by Laird Hunt
There are times I sit here and think on it—and thinking on it is practically all I do—that the sky goes cloudy and black behind Leander and those buses. It’s not every time and not pitch-black like it is with the courthouse. I don’t float up out of my hiding place behind the rose of Sharon and fly over into the buses and swirl around in the seats. It’s more like a quick cloud or a chunk of moon or a careless devil’s thumb covering over the sun. Covering up my walking quickly away from that churchyard. It all smears dark a little but then it lights up again.
There were some smart-looking starlings pecking at the vines next to the Dictator and two or three of them hopping around on its hood. They scattered when I came up and joined a greater, louder group ganged up by the dozen in the branches of a nearby catalpa tree. Roscoe had never liked starlings. Said that smart little look made his neck hair stand on end. Gave him nightmares if they kept it on him too long. I didn’t like any kind of bird when it was gathered in great number but I had otherwise always thought starlings looked handsome. When I shut the Dictator’s door, a few of them jumped up from their branch, and when I started the engine they all lifted up like one thing and wheeled away. I asked mop doll what she thought of the birds and she stared straight ahead. Had the focus I was looking for. I could see when I got the Dictator out of its hiding place and back on the road that the buses were about ready to roll.
Considerable cheering came out the polished windows, clenched fists were raised, honking cars had lined up behind. I thought I could see the heavy lady had tried to feed me that pile of food. Food for all. Catfish of the Lord. I had been to church plenty. I had heard the good message. The Klan were honest churchgoers wanted what was best for their country, and cornflowers and anything wasn’t silk came straight from the devil, and we all needed to work hard and never speak, and Jesus Christ was a carpenter who conjured miracle fish for cornsilks to gobble. So forth and so on.
There was a side lane went past cowsheds that I knew would take me out of town then loop me back around. I’d used it before. Do it quick and have a talk with my sweet Leander after all. The cows were all huddled up in their sheds. I gave them an extra dust blanket when I went past.
“You ready now, girl?” I said and the mop doll wouldn’t answer, so I answered for her.
“Yes,” I said.
I wasn’t more than a hundred yards out when the first bus, Leander’s, started in to honking at me. Leander was waving his hand crazy like there was a hornet behind the windshield and about half the riders had their heads out the windows and were waving at the air like they thought that might work some miracle and make me turn. I’ve already said the Dictator could fly when you wanted it to. Fly, straight toward those buses, we did. It was me flying ahead of my heart this time. My car, covered in angry eyes. My heart, back in the churchyard. I would feel this true.
For a long second I thought that at least one of us was going to keep driving, and driving straight, that right out there in the middle of the hot road we would have ourselves a kiss, only a lot bigger and louder than the one I had been imagining us having all day. The one after I had told him what I had to tell him and he had answered right. Kiss like the kinds Roscoe had always given me. Like all that mattered was the kiss. All those kisses. Kisses that didn’t stop after Uncle D had put the bullet in the doorjamb. Kisses that didn’t stop even after Leander had commenced his courting, after I had told him, Roscoe, thinking I meant it, that we were through.
But I saw Leander slowing so I slowed, and then Leander stopped and I stopped. We both kept our vehicles running. I watched him turn and tell the people in the bus to hold tight, that he would attend to the impediment before him. He did the same thing again when he stepped out of the bus, for the drivers behind him had all come down out of their own conveyances. He paused a minute to gather himself when he had turned back toward me. He straightened his tie, smoothed his suit, and wiggled his jaw. While he was flattening down his hairpiece I rose from the Dictator, leaving the basket, and came and stood in front of the vehicle with my arms crossed.
“Sweet Jesus on Sunday morning, Calla!” he said when he saw it was me. “You gave me a scare. What in God’s name are you doing here? You have sprung up out of the earth like a phantom. What has happened to the Dictator? Why is it covered in eyes?”
He took a step closer. The crowd had grown and was shifting behind him. He looked over his shoulder, called out, “It’s all right, folks,” and turned back to me.
