Under the Mercy Trees (23 page)

She left the doctor's office and walked down Main Street toward the bus station. People who passed, headed home for their suppers, didn't notice her. She was invisible, a middle-aged mother, too ignorant to know you couldn't pick having a boy or a girl. The walk took her west, and even in her misery the twilight demanded her attention. The dying sun made lightbulbs of new buds on spring trees and stained the long boarded porch that ran along the front of the town's stores and eateries. She stepped up on the porch, hearing the deep boom of her footsteps, and wished she could just keep walking along it forever, instead of going home.

And then she heard the music, old time, the same that played when she and her girlfriends used to go out dancing. Change came slow to this part of the world. Even Elvis hadn't made inroads here before he left for the army. Bertie saw him once on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and his noise hurt her ears. She was just going to peek in, not let anybody see her. The place wasn't even a real dance hall, just a barbecue restaurant that put the chairs on the tables in the evening to open up its floor and had local people play. The band had a banjo, a fiddle, a guitar, and a mandolin. Bertie loved a mandolin. As she stepped up to the door she heard them start “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” a song the Carter family sang that always called up in her a false memory, sad but sweet, of somebody she had lost. But when she stopped to think who it might have been, she realized there never was anybody and she was looking back at nothing.

As she leaned against the doorframe, watching the few people who were dancing, she felt a touch on her shoulder. She turned and he was standing there. The light of early evening gleamed on black hair that was still wet from a bath. His face was tanned from outdoor work, and he looked a little tired, like he had worked all day but then just had to come out. He smelled of soap and aftershave.

“Well, hey.” She tried to think of an explanation for why she was there, but he didn't seem to require one.

“You're looking pretty, Bertie.”

She looked down at her dress, a faded shirtwaist of dotted swiss mostly hidden under her long sweater. She didn't feel pretty, hadn't in a while, but she appreciated the compliment.

He peered inside the restaurant. “James here?”

“No. I had some errands to do. I'm about to go home.”

He looked at her, really looked at her. He was standing close. “Why not stay a while.” His blue eyes, tired as they were, flashed mischief. James's eyes never flashed mischief.

She turned toward the music again. “I didn't know you were back.”

“Haven't told the family. Sometimes it's nice to slip in without anybody knowing.” Then he took her hand, looking at it, not up at her face. It was so strange. Leon had never been any more to her than James's brother. Now they stood together in the bewitching light. His hand was soft and hard at the same time, so pleasing. She wanted to move closer.

“Come dance one with me, Bertie.”

She followed him inside. He helped her take off her sweater, folded it, and set it with her pocketbook on a chair. She didn't see anybody she knew, so she relaxed. She did love to dance. The musicians finished their song. The half dozen people who had been dancing sat down in the restaurant's straight back chairs, fanning themselves and looking around for iced tea. Leon went up and spoke to the fiddle player. The man nodded, and as Leon came grinning back toward her, the band struck up “Tennessee Waltz,” a song that tapped out a rhythm in the heart of even the clumsiest dancer.

Leon took her hand, and they stepped out on the wood floor. Looking down, she could see their movements reflected in his polished shoes. He wore trousers then, not the overalls that became his uniform later. His strong hands slid down her sides to her hips, no apology, he just wanted them there. And Bertie wanted something, too, even if she didn't know what. She rested her head in the crook of his neck. Leon was tall, able to kiss the top of her forehead. She didn't know if other couples joined them on the dance floor or not.

The band slowed the song to a stop. Bertie's hand slid to Leon's chest. She felt the ridge of a scar through his shirt. He brushed her hair back, touching her right cheek. “Do you want me to take you home?”

She told him no.

He had a camera, a fancy one. At the motor court in Asheville he showed her how to load the film. She didn't care about that, but she liked the way his fingers looked when they pressed the film in, matching up the little holes along the edges of the film with the line of bumps that held it in place. She liked it, too, when he looked down into the top of the camera to see her through the lens, then cut his eyes up to look at her for real. He liked what he saw, both places. She posed for him, there on the bed, in a white button down shirt that belonged to him and shorts he'd bought her at Efird's Department Store. She tied the tails of the shirt in a knot over her navel and arched her back to make her rib cage show, like the girls in
McCall's.
She stuck her legs up and pointed her toes, pretending she was a pinup girl. The two of them went a little crazy with the camera, using up the whole roll of film.

That last morning, when they knew it was over, they moved around each other in the motel room, packing up their meager things, and she heard Leon toss the film canister into the trash can. She imagined the finished roll of film curled up inside the canister, never to be developed, and wondered what she would have looked like in those photographs. Would they have shown her to be as beautiful as she felt those few days, or would they just have been one more disappointment?

