The Color of My Native Sky
By
L.D. Bloodworth
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to people or events is purely coincidental.
©L.D. Bloodworth 2018, 2019
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He was the sun, the moon, the stars. A night sky filled with wonder and darkness and light and she didn’t know it. He was everything and she didn’t know it.
Those were the days of stain, when innocence was slaughtered, and childhood abandoned to the gnashing teeth of the chaff. And the blood stained.
1
Edie saw it sometimes, the color of that sky. Took her a long time to forget.
It was pastoral and far and false. It wore cotton shirts you could hear snap back and forth in the dry heat, and shadows that threatened relief but then fizzled out. Not enough umphh.
Not yet.
Washing was done every Tuesday with her mother, Shelly, and the younger ones, Sara Beth and Rosemary. They were just kids.
Edie was eighteen. Rosemary wasn’t much more than a baby. Thirteen, she thought. She and Sara Beth were closer in age, but not in disposition. Sara Beth loved the men folk, their mother said, and Edie was dry and dusty as the flatlands, Sara Beth said. It wasn’t so. She just didn’t take a liking to any of them. Not in their plaid shirts and their dirty boots, no poetry written on their faces, only dimwitted grins and squints.
She called him Randall ‘cause she never felt much like calling him daddy. He sat in the swing that hung from the rafters of the back porch drinking lemonade and watching over them as they did the day’s work.
Eyeglasses, turned dark from the sunlight, hid his squints. She knew from the way he scraped the underside of his fingernails with his pocketknife, bearing ruddy bandages on the backs of his hands, he was nitpicking behind those glasses.
He wasn’t big, not as big as his shadow. Sometimes he fooled you and it felt like the only thing bigger was the sky. She thought he fooled himself. Maybe he thought his heart unlike her lot, common.
She reached up, placed the waistband of a skirt onto the plastic-coated wire and clipped it, just like he showed them. Cringing, she heard the crunching of the burnt grass beneath his feet and the swishing of his polyester slacks as he came up on her like he did: slow, with one foot dragging a little. She let her eyes fall away toward the ground and stood stone still when he came close.
His hand went to her shoulder, squeezing.
“Edie, it’s time.”
She shirked his hand away and made for the uncertain safety of the house.
Smelling of sunlight and scorched earth, they scurried single file inside. She pulled Rosemary into the room she shared with Sara Beth. They washed the blood dust from their faces and brushed their waist length hair. She ran the brush through Rosemary’s hair and pulled it away from her eyes, fastening it with a ribbon whose ends were frayed.
She wondered if Rosemary had the headaches. She was about her age when the headaches began. The doctor had told her mother to cut her hair, but she wouldn’t hear of it because Randall would disapprove.
“Edie?” Rosemary whispered, still full of innocence.
“What?”
“Did Billy Charlie go to heaven?”
“Course, he did, why do you ask that?”
Edie hesitated and heard her mother calling from the kitchen, “Girls? Let’s go, now.”
“Come on, we’d best be going. Don’t say nothing like that to Charlotte, you hear?” Edie warned.
“But whyyyy?”
Edie looked sidelong at the dark circles on the face in the mirror, the girl she used to be passed away by the one she had become.
Randall hurried them along to the waiting car. She wished she could walk instead, not wanting to breathe the same air as him.
Nobody had much to say on the drive over. She didn’t reckon there was much to be said when your best friend was being put in the ground. Nothing seemed to cover that, no how.
They were seated on cold wooden pews, crammed together in the auditorium of the church where the smell of artificially preserved flowers and embalming fluid mingled together in a bittersweet cloud. They watched the line of people pass through the church and up to the coffin where, ordinarily, they would view the body. Since the back of Billy Charlie’s head was missing, the casket was closed.
The portly Mrs. Wheeler came in front of them, shuffling sideways between the pews, adjusting her pillbox hat.
“Good of your father to deliver the eulogy in his condition, don’t you think, girls?” she said, her tongue dripping syrup.
They nodded and bowed their heads, praying she would move along. Instead, she heaved her considerable weight onto the pew in front of them, bathing them in the cloying scent of cheap jasmine perfume and Juicy Fruit gum.
Their mother sat up front and rubbed Charlotte’s back and passed her tissues, answering for her whenever someone came up to shake her hand or hug her. She would nod her head, look to Charlotte, rub her shoulder, and send the visitors on their way as she welcomed the next person in line. It was like a shepherd would herd sheep through the loading chute. Inoculate them, move them along, send them off to slaughter with the rest.
She didn’t wanna think about Billy in that metal box and she was glad that she hadn’t had to see him lying there, made up in clown paint, his eyes and mouth sewn shut like some kind of ragdoll. She was glad she hadn’t had to go up there and stand over him and smell his death mingled with perfume and flowers and Juicy Fruit.
She felt so ashamed for every time she ever complained. Sorry for all the terrible thoughts she’d had about any of those people, whether she liked them or not, and she hung her head, unable to look at them. She wished to be back at that age where the veil was still in place and she was shielded from the faults and flaws of every human being including herself, to be protected from the clear and brutal truth: we are all stained and dying.
