Under a Dark Summer Sky

by Vanessa Lafaye

  So he really was back. Selma had gotten the news only a week ago, since which time Missy had lived in a state of feverish anticipation. He did not seem to recognize her, for which she was grateful, looking as she did like someone who had been through a wringer. Heart thudding, she studied him with sideways glances, at once desperate to be somewhere else but unable to turn her eyes away. He looked so different, no longer the young man she had seen off to war all those years ago. He was thin, ribs clearly visible through the open front of his sweat-stained shirt. Gray stubble marked cheeks no longer smooth. He took a dirty rag from his pocket and wiped his neck. There was a long, curved scar there, like a great big question mark. He looked, she thought, just like the millions of hopeless souls lined up at the soup kitchens in the North, seen in the newspapers that Mr. Kincaid threw out.

  So, she thought, the war’s been over for seventeen years and he never saw fit to come home until Uncle Sam sent him and a load of other dirty, hungry soldiers to build that bridge to replace the ferry crossing to Fremont. If this was supposed to make the veterans feel better about having to wait for the bonus they had been promised by the government, she figured the plan was less than a complete success. It sounded like there was a lot more drinking and fighting than bridge building going on at the camp.

  Since hearing he was back, she had both dreaded and hoped for a chance meeting. In her daydreams, they met at church or maybe in town. She would be wearing the yellow dress with the daisies, and a white hat and gloves. She would be poised, head high, and would walk past without noticing him. He would be in his uniform, like he was when he left, shoes polished to a high shine, sharp creases in his pants. He would tip his hat to her, then do a double take and say, “This beautiful woman cain’t be Missy Douglas. She was just a child when I left. Ma’am, may I escort you home?”

  “Is that little Missy Douglas?” His voice had startled her out of the memory, that voice she had longed to hear for eighteen years but had thought never to hear again. He wiped the blood from his machete and hooked it to his belt. Sweat darkened his collar. He passed a dirty rag over his forehead. For a moment, she had wished the gator had taken her down. Blood caked her face, her hair. Even her shoes squelched with it. “I should’ve known,” he had said with a slow smile, “you’d be mixed up in this somehow. You bite that gator’s head off all by yourself?”

  Her mouth had opened and closed uselessly. She could not think of one single thing to say, still caught up in the daydream she had nurtured for eighteen years. All that time, while he was away, she had prayed and wished and cajoled God and the angels and the apostles and the universe to bring him back to her, and now here he was.

  She narrowed her eyes against the glare off the road. Her steps quickened again. It was going to take some time to get clean of all traces of the gator. Henry was back, yes, but what else? Changed? Most certainly. Broken? Very possibly. She had heard the stories, of how the veterans needed to be drunk to sleep, how their hands shook so badly sometimes that they could not hold their tools, how any loud noise could provoke either tears or vicious violence. Just how badly damaged is he? Her need to know was perfectly balanced by her fear of knowing.

  But then, she realized, everyone had changed, including her. Nothing stayed the same, not after so many years. What would he think of her? Of what she had become—or, more importantly, not become? Still living with Mama, doing for the Kincaids, never been anywhere or done anything of note. Taking an encyclopedia to bed every night.

  He had stood there, waiting for her reply. That same smile, in a much older man’s face. And then, to her everlasting shame, she had fled.

  • • •

  Missy’s feet scattered the chickens in a bad-tempered flurry as she raced up the porch steps and flung open the door. Mama shrieked and rushed toward her. “My God, chile, what they done to you? Where you hurt?” She patted Missy all over. “I knew this day would come, didn’t I tell you? But you too smart to listen to your old Mama anymore. When I catch the devil who did this to you, I’m—”

  “I’m fine, Mama.” Missy stripped to her slip and pulled off the stinking shoes. “There was a gator. He went for the baby, but Selma blew his head right off. Her people chopping it up now. You shoulda seen her; she saved Nathan, and me, and my job. She was”—she paused, choosing the right word for what Selma had been that day—“magnificent.”

