BLUE MOON
By Grace McKeaney
Winnie Noble is a healer and spiritualist in her mid-forties. Winnie is a plainspoken woman who calls a spade a spade. A psychic, she possesses the ability to establish intimate relationships with everyone she meets, clearly seeing their destinies. Winnie is speaking to the world in these two monologues.
winnie: I was raised in Noble, Kansas. I'm a Noble and somehow the Nobles managed to hold fast in that shifting landscape an unlikely long time. Kansas ain't the easiest place to hold your head up, but we're stubborn. And the rest of them will be there as long as it takes to get through their lives, but not me. I won't never go back to Kansas. Not since I've learned to float. My mama brought me to the Boardwalk all the way from Kansas when I was a child of six, just to see the water . . . She suffered always with dreams of water . . . that's 'cause she was going to die in the water . . . And now the water is my shadow, too. Got to be by it, hear it lapping. And once you learned to lie on your back and float, which is important in this here life, you got to stay by the water so's you don't get out of practice.
Don't get me wrong. Kansas is okay. It's easy to find on a map. It's there in the middle of everything getting beat daily by the wind, and there are folks like the people I'm from that thrive on standing up to it. But I got my fill of the wind whipping folks like the devil whipped his children. Got my fill of long, dry days and lonesome shadows on prairie afternoons.
I like the ocean because you can't cut it with a knife no matter how hard you try. It's all of a piece and I like that. What I feel is there's no place good or bad of its own. Where you wind up depends purely on your nature and, of course, on what's in store for you.
winnie: Now here's an interesting thing about me: I lost my hearing in a dust storm when I was newly born. Spent my precious childhood as deaf as a stone. What's the difference? Most folks hear what they want to. I heard as much ever as I needed. Folks, as a rule, don't have a powerful lot that needs saying. You can see all you need to; if you got eyes.
As it happened, this one summer my daddy didn't love my mama no more. Nobody ever had to say a thing to me about it. Some things you know.
She knew. She knew he wouldn't come back this time. I seen the careful way she took his clean clothes from the line that morning. I seen the way the wind made the wash smack her in the face like just everything was against her. I seen the way she hung back, then run after him into the barn. And I seen through the window how she clung to his leg like a child.
Now I don't know what use that was. He was going. All that was left was his body riding off. His heart rode off from that place years before only Mama was too proud to see.
Iknew all this because my daddy showed me things I guess he shouldn't have. Sunday, Mama would teach Sunday school, teaching one and all how everything had a season, and I got something useful out of that. But it was Saturdays when Daddy would take me to the matinee movies that I saw what life held when its season was ripe in bloom. My daddy loved the ladies in the movies more even than the cowboys. He had a eye for gold. The ones with the yellow hair like the wheat waving there behind our barn, they were his particular fancy. Gayla had yellow hair.
Gayla run the feed store across from the moving-picture house. And in time, Gayla and my daddy kinda struck it up. For good. Daddy would drop a handful of gumdrops in my apron, and I'd sit on Gayla's stoop after the movie and watch them change the letters on the marquee and chew my gumdrops and wait for them two to finish up. And sometimes they didn't get it done till the last gumdrop was gone. My daddy and Gayla was always making plans for how they were going to be happy someday, and my daddy's whole restless attitude left him when he was rolling up a Viceroy there at her little table, 'Way he looked at her after finishing a meal she made him was like he was still hungry . . . but not in a starving, grasping way. More like the sweet, thorough way a dragonfly draws sweetness from a flower . . . My daddy loved this lady in a deep and thorough way and I guess as far as I was concerned, I didn t mind the gumdrops.