Under the Mercy Trees Read online

  “Steven, come here a minute.” Hodge took Steven’s arm and led him off a few yards, close enough for Liza and the others to eavesdrop. “Nobody’s accusing you of anything, son. Wally has to ask questions. James has a right to hear what you know. That chip you carry around on your shoulder is going to get you in trouble.”

  “That son of a bitch. That hearing aid makes him seem all harmless and innocent, but he ain’t.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Leon?” Hodge said.

  “A few weeks, like I said.” Steven turned around and raised his voice so they didn’t have to strain to hear. “Leon didn’t call me to drive him much anymore because he was getting James’s boy, Bobby, to do it. Ask Bobby when he saw the man last.”

  “I’ll do that, son,” Wally said calmly.

  Steven turned his back. “I’m out of here.”

  “Steven, we still need you to help look,” Hodge said.

  “Let James look for him his own damn self.” Steven shrugged off Hodge’s hand. “No old man could last in the cold this long, not even Leon. Any more looking would just be for a family that never did a thing for me. I’ll see you, Hodge.” He headed for the house, where the searchers’ trucks were parked. Steven’s hair was graying and his shoulders drawn up like an old man’s, but to Liza’s teacher eyes he was still a teenager with his feelings permanently hurt.

  Wally called to Hodge. “He okay?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be all right.” Hodge walked over to James and slapped him on the back. “Let’s get to it.”

  “I’ll head down and look by the sawmill,” James said.

  Hodge waited for the sheriff and James to walk far enough away, then said to Liza, “It hurts me to see family at each other’s throats like that. The Bible says, ‘first be reconciled to thy brother.’ Seems like that ought to go for uncles and nephews, too.”

  “Have you told them that?” she said.

  Hodge shook his head. “I’ve learned to be sparing with Scripture around the Owenby men.” He looked at her. “You’ve spoken to Martin?”

  “I’m picking him up at the airport tomorrow.”

  “How’d he sound?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “It’ll be good to see him.”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  Hodge said good-bye and rejoined the search. The volunteers separated to cover the land that remained. Liza stood alone. She surveyed the expanse of land around them, exhausted fields and scraggly timber as far as she could see. A creek ran narrow through the Owenby property, past the house and down behind the old sawmill. She hoped, for the family’s sake, that Leon wasn’t lying out there somewhere. That he had gotten an urge to travel and climbed on a bus, off to see a lady friend no one knew he had. Around the property’s edges, in the lace of bug-eaten leaves, the light was failing. She turned and went back to her truck.

  With her headlights on she drove down the Owenbys’ dirt road, then out onto paved state road. Her pickup truck hugged the same curves she and Martin had traveled in her Ford Sunliner convertible all through high school, before she knew Martin was gay, maybe before Martin himself knew he was gay. Deer eyes gleamed red in her headlights, and she clutched at time the way she grasped her steering wheel, her own selfishness appalling. Leon Owenby was missing, and Martin Owenby was coming home.

  * * *

  She was twelve. It was spring. Dandelion heads sloughed seeds like old men spitting teeth. Her father’s mouth moved in a happy whistle, gusts of wind through the open windows snatching the sound. She trailed her hand out the window, blocking air with her palm, then letting it go, searching for coded messages in the tire tracks that crisscrossed the mud road. Morning sunlight rolled out like a carpet over low mountains, and her father stopped in the yard of Solace Fork School.

  “You’ll like it, Liza.” He grinned at her, an almost-tug on her hair melting her heart. Inside, the smells were oiled floor and chalk.

  She was new to this place, but her father was not. Summers spent here with cousins as a boy were his passkey, unlocking lidded eyes. He had returned a doctor, a man “what knew things.” Liza stood as his daughter before the children of Solace Fork School, her dress unpatched, in shoes that only she had worn, the teacher’s warm hand on her back. Her hair curled, an alive, rich auburn, not baked to transparency by the sun. Girls’ hands twitched, wanting to touch it. Her well-formed body had never hungered, and ten spines straightened to match hers. Eyes widened at her that day and never closed. Forty years later, waist thick, hair faded, and dues paid, her life trailed out behind her like a tattered peacock’s tail, yet the folk of Solace Fork still treated her like an exotic stranger.

