Under the Mercy Trees Read online

  He turned around and smiled. The ear pieces of his gold wire-framed glasses left red marks on both sides of his head. “Good morning. My name is Robert Samuels.” His accent was neutral, not southern. He sounded like the people on the radio news.

  He was new and they could have tested his boundaries, but they didn’t. None of the seniors were troublemakers, except Martin when provoked, and the younger students took their lead from the seniors. Or it may simply have been that Mr. Samuels exuded authority.

  He took the roll, staring at each student as he or she answered to memorize the name. Then he put his roll book down. “Today, class, we’re going on a hike.”

  The students exchanged looks. Some didn’t have shoes, or if they did, the soles had worn through or separated from the shoes like flapping mouths. Mr. Samuels examined their feet. “A walk, then, not a hike. A half mile at the most. Bring a pencil and a piece of paper.” He picked up a canvas rucksack from beside his desk.

  They lined up and followed him outside. It was the best kind of August day, not too humid, the sky a pure blue, the air so clear you felt you could see every little thing. Mr. Samuels led them down the deer path in the direction of the secret clearing. Liza worried that he had discovered it, but he took them left through the woods. They came out on a dirt road and walked along it until they reached a meadow surrounded by tall pines, former farmland. A tumbled chimney rose from blackberry thorns, the only memory of some family’s homestead. Mr. Samuels led them over grass to a small spring. He knelt down, cupped his hands, and drank. “Have some water,” he invited. “Be careful not to stir up the mud.”

  “It might pizon us, Mr. Samuels,” a ninth-grade boy said.

  “I had some Saturday and I’m still here,” Mr. Samuels said.

  Liza and Martin went to the stream and drank. The water was perfect, worth the risk of contamination.

  After everyone drank, Mr. Samuels led them farther into the meadow. “Stop here.” They looked around, wondering what he had brought them to see.

  “Pair up,” he said. Martin moved closer to Liza, leaving Hodge to look around for a partner. Mr. Samuels pulled a pocketknife and a skein of brown yarn out of his canvas satchel and began cutting lengths about three feet long, handing one to each pair. “Make a circle with your yarn. Then sit down and observe. Write down everything you see inside your circle, every type of flora and fauna, every mineral. Don’t disturb anything. The couple with the most impressive list at the end of a half hour will win a prize.”

  Younger students began running around, looking for the most diverse patch. Liza looked at Martin. “Do you have a preference?”

  “Somewhere soft to sit.”

  They walked over to the meadow’s edge and draped their yarn in an oblong around an anthill.

  “Can we count every ant?” Martin said.

  “Start observing,” she said.

  They peered at their little patch of ground and grass. Liza served as secretary. “Ant. Spiderweb. Wild onion. Grass.”

  “Dirt,” said Martin. “Stinkweed. More grass.”

  Mr. Samuels walked around the meadow, checking on each pair’s scientific methodology. When his back was turned, Martin plopped down, rear end first, inside their circle. “Observe me, Liza.”

  “You’re squashing my flora and fauna,” she said. He scrambled out before Mr. Samuels turned around.

  The world inside the circle seemed to grow bigger as they examined it, and louder, teeming. Blades of grass bent as insects crawled up them on their way to nowhere. Indignant ant scouts came out of the red hill and shook their little fists. A small clumsy beetle bumped up against the yarn enclosure and ran in a panicked circle until he reached the break and escaped.

  “Stupid fellow,” Martin said.

  Liza listed the rocks poking out of the dirt, some brown, some crystal white. Clover, the edges nibbled by rabbits.

  Mr. Samuels came over with his field guide and read their list over Liza’s shoulder. He fingered the tall weed flowering white in the middle of their circle. “Now, what are you calling this?”

  “Stinkweed,” Martin said.

  “Ah. Daucus carota. Wild carrot. Poetically known as Queen Anne’s lace. True stinkweed is something else altogether.”

  “It does stink, though. If you smell it for too long it’ll give you a headache,” Martin said.

