Man in the Blue Moon Read Free

Busby, the picture taker, and let him take it on his circuit. He could sell it just like he had all her father’s other possessions, and she could split the money with him again.
    Ella reached for a log that was stacked atop a pile in the corner, and a lizard ran out. She snatched it up by the tail and jerked open the screen door. As she threw the lizard outside, Ella was sideswiped by the fear that she, too, would be tossed out of her home. She pictured the fear that had become a constant tormentor as a black mushroom clamped to the side of her brain, a deformity of sorts that she had begun to accept as her lot in life. She put another log in the stove and poked at the embers extra hard, causing sparks to fly out. She never paused to realize that before Harlan’s afflictions, the idea of catching a lizard by the tail would have caused her to shiver.
    “Samuel . . . Samuel, are you here?” Ella could smell the salve from the hallway. She followed the scent to her youngest son, Macon. He was propped up on the bed, his throat swollen and blisters the size of quarters covering the outside of his lips. Sweat lined Macon’s forehead, and when he turned to look at Ella, his cheeks seemed gaunter than they had the day before.
    “Did he eat anything?” Ella asked her other son, Keaton. Then, not wanting Macon to think that she thought he was invisible, she turned to him and wiped his brow with the rag that was in the basin next to the bed. “Baby, did you manage to eat any breakfast?”
    Both boys shook their heads at the same time. There were seven years between them, yet Macon looked more like he was three instead of six. The virus that wouldn’t let go had caused him to seemingly shrink until there were nights when Ella dreamed that she walked into his room and found nothing more than a son the size of an acorn.
    In desperation, Ella had even used some of the mortgage money to hire an internist from Panama City to make a house visit. The doctor had arrived with a medical bag made of cowhide. When he set the bag on the edge of the bed, Ella noticed that it was ripped in the corner, revealing discolored cardboard. The doctor spread his tools across the nightstand next to Macon’s bed and anointed Ella’s oldest son, Samuel, his assistant. “I take it you’re the man around the place now that your daddy has run off from the henhouse,” the doctor said without looking at Ella. Samuel rubbed the sparse goatee that he was trying to grow on his sixteen-year-old chin and nodded. When Keaton stepped forward to get a closer look at the scratched silver tools on the nightstand, Samuel jerked his brother away and shoved him back toward the spot where Ella stood at the bedroom door. While the doctor prodded and poked Macon, he rambled on about a weakened constitution caused from parasites.
    “You know how boys this age can be. He’ll eat the dirt and anything that’s in it,” the doctor had said. “A virus in the chicken pox family,” he declared. “He’s still puny because the illness is aggravated by his asthma. He’ll be back to running around in no time.” Ella followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter, preparing coffee so thick that it looked like mud. She mixed in the powder that the man had magically pulled from his bag. Macon gagged and vomited when she fed it to him. By the fifth day, she had heeded Macon’s plea to stop making him sicker.
    “Well,” Ella said as she sat on the side of Macon’s bed. “What if I get you some candy? Not that cheap candy from our store . . . genuine salt water taffy from the dock.” She watched her ailing son’s eyes light up. He loved the taffy that came straight from the boats that docked in the bay at Apalachicola. Back when times were better, he’d gone with his father to town every chance he had.
    “We’re going to town today?” Keaton, the middle son, asked. There was a stitch of hair above his lip. It was a constant reminder to Ella that he was a boy