  Only Martin really saw her. That morning he appraised her, while Hodge Goforth blinked curious from the next desk over. Martin’s fingers tapered slender as beeswax candles. Dark hair fell over his brow, covering one green eye. The other winked at Liza, long-lashed and shameless, her father standing right there.

  At recess, before the girls could draw near enough to claim her, he was at her desk, Hodge shuffling behind. Martin might as well have put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Come with us. We’ve a place to show you.” The mountain had pressed his vowels flat, and “you” was “ye.” She missed that boy’s voice, now that only perfect words dropped from Martin’s mouth, all polished smooth like rocks from a tumbler.

  She walked with him and Hodge down a rough deer path into the woods without a thought, something she would never let her two daughters do today. She heard the creek before she saw it, water burbling, heavy drops plopping from rhododendron leaves. The boys turned off the path. They ducked under limbs and came out into a clearing.

  It was a sanctuary. Soft grass the greenest she had ever seen carpeted the aisles. Martin and Hodge had swept it clear of leaves. All around, mature hardwoods grew bent in the shapes of chairs, up, then sideways, then up again, a dozen giant church ladies sitting down. She could just see water through the trees, light brown where it flowed over rocks and almost black at the deep place where the creek branched.

  Martin watched her, triumphant. Hodge looked worried, not ready to share this place.

  She reached out to touch the closest tree. “How did they grow like this?”

  Martin rested his hand next to hers, stroking the bark as if petting a horse. “A storm hit them in nineteen aught two, when they were too big to snap back and too little to come up by the roots. They grew sideways and then back up toward the sun.”

  Hodge cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “It’s the onliest hurricane to ever make it this far west. They say it sucked the water out of every creek between here and the coast and spat it out on Spivey’s Bald.”

  Martin cupped his hands into a stirrup. “Want to climb up?”

  She let him help her up onto the tree’s broad bench, tucking in her dress. She could smell her own clean scent and Martin’s, too, homemade rose soap that lingered in her nostrils. He hopped up beside her. From up there, the grove of trees was an eerie elephant graveyard, a field of bent bones.

  “It’s so odd,” she said.

  Martin’s trousered leg touched hers. Sun filtered through the trees, dappling the grass and warming the top of her head. Down below, Hodge shifted from one foot to the other, opening and closing his hands.

  A ladybug landed on Liza’s knee. Martin reached over and gently brushed it off. “Maybe we’d grow crooked, too, if we got hit in the middle by a storm.”

  * * *

  Liza drove to that place now, reaching her destination in the dark. She pulled a flashlight from under her seat and let the slam of the truck door puncture the cool silence. Solace Fork School stood abandoned, marked for demolition, the children bused to bigger buildings of aluminum and glass. The deer path was still there. She pushed through autumn-dried blackberry thorns to the clearing. The creek that forked wide h
ere was the same creek that ran through the Owenby property. She could hear the water whispering.

  Some trees had rotted and lain down tired in the undergrowth, but some still sat. She counted them in her flashlight beam, eight calm ladies murmuring a welcome. She touched the closest one, running her fingertips over dry bark. She wondered if the ladies minded the kinks in their trunks. Did they remember the trauma that bent them, or had they gotten on with things?

  3

  Bertie

  Bertie Owenby stood at the mobile home’s kitchen door, smoking a cigarette, waiting. Lately it was hard for her to leave the trailer. The sky outside strangled her, while the close walls of the mobile home were more comfortable than skin. Her husband, James, was just the opposite. He felt squeezed when he was inside. His shoulders were as broad as their hallway, and he made the floor shake when he wrestled the bathroom’s accordion door back onto its runner.

  Bertie would stay inside all the time if she could, but her sister-in-law, Eugenia, was insisting they clean Leon’s house. She said she wanted it nice in case Leon wandered home, and she was worried that vandals or even the people helping search would break in and take Leon’s valuables. There weren’t any valuables. Eugenia was just embarrassed that other people might see how nasty Leon kept the place.

