Butterfly Sunday by David Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

only time and place, but also all things real or imagined, including death itself.

    Now it was all pure and exquisitely simple. Now the intuitive course she had taken became something inevitable. All that had ever been would always be—including her slain infant and her all-consuming will to nurture its eternal essence with detailed public acknowledgment of her avenging deed.

    The argument inside the house was still building. Three outraged voices preached three hissing and popping sermons in a simultaneous din. It was one of those watershed wailing contests people stage when their general fury at life overwhelms them. They were lost in their own little riot. Leona had shifted her position toward the back of the yard, such as it was, in order to turn down their volume a few notches.

    She felt better than she had in several days now. She didn’t even suffer that gnawing need to have it done. It was already done. Her duties were all but finished. She steadied herself in the knowledge that so little could go wrong now. All those hundreds of frenzied “what ifs” had faded away.

    The only part she kept stumbling over was Blue. Why try to fight that? Didn’t the sadness pressing down on her deserve its due? Wasn’t he a real loss? Didn’t this all-consuming ache honor him by its degree? What was the point in pretending it could be any other way? What was the harm now in looking back? It wasn’t going to stop anything. It couldn’t interfere with things that had already been accomplished.

    How could she stop remembering it? She would never stop loving him. She even allowed a guilty gratitude for the fact that he still loved her. She was sorry that it gave him so much pain. Yet she knew it wouldn’tkill him. He was strong and young and overflowing with all kinds of passions. He’d love someone else before too long. She had to believe that. She never would have found the strength to reject him if she hadn’t known it in her heart. It kept her from hating herself. (Though the truth was, it also broke her heart.)

    If she had to sum up Blue Hudson in a word, that word was “kindness.” Not that he’d agree or consider that a compliment. He’d much rather be regarded as strong and maybe honest. He was those things too. He took enormous pride in his physical stamina and he worked almost obsessively to maintain it. He walked and talked like a hard-shell redneck—unless you actually listened to him, which most people didn’t. And maybe he didn’t want them to. He carried himself in an almost menacing manner. There was a tension about him that seemed eternally about to explode.

    It was all left over from some kid he had long since determined he didn’t want to be. No, the one-word description was “kindness,” whether he liked it or not. What made Leona melt into his arms for the first time wasn’t his powerful good looks. Experience had long since taught her the folly in that. It was the fact that Blue seemed to know his own strength. He also knew in some essential way that its purpose wasn’t self-protection or physical supremacy. Strength was given to some so that they could use it on behalf of those who were weaker than they were.

    He’d never said that. He would have made fun of Leona if she had. Yet it was second nature to him. When she was with Blue she was safe. Funny, she had no idea he was any of those things the first time she found herself alone with him. In fact, at first, she smiled to recall, she had actually wished Averill would come home.

4

    WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 1999

    4:19 P.M.

    Saint Patrick’s Day always fell in that mystical week of March when a sudden blur of little red and purple leaves floated on the wet black limbs rising out of the mist. Overnight the dry yellow stubble in the yard was neon green and the jagged forsythia bushes beside the driveway atoned for five months of gnarled ugliness with a gossamer burst of sunshine yellow.

    She had dragged herself out to sit on the porch