Under the Mercy Trees Page 3

  “No.”

  “Then why ain’t you driving it?”

  “I got out of the notion.”

  From then on if Leon wanted to go anywhere, he’d get somebody, usually Bertie’s son, Bobby, to drive him in his own truck and give him a few dollars for his time. Leon liked riding in his own truck. Sitting in the driver’s seat of that green monster, Bobby looked like a young Leon. Bobby and Leon both favored James’s daddy, Rory Owenby, though Leon’s hair had been dark when he was young, while the hair that swirled in two long cowlicks down the sides of Bobby’s neck was dirty blond. Bertie always itched to shave it.

  Bobby acted like driving Leon around was the only work he needed. He quit his sometime job at the Tyson chicken plant and moved out of Bertie and James’s trailer to go live with his girlfriend. In a way it was a relief to have him gone, since he came home drunk most weekends and never offered to pay any rent, but without Bobby around, the silences that settled between Bertie and James left her so on edge she wanted to rip her hair out by the roots. She and James rarely talked, not about anything real, and hadn’t since Bertie left him that time, years ago. It was a mistake, and she came back after only four days, but James had treated her carefully ever since, like he was afraid she’d run off again.

  Over by the stove, Ivy whispered, “hush, now,” to nobody in particular as she scrubbed. It was typical of Eugenia to leave Bertie alone with Ivy and her craziness. Bertie walked down the short hall to where Leon slept, in the bedroom that had been his parents’. The overhead bulb was burned out, but dim light from the window streaked the wood floor. The bed in the corner was made, a faint smell of sweat rising from the covers. To Bertie’s right a rusty mirror hung above the dresser where Leon kept his toiletries. His safety razor lay beside a bowl of old water. Leon’s whiskers, gray and black, bled out of the razor onto the dresser top. Bertie picked up the razor. The handle was surprisingly warm in her hand. She pressed her finger against the blade.

  “What are you doing?” Eugenia’s accusing voice made Bertie jerk.

  “Cleaning,” she said.

  Eugenia took Leon’s razor out of Bertie’s hand. “You don’t need to mess with his things. I’ll take care of them.”

  The bad feeling that had lain in Bertie’s stomach all morning started to rise. “I wasn’t messing. You said you wanted my help.” Eugenia had no call to make her feel like a criminal. Bertie had belonged to this family for more than thirty years. She had as much right to touch Leon’s things as anybody else, more maybe.

  Eugenia set the razor back on the dresser. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just need you to finish dusting in the other room. You missed some corners.” She herded Bertie ahead of her back to the kitchen and living area.

  Ivy had wiped down the stove with paper towels. The surface gleamed. Eugenia set to work mopping the floor. When Eugenia’s back was turned, Ivy smiled at Bertie and walked over to put her big hand on Bertie’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  Bertie couldn’t tell if Ivy meant, don’t fret about the way Eugenia acts, or don’t worry about Leon, or if Ivy was sharing a broader truth her simple mind had discovered. Whatever Ivy meant, somehow it made Bertie feel better. She started moving her duster, getting her rhythm back, and they got on with their chores.

  4

  Ivy

  You’d think this house would have been full enough with the living, me and Eugenia and Bertie trying to stay out of each other’s way while we dust and scrub. On top of them I also contend with the dead, crowding with bent necks under the eaves, warming their hands by the unlit stove, arguing, spilling out the door. And the yet-to-be born, baby spirits chortling, drifting by like the bits that float behind an eyeball. Kin mostly, I’ve gathered, both past and future, though few known to me in life. The weight of them all makes the house lean north with a sigh like an overloaded tinker. The mop water in Eugenia’s bucket leans with it, threatening to spill out on the floor.