  “Thank you for the warning. And what is this? We don’t have these in Ohio, where I’m from.” Mr. Samuels squatted and hooked two fingers under the pinkish purple blooms of a small fuzzy-leafed plant, as if he were lifting its chin.

  “We call it shepherd’s whistle.” Liza pulled off one of the tiny, tube-shaped flowers, bit the end off and squeezed a drop of nectar onto her tongue. “Try it.”

  Mr. Samuels copied her. “Very nice. The leaves look like something in the mint family.” He opened his field guide and began flipping pages. “Here we go. Henbit. A weed introduced from Europe. Latin name Lamium amplexicaule.” He showed them the picture. “But I like shepherd’s whistle better. Thank you for teaching me the local name.”

  Hodge called over, “How many things y’all got?”

  “It’s quality, not quantity, that counts,” Mr. Samuels called back.

  “I’m waiting for a rabbit to come out of this hole,” Hodge said. The younger boy who was his partner got up and went searching for more interesting things to drop into their circle.

  “That’s cheating,” Martin said.

  “You can’t import objects,” Mr. Samuels said. “Just write down what’s already there.”

  Over to their left, Liza heard Betty, the slow Gaddy sister, observe, “Bird doo.”

  Mr. Samuels was still crouched over Liza and Martin’s circle. He poked at a piece of quartz embedded in the earth inside the circle, then pried it out of the ground.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to disturb anything,” Martin said.

  Mr. Samuels held the rock out on the flat of his hand. He had the callus of a writer on the inside of his middle finger, but his palm was hard. He was a man who worked as well as studied. “Look.”

  They looked. The rock was an Indian arrowhead.

  Martin raised his eyebrows, asking permission to pick it up. Mr. Samuels nodded. He held perfectly still, as if inviting a wild bird to feed from his hand. From where Liza sat she could see the vein in Mr. Samuel’s neck pulsing faster than it should have. Martin took the arrowhead and held it up, testing its sharpness. Sunlight shone through the thin edges. “That’s a nice one.” He handed it back to the teacher.

  “Do you find many of them around here?” Mr. Samuels said.

  “Depends on the place. One of my daddy’s fields turns one or two up every time we till.”

  Hodge gave up waiting for his rabbit and came over to look. “We find some every summer in the creek.”

  “What do you do with them?” Mr. Samuels said.

  “Skip ’em in the water. They make good skipping rocks.”

  “Next time you find one, bring it to me instead of skipping it.” Mr. Samuels pocketed the arrowhead.

  “Does that mean we win the prize?” Martin said.

  Mr. Samuels let the class vote. Liza and Martin lost to a team who put their yarn around a half-eaten frog. The winners got horehound candy to suck.

  On the walk back, a boy grabbed the Gaddy twins’ list and began making fun of Betty Gaddy’s bird doo. “Stop it,” Mr. Samuels said sharply. “Miss Gaddy did exactly as I asked. Her observation of avian feces was entirely appropriate.” He reached in his pocket and handed her a piece of candy. Betty Gaddy had never heard praise from a teacher before. Her face turned a mottled red. She walked back to school sucking her candy, not looking left or right, her shoulders straighter than usual.

  Liza and Martin fell back. “What do you think of him?” Liza said.

  Up ahead, Mr.
Samuels walked beside Betty Gaddy, talking to the students around him, pointing out plants along the side of the road. Afternoon sun turned his hair a dark gold. Martin studied him.

  “Well?” she said.

  He looked over at her, as if he’d forgotten she was there, then grinned. “Good,” he pronounced.

  * * *

  Now in the dusty classroom, Martin traced a finger over faint images that had been erased from the chalk board. He caught Liza looking at him. “What are you thinking about?”

  She laughed. “Betty Gaddy.”

  “Good old Betty.” Martin slacked his jaw in a perfect imitation of Betty.