  Bertie dreaded it. When Eugenia pulled up to the trailer in the new Mercury her husband, Zeb, had bought her for their anniversary last year, her bitty self barely peeking over the steering wheel, something in Bertie just put its head down and cried. Having to go out at all was bad enough. Worse was having to spend the whole day listening to Eugenia’s critical comments about the size of Bertie’s trailer, her and James missing a week of church, or some past mistake she’d said she was sorry for a million times. She put out her cigarette and picked up her cleaning things to meet Eugenia at the car so Eugenia wouldn’t set a foot in her home. Even so, she caught Eugenia’s superior glance across the road at the house where Bertie’s parents lived.

  “How your folks doing, Bertie? I heard your daddy was ailing.”

  Bertie got in the car. Eugenia knew full well that what ailed Bertie’s daddy was the drink. “They’re fine.” She watched to make sure Eugenia didn’t back over her azalea bushes getting out of the driveway.

  A few raindrops plopped on the windshield. Eugenia turned on her wipers. “Your family is certainly blessed with longevity.”

  What Eugenia meant was, weren’t Bertie’s mama and daddy ever going to die off so Bertie and James could move into their house? Was it really the natural order of things for them to raise three children to adulthood in the single-wide they’d bought the week they married? The road opened empty in front of Eugenia’s car. Bertie felt exposed. Her fingers itched for a cigarette.

  Eugenia turned on her car radio to some preacher yelling. She pushed her silver wire-framed glasses higher on her nose. “You’ll have to help me find Ivy’s new place.”

  Ivy was James and Eugenia’s sister. Ivy’s son Steven had built the house for her more than a year ago, so it wasn’t all that new, but neither Bertie nor Eugenia commented on the strangeness of not ever having been out to visit. “James said it’s two down from Stamey’s Feed and Seed, off Old Buncombe Highway,” Bertie said.

  “I called her, and of course her directions made no sense at all. We’ll just have to look for her car.”

  At the Feed and Seed Eugenia slowed down, and they started looking. They found Ivy’s beige Pontiac parked in the front yard of a cute little yellow wood-frame house. Eugenia pulled in, and they saw Ivy wave through the screen door.

  “This house is precious.” Eugenia sounded surprised. Bertie knew she was thinking Ivy didn’t deserve such a nice place.

  “I guess Steven’s doing pretty well with his body shop. Whatever else anybody might say, he does take care of his mama,” Bertie said.

  “Humph.”

  Bertie didn’t judge Ivy the way Ivy’s own sister and brothers did, though she’d followed James’s lead all these years and not had much to do with Ivy and her children. You could say Bertie didn’t have room to finger-point at Ivy the way Eugenia did, or thought she did.

  The rain was coming down a little harder now. Ivy lumbered out of the house, wearing a large dress too thin for the cool weather and a shapeless blue sweater that had seen too many washings. She smiled the wide dreamy smile she’d worn forever. She climbed in the backseat, causing the car to rock. There they sat, a generation of Owenby women by birth and marriage.

  “What you been up to, Ivy? Still working at the Days Inn?” Eugenia said.

  “No, it got too hard on account of my knees.” Ivy raised her voice as if talking over somebody. “I do laundry for some old folks, like I did for Leon.”

  “When’s the last time you were up there to Leon’s?” Eugenia’s arms dragged the steering wheel as she turned the car around to get out of Ivy’s yard.

  “I don’t rightly know.” Ivy wiped rain off her face. She was never one for dates and times. Days and months and years didn’t seem to pass in a straight line for her the way they did for everybody else. Bertie caught herself feeling envious.

  “Leon can’t have had that much laundry to do. He always wore the same thing,” Eugenia said

  “Overalls and flannel shirts,” Ivy said.

  “We gave him a new shirt every Christmas. Zeb thought he’d come to church if he had something to wear, but he never did,” Eugenia said. “We gave him underwear, too.”

