The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  “I’m going out to talk to her.”

  “No, don’t. You’ll scare her off.” Havens wants the day to make haste now, wants the sun to quit dallying on the other side of the hill and display her. “Hand me my camera.”

  Massey props Havens against the chair and thrusts his Contax at him before slipping out of the room. Havens adjusts the aperture for low light and looks out the window, but she is gone again. Always disappearing. He watches the strange land become stranger still, aware that something has been disturbed in him. He recalls attending a presentation once by a famous ornithologist in which the man spoke of the rara aves, that rare, elusive creature every birder and explorer hopes to see. A man can’t walk ten feet in the world without tripping over duplications and counterfeits, and in any medium the same ideas are repeated in the same worn patterns. Generations of photographers have gone to their deathbeds without ever encountering firsthand an example of originality, and here she is. His rara aves. Capturing her on film is sure to bring substantial enough payment to keep the ship afloat a few months more, but the kind of picture he has in mind would do much more than that. It could revive in him a purpose, even restore the very principle that first made him take up photography—that making images is born of a desire to share with others, to connect on some intimate level with another person; to be known, in other words.

  Her sudden appearance in front of the window startles him, but if she is as surprised as he is, she does not show it. In the dawn light there is nothing of spectacle about her, only iridescent grace. A shimmering blue-gray, she might as well be formed from mother-of-pearl. Her long auburn hair is tied back with a scarf and her features are a study in precision, and although the light prevents him from knowing the exact color of her eyes, they keep him from moving. Her face is a perfect rendering of two-point perspective—the width of her forehead, the angles of her cheekbones, and the tapering outline of her face have made her eyes the two vanishing points on a beckoning horizon and her mouth the bewitching focus. Even her slight overbite is dazzling. It surely cannot be with the same fascination with which he views her that she continues to inspect him, parting her lips as if she might have something to say, then thinking better of it. He ought to stop staring and yet he cannot. She might as well be a myth, sprung up from the fields, raised by the elements, able to command the beasts.

  His heart is thumping. He realizes he has stopped breathing, and cannot seem to start up the mechanism again. Make art—that’s what he must do.

  As soon as he raises his camera, her expression of curiosity turns to crossness. She makes a stop sign with her hand and dashes off. Havens cranes his head to track where she might have gone and sees nothing.

  He is still using his camera as a scope when Massey rushes into the room.

  “I saw her come past this way; did you get a picture?”

  Havens lowers his camera, letting it hang at his side like a partially severed hand. He doesn’t bother to answer.

  JUBILEE

  You’re not supposed to be here,” scolds Willow-May when Jubilee creeps inside the house. This morning, her sister’s dressed in Pa’s Sunday suit, britches and suspenders and shirt, but she is wearing someone else’s hat—one of the men’s. Jubilee pulls it off her head and throws it on the table and puts her finger to her lips, glancing through the breezeway toward Mama’s room. Pa and Levi have gone to trade with some of the other farmers, the newcomer she needs most to watch out for is in the barn, where the lamp is burning in the window, and Mama’s getting an early start on laundry, gauging from the wood smoke near the wash shed.

  “He’s asked after you,” Willow-May says in a loud voice.

  Again, Jubilee indicates for her to whisper. Knowing her sister is a seasoned eavesdropper, she whispers, “He did? To who?”

  “To Mr. Massey. He hasn’t asked a single thing about the snake, though. I’d want to know about the snake, wouldn’t you? I wonder how long it was.”

  Her sister’s likely to go on and on, so Jubilee shushes her and puts on a stern face that shows she means business, then creeps along the breezeway to the doorway and peeks inside.

  The Bufords have a squashed aspect to their faces, but his is long and narrow with creases on each cheek. The rest of him is stretched, too, and his feet stick over the end of the bed. Her feet are dirty and rough and might as well be hooves, but his unaffected foot is pale, as if it’s never been without a shoe. What kind of place does he come from that he has to keep his feet covered? Some scalding place, has to be.

