Man in the Blue Moon Read online

  Both boys shook their heads at the same time. There were seven years between them, yet Macon looked more like he was three instead of six. The virus that wouldn’t let go had caused him to seemingly shrink until there were nights when Ella dreamed that she walked into his room and found nothing more than a son the size of an acorn.

  In desperation, Ella had even used some of the mortgage money to hire an internist from Panama City to make a house visit. The doctor had arrived with a medical bag made of cowhide. When he set the bag on the edge of the bed, Ella noticed that it was ripped in the corner, revealing discolored cardboard. The doctor spread his tools across the nightstand next to Macon’s bed and anointed Ella’s oldest son, Samuel, his assistant. “I take it you’re the man around the place now that your daddy has run off from the henhouse,” the doctor said without looking at Ella. Samuel rubbed the sparse goatee that he was trying to grow on his sixteen-year-old chin and nodded. When Keaton stepped forward to get a closer look at the scratched silver tools on the nightstand, Samuel jerked his brother away and shoved him back toward the spot where Ella stood at the bedroom door. While the doctor prodded and poked Macon, he rambled on about a weakened constitution caused from parasites.

  “You know how boys this age can be. He’ll eat the dirt and anything that’s in it,” the doctor had said. “A virus in the chicken pox family,” he declared. “He’s still puny because the illness is aggravated by his asthma. He’ll be back to running around in no time.” Ella followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter, preparing coffee so thick that it looked like mud. She mixed in the powder that the man had magically pulled from his bag. Macon gagged and vomited when she fed it to him. By the fifth day, she had heeded Macon’s plea to stop making him sicker.

  “Well,” Ella said as she sat on the side of Macon’s bed. “What if I get you some candy? Not that cheap candy from our store . . . genuine salt water taffy from the dock.” She watched her ailing son’s eyes light up. He loved the taffy that came straight from the boats that docked in the bay at Apalachicola. Back when times were better, he’d gone with his father to town every chance he had.

  “We’re going to town today?” Keaton, the middle son, asked. There was a stitch of hair above his lip. It was a constant reminder to Ella that he was a boy trapped inside a body that was becoming a man.

  “I’ve decided to go ahead and pick up that shipment from the clock company.”

  Keaton jumped up from the wooden chair and shuffled his feet in a playful way that made Macon laugh and then grimace in pain. Before Ella could touch Macon’s forehead again, her youngest son sighed, expressing the frustration they all felt toward the illness that not even Narsissa with her herbs and chants could eradicate.

  “Where has Samuel run off to now?” Ella asked. Since the day the doctor had prescribed him the role of head of the household, Samuel had taken the responsibility with a seriousness that at first made Ella proud. Now his arrogance was irritating. It was, she realized, the same overconfidence that had first attracted her to his father.

  “Samuel is still out squirrel hunting,” Keaton said. His eyes were green like her father’s had been. Of the three boys, Keaton was the one who felt most like hers, seemingly untainted by the troubled blood of her husband.

  “Please get him. Ask him to hitch the wagon. And ask Narsissa to come inside. She can stay with Macon until we get back from town.”

  Inside her bedroom, Ella looked into the spider-veined mirror above her dresser. Pulling her hair into a twist against the nape of her neck, she snatched out a gray strand. She put on the earrings Narsissa had made for her out of baby mockingbird feathers and oyster shells. Fingering the dangling earrings, she felt that by wearing them she somehow paid homage to the young woman she used to be. That young woman, who had been sent to attend finishing school in Apalachicola by the aunt with dreams, had become nothing more than a mist that sprinkled her memories. For some odd reason, Ella could still recite bits and pieces of a poem from English class. A verse about the eyes being the mirror to the soul. Pulling back the skin around her forehead and causing the wrinkles to momentarily disappear, Ella studied her eyes. There was dullness now that resembled the marbles her sons played with in the dirt. She snatched up a doily that her aunt had knit years ago and flung it over the mirror.

