Love with greasy fingers - short story

When the first Black family moved to Ferngreen, their white neighbors moved out in such haste that--it is said with great seriousness--some of them left without their furniture. Now, ten years later, the 27 red-brick cottages with severely mowed lawns and overarching oaks belong to Black families with modest jobs, savings accounts in credit unions and American cars in their garages. On Sundays their church trembles with the songs of parishioners who are so filled with the love of God, and so busy assailing heaven with volleys of praise and glory, that sometimes there is not enough love left for their neighbors.

Miss Francesca Anderson the journalist--who has been 34 years old for the past three years--and Mr. Henry Lyle, the 40-year-old mechanic, used to attend that church every Sunday, but they were careful to sit as far away from each other as possible. Each sought to arrive just a little later than the other so that one could stare at the back of the other's head and direct glances of hatred so intense and consuming that it left them exhausted, and the devil pleased but bewildered.

Until her strategy was discovered, Miss Anderson would peep through her curtains until Mr. Lyle drove past, and she would follow when he had disappeared around the corner. After a month of having the back of his head seared by Miss Anderson's stares, Mr. Lyle would park one block away from the church, then walk back quickly to crouch behind a hedge of red crepe myrtles and wait until the enemy entered. He noticed that she arrived exactly three minutes after him and so deduced her tactic. But in October the shrubs shed their leaves, and each protagonist was forced to wait for providence to offer an advantage.

Such an enmity had not come suddenly or lightly. Once Mr. Lyle had loved the delicate and elegant Miss Anderson with a passion that had ruined his appetite, his sleep and three spark plugs. The sight of her in church and the smell of her cooking would drive him into paroxysms of emotion that caused him to abandon his friends, sneer at bachelorhood and keep the creases in his pants so firmly ironed that the cloth shone like satin.

He kept her appliances working better than new, made small repairs to her house before she noticed any damage, and once had treated her to a small soda and a minute hamburger at the nearby Dairy Queen. She had refused the foot-long hot dog and the double cheeseburger that he planned to order for himself. He had quivered in admiration at her restraint and ordered the same, but after driving her home, had returned to the restaurant for two foot-long hot dogs, a large vanilla milk shake and a small apple pie.

One Christmas Eve, Mr. Lyle drove his heart's desire to church. On the way back, lightheaded with the spirit of the season and submerged in a morass of nervous sweat, he asked her to marry him. Miss Anderson looked at her tall, gruff suitor, glanced at his grease-stained fingers, and with merciless certainty told him that the Good Lord bad better things for her than marriage to a "garage man." Mr. Lyle did not think to ask what were the Lord's plans for his beloved. Instead, his feelings for her instantly turned into a loathing as intense as his love had been.

Occasionally small sorties in the Lyle-Anderson war took place in public, and the neighbors began to take sides. Most of the men sympathized with Mr. Lyle, but did so quietly because their wives bad immediately and fiercely allied themselves with Miss Anderson. Of course the women were always gracious to Mr. Lyle and would have vigorously denied any antipathy toward him. The only neutral parties in the community were 17-year-old Francis Wilton, his diabetic friend, Cassandra Marshall, who had a proverbial appetite for sweets, and her unendingly tall brother, Lighthouse, whose similar weakness had rendered him almost toothless. Since the onset of hostilities, Miss Anderson had stopped being generous with her pastries and corn bread, and Mr. Lyle seldom had time to help the neighbors with minor car problems.

One April an event took place in Ferngreen that should have brought the warring parties together: A tornado swept through the community with the destructive precision these acts of nature usually reserve for mobile-home parks. The neighboring communities were unscathed. Fortunately, only three houses were damaged by a fallen tree, and one of these was Miss Anderson's. Even before she could assess the damage, the neighbors had assembled with axes and chain saws.

No one worked harder than Mr. Lyle. He brushed past her without acknowledgement, and with a pruning saw and lopping shears set upon the branch that had spread its green embrace over her best furniture. Clumps of wood, leaves and twigs gushed in a green stream from the broken windows until only small fragments were left on the wet carpet. Forty minutes after he had entered the house, he left without a word. He would have walked past Miss Anderson without seeing her, but she stepped forward to block his path.

