Lightning Bug

by Donald Harington

  “Horsefeathers,” she said. She said that and he hushed, and she said, “Every, if you’re asking me to believe that you actually heard a voice saying those words, then you are crazier than I ever was.”

  He looked hurt for a moment, but then he grinned and asked, “When you were down there at that state hospital, did you ever hear voices?”

  “I don’t recall,” she said. “I suppose I did.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said, “that you even hear voices once in a while even still.”

  She shook her head, but he was right.

  “Aw, come on, I’ll bet you do,” he insisted.

  “Okay,” she said. “So both of us are crazy.”

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t have to be crazy to hear a voice. Now I don’t mean for you to believe that I heard some actual sound coming out of the Lord’s mouth and into my ear. I don’t hold with that prodigy hokum myself. But a true Christian has got his Lord in him, and can talk with Him subjectively, in his mind or in his heart’s core. Likewise, some crazy people might have the Devil in them, and hear subjective voices of evil.”

  “So you believe in Satan too?” she said.

  “I believe in Evil,” he said, “just as I believe in Good. I don’t believe in any fiendish-looking brute running around in his red underwear with a long tail and a pitchfork, just as I don’t believe in any old white-bearded Grampaw a-sittin Up Yonder on a cloud. But I believe in Forces. Powers. Causes. Agents. Movers, even if all they move is people. I believe in Light and Darkness, in Right and Wrong, in True and False, in Sickness and Health…”

  “You’ve got it all spelled out, have you?” she said, with sarcasm, but then she softened her tone and said, “Preach to me tomorrow, Every. Go ahead and finish telling me about this little chat you were having with the Lord.”

  “Well, He just wanted me to know that He was trying me out on my own, that I couldn’t be hanging onto His apron-strings during this particular time of trial. But He left me with the notion that He wouldn’t think too highly of me if I was to back down.”

  “Maybe that Mover inside of you isn’t the Lord,” she said. “Maybe that thing talking to you was just your guilt.”

  He thought about that for a while. Then he asked, “How do you mean that, Latha?” There was that sudden nervousness in his voice again.

  “You feel the Lord has deputized you to come and save Stay More,” she said, “to save the town you nearly ruined!”

  He was stricken. “You mean you—”

  “I don’t mean me,” she said.

  “Then I don’t know what you might mean,” he said.

  “I think you do,” she said.

  Impulsively his eyes shifted to the old stone edifice across the road, and then he seemed to realize that she had caught him glancing at it, and when his eyes returned to hers they were thoroughly sheepish. He asked, “Does everybody think that I—?”

  “Nobody thinks anything,” she said. “Nobody even knew that you were back in town, remember?”

  “Then why do you think it was me?”

  “Think what was you?”

  “Think it was me that robbed—”

  “How did you know it was robbed?”

  “You just said so.”

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t say a word about it.”

  “Well, somebody told me, then. But why do you think it was me?”

  “Good Lord, Every, who else could it have been? And even with that get-up you were in, that hood with the two eye-holes cut in it, and those outlandish clothes, I knew it was you, Every. Have you forgot it was me that you robbed, not just the bank? Have you forgot that I was the poor scared teller you held up? And even though you didn’t even speak to me, even though you didn’t want me to recognize your voice so you just passed me that note, I knew it was you. But I almost didn’t believe you, I almost felt like testing you, to see if you really would kill me, but I figured that if you were desperate enough to hold up the bank, you were desperate enough to kill me. You would have killed me, wouldn’t you have?”

  “Did you ever tell anyone you thought it was me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Didn’t the sheriff ask you who you thought might have done it?”

  “Yes, but I told him I thought it must’ve been some foreigner because there wasn’t any resemblance to anybody I’d ever seen.”

  “Why’d you tell him that?”

  “Why, to protect you, of course, you fool. See? That’s what I did for you, after you’d gone and threatened to kill me. And you would have killed me, wouldn’t you have?”