  “Don’t be cruel.” Mr. Samuels never made fun. Liza appreciated that now, the temptation to single out one student to torment. She had seen her colleagues do it, choose one irritating, unpopular student to pick on, reaping the reward of having the other students laugh with you. Eye-roll about him or her in the teachers’ lounge. All the others will love you, only one will hate you. In memory of Mr. Samuels she was careful not to do that.

  She eased out of the desk and stood up.

  Martin reached up to the top of the chalkboard, where a map was rolled up like a window shade. “I bet that’s the map they had when we were here.”

  “Probably.”

  He grabbed the bottom of the map and pulled it down with a rip of vinyl, then screamed when something flew out of it. Liza jumped back. A small brown bat hurled itself at the water-stained ceiling, then at the chalkboard, then at Martin. Martin ducked and covered his head. “Jesus!” The bat slammed into a cracked window and dropped to the floor, stunned.

  “Don’t touch it! It might have rabies.” Liza made sure she stayed back several feet.

  “Thank you, teacher. I was going to pick it up and give it CPR.” Martin grabbed a decayed cardboard box from a corner and put it over the bat. “I thought their sonar was supposed to keep them from running into things.”

  “We must have panicked him. There the poor thing was, curled up between Ceylon and Basutoland, minding its own business. Look at all the bat droppings under the map. He must have lived here a while.”

  The bat came to and started thumping against the sides of the box. Martin looked at her. “What do we do now?”

  She started laughing. She couldn’t help it. “You should have seen your face when that thing flew out.”

  Martin started laughing, too. “Scared the shit out of me.”

  The bat hit the side of the box hard enough to shake it. Liza and Martin both jumped, then got even more tickled at themselves. Martin had to lean against the windowsill. It had been a long time since Liza had heard him belly laugh.

  “Oh, Lord.” He got his breath and wiped his eyes. “I can’t leave him under the box. He’ll get bulldozed.”

  She went and picked up the desk lid that leaned against the wall. “If we slide this under the box, you can carry him outside.”

  “I can carry him outside?”

  “It’s a man’s job,” she said sweetly.

  They maneuvered the wooden desk lid under the box without letting the bat escape, and Martin lifted it up. He carried it toward the door, like a waiter carrying a tray.

  She followed him out onto the little porch. “I’ll just stay here while you take him into the woods.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  He carried the box out into the schoolyard, to the worn place at the edge of the woods where the deer path began. His body was as trim as when they were teenagers, arms wiry, back strong. Liza wished he still were that boy and would turn around and call out an invitation for her to walk with him to their clearing of twisted trees.

  * * *

  After school the day Mr. Samuels assigned them the yarn circles, Liza went swimming with Martin and Hodge in the creek near the clearing. It was the perfect place to swim. The creek was less than fifteen feet across, but where it forked it was four to five feet deep, deep enough to play in, with a gentle current that pulled at their legs as the water debated whether to flow left or right. The water was freezing. Long grass softened the bank. The warped hardwoods screened them from anyone walking through. Younger trees, wild cherry and mulberry, bent over the water, some trailing their fingers in it. In warm weather, Liza and the boys went there whenever they could sneak away. Having no mother meant Liza got to do what she pleased. The first time she swam there, her body was straight and long legged. By the beginning of their senior year, a woman’s curves showed under her modest bathing suit, and Martin and Hodge had hair on their chests.

  When they got there that afternoon, she and Martin went right into the water, heads under, to take the sting out of the cold. Hodge stepped in up to his ankles, then stopped, with his arms crossed over his chest. His belly, painfully white, stuck out over the band of his cutoff dungarees.

  “Come on in, Hodge. It’s not going to get any warmer.” She blew water out of her nose and turned over on her back to float.

  “Didn’t seem this cold last time.” Hodge ventured out a little farther but stopped before the drop-off, the water now up to his shins.

  “Get in or I’ll pull you in,” Martin said.

  Hodge worked up his nerve and finally eased in up to his shoulders but kept his hair dry.

