Butterfly Sunday (4 page)

Averill sounded foggy to her. Was that the arsenic already? It was supposed to take several hours. He wasn’t supposed to shake or bend with cramps or palpitate or any of that until late this afternoon when the crowd was gone and no one but the wind would hear him beg for a doctor. Audena and Winky sure as hell weren’t supposed to be here!

Logic and math were called for. She couldn’t let herself slip into paranoid suppositions. There was nothing to worry about. She had read the directions and precautions, hadn’t she? Yet try as she would to reason with herself, she couldn’t exorcise the image of Averill falling stone dead from his pulpit in front of the congregation. Now, thank you very much, he would go stiff at his sister’s feet. Oh, yes, Audena had to waddle down to the front with a half-inch run in her stocking and plop her double-wide behind down on the front pew right under the pulpit. Audena was going to have it known that her brother was the preacher.

No question, Leona would have to feed them dinner—today of all nine hundred ninety-nine million billion days in creation. Though, first and most crucial at this moment, Leona had to sit there and make like a born-again hussy at the well in her crimson choir robe. She had to play like she had three-fourths of her eyes and ears fixed on Averill’s message while the remaining quarter of her being telegraphed complete delight at the arrival of her in-laws.

All of which was an act to rival Houdini’s. Well, those were life’s terms today. She was going to take
it minute by minute. No one was going to suspect a thing if she could possibly help it. No one would have the remotest hint of a sign that this was going to be Averill Sayres’s last sermon. Nobody would have the legitimate right to claim later that they had seen it coming all along.

Averill was just warming up his sermon, ten thousand feet and climbing. It was already hot in the church and the recently varnished floor and pews had begun to emit fumes. What’s more, it was packed, which didn’t do anything for the air supply. Averill was talking against all that, trying to wake the crowd from their stupor.

It had thrown him completely off track to see his sister and brother-in-law. Obviously, he too considered it portentous. In fact, he got so addled he lost his place and had to extemporize from his favorite, fail-safe, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” homily. It was several minutes before he regained his next point and went on with “Why Did Jesus Go to Jerusalem?” It was one of those self-righteous topics that made Leona want to stand up and shout, “He went to Jerusalem because the highway to Memphis was closed due to a freak ice storm.”

Averill took self-righteous to the fourth dimension.

Everyone in the place kept sneaking glances at Audena and Winky. Leona had only just met Audena briefly several years back. At the time Winky, she had later surmised from gathering scraps of evidence, had been away at Parchman Prison serving a sentence for she still didn’t know what. (Averill did, but he claimed not to.)

Audena was one of those people who had nothing to say to your face, but more than you cared to hear in her letters. She was Averill’s only sister.

“God bless and keep you, my angel and only blood,” she would sign her long, rambling correspondences. Why did people think you gave a damn what they fixed for supper last night?

“Saint Peter came down to earth in a black neighborhood,” Averill began his racist joke. “And he walked up to a group of young men drinking liquor on the corner.…”

Leona had invited Audena and Winky to visit many times. She had somehow believed it was her duty to nurture Averill’s ties with his only sibling. It was one of those arrogant young notions about a wife’s duties that she had soon ditched along with any desire to be in the same room with—much less married to—Reverend Averill Sayres. In the beginning, however, she was forever dropping Audena notes, begging them to come for Fourth of July weekend or Christmas.

Audena’s letters were also filled with references to this “sterling” spoon Mama meant for me to have and “my bowl and pitcher” you got from Aunt Euline, which at least explained the origins of some of the old dollar-store junk Leona found all over the house.

Was that why she was here now? Was it possible? Audena couldn’t know that, if Leona’s measuring spoons were accurate, her brother Averill would be a corpse by first dark? How could she? No one knew that except Leona. No one else could have imagined such a thing. She and Averill looked like a happy young preacher and his wife. The rest of the world believed the hundred or more yellow irises that rose out of the ditch separating the parsonage from the road. They believed Leona’s kindness and self-deprecating anecdotes, and all the other public effects she incorporated into her role as their dedicated preacher’s wife.