  It’s his hands that catch her attention again. She’s never seen a man whose hands weren’t calloused or gnarled or missing part of a finger, but his don’t even have a spot of dirt on them. No ring, either.

  But why is she dallying? She spots the camera on the chair in the far corner. Right-coloreds steal what you wouldn’t think could be taken from a person—a man’s pride, a mother’s urge for more childbearing, a maid’s virtue—now these men have stolen her likeness. It’s only right that she steal it back. She makes her way across the room, appraising the rest of him as she goes. Apart from the effects of the venom, he has no sickness on him—no scabs or sore places or scars. He’s barely even whiskered. If an angel fell to earth this is what it might look like. Thief, she reminds herself, not angel. And yet one who also stops what he’s doing to follow the flight path of a hawk and who finds beauty in a tree nature has rebuked. She takes another step toward the camera and checks his face, then another step, and another. She knows the character of every last board in this house, which ones give you away and which ones can keep a secret, and her last step is as silent as all the others, silent enough to hear his breathing change. She swings her head his way just as his eyes open. They are the color of scrubbed floors.

  “It’s you,” he says.

  Why does he greet her so cheerfully, as if they’ve already been introduced?

  “Please, don’t go,” he calls as she bolts for the door.

  She sprints through the front room and flies out the kitchen door only to slam straight into the unyielding form of Mr. Massey, who insists on helping her to her feet even though she pulls away and asks him please to stop. She’s never heard a Right-colored apologize before, and instead of how you’d think it would sound, stingy-like, Mr. Massey takes more blame than there is to take. She excuses herself, but he puts his hand on her arm, and that’s how she realizes his apology is meant to serve some other purpose.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asks, presenting his teeth for inspection.

  Fixing her attention on his hand makes him release it.

  “May I at least know who I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  If Mama catches her here, she’ll have sharp words for her, but Socall will also catch an earful for not paying closer attention, and Jubilee might never get another chance at that camera, so instead of answering, she hurries toward the path that leads back to Socall’s.

  He falls in beside her. “I just wanted to thank you. If it hadn’t been for your quick response, I’m not sure Havens would still be with us. Boy, are you fast—you had me beat, and I used to be my school’s cross-country champ.”

  Imagine, speed the feature that most distinguishes her. She maintains her silence and wonders if he’s a bit like the Farnsby boy, who can’t tell a green tomato from a ripe one.

  “Won’t you at least tell me your name? That can’t hurt, surely.”

  To be rid of him, she gives it, which only encourages him.

  “Jubilee. What a beautiful name. The fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

  Her name is no big parade and banners waving. It comes from the mandate in Leviticus that after every six years must come a Sabbath year, and after the seventh Sabbath must come the Jubilee Year. Supposedly, all things are to be made right then—debts forgiven, prisoners freed, and land going back to who first owned it. Some days Jubilee sounds like justice served, but some days like Blues will have to eat up more hell. “It’s just a name. It d
oesn’t mean anything,” she tells the newcomer.

  “How old are you, Jubilee?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  He nods like this has taken some great doing on her part. “Is your last name Buford or are you spoken for, Jubilee?”

  She wishes he’d quit saying her name like that. She steps up her pace.

  “You don’t have to go back to your hiding place for our sake, if that’s where you’re headed. I know what some in town say about you, but I assure you, we hold none of those opinions. In fact, I think you are remarkable.” He goes on calling her this and that, making out like she is snow in July.

  “I’m just blue, mister. That’s all.”

  “Yes, blue,” he says, as though he has just now put his finger on it. “Forgive my impertinence, but may I ask if you are ill—because you don’t seem ill to me. I’m curious if there is a name for your condition. Your brother has it, too, doesn’t he? But not your little sister. Has it been this way since birth or did it develop later?”

  She tires of Mr. Massey’s questions. “Some say it’s catching.”