“Calla, Calla, my darling, you have to leave, this isn’t the time for us to meet, truly, it isn’t.”
“You didn’t come this morning,” I said. “I sent you a message to come.”
“What message? Come where?”
“I waited. I brought us a picnic. I had something to tell you. I still do.”
“What in hell, Hale?” said a bulky man wearing a driver’s cap coming up behind him.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” said Leander. “It’s a young woman on the road, Morely. I think she is unwell. I will help her and we will be on our way. Don’t come too close. Let’s not scare her. I think she may be lost.”
I cocked my head but otherwise didn’t move. Morely looked dubious and spit a squirt of chaw out the side of his mouth. Five or six others had come up to stand beside him. Some of the people I’d noticed at the church. I looked to see if the heavy lady or the red-haired woman or maybe even Leander’s mother was in their number, but they weren’t. Leander came another step closer.
“You don’t mind that I’ve called you unwell or lost, do you, my sweet? I said it to throw them off. To keep our secret.” He whispered this last part and kept looking over his shoulder, then back at me. He gave out a small and nervous laugh. His fingers were twitching and turning at his sides like little pond eels.
“Pick up that crazy cornflower bitch and toss her in the corn!” called a woman’s voice. I couldn’t see where she was standing. Most of the men had straw toppers pulled low over their brows. The women’s faces were lost under fruit- and flower-smothered hats. Quite a little crowd had gathered. There was considerable snickering and laughing. I spotted the heavy lady. She was pointing at me and talking into the ear of an old fellow, might have been her husband, who was standing next to her.
“My darling Calla, please... ” said Leander. His eyes had the look in them like they got when he wanted me to do something. Something private. “Can’t we speak about this later, perhaps tonight upon my return? You could just back the Dictator up to that tractor lane over there yonder and turn it around. The road is too narrow and the ditches too deep for us to safely pass you.”
“Do you mean upon your return from Marvel and having missed our rendezvous and tête-à-tête this morning, you imagine we could converse at our leisure and in appropriate intimacy in your nearby place of dwelling, Mr. Homer Hale of Ryansville?” I said. I said it loud, and he flinched so hard when I said appropriate and intimacy and dwelling that I thought he would fall over backward and knock down some of his friends.
“Not so loud, please, Calla, please, my darling,” Leander whispered. He went from flinching back to moving even closer to me just about without my noticing it. His hair had come good and cockeyed again and his belly fat was spilling a little out of his shirt where a button had sprung loose. He looked over his shoulder to the crowd that had come in closer with him. “Just one more minute, my good people, and we will have her on her way, she has taken too much heat, as probably we all have,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief and patted at his head. I saw now it was a light blue handkerchief trimmed about its edges with purple carnations. I had given it to him the last time we met. Bought it with money I had stolen out of Aunt V’s purse. I do not know if he realized which handkerchief it was, not when he was patting his brow, nor when he held the dampened thing out to me and asked me if I would care to make use of it. Both of us looked at the handkerchief. Probably everyone who was standing there did.
“No, thank you, Mr. Hale, t
hough that is a pretty handkerchief you are offering me.”
Someone called out about getting the buses rolling even if they had to roll over me and my car. Leander put the handkerchief back into his pocket, leaned in close, and put his mouth almost next to my ear. “I have rented these machines at some good expense, both to me and to my mother,” he said. He leaned in a little closer. “I have incurred debt for them. It is for my career. All of this. That is all.” Even closer. “For our future, our future, my love.”
I leaned in then too, put my lips to his ear, whispered, “Where is your new friend in the green dress, Mr. Hale?”
“What friend?”
“The blowsy bitch with the red hair,” I hissed.
“I don’t understand, Calla, were you there, at the supper? Where have you come from? What’s all this about a picnic? I don’t understand anything.” As he said this his voice rose and he grabbed a little at the sleeve of my dress.
“Please step away from me now, Mr. Hale,” I told him, my voice bright and firm again. “You are standing too close.”
He did as I said. He did it uncomfortably but gracefully, and made a little bow.