  Is it a blessing or a curse, this seeing of mine? I’ve about decided it’s neither, though it’s made me look like a fool my whole life. Mama saying, “Ivy, what in the world,” when I dipped and curved around the room as a girl, trying to avoid the ghosts on my way to set the table. I learned later to breathe deep and walk right through them. Pop’s stares when I slipped and answered a question he hadn’t heard asked. Me unable, still, to tell when a sight or sound is real to other people, not just to me. My brother James asked me once when we were young why it was that I felt bound to open my legs to every rounder between here and Lenoir. The answer is this: that sex is all smells and feeling, two things trustworthy and all of this world. Like the smells of my children, first Ivory soap and dirty diapers, then warm oil at the roots of their hair after a summer night of play, then the years the county had them when there were no smells, and I grieved that the three of them had never been real at all.

  A baby spirit floats by, laughing, her hair red and curly. She passes through Eugenia’s chest and Eugenia coughs. “I must be coming down with something.”

  “It’s just dust,” Bertie tells her. The yellow feathers on Bertie’s duster flick and dart, flick and dart.

  “Shoo,” I say under my breath to the baby spirit, shaking a throw rug at her. “We’re nobody here but old women.”

  “Speak for yourself, Ivy,” Eugenia says. “Don’t tell me you’re groaning about a little housework.”

  As each of my children was conceived I saw its spirit leaping beyond the haunches of the father, grappling past other babies for a chance at life. Before I missed a month’s bleeding I knew my sons and daughter from beginning to end. I saw Steven stocky and sweet, then a coarsened, bristled man. Trina, always a prankster in spite of want and battering. Shane, my oldest, twirling broken from a rafter in a last foster home. I catch sight of Shane sometimes now, always just behind the next doorway, ducking away from me when I try to follow.

  I take stock of the room we’re in. The old woman who was Pop’s mother, Alma, swaddled in black to her wrists, ankles, and chin, spins by the stove, heedless of Eugenia mopping around her feet. Three of her teeth have died and turned a blue paler than a robin’s egg, the only color about her. She is as hard in death as in life, the one spirit I don’t dare pass through. Her mother, the carrot-haired Missouri whose adventures I’ve heard in family tales and seen for myself, appears her favorite age of twenty-one today and huffs with impatience, waiting for the rain to stop so she can leave the house. Two old fellows share a jar of moonshine across a checkerboard. I notice Bertie sniff the air, her nose sensitive enough to detect corn whiskey even from another world. Fair-skinned toddlers play around a mouse hole that Leon never boarded up.

  Not every family member who passes on appears to me here. I don’t know why some linger and some don’t. But I wonder that Leon isn’t here, as hard as he roosted here in life. I ask the old men, “You reckon he’ll be coming soon?”

  “Who?” asks Bertie.

  “Who?” ask the old men.

  “Leon,” I say.

  “I reckon not,” one of the men says. “We ain’t got room. They’s too many of us as it is.” He spits a big gob on Eugenia’s clean floor, and I’m glad she can’t see it.

  “There’s a spot for him there in front of the television, like always.” I point.

  The man looks at me queer, pondering what I mean by television.

  Bertie and Eugenia swap looks.

  “Ivy, honey,” Eugenia says, “he might not be coming back.” She whispers to Bertie, “Poor old addled thing.”

  “I know,” I tell her. “I know it.” But I clean with one eye out the window, watching for Leon to walk up through the cattails that grow along the creek, to come in and start up a pan of hard corn bread to throw in the yard for the ghost dogs that circle and whine out there in the wet.

  5

  Martin

  Sober. The sun skirted cloud tops and
pinned Martin to his window seat. He was brave for the stewardess, declined small bottles, heeded signs not to smoke. He prayed to his estranged higher power that the bruise on his face had healed enough that Liza wouldn’t notice it.

  The flight attendant came by, offering tiny bags of peanuts. The man seated next to Martin was asleep. “I’ll give him his when he wakes up,” Martin said, taking two bags. When the flight attendant was safely down the aisle, he pocketed both. He picked up the plastic cup that had held his ration of ginger ale and tipped an ice cube into his mouth. Smells settled in the cabin’s circulated air, a mix of perfumes, peanuts, unbrushed teeth, the banana sandwich the woman across the aisle had produced from her carry-on bag. He looked out the window. The plane was flying west over North Carolina’s flat Piedmont toward the mountains. Through holes in the clouds he could see the land below. Towns in this part of the state respected one another’s space, spreading themselves out like strangers at a picnic ground, each centered on a miles-wide quilt of tobacco fields and curing barns.

