The Name of the Nearest River: Stories by Alex Taylor

Author:Alex Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2012-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Evening Part of Daylight

IT WAS LUSTUS SHEETMIRE’S WEDDING DAY AND he’d just punched his new bride Loreesa in the jaw. The reception guests flocked around her. Most of them were near drunk and wept with disbelief. Loreesa staggered back, crumpling onto the mown bank of the lake where the reception was being held, an eruption of suds beside the still murk of the water in her dress and veil. Some of the guests had been fishing at the moment of violence, their hooks baited with shrimp and catalpa worms settling on the bottom, their poles and Baitcaster reels rising lewdly from between their legs. And now this.

It was a pay lake. After the vows in the Umpole Church of Christ’s Witnesses Protected, they’d laid out ten dollars a piece to cast their lines into the dim thick waters. One of the catfish had been tagged with a red twistix pinned to its tail and whoever caught it would win the fifty dollar purse. This was a tournament. But now they gathered around the broken woman on the ground, sweating in their tuxedos and pastel dresses, faces blossoming. The time for peaceable fishing had passed.

“He’s killed my daughter is exactly what he’s done!” shouted Verndon Lindsey. “And on her wedding day!”

He was a large and greasy man. He wore an ascot speckled with tomato sauce from the plate of meatball hors d’oeuvres he’d been eating, and he came rolling up the bank reeking of beer and sweat, his fists beating the air.

Lustus hit him in the throat, and Verndon sat down as if someone had done no more than simply ask him to. Unable to rise, he sulked in the dry brown grass holding his Adam’s apple with both hands and coughing steadily.

“She’s not killed,” Lustus said. “Listen to her bawl. No dead woman ever made any noise like that.”

It was true. Mrs. Lustus Sheetmire squalled behind her veil, a high ripping cry that scattered waterfowl into the air like flurrying ash, and the cries went on steadily and unyielding, echoing far over the calm face of the lake and into the stand of walnut trees beyond, a shivering noise that unsettled the dirt.

Lustus, however, was not patient enough to listen.

He walked up the crisp gravel lane to his truck parked under an osage tree. No one followed him. He half-expected to hear the cackle of rifle fire, to feel the slug sink deep in his back, but nothing happened. There was only the blind whiteness of the gravel, then the rust of his Chevrolet. The lake behind him, the crying wife attended by a covey of bridesmaids with beery breath, the water and tremulous shade leaking over the water—all of that did not matter. What mattered at that moment, what seemed to mean everything, was the blue orchid corsage crumpled in his fist. The flower had been pinned to the lapel of his tuxedo. He’d spent months nurturing it from dark soil, had ordered the bulb from a foreign

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