Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“I remember him all right. Where’d he go?”

“Oh, he’s doing just fine. He got out of teaching, and he’s up in St. Pete in some kind of scientific company he’s a partner in. He was a science teacher in the high school. Now, if a person had to find out more about Miz Rowell, I guess that would be where he’d have to go. Why you so interested in her, boy?”

“Oh, Borklund wants to run a series of features on Palm County characters. He made up a list. I’m starting with the tough ones. She won’t talk about herself. You’re on the list too.”

“Who else is on it?”

“You just wait and read the paper.”

“Maybe she won’t talk because she’s hiding something.”

“If I find that out, I’ll have to take her off the list.”

“Look how red that sun is going down, will you? Maybe we’ll get to make a wish.”

“You mean a flash of green? That’s tourist talk, Aunt Middy.”

“I seen it once, boy.”

“You what?”

“Now, don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you a true thing, boy. I’ll even tell you the year. Eighteen and ninety-eight, and I was a twenty-one-year-old girl, feeling older than I do right this minute. My daddy brought us kids on down to this piece of wild coast when I was ten. We were Foleys, you know, and that’s how the crick got named. We put up the homestead on a knoll just a quarter mile south of where we’re setting. But I told you all that before, how I lost a brother to the fever and a sister to a cotton-mouth snake. So I was twenty-one, married since fifteen to Josh Britt, and he’s dead now since nineteen and twenty-two, May ninth, hard to believe it’s so long. It was an August evening, and we were in the fever time again, when folks died. I had only two young then. I’d had three and lost the first to fever the year before. There wasn’t fifty of us in the whole settlement. Josh’s brother was down sick, and he was the one worked the boat with Josh. I had to leave my two with my sister and help Josh on the boat. We were food-fishing that day. My two were both fevered, and I was sick in my heart with worry, wondering if I was put on earth just to carry my young and watch them burn with the fever and die. I was two month along with my fourth, and I did a man’s work that day, helping pole that heavy old skiff and help Josh work the net until my back was broke in half and my hands like raw meat. We were poling back along the shore, coming home with less fish than was needed, and we could see the sun going down red like that, right out through Turk’s Pass. I was as low down in my spirits as a woman can get, and the night bugs were beginning to gather like a cloud around us. We rested from poling to brush away the bugs, and we watched that last crumb of sun go, and the whole west sky lit up with terrible great sheets of the brightest green you ever could see. ‘Make a wish!’ Josh yelled at me from the stern of the skiff. I wished, all right. There couldn’t ever be enough green for the wishes I had, boy. It didn’t last over ten or fifteen seconds. It was dark when we moored the skiff. The fever had eased for my young ones. Life worked better for me from then on, somehow. I raised six young out of twelve, four still living, and that was better than most in that time and place. I’ve seen children die and men killed and women broke, but I never got so low again in all my life as that one day on the net. So don’t say it’s tourist talk, Jimmy. I prayed to God my whole life, and in fairness I got to credit Him with doing good by me. But a flash of green is something you see. We didn’t see one tonight. You act like you need one, Jimmy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t set easy. You set like you got a knotted belly. You’re a man thinking of yourself too much and not liking it much. I had one son like that. He lived a mean small life because he wouldn’t do what I told him.”

“What did you tell him, Aunt Middy?”

“I kept telling him until he was past forty to go find himself a healthy young girl and get as many young off her as she was able to bring into the world.”

“I’m married.”

“To what? A sorry piece of flesh that’ll never know you again in this world, that they keep breathing just to prove they can do it when it would be God’s mercy to let her go. Any lawyer would know what to do about crossing that kind of marriage off the legal books. But it pleasures you more to go around acting tragical.”

He shook his head. “How can you sit on this porch and know everything about everybody?”

“People stop by and set and talk about things. You want a good young wife? You couldn’t get her right off, but in six months she’d be ready. Judy Barnsong, down to Everset, widow of Claude that just got hisself killed without a dime of insurance money. She’s twenty-three and got three young, bright as buttons. She’s pretty and healthy and even-tempered, and built good for having babies. She’s a good cook and she keeps a clean house. She’s got three years of high school, and she’d make you a proud wife, if you got sense enough to go after her.”

“Aunt Middy, you are an astonishing woman.”

“There’s been fine marriages arranged right here on this porch. You think about Judy Barnsong. You go sneak a look at her. She’s a worker and she’ll keep her looks. A ready-made family with more to come will keep you out of devilment.”

“What do you mean?”

“A man snaps at an old lady that way over a little thing like I said has got a bad conscience. You doing something you shouldn’t be doing, boy?”

“I drink and smoke and stay out late.”

“Never knew a whole man who didn’t. It’s in the breed.”

He stood up to go and said, “What do you think about them filling up the bay?”

“I’m eighty-four years old, and I’ve been watching the bay of an evening for seventy-four years. I’m not tired of looking at it. I just don’t know how I’ll be at looking at houses. I’ve got the feeling they won’t hold my interest.”

He went down off the porch, walking slowly to his car. A bay boat was at the old fishhouse dock, and two men were shoveling mullet into hampers to carry them up to the fishhouse scales. The fish seemed to catch the silvery dusk light and gleam more brightly than anything else in the scene. The old coquina-rock smokehouse was in operation, and there was a drift of burning oak in the evening air, flavored with the slight pungency of the barbecue sauce which had been rubbed into the white meat of the hanging fish. Somewhere nearby a girl laughed and a saw whined through a board.

Blessings on you, Mrs. Judy Barnsong, he thought. On your tidy house and fertile hips. I saw a little bit of what that marine engine did to your Claude when it slid forward into the front seat of the panel truck, and it was not anything I cared to look more closely at. But it left the face unimpaired, so you may safely have a viewing of the body. You’ll never know how a dry and dreary man considered you almost seriously for half of one moment. Perhaps you would have said yes quite readily, because you sound like a person who would sense the kind of need I have. But the lust is for a more complex widow, and it is a little past the time when I could have escaped gently into you, into your tidy house, amid your busy button-bright children, to mist your memories of Claude and cushion my awareness of many dark things.

As he drove slowly toward town he remembered the sailor. Gloria had been missing for five days. They’d found her at that motel in Clewiston. They stopped the sailor as he was walking back there with a sack of hamburgs and a bottle of bourbon. The three of them had talked to the sailor out under the bright driveway lights. He was young, and at first he was defiant. He did not know how to handle being confronted by a deputy, a doctor and a husband. He thought it was some kind of a raid.