Under the Mercy Trees (9 page)

13

Bertie

Why did one thing send her spinning? Bertie felt a small minute of peace when she first woke up in the morning, then one thing, like an unexpected bill or a saleslady not treating her friendly, and she was sour the rest of the day. Up and down, up and down. Some days she couldn't even figure out what was eating at her. She'd run a list through her head and not be able to point to a thing. It was just a bad feeling, like her body was full of chemicals and she had to suffer until they got flushed out.

She stood in the doorway to Bobby's room. Today the thing bothering her was Martin leaving after only one night to go stay at Eugenia's. Bertie's home was as nice as Eugenia's. Bobby's room wasn't big or fancy, but it was clean. The bed was firm. She had put away Bobby's stuff so there was space for Martin's things. She knew Martin had left because he was afraid to say no to Eugenia, who had bossed him around since he was small, but Bertie still felt like she'd done something wrong. Like maybe he'd seen a roach, which was impossible as clean as she kept things. Or like he'd found a pubic hair on the bathroom soap, which Bertie would never let happen either.

She stripped Martin's dirty sheets off the bed. As she was putting them in the wash, Bobby and his girlfriend, Cherise, drove up and came barging into the house.

“Ma, I need my WKIX T-shirt, so I can get in free to see Nantucket at the mall. Where's it at?” Bobby said.

“The clothes you left here are all folded in the bureau drawers in your bedroom. I wish you'd take them with you.”

He headed down the hall.

“Don't be loud. Your daddy's sleeping. And don't strew everything all over,” she said. He didn't pay any attention.

Cherise sat down at the kitchen table. For someone in the cosmetology business she sure let herself go on her days off. Her hair was pulled back tight with a fabric ponytail holder, and it didn't looked like she'd washed it that morning. Her red-orange fingernail polish was chipped, and she needed to bleach the hair above her upper lip. She didn't even try to make small talk, just ignored Bertie.

Bertie crossed her arms. She could hear Bobby pulling out drawers in the bedroom.

“Found it!” he called, not bothering to be quiet. He came back in the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt with the radio station logo. It had fit him in high school but was way too small now. When he lifted his arms his belly button showed, along with the trail of hair leading up to it.

“Bobby, that shirt doesn't fit,” Bertie said.

“That's okay. I'm getting in free.”

“What about me?” Cherise said. “Don't you have another shirt?”

“No. You'll have to pay.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

A horn honked outside. Bertie looked out the window. Hodge Goforth's truck idled in the driveway. Bertie left Bobby and Cherise arguing and went outside to see what he wanted.

Hodge rolled his window down. “I can't stay, Bertie. I'm just dropping these off.” He handed her a stack of photocopied flyers, black and white, with a blurry picture of Leon under the big word “MISSING.” Leon was turned sideways, like he'd been trying to get away when the camera flashed.

“Where'd you get the picture?” She hadn't known anybody had a photo of Leon recent enough to identify him with.

“Eugenia had it. I've already put these up all around Whelan. If James can do Solace Fork today, we should have it covered. Here.” He handed her a staple gun and a roll of duct tape. “I'll get the staple gun back from you next time I see you.”

“I'll make Bobby help,” she said.

“I'm sorry I have to run. I'll talk at you later.” Hodge backed out of the driveway.

She went back inside. Bobby was looking in the refrigerator for something to eat. Cherise was working on a package of turkey she'd pulled out, peeling one piece off at a time and sucking it into her mouth. The girl did not need to be eating like that. She already looked heavier than the last time Bertie had seen her. Bertie put the posters down on the table and took the package of meat away from Cherise. “That's for James's lunches,” she said.

Bobby handed Cherise what was left of a baked chicken. The girl sat down at the table, digging her fingers into it, stripping off the meat even down to the red-streaked pieces that lay right next to the bone. Bertie had been saving that chicken to make chicken and dumplings, but she wasn't going to eat it or serve it to James after seeing Cherise paw all over it.

“Hodge brought these posters by. I'm going to give you half and James half to put up this morning around Solace Fork,” she said.

