The Last Blue

by Isla Morley

  “I can help you, if you want,” Jubilee pledges.

  Sarah gives her a look that says, How, how could you possibly help? “It’s not as if I’ll be the first woman to cook and clean for a man she can’t abide.” She catches sight of herself in Pa’s shaving mirror. “Levi would run the other way if he saw me now.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.” Jubilee picks up the comb and asks permission before removing Sarah’s bonnet and gently coaxing her tangles into curls.

  “A heart doesn’t break clean the way bones do,” Sarah says. “If it did, it would knit back together.”

  “I had someone tell me to let the hurt scab over and not go picking at it, but what about when there’s a hole too big for anything to grow over, least of all a scab?” Which was how Jubilee knew it would take a long time to be over Havens, long time as in never.

  As soon as they return to the porch, Eddie starts grousing about how lazy Sarah is and how she has to be told over and over what her wifely duties are. “If I wasn’t a man of my word, I’d send her back.”

  Sarah situates herself on a chair, and Jubilee bends down and unlaces her boots to make room for her swollen feet. Going inside to fetch lemonade, Jubilee startles to find Mama hiding behind the door, damp with sweat and shivering as if she’s been caught in a rainstorm. How so lopsided a form can stay upright, Jubilee has no idea.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” Agitated, Mama pulls Jubilee close only to screech in her ear, “I won’t have her here!”

  It does no good trying to hush Mama.

  “You tell that girl we don’t want her here! Levi would still be with us if it wasn’t for her!”

  Jubilee leads Mama back to her room and has Grandma sit with her, then takes the lemonade out to the porch, where Uncle Eddie is in the midst of explaining the real reason for his visit. Gesturing at Sarah’s belly, he says, “So if it does come out a Blue like its father, can Jubilee witch it right?”

  “This isn’t witching,” Jubilee argues, but before she can state the facts, the screen door swings open and Mama comes out as if she’s wading through a swift-running creek.

  “You shut your mouth, Eddie!” Mama roused thus is how they say the near-dead can sometimes spring up from their stupor to impart a long-held secret only to expire a minute later. “You’re not half the man Levi was! Be gone with you and don’t you ever come back here! Neither of you!”

  Mama grabs the broom from against the wall and waves it at them.

  Uncle Eddie cusses and protests and says they’ll all come to regret this, but Sarah keeps that flat look, as if a beating isn’t worth trying to avoid.

  As Uncle Eddie is hauling himself onto the wagon, Sarah turns to Jubilee. “Maybe you like being normal now, but wait till you’ve been normal as long as the rest of us. It’s no fairy tale.”

  Before the wagon has made the turn at the bottom of the field, Mama calls from inside, saying for Pa to wash up because she’s fixing chicken fried steak for dinner. Mama putting on her apron has the same effect on Pa as Jubilee coming home in right-colored skin, but ten minutes later, Mama is still standing in front of an empty bowl with a spoon in her hand. Pa takes off her apron, leads her to a chair, and says, “It’s good that you spoke his name, Glad. It’s a start.”

  Mama slumps against him and cries, and he tidies her hair. After a while, she pulls herself upright and turns shallow eyes to the window. “Oh, see,” she says. “It’s going to be one of those pretty sunsets.”

  The sun is nowhere near setting.

  * * *

  Long after everyone goes to bed, Jubilee takes a lamp and looks everywhere for the photographs, the one she took of him especially, and can’t find them. Frustrated, she returns to her bed, where she lies awake thinking about Sarah’s predicament and Levi in his grave and how it is becoming more and more difficult to picture things as they once had been. The full moon rises up over the hills and shines into her room, bullfrogs bellow to each other from across the creek, and a barn owl hoots from the shushing trees, all things she knows Havens would love to photograph. Why can she not forget him? She was raised to make demands of no one, to shear off her needs and desires long before they grew full-sized, and for good reason, because now look—a new skin, and she cannot stop herself from imagining what Havens would make of her.