  “I still haven’t said it was me,” he said.

  “Then don’t say it! Keep it a secret to your grave! I don’t need you to say it, because I know it was you!”

  “Shhh, Latha. No call to shout. Somebody might hear.”

  Quietly and wearily she asked, “Why did you do it, Every?”

  “It wasn’t me, Latha, Not me, the me that I am. Not the me that I am now. I’m a Christian, and a good man. That job was pulled nearly twenty years ago by a mean young hellraiser.”

  “All right, why’d he do it then?”

  “Pure meanness. He hated Stay More. Those Ingledews had already run him out of town twice, hadn’t they? And after all he’d gone and done, getting in trouble with the Army and court-martialed, trying to rescue Raymond Ingledew from the Huns. And coming home to find his dad dead and finding out nobody’d even gone to the funeral. And finding the girl he’d loved all his life was still pining for Raymond that wasn’t ever coming back…”

  “And raping her.”

  “Yes, and ravishing her out of despair, and doing all kinds of mischief, and making all kinds of trouble, until the only mean thing left for him to do was take the bank’s money and—”

  “And go away forever.”

  “No. He never meant to do that. He meant to go down to Little Rock and buy an automobile and come back and get that girl.”

  “And why didn’t he?”

  “Because being a mean young hellraiser, you see, wouldn’t he just have to go and get himself into a gambling game down there in Little Rock and get himself drunker than a boiled owl and lose most of his money, and get in a fight, and get picked up by the police and handed back over to the Army to serve out the rest of his court-martial that he’d broken out of Leavenworth to go back home and ravish that girl and rob that bank, and be locked up for three more years before he could break out again and go back to Stay More once again long enough to find out that she herself was locked up down in the state hospital in Little Rock.”

  “She broke out too,” Latha said.

  “Does she remember how she broke out?” he asked.

  “No, she just woke up one morning and discovered that she wasn’t in the state hospital but in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee.”

  “That,” he announced, “was the same hotel room where that mean young hellraiser got converted into a faithful Christian.”

  SUB TWO: Twenty and Eighteen Years Ago

  For a while yet, Bug, I cannot permit you to discover what he meant by that. You will find out in time. And when you find out it will heal that scar tissue which you spoke of. But until then I cannot let you love him as you had when you were a child.

  He had been your first lover, we know that. His mother was a second cousin of your own mother, whose grandfather was the great-uncle of his mother, and when this old man lay dying in his home down at Demijohn, when you were only eleven and Every was twelve, you had been left at the Dill cabin one night when the grown-ups went down to Demijohn to set up with the dying man, and although you had been left in the bedroom of the cabin’s east wing, separated by the dog-trot from the west wing where he was to sleep, you crossed this separation out of loneliness and fear of the night and out of curiosity, and although he was shy and awkward, just as virginal as yourself, he was just as ripe as yourself, and the two of you tried. You tried long enough, and it worked.

  From th
en on he considered you his girl, and he planned to marry you as soon as the two of you came of age. But when your mother learned of your attachment to him, she talked you out of it. It took her a while, more than a while, but she did. The Dills, she thought (and said) were trash, even if Every’s mother was her own second cousin. Every, she thought (and said), would never amount to anything. She wanted you to marry an Ingledew. Presumptuous of her, that “social climbing”—upon a ladder with so few rungs, and those broken or cracked, that it was not fit for any ascension. The Ingledews were, by and large, wealthier than most people in Stay More, since John Ingledew owned the bank, and they were certainly wealthier than the Dills, who were quite poor indeed, but I have never been able to figure out why your mother sensed any sort of social or economic strata in a town where nobody had any great wealth to speak of.

  Still, Every was the closest thing to a beau you had for several years, although you had to keep it hidden from your mother. But when you started high school it was Raymond Ingledew who sat beside you on the school wagon into Jasper, you and he the only two graduates of the Stay More school to be sent into town for the last three grades. Every didn’t go; instead, like most others, he went to work. Now your mother really had a reason for rating Raymond over him.