  That stops him in his tracks. Mr. Massey shoves his hands in his pockets, takes a step back, but then runs after her with a wagging finger. “I do believe you are teasing me, Miss Buford.”

  “I have to go.”

  Mr. Massey keeps up his questions until he sees Levi and Pa riding toward them.

  Bringing Lass to a halt, they climb down from the wagon, Levi stepping so close to Mr. Massey that the brim of his hat bangs up against Mr. Massey’s forehead. “Had your fill of looking yet?”

  Mr. Massey doesn’t seem the least bit put off. “I fully appreciate that you’re wary of me. I would be, too, in your position.”

  Levi scowls. “What would you know about my position?”

  Pa cautions Levi, and asks after the one still in bed, but Levi doesn’t give the man a chance to answer. “We don’t need reporters sticking their noses in our affairs.” This is what always gives people the wrong idea about Levi, like all there is to him is the hottest part of the flame.

  Putting a bit of space between him and Levi, Mr. Massey takes out his notebook and flips to a page. “There are those in town who have some pretty strange notions about you and your family, and I thought you might care to comment, maybe give your side of the story.”

  Levi confronts Pa. “See, I told you. You ought to have sent them back to town already.” Levi snatches the notebook, leafs through the pages, and reads what’s written. “ ‘I don’t rightly know how blue is spread.’ ” He ducks out of Mr. Massey’s reach to read more. “ ‘You can’t be touching the same things or sitting on the same chairs, I do know that.’ ”

  “I assure you, those are not my opinions at all,” Mr. Massey pleads. “If you read further, you’ll see they are attributed to Mrs.—”

  “ ‘One place you’ll never see a Blue is the doctor’s ’cause they don’t want folks to know they don’t bleed.’ ”

  Pa insists Levi give the man back his book, but Levi keeps at it, and Mr. Massey clasps his hands behind his back and drops his head.

  “You heard Pa. Give it back,” says Jubilee.

  “Here’s one about you,” Levi tells her. “ ‘The girl used to be the kind of Blue a person could tolerate until she started frequenting the graveyard. Blues aren’t satisfied worrying the living, see, they’ve got to worry the dead too.’ ” What Levi comes to next makes him fling the book to the ground. “We aren’t interested in being one of your stories!”

  She picks up the notebook and hands it to Mr. Massey, but not before seeing the offending words underlined. Claims of inbreeding.

  “It’s true, people have spoken to us,” Mr. Massey responds. “And I’ll admit, curiosity got the better of us. A journalist lives by his instincts, and mine were telling me that there was one heck of a story up here, so yes, we came to investigate, but I respect your right to privacy and I won’t pen one word without your consent, sir.”

  Before Pa can say what his wishes are, Mr. Massey speaks of writing about the Ohio Valley flood last year and before that the Union Stock Yards fire in Chicago. “I know folks don’t necessarily want their hard times blabbed all over the front page, but we’re not hacks,” he insists. “I’ve spent years covering the unfair treatment of laborers, and Havens has taken photographs that brought federal attention and funding to starving inner-city children. He even won the Pulitzer.”

  Levi mock-claps after Mr. Massey gets done explaining that stories can bring about change for the better. Mr. Massey can surely hear what Levi says when he pulls Pa aside. “Folks in town get wind of us talking to these outsiders and they’re going to send a posse up here.”

  “The man was struck by a snake, son. He can’t even walk.”

  “I can give them a ride to the gas station, and one of Wrightley’s boys can take them the rest of the way.”

  Pa puts up his hand. “I won’t have them in town keep me from my Christian duty. We are going to give these men our charity until Mr. Havens is recovered enough to walk himself off my porch.”

  “Charity? Name one instance when charity did us any good.” Levi’s right. In town there is charity toward the middle child of Hester and Phyllis Granger, who grew one leg faster than the other, and Philip Burns, who has to be tethered to his twin sister lest he wander off into the hills and never come back, and even a few slaves who passed through these parts on their way up North are said to have received charity, but charity has its limits and Blues are on its other side.