“I ain't doing that today. I got a show to go to,” Bobby said.

“What time is the show?”

“Two o'clock.”

“You have plenty of time.”

“Why don't you do it?” he said.

“I'm going across the road to do chores for my mama today. Here.” Bertie's pocketbook was on the counter. She dug out a ten-dollar bill and offered it to him. “Put up the posters, and you can use this to pay for Cherise getting into the show.”

Cherise snatched the money out of Bertie's hand and put it in her jeans pocket.

“Fine, we'll do it,” Bobby said. He picked up Hodge's staple gun and squeezed the handle. It went off with a bang and a staple flew across the kitchen, dinking the refrigerator and then hitting the floor.

“Stop fooling around, Bobby,” Cherise said.

“You're going to put somebody's eye out,” Bertie said.

Bobby took half the stack of posters. “Come on, Cherise. We've got to get these done before the show starts.”

Cherise stood up, licking chicken grease off her fingers, and headed out the door without washing her hands or saying good-bye. Bobby followed her.

“I'm sending James out later to make sure you put them up,” Bertie called after him.

“I said I'd do it, Ma. Get off my back!” The door slammed behind him.

Bertie picked up the chicken Cherise had mangled and tipped it into the garbage can.

James wandered into the kitchen, his hair messed up from sleep. His shoulders were slumpy all the time these days. “What did Bobby want?” he said.

“A shirt he'd left here.” She showed James the posters on the table. “Hodge brought these by for you to put up. Bobby already took half.”

James nudged the posters with a finger but didn't really seem to be looking at them. It was like his spirit had left him. He was going to have to go back to work the next week, and Bertie wasn't sure how he'd do.

She tried to offer him some hope. “If we get the posters up today, maybe somebody will call.”

He sat down at the table and picked up Hodge's duct tape, peeling up the edge with a bitten fingernail.

“I'm going to head over to my folks'. Mama will be wondering where I am,” she said.

James turned his hearing aid off and took it out, rubbing his ear, shutting her out.

She went and got her coat and walked across the road. Her mama had got so she couldn't bend to clean, and her eyes were too weak to see the dirt. And it wasn't like Bertie's daddy was going to help out. She made her parents lunch and cleaned up the clutter so they wouldn't trip over anything. At four o'clock she walked home to watch her soap operas.

James got home as
Guiding Light
was ending and the local news was coming on. He sat down on the couch next to her. She handed him the remote control. “I'll go get supper started.” He didn't answer.

In the kitchen, the chicken carcass she'd thrown away that morning was making the trash smell. Bertie tied the garbage bag to take it out. Outside, it was getting dark. A short wind blew dried leaves along the ground around her feet. The cold had shut the bugs up. James's truck door wasn't all the way closed, and his interior light was on. She went to close the door so his battery wouldn't drain and noticed papers sticking out from under the passenger seat. A whole pile of papers, with Leon's face over and over again. She reached in and pulled them out to look. James had been gone all day and hadn't put up a single poster. She pushed the stack back under his seat and shut the truck door. Inside the trailer James turned up the volume on the TV. A commercial blared, loud enough to hear through closed windows and doors. She stood there with the garbage bag in her hand, feeling scared. Being the depressed one was her job. They couldn't afford for her and James both to be like that.

14

Martin

After Eugenia and Zeb left for their church supper, Martin walked to his nephew Steven's body shop, where Steven had an apartment over the shop. Martin was glad it was close to Eugenia's house. He could drink all he wanted and walk back to Eugenia's without worrying about driving.

At the body shop, the day's last customers were claiming their cars. Martin's niece Trina, Steven's younger sister, waved to him from behind the register in the small business office. Martin could hear Steven inside the garage, yelling to his help over the shrilling of some piece of machinery. Paint fumes wafted out of bay doors. Martin leaned in the office doorway. There was no place to sit.

Trina handed her last customer his key and the man left. She took a twenty-dollar bill out of her register drawer and locked it. “Chinese food okay with you, Martin?”

