The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  Even ailing so, the one called Havens is a sight to behold. Sweat has stuck his hair down flat, and she has the urge to clear it from his eyes. His large smooth hands are clenched at his sides.

  Jeremiah Wrightley spots her and asks, “You get a look at what got him?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Copperhead’s my guess.” To the other outsider, Jeremiah explains, “If this bite was going to turn real bad on your friend here, it would have swelled up a whole lot worse by now. It’ll hurt like blazes and he’s probably going to use that bucket a few more times, but give it a few days and he’ll be on his feet again.” He hands Pa one of the bottles from his tackle box, and gives instructions about mixing doses.

  Jubilee follows Mama and Grandma down the breezeway.

  “What if he succumbs?”

  “He won’t,” Mama answers, even though it’s early yet, with a long night ahead, and they all know the wee hours are when even the strongest can slip away.

  Back on the porch, they notice Socall rounding the side of her house with her lantern in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Like Chappy’s relations and most of the tenant farmers in the bottomland, Socall’s what’s known in town as a Blue-sympathizer, but she might as well be kin. She used to be the town’s granny woman until she assisted with Levi’s birth, and then the calls for her to deliver babies dropped off. She and Mama became best friends after that, and when the time came, Socall helped bring Jubilee into the world, and then a few years later, her little sister, Willow-May.

  “You’re to stay with Socall tonight,” Mama says.

  “But why? They’ve seen me already.”

  “We don’t know the first thing about them—what they’re doing up this holler, for instance—so give your pa time to assess what’s best.”

  “They could’ve just been out for a walk.”

  “Nobody comes up Spooklight Holler for a walk,” says Socall by way of a greeting.

  Everything about Socall is big. She has big lips and a wide mouth, big cheeks, and hair that stands up big and bushy if she doesn’t tie it down with a scarf—Socall’s scarves are the size of tablecloths. The biggest thing about her is her heart. She’s ten years older than Mama, and used to go by another name until she tired of her long-gone husband calling her a so-called wife and a so-called cook, and named herself Socall as a way to show him who was boss.

  While Mama goes inside to gather a few things, Socall moves to the window for a peek inside, and Jubilee squeezes in beside her. Accommodating these strangers, the bedroom seems to have shrunk—their whole house, in fact, as if it will not be able to return to its original form even if the men were to leave this instant.

  “Heavy on the manners, isn’t he?” she says of the talkative one, who is shaking Jeremiah Wrightley’s hand, then Pa’s.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being mannerly.”

  “Folks were being mannerly all the while driving nails into the son of God.” Socall takes the bundle of clothes from Mama and heads Jubilee down the porch and toward the path that leads to her house not quite a mile away, listing everything she knows about men and ending on a guilty verdict. “Most men are nothing but trouble, but those two are right-colored, Northerners, and city men—that’s three counts against them.”

  Backed by a steep hill and walled in on both sides by woods, Socall’s place is about as hidden as a place can be. Socall has a thing for color—the window shutters are pale blue and her front door a slap-you-right-awake yellow. One season she’ll paint her front steps a welcoming color and the next season a stay-away red. Pa told her once she’d made her point on the issue of color, which she didn’t take kindly to. “No point in arguing with a fence post,” is what she said, something she tells Pa about every other week when they come to yet another issue on which they can’t agree. Inside, her house is not dreary or sparse like the Bufords’, and has enough furniture for five families, though she lives alone.

  Socall heats up coffee, then pulls out a kitchen chair for Jubilee and lifts her hair. “What happened here?”

  Jubilee doesn’t know why her body will always go on answering for her even after she tells it not to.

  Like a stench has come up suddenly in her nose, Socall says, “Please tell me it was not that coward,” letting loose a string of cuss words and thundering on about the no-good likes of Ronny Gault and his father, the pitiful excuse of a mayor. Half the town she names.

  “Not all people are like that, surely. Some must be decent,” Jubilee insists.

