Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (16 page)

S
O
T
AMMY
LEAVES THE
lights on for Harold when she finally goes to bed that night. She tried to wait up for him, but she has to go to school in the morning, she’s got a chemistry test. Her mamaw is sound asleep in the little added-on baby room that Buddy Oxendine built for Cherry. Gladys acts like a baby now, a spoiled baby at that. The only thing she’ll drink is Sprite out of a can. She talks mean. She doesn’t like anything in the world except George and Tammy, the two remaining cockapoos.

They bark up a storm when Harold finally gets back out to the farm, at one thirty. The cockapoos are barking, Cherry’s mom is snoring like a chain saw. Harold doesn’t see how Tammy Lynn can sleep through all of this, but she always does. Teenagers can sleep through anything. Harold himself has started waking up several times a night, his heart pounding. He wonders if he’s going to have a heart attack. He almost mentioned his symptoms to Lois Hickey last week, in fact, but then thought, What the hell. His
heart is broken. Of course it’s going to act up some. And everything, not only his heart, is out of whack. Sometimes he’ll break into a sweat for no reason. Often he forgets really crucial things, such as filing his quarterly estimated income tax on January 15. Harold is not the kind to forget something that important. He has strange aches that float from joint to joint. He has headaches. He’s lost twelve pounds. Sometimes he has no appetite at all. Other times, like right now, he’s just starving.

Harold goes in the kitchen and finds a flat rectangular casserole, carefully wrapped in tinfoil, on the counter, along with a Tupperware cake carrier. He lifts off the top of the cake carrier and finds a piña colada cake, his favorite. Then he pulls back the tinfoil on the casserole. Lasagna! Plenty is left over. Harold sticks it in the microwave. He knows that the cake and the la sagna were left here by his ex-wife. Ever since Cherry has been in Intensive Care, Joan has been bringing food out to the farm. She comes when Harold’s at work or at the hospital, and leaves it with Gladys or Tammy. She probably figures that Harold would refuse it, if she caught him at home, which he would. She’s a great cook, though. Harold takes the lasagna out of the microwave, opens a beer, and sits down at the kitchen table. He loves Joan’s lasagna. Cherry’s idea of a terrific meal is one she doesn’t have to cook. Harold remembers eating in bed with Cherry, tacos from Taco Bell, sour-cream-and-onion chips, beer. He gets more lasagna and a big wedge of piña colada cake.

Now it’s two thirty, but for some reason Harold is not a bit sleepy. His mind whirls with thoughts of Cherry. He snaps off all the lights and stands in the darkened house. His heart is racing. Moonlight comes in the windows, it falls on the old patterned rug. Outside, it’s as bright as day. He puts his coat on and goes
out, with the cockapoos scampering along beside him. They are not even surprised. They think it’s a fine time for a walk. Harold goes past the mailbox, down the dirt road between the fields. Out here in the country, the sky is both bigger and closer than it is in town. Harold feels like he’s in a huge bowl turned upside down, with tiny little pinpoints of light shining through. And everything is silvered by the moonlight — the old fenceposts, the corn stubble in the flat long fields, a distant barn, the highway at the end of the dirt road, his own strange hand when he holds it out to look at it.

He remembers when she waited on him in the Food Lion deli, three years ago. He had asked for a roast beef sandwich, which come prepackaged. Cherry put it on his plate. Then she paused, and cocked her hip, and looked at him. “Can I give you some potato salad to go with that?” she asked. “Some slaw?”

Harold looked at her. Some red curls had escaped the required net. “Nothing else,” he said.

But Cherry spooned a generous helping of potato salad onto his plate. “Thank you so much,” he said. They looked at each other.

“I know I know you,” Cherry said.

It came to him then. “Cherry Oxendine,” said Harold. “I remember you from high school.”

“Lord, you’ve got a great memory, then!” Cherry had an easy laugh. “That was a hundred years ago.”

“Doesn’t seem like it.” Harold knew he was holding up the line.

“Depends on who you’re talking to,” Cherry said.

Later that day, Harold found an excuse to go back over to the deli for coffee and apple pie, then he found an excuse to look
through the personnel files. He started eating lunch at the deli every day, without making any conscious decision to do so. In the afternoons, when he went back for coffee, Cherry would take her break and sit at a table with him.