  * * *

  In August 1954 he had taken a Trailways bus out of the mountains into the Piedmont, feeling the heat rise and wrap itself around his neck. Until that morning, when he’d climbed on the bus with his clothes and books packed into a mildewed duffel bag Leon had brought back from the war, Martin had never been out of Willoby County. He pressed his face to the grimy window. The bus zigzagged between stops, stitching a ragged line along patched and broken two-lane. An old woman in the seat behind him gave him a boiled egg, then moved forward to pester the driver. Diesel exhaust filled his nostrils, the smell of adventure.

  The bus depot was in Whelan, the closest town to Solace Fork big enough to host a bus station. It was Liza who took him to the depot that day, one last ride in the Sunliner convertible that had elevated them to royalty as seniors at Solace Fork School. Liza’s father, Dr. Vance, who bought her the car, also gave Martin the money to attend college at Chapel Hill. Martin’s own father thought education was useless and had disappeared into the fields that morning without saying good-bye. His mother had felt too poorly to come with him to the station.

  “Do you mind your family not seeing you off?” Wind rolled Liza’s hair along her neck as she drove.

  “No.” His answer was honest. Greed for newness had banished fear, and he couldn’t get out of Willoby County fast enough.

  At the depot, Martin handed his duffel bag to the bus driver to throw into the underbelly of the bus, then turned and hugged Liza.

  “You’ll come over to Greensboro to see me at college, won’t you?” she said when they separated. She blinked back tears.

  Martin touched a finger to the corner of her eye. “Now, don’t start that.”

  She tried to smile. “I know.”

  He kissed her good-bye. Her lips tasted of mint folded into tea and ice cream churned on a hot day, the slightest lacing of rock salt.

  From the bus station in Chapel Hill, he walked north to Mrs. Bowen’s boarding house, where Dr. Vance had lived as a student thirty years before. The doctor had written and secured him a room. The house, like the landlady herself, had not aged well. Gray paint peeled off the wide porch. Bricks had worked themselves free and fallen into weedy flowerbeds. Young men who would once have taken a place at Mrs. Bowen’s table now lived more comfortably in university dorms. The only other residents were two old men, retired salesmen with no families, and Mrs. Bowen’s own sister. In Martin’s room, water stains mapped continents on the ceiling, but he didn’t mind. To have his own room, after sweltering with snoring brothers in the triangular space under his father’s tin roof, was a luxury.

  On campus, he joined a swell of students moving toward the gym for registration. The young men were confident, dressed in new khakis and saddle oxfords. The girls wore clothing in textures he had never seen before, linen and cashmere. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch them. He took his place in a line of students picking up course cards. Two men ahead of him were returning from Korea on the GI Bill. Martin felt like a baby beside them. He tightened his jaw and stood up straighter.

  Once registered, he wandered toward tables set up along the gym walls, where student groups advertised for recruits. A thin, plain girl with a name tag that said “Margaret” manned the table for the Carolina Playmakers, the university’s drama group. She eyed him as he approached. “Actor, right?”

  “Playwright.” At eighteen, with life stretching before him in all its promise, authorship of a few scenes acted out in the yard of a four-room schoolhouse was enough to make him think he was somebody.

  “We do need writers. Especially writers who know how to use a hammer and paintbrush.” Margaret pushed a sign-up sheet toward him and told him the date of the group’s first meeting.

  At dinner that evening, Mrs. Bowen gushed on about Dr. Vance. “The most intelligent young man I ever had stay here. And such good manners, too.” Her eyes flitted to Martin’s elbows, which were planted on the table. He moved them. The two old salesmen and Mrs. Bowen’s sister ate without talking, their dentures clicking in unison.

  Mrs. Bowen put more mashed potatoes on Martin’s plate without his asking. “And his daughter. What’s her name? Elizabeth?”

  “Liza,” he said.