  “Lord, the words you use… Give me those things.” She held out her arms. “They got to be boiled right now.”

  Mama set the washtub on the fire and filled it with seawater. Fresh water was reserved for the rinse. She had warned Missy umpteen times not to use those big words outside the house. One day, for sure, the wrong person would hear, and it would be her undoing. She piled the bloody clothes into the water with a scoop of carbolic and stirred with a big stick. Growing up, she recalled as she stirred, Missy had few friends. Her preference for books over swamp games made the local kids think she was stuck-up. And now Missy was a grown woman, she showed every sign of ending her days alone. Too smart for local fellas, too proud to play dumb. At Missy’s age, Mama had already had two babies and been married to Billy, a shiftless fisherman. He drank his pay every week before doing them all a favor and going to sea one night in a storm, drunk as a skunk. The boat washed up a few days later down the coast, with only an empty bottle on board and Billy’s gaff. He probably just fell in and drowned, but she liked to think of him as Jonah, living out his days in the gullet of some giant fish. He’d have plenty of time to think on what he’d done to them and, most of all, to little Leon. She caught her breath, pressed a hand to her side. Even thinking of the child’s name shot a jolt of pain right through her.

  She continued to stir. The red had begun to lift from the white of Missy’s uniform. She skimmed the pinkish foam from the water. Had it not been for Henry Roberts stepping in to help when Billy died, things would have been a whole lot more desperate. Although he was little more than a child himself, he watched Missy so Mama could go out to work. It gave her time to get back on her feet. He was so sweet with Missy, even when she followed him around everywhere like a duckling, no doubt embarrassing him with his friends. But he was never unkind, always patient with her. Every night, he read her those stories that turned her into such a bookworm, stories of places she had never heard of, with names like Zanzibar, Ceylon, Treasure Island. She’d come in to find their heads together over a book in a circle of lamplight. And when he went away to war, it just tore Missy apart, much more so than losing her daddy.

  She had heard he was back, with that group of dirty old vagrants at the veterans’ camp. Well, Henry Roberts, she thought as she tipped away the filthy water, you got some explainin’ to do.

  Missy filled the bathtub with brownish water from the cistern. It had its own aroma, which she was accustomed to, and would at least rid her of the slaughterhouse reek of blood. She could hear Mama’s humming from the other side of the partition. As she stepped into the bath, the water went dark. She scrubbed and scrubbed, held her nose, and submerged her head. Although she came up feeling cleaner, she knew it would be days before she lost the stench.

  Water dripped from the end of her nose. Selma had saved every one of Henry’s letters from France, had never given up hope, had always believed he would come back, one day, to be with his people. She kept a room in her house for him, prepared for the day of his return. But when that day finally came, it was not as she expected. He was back, but not really back, Selma said. He would not use the nice room she had, would not stay with his people, but instead would live out at the collection of dirty, smelly shacks they called a camp. Worse still, it turned out he had been there for months already—almost a year!—before he made contact, avoiding the town the whole time. He explained none of it to Selma. Missy had never seen Selma cry, but when she learned that he had come home with no word to his people, her face had just crumpled into folds of disappointment. Even so, she still started to t
ake meals to him, walking the five miles each way to deliver her casseroles, her fried chicken, and of course her famous peach cobbler. She pronounced that her hogs ate better than the veterans. The whole town could smell the camp latrines when the wind blew the right way. Missy had heard Mr. Kincaid say many times that the camp was a disgrace, to the men and the country.

  Missy scraped dried blood from under her nails as she went over the events of the afternoon. It had been such a close call. The Kincaids would be home by now. They were a strange couple; everyone said so. When Selma first told her about Mr. Kincaid’s drinking, Missy had been indignantly defensive of him. Then she began to notice the signs: the mouthwash on his breath when he came home at night, the overly precise way he spoke, the scratches around the lock on the Cadillac driver’s side door. It had started when Nathan was born. Selma knew why. “Some men,” she had said, “cain’t look at a woman the same after a baby come out of there. I’ve known men to walk right out of the hospital and keep on walkin’.” And Mrs. Kincaid kept growing fatter every day, although Missy was careful with her portions. It was as if the woman thought she could get his attention just by taking up more space in the room. Her secret eating and his secret drinking… None of it made sense to Missy.

