Another few hours later, after that load of laundry had dried in the blistering afternoon sun, Frances was doing just what she’d earlier sworn she would not. While working the needle, the image of John’s yellowed toenails cutting through the cotton sock repeated with almost every stitch. She considered leaving off the chore at least twice more, but before she could rally her resolve she was finished. After all, what else was there for her to do, Frances thought.
The porch creaked to the rhythm of her gentle rocking, and the tabby cat, Rusty, sprawled a few feet away, tongue panting as though it were a dog. There was no way for her to know, but the animal was ill from eating cicadas, a lesson it seemed the poor feline was never destined to learn.
Out in the fields, from behind the house, she could just make out the steady thrum of the tractor. The sound seemed in concert with the undulating waves of heat that distorted the horizon. She had no way of knowing whether it was her husband, John, or the field hand, Ben, who was at work there. She hoped it was John. Otherwise, he might be pulling up in his truck at any moment and that was an encounter she preferred to face later. She was too exhausted to continue her argument with him just yet. Cutting the thread with her teeth when she finished the knot of the last stitch, and tossing the sock into the basket at her feet, she paused to notice the seam made from the mend looked like a little smile.
“Yeah, right,” she huffed and kicked the basket aside.
Rusty thwacked his tail about to let her know she was irritating him.
“You and me both,” she told the old cat.
Back upstairs, where the swelter collected mercilessly, the open windows could hardly be of any help. The heavy air seemed too tired to move. Frances repeatedly blew the hair from her eyes and wiped her glistening brow with the back of her forearm as she balanced the laundry basket on her hip while putting her husband’s things away.
She was still wrestling with her anger with John when her hand discovered something unexpected as she pushed clean and newly mended socks into his bottom dresser drawer. Three sheets of folded paper brushed against her hand. She crinkled her nose in wonderment and set the laundry basket to the floor. Something deep inside told her that this was trouble; perhaps more than she was ready to undertake. Leave it be, that little voice said. She would not.
Taking the pages out but not unfolding them, she could tell that it was a handwritten letter. In a flash of thought that she covered more quickly than could have been recounted, she went from considering it was a letter from a lover to the idea that it might be a letter to a lover. Before any of those notions could have come to fruition, however, she banished them.
“He’s never had eyes for other women, you silly goose,” Frances quietly chastised herself.
Still, she couldn’t bring herself to read it. She stood there in the heat unable to come to a conclusion. She finally moved to put it back, but then caught herself knowing that such would only be a postponement of the inevitable. Running her finger through the bangs of her hair that were intent on teasing her eyes, she stepped back to the bed and sat, placing the pages in her lap to regard them as if they were the urn of some loved one’s ashes.
“Why do men think they can hide things in their sock drawers?” she asked herself aloud. She had to chuckle at the absurdity. “Stupid.”
Then, like a soldier grimly rising from the trench, she snatched the letter open and faced her fear head-on.
My Darling,
It began, drawing a lump to her throat.
When I went out this morning it seemed no different than any other. Dog panting as he trotted beside me in the half-light getting a head start on the day’s heat. Over to the east the sky all a hazy shade lighter than elsewheres. Earth spongy with dew. My shoulders hard with ache. And I don’t know why but I stopped when I reached the barn and just stood. No reason. Just stopped and stared out into the remains of the heavens. A few flecks of glitter here and there. Dog took to his haunches and stared at me in turn. I think I said something to him, but I ain’t sure on that and don’t know what if I did.
And I was pretty sure I was about to be getting on, but just about that time the morning star caught my eye. Venus, just up there, hanging like it were as near a light hardly down the road a piece on some long, dark highway. Last gas for seventy miles or some such. So I stayed there with it taking it in like I’d never done before. Beautiful. Best of God’s ornaments, I suppose. Anyways, while I stood there letting the daylight come on me like I’d nothing better to do, something kind of profound came over me.
