Butterfly Sunday by David Hill

woman. Worse than that was her knowledge of its approaching, inevitable outcome. It seemed awful enough to Leona that people lived with general knowledge of their own mortality. In her mother’s case, she had been compelled to lie in pain and watchher death make its slow, steady progress like a ship with black sails moving into harbor.

    She couldn’t bear the idea that her stupidity had created another source of pain for her mother. So she denied all reason for it, though her denial was as much to protect herself as well. The future, though immediate and inescapable, was imponderable and impossible to face. Leona didn’t know, looking back, what might have transpired if she had shared her dilemma with her mother. However, she was certain that other, more sensible arrangements would have been made.

    After two desperate weeks of calling and knocking and mailing notes to Ty’s house, she saw his father’s Oldsmobile in its familiar place in the driveway on Sunday morning.

    “Hey, Leona.”

    “Morning, Mr. Crockett.”

    “What can we do for you this morning?”

    “I just came by to see Ty, sir.”

    “He’ll be sorry he missed you.”

    “When do you expect him?”

    “I couldn’t say, sweetheart. He’s touring the Continent with his mother.”

    “But he has to start classes at the university in two weeks, right?”

    “His mother and I felt he should travel for six months or a year while he decides where to attend college.”

    Mr. Crockett excused himself, explaining that he had to teach the Presbyterian Men’s Sunday School Class in half an hour.

    It rained that afternoon, a torrential harbinger of an eternal season descending. Viola slipped into a finallethargy and Leona sat holding her hand while her mother drifted in and out of the withered shell of the life she had completed in this world.

    “I worry about you.”

    “I’m fine, Mama.”

    The dying woman summoned her last strength and placed her hand against Leona’s stomach. Her eyes flooded with joy and sadness.

    “I love it so,” she whispered. Leona bristled with shock. She didn’t mean—she couldn’t know. Then Viola’s withered hand rose slowly and she brushed Leona’s tummy with the tip of her index finger in a gesture that could only mean one thing.

    “Tell it I loved it.”

    “I will, Mama.”

    “You were my delivering angel,” she said in a barely audible tone.

    “And I’ll have mine,” Leona heard herself say, experiencing the notion as she imparted it. Viola’s lips drew back into a heavy smile. Leona saw her mother abandon her eyes, and she felt her drift away.

    She was dead. Love was dead. Days and nights became indistinguishable.

    For the next several days the house was filled with women who kept cleaning the house and wrapping food in aluminum foil and keening every time another hideous red-and-orange flower arrangement arrived. They told Leona what to wear and instructed the minister which hymns to sing. It relieved her to know that her mother was no longer in pain. Yet the loss was astounding, and the sadness sat on her shoulders like a mountain of stone. It made Ty seem trivial, and the baby, whowas still not in evidence, feel distant and remote. Everything and every moment was saturated with the terrible emptiness, the unbearable longing for her mother.

    There was an edge of autumn coming in the breeze as she stood listening to the minister recite the dreadful rhetoric of dust and eternity over Viola’s casket. There was an echo of life dying in the shuddering bursts of falling leaves on the faded grass. All around her the worn granite tombstones stood like a mournful tribe of headless phantoms, their shoulders stooped and useless against the crushing weight of time.

    That night a small circle of women who had known Viola from early childhood lingered after the condolence crowd was gone. Bit by bit Leona found herself penned in by a group who already knew about her predicament. In fact, they knew