  “He wore the underwear. Men’s underwear can get right nasty,” Ivy said.

  That remark shut Eugenia up for the rest of the ride.

  They drove up the gravel road to the Owenby home place, passing cars and trucks that the searchers had parked along the road. The home place was a hundred acres. James’s daddy had built the house himself, starting with two rooms, then adding on as the family grew, until the house wandered all over its clearing. A buckled porch circled it, keeping it in check. Red clay stained its walls to waist-high. Behind the house tall poplars and other decent timber grew so thick you couldn’t tell you were at the foot of a mountain, but most of the rest of the property was worthless except for raising ticks and snakes. Only Leon had stayed on there after their daddy died. None of the other children were interested in the place. Leon had eventually put in electricity but not indoor plumbing, and an outhouse peeked from behind the house. Next to the outhouse was the shed where Leon kept his tools. Beside the shed a fenced pen held Leon’s three dogs. The dogs watched them drive up, barking a few times before going back to their own business.

  Leon’s old Chevy pickup truck sat under a tree in the yard, its dull green paint flaking. Eugenia pulled up beside it, and she and Ivy carried cleaning supplies into the house. Bertie lit a blessed cigarette on the porch to calm her nerves, looking out at the vehicles parked along the road. Her husband James’s truck was the first in line. He’d been out since dawn. Bertie tried to spot him along the ridge, but the search had moved too far off to make out any people. She exhaled, frost from her breath mingling with cigarette smoke. Rain ran off the porch roof, drumming on dead leaves and making furrows in the mud below.

  Bertie got married in front of this porch, by the steps where a butterfly bush used to be. They had the wedding at home because James’s mama, Nell Owenby, was failing so bad by then she couldn’t get out. James and his daddy carried Nell onto the porch, her arms and neck wasted thin but her belly swollen with fluid. Bertie’s parents came, her daddy not drunk for once. James’s people were there, except for Martin, who’d gone off to college, and Leon, who was supposed to be the best man but took a job at a mill down east all of a sudden right before the wedding. The service was short and plain. James had his hair cut like James Dean. He’d bought a new suit, light gray, and cleaned up his work shoes the best he could. It was a happy day, it must have been, but when Bertie thought of it now, what she remembered was the smell of urine
mixed with earth that rose up from the ground beside the butterfly bush, from years of Owenby men peeing off the porch.

  She pressed her cigarette out on the wet railing and went inside to help Eugenia and Ivy. In the short time since Leon had disappeared, the house had already grown cold and vacant smelling. She surveyed bachelor filth made worse by the sheriff’s fingerprint powder. Leon’s kitchen and living area, where he spent the most time, were the worst. Years of baked-on spills crusted the old-timey cookstove. The few pieces of furniture—a hard, stained couch, a couple of straight-back chairs, and a wooden chest—were covered with unopened junk mail, plastic bottles, dirty dishes, clothes. The only clean thing in the room was the television on its metal stand. It was a man’s house, no sign of a woman’s touch anywhere. Nothing soft to sit on. Nothing pretty to look at. When James’s mama died, his daddy had cleared every sign of her out of the house.

  A piece of yellow crime-scene tape fluttered in a draft that blew through a crack in the plank floor. Eugenia pulled the tape up and rolled it into a ball. “The dirt in here gives me the shivers.” She put the tape wad into a black plastic garbage bag and went outside to get spring water for mopping from the gravity-fed pipe behind the house. Ivy started to scrub Leon’s stove with a piece of steel wool. Bertie got out her duster to brush the fingerprint powder off things before they did the floor. She worked without talking, using the rhythm of the dusting to keep herself calm.

  Through the room’s low windows she could see Leon’s truck in the yard, rain misting its windshield. It was queer how Leon just quit driving one day. A man who had always loved gadgets and anything mechanical and who had souped up his truck with a race car engine. It took the family a while to notice he wasn’t driving anymore. If he needed to get to town he’d walk in, and there was always somebody who could carry him back home when he got ready. After a while James realized that Leon’s truck hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d parked it in his yard. He asked Leon if it was broke.