With the sky changing from gray to blue, in slow little increments that one can’t measure but still perceive all the same, that morning star started to die. Bit by bit, the day crept up to swallow it. It was just there, a pin prick of light against the haze. The other lights were all gone and what’d made the morning star special seemed lost. But I guess it was special still since I knew what it had been. Even more so since where all the others were spent it stayed on refusing to be snuffed out.
Near the end, half the sky was full of the day that any moment would be bursting over the ghostly trees at the far end of the fields. Venus was so far gone that I knew if I was to look away for even a breath I’d never find her again. So I hung on until finally she just wasn’t there anymore. I put myself to stare on where she had been…where I knew in all truth that she still was. Gone from me, but still just as wonderful right on. And somewhere about that time it hit me. That light hadn’t gone away. I had. It was still there, always would be. Departed only by perception. My perception. Where I’d been pondering how incredible it was something so wonderful and magnificent could simply vanish, it really was something so small and inconsequential—me—that had disappeared. Forever lacking the faculties to keep the most beautiful thing in my eye.
Your loving, John
Frances read the last line over three more times and then carried the letter to the drawer where she’d found it. She pushed the socks back over it. As she closed the drawer she couldn’t help but notice that the mended sock was turned upside down now into a frown. It made her think the universe—the very one her starry-eyed husband had been waxing romantic over—was also speaking to her.
She did her best to forget the letter over the course of the afternoon. She failed. It was as relentless as a toothache and refused to be ignored. It thudded against her thoughts until in her distraction she’d cut her hands twice peeling potatoes. Frustrated and frayed, she’d wept softy then and swore to push it all from her mind only to stumble on the back steps as she went to gather in the last of the day’s wash. Forgetting all else she finally gave in and railed against the wooden planks on the porch, bloodying her knuckles as well, imagining she was punishing her husband and not herself. When her anger seemed spent she curled up there as though she were Rusty, the family cat. She held her eyes tight and in that self-imposed darkness Frances swallowed down the thick scent of her own sweat and blood mingled in the salt of tears.
The sad truth was, however, that for all Frances Sayre’s torment, she failed to see things for what they truly were. For the past few weeks she’d been worried that John had taken up with the Klan—that her husband was some cruel bigot—and now that concern had been trumped by the discovery that her husband was in love with another woman. He was, but that was not what the letter she found had meant. It was a love letter of sorts. And it was a love letter like she’d never known to have come from John, but that was because it was much more. It was also a suicide note; one of many that John had secretly penned over the years in his maudlin, self-pitying moments. The letter was in fact for Frances, or so John had imagined when he’d put pen to paper. Like so many such parting gestures, however, it was more for John’s benefit; one last deep indulgence into his guilt and self-loathing.
Near the end, the only thing Frances really got right was that she didn’t really know the man she’d known for so many years at all.
…
At the window nearest to Deputy Tippen�
�s desk, Dennis Hart sat as the officer had directed him, patiently awaiting his return. A desperate housefly pitched itself against the pane near Dennis’s shoulder in its reckless dance to reach the sunlight beyond. Dennis’s eyes stayed with it as he reconsidered the purpose of having come there himself. Several minutes became a dozen and he was just on the verge of leaving, deciding that obviously the deputy had little interest in whatever some lowly cemetery groundskeeper had to report, when the sound of a toilet flushing was made even louder as the bathroom door on the far side of the office swung open wide.
Tippen stepped out still buckling his trousers and hefting his fly. He paused a moment to nod at Dennis with an air of annoyance when their eyes finally met as though he’d forgotten the man was there. Tippen fanned his backside and adjusted his side arm before finally crossing the room with what the Sheriff often called his ridiculous saunter.
“All right, Mr. Groundskeeper, what’s the emergency?” he asked, plopping down behind a cluttered desk.
Dennis had never had a problem being called a groundskeeper, until now.
“No ‘mergency, deputy. Actually, will the Sheriff be in soon? Maybe I should—”
“Sheriff is out. Like I told ya when you come in. Now, either you got business or you don’t. And if ya don’t, well then ya need to amble back out to your worm farm and let me get back to real work. I got plenty to keep me busy, ya understand?”
