THE SPECTATOR OF CALAMITIES /// Frank Richards

THE SPECTATOR OF CALAMITIES

///Frank Richards

Lorena MacInnes always rose before dawn, and the first thing she did was put water in the kettle for her cup of tea. This chilly day was no exception. Then, electric lantern in hand, she picked her way through the darkness and out to the barn to feed the goats. The night’s moonless visibility enabled her to see the stars, her reliable companions, glittering in the early autumn sky; red, yellow, white, and blue, they were perpetual fireflies, shards of memory, spangling the darkness, looking down on her with their light from the past. She spotted Orion, fully risen in the southeastern sky. Orion had been Caleb’s favorite constellation. He had always pestered her this time of year that he might be allowed up early to see the Orionids, a minor meteor shower of particles left over from a comet that had passed this way once, perhaps too near the earth, and inevitably destroyed by the tug and pull of gravity, had melted away, until only a few remnants were left to fall to Earth, fiery, burning with everything they had before fading out. None ever seemed to reach the ground. In some ways, Caleb had been an easy son to raise, but in other ways, he’d proven himself a difficult child. Even when he was grown and had Willie, his own son, to care for and to teach, Caleb had a talent for being oblivious to the obvious. His keen perceptions of nature and the multiplicity of its interrelations were not mirrored by a similar perception of human motivations. He’d been flummoxed by even the simplest things, bursting into tears in frustration. Irony was lost upon him. She wondered at his perceptions. How had he seen the world? It wasn’t necessarily anything he lacked, precisely. It was as if his perception were off, somehow moved up the scale from that of the rest of us. He saw things we didn’t see, but he was oblivious to things that were plain to others. Sometimes, when getting him off to school or to a party with acquaintances, Lorena felt fear for him, for the lightness of his spirit,

his easy frustration, and for his lack of social perception, as a sparrow might feel a pang of fear on watching her smallest nestling preparing to fledge. That sort of fear. Caleb was partially protected by the isolation of their rural way of life, but Lorena couldn’t keep him isolated forever. He’d fallen head over heels for that Janey Staunton, just as Lorena had feared. Caleb met Janey at the Redford Post Office, where they both worked. He’d given Lorena a tour one time, and she could see why he loved the post office. He had a job that mirrored the exactitude of the organization he preferred in his own life. It was a place of glaring fluorescent lighting and stark gray metal equipment; voices, clacking machinery, and other unidentifiable “Voices, clacking noises echoed harshly to Lore- machinery, and other na’s ears. Paper dust, from all unidentifiable noises the letters, she supposed, tick- echoed harshly to led her nose, and she fought off a sneeze. Lorena’s ears.” Keith James, the acting post office supervisor, looked up from his paperwork and introduced himself to her. He wore a wrinkled white short-sleeve shirt and a brown-and-blue-striped clip-on tie. Janey, wearing a post office blue blouse, tight-fitting shorts, and crooked, smirky smile, leaned against a nearby metal table stacked with packages and watched as Caleb began his tour. “Letters go in these trays, but they have to face the same way. In the same direction, see?” He pointed to the letters standing on edge in a plastic tray. “And all the stamps go down, not up. They all face the same way. That’s so you can reach down and pick up a handful, like this, and sort them.” He raised the letters in his left hand, pushed up the top one with his thumb, took it with his right, and flipped it into a square opening on the distribution case. “We have to do this with any mail that comes in unsequenced by the sorting machines. And sometimes it’s missorted by the machines, and we re-sort it. We distribute it to the carrier routes, and then the carriers put it into delivery sequence at their cases.” He