  Her bedroom door squeaks open and a nose sniffles. Propping up on one elbow, Jubilee whispers, “Willow-May?”

  A little silhouette takes a step closer.

  “What’s wrong?” She goes to her sister and strokes her head. It’s her sister’s first night back at home. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “You want to sleep with me?”

  Willow-May climbs into Jubilee’s bed and stares at Jubilee and says, “You look right, now.”

  Shadow-colored, her sister means, because the blue has returned.

  “Juby?”

  “Ssh. Close your eyes now, and go to sleep.”

  “Can we play a while in the morning before you take your pill?”

  “Sure,” Jubilee says. “No more talking now.”

  A few minutes later, Willow-May whispers, “Juby?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “I don’t want anything bad to happen.”

  “Nothing bad’s going to happen,” Jubilee promises.

  “You won’t leave again, will you?”

  “Never.”

  HAVENS

  Sitting in the basement, Havens no longer wonders if he is on the brink of some kind of collapse, but is convinced of it. It’s been days since he went outside, maybe more than a week, and he can smell his own body. His mother has given up protesting the beard. Her battles now involve telephone numbers that he is supposed to dial—Dr. Friedman’s son, Gerald, has taken over the family practice, his mother tells him, and is more than happy to make a house call. Another number is for Stedman Studios, which is looking for a part-time photo finisher, and the most recent number belongs to Beth-across-the-street’s sister’s second cousin, who went away to beauty school and has come back to start her own Avon business.

  His parents are worried about him, which is why he ought to move out. A couple weeks ago, he gave loose change to a guy who used to pitch for the Reds who’s now eking out an existence in Hooverville on the other side of town, which apparently isn’t nearly as bad as hopping the freights. Poverty doesn’t bother Havens. Nothing bothers him anymore, except his memories of her. Against his better judgment, he’d written to the Bufords by way of the postmaster two months ago in the vain hope that he’d receive a reply. A man can find his footing on a rebuke, but silence is a bottomless cavity through which he keeps falling.

  Between his feet is his camera bag. He opens it and takes out his father’s .45 Colt. It weighs about as much as his Contax. His grip is firm and the handle warms quickly, and instead of an inanimate thing, the revolver feels like an extension of his arm. His hand does not shake the way it does whenever he tries to raise his camera these days. It is steady, purposeful. He doesn’t intend to blow his brains out, but his mind does need to be threatened. It has started to lose his memories of her. Only fragments of her come to him now instead of the whole picture, and this was not part of the deal. His memory is supposed to compensate for the future he cannot have with her, but now not even the photographs can bring her back to him all the way, and every day he loses more of her, which means it is only a matter of time before he wakes up and she is lost to him entirely. Desperate people know their demands have the best chance of being met when they are made with a weapon, and Havens makes his demands now. He directs his hand to the side of his head and it seems that he has made a fist at his temples, not pulled a gun on himself.

  Think of her! Think of everything about her.

  It seems his mind does clear some. Skin is what first comes to him, but not her skin—his. He remembers how it felt when she first touched him. He remembers exactly how soft her fingers were, how it felt when she buried them in h
is hair. It was her touch that made him aware for the first time that he needed touching, that he needed tenderness, tending. His chest rises and caves. Gooseflesh runs along his arms.

  Remember more!

  Thoughts assemble her into something of a fable. She catches lightning in her hand.

  Havens jams the muzzle against his temple. Remember straight, damn you!

  His mind slips a gear. She is clapping thunderclouds together, relieving heaven of its duties.

  No, remember the real Jubilee!

  But his mind rewinds back to that awful morning in the clearing, where she lay naked and tied to her brother.

  No, not this, don’t remember this!

  The occasion in which she bloomed and he came to life—why will his mind not relive this? Why will it not bring her back to him as she was that day at her aviary or when he held her during their one and only dance or the way she’d looked at him when she’d pleaded for him to wait at the shack? She’d been happy, but now he can only picture her distress.