  “Some are decent and some just act decent; the trick is to figure which is which.” Socall fetches a hairbrush and a pair of scissors and tidies up the butchered part. “Your hair always reminds me of a red fox’s tail.”

  Jubilee is debating whether to tell her about the men having taken her picture when Levi lets himself in.

  “Why are you two so jumpy? You expecting trouble?”

  “And see how we are not wrong,” Socall replies.

  Levi hands Jubilee a small wooden box. Something shuffles inside.

  Through the slats, she sees two wide eyes and a beak about the size of a pinky fingernail—a baby owl. “Hi, little guy!”

  “I guess flying lessons didn’t go too well.” Levi is always going on about what a waste of time it is interfering with nature instead of letting it take its course, but half of her patients come from him. This one is meant as a peace offering.

  They both make hooting noises at the baby owl. Socall hands Jubilee her Bible and tells her to tear out what she needs for nesting material. Few pages remain. Genesis and the other Books of the Law were used for lighting fires during the winter that wouldn’t quit, the Prophets were shredded for the chicken coop, and much of the Gospels plug the holes in the walls to stop the drafts from chilling a person to the bone, which Socall claims is what the Good Lord intended all along.

  Levi slings his guitar from his back, puts his foot up on a kitchen stool, and strums a lullaby until the owl nests down, then pours himself a cup of coffee, humming as he raids the cookie jar.

  “You’re sprightly given that there are two strange men in your house.”

  Socall’s right. Ordinarily, Levi would be sullen and suspicious. “They’ll be turned out tomorrow, so why fuss over it?” he says.

  Jubilee can’t believe this is her brother talking; neither can Socall, who goes nose to nose with him to determine if he’s sauced. “If it ain’t shine, it must be love.”

  Levi glances at Jubilee, who’s quick to shake her head to indicate that she hasn’t ratted on him.

  “And who might the lucky lady be?” How Socall knows things is one of life’s great mysteries.

  “When do I have time for girls?” Not meeting Socall’s eyes is a dead giveaway.

  Socall adds a generous portion of what she calls Nature’s Flavoring to her coffee. “I once loved a man I wasn’t supposed to.” She downs half her drink, then breathes out fumes and philosophy both. “There are but three things over which a poor soul has no control: his birth, his death, and who he’ll love, and anyone who tells you an orderly tale about love has surely never encountered the real thing.”

  “There’s love, and there’s also just someone catching your fancy,” Jubilee argues.

  “A man can surely tell the difference himself,” Levi counters.

  Socall finishes her drink. “Here’s how you tell the difference. You put on your best face for those you fancy, but you present your flawed self, warts and all, for your true love.”

  “And a true love is someone who’ll do whatever they can to keep you safe.”

  “Oh honey, no,” Socall corrects Jubilee. “There’s no such thing as being safe when it comes to love. Give your heart away and there’s no predicting what’ll happen.”

  Levi acts as though he’s won an argument, and Jubilee’s of a mind to speak Sarah Tuttle’s name out loud to put an end to such reckless talk, but Socall senses to change the subject. “What’s that tune you were humming?
Is that a new song you’re working on?”

  “As a matter of fact…” Levi picks up his guitar, flat-picks the intro—a merry rhythm suited for banjo—and sings in the cadence of old-time balladeers:

  Gaily comes a damsel pretty tonight

  Fair as any has ever breathed

  Among a starry grove she ’lights

  My little lark sings for me.

  What can a boy give a maid so fair

  I have but a tune and a rhyme

  No fortune but your heart, cries she

  A love in three-four time.

  No pardon beyond the trees shall lie

  Lest soon I bid her adieu

  Only heaven can hear the harmony

  Of the lark and the boy so blue.

  “Well, don’t quit there,” Socall says when Levi rests his guitar against the chair. “Is he going to bid her adieu or not?”

  “I haven’t got that part figured out yet.”

  “How about he leads the lovely maid to my house next week for the frolic and asks her to dance?”