pointed to more metal furniture arranged in rows of U-shaped stalls on the other side of the office. “Every day is the same as every other.” Precision. Just the way he liked things. He might make a good career out of this, she thought. The pay was okay, there was good medical coverage, and he had the job security that comes from working for the government. Lorena wondered whether her own routines in life, necessitated by the demands of rural Virginia living, contributed to Caleb’s routinized lifestyle. You never know what children are going to pick up from your example. Maybe she should have showed him more of the variety of life. She wished that he’d picked up what she thought was her own common sense about people. But his infatuation with Janey showed he had not. When Lorena pointed to Janey’s prior opioid use, Caleb had been dismissive. “She’s not using anymore.” “How do you know that?” There was so much drug use going around these days. Especially here in rural Virginia, where people have a hard time getting decent jobs. The newspaper said it was an epidemic. And some of these doctors and dentists prescribed opioids for any little pain at all. Lorena had seen one of the drug company sales ladies carting in a big expensive take-out lunch for all the staff down at Urgent Care. She felt sure it was some kind of bribery, out in the open, right in front of everybody. “She’s taking a pill for it. I’ve seen her take it. And she has her blood tested. They won’t give the pill to her if her blood tests positive for opioids. For Chrissakes, Mom, she’s going to kick it. Have some faith. Isn’t that what they teach you down at Calvary Baptist?” “Mmm.” She thought she’d just wait and see about that.

# # #

Lorena’s best friend, Clementine Cummings, often stopped by the farm Mondays and Fridays for coffee and an afternoon

chat. But this was Thursday. “So, Caleb’s dating again.” Clementine spooned a second teaspoon of sugar into her cup and gave her coffee a quick stir. “They say it’s the Staunton girl, the older one. Janey.” “About time he quit moping around and got over Betty,” Lorena said, adding, “Don’t you think?” Caleb’s wife Betty had gotten bored with the rigors of housewifery and child care. She’d taken off with a substitute teacher from the high school last year, leaving Caleb and Willie to fend for themselves. “But Janey Staunton? Land o’ Goshen.” Clementine often dropped into the exclamatory language of her parents’ generation whenever moral rectitude was to become a subject for discussion. Lorena knew what was coming next. “She still thinks she’s in high school, the way she dresses and carries on. Lordy, all that makeup. Her momma shoulda tanned her hide for some of the stunts she’s pulled. Remember that time she was smoking in the girls’ lavatory and set half the school on fire? Not a lick of sense. And Caleb—” “I know.” “I figured you’d have a conniption fit.” “At least Caleb’s a responsible person. And Janey, yes, she’s got her faults all right, like you say, but she’s got a good heart. Remember when I had that sick kid last summer, and Janey came over every day and fed him? Nursed that little goat right back to health. And all that volunteer work she did down at Vet Moseley’s place—” “Yeah, and Bonita Harris, bless her heart, said she saw Janey taking care of Caleb parked down behind Gray’s Tavern the other night.” So that’s what this visit was about. Bonita Harris was wife of the sheriff and the town’s most voluble gossip. Caleb and Janey’s business would be spread all over town by now. She’d have to tell him to be more careful.

# # #

On the day everything happened, Caleb was awarded a bid to work the day shift on the window service counter at the post office and had to leave Willie with Sadie, Janey’s younger sister. Sadie would take Willie to school and pick him up. School started at eight, after Caleb was due at work, and ended at three in the afternoon, while he didn’t get off until five thirty. They’d called Caleb up from Jubal Early, Willie’s school, to say Willie was sick. So, Caleb had to leave work. By the time he got to the school, the principal had called an ambulance to take Willie over to the emergency room at the hospital. That’s where the doctors questioned Willie and found out Janey had given him an orange-colored pill, Suboxone, the drug she was given to combat her opioid addiction. According to the article Lorena cut out from the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record:

“These allegations stem from 25-year-old Janey Stevens Stauton’s desire to renew her prescription for Suboxone without being able to pass a urine test that showed Suboxone but no illegal drugs,” according to Commonwealth’s attorney Elizabeth Swann. “Giving drugs to a child. I can’t think of a more appalling situation,” Swann said Friday.