  He hears footsteps on the stairs and manages to zip the .45 back into the bag just as the light snaps on.

  His mother is holding a hamper of clothes. “What on earth, Clayton? You about scared the life out of me!”

  He clamors to his feet.

  “What are you doing down here in the dark?” She takes stock of the room and eyes the camera bag. “What do you have in there?”

  “Nothing.” He slings the bag over his shoulder, but she blocks his exit.

  “If you are up to funny business.”

  What if he had pulled the trigger? She would’ve been the one to find him. For no other reason, he is glad he didn’t.

  “You’re not taking drugs, are you? Because I won’t stand for any of that nonsense poor Doris next door has to go through with her son.”

  He does his best to reassure her. “I’m not on drugs, Mom.”

  “You’ve just been acting so strange lately.” So unlikely is her embrace that he at first believes his mother is about to beat him. “You’re a good boy, Clayton. Come on, son.” She pounds his back as though to clear his airways of an obstruction. “When life bucks you out of the saddle, you just have to get back on up.”

  “I’m fine, Mom, really.”

  She picks up her hamper and says, “Oh, and there’s a letter come for you.” From her brittle tone, he can tell she disapproves. “The postmark is that town you went to, the one out in the sticks.”

  Havens takes the stairs two at a time.

  JUBILEE

  Fall’s shrinking daylight ought to mean the hours pass more quickly, but no, it can take forever to be done with morning, only to have the afternoon follow on millipede legs. Nothing, though, takes as long as night. In the sagging hours between midnight and dawn, the World of Wonders Sideshow will often haunt her. Freak Show is what most called it. Tall canvas banners painted with poor likenesses of her and the others, along with the words ERRORS OF NATURE, THE UNTHINKABLE, and WHAT IS IT drew fairgoers into the tent where she sat. After hiding all her life, she had to show herself. No longer hunted, but caught. Waiting for people to come to her little stall was like hearing a swarm of locusts and hoping they’d find some other field where they could gorge themselves. You can’t rightly call it staring, what they did. Eyes can judge, condemn, pity. They can be filled with the kind of menace that made a person glad for that chair and not to be out walking along a dark street. No matter what kind of eyes, though, none of them kept her from feeling like a prediction come to pass.

  At daybreak, Jubilee reaches for the bottle and swallows a pill. If she sprouted soft white feathers, it would be no less a miracle, but today she marks the change with less awe and from a distance. Between her and her new skin is a separation she can no longer deny. Maybe it’s on account of the distance that returns between her and Willow-May every time blue gives way to right-colored skin, or because a distance persists between her and Grandma, and her and Mama. Some of it could be that Jubilee and this new skin share no memories—they go back together only a few weeks. When she first joined the World of Wonders and the issue of her act was being debated, her friend, the one they called Mr. Lizard, protested the mummy costume Jubilee was to try on, saying, “Just because something fits a person doesn’t mean it becomes a person,” and now, she wonders if this isn’t true of skin, too.

  Instead of trying out woman postures in front of the mirror, she throws on an old dress and goes out to the kitchen, where she puts on a pot of coffee and mixes dough for biscuits, which she’ll put in the oven once Mama and Grandma are awake, even though Mama can seldom be persuaded to get much more than half a glass of milk down and Grandma will eat only when Jubilee is out of sight.

  Outside, Pa is dragging a load of deadfall from the parcel of land he’s been clearing, and he turns down her offer to help as though she were in Sunday clothes that weren’t for getting dirty. Pa might be wrong about everything turning out fine. Three weeks have passed and few things have gone back to how they used to be, Mama most of all. What Jubilee wouldn’t give for Mama to draw closer—even a little closer would comfort her a great deal—but Mama holes up in her room. Jubilee’s tried talking to her, but she’s as good as stone now. Boil a stone and the heat will run right out of it.

  Jubilee is hauling water from the well back to the house when she hears Chappy’s honking from down the path. Never does he come this early, and right away she assesses that he is worked up about something and she runs through a list of who might have died in the night.