  After she had dressed in the last gift her husband had given her, a dropped-waist lilac-colored dress shipped from Atlanta, Ella kissed Macon on the forehead and tried not to look at the open sores lining his swollen lips. Narsissa sat in the chair next to the bed. She had brought the butter churn inside and with a steady rhythm pumped the wooden handle.

  As Ella rose up from kissing her son, loose ends of Narsissa’s hair tickled her arm. Narsissa leaned close and whispered in that graveled voice that always made Ella think she was part man, “Don’t pay that steamboat company one cent until you see what you are getting because—”

  “Narsissa, please don’t.” Ella pulled away and straightened the top of her dress. “Don’t patronize. Not today.”

  Narsissa leaned back in the chair and made a mulish huffing sound. She flung her coarse braid and continued churning the butter.

  “When I come back, I’ll have that taffy for you, and a surprise,” Ella told Macon. “I’ll have a surprise waiting.”

  Macon tried to smile, but his chin quivered. Kissing her finger, Ella pointed at her son and then kissed it once more and pointed at Narsissa, who pretended not to notice.

  Outside, Samuel was squinting as he jerked the halter on the draft mule and led the wagon closer to the back of the store. Ella saw her oldest son watching her, studying her through the gaps in the tall sunflowers she had planted years ago for beauty as much as for a border between their family life and the life meant for income.

  “Mama, can I go to the picture show?” Keaton asked as he climbed into the back of the wagon.

  “We’ll see.”

  Samuel climbed up on the wagon, and Ella felt his leg brush against hers. At least he didn’t pull away. Keaton leaned in from behind and jabbed Samuel. “Clayton Carson says there’s one playing about a preacher . . . I mean a priest. See, he protects these people over there in the war. The people over in France. He protects them from the Germans.”

  Samuel shrugged Keaton away. “We won’t have time to go to no picture. We need to just get this package that we’re probably paying too much money for and get back to the store.”

  “You’re beginning to sound as crotchety as Narsissa,” Ella said.

  “As it is, we’re missing out on the busiest time of the day.” Samuel popped the reins, and the mule bobbed his head.

  “Need I remind you, the letter said that the package was paid in full? If we have to pay the freight, so be it,” Ella said, trying to convince herself as much as Samuel. “And another thing . . . we work at that store six days a week from sunup to sundown. It won’t kill anybody to have an afternoon off.”

  “The Cross Bearer—that’s the name of the picture. The Cross Bearer,” Keaton said.

  The rocking motion of the wagon seemed to pacify everyone but Ella. She kept toying at her wedding ring, flicking it around her finger until it threatened to rub the skin raw. Her thoughts and fears alternated back and forth between her son’s disease and her husband’s desertion. No one spoke for the remainder of the thirty-five-minute ride to Apalachicola.

  Along the way they passed the few buildings that made up the Dead Lakes community. A church with a weathered cemetery and a schoolhouse that rested on cinder blocks marked the official spot where Dead Lakes was noted on the Florida map. The store, like Ella herself, was distant from the center of the village. Ella enjoyed the wide porch that swept around the side of her clapboard house and the acreage of timber that obstructed her view from neighbors on either side. There were the occasional visitors to the aquifer spring that the Creek Indians vowed had healing properties. Sometimes during summer evenings when Ella sat on the porch rocking in the chair that Harlan had ordered for her special from North Carolina, she could hear muffled voices and splashing water from the hidden pool. Even Harlan had heeded Narsissa’s warning that calamity would fall on his family if he barred access to those he deemed superstitious fools.

  Although Ella had privacy on either side of her, the front of her house was clearly visible to the neighbors who lived across the road. When times were good and her worries fewer, Ella used to pity her neighbors for their lack of privacy. Their houses were built so close to one another that Mrs. Pomeroy, the doughy-cheeked woman who lived with her middle-aged husband in the house with the red door, routinely came into the store complaining about the eavesdropping Myer Simpson, who lived with the reverend in the parsonage next door.