  “Beautiful girl.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “I almost forgot.” Mrs. Bowen got up from the table and rifled through a pile of mail on a sideboard. She handed him a package wrapped in brown paper. “Dr. Vance sent this for you.”

  The old people stopped chewing, watching Martin. He didn’t want to open the gift in front of them, but it seemed he had no choice. He pulled off the paper. Inside was a dictionary, so new the thin pages stuck together. A note in Dr. Vance’s handwriting said, “Something every playwright needs.” Mrs. Bowen beamed. “Didn’t I tell you the doctor was thoughtful?”

  Martin excused himself and went upstairs to his room. He unpacked his few other books and placed them on a shelf above the room’s scratched desk. A Bible from his mother, worn copies of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! stolen from the county library and never missed, and a crisp new copy of Eugene O’Neill’s collected works. His high school teacher, Mr. Samuels, had called the O’Neill collection a school prize for the play Martin wrote as his final English paper, but Martin knew Mr. Samuels had paid for it with his own money. Martin put Dr. Vance’s dictionary with the other books and arranged and rearranged them, imagining how they would look to new friends coming to visit him, the conclusions they would draw about him from the titles. When he was satisfied with the display, he opened his billfold and took out the registrar’s receipt for the $123 he had paid for his first semester’s tuition and fees, and tucked it into the Bible, preserving it like a holy thing.

  * * *

  The Fasten Seat Belt sign above Martin’s head dinged twice, and the plane lurched under his feet as the pilot began the approach to the Willoby County airport. Foliage and buildings gained definition as they descended. The plane turned and the mountains came into view, red and gold leaves vibrant on the trees near the base but already patchy at the higher elevations, where strands of gray cloud settled on low peaks. Martin’s throat tightened with loss. Dr. Vance had thought him a man of honor and promise. Martin was glad the doctor had died before he could realize that Martin had failed him.

  6

  Bertie

  The day after cleaning Leon’s house with Eugenia and Ivy, Bertie sat at her kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, waiting for James to come home for supper. She had a meatloaf in the oven. The trailer was clean, every piece of bric-a-brac dusted, afghans lined up straight with the backs of the chairs and sofa. She had clipped all the articles about Leon out of the paper and set them aside to save for the family, and made her weekly calls to her grown daughters, who both lived near the coast. She was glad not to have to go anywhere.

  She expected
James to come home and eat, then head outside to escape the press of the trailer, finding excuses to stay out as long as he could, piddling with his tools and fixing small things that didn’t need to be fixed. She and James used to sit in the living room after supper and watch MacGyver or The Golden Girls on television, but they couldn’t watch together anymore because he had to turn the volume up so high. The lathes at the furniture plant had sanded down his hearing. Giant lathes that fashioned bedroom suites named after some French king, with carved mahogany pineapples on the bedposts. The company offered employees a discount, which was a joke. The bed alone was bigger than their living room and so heavy it would make the trailer floor separate from the walls.

  She heard the wheels of James’s truck kick gravel and the engine turn off. She waited for the sound of his door opening, his step on the little porch, the pause while he took off his boots, something he did for her to keep mud off her floors. When she didn’t hear those things, she got up and went outside and saw James gripping his steering wheel, his seat belt still on.

  He had brought home Leon’s dogs.

  Leon never named his dogs, just called them “dog” or “pup.” When one died he got another. Every day since they’d discovered Leon gone, James had fed Leon’s dogs at the home place, where he’d penned them up so they wouldn’t bother the searchers. James treated it as temporary, as if Leon would be coming back to rouse the dogs out of the dirt and sit again with them on his porch, picking ticks off their necks. Now the dogs panted softly in the back of James’s truck, just waiting for the next thing the way dogs do.

  Bertie hurried around and opened the driver’s-side door. James looked terrible. The muscles of his face looked like they were about to turn loose, about to let his eyes and nose and mouth slide right off like candle wax, on down his front. She undid his seat belt and took his arm to make him get out. “Leave the dogs in the truck,” she said. “They’ll be all right for a minute.”