  And Raymond was very good-looking, which Every had never been. But that itself was what was wrong. He was too much interested in girls to give all his attention to you. Like the fickle male lightning bug, he was all too ready to forget you whenever anybody else wearing a dress came into view. Even after he had asked you to marry him, and you had agreed, he still courted other girls. You pretended not to notice, but Every, who never gave up trying to get you back from Raymond, would make you notice; he would rub it in.

  One night when Raymond was away keeping company with Wanda Dinsmore, who everybody knew was a loose girl, you, in bitter retaliation, gave yourself to Every again, for the first time in years. When Raymond found out about this, his strict double standard tore him up. He and Every had a fist fight, which did not last very long. When Raymond picked himself up, he ran off to Jasper and enlisted in the Army. You blamed yourself more than you blamed Every, but still you would not let Every become your beau again, although he tried very hard—until Raymond’s brothers ganged up on him and told him he had better go and join the Army himself, or else.

  They were both gone nearly two years before you saw one of them again, and the one you saw again was not the one your heart had grown fonder over the absence of.

  He comes: the horse galloping madly, down the road from towards Parthenon; he jerks up on the reins and brings the horse to a stop, and is leaping down and hitching the reins to the post even before the horse can cease all its momentum. Then he takes all of the steps of the porch in one bound.

  You are in the first month of your new job at the bank and you are still not accustomed to John Ingledew’s habitual noontime parting, made with a grin, “Watch out for robbers”—you don’t know yet just how much he means it or not, and thus, alone in the bank, you are frightened at the dashing speed with which this man arrives.

  You do not know him at first. He struts boldly up to the counter, dressed in a soldier’s uniform with the red chevrons of a sergeant on his sleeves, and a broad and flat-brimmed doughboy hat cocked down over his eye. He thrusts the folded note at you. With trembling hands you take it and unfold it and read it.

  THIS IS A STICK-UP. FORGIT THE MUNNY, BUT HAND OVER YOURSELF. ALL OV IT. P.S. I LOVE YOU MOAR THEN ENYTHANG IN THE HOLE WIDE WURL.

  You look up, and he is grinning big at you, and you recognize the grin before you recognize the face: the old familiar, half bashful, half-mischievous expansion of the mouth with just a thin line of the white teeth showing. You are about to exclaim his name, but instead you wad up the note and fling it at him and say, “You gave me a bad skeer. I ought to get the sheriff on you.”

  He holds up his hands as if you were pointing a gun at him, and says, “Aw, please, Latha, the only crime I’ve done was borry a horse from a feller without him knowin it so’s I could come and see ye.”

  “Your’re looking right good,” you say. “How come you’re wearing that fancy uniform if you’re out of the service?”

  “I ain’t out yet,” he says. “Matter of fact, I aint even on a proper furlough, but I was gittin to where I was gonna kill me a couple of majors or colonels, ’less I could come and see you.”

  “How’d you know I was working in the bank?”

  “Mandy tole me.”

  “Where’d you see Mandy?”

  “Well, my train ended up in Little Rock, and this buddy in my outfit was a cousin of Vaughn’s and he’d given me their address, so I figgered I’d just drop by and ask her how-all you was doing.”

  “You tell her you were coming up here?”

  “I did.”

  “What’d she say?”

  He laughs. “Said she aimed to write Tull or Bevis and warn em I was a-comin. I aint skeered a them, though. I’d walk through hell barefoot and blindfolded to see you.”

  You do not smile. “I tole you last letter I sent you,” you say, “that you better just put me out of your mind.”

  “Yeah, you did, but that was before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Before Raymond was listed missing.”

  “I don’t care,” you say. “He’s just missing, and he’ll find his way out of there one day…unless…unless, and this wouldn’t surprise me a bit, unless you killed him yourself and hid his body somewheres.”