  When the wagon passed the gray-shingled house that belonged to the woman who had once been Ella’s confidante at finishing school, the mule bowed his head and chewed harder at the bit. Neva Clarkson was now the teacher in Dead Lakes. Washtubs filled with pansies covered the front lawn. Neva had been Ella’s best friend until Harlan redirected his affections from Neva to Ella. Behind her back, the townspeople called Neva a certified old maid. There was a time when Ella had felt sorry for Neva. Now she envied her. A chill snaked down Ella’s system and settled so deep that not even the spring sun could thaw it.

  They made their way around the low-lying lakes and cypress trees draped in Spanish moss and headed toward the red clay fields, plowed and ready for planting. An island of trees and kudzu sat in the middle of the beekeeper’s farm. Ella shaded her eyes and looked out at the land, wondering if Harlan had taken refuge in a place like this and was weaning himself off the opium. Maybe he had been hired on as a laborer at such a property and would come to his right mind when the poison cleared his system.

  Har
lan might have surrendered himself to the powdered substance, but Ella had not. Her emotions tilted back and forth between anger, despondency, and love for her husband. The only thing she knew for certain was that a part of her felt sorted through and broken, just like the field they passed.

  The mule’s hooves kept an uneven pace against the clay-dirt road. The wagon rocked and chains rattled. A hush settled over Ella and her sons.

  Ella clasped her hands and pictured her husband passed out on a red velvet sofa stained with human liquids in one of the Chicago opium dens she read about in the newspaper.

  Keaton leaned against the backboard of the wagon and pictured a dramatic priest pulling a sword from beneath his robe and defending people in a land unknown to him before the war.

  Samuel gripped the reins tighter and pictured their store windows covered with plywood, a foreclosure notice dangling from the front door.

  But none of them could fully picture the box with the logo of the Blue Moon Clock Company that awaited them or the ways in which opening that crate would forever change the direction of their lives.

  2

  As they approached Apalachicola, the county seat, salt air tickled Ella’s senses and caused her to canonize the past, the same way it did every time she came upon the white pine Episcopal church at the edge of the city limits. Tucked alongside a bay on the Florida panhandle, the town marked the spot where the Apalachicola River emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. One of the largest export centers of cotton before the Civil War, the city of two thousand now drowsed in a state of neither sleep nor vigor. Empty lots tangled in overgrown weeds, sandspurs, and vines were lingering imprints of a fire that had ravaged the city eighteen years before. The cavities competed with the surviving Georgian structures that still beckoned for the days when the French government housed a consulate in a brick building overlooking a saw-grass island in the bay. Wide streets edged the bay where pieces of cotton once sprinkled the banks like fresh snow. Now there were only four warehouses that guarded the waters. They stood like oversized mausoleums with sun-bleached walls bearing the faintest of letters that spelled out the names of cotton brokers from long ago. Oyster shells piled high as sand dunes filled the vacant spaces.

  Women of color, dressed all in white, sat on the porches of the Victorian homes the wagon passed. The women fanned, gossiped, and guarded the children in their hired care. A trio of white men in black bowler hats glided across the sidewalk in front of the J. E. Grady hardware store.

  Ella took it all in and longed for the days when she lived in the dormitory at Miss Wayne’s School for Women. An automobile blared its horn, and she flinched. Ella turned and watched as the car rattled and then gained traction past their wagon. At the corner, massive oak trees lined the park where she had first met her husband at a town dance. Harlan’s black mustache had glimmered underneath the gas lanterns that hung from bamboo poles that night.

  Two weeks after the dance, Ella became intoxicated by Harlan’s ability to fan money across the table to pay for oysters and French champagne. Childhood promises made to her father and the cautions of Aunt Katherine, the spinster who had raised her, became nothing more than nuisances that competed with her infatuation. Before she knew it, she had caused her aunt to take to the sickbed when she decided to marry Harlan and cancel her plans to attend art school.

  Two children later, she was living in a home next to a store that she was forced to manage. By the time there was a third son to care for, Harlan had shaved his mustache and was sipping whiskey, first only at night and then every morning, to help soothe the back pain caused when a filly he had tried to break threw him against the side of a fence.