Harold and Cherry talked and talked. They talked about their families, their kids, high school. Cherry told him everything that had happened to her. She was tough and funny, not bitter or self-pitying. They talked and talked. In his whole life, Harold had never had so much to say. During this period, which lasted for several weeks, his whole life took on a heightened aspect. Everything that happened to him seemed significant, a little incident to tell Cherry about. Every song he liked on the radio he remembered, so he could ask Cherry if she liked it too. Then there came the day when they were having coffee and she mentioned she’d left her car at Al’s Garage that morning to get a new clutch.

“I’ll give you a ride over there to pick it up,” said Harold instantly. In his mind he immediately canceled the sales meeting he had scheduled for four o’clock.

“Oh, that’s too much trouble,” Cherry said.

“But I insist.” In his conversations with Cherry, Harold had developed a brand-new gallant manner he had never had before.

“Well, if you’re sure it’s not any trouble . . .” Cherry grinned at him like she knew he really wanted to do it, and that afternoon when he grabbed her hand suddenly before letting her out at Al’s Garage, she did not pull away.

The next weekend Harold took her up to Memphis and they stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where Cherry got the biggest kick out of the ducks in the lobby and ordering from room service.

“You’re a fool,” Harold’s friends told him later, when the shit hit the fan.

But Harold didn’t think so. He doesn’t think so now, walking the old dirt road on the Oxendine farm in the moonlight. He loves his wife. He feels that he has been ennobled and enlarged, by knowing Cherry Oxendine. He feels like he has been specially selected among men, to receive a precious gift. He stepped out of his average life for her, he gave up being a good man, but the rewards have been extraordinary. He’s glad he did it. He’d do it all over again.

Still walking, Harold suddenly knows that something is going to happen. But he doesn’t stop walking. Only, the whole world around him seems to waver a bit, and intensify. The moonlight shines whiter than ever. A little wind whips up out of nowhere. The stars are twinkling so brightly that they seem to dance, actually dance, in the sky. And then, while Harold watches, one of them detaches itself from the rest of the sky and grows larger, moves closer, until it’s clear that it is actually moving across the sky, at an angle to the earth. A falling star, perhaps? A comet?

Harold stops walking. The star moves faster and faster, with an erratic pattern. It’s getting real close now. It’s no star. Harold hears a high whining noise, like a blender. The cockapoos huddle against his ankles. They don’t bark. Now he can see the blinking red lights on the top of it, and the beam of white light shooting out the bottom. His coat is blown straight out behind him by the wind. He feels like he’s going blind. He shields his eyes. At first it’s as big as a barn, then a tobacco warehouse. It covers the field. Although Harold can’t say exactly how it communicates to him or even if it does, suddenly his soul is filled to bursting. The ineffable occurs. And then, more quickly than it came, it’s gone, off toward Carrollton, rising into the night, leaving the field, the farm, the road. Harold turns back.

It will take Cherry Oxendine two more weeks to die. She’s tough. And even when there’s nothing left of her but her heart, she will fight all the way. She will go out furious, squeezing Harold’s hand at the very moment of death, clinging fast to every minute of this bright, hard life. And although at first he won’t want to, Harold will go on living. He will buy another store. Gladys will die. Tammy Lynn will make Phi Beta Kappa. Harold will start attending the Presbyterian church again. Eventually Harold may even go back to his family, but he will love Cherry Oxendine until the day he dies, and he will never, ever, tell anybody what he saw.

Folk Art

L
ord have mercy! You liked to scared me to death! Come on out of there this minute. You’re tramping on my daylilies. There now. That’s better. Let me get a good look at you. You don’t say! Why you don’t look hardly old enough to be a art professor, I’ll tell you that. I would of took you for a boy. Just a little old art boy, how’s that? Me, I’m Lily Lockhart. I reckon you know that already. How’d you get in here anyway? Well, it don’t matter. Honey, you have come to the right place! Art is my life, if I do say so myself.