When her father took the podium, everything fell silent. He tapped a white pen on one side of the podium with his right hand, the left hand resting beside his open bible. She couldn’t help but think of the white-gore pen and if he had spent the morning making the wounds beneath the bandages on his hands deeper.
His pallor was that of sour milk, mostly white with touches of the greenish-gray color you turn just before you faint. When he opened his mouth to speak, his voice broke as he read the chosen verse.
“The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come.”
After a long pause, he added, “I think most of us knew Billy to be a good young man troubled by a besetting sin. Perhaps it was the Lord’s will to take him on to Paradise so that it would not lead to the damnation of his eternal soul. We should all be so lucky.”
He glared out at the crowd, lost for words, searching the faces for some hint, some clue as to what he was supposed to say, the truth of it eating away at him like a worm eats its way out of a rotten apple.
The days of the stain were upon us.
“May God have mercy on us all.”
2
Edie flung the bedroom door open, the heat stretching from a cracked window into the cool of the room. The warm tendrils drew her to the bathroom where her younger sister stood beneath the window sill in her underwear, blowi
ng a plume of smoke out of the crack at the bottom. Sara Beth realized she was caught mid-draw, and suddenly stopped and held back the smoke, more concerned with the cigarette in her hand than her lack of clothing.
“Shut the door, ninny,” she coughed, flipping the cigarette out the open window and pulling it closed.
“I didn’t know you were lit up, Sara Beth. Geez. You’re gonna get it. You’re gonna be up there on Sunday doing confession, he catches you.”
Sara Beth breezed out of the room, Edie right behind, and plopped onto the mattress sending it into a series of mini-quakes. “So? You think he wants me to confess to the sheep? How would that make him look? One of his obedient little girls smoking and fornicating?”
She feigned a gasp and they both laughed as if it were funny.
Ankle length skirts were slung over the closet door, limp and faded like washed up whale carcasses. She smoothed the brunette waves away from her face and tucked them carefully behind her ears, pulling the length of it over her shoulder. She might have braided it were it not so long.
“Edie? Sara Beth? Get moving.” Her mother’s voice carried through the house along with the jangling of keys, a strategy employed to herd them into the car when they were running late.
Swaddled in the long denim whale skins, they crammed into the backseat of a station wagon that should have been put out of its misery. Randall drove the car, looked straight ahead, never speaking, seldom blinking, unavailable to mortals. A silent shepherd, his hands vice-like on the wheel, white knuckles and the backs of his hands stretched tight with round silver disks that were scars.
He was the man of God in the one stop-light town he was called to serve. Edie always wondered if he actually heard God calling or if he suffered from some kind of delusion. She leaned toward delusion, especially when the stain was on him.
Daring, she asked, “Randall?”
“Yes?”
“Could I drive?”
“Your lot is too flighty to be driving a vehicle. Woman is meant as a helpmeet, a helper, for man. You should be worrying over finding a husband, now you’re eighteen.”
He forbade her to drive, and he believed it would stick. He believed she would obey.
Secretly, she swore that someday she was going to learn how to drive and haul herself right the hell out of there. Maybe, by God, wearing pants.
For forty mind-numbing minutes in the hot car, she stared out the window and wondered what lay beyond the windswept sea that surrounded her. Stalks of corn shot up from the ground like cell bars, intertwining their limbs together to form a wall of green, blocking her view of the outside.
The car pulled into the lot just as Mrs. Wheeler was coming out of the market door. The woman wore a permanent look of exasperation. Coupled with the fact that she seldom unpursed her lips long enough to smile, she had a way of looking at you that made you feel like something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe.
She had a far-away look about her when Randall was around. Eyes round with adoration, she approached him with an unnatural reverence.
She can’t see who’s holding the strings, Edie thought, and he’s just a puppet.
“Brother Harper,” she droned, “so nice to see you.”
“And you, Mrs. Wheeler. How is Bob?”
“Oh, he’s much better. Praise God,” she said as she rolled her eyes toward the sky and clutched her hands to her chest. “The power of prayer, Brother Harper.”
“Yes,” Randall looked at his shoes, “God is merciful.”
Edie withdrew and slid a few feet away, feigning interest in some potted plants on sale outside the store window. A low, quiet voice, said, “Well, hello, Miss Edie.”
“Jimmy,” she said flatly.
Blond curls ringed the band of his cap and when he removed it, they were molded into a blond helmet that made him look like a little boy. “Aren’t you looking lovely? When are you gonna let me see how sweet you are? I bet you’re just like candy, aren’t ya? Oh, hello, Reverend.” He went around shaking their hands, all grins and squints, mirroring their every expression save for when he turned to glance at Edie. For her his eyes turned, serpent laden pools alive with darkness.
He put his hands in his pockets and shifted from one foot to the other while he waited. He knew they would disburse and that she would be left out there alone where he could cop a feel without the good reverend having to witness it.