At first, Caleb couldn’t believe that Janey had given her drug medicine to Willie. But Sadie told Caleb Janey had been cheating on her drug tests for months. She had persuaded Sadie to take the Suboxone and give Janey her urine so she could pass the test and keep getting her medicine every month, even though she was still using. Caleb said he had confronted Janey about what she’d done when he visited her at the jail where they were holding her. The judge had denied her bond. “I didn’t know he’d get sick from it,” Janey said. “It’s kind of funny, actually, when you think about it.” “Funny?” “I never got sick. Sadie never got sick. Why would Willie get

sick?”

“He’s an eight-year-old boy. Besides, you told me you’d

stopped using.” “I was working on it. Even though it was hard, I kept trying. You know that. I knew this month I would quit for sure. I just needed one more Suboxone dose. One more. And Sadie wouldn’t take it for me this time. Can you believe that? My own sister wouldn’t help me. I had to get tested. What else could I do? You wanted me to get straight, didn’t you?” When Caleb described this conversation to Lorena, she asked him where Janey was getting the drugs she was covering up. “How could she afford them, Caleb? The nurse over at the Urgent Care told me Oxycodone sold for a hundred dollars a pill on the street. She couldn’t afford much of that on her pay from the post office, could she? How was she paying for her drugs?” “I don’t know, Ma. She wasn’t getting high every day.” He paused. “I don’t think.” He frowned. “The important thing is, she was trying to get well.” “But she poisoned Willie!” Lorena slapped her hand on the table in front of her. “I thought you were going to break up with her.”

“She didn’t know Willie would get sick. She thought he could handle it, just like Sadie did. She’s cured now, because of the time she spent drug-free in jail. You have to give her another chance, Ma.” “Seems to me like she’s had a million chances. Don’t you see it, Caleb? She’s never going to change.” But Caleb got Janey a slick lawyer from down Blacksburg way, and he was able to get her a sentence diverting her into treatment. She was out of rehab in less than three months. Caleb had quietly married her soon after.

# # #

Lorena had hoped, for Caleb’s sake, that her judgment about Janey was wrong. But the day came when Caleb was at work and Willie was in school. Janey had gone out joyriding up in the hills with Keith, Janey’s acting supervisor down at the post office. He’d taken the top off his new red Jeep Cherokee, it being a nice day and all. Clementine phoned Lorena right after she heard

about the accident from Bonita. “Lorena, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but I thought you needed to know. There’s been an accident out on old Highway 41. Janey and Keith.” “Keith?” “You know, the acting supervisor at the post office.” “Are they okay?” “Uh, no. Unfortunately, they’re both dead. Bonita says nobody seems to know where Caleb is. Sheriff’s looking for him to tell him what happened.” Clementine told her they’d been out in Keith’s new Jeep, speeding, and come around that curve, the one near Paw Paw Mountain, and the farm combine was right there, and they hit it head-on. The combine driver told the sheriff he saw only Keith with a look of open-mouthed surprise before the crash, but they’d found Janey’s body some distance from the wreck. “You’ve got to find Caleb and tell him before he hears about it from anyone else.” Caleb was due to pick up Willie right about then, so she waited for him to show up at her house. But he never did. Officially, that’s all there was to the accident, but according to Sadie’s tearful account, later confirmed by Bonita Harris, her sister never knew what came at them; Keith’s fly was open, and she was busy down below, pleasuring Keith when he lost his head, severed cleanly by the combine, just as his penis was severed by Janey’s clenching rictus of death. Janey had been pleasuring Keith in exchange for drugs. Lorena had found all this out weeks later, of course. After Caleb, who, distraught, put a shotgun under his chin and let go with both barrels, blasting a hole in her heart that would never heal. I suppose it’s true, she thought, watching a meteor flicker above and then flame out. We are always undone by our own weaknesses. She finished feeding the goats and went back to the house. Willie sat at the table in his pajamas, spooning down the last of a bowl of Frosted Flakes. A drop of milk dribbled down his chin. She