Why sure, I’ll be glad to show you around my backyard, now that you’ve got in here. It’d be my pleasure. It’s not much to see, though. Not much to show somebody like you. Why thank you. I appreciate that. Mama planted a lot of them herself. She used to say, “Lily, I want our backyard to look just like the Garden of Eden.” That’s bee balm. Mama planted it years and years ago. Them wild spiky flowers, them’s cleomes. And these here is holly-hocks, of course, they’re my favorite. Me and Daisy used to take us a blossom and hold it just so, and pretend it was a dolly, going to a dance. See here? This is her party dress. Why no, they’re easy, once they get a good start, just like anything else. Once you get something going, it takes on a life of its own, seems like. Looky
here how tall they get! Taller than Billy, and Billy’s tall. He’s in the house, he don’t get out much anymore. You’re the first visitor I’ve had in — Lord, I don’t know how long! Of course I’ve got lots of company out here in the yard. You want to meet my people? Come on then. I’ll be glad to introduce you.

Now this here is Mama, who loved flowers and songs and every pretty thing. Oh, I wish you could have seen her in life! She was the sweetest thing, she reminded me of a butterfly somehow. Yellow hair hanging down to her waist, and the littlest, whitest feet! She used to paint her toenails fire-engine red, and then she’d paint our little toenails red, too. She’d put cotton between our toes, to let our toenails dry, and then we’d dance and dance in the garden, Daisy and me and Iris Jean, and Mama would sing.

Oh, I don’t know. Songs she made up out of her head, I reckon. Daddy didn’t like it. He thought all music ought to be church music, but he didn’t say a thing. He never spoke a word when it came to Mama, she meant the whole world to him, which was true from the minute he first laid eyes on her at that little church up in the Blackey coal camp where she was born. She was one of nine children, and the oldest, though she was not but fourteen years old when Daddy came riding up the holler to preach that first time. She stood up in front of the altar all by herself and threw back her head and closed her eyes and sang “Beulah Land” in her pure gold voice that never faltered, sang so beautiful Daddy said you could see the notes floating out perfect and visible in the air. Daddy was thirty years old at the time. He had already been out west, gone to jail, married a Mexican, got shot in the leg, you name it! All of these things before he got religion, after which he had took to the road for the Lord. Oh, he’d been places, and seen things. But he had never seen nothing like Mama the day he came
to the church at Blackey when she was singing “Beulah Land.” Mama noticed him too, of course, the handsome stranger with the snapping black eyes and the big black hat standing thunder-struck in the open door at the back of the church.

And then he
did
preach, though he hardly knew what he said, and after it was all over, Daddy exchanged a few words with Mama and then went right up to her father, old Joe Burns, and said, “Sir, I want to marry your daughter Evalina.”

Old Joe Burns looked Daddy in the eye. “I appreciate the offer,” he said, “for times is hard, but Evalina is too young, sir. Come back next year and you can have her.” And so he did, and brought her over here to Rockhouse Branch, and built this house for her, meantime farming and preaching down at the Mount Gilead church which you must of passed on your way up here.

Why, I don’t know as she thought
anything
about it! Girls in those days did as they were told, not like they do now, not like Daisy and Iris Jean have done! Anyway, it was plain to see that Daddy doted on her and got her anything she could think of, though he did not like for her to go off the place except to church. He was always worried that something bad might happen to her. He brought pearl buttons and ribbons and pretty cloth from town, and was real proud of how nice she could sew, and she did make beautiful dresses for us girls and for herself, though there were always those at church that talked about it, and about the sin of vanity.

“My little flowers,” Mama called us, and in fact we truly were her garden as she said, Iris Jean the oldest, born when Mama was sixteen, and then me and Daisy my sweet twin, and then Billy, three years later. I know it was a lot of children for a slip of a girl
to bear, and sometimes I have felt that what happened was
our
fault,
somehow, for coming on her so fast.

I remember so clearly one thing I heard her say to Daddy when we were all just little and Billy was newborn. She was lying in the big old bed with Billy nestled up close by her, and Daddy though fully clothed lay by her side and stroked her long bright hair. I stole in the room and stood at the other side of the bed, where they did not see me. “Gabriel Lockhart,” Mama said, as if in a dream, “Where did all of them come from? Don’t you remember back when it was just me and you? But now there is so many. I keep thinking, oh who are they all? and where have they come from?”

“Now Evalina,” Daddy said, “You know they have come from God.” And she smiled at him, and then she started humming a little faraway tune while Billy nursed. Everybody was worried about Billy, who came out backward with the cord wrapped around his neck and had terrible seizures as a little child.