  Harlan knocked the drinking problem and the back pain thanks to a doctor’s suggestion that he take opium. “Miracle worker,” he declared, and gave the doctor a gold-tipped walking stick. Within three weeks, Harlan began ordering mass quantities of the miracle drug, and within four months he no longer pretended to function. He sat shirtless on the steps of the store, spat tobacco at the cat, and watched the crossroads community of Dead Lakes, Florida, pass him by. Then, a month before Easter, when the air was still cool, he slipped away with the fog of early dawn. If not for his debts and the sons he left behind, a visitor would never have guessed that he had ever really existed.

  When their wagon passed the brick building with the words Gillespie Savings and Loan above the archway, Ella felt a knot tie her stomach. She wondered how many times she had passed the brick building as a young girl in town, never once guessing that one day she would be groveling for her future with a man who pasted thinning hair to his scalp.

  “Mama, can we get cherry lemonades?” Keaton asked as Samuel tied the wagon to the post in front of the drugstore. A little girl in a pink linen dress stood on the sidewalk and looked up at them before a woman put her arm around the little girl and shepherded her away.

  “We’re broke. Flat broke,” Samuel said between locked teeth. “What is it about that that you don’t understand, Keaton?”

  Ella pulled Samuel away from Keaton and handed the younger boy two coins.

  “Mama,” Samuel protested.

  “There’s money enough for you, too,” Ella said. “I’ll be in to get you directly.”

  Samuel stood in the doorway of the pharmacy and looked at Ella and then at the savings and loan building across the street. A man wearing suspenders with one brace broken and dangling at his protruding belly shuffled around him and slipped inside the pharmacy. Ella waved to her son, turned her back so he couldn’t see the anxiety she knew she wore on her face, and walked across the street. Unlike her husband, she never had a poker face.

  Clive Gillespie was leaning against the marble counter of the teller station when Ella walked into his bank. A white-and-red framed print with a sketch of a freckle-faced boy holding a dollar hung on the wall behind the teller: Raise Your Children Right. Teach Your Son to Save. Clive glanced her way before finishing with the teller.

  Never formally acknowledging Ella, he motioned for her to follow him inside an office with a frosted glass door. Blades from a wicker ceiling fan sliced the thick air. The edges of a newspaper on his desk lifted with the breeze.

  He tossed a pad onto his desk. “Ella, have you come to your senses and banished that deadbeat husband’s mistakes by letting me buy your land?”

  “Good afternoon to you too, Mr. Gillespie.”

  “Good afternoon.” Clive sighed and massaged his chin. Scars from youthful acne still lined his middle-aged face. “I hate that we’ve come to this. I really hate it.”

  “Hate is such a strong word.”

  He fingered the handle of the adding machine that sat on his desk. “I’m sure you didn’t travel all this way to town just to talk semantics with me.”

  Ella pulled an envelope from her purse and slid it across his desk. “I was hoping to leave this out front with the teller. But there you were, and so . . .”

  He flipped open the envelope and smiled at her in a way that made her shift her weight in the chair. “Ella . . .”

  “See, I have this delivery I’m picking up today, and when I sell it I will . . .”

  He sighed again but in a way that caused Ella to think that maybe he really did have sympathy for her cause. “This is not even a quarter of the month’s payment.”

  “It’s coming. Really. Summer is right around the corner, and there will be a crop.”

  “If I recall, the crop last summer was supposed to come in too, but it didn’t. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s when your husband lost his automobile.”

  Ella leaned forward and touched the edge of Clive’s polished desk. “That was . . .” She fingered the desk like she might have been inspecting it for dust and then leaned back against the chair. No matter how challenging life with Harlan might have been, Ella never talked about her marital troubles in public. It was not becoming.

  Clive sighed once more. When he shifted his weight, the springs in his chair creaked. “We both know who got you into this mess, precious. Now I want to help you, but I’m beginning to get offended. You don’t seem to want my help.”