  “Whereupon he steps all over her dainty feet and she calls the whole thing off,” Levi replies.

  “No, she won’t, because he’ll know how to dance once I’m through teaching him.” Socall puts a record on her gramophone, which sets Levi off on a jig around the house to prove he’s beyond instruction. Socall grabs his hand and holds it up as an arch for her to pass under, and after a few dizzying turns, she staggers in Jubilee’s direction. “We’re going to get you all learned up, too, so you don’t sit in a corner like last time.”

  “Nobody’s going to ask me to dance.”

  “What makes you so sure? I heard Wrightley’s oldest has been making inquiries after you.”

  Jubilee groans. Wyatt Wrightley has the temperament of an empty pail.

  “Up! Come on.” Socall shimmies in front of her, grabs her wrist, and pulls her into a twirl.

  There’s no satisfying Socall with a half-hearted scuffle, so she sways her hips a little.

  “Now you’re getting the hang of it.” Socall could have made the Lord himself come down off his cross to dance with her.

  Snapping his fingers, Levi takes the coat rack for a partner and zips from one end of the room to the other, and Socall chooses her dance mate, a big bag of flour that she nuzzles and two-steps around the table. Jubilee fetches the box with the baby owl. Dancing in Socall’s front room must be what heaven is like—just plain forgetting a person’s worries.

  HAVENS

  He’s awake.” The woman beside Havens is applying a damp cloth to his forehead. Her short, rust-colored hair is streaked with gray, her cheeks are sunken, and her blue eyes are ringed with wrinkles, and she’s wearing an unbelted print dress that has all the color strained out of it. “He’s awake,” she says again, keeping her gaze fixed on Havens in such a way as to make it clear he is to respond, except he can’t think to whom she might be referring.

  “He is?” he replies.

  She raises the volume of her voice. “He’s talking now.”

  Havens tries to figure out who she might be. Why is he lying in a bedroom with walls made from rough-hewn timber, and not his own, and why can’t he tell if it is early morning or late afternoon when he looks out the window near the foot of his bed? In the corner are a small table on which his camera bag rests and a hardback chair that looks as if it is about to collapse from the weight of his jacket. A narrow wardrobe takes up most of the wall to his right, and hanging from a nail is the room’s only adornment, a small oval mirror.

  A tree stump has fewer lines than the face of the slender man who addresses Havens with a strange accent. “You gave us quite a scare.”

  Havens has the peculiar feeling that he is onstage, in a period play perhaps, which would explain the rudimentary set, the old-fashioned costumes, the stilted way these characters deliver their lines.

  “Would you care to take some broth?” The woman holds a ceramic bowl in front of him.

  He can’t answer because a pain is gripping his left leg, ankle to groin, with such intensity that he becomes dizzy and nauseated, and he rolls to his side, where the woman meets him with a bucket. After heaving, he settles against the pillow, and the woman puts the cloth back on his forehead before hurrying from the room.

  The man takes her place. “You don’t remember being snake-bit, mister?”

  It takes drawing back the covers and seeing his bandaged foot and swollen purple toes to make sense of this. Havens cannot recall being injured, only giving chase through the tangled woods after a strange woman who struck him first as having been elemental in that setting, regal almost, until forced to flee and, just like that, vanished, making her somehow ethereal.

  The woman returns with a bitter drink, insisting it’s a cure, so he does as he’s told and finishes it.

  “My wife here doesn’t care too much for Wrightley, and I’ll grant he’s on the unconventional side, but on the issue of snake bites and their curing nobody knows better. He’s been bit a dozen times.”

  “More venom than blood running in his veins,” the woman says.

  Havens tries not to groan even though his leg feels as if it’s been caught in baling wire.

  “Tomorrow we will see about you putting some weight on that foot, but for now you stay put.” He directs Havens’s attention to the chamber pot beside the bed. “You holler when you need help.”

