his T-shirt and tied his long-sleeved camo shirt around his waist. He’d been cold ever since he got back. His thermostat was off, and sometimes the long sleeves of his fatigues felt good, even in the stifling summer heat of August.

  Besides, they hid the jungle rot that ran from his wrist to his elbow on his right arm. Piper’d been right—hydrogen peroxide was drying it out even without a daily dose of Dapsone, but the pus had gone crusty, and it was still disgusting and he didn’t want anybody to see it. So far, Piper hadn’t noticed the open sores on his left sole from immersion foot. He’d caught it early, got out of the boots and into dry socks in time so it didn’t go gangrene on him. Still, it was repulsive. He didn’t want to see it, and he sure didn’t want his wife to.

  Piper’s face formed in his mind in splendid detail. The feather of dark eyebrows above her brown eyes and her full lips. She was real. And somehow he had to shovel out all the slime—the goo as disgusting as the rot on his hands and foot—that lay between them so he could be with her again, really be there.

  But he didn’t know how.

  He looked around for a place to sit in the shade and enjoy the view spread out below him as he ate his lunch. Piper had packed him an apple, a chocolate-chip cookie and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the knapsack. He’d always loved peanut butter, even the kind that came in a small tin in K rations. The other soldiers hated it, though, and would toss the tins into the fire pits, where the cans would heat up and then explode. The GIs called them peanut butter ambushes.

  He spotted a sugar maple tree that lifted a leafy umbrella over a bed of moss and lichen around its lumpy roots dug into the rocky soil. He leaned his rifle against the trunk, then settled himself among the lumps into what was a surprisingly comfortable seat.

  He ate the sandwich, washed it down with swigs from his canteen, and chomped the apple as a chicken hawk flew high overhead, up above the black scar of dam. He didn’t allow his eye to follow the bird that far. He’d done enough staring at that ugliness this morning. Though it was totally irrational, he’d made a decision as he sat on the porch of the abandoned church building. He was getting his family out of that house as soon as he could. Once he knew where he’d be stationed after his leave was up, he’d move the three of them—Piper, Sadie and his mother—into off-base housing. No…maybe it would be the four of them.

  There was Maggie, after all.

  He pulled the cookie out of the knapsack. What about Maggie? He and Piper couldn’t cart her off somewhere even if the sheriff couldn’t find her family—which was crazy! Who doesn’t report a missing ten-year-old child?

  He grabbed his emotions before they could follow the rabbit down that hole. Gray didn’t want to get angry at Maggie’s parents because that meant he cared for her. And he couldn’t care for her!

  He started to take a bite of the cookie.

  Ookie-kay.

  That was the first pig Latin Nguyen ever learned.

  The two of them sit together beside a small fire they’ll have to put out before dusk. Haystack, the red-haired kid named McKenzie they called Bagpipes, a skinny soldier called Beanpole or Beanie, and KFC, the chicken farmer they’d dubbed Kentucky Fried Chicken, are preparing to cook their K rations—small cans the size of tuna fish cans full of chopped ham and eggs, ham slices, beef, or turkey loaf.

  Haystack reads off the label: “Says this here was made during World War II. I hate eating food’s older than I am.”

  Beanie smiles. His father is a dentist, and he looks like the poster boy for Crest toothpaste.

  “Don’t nobody tell no jokes when Beanie’s in a hooch with me,” Haystack says. “You can read the label on the K rations from the glow off his teeth.”

  Grayson turns to Nguyen as he digs into the accessory pack that came with his K rations.

  “Pig Latin. Ig-pay atin-lay. You try it.” He removes a white plastic spoon; some instant coffee, sugar and nondairy creamer; two Chiclets; a small roll of toilet paper; moisture-resistant paper matches; and salt and pepper before he finds the cigarettes he’s looking for.

  “Ig-lay atin-lay,” Nguyen says.

  “No, the first sound of the word. Ig-pay.”

  He looks at the four-smoke mini pack of Pall Malls. The Winstons, Marlboro’s and Lucky Strikes are better, easier to trade. He holds up the Pall Malls.

  “What do I hear for this fine assortment of death, four Pall Mall cancer sticks for your coughing pleasure?”

  “I’ll take ’em,” say Haystack and Beanie at the same time. Then Haystack holds up a round chocolate cookie tin and tosses it toward Grayson, who catches it and throws back the cigarette pack. Beanie groans, and Haystack fishes out one of the smokes and hands it to him.