"Mr. Lyle," she said and paused, "thanks. Um . . . how much do I owe you?"

For a few seconds Mr. Lyle stared uncomprehendingly at her, then his hands jerked, his eyes flamed and his chest swelled. Miss Anderson jumped back, convinced that the huge mechanic was about to lop and prune her head and limbs.

"Christ!" Mr. Lyle said, and strode off.

At that moment some of Miss Anderson's allies deserted her and became silent sympathizers with Mr. Lyle. Mr. Lyle's allies raised their eyebrows and maintained a silence that almost roared. The nonpartisan Francis, Cassandra and Lighthouse revived memories of pastries that were good beyond praise and trembled in agony at their loss, as they sat in Cassandra's living room to look at old copies of Jet magazine and to construct schemes, plots and stratagems to bring Miss Anderson and Mr. Lyle together.

One night the conspirators were engaged in profound contemplations of human anatomy, as illustrated by the happy, smiling women in the magazines, when Cassandra pointed with disgust to a photograph of a singer dressed in little but a boa constrictor.

"That's nasty," she said. "What's she going to do if the snake starts to strangle her?"

"These snakes can crush somebody to mincemeat," Lighthouse said learnedly.

Francis shook his head, "No, man, these snakes only eat rats."

"I don't care. If I saw a thing like this in my house, you'd hear me all around the I-285. Man, I hate snakes," Cassandra said, shivering.

Francis jumped from his seat. "Hey! I got it. I got it!" he shouted. "Look, you know what we can do? We can put a snake in Miss Anderson's house and when she starts screaming, we can call Mr. Lyle to kill it. After that, they bound to make up."

"Where the hell you gonna get a snake and who the hell gonna put it in the house?" Lighthouse asked reasonably.

"I can get a grass snake in the woods back of the house," Francis said.

"You gonna catch a snake?" Cassandra asked. "Well, don't bring it by me."

"Doesn't bite," Francis reassured her.

"Don't care, just don't come by here with any snake," she said.

Lighthouse spoke up bravely, "Well, I'll come with you, but you do the catching."

"And how you going to get the snake in the house?" Cassandra asked.

"On Saturday morning, Miss Anderson always opens the windows when she cleans the house. I can slip it in the kitchen window," Francis said.

The discussion continued for about an hour and ended with two voting for and one against the scheme. The dissenter promised not to betray the others, and on a Saturday morning, a small, bemused grass snake found itself in a strange new environment and promptly secreted itself in a cupboard under the sink, where it pondered on what the future held for it in its new situation.

Sometimes we recoil when a stranger reaches out to help as we stumble, and sometimes we retort to a kind word with an unpleasantness that was not intended. So it was with Miss Anderson: She considered all the people on her street as her extended family; she had not meant to hurt Mr. Lyle when he had proposed, but she had been too surprised to refuse him politely, and she had responded too quickly. Then she had become angry at Mr. Lyle because of her confusion and his own anger. Miss Anderson was a Strelling University woman, and she expected to marry a Masefield man.

"You don't marry no man without a degree," her grandmother reminded her constantly. Mother Constance Anderson had invested $2,000 in her granddaughter's education and so was entitled to make the most important decisions for her. But the Masefield men whom Miss Anderson had seen luring the last ten years had enjoyed her cooking and generosity and had moved on. Still, she would not entertain the prospect of marrying a mechanic. But her quarrel with Mr. Lyle was not right, and she wanted it to end.

These were her thoughts on a Sunday morning as she sat in her kitchen with a cup of coffee, playing with her poodle's ears. Then she saw the snake crawl out of the partly opened door of the cupboard under the sink. Her scream was probably the loudest sound ever heard in Ferngreen. Francis heard and recognized it. He was out of the house and running toward Miss Anderson's house to confirm the cause of the noise before his parents were aware of the disturbance. Miss Anderson was in her yard, dressed in a thin housecoat, jumping around screaming, "Snake! Snake!"

