Sweet Mercy (2 page)

L
ate in the afternoon of the third day of our journey, we arrived in Mercy. We climbed out of the car stiff and weary, our clothes sticky with sweat, our ears ringing from the churning of the engine and the rattling of the tires over the roads. But even as I stepped into that sweet Ohio air, I felt at once refreshed.

I breathed deeply, glad to have arrived. As we moved from the graveled parking lot to the lodge, I listened to the happy cries coming up from the river, from the dozens of people swimming, boating, and picnicking on Marryat Island. Even the grounds around the lodge were bustling with visitors, some moving to or from the island, some strolling along the riverbank, others taking part in a game of croquet on the expanse of green lawn. I stopped just a moment to watch the game. The women looked stylish in linen chemises with matching cloches pulled low over their ears. The men wore neatly pressed slacks, cotton shirts, and straw hats or caps; one of them was pulling on a pipe. Their laughter and chatter
rose and fell like winged creatures at play. I wanted to join them, to be part of this simple pleasure.

But smiling, I turned away and moved on to the lodge. It was much the same as I remembered, though even more beautiful now because it was home. Far larger than any Victorian mansion in St. Paul, it was a mammoth two-story affair, probably the largest structure in town aside from the Mercy Milling Company up on the north side. Part fieldstone, part clapboard siding, Marryat Island Ballroom and Lodge sat enthroned on the banks of the Little Miami like the fortress I wanted it to be.

I fairly floated up to the porch where vacationers reclined in a neat row of rocking chairs. I was hardly aware of Mother's and Daddy's heavy footfalls behind me as I stepped into the expansive front hall and looked around, trying to take it all in. To the right was the dining room. Even now dinner was being served on linen tablecloths. To the left, the spacious sitting room, filled with comfortable chairs and couches, walls of books, a phonograph, a fireplace. Straight ahead was the front desk and behind that the large circular staircase leading up to the twenty or so guest rooms on the second floor.

Uncle Cy was behind the desk, facing away from the door. With the telephone handset pressed against his right ear, he spoke loudly into the mouthpiece while his left hand stayed busy hanging up room keys on the rack and sliding letters into the myriad mail slots lining the wall. I walked to the desk and waited. And listened, as he was unaware that I was there.

“That's right, Charlie, he's done it again. Plowed up Williams Street and planted oats. Four neat rows, straight as six o'clock, all the way from Third to Fifth. What's that? Another warning. Naw, that's not good enough. It's time
to talk to the solicitor. I'm telling you, Ralph has got to be prosecuted. For what? Defacing public property, for one. Ignoring the law, for another. Yeah, that's right. I know it's not a main thoroughfare, but people have got to drive their cars down that street, and that's hard to do when you've got oats growing under your wheels. If we could just get that stretch paved, this wouldn't happen.”

Uncle Cy sighed. I remembered then how, as a very young child, I thought his name was Uncle Sigh because he sighed so often. It was as though at regular intervals all the worries in the world squeezed the air right out of his chest.

“And then there's the matter of his wife's chickens,” he went on. “Yeah, the neighbors are complaining again. What? Well, how would you like it if you woke up and found Trudy Mae's chickens pecking their way through your flower bed?”

At that point, Uncle Cy turned around and saw me. He looked at me quizzically a moment as though he didn't know who I was, and I don't believe he did, till he saw Mother and Daddy standing a ways off behind me. “Listen, Charlie,” he said, the flash of recognition lighting up his eyes, “I've got to go. Yeah, we'll bring it up at the meeting tonight. All right, yeah. See you then.”

He settled the handset back in the cradle and leaned forward on the front desk with both palms down. “Drew, Rose,” he said. “And this can't be . . .” He stopped and shook his head.

I laughed. “Yes, it's me, Uncle Cy. Eve.”

“Well, I'd have never known. Listen, sorry about that.” He nodded toward the desk phone. “Town council business. I'm president this year. So hey, welcome, huh?”

He smiled and walked around the counter with one beefy
arm extended. He went to Daddy first and shook his hand, then gave Mother a hug. Turning back, he leaned forward, and I stood on tiptoe so we could exchange pecks on the cheek. He was a tall man, the tallest of the three brothers and big as a linebacker. Though he was somewhere over fifty years old, he still had a full head of hair that he combed straight back from his ruddy face. His hair was streaked with gray now, though, and he was beginning to lose his chin and gain jowls instead. Crow's feet fanned out from his eyes, and even his brows had turned gray. Time was catching up with Uncle Cy.

“Well, you made it,” he said, and while he waited for one of us to respond, the air was filled with an awkward silence. I looked at Daddy who, after three days, still held that same pinched expression I had seen reflected in the rearview mirror as we headed out of St. Paul. He didn't want to be here.

“Looks like business is good, Cy,” Daddy said at last, feigning an interested glance around the place.

“Nothing like a couple years ago,” Uncle Cy said. “Or even a year ago. People have been hit hard. But we have enough of a crowd to keep us afloat.”

While Daddy nodded, Mother asked, “How's Cora, Cy?”

Uncle Cy sighed again. “She's about the same. I've got her at the best place in the country, though. If they can't get her better, nobody can.”

“She'll get better,” Mother assured him.

“Yes.” He nodded, but his dark eyes said he wasn't sure at all. “She's been there only a month. I don't expect her back before Christmas.”

