Under the Mercy Trees (6 page)

“It's cold as hell,” Martin said happily, blowing on his hands.

Deke pulled a flask from his coat pocket and offered it to him. “This'll warm you up.”

Martin took a swallow, the unfamiliar taste of Scotch burning his throat and then, as promised, warming him through. He took another swig and handed the flask back to Deke. Their fingers touched briefly. Deke seemed unperturbed by the cold. Compared to Korea, Martin supposed, tonight was balmy.

At the intersection of Franklin Street and Airport Road, the world came to life. Two squads of fraternity boys hurled snowballs at each other while their girlfriends squealed on the sidelines. Martin felt like dancing. Instead he rehashed the performance. Deke listened, tolerant.

“Margaret really clinched that final scene.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Deke agreed.

“I should send flowers to her and Stoney to thank them for not screwing up my work.”

“Hey, what about your director?” Deke cuffed him on the back of the head and tugged at his hair. The touch made Martin burn all over. He unbuttoned his coat to let cold air blow in.

The moon and streetlights skimmed white and yellow light across the snow. Martin couldn't help himself. He took off running, testing how far he could slide in the snow without losing his balance. He skidded in front of a car in chains moving slowly up the hill. The driver swore at him. He ran farther, gaining speed in icy tire tracks in the middle of Franklin Street. He heard another car crawl up behind him. He skated in front of it, swerving back and forth, ignoring its honking horn until someone yelled, “Stop! Police!” He slumped to his knees in the snow and turned around. A police car. He climbed to his feet and dusted himself off. Deke walked up behind the patrolman, calmly smoking a cigarette.

“What's your problem, son? You want to get yourself arrested?” The policeman was livid.

Martin metamorphosed into the picture of prep school politeness. “No, sir. I apologize, sir.”

“Is he with you?” the cop asked Deke.

Deke, unflustered, tossed his cigarette in the snow. “I'm afraid so.”

“Well, make sure your friend stays out of the street or I'll arrest him. We've got enough going on tonight. We don't need this aggravation.”

Deke took Martin's arm. “I'll see that he gets home.”

“I apologize again, sir.” Martin bobbed his head in a little bow that stopped just short of insolence. When the police car had driven out of sight, he tore away from Deke and sprinted down the sidewalk, howling at the top of his lungs. In front of the Carolina Theatre he skidded into a snowbank and lay still, gathering his breath, playing dead, wanting attention.

Deke reached him and nudged him with his foot. “Up.”

Martin kept his eyes shut, his face serene.

Deke sighed. “You asshole.” He bent and grabbed Martin's forearm, his strength surprising, and hauled Martin to his feet. Martin tried to run again, for fun, but Deke's grasp was too tight. Deke spun him around. Their faces were inches apart. Breath steamed between them. Deke grabbed Martin's numb ears and pulled him close, giving him a rough shake.
“Shape up!”
Their cheeks touched. Stubble on Deke's face scraped Martin's skin, intimate as a kiss. Martin's breath caught and he leaned in, wanting to feel the scrape again, wanting to press his body against Deke's, for everyone else on Franklin Street to disappear and leave them alone in the snow.

“We're going to my place,” Deke said in his ear. He shoved Martin away from him.

Martin would have followed him anywhere.

10

Ivy

The day after the meeting with the sheriff, early, I drive up to the home place. It is just light. Frost covers spiderwebs on the ground, turning them into little silver tents. The searchers have all gone and won't be back. I walk around to the side of the house to Mama's garden. I call it hers though she's been dead these many years because her plants still thrive around its edges. Irises and day lilies that will come up in spring in colors you can't get anymore, a country rose that puts out a smell far bigger than its tight, thorny flowers, a quince bush whose knobby apples look like people's faces. Maybe her plants do best when they're ignored, like Mama herself. I've come up to harvest Leon's vegetables. No sense in wasting them. The garden is a mess. Squash and pumpkins have jumped their rows. Greens have gone to seed and potatoes to black. One stalk of corn still holds its head above the weeds. I'll gather what's left and spend my day cutting the bad spots into my sink.

This garden is where I sat with Shane when I was eighteen and he was nine months old, the first time the state came to take him. Sat with him on that rock over there, enjoying the delicious, melted-crayon smell of his little old dirty head. I sang his favorite song in a whisper, the riddle song. When he yawned and stretched, I yawned and stretched. The sun was warm on our hair and the rock cool beneath.