  “Latha,” he asks, “when do you git off work? I got to talk to you.”

  “Four o’clock, but I won’t see you then.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t want to see you. Can’t you get that through your big dumb head?”

  “My head may be big, but it aint so dumb. It knows a few things that might be of interest to your ears.”

  “If you have something to say, then say it.”

  “Not here. Standing up like this. We got to sit down someplace private.”

  “I don’t want to be anyplace private with you.”

  “Latha, why do you hate me so?”

  “I don’t hate you. I just don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  “All right,” he says severely. “I’m going up to visit with Mom and Dad for a little spell. Then I’ll come and talk to you. Then I’ll go.” He turns on his heel, a soldierly about-face, and marches out.

  At four o’clock, Mr. Ingledew closes the bank, and you walk with him down to his brother Willis’s post office and store, but you do not tell him that Every is back in town. It is for nothing that you withhold this information, for as soon as you arrive at the post office, Willis says to his brother, but glancing at you, “John, Tull says he got word Every Dill’s coming back to town.”

  “No!” John Ingledew says. “Where’d he hear that?”

  “A certain gal wrote him and told him she’d heard it from Every hisself.”

  Mr. Ingledew looks at you. “Just let us know,” he says to you.

  You decide not to keep it. “He’s back, all right,” you say. “He came in the bank at noontime while you were out.”

  “No,” says Mr. Ingledew.

  “Aint he got a nerve, though?” says Willis Ingledew.

  “What’d he do? What’d he say to you?” Mr. Ingledew asks.

  “I reckon he’s still after me,” you tell him.

  “That bodacious rasper!” says Willis. “He wouldn’t dast!”

  “What’d you tell him, girl?” Mr. Ingledew asks.

  “Told him he was wasting his time,” you say.

  “Where’s he now?” Mr. Ingledew asks.

  “Said he was going up to visit his folks.”

  “Come on, Willis!” he says to his brother. “Where’s the boys?”

  “I don’t know. Over to the mill, maybe.”

  “Never mind em, then. Me’n you’s enough.”

  “Lola!” Willis ho
llers. “Mind the store, I got to go out.”

  They stalk off up the road at a brisk pace, and after a moment you follow. You are going that way anyway; it is necessary to pass the Dill place to reach your own house. But that alone is not why you are following. There is an imp of perversity in you, Bug, that makes you want to witness the confrontation between these two angry men and Every. Well, you say, justifying it to yourself, if I can’t make him go away and leave me alone, then somebody else has got to do it for me.

  The Dill place is a wattle-and-daub log cabin of two rooms connected by a dogtrot, set back up on the hill a short way from the small clapboard shop on the road where William Dill makes and repairs wagons. The cabin is nearly choked up by a lush growth of vines and trees surrounding it. The two men pause at the shop and, finding no one there, head on up toward the house. You leave the road and cut through the woods, to eavesdrop from the side of the house without being seen.

  Old Billy Dill and his ugly wife and son are sitting together in the dogtrot.

  Mr. Ingledew addresses them. “Howdy.”

  “Howdy, John. Howdy, Willis,” Billy Dill says. “What brings y’all way up to my digs?”

  “Him,” Mr. Ingledew says. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Wal,” Billy says, “I caint see none too good ’thout my specs, but looks to me lak he’s jest lollygaggin thar and airin his heels.”

  “Don’t ye trifle with us, Billy,” Willis Ingledew says. “Whut’d he come back to Stay More fer?”

  “Damn ’f I know, really now,” Billy says. “Reckon maybe the durn idjit got some fool notion ter drap in and see if his ole folks was still above ground.”

  “I got a powerful hunch,” says Willis, “that his ole folks aint the main party he’s interested in. I got a idee he’s maybe sniffin around after a sartin gal, and me’n John is wonderin if he aint complete disremembered that that gal belongs to John’s boy.”