“You gonna give it to me, one of these days, you’ll see.”
“Jimmy, go find someone else to pick on.”
“Damn girl, why you gotta be so mean? I’d be good to you. I’d be real good to you,” he said, grabbing his pants by the belt buckle and giving them a jerk.
While her mother and father entertained Mrs. Wheeler, and she tried to fend off an increasingly belligerent Jimmy, a beat-up blue truck squealed sideways and roared into the parking space beside them. Music thundered from the open window and the sound of high-pitched squeals and little giggles filled the lot bringing it to life like the notes of a song.
Transfixed, Edie watched three girls her own age spill out of the truck. The driver was raven haired with blue, kohl rimmed eyes that glared fiercely in the direction of anyone bold enough to look. A blond was next, small and pale and fairy-like. She was ethereal and seemed to float from place to place like some ghost. Lastly, a very tall girl with red hair that shone like fire in the sun crawled out the passenger door.
All three wore black. Black t-shirts, black jeans and boots, with nails painted in the deepest shades. Their feet hit the pavement, dancing circles around one another and twisting their arms out toward Jimmy in invitation to join them like a group of sirens.
They laughed at Jimmy, standing there with his too-dark jeans and pastel button up shirt hanging from his wiry frame just as if they were hanging from a hanger, and blew kisses at him as they breezed their way past him into the market.
Jimmy’s mouth went slack and then he grinned, all teeth and venom. “Ooh, you missed your chance, Edie. Hello, ladies,” he whispered, slithering through the parked cars after the girls.
Mrs. Wheeler looked aghast and shook her head disapprovingly. The old woman leaned toward Edie’s mother, saying in a low voice, “The devil’s children. Those three are doing the devil’s work.”
Edie hoped they weren’t planning on trying to get a job there or anything. One little whisper from Mrs. Wheeler to the congregation could shatter those plans into a million pieces.
“Say a prayer for them, will you, Mrs. Wheeler?” Shelly asked.
“Oh, they’re past that, dear. I heard they’re here to stay, the lot of them. Moved into that old house on forty-one.”
“The old Hanson place?” Randall took out his notepad and jotted something down. “Does Rick still rent that?”
“No. Some of Martha’s relatives inherited the place after she died. Nasty business, diabetes. Right after she lost her right foot, too.”
“Oh, yes, that’s right. Is that the same place Matt McCallaugh has been complaining of? The loud music and such?”
“I believe so. The talk was that they were going to auction it off because they couldn’t locate Martha’s nephew. He was next of kin. Then those three turned up. I suppose they’re some relation to him.”
“You reckon they’re all paid up on property taxes and such? I mean, we wouldn’t want them to run into any hitches that might make it so they can’t live there,” Randall said, studying his note.
“Brother Harper,” Mrs. Wheeler cast a knowing glance in Edie’s direction, “look at them.”
Randall scratched the back of his hand with the notepad, gouging the skin with the end of the wire spiral, spreading the stain.
3
The highway melted beneath the onslaught of the sun and blurred vehicles clung to the horizon in the dead heat of the afternoon. The road stretched out like it had no end and no beginning, a ribbon of pavement that cut through acres of fields with little more than a slope or rise to break the monotony
of the flatness. Seemed like it’d only take you to places you’d already been.
“Can’t you turn on the air, Randall?” her mother pleaded, fanning herself with a church bulletin. “It’s hotter than Hades on this road and all the groceries are gonna ruin.”
“Uses too much fuel, Shell. ‘Sides, we’re almost to the house.”
Pulling her skirt up under her, Edie swung her arm out the open window, letting her hand ride the current as the car lumbered through the heat. The hot breeze brought the sweet smell of corn into the car as it swept across the fields and through her hair while the car rocked back and forth. Her eyes were heavy, and her head began to loll when she was jerked awake by the piercing squeal of the brakes.
She threw her hands onto the back of the passenger’s seat, bracing for what she thought was impact with an animal or another car. Randall pulled hard on the steering wheel and swerved to miss, not a dog or a deer, but a group of people standing around an old blue pickup as if it were a dead body. The hood was up, and steam rolled out of the engine.
As the car crept past the scene, a man sauntered around the front of the truck, blissfully unaware that he had almost become a smudge on the pavement. He was a few years older than Edie and wore a thin white t-shirt that clung to his muscular frame. His jeans were grimy and grease-smeared, evidence of his failed attempt to resuscitate the truck.
Randall turned to look them over, checking for damage as he steered the car off the road. There was a slight flare of his nostrils and clench of his jaw, but all in all, he was calm and said quietly, “Everybody’s all right. We’re all right.”
Randall knew how to keep his cool, his demeanor under stress a relic from his time in the army. He had signed up straight out of high school, just as soon as he’d married her mother. Edie had come along right after. Gotta get the order right, she thought. They didn’t talk much about those times. Sometimes, she suspected that they weren’t the happiest years of their marriage. Things got better when Randall came home and enrolled in the seminary. She wondered if he did that for himself or for her mother.
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