“Fine.”

“We'll just eat upstairs at Steven's place. Come tell me what you want.” She untaped a dirty menu from the wall behind her and handed it to him. He chose cashew chicken, and she picked up the phone. “Hey, Fong. It's Trina, over at the body shop. Bring me a number thirty-four, a number forty-five, a number twelve, and three wonton soups. All right, hon.” She hung up. “I'm his best customer. There ain't anywhere else good to eat around here.”

Steven came in through the door to the garage, wiping his hands on a rag and whistling. He was a generation younger than Martin, but his wiry hair had more gray in it. Martin's hair was still almost completely brown, and he hadn't inherited his father's tendency toward baldness. From the back, he still looked like a young man, though from the front the sag of his cheeks and the broken vessels around his nose gave him away.

“I ordered you a mu shu pork,” Trina told Steven.

“Good. The guys will close up.”

“Your shop seems busy,” Martin said.

“We got plenty to do. One of the big insurance companies picked us to do all their work,” Steven said.

“Steven beat out eight other body shops to get that contract,” Trina said, proud of her brother.

Martin was proud of Steven, too. Mr. Samuels and Dr. Vance had helped launch Martin on his way, and he had gotten nowhere. No one had helped Steven.

“It's a lot of paperwork, but it's worth it,” Steven said. “Martin, you ought to stay with me next time you come to town. My couch is as good as anybody else's.”

“I actually got a real bed at Bertie's. Bobby wasn't home.”

Steven balled up the rag he was holding and lobbed it into a metal trash can in the corner. “Bobby. Don't get me started. I despise that boy.”

“And that bitch he goes with, too,” Trina chimed in. “Cherise, or whatever she calls herself now. In high school she was just plain Cheryl.”

“We're going to have it out one of these days. He's all but said I murdered Leon. If he keeps it up, I will murder somebody—him. Mama and Trina want me to promise not to hurt him. Shit. He better stay out of my way, or they'll be visiting me on Sundays at Central Prison,” Steven said.

They waited downstairs until a small Chinese man with a brown paper bag hurried across the street, dodging traffic.

“There's Fong.” Trina picked up her twenty-dollar bill and went out to pay him. When she came back in, the smell of Chinese food filled the office.

“Come on upstairs,” Steven said.

They went around to the back of the shop and climbed the long wooden stairs to Steven's apartment. The apartment hadn't changed much since Martin's last visit three or four years ago. It was clean, by male standards. Steven worked so much, he wasn't there enough to mess it up. The entry door opened into the kitchen, and the first thing Steven did was check the fridge. Martin looked over his shoulder. Beer and baking soda. He approved.

Steven dug around among bottles that rolled around in the crisper. “Rolling Rock okay?”

“Sure.”

“Y'all probably drink fancy beer up there in New York.” He set three bottles on the counter and popped the lids off with a church key.

“Whatever's cheap.” Martin took a beer, wishing for the bottle of Scotch he had hidden under the guest bed at Eugenia's that afternoon. Beer filled him up before it got him drunk.

Trina claimed her bottle of beer and leaned against the counter. “I might come up and see you some time, Martin. I've never been to New York.”

“Or anywhere else. Myrtle Beach don't count,” Steven said.

Trina pretended to kick Steven. “Big brother here won't give me the time off. But seriously, I'd like to come up and maybe see a show, or come at Christmas to see the ice skating.”

“At Rockefeller Center,” Martin said.

“That's it. They have packages out of Winston-Salem, with cheap airfare and all.”

“I would love for you to come.” Martin meant it. Trina would eat up New York. And she was the first of his relatives to suggest coming to visit him in all the years since he'd moved to the city.

Trina got paper plates out of a cabinet. They took Fong's takeout into Steven's living room and spread it out on the coffee table. The food was bland and heavy on the cornstarch. Fong had taken all the spice out to appease the local clientele. After they ate all they wanted, Steven disappeared into his bedroom and came back with a pipe and a bag of pot. They passed it around until Martin was so relaxed he felt like his body had merged with Steven's couch. Between hits, Steven and Trina entertained him with stories about their customers and employees. Then the talk turned to their brother, Shane. The talk always turned to Shane.