Except—and thank God for her one true friend—for Soames. Soames knew just about everything. She was the exception to many local rules, which meant of course that Soames had real common sense. There were about two hundred people in church this morning and, Leona aside, Soames was the only one who saw through Averill.

“ ‘… How many of you all want to go to heaven?’ Saint Peter asked the motley crew.…”

What a pathetic loser, what a cheap little redneck racist weasel he was. How could they listen to him Sunday after Sunday?

Leona had never quite figured it out. Did people believe what they saw? Or did they only let themselves see what they believed? Either way, it seemed to her that the longer you lived the more life clobbered you over the head with the fact that nothing—absolutely nothing—was what it first appeared to be. Sitting there in that stifling church redolent with heavy odors of pine resins and cheap colognes, it struck Leona that she herself was a fourteen-karat example of an illusion. At that very moment she was listening to her husband preach a sermon. Wasn’t she? From her beatific profile and the decorous tilt of her head, it certainly seemed so. Who among the congregation would suspect that her charmed chuckles at his worn-out anecdotes concealed a murderer’s heart? For she was already a murderer, and the perspiring young man of God who was beginning to work his indefatigable spell on them was already her victim.

People survived by keeping themselves a secret from each other—who they really were, what they really felt, what they had really done or intended to do. Leona had come to think that the things they were created to hide shaped a person’s most defining outlines. She would love
to know what secrets Audena had stowed behind her virtuous drab brown dress with its ludicrous white collar. And didn’t Winky complete the picture in his olive khaki Sunday suit? She could see from the choir loft twenty feet away that his fingernails were black with filth at the tips.

“Honest” country people, the politicians were always deifying people like them. Didn’t they seem the benchmark of harmless, faded church supper types? Leona had learned a lot about church supper types over the last few years. Sad to say, ninety-nine percent of it had made her more wary than wise.

She found Audena’s weekly letter in her mailbox every Tuesday morning. Audena scribbled pages on pages about hard biscuits and puppy teeth and Winky’s bunions. Averill said Audena was just dull but well-meaning. Leona could see into that. Those relentless, bleak letters, pencil on ruled paper, carried messages from sister to brother between the lines. In the year and a half of marriage, Leona hadn’t begun to figure them out. Now she was glad to say she would never have the opportunity. A year and a half? It felt like two hundred years in this wilderness.

“ ‘… Yeah, boss, I want to go to heaven.’ ” Averill hung his head to the side and threw out his arms trying to look like a half-wit. “ ‘But I thought y’all was getting up a busload to go tonight,’ ” he said, finishing his tasteless little skit. She wondered as she smiled brightly and winked in conspiratorial glee at the choir director, how many of the other chortling Christians really thought he was funny.

At least two hundred, more like two thousand years.

The thought had an altogether galvanizing effect on
Leona. Audena, Winky and the rest of creation notwithstanding, this was going to be the last day of her interminable sojourn in this wilderness of insanity. Unless she’d misread the large-print directions on the big red bag of Rat Zap. The print on the back had touted it as the ultimate weapon in man’s endless war against rodents. All the same, it wasn’t a thing but arsenic.

By 11:09 A.M., which was what her watch had said when Audena made the church door cry like a banshee as she opened it, the poison was deep into his system. He’d swallowed a collective tablespoon of poison over the last seventy-two hours. She’d dissolved it into Jell-O and added it to his iced tea. She’d rubbed it with olive oil into his round steak and added it with the salt to his dinner rolls. Three-quarters of a tablespoon was supposed to be adequate. So Averill’s big amen was going to be sooner rather than later.

She’d followed the man’s instructions with meticulous care. The man was some kid the manufacturer had hired to answer questions for those who called the 800 number on the sack.

“How much of this stuff do I use?”

“Depends on what you’re killing.”

“My husband—”

“You got any idea how many times a day I hear that dumb joke?”

“This is no joke.”

“Then you might better shoot him because this stuff will take you several days.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to administer it in eighths of a teaspoon, at least four hours apart for three or four days.”

“Why not all at once?”

“He’d throw it up.”

“Thanks.”

“What’d you really need to know, ma’am? I got another call here.”