Another awkward moment followed in which I thought about Aunt Cora. I'd met her only once, at the wedding. She
was Uncle Cy's second wife, his first having died in 1919 in the final days of the great flu epidemic. They'd had no children. Uncle Cy met Cora some years later and married her in 1926. Now Aunt Cora was convalescing in a tuberculosis sanitarium at Saranac Lake in upstate New York.

I shivered at the thought of the dread disease and hoped none of the tainted air from Aunt Cora's lungs still lingered in the nooks and crannies of the lodge. Consumption would be an unwelcome guest in Paradise, and I wanted nothing of it.

“Well,” Uncle Cy rubbed his large hands together. “Let's get you settled. Have you eaten supper?”

Daddy looked toward the dining room with reluctant eyes. I knew what he was thinking, that eating Uncle Cy's food was as good as taking a handout. And that meant, to Daddy, that he was little better now than the drunks and the prostitutes down at the St. Paul Mission where he'd spent so many years helping out. I'd heard him say as much to Mother when he thought I wasn't listening, back during one of their late-night talks about whether or not to come down here after Daddy lost his job.

Before Daddy could respond to Uncle Cy's question, I jumped in and said, “We're starving, Uncle Cy. What's cooking?”

He smiled at me. “All your favorites, I bet. We'll go see, soon as we get you settled in your rooms. Where's your luggage?”

“Out in the car,” Daddy said.

“I'll have someone help you carry it in.”

We were given adjoining rooms, connected by a bath. The rooms were at the very end of a long hall. Mine was a corner
room with windows overlooking both the river in front and the side yard where the croquet game was still under way. The only true apartment in the lodge was on the ground floor in the back. That was where Uncle Cy lived, and Cora too, when she was there.

Having no kitchen of our own, we would take all our meals in the dining room, which is what we did that evening. It was a brief and solemn meal, punctuated by the small talk of two brothers who hadn't seen each other in years, and Mother, who in her own quiet way always tried to make everything right. I said little and instead satisfied my hunger with huge helpings of roast beef, boiled new potatoes, and corn on the cob. Other guests came and ate and left; their chatter merged and mingled with our own. A couple of waitresses bustled about, carrying trays of food and pouring glasses of tea and water. I knew then that all our meals would be taken in the midst of constant motion, and yet, the busyness of the room was tempered by the lazy flow of air from the open windows and the slow churning of ceiling fans overhead.

Shortly, Uncle Cy excused himself to go to his town council meeting, and when he left, I did too, called out to the island by the breeze wafting up from the river. A small steel bridge, humped like the back of a frightened cat, extended from the riverbank over the tributary to the island. I walked across, and a rush of childhood days came at me like a giant wave cresting and rolling over the shore. I welcomed them—welcomed the remembrance of that innocent time when life's greatest wonders were as simple as a shovel and a pail of pebbly sand, an hour of splashing with Mother in the cool clear water, an afternoon of rowing on the river with Daddy. Even Cassandra was friendly toward me then. She'd play with me, keeping me
entertained by twirling me around on the dance floor when the bands played in the pavilion on summer nights. Those were good days, and I embraced them now like long-lost friends. Words could not describe how glad I was to be there, where neighbors weren't fugitives, nor the local drugstore a front for a money-laundering business, where the greatest problems to be dealt with were ill-planted oats and wayward chickens, and where I wouldn't have to worry about seeing anyone sliced up by a hail of bullets the way we saw the man murdered near the St. Paul Mission.

That was the thing that haunted me most—that murder. Mother, Daddy, and I were walking downtown, on our way to serve soup at the mission, when a Lincoln sedan drove past us and slowed down. In the next moment the long black barrel of a Thompson submachine gun appeared in an open window. Shots rang out, and little sparks of flame, and a man not half a block ahead of us rose up from the sidewalk like a rag doll tossed by a child, his arms upraised as though in surrender. He seemed to hang in the air a moment in a shower of his own blood before he crumpled in a lifeless tangle on the front steps of a Jewish deli. The next moments were pandemonium—women screaming, tires squealing, two men rushing to the body to feel for a pulse and, finding none, removing their hats and shaking their heads. And I . . . I stood speechless while the final moments of my childhood slipped away. The next day, after reading about the killing in the paper, Cassandra told me that's what happened to hijackers who interfered with another man's bootleg business. I'd had nightmares about that murder ever since.

Taking a deep breath to clear my mind, I strolled along the path leading to the picnic tables and the small pebbled beach
where a section of the river was cordoned off for swimming. Dusk was settling and families were beginning to pack up their picnic baskets and head out for the night. As it wasn't the weekend, I doubted that a band would play, but that was all right; the air was filled with the night songs of crickets and tree frogs, and when I put my head back I could see the faint glow of Venus and the pale wafer of a full moon.

I was finally here and I was safe. I knew this was a safe place because the temperance movement had begun right here in Ohio. It was Ohioans who wanted the drinking to stop, all the dreadful drinking that ruined so many lives, tore apart so many families, left so many destitute. It was here in small towns that bands of women gathered and prayed in front of saloons until the owners agreed to close. Maybe something of those prayers remained, making Ohio a sacred place of sorts, protected from the evils of drink.

I'd read all about the temperance movement for the essay contest sponsored by the St. Paul chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. My essay was awarded first prize for the year 1930. By then, Prohibition in America was ten years old. I spoke glowingly of Prohibition and firmly believed everyone should keep all its laws.