“Remember how he used to like to fish?” Trina handed Martin the pipe and went over to Steven's entertainment center. She picked up one of several framed photographs—Shane, at about age fourteen. His hair was long. He wore bell-bottom jeans and a checkered shirt. His teenage mustache was a smudge of dirt on his upper lip. He was holding a trout and a cardboard sign with its weight written in Magic Marker, six pounds two ounces.

“Leon's the one used to take Shane fishing. He'd take me, too, once in a while. He was real patient with us,” Steven said.

It was hard for Martin to imagine Leon patient or kind. But one couldn't speak ill of the missing. He took a hit off the pipe and passed it to Steven.

“Shane was so proud of that trout,” Steven said. “He wanted to stuff it. Got mad at Leon because Leon said fish were for frying, not for stuffing. It did taste good, though.”

“Shane could get mad.” Trina put the photograph back among the others, carefully straightening it. It was the closest Martin had ever heard her come to admitting that Shane had a fault. She and Steven wouldn't let anyone talk badly about their brother. If he had rages, if he assaulted his foster brothers or his teachers, it was because they deserved it. Shane was troubled. He never had a chance.

Steven lifted the pipe to his lips. “He tried, man. One time we all got to go to Mama's for Christmas. She had a place out Springfield Road for a little while. It was small, but she could fit us in for a few days. An ice storm came up. Mama's car completely iced over. She sent Shane outside with the scraper to scrape the ice off her car windows. The ice was so thick and hard it wouldn't scrape easy, so Shane goes and gets a hammer out the shed and starts shattering the ice. He totally forgot he was shattering the glass along with it. Mama didn't even get mad. She just sat down and cried because she didn't have the money to replace the glass. Shane was so upset. He wouldn't come home for another visit for months after that—too embarrassed. Mama tried and tried to tell him it was all right. She borrowed money for the front window and put plastic over all the rest, but Shane couldn't stand to look at that car. It reminded him of what he'd done.”

“He was always sensitive,” Trina said. “Me and Steven got the thick skin. Shane didn't have any skin at all.”

Martin felt guilty that all his memories of Shane were from when Shane was small, before Martin left home. His mother teaching him the proper way to hold Shane, love for the baby softening her weathered face as she demonstrated. “Like this, Martin, in the crook of your arm.” Shane's tiny fists flailing. Martin taught Shane the alphabet when Shane was two. Shane would say a few letters, slurp a breath, say a few more. Ivy and his mother were so proud. “He's going to be a smart one, like you, Martin,” his mother said, handing Shane a biscuit with butter and fig preserves. Shane beamed and climbed up on Martin's lap, his breath sticky on Martin's cheek.

Martin had to think hard to remember seeing Shane at all during the boy's teenage years. Shane must have been at the funeral when Martin's father died, but Martin couldn't remember. Rory Owenby had died about a year before Shane committed suicide. Martin went home for his father's funeral only because he didn't want Eugenia and James and Bertie to think ill of him.

Trina and Steven didn't seem to notice that he had no memories of Shane to contribute. They gave Martin more credit than he deserved for being an ally. Martin never did anything more for them when they were kids than the aunts and uncles who were here. He just had the excuse of living far away.

Steven reached for the bag of pot. “Mama tell you about the monument?”

Martin watched as Steven expertly repacked the pipe. “Monument? No.”

“She's ordered a real nice one for Shane's grave, finally. Me and Trina would have helped her buy one a long time ago if she'd let us, but she didn't want our help.”

“It'll have his name on it and part of a poem I wrote,” Trina said.

“Poem?”

She looked shy. “We're going to run it in the paper this year, on the anniversary of the day he died.” She looked around. “Where's it at, Steven?”

“On top of the TV.”

She went and got it and handed it to Martin.