Francis rushed to Mr. Lyle's house. Mr. Lyle was in his garage, dressed in a pair of shorts and a greasy T-shirt. "What's going on over there? Who's screaming?" he asked Francis.

"Snake in Miss Anderson's house!" Francis gasped.

Mr. Lyle grabbed a massive crowbar from the garage and ran to save the woman he hated. When they arrived at Miss Anderson's house, a small crowd of brave rescuers had gathered in the street at a safe distance from the house, bearing an assortment of anti-snake devices that included a tire iron, a spray can of insecticide, two shotguns, a walking stick, three bricks and one umbrella. Mr. Lyle pushed through the crowd. The sight of Miss Anderson in the translucent gown set his blood to boiling; he would cheerfully have faced angry Brazilian anacondas for her at that moment.

"Where's the snake?" he asked.

"In the kitchen," Miss Anderson answered.

Mr. Lyle rushed inside, and the dog immediately attacked him.

He rushed back outside.

"Somebody get that dog!" he shouted.

Miss Anderson called to her poodle and grabbed him as he came out the door.

Mr. Lyle went back into the kitchen. He looked carefully around the floor and under the chairs and table. There was no snake. Then he went down on all fours and even more carefully began checking the cupboards under the counter. While he was looking under the sink, the poodle escaped and ran back into the house. It went into the kitchen and saw Mr. Lyle's bottom erupting from the cupboard. Unsure of what to do about the unusual presentation, it went up quietly to investigate. Mr. Lyle was suddenly aware of a cold object nosing around his shorts. He cried out and reared back, thinking it was the snake, and crashed his head against the top of the cupboard, knocking himself out. The poodle became frantic.

The crowd heard the noise and sent a small posse to investigate. They saw Mr. Lyle sprawled on the floor and immediately surmised that he had been bitten by the snake. Someone quickly called 911. In five minutes, a police car roared up, followed by an ambulance. Two policemen with guns drawn entered first, followed by two very worried paramedics with a stretcher. They found Mr. Lyle sitting on the floor rubbing his head.

"Where're you bitten, sir?" one paramedic asked.

"No, I knocked my head against the counter," Mr. Lyle said.

"Well, I think we'd better take you to Emergency anyway. For a check."

So Mr. Lyle climbed onto the stretcher, and the paramedics were on their way out when the grass snake decided to check on the commotion outside its new home. It crawled out of a cupboard near the door, near the foot of one of the policemen, who shouted, "Snake!"

The paramedics looked down, glimpsed the little creature and burst out of the house. The handle of the stretcher caught against the doorjamb, and Mr. Lyle was thrown out into the yard. The policemen were unable to fire at the snake for fear of killing each other in the small space. The grass snake concluded that all was not well in the new place and headed for the bright light of the doorway. It perceived the milling crowd at one end of the garden and immediately headed for a thorn hedge at the other, resolving not to stop moving for the next hour. Henceforth it would avoid all contact with its human neighbors.

Mr. Lyle suffered a bruised elbow and a severely sprained ankle. Later that evening, as he sat on the couch watching 60 Minutes with his bandaged leg resting on a footstool, Miss Anderson knocked and walked in.

"Brought you some chicken-and-dumpling soup. And some pastries," she said.

Mr. Lyle smiled hesitantly, not sure of an appropriate reaction. "That's very nice. Thank you. You'll sit down for a minute?"

"Okay," Miss Anderson said.

Two hours later she rose to leave.

"Um . . ." Mr. Lyle said hesitantly, then blurted, "why don't you stay?"

"The night?" Miss Anderson asked in surprise.

Mr. Lyle nodded, too scared to speak.

Miss Anderson thought for a moment, then said, "How about tomorrow night?"

Mr. Lyle smiled in disbelief He would have been happy if she had said next year.

Miss Anderson bent down and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

"Good night, Henry," she said.

"Good night, Francesca," he answered.

Earl G. Long has been writing short stories since high school. Originally from St. Lucia, he has a Ph.D. in microbiology and works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group