“Don’t worry. No one will know you’re an accomplice.”

What he told her confirmed what she had already figured out. Leona had spent her childhood watching her father weigh and measure and mix chemical compounds at the back of his pharmacy. She had learned a great deal about certain mixtures and doses and how they worked. When Leona was ten, Mrs. Crowe, a widow who lived across the street, was arrested for murder. It turned out she had fed arsenic-laced Jell-O to her mother-in-law, who was in the hospital suffering the effects of a heart attack. Within a few days, four bodies had been exhumed. Mrs. Crowe had murdered her husband, her father-in-law and her own parents with arsenic. She’d gotten away with it all those years because the symptoms were identical to those of a heart attack. Besides, Mrs. Crowe was a good woman, a Christian lady to the core. No one had ever suspected her. No one thought to look for arsenic.

Mrs. Crowe had chosen it for several reasons. The first was its accessibility, since she had purchased it two blocks from her home, from Leona’s father. At the time the town was installing new sewer lines. Half the population had been in to buy rat poison from her father. Of course, he kept records of all potentially lethal purchases. He showed the police that he had noted that Mrs. Crowe, like everyone else, had reported an acute problem with displaced rodents nesting under porches and eaves.

Mrs. Crowe had been the high school home economics teacher. She taught Sunday school as well. Leona had often spent the night with her daughters. The event traumatized her. Leona liked Mrs. Crowe. Mrs. Crowe had read them
The Velveteen Rabbit
and made them cry with happiness as they fell asleep. Beyond that, Mrs. Crowe had taken Leona and her girls to see the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Memphis one Sunday afternoon in October. The girls had talked about the event for weeks in advance because Mr. Crowe had ordered a new Cadillac and the celestial carriage was promised to arrive just in time to transport them to the event. However, on the day in question, Mr. Crowe was in bed with a stomach virus, so his wife, Tilly, drove them instead.

A week later Mr. Crowe was dead.

It gave Leona nightmares. While they were having their grand adventure, Mr. Crowe was dying. It was too horrible. They could have stopped it then. Mrs. Crowe knew it. She knew it and she drove on up the road, singing silly songs with them.

For months after they arrested Tilly Crowe, Leona hounded her mother and father with questions about every detail. Her mother always deflected her questions because she feared the grim nature of some of the answers would only add to her child’s unhealthy obsession. However, her father took what he considered a more enlightened approach.

He answered each question in vivid, if nonsensational, detail. He explained the cumulative effect of certain poisons like arsenic. He showed her how Mrs. Crowe had carefully measured and scheduled each dose, explaining how incremental amounts digested at
intervals would manifest increasingly severe symptoms. Yet each set of symptoms was familiar and attributed to nonthreatening natural causes. Each of her victims had shown a gradual decline that began with an upset stomach. By spacing out the doses, Mrs. Crowe was able to give each victim a false sense of security, as the symptoms would actually diminish for a while.

Almost no one sees a doctor for gas pains and diarrhea. By the time their symptoms had progressed to chest pains, the poor souls evidenced other classic indications of a heart attack. No doctor sees an apparent heart attack in progress as a potential poisoning—unless, of course, the patient suspects as much and informs his physician. All of Mrs. Crowe’s victims were well into middle age. None of them suspected poison. Though Mr. Crowe’s mother had vehemently asked for an autopsy, which her grief-stricken daughter-in-law overruled so as not to torment his distraught children any further. The old lady acquiesced with apologies and held her suspicions in silence for the next eighteen months.

Tilly boasted that she and her mother-in-law had become like sisters in the months after Mr. Crowe’s death. Old Lady Crowe had confirmed this by singing her daughter-in-law’s praises all over town. Of course no one, except Tilly, knew that Mrs. Crowe had written a new will, naming her daughter-in-law her sole heir and executrix. Though not even Tilly knew that old Mrs. Crowe had seen a doctor when she developed a sour tummy after she ate a slice of Tilly’s lemon pound cake. Nor did Tilly know that the police would impound the container of Jell-O salad laced with arsenic when she rushed to her ailing mother-in-law’s hospital bedside.