It has been twenty years

Since you went away

We loved you so much

But you could not stay

We remember your laugh

And your big appetite

You were our star

You were our light

Not a day goes by

That we don't think of you

We will always remember

We will always be true.

Love forever, Mama, Steven, and Trina

It was painfully bad and painful for other reasons.

“Do you like it?” Trina said.

Martin was the family poet. His opinion mattered. “It's lovely.” He handed the poem back to her.

“We're going to install the headstone that day, too. You should come, Martin,” Trina said.

Martin breathed in the haze they had created with Steven's pipe and suddenly didn't want to be there anymore. “I doubt I'll be able to make it down.” He stood up and waited for the room to stop reeling. “I'd better go. I don't want to get back to Eugenia's too late.”

“I'll drive you,” Steven said.

As impaired as Martin was, he knew Steven was in no condition to drive. “No, I'll walk. It'll help me sober up.”

“Suit yourself.” Steven shook his hand, and Trina gave him a hug. It was seven o'clock. Trina turned on the porch light. He made his way down the steps, both hands on the rail. Traffic had quieted. Streetlights marked the way for the few cars that passed. He pulled his coat around him, wishing it were warmer. As he walked, he thought about Leon taking Shane and Steven fishing. He just couldn't see it. Leon was mean. He was mean when he left for the war in 1942 and even meaner when he got back.

*  *  *

Not long after Leon got out of the service, when Martin and Hodge Goforth were eight or nine, Leon caught them down behind the sawmill, showing each other their penises. They weren't doing anything other little boys didn't do. Hodge didn't grow up to be a queer because of it. But Leon went nuts. He didn't hit Hodge, but Martin remembered his friend's face as Hodge cowered against the wall of the sawmill, his pants still down around his knees. Hodge expected Leon to kill him.

Leon did hit Martin, cuffing him so hard on the side of the head that he fell down. “Go on home,” Leon told Hodge. Hodge took off running, crying, pulling his pants up as he ran.

Leon turned on Martin again. “You mama's boy, candy ass, sissy.” He kicked him with every word. Martin crab-walked backward in the dirt, trying to dodge the blows. It seemed to Martin now that Leon must have suspected he was gay, even that early, and was determined to beat it out of him. He nearly did. He kicked Martin in the crotch. The pain was blinding. Martin curled up in a ball with his fingers over his groin to protect it. Leon kicked him again. “I hope your pecker swells up like a watermelon. Then maybe you'll be ashamed to show it around.” He left Martin lying there and went back up the hill toward the house.

When Martin recovered enough to walk he went home, crying. His mother was in her garden and wanted to know what was wrong. “Leon beat me.” He showed her his bruised fingers only. She wiped his tears away with callused thumbs. “Don't mind him,” she said. “The war was hard, and now he's back he don't know where he fits in. Just stay out of his way.” Martin did stay out of Leon's way, nursing his swollen balls until they went back to normal size and he could stop walking bowlegged. God, Leon was mean.

When they were ten, Hodge apologized for leaving Martin that day. As if Hodge's soft little body could have shielded Martin from Leon's blows and his staying could have made a difference. Hodge apologized the day he and Martin and the Gaddy twins were baptized. At Solace Fork Baptist Church, when you turned ten years old, you got baptized by total immersion, whether you wanted to or not. Martin never knew any child who said no. It was simply what you did. The preacher, Brother Pike, met with the four of them beforehand. He was a tall, gangly man with dark yellow hair and a droopy mustache, who worked as a plumber during the week. His sermons were full of plumbing analogies, of sin blocking people's drains, the need to flush out the waste in their lives and be purified. They met with him the Sunday before the baptism to rehearse the one-line profession of faith they would mutter before they went under, JesusChristismyLordandSavior. Brother Pike explained how he would have one hand under their backs, while the other held a cloth over their mouths and noses so they wouldn't swallow water and embarrass themselves and the Lord by coughing. The slow Gaddy twin, Betty, had adenoid trouble and breathed through her mouth. Martin wondered if she would smother when the preacher put the cloth over her nose and mouth.