When he was away from me I pulled back my shoulders and said, “Are you driving these folks to Marvel to see the lynching of those young cornflower boys, Mr. Hale?” I spoke even louder than I had before and there was a murmuring in the crowd. It rippled forward and back. I thought about those starlings, swooping in their shivering rush through the air. You aren’t anything near as nice to look at as Roscoe, I thought, looking at Leander, standing there sweating and spilling out of his shirt. He was moving those long fingers of his. Slower now, like he did when he was thinking. I didn’t let him finish his thought.
“I am pregnant,” I said.
Leander looked at me, took half a step to the side, then stood there struck dumb like he had turned straight to salt and lacked only the cow to come and lick at him.
“I am pregnant,” I said again, louder this time.
There was more murmuring from the crowd. The heavy lady edged closer. Morely was playing with his cap.
“We will speak again this evening, Mr. Hale, yes, I like that plan of yours. I very much like it,” I said. Then I called out to the crowd, as loudly as I could, “Are all of you bound for Marvel to see the lynching?”
“Hell yes, we are!” is more or less the answer I got. I turned my back on them then, and on Leander, and stepped to the Dictator.
“Calla,” Leander said as I climbed in.
“How do you know that young girl’s name?” said the heavy lady. “And what did she mean by telling you she’s in the family way?”
Leander stood there silent and frozen between me and the heavy lady. And at just that minute came a kind of scraping sound, and an old cornsilk man shuffled up next to the Dictator dragging a big gun.
“Come on back out here and pick this thing all the way up for me so I can fire it at these sons-of-bitches,” he said out of the side of his mouth when he was up next to my window.
“Is that crazy old Wilton?” I heard someone say. “He thinks that gun can be shot. It ain’t been shot since the Civil War and probably didn’t even work then.”
“It worked fine then because I killed people like you with it and it works just fine now, you sad sons-of-bitches,” said this Wilton, shaking his fist.
There was a gale of laughter. The crowd was already dispersing a little, people going back to their cars and places on the buses. Leander hadn’t moved a muscle. His long fingers gleamed and glistened dull now.
“There’s more than one way to butcher this hog,” I told the old man. “Step to the side and watch yourself, now.” Looking into Leander’s unmoving eyes, I put the Dictator in reverse.
I looked just once over my shoulder to make sure the way was clear, then turned to face forward, put both my hands on the wheel, and watched a slumped-shoulder Leander and the buses and the cars and the town of Ryansville grow smaller and smaller like a problem that could be solved and made to vanish away forever just by leaving it behind. But there stood Leander. I could not stop looking at him. And it seemed to me even as I rolled backward that there wasn’t just relief in the movement that came first to his mouth, then his cheeks, then his fine, wide lips, that there was something else, something softer, tenderer, which I knew I would remember for many a year and that I knew I would be sorry for, just as long, to see leave him, as leave him it did when I hit the Dictator’s brake.
Stopped it just far enough back to get a good running start, then set the Dictator to leaping forward as fast as its shiny wheels would go.
I had this idea that just about half the whole world would shake when the Dictator and that bus did have their kiss. As it was, apart from the sound of some of Uncle D’s paint jars shattering and some ugly scrape and crunch from the collision, the loudest noise came from the old man, who had somehow got his big gun pointed skyward and pulled the trigger and blasted off a black-powder boom. It was to him dancing and hollering and twirling around that I stepped out of the Dictator when I realized I couldn’t back it away, that the grilles of the two vehicles had gotten tangled and stuck. I had hit my head a good one on the steering wheel too and it spun a little as I stood and sniffed at the air and rubbed at some blue paint splotches on my wrist, which was also sore.
Apart from the old man who was dancing his roadside jig, there was a sure silence to the buses and the cars behind them. Like the whole line and all it contained had been turned to salt. Leander, who had jumped out of the way as I drove down on him, was sitting in the side ditch with his elbows on his knees and his handkerchief hanging limp in his hands. The mop doll and picnic basket had gone for their own merry ride with the loose paint around the inside of the car after I had hit the bus, and my hat had come so far loose and had caught so many splotches of color that I tore it the rest of the way off my head and tossed it to the ground.
