Butterfly Sunday by David Hill Page A

without a trace. Blue had no idea Lucy was carrying on with the surgeon and no expectation whatsoever of finding himself in an empty house with nothing but the clothes on his back.

    According to Soames, Blue had worshipped the ground beneath Lucy’s feet. They said the poor man was close to suicide. Leona had taken all that with a grain of salt. She didn’t join Soames in condemning Lucy as a double-fanged harlot—not right off like that. Women were always ready to think the worst of other women—especially one who had broken out of local ranks and gone off into the wider world. Besides, Lucy was an exquisitely beautiful woman, one who could throw a moth-eaten cotton sack over her shoulder and make it look like a silk stole.

    She had never looked comfortable on an old pine pew in a country church. Leona had also observed that she didn’t look right sitting next to a sunburnt kid of a husband. Of course, Leona saw their initial attraction. In his own way Blue was as pretty as his wife. It wasn’thard to imagine them a couple years back, two starry-eyed teens joined at the hip. Yet it struck Leona from her vantage in the choir loft that Lucy had a worldly enervation, a look on her face that told you she had peered up the road ahead. There was none of that anywhere on Blue. He looked like any other kid who was content with the things he could get being cute and always on the lookout for some fun. Thinking back on it, Leona realized that Lucy had already begun to look and act like a surgeon’s wife.

    Soames knew all the details. Lucy had come from lower, less educated and looser origins than Blue. They had begun their marriage as teenagers with a baby coming. Typical country kids, they’d been high school sweethearts. It was easy to imagine that they had been the prettiest couple in high school. There was nothing effeminate in Blue’s manner, and his attraction to the opposite sex was almost comically obvious. All the same, inch for square inch, Leona would have had a devil of a time deciding who was more beautiful. She could just see them at seventeen, stuck on each other like sweat bees on a raspberry jam cake.

    About once a month Lucy and Blue brought their little handicapped daughter to church services. She lived at the Home for Incurables in Memphis. No one knew what was wrong with the child, not precisely, only that she had severe birth defects. She was terribly misshapen and virtually paralyzed. She couldn’t talk and she had limited mental faculties. Blue always held her on his lap, stroking her baby fine platinum hair and wiping her mouth with a handkerchief. Now and then he’d whisper something in her ear that always drew a little half smile and a sigh from the pitiful thing.

    Lucy always sat straight-backed and solemn with theother two normal kids on her far side. If she moved at all, it was to warn them into behaving themselves with an upraised finger or a meaningful glare. She never had much to say afterward in the churchyard. She was a tight-lipped woman who rubbed her forehead and looked over your shoulder when she was talking to you. Leona never made much of that. Not with Lucy’s wretched freak of nature looking up at the world from her canvas stroller. People had no call to judge the poor woman harshly.

    Yet they took it upon themselves to disapprove of the fact that she had placed her daughter in an institution. So when Lucy left Blue, her Christian neighbors demonized her immediately. They had a tremendous love for plucking out eyes and rotten apples, a passion for a sacrificial woman at the well. Of course, she was gone and doubtless impervious to the fact that she was being crucified on the cross of respectable opinion.

    Leona wasn’t devoted to Lucy. She was hardly ready to take up the woman’s cause. She had barely known her. All the same, she had to admire any woman from this backwater who could unshackle herself from a husband and a badly misformed child and land herself in five