  And yet the Kincaids must have loved each other once, or else why did they get married? They seemed to have everything needed for a happy life. Such a nice big house, with its wide sitting porch and high ceilings, one of the first in town to get electricity. It was meant to be filled with many more babies, but it seemed certain now that Nathan would be the only one. The baby is safe, thanks be to the Lord, and Mr. Remington.

  Missy’s stomach cramped with hunger. She had eaten nothing since daybreak. There would be plenty to eat at the barbecue, as always. A hog had been roasting on embers, buried deep in the sand, for two days already. It would take center stage, the meat smoky and succulent, dripping with Mama’s famous sauce and surrounded by the platters of salad and corn bread. There would be fresh, sweet coquinas, dug from the beach that morning and cured in Key lime juice, and fried conch. There would be turtle steaks, harvested from the kraal that morning. There would be Key lime pie and Selma’s fresh peach cobbler. And there would be bottles of beer, lots of them, glistening like jewels in their barrels of ice. She had heard about the starving folks up north, lined up for hours just for a cup of thin soup, and others in the Midwest, trying to farm land that had turned to dust. Is that why Henry came back after all this time? Because he tired of being hungry?

  She scrubbed her hair, her ears, her face, with the precious sliver of Ivory soap she had been saving. There were so many questions she itched to ask him. That long, raised scar on his neck, shaped like a question mark. What tale do you have to tell? She traced a finger down her own neck in the same shape. She hoped he would come to the barbecue and hoped just as strongly he would not. The veterans had been invited, she had heard, against the better judgment of many.

  She called from the bath, “He was there, Mama. He came to help.” The sounds of sloshing from the kitchen ceased.

  “How he look?”

  “Like Doc Williams.” Henry did not just look older, as Missy expected. More than that, he had the same look that Doc Williams had when he came back from the war. There were the deep, puffy bruises under the eyes that never went away, not even after years of home cooking and Florida sunshine. It was as if the soldiers had been tattooed, from the inside, by whatever they had seen. It had to come out somewhere, Missy thought. It came out through their eyes.

  The sloshing resumed in the kitchen. Mama called, “He gonna be there tonight?”

  “I ’spect so,” she said, hoping Mama might not hear.

  Mama’s head appeared around the partition. “You didn’t ask him?”

  Missy could not admit she had run away without a word, like a silly little girl. She sank lower in the water. Red bits floated on top. She wanted to get out, but Mama stood there, hands on hips. “Not as such, no.”

  Mama pulled her to her feet and began to rub her dry with a rough towel, each stroke emphasizing her words. “Have. I. Not. Taught. You. Any. Manners. Girl.” She turned Missy around to face her.

  Missy saw herself in Mama’s eyes, not as a grown woman, but as a child again. All the years of worry and hope were there, all they had endured together. Nothing had turned out good in a long, long time.

  “Come here, chile.” Mama wrapped her in the towel. They stood like that for a few minutes, Missy’s head on her shoulder. Mama rubbed her back. “Gonna be all right, everything gonna be all right, you see. Now,” Mama said, pulling back to look hard at her face, “big question: What you gonna wear?”

  Missy stepped out of the water. “The yellow dress, with the daisies.”

  Chapter 3

  Doc Williams put a roll of bandages into his old black leather medical bag, topped up the Mercurochrome antiseptic bottle, and put that in too. He snapped the latch shut, thought for a moment, then opened it again and added another roll of bandages. As he was forever telling the boys in his Scout troop, “It’s always better to be prepared.” He shut the bag again and rested his weight on its familiar bulk. It had accompanied him to war and back, probably still had French mud in the hinges. And blood in the leather. “Almost time, old friend.” He patted it fondly.