  “Mr. Havens’s come!” he blurts, making her drop the pail.

  Trying to catch his breath, Chappy repeats himself, and adds, “He came by train last night!”

  Holding herself doesn’t stop her insides from flip-flopping.

  Chappy reports that Havens checked in at Sylvia Fullhart’s place. “He said he’d be paying you a visit today.”

  The ground is trying to buck her off. “He can’t come up here, Chappy.” Not after everything that happened, especially not after Mama’s reaction to Sarah. Pa’s also made it ample clear that no one’s ever to mention his name, let alone open the door for him. “You have to tell him he can’t come.”

  “He’s fixed on seeing you, Juby. Pharaoh’s army couldn’t stop him.”

  What if she was to meet him somewhere? She rules out the grave keeper’s shed on account of last time, her aviary because it’s too close, and Socall’s house because Willow-May will be taking her lessons there after breakfast. “Could I meet him at your house? Would your grandma mind?”

  Chappy says, “How about you just go to him?”

  She considers the idea. If she went now, she could be there before the stores opened and people started milling about. She asks Chappy to wait for her and flies back to the house.

  * * *

  Maybe he’s come about the picture—perhaps it has been printed, after all. Or could he somehow have heard talk of a blue she-devil at the Kentucky State Fair? If he has, how should she answer? What would he make of people lining up to see her? Would it help him to learn how quickly their shock wore off and that they mostly went away disappointed they didn’t get more for their money? She could deny it altogether or she could spell out only the good bits—that she’d had a place to sleep, someone to cook her meals and wash her clothes, that she didn’t have to lift a finger, just sit all day, and for that alone she earned more money in a week than a factory worker in a month. Maybe he hasn’t come for either of these reasons. She permits herself the possibility that he’s returned for a visit as he said he would.

  She chooses the yellow dress she bought in Smoke Hole, brushes her hair and pins back the sides the way fashionable women wear their hair in the city, and daubs on a little lipstick. She wipes it off. Then puts on some more. The house is still quiet when she tiptoes out the front door. Pa returns her wave when she and Chappy take off for town.

  “I told you he was sweet on you,” Chappy says.

  * * *

  Sylv
ia Fullhart opens the door only halfway and says, “Early for a visitor to be calling, isn’t it?”

  Jubilee can’t stop smiling. This is a new thing—being told off for something other than being blue. Asking for Havens comes out tipsy-sounding, so in a more sober tone, she adds, “Please, it’s important.”

  The matron doesn’t hide how peculiar she finds Jubilee. She takes a few steps into the hallway and yells up the stairs, “Havens, a visitor to see you!” and then motions for Jubilee to come inside. “Parlor’s through there.”

  How do Right-coloreds behave when they enter someone’s home? Surely not the way she does, expecting people to leap out from behind walls to grab her and throw her out. The front room is not like any she’s ever seen, so many chairs, for one thing, each covered in fabric and with its own little pillow, and a carpet patterned with flowers, making it so she doesn’t want to tread on them. At the fireplace she studies the clock ticking loudly on the mantle. For the life of her, she can’t tell the time. She’s remembering the first time she got a close-up look at Havens, standing at Mama’s bedroom window that first morning, his hair flopped across his brow, so much goodness in his eyes.

  She hears footsteps on the staircase. Should she stay where she is or sit like a lady or meet him at the doorway? Where there used to be one Jubilee, there are now two. One Jubilee would have her run and hide, and the other that she stop acting blue and stand up proud. She instructs her heart to send its taproot way down deep into the earth to keep her from toppling over.

  “A young miss is here for you,” Jubilee hears Sylvia Fullhart say. “A dippy one, if you ask me.” She informs Havens she’s about to start cooking breakfast and he’s not to get any ideas of having tea or coffee served early.

  Right-colored blood flows faster than blue. Think straight, speak straight, be straight. Jubilee is still trying to find the best place to light when he enters the parlor.