Butterfly Sunday by David Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

swing in the early afternoon sun. It was chilly now. The blanket was too thin to do much good and the mist was slowly turning into a rain that the weatherman said would fall hard and steady through the night. The air was like a cold stew.

    It had been nine weeks since the thirteenth of January, the night she had lost the baby. Across the roadthrough a blur of shriveled bramble she could see her gray tombstone near the edge of the cemetery. Earlier she had heard a car and voices from the far end near the church. It was kids, know-it-all teenagers getting themselves stuck up for life.

    Several times now Averill had run across their refuse—beer bottles and what the holy hypocrite referred to in a subsequent sermon as “life-preventing apparatus”—designed for adulterers. It might stun his flock to know that Brother Saintly had an old boot in the bottom of his closet where he kept a secret trove of those very same evil implements. Furthermore, their sanctified shepherd had never employed a single one of them in any intimate activity involving his wife. So when Averill pronounced the condom an implement of adulterous facilitation, he had it on good authority.

    Not that she felt one way or the other about it—or anything else at the time. Losing her baby had subverted all her feelings under a heavy pall of empty despair inside of her that seemed to reflect the heavy gray winter skies and bare trees outside her window. She had a vague sense that spring might stir her to some plan or forward action. In fact, moving from the living room to the porch swing earlier had been a near monumental triumph over lack of will.

    By then Leona was well into her “awareness,” as she called it. By then she knew her marriage was an irreparable disaster. She was not only accustomed to Averill’s absences, but she preferred them to his company. She knew he had women—or a woman—whichever. That was fine. It spared her any obligation to avail herself to him as a wife.

    In the first few weeks of their life as man and wife, Leona had gone to some lengths to arouse and satisfyhim. At first Averill’s eager facility for pleasing her gave her a fragile hope for their future together. However, it didn’t last long. Willingness and effort had ephemeral power at best in the bedroom. He had an intensity she didn’t know how to return, and it grew increasingly difficult to substitute gratitude for desire.

    Maybe it was because she was almost six months pregnant by then and her swollen shape reminded him that she was carrying another man’s child. Whatever the reason, Averill hadn’t touched her since their fourth week of marriage. Though she knew she didn’t really want him and she doubted that he wanted her. As the weeks passed, they made less and less formal pretense. Averill drifted into his solitary routine, using the house as a place to sleep and change clothes while using her in Sunday public as a prop—his beloved wife and soon-to-be mother of his longed-for child.

    She had a head filled with questions about her own future as well as that of her unborn child. If it came as predicted by mid-January, then it would be six months old by midsummer. Sooner than that, it would be too fragile, and soon after that time, it would grow too difficult to carry while she made the two of them a life. Strange, she had never discussed it with Averill, but she knew he wouldn’t mind her going. She was so blinded by her desire to leave, she never noticed how little sense the entire situation made.

    Even now, Leona still couldn’t pretend she understood why Averill had married her. If she had looked more closely from the beginning, if she had examined the incongruous signals from the start, she might have seen what was coming and gotten herself out in time.Leaving out all the hell of it, giving his philandering some legitimate impulse of certain otherwise well-intended men, she couldn’t find the logic anywhere. Why would a man marry an almost