  Pa returns to Mr. Massey with one condition. “There’ll be no story or pictures.”

  Mr. Massey agrees without hesitation. Looking at Jubilee, he tells Pa, “Surely there’s no point in your children having to hide now. I cannot take advantage of your kindness if it comes at their expense, sir.”

  Levi says, “You can’t take a Right-colored at his word, Pa,” but Pa gets up on the wagon and holds his hand out to Jubilee. Down the line, Levi could very well turn out to be right and they might all come to view this moment as a terrible lapse in judgment, but for once, it feels good not to have to hide, to get up on that wagon bench and sit up proud beside Pa while a Right-colored looks on.

  HAVENS

  Havens struggles out of bed, does a poor job of making himself presentable, and gathers his belongings, certain that he and Massey soon will be carted off the premises. The young woman knows of his and Massey’s intent or she would not have attempted to gain possession of his camera, and by now Buford and the other family members must know, too. His hopes of some kind of redeeming portrait were far-fetched to begin with, but unless he adopts the methods of a sniper and sets his aim on her from some tree branch or from behind some bush, even a fleeting shot is unlikely. Equally worrisome is what she must think of him.

  He hobbles from the room into a narrow breezeway that joins the sleeping quarters to the communal rooms of the house, and is afforded his first breath of fresh air in two days, along with a bit more of the view of the outdoors. The old woman is on the porch, along with the youngest Buford child, who sits among her books with a chalkboard on her lap, while Gladden Buford tends a flower bed below them. Rather than call to her, he hops through the next doorway into a living area, which smells of wood smoke, lard, and sweat, and where sunlight forms seams between the wallboards. For a crude dwelling in which everything is grained—the rough-hewn walls, the floor, the furniture—there is a sense of order. Taken up mostly by a dining table, the main room leads to a kitchen from a bygone era, accommodating an iron stove, a churn, pots hanging from nails on the walls, and two-by-four shelving on which meal bins and cans of preserves are stacked. There arises in him a desire to photograph the scene, but he cannot risk being caught with his camera, so he settles himself on a chair. The first thing that strikes him as odd is that the window shutters are attached on the inside of the house and have planks for barring them. Peculiar, too, is the front door, which is twice as thick as the walls and reinforced w
ith sheet metal. He searches for clues for these fortifications and finds them just to the right of the door latch—three small bullet holes. Havens feels uneasy.

  He is trying to situate his foot to alleviate the throbbing when Massey, Buford, his daughter, and a blue-skinned man he takes to be her brother enter the house, each with varying degrees of interest in his being up. Havens guesses that the presence of Buford’s blue children is the reason for Massey’s beaming, Massey, who now offers to pluck the nose of the young child, Willow-May, as she rushes to his side.

  Buford makes introductions, but it takes some prompting for Levi Buford to shake hands with Havens, while the young woman, Jubilee, does her duty with no display of personal feelings one way or the other.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Havens,” she says.

  If a statue came to life it would have no less of an effect on him. Havens takes her hand, registers her firm grip, and requests she drop the mister part. Her eyes—green with flecks of hazel—confirm his first assessment, vanishing points. He forces himself not to dwell on her lips, stained as though from blueberries.

  “I promised Buford the film from your camera,” Massey informs him.

  Looking first at Jubilee, then at her father, Havens swears, “But I didn’t take any pictures.”

  “Just so there isn’t any doubt.” Massey fetches the Contax, even though Buford says he takes a man at his word.

  Havens winds the film to the end and removes the canister, then offers it to Buford. While this still leaves Havens with eight black-and-white film packs, he’s down now to only one roll of color film. For his part, Massey rips several sheets from his notepad and offers them to Jubilee, who reacts as though she’s being a handed a posy of poison ivy, so he shreds the pages himself and slaps the fragments on the table.