Old Alma hobbles out the side door of the house and steps off the porch to join me. Without a word she bends to pick squash, dropping them in one of the baskets I've brought, not as a favor but because work is her habit. I keep quiet, grateful for the help. I try to make my two hands work as smooth as hers, one over the other, hardly rustling the leaves that grow around the squash as she twists and plucks.

I hid my pregnancy for the longest time. Eugenia was the one who found me out. She wasn't living at home then; she got married as soon as she could to get out of the house, but she liked to come back and remind me that she was a grown-up and I was still a child. Mama had measured me for a new dress and took her time sewing it. By the time she had me try it on to fit, it didn't. Eugenia was at the house that day. She took a long look at my belly. “Mama, she's pregnant!” Mama chased me around the room, whipping me with the end of her measuring tape. When she calmed down she decided I could stay.

I stand up now to ease knees that hurt already. Missouri comes outside, the young woman in bloom she prefers to be. She stays on the porch. Our labor doesn't tempt her. “Law, daughter,” she says to Alma. “Save the work for the living. We did our bit.”

Squash falls from air to ground, and Alma is on the porch now, too, churning butter in a rusty churn. She turns the wheel harder and harder as cream stiffens against the dasher. “You never did your bit.” Her old face is sour under her white cap. Her three blue teeth glisten when she sneers.

I leave them to bicker. I finish the squash and turn up earth to hunt potatoes.

The social worker came out one time before they took him. I know who called Social Services on me, a girl at the glove factory who didn't like me because my production was higher than hers. I kept to myself at work, didn't socialize. You couldn't really talk to anybody anyhow with the machines so loud. I worked alone at my station, sewing thumbs on gloves as they came off the line, so many per hour. Once in a while I had company, ghost men missing their work, a bored Missouri with nothing better to do, Alma looking for Missouri so she could nag. Sometimes Alma chased Missouri around the plant floor or up among the metal beams of the factory's high ceiling. I tried to ignore them, but Missouri in particular won't be ignored. If I tried, she would stick her hand in my machine and mess it up, or smear grease on the gloves, so sometimes I had to talk to her a little bit, just out the side of my mouth. And at least two times I know that girl, Wanda Harper, saw me talking to the air. She didn't say anything, until I had Shane. Then she, I'm sure it was her, called Social Services to report the crazy woman had a baby.

First the social worker made a home visit, driving up into the yard on a Saturday afternoon. I wasn't smart enough to be wary. She convinced me they came to check on everybody's babies. Mama was out in the fields when the lady came, or maybe she would have stepped in and made me keep my mouth shut. The social worker seemed so nice. She asked about Shane, what I fed him and whether Mama minded caring for him while I was at work. I told her what a good baby he was. Then she steered the talk around to my hearing voices. I was so young and dumb, the way she asked it, she made it seem like it was nothing queer to hear voices nobody else could hear, or see people nobody else could see. I was so happy to find another human being who understood what that was like. I told her about the ghosts I talked to. She went away that day and wrote up a report with the word “schizophrenic” in it. The next time she came back, she had the law with her.

Now I know better. Now when somebody hears me talking, I just tell them I'm bad to say things to myself, and they leave me alone.

Up on the porch, the door behind Alma and Missouri cracks open a wedge. My son Shane lurks behind it. I recognize the red and blue of the nylon windbreaker he wore the night they cut him down.

“I could have cared for you,” I say across the garden rows, loud enough for him to hear. “I tried.”

He shuts the door.

Martin was still a boy at home when they came for Shane. I'd have thought that even if Mama didn't love me enough, she would love Martin enough not to let that happen in front of him. He was fourteen then and loved the baby. He danced Shane around the room until Shane fairly shrieked with glee. He made up stories for Shane, and Shane seemed to listen.

They came in a sheriff's patrol car, the deputy and the same social worker. I was so comfortable there in the garden with Shane on my lap that I didn't get up. Pop talked to them first, then Mama went over. Then they all walked around to where I was. The social worker pointed to me, and the deputy handed me some papers.

“What's this?” I said.

“Emergency custody order.” He may as well have spoke Greek, though I did later learn the language of Social Services. “We're going to have to take your child, ma'am. You'll have a hearing at the courthouse next week to see if you can get him back.”

Some moments in life can still make you feel sick when you turn your mind to them, even years later.

I looked to Mama and Pop. Pop was a fierce man, but the social worker and the deputy, so official, had cowed him. “Go along with them there, Ivy,” he said. Mama didn't say anything.