“I just thought…” Dennis began, only to reconsider leaving once more. No, he settled his mind, he’d come this far. “You see, thing is, I’ve been gettin’ some strange visitors out to the cemetery.”
“Yeah? Whatdaya sayin’, like ghost?”
Dennis squirmed in his seat. The deputy sounded serious and was now suddenly treating him as such. Dennis shook his head. “First it was John Sayre. Then it was that odd fella Wes Crocker. You know ‘im…big guy.”
“Nugget?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah, I suppose people do call ‘im that, don’t they?”
Tippen squinted and leaned in on his elbows. “So what? Ain’t they both got kin buried out there? Ain’t near everybody for that matter? Hell, myself, I got two aunts and all my grand-folks out there stayin’ with you. Don’t never visit ‘em none. Don’t see no point. But what the hell business is it of yours who does?”
Dennis Hart got up. He stood for a second staring blankly at the deputy. Tippen leaned back, pleased with himself. Dennis bit his lip for a moment and then asked, “You planning on being Sheriff someday, you reckon?”
“Maybe. I reckon,” Tippen said.
“Case you haven’t caught on, Sheriff is an elected position,” Dennis Hart said, and turned to leave.
Tippen puckered his lips and wanted for some pithy comeback, but his foul temper could only imagine expletives. As he reached the door, Dennis decided no matter that the deputy was an ass, the authorities should know what he knew and Tippen was the authorities.
“See, Deputy Tippen, it’s not that they came out,” He said, turning back. “You’re right on that count. Lots of folks do. Folks who know the decency of paying their respects to those who have gone on. So it isn’t that. No. It’s who they came out to see.”
“Yeah? And who was that?”
“They both come out…well snuck out would be to say more accurate…to see that colored man…Raymond Stout. I don’t see how either could’ve known him, do you? Him being new to town and all. Him being…well, traveling in different circles, if you take my meaning. Wes even cried, I do believe.”
Tippen leaned forward and his mouth fell open a bit. “Nugget….”
“Yep. Two white men sneaking out to see the grave of a murdered colored man. And a stranger to ‘im, at that. Just thought the Sheriff should know. Have yourself a good day there, deputy.”
As Dennis Hart climbed back into his pickup to return to the cemetery, he chastised himself for being a little too glib about the whole affair. That usually wasn’t his manner. The deputy had provoked Dennis into getting away from himself. “Should’ve waited for the Sheriff,” he sighed. “Ah, cripes, Dennis, let ‘er go. What’s done is done.”
Deputy Tippen poured his third cup of coffee for the day and was thankful the Sheriff hadn’t been there to hear what Dennis Hart had come to report.
“And he never will, neither,” Tippen said aloud, watching out the window as Dennis Hart drove off. Scurrying across the window pane between the two men, the trapped and exhausted housefly made one last futile flight to be free before quieting as if to accept its fate.
Chapter Sixteen
All along the one side of the goldfish a spray of white flecks peppered its otherwise brightly orange and perfect mail. They were the scars of an infection that had nearly killed the fish. Buckshot imagined them to be the reminders of an almost fatal shotgun blast. This fish is a survivor, he told himself. The proprietor of Melby’s House of Exotic Pets, Mrs. Stella Humble, had been foolish enough to give Buckshot a discount on this particular specimen since she considered it flawed. Nothing could have been further from the truth as far as Buckshot was concerned. Vitamin D was perfect.
He’d named the fish in honor of all the milk money he’d saved to purchase it. He’d made the majority of the money from his allowance for chores, but by far it’d been those milks he skipped that’d pained him the most. Oh, how he’d suffered. Almost as much as the gunshot wounded Vitamin D, he supposed. Of course, his greatest financial windfall had been the dollar bill his mother had given him to assuage his grief on the day he’d found Raymond Stout, a memory he was determined to erase. No, that didn’t bother him, he’d argued silently with his fear each night since.