“You see all that?” I said to them. Then I said it again to the eyes on the Dictator. “You attending to this, little girl?”
Some of those people were starting to stand. There was a man in the front row of Leander’s bus holding on to the top of his shoulder like it hurt. Others were climbing down out of the buses behind. Their conveyances were stuck a good while at least behind Uncle D’s Dictator and Leander’s ruined bus on the narrow road. But they weren’t stuck and I figured I had about thirty seconds before I became lynching material myself. So I leaned back in the car, grabbed up my poor paint-spattered basket, settled mop doll, eyes facing front and fierce, behind the steering wheel, and turned.
“Good-bye, Homer Hale,” I said. “I am sorry to have spoiled your excursion and to have injured your investment. I do hope there is something you can salvage of your day.”
“The sheriff will be coming,” he said, looking up at me. His hair had come almost entirely off his head and was hanging over one of his ears. He wasn’t smiling but he wasn’t crying either and I thought I saw a gleam in his eye. “He is riding in the last bus. He is a heavy man and slow to move, but once he gets going, if he can see his target, he doesn’t stop.”
“I am leaving,” I said.
“Is it true?” he said.
I took the pretty handkerchief out of his hands, used it to wipe at the paint on my arms and the back of my neck and on the top of the basket. Then I returned it to him.
“It’s true,” I said and stepped from him into the thicket of corn. It was eight feet high if it was a inch. Shouts jumped up and I heard some crashing behind me and I was glad I had my sturdy shoes and could run. And, basket in my arms or not, I did. First cutting through the stalks, row after row, pushing away the crispy leaves so I could find my way through, and then, when I was deep into the field, running down the rows, basket held up high to protect my face, and only every thirty strides or so cutting diagonally through the stalks. It could have been a hundred people or not a one after me with those dry leaves whacking my arms and face, I wouldn’t have known.
>
I ran for a long while, catching heavy spiderwebs across my arms and sending big yellow hoppers into the air, ran through loud and quiet, light and shade, then came at last into a clearing of stunted corn. The clearing was big enough to tell me where I was, tell me exactly: not much more than yelling distance from Leander’s farm. I heard crashing behind me and plunged back into the tall corn. A few minutes later, I stepped out of the field and alongside a creek. I followed the creek, making little frogs leap into loud rings, and came to Leander’s swimming hole, where I’d swam with him many a night. I ran and kept running but part of me jumped out of myself and into the cool water when I passed that pond. I ran, breathing hard and wrist hurting and head pounding, and that other part of me plunged. Went in fully dressed through the sunlit water, cleaned off paint and sweat, knife-sailed down and dark, deep and fast to the bottom, where I closed my eyes and said to myself, “Sleep now, Calla Destry. Drown.”
I don’t know if it was the me that was killing herself under the shallow deep or the me that was foot-pounding through the afternoon that realized I wasn’t being followed anymore. Either way, soon as I did I sat straight down on the path that led up from the pond to the house and put my face in my hands.
Aunt V, no girl’s fool, had yanked me hard aside more than once, that morning included, and told me that whatever it was I didn’t think she knew I was doing by carrying on with cornflowers and cornsilks both, it wouldn’t end well. “Going to end in torn hair and teardrops” is what she said. About that fine piece of trouble kept coming up from Indianapolis. About that lump of drippy molasses I’d left in the ditch.
And yes, I was crying as I sat there with my face in my hands. I had been crying since I stepped out of the ditch and into the corn. Had been crying as I flew through the cool of the pond water. Crying since those begonias. Since that girl threw that rock. Since Big Bob fed me that orange. Crying all that day. Since I rose from the river. Since I took Uncle D’s service revolver and put it in the picnic basket. Since Aunt V had stood next to Uncle D and watched me make ham sandwiches on the back porch and told me I could go straight to the devil if it was the devil I needed so bad to see.