“You can't have him.” I stated the fact. I slid off the rock and backed toward the house with Shane. The papers fluttered away into the vegetable beds. Martin had stepped out on the side porch behind me. He let me in the door, and I ran for Mama and Pop's room, the only one that locked.

I could hear the deputy trying to reason with Martin to let him past. Martin kept saying, “No, sir.” I believe he spread himself out and grabbed both sides of the doorframe. The deputy didn't want to touch a boy to pry his fingers off the jamb. I locked the bedroom door and held Shane close. Oh, he was so warm in my arms. Even his pee smelled good. I tucked the ends of his blanket up under him.

“Miss Owenby, don't make this hard. I don't want that baby getting hurt,” the deputy called.

“You're not taking my baby!” My shriek woke Shane up, but he didn't cry, yet. I heard the deputy struggle with Martin. Then the social worker was outside the bedroom door, she must have come in the front. “Ivy, you need to cooperate or it'll go worse for you.” How could it go worse?

The deputy got by Martin and started kicking the door. Shane began to cry at the noise. The lock on the door was just a piece of wood. The kicking splintered it, and the deputy fell into the room. Martin was still after him, grabbing the man's muscled arms, jumping on his back. “Leave her alone!”

The deputy got free of Martin and grabbed Shane out of my arms. The blanket Shane was wrapped in unrolled, and the man nearly dropped him. Shane and I both screamed. I tried to take him back, but the deputy held him high over his head and made for the door. He handed Shane off to the social worker, and she ran to the patrol car while the deputy blocked me and Martin. Mama and Pop stood as shadows and let it all happen.

When the social worker was in the car, the deputy abandoned us and ran for the car himself. He got in and locked the door before I could get there. I banged on his window and ran after them on our dirt road, choking on dust, until they disappeared from sight. Then I sat down in the road and howled. Martin was the only one to come and touch my shoulder.

I find I am crying now, over Leon's vegetables. I have nothing to wipe my face with. Missouri, ever one to spot weakness, calls over from the porch, “Don't blubber like that, girl. So you weren't fit to mother. It's past.”

The two pieces of wood that top Alma's churn bounce violently. “What do you know of mothering? You were no mother to us, barn cat, rising up to leave when your kittens drew close to nurse.” Her words age Missouri, dull her bright hair, draw her mouth up tight. Ghost children twirl around her on the porch, grabbing her skirts, harassing, asking for this and that. She puts her hands to her ears and screams them away, flings them off into the yard with a great shrug of her shoulders. “Go!” The children disappear, leaving Missouri as young as before but frazzled. She advances on Alma, small fists knotted, unpeeling one finger to slice across the air in front of her daughter's face. “Do not!”

Alma knocks the top off the churn, grabs a handful of fresh butter and throws it in Missouri's face. She wipes the rest across Missouri's dress front, ruining fabric.

“Oh!” Missouri rears back to slap.

I yell, “Stop!”

They stop.

“Be ashamed.” I wipe my nose on my sleeve.

They aren't done. Alma spits at Missouri, “Three children, with three different fathers, nary a one named.” Alma forgets that I myself repeated this bit of family history.

Missouri calms. She licks new butter off her fingers. “My name was as good as theirs. Ain't no man worth letting move into your house. Why keep just one when you can have whichever one pleases you on a given day?” She gives herself a shake, and her frock is clean of butter. “Choosing one surely never did you any good.”

I turn back to the vegetables.

After the law came with the social worker and took Shane screaming out of my arms, I heard his cry in everything. Running water, radios, tires on gravel, a dog's bark miles away. I nearly lost my job at the glove factory because I kept stopping my sewing machine to listen.

They did finally let him come home, three months later, to Mama, not to me. He had to learn all over again who I was. Mama could have ignored Social Services' instructions. Instead she took them to heart. She wouldn't leave me alone with Shane. She watched everything I did with him. When the social worker came to check, Mama talked about me like I wasn't there, like she was Shane's mother. I sometimes think Shane must have remembered that time. I want to explain, but he won't come near enough to me now to listen. I didn't really get him back until Mama got sick and wasn't strong enough to keep him from me anymore.

The side porch door moves a little on its hinges. I wonder if it's Shane or just the wind. In case it's him I start to sing, of cherries without stones and chickens without bones. Alma and Missouri cross insults on the porch. My baskets fill, my harvest the browns and yellows of a passing fall.