“Weren’t nothin’ but a dead man,” he’d nonchalantly told Casey over the crackle of their campfire nights before.
Dead men and shotgun wounds be damned, all that was behind them; the boy and his pet fish were united at last.
Buckshot fogged the glass of the fishbowl as his hot breath heaved with the excitement of the moment. Inches away, yet in a world all its own, Vitamin D floated languidly, but not at all indifferent to him. As Buckshot peered in close—the tip of his nose moving from side to side—little Vitamin D followed the motion with casual strokes of its gossamer tail and fins.
“Ain’t you a sport model?”
He pinched a few more flakes of food into the bowl. Vitamin D rushed up to take them in. Mrs. Humble had warned that too much food could kill the fish, but Buckshot wondered if maybe she wasn’t just having some fun with him.
“Eatin’ don’t kill nothin’. It’s starvin’ what’ll do ya in.”
He let another pinch of flakes lily pad the surface. At first Vitamin D raced away to the rainbow colored gravel lining the bottom of the bowl, only then to dart back to feed some more. Buckshot was enjoying the fish as much as he could, but he was also discovering that interaction with a pet fish quickly finds its limits. There would be no petting or playing of games. A pet fish is more of a sit and watch deal, Buckshot came to realize. After a few minutes of lip-chewing contemplation he accepted the fact without buyer’s remorse, however. Letting slip another pinch of food, he nodded to himself, satisfied that having a secret fish had its own rewards. Far better rewards.
There were a number of reasons Buckshot had kept his fish a secret, but primarily it was because he didn’t think he’d be allowed a fish in the first place. Over the course of the past few years the boy had managed to navigate some pretty hot water due to his poor pet judgment.
Last year it’d been the mice. Four, to be precise. A little nest he’d found in the barn one winter morning after milking the cow they now no longer had. The brood of mice were just ready to leave their mother’s teats, although still a little unsteady and clumsy on their feet. Buckshot easily caught them up in his milk pail without really thinking about why or what he could do with them, and by the end of the day they’d been safely relocated to a shredded newspaper-filled shoebox under his bed. That night after dinner he fed them cereal, bits of dried a
pple, raisins, and of course cheese. He’d even used an old eyedropper to give them a little water.
In no time at all he had to keep an old dictionary on the lid of the shoebox to keep his rapidly maturing charges contained. After just three days, things were going so well with his secret gang of mice that he considered telling his mother about them. But then he came home from school only to discover a mouse-less shoebox with a ragged hole gnawed through one corner.
He didn’t want to confess—he knew the trouble it’d bring him—and so at first he didn’t. But when his mother saw two of the more brazen mice rushing along the floorboard one after the other the next morning as she was coming in to wake Buckshot, he had no choice. Frances immediately began setting out spring traps, to break their little necks and spines, and so Buckshot broke down and pleaded with her.
“Mama, don’t! They ain’t bad mice. They mine!” he’d cried.
He cried more later that evening when John whipped him for sneaking wild mice into the house, and then he cried four more times when each spring trap did its work. It had proved to be a painful experience for Buckshot all the way around.
And then there had been the ants. Fire ants. Two mason jars filled with hundreds of the cantankerous things. Buckshot had sense enough to keep those in the barn. He’d learned his lesson with the mice. But he didn’t have sense enough to keep from getting stung. Over and over again. Unscrewing the lids to feed his colonies their lunches of crickets and grasshoppers, it was inevitable that a contingent would scurry free, starved skirmishers whose instincts compelled them to go forth. The more Buckshot fought to catch and contain them, the more his efforts failed and ended in painful welts. They were legion and his efforts were akin to sandcastles against the tide. After a while his hands and arms were a mess, fresh pimply, pus-filled whiteheads peppered amongst the previous day’s well-scratched scabs. When his mother asked him to roll his sleeves up one night for dinner, the jig was up.
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