  Massey walks in as the couple is leaving. He lays his hand on Havens’s shoulder. “Welcome back, buddy.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Almost twenty-four hours. It’s Monday.” Massey closes the door, fetches the chair, and sits beside him. “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. This wouldn’t have happened if we’d done as you said and turned back.”

  “Hey, I’m not a gonner.”

  “It looked iffy there for a while.”

  “Where are we? Who are these people? I think this is their bed.” Havens pushes aside the covers and tries to move his legs, but intense pain shoots from his toe to his hip, and black spots mar his vision.

  “You stay where you are, sport.” Massey tells them they’re in the home of Del and Estil Buford, then, lowering his voice, adds, “You’re not going to believe this.”

  Havens tries to shift into a more upright position.

  “This is where she lives; those are her parents. What kind of dumb luck is that?”

  Havens feels a flutter in his stomach. “You’ve seen her again? Have you talked to her?” Havens must apologize to her for spying on her and chasing her. What must she think of them? What must her parents think?

  “They’ve stashed her at someone else’s house.”

  “They know what we were up to and they are still letting us stay here?”

  “They don’t know. She covered for us. She said we were trying to ask for directions.” Massey whispers about a brother who is also blue. “You should see him, he’s like some throwback to another era. I tried talking to him, but the guy acted like he’d just as soon scalp me, and he cleared off, too.”

  This only makes Havens more certain that they should be on their way without delay. What if these people are not as friendly as they are making out to be?

  “Neither of them appears the least bit sick. I’m telling you, Havens, we’ve come upon something extraordinary.”

  “The FSA isn’t going to be interested in this.”

  Massey is thinking along the same lines. “No, but Time will be.”

  “If we pitched it right, maybe even National Geographic.”

  Massey agrees. “It’s got to be more than, ‘Hey folks, here are some blue people.’ ”

  But there’s a bigger problem than angle. “I don’t see how I am going to get a picture,” says Havens. “Even if she turns up, it’s not like I can ask her to sit for a portrait.”

  “Maybe you’re going to have to settle for a couple of fleeting shots. I’m going to snoop around and see if I can find where she’s hiding out, and you wor
k on getting mobile.”

  Massey moves his chair to the table, lights the oil lamp, and begins scribbling in his notebook.

  A fleeting shot. Massey makes it sound so simple. Advances in technology have led to most of his colleagues using the single-lens reflex camera to produce quick shots, easy converts who now talk up spontaneity as though it were a necessary component of any good shot. Not so for Havens. Part of it is that the stand camera best suits his style of deliberate and exacting attention to description, but also he remains committed to the idea that the economy it takes to produce a single image can say more about a subject than a series of cheap snapshots. The other way to put it is that Havens isn’t any good at introducing spontaneity into his work because he lacks the requisite instinct for it, and unless his subjects are cemented on foundations or seated on chairs, he can’t be sure what they are likely to do. If he didn’t have the reaction time of a blindfolded man in a boxing ring, he would’ve taken that picture of the woman at the stream when he had the opportunity. Instead, here he lies.

  While Massey writes, Havens imagines what backdrops might suit her best. Even against a plain white sheet, would she not make the most magnificent picture?

  * * *

  Havens wakes up to Massey yanking on his arm. “Quick! She’s outside.”

  Havens doesn’t need to ask who.

  Though the room is dark, the window displays a sky layered in violet and pink bands.

  Massey hoists him to the edge of the bed. “Hurry!”

  Putting his foot in a pot of boiling water might be less painful than standing. The dizziness makes him sway, but Massey wedges his shoulder in Havens’s armpit and all but drags him to the window, where the view is of a gentle grade cleared of timber and planted with sorghum already thigh-high. To the east is a rippled hillside over which the retreating darkness seems reluctant to relinquish its hold, and above, a sky entertaining rumors of morning.

  Massey gestures to the right. At first, Havens can’t see anything but a dim outline of a henhouse about eighty yards away, but gradually a silhouette distinguishes itself from the murk and glides toward the house. The woman from the creek.