  Through his front window, he could see men carrying plywood and sawhorses, setting up for the barbecue that evening. Zeke went by on his old bicycle, Poncho the macaw in his usual place, clinging to Zeke’s shoulder. The bird’s flamboyant, cobalt tail brushed Zeke’s scrawny haunches. Doc had been to Zeke’s shack on the beach not long ago to treat his chronic leg ulcers, but as the man spent most of every day standing in seawater, yelling at the waves, there was little he could do to help. Zeke had not always been like that, he remembered. He used to work on his uncle’s pineapple farm, spent all his free time in a little skiff, sat for hours on the still brown waters of the mangrove swamp, patiently waiting for a tug on his fishing line. He knew all the best spots, even took a few tourists out. And everywhere he went, Poncho went too. People said it was the storm of 1906 that did it. Zeke was the sole survivor of his family of sixteen. His little sister was torn right from his arms and crushed by flying timber. Ever since, he had raged at the sea, with only Poncho for company at his lonely shack.

  As Zeke pedaled past, Doc noted that the leg ulcers had worsened. He worried that he had ceased to relate to patients as people. They had just become collections of ailments to him: Zeke was ulcers, Missy’s Mama was uncontrolled diabetes, Dolores Mason was the clap (again). It had started during the war, of course. It was just wound after bloody wound. They could have been cadavers, except for the screaming. And then, when the war was all but won, the Spanish flu arrived to finish off many of the men who had survived the battles. Any faith that remained had left him as he watched them drown in their own fluids, helpless to ease their suffering.

  Peacetime medicine, of course, was supposed to be about listening to the patients, but sometimes, even after all these years, they appeared from him simply as talking lumps of meat—no different from the hog that was even now being disinterred from its sandy grave.

  He sighed, rubbed his glasses with his shirttail, tried to muster some enthusiasm. The heat made his head hurt. There was beer in the icebox, but he needed to stay sharp for the evening. He had been dreading the barbecue for a long time, and not just because of the inevitable stomach upsets from Mabel Hickson’s potato salad or the minor burns from the reckless handling of fireworks. Someone would wander into the surf after too much beer and need rescuing, or maybe even resuscitation. The soft shush of the waves came to him through the open window. The ocean, which looked so innocent now in the afternoon sun, waited patiently to embrace the unwary.

  He was prepared for all of that. He was also prepared for the violence that would well up after whites and coloreds had been marinating in liquor and old grievances for
hours, each in their separate areas on the beach. You could set your watch by the fight that would break out between Ike Freeman and Ronald LeJeune. No one remembered where the hatred stemmed from, including Ike and Ronald. Some folks thought a milk cow was involved. And it didn’t help that Ike’s grandfather had been owned by Ronald’s grandfather, and not very well treated at that. So once a year, they pounded the tar out of each other. It was a kind of ritual. And Doc would be there to patch them up.

  He poured a glass of lemonade and allowed himself to remember the little migrant girl, as he did once a year. He had only been back from the war for six months, still waking Leann every night in the grip of his terrors, still haunted by visions of horror during the day. They were always with him. Even when he played with baby Cora, he saw the piles of amputated limbs like a grotesque doll factory, felt the sinuous coils of intestines twined around his ankles, heard the screams from a hundred shattered faces. The Fourth of July barbecue that year had promised to be a much-needed dose of wholesome good fun, to help ease him back into normal society. He almost looked forward to dealing with the everyday sorts of injuries that would occur, so unlike the industrial destruction of bodies during the war.

  The girl was only six years old, with an innocuous-looking puncture wound on the sole of her foot. She had stepped on a rusty nail while running around with the other children during the fireworks display. Her mother, one of the many who came to harvest the Key lime crop, simply washed the wound and applied honey to it. By the time Doc was called, the child’s jaw was locked tight. There was nothing he could do but hold her while the paralysis raced up her little body and finally stopped her lungs. He had heard rumors from an old army buddy that someone was working on a tetanus vaccine, but it would be far too late to help this girl. After that, his nightmares took on a new dimension, much closer to home. And he would never again look forward to the Fourth of July barbecue.