  The company has been encamped here outside Yan Ling, Nguyen’s village, for more than a week. They could be here another week, a month, or they could be ordered to pack up and haul butt in twenty minutes. Those decisions are made by folks higher up the food chain than a simple foot soldier like Grayson.

  And that’s what he is. A foot soldier. That’s how he sees himself now. He is a chaplain who packs every instrument of death the other soldiers carry—an M16, ammo, grenades and a viciously sharp Bowie knife.

  Nguyen has hardly left his side since he came to in the hut, and he’s found out a mountain of information from her constant chatter. She is an orphan. “Father step on mine. Not find all of him.” Her mother died of some kind of jungle fever, so she is being raised by the village. Everybody’s child. And, consequently, nobody’s child. She does as she pleases, ranges far from home. That’s how she had come to be the first to the bodies of Grayson’s unit, discovered that the one with a cross on his helmet wasn’t dead, and then rolled him over and over like a log into the latrine when she heard the Cong in the jungle nearby.

  He pops open the round tin with the cookie inside.

  “Want a cookie?” he asks and hands it to her. Then holds up the beef loaf and turkey loaf tins, trying to decide which is the least distasteful.

  “Ookie-kay,” Nguyen says.

  He turns and stares at her. “What did you say?”

  “Ookie-kay.”

  “That’s it!” He gathers her in his arms in a big bear hug, then turns to the others.

  “Did you guys hear that?” Back to Nguyen, “Tell ’em what a cookie is.”

  “Ookie-kay,” she says and giggles. All the soldiers within earshot burst into spontaneous applause.

  Grayson looked at the cookie in his hand and whispered “ookie-kay” because his throat was too tight to say the word out loud.

  Then snapshots of the little girl who said the word play across a screen in his head like he’s turning the pages of a picture album. Nguyen, giggling when Bagpipes pretends to pull a quarter out from behind her ear. The solemn way she looked at him sometimes, like she knew what he was thinking. “You miss her, don’t you, Grape? Your girl, Sadie?” And he did, but he couldn’t see Sadie then. Or Piper. All he could see was what was in front of him, the dark-eyed little girl who was so full of life. She had brought him back from the hole he fell into after The Birdhouse. As long as he could see the light in her eyes, he could get up one more day, pull on his boots one more time, carve one more notch in his short-timer’s stick.

  The pig Latin phrase beat softly in the back of his head, like the sound of surf crashing rhythmically on rocks. There was more. Something else. But it was in a black box, and he had no intention of stepping on one of the black-box landmines and having his guts splattered all over Cochran County.

  No, thank you.

  He stood, picked up his knapsack and his rifle, and headed into the trees, the woods a balm to his wounded soul as soothing as a clean white bandage on a burn. He felt th
e world become more and more real as the hours passed and the sun slid across the open space above the valley and down behind the mountain to the west. As the world he had left behind faded, a scab started to form over the lacerations in his soul. The wounds of war take a long time to heal, but it had to start somewhere and for U.S. Army Chaplain Grayson Addington it had begun today under the tender ministrations of the West Virginia mountains.

  Perhaps for the first time since he stood in the rain at The Birdhouse and looked out over a smoking ruin of humanity, at the bodies of young men who had cows back home to milk and girlfriends to marry, he dared to hope that there really was a world beyond that. And that he could return to that world and live a life there.

  Tonight he and Piper would talk. About Maggie, and moving, and what happens next in the life of a minister who no longer believes in God.

  He saw the sheriff’s cruiser angling up the road to the house as he descended the mountainside. They must have found Maggie’s family. And he was surprised to discover how that saddened him. High above, a chicken hawk bleated out a cry that sounded as mournful as he felt.

  When he came out of the woods and crossed the small clearing behind the house, he could see Piper standing on the front walk, talking to Cochran County Sheriff Clifford Bayless, and he circled around the backyard fence and headed in their direction.

  He was tired. The gun felt heavy. And he was hot. He reached up and pulled at his T-shirt collar. A small gray ringneck snake slithered away from his boot—just one ring, not like the many-banded kraits solders dubbed two-step snakes—so venomous if one bit you, you’d be dead before you could take two steps.

  The mountains dissolved into jungle between one breath and the next. He hadn’t stepped on a krait, he’d stepped on a black box. But it might prove just as deadly.