  “Get your head wet, Hodge,” Martin said.

  “Naw, I gotta leave soon. I told the preacher I’d help him set up for the revival this evening. I don’t need wet hair.”

  “Another revival?” Liza and her father went to the Episcopal church in Whelan. Things Baptist fascinated her. “Didn’t you just have a revival?”

  “Yeah, Hodge, how many times you gonna get saved?” Martin said.

  Hodge was too good-natured to take offense. “Oh, Lord, save me from these heathens.”

  They paddled around until Hodge said he had to go. He got out, shook himself like a dog, and went behind a tree to change into dry overalls. He emerged and walked to the edge of the water to wring out his cutoffs. “Come by the house later if your daddy will let you,” he said to Martin. Hodge rarely got to spend time with Martin without Liza.

  “Yeah.” Martin didn’t sound hopeful. Once he got home his father would put him to work.

  “Bye, Liza,” Hodge said.

  “Enjoy your revival.” She lifted her toes out of the water in front of her.

  Hodge turned and walked down the path that led back to the school. “Pray for our souls,” Martin called after him, and swam over to Liza. “Are you getting too cold?”

  “No.”

  He dove down to the creek bottom. She leaned back against tree roots that stuck out into the water, letting her legs float on the water’s surface in front of her, her eyes half-closed. Martin surfaced, holding a handful of the rich gray clay that lay beneath the sand on the creek bottom. He dribbled some of it onto her bare thigh. It beaded where it landed, like mercury from a broken thermometer. She gave him a look and closed her eyes.

  “Mr. Samuels seems all right.” Martin let more clay squeeze from his fist to her leg.

  She opened her eyes and lowered her legs into the water to wash the mud off. “He’s bound to be better than Miss Yates.” Miss Yates, the woman who had taught them since the eighth grade, had left to marry a lawyer in Asheville. “I feel like I hardly learned anything last year, she spent so much time scolding the younger kids. We need somebody who can get us ready for college.”

  “College,” Martin said. “Not sure I’ll be able to go.”

  “Of course you’ll go, silly.” She lifted her feet out of the water and put them on his chest and pushed him over backward. He came up sputtering. She stood up from her nest in the tree roots, giggling.

  “I’ll get you for that.” He dove under and grabbed her by the ankles, tipping her over. He came up and she started to run away, in slow motion, squealing when he grabbed her around the waist. The water lubric
ated their bodies, so that every touch was slick, his forearm along her rib cage, his hand on her hip, her shoulder against his chest. They made excuses for more, pushing each other, wrestling.

  “Hey,” she said. “Let me get on your back. I think I can reach those grapes.” She pointed to a wild muscadine vine that hung five feet above the water, clinging like a parasite to a tree branch.

  “Get on.”

  She climbed on his back and wrapped her chilled legs around his torso. “Not high enough.” She hooked her right leg over his shoulder, then her left, so that she rode on his neck. She could feel her pubic bone against the back of his head as she stretched to reach the grapes. His hands rested on her thighs. He looked up at her. She moved so that he could see the curve of her breasts under her conservative bathing suit, the white underside of her arm. She tugged off part of the vine. The grapes weren’t quite ripe, their taut skin black with a sheen of green. She looked down at Martin, her left hand resting on the top of his head. “Take us over to the bank.” He waded over, holding her lower legs to steady her. Her body glided against his as she slid off his back.

  “You weigh a ton.” He lay back on the grass, pretending to be exhausted. His chest was muscular, a man’s chest.

  “Your reward.” She held a grape over his face and lowered it to his mouth. He wrapped his lips around it, popping the skin with his teeth to suck out the fruit, swallowing the seeds. She dabbed his lower lip with her little finger. “Grape juice.” She leaned over him. “I don’t think I got it all.” Her wet hair fell in a slow curl in front of her shoulders. She leaned in closer, until her hair touched his chest. She kissed him, licking the grape juice off his lower lip. His lips were full and soft. She could feel her pulse all over her body.