Nine months later Bobby was born. Even with the shame of everybody whispering, Bertie felt again the shadow of the hope she'd felt when she ran off. She could place hope in a boy that she couldn't in a girl, just because of the way the world was. She clung to that hope when she bounced Bobby on her knee and when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at Solace Fork Baptist Church. She held onto it when his teachers told her he was causing problems, when he quit school. She kept hold of it when he started running with that tramp, Cherise, even though Bertie knew it was only a matter of time before he got her pregnant. Bertie still clutched it now, despite Eugenia saying out loud the word “kill,” but she could feel it slipping through her fingers. Her son, conceived in hope and a last deep breath of freedom, had done nothing but let her down. She couldn't retrieve in him even a taste of what once felt good about her life.

She never told anyone who it was she'd run off with, and over the years she came to feel like it couldn't have been Leon. The laughing man who had led her away from the dance by two fingers was just too different from the one who'd sat up in that old house all those years, letting his life shrink in.

*  *  *

Beside her in the driver's seat, James stared ahead, the way he had for so long, like if he didn't look at her, at what she'd done, maybe it wouldn't be true. The brake pedal was within reach of Bertie's left foot. She had the crazy thought of stomping on it, as hard as she could. She imagined their seat belts jerking them up short, her pocketbook sliding off the seat and spilling on the floor, James turning to her to ask what in the world she was doing. The two of them stopped there, in the middle of the road, until they finally talked about that time and got it out of the way.

James felt her staring at him and turned his head. “What, Bertie?”

“Nothing,” she said.

31

Martin

Martin was unaccountably nervous about going to the probate office. He threw a pair of crumpled khaki pants and a white dress shirt in Claudie's dryer to get the wrinkles out. He was glad she and Hodge weren't home. Claudie would want to get out the real iron. The probate office was in the county courthouse building. He was due there by eleven. When he'd called, the clerk told him not to come any later than that or he'd make the girls who worked there late for lunch and they wouldn't be happy.

He took his warm clothes out of the dryer and got dressed. Bertie had given him a folder of papers, including his parents' yellowing death certificates. He put it in his briefcase. His family seemed to have such faith in him. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to accomplish.

Bertie hadn't found his parents' original deed among her other papers, and no one else knew where it was, either. If Bobbie and Cherise had seen it, they weren't saying. At Hodge's suggestion, Martin stopped first at the Register of Deeds office on the ground floor of the courthouse to confirm what the sheriff had said about who owned the home place. A nice lady in the records room showed him how to search the title.

“Owenby. Isn't that the name of that missing man?”

“My brother,” he said.

“Bless your heart.”

Martin followed her instructions and couldn't find any transfers of property after the one to his parents. He went to the sole computer and typed in Leon's name and his parents' names, in all their variations. Nothing. He called the clerk over.

“I need to make sure I'm doing this correctly.” He gave her his most charming smile and told her what he had already done.

“That's right,” she said.

“So if it doesn't show a transfer to my brother, there was never one recorded?”

“If there was a conveyance recorded, it would show here on the computer.” Her faith in the machine was absolute.

The clerk helped him print out his title search and made him an official copy of his parents' deed. He thanked her and then walked up wide, curving stairs to the mezzanine to see the probate clerk.

A woman with shellacked black hair sat at the front desk, taking dainty bites from a sandwich. She smiled when she saw him and swallowed the bite in her mouth.

Martin held out his hand and introduced himself.

“You're the one I talked to on the phone yesterday,” she said. “Did you bring all your paperwork?”

“I think so.” He spread his documents out on her desk. “Here's the last deed to the property.” He didn't mention Bobby's fabricated deed. “My mother died in 1954. My father died in 1965. His estate was never probated. My family wants me to find out who owns his property.”

“Your mother's interest went automatically to your father when she died. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“There are five of us.” He almost said four.

“Then if you probate your father's estate now, you'll take the property in equal shares.”

“I'm embarrassed the family never did anything about this before,” he said.

“Don't be. You'd be amazed at how many folks never bother with the paperwork, until they get word a highway's coming through or Kmart wants to build on it. Mountain people don't care for paperwork.”

“What if one of us died before the property was divided up. What would happen to his share?”

“If he had any children, they would get it. If not, the other four of you would divide up his share.”

“So, what do I need to do to probate it?”

The woman plucked his father's death certificate from the pile. “Let me get you under oath.” She swore him in as his father's administrator, two decades late. She handed him an inventory sheet to list all of his father's personal property, and he entered zeros on every line except the real property line. She didn't look surprised. There were probably a lot of farmers in Willoby County who didn't own anything but their land.

Martin read the mimeographed sheet she gave him, listing things to do and the address of the local newspaper to run an ad for his father's nonexistent creditors. He felt a depression coming on at the thought of suddenly owning property here, as if something heavy had grabbed at his leg. “What does a person do if he doesn't want his share?” he said.

“You can renounce.”

The word appealed to him. “Renounce,” he repeated.

“It has to be in writing and filed with the probate court. If you do that, it will be like you never got a share.” She collected his forms. “Come back when the newspaper ads have run.”

Martin put all the documents and forms in his briefcase, then walked back down the mezzanine stairs. The marble steps dipped in the middle, worn down by a hundred years of trudging feet. Voices from the ground floor lobby echoed up, a man pissed off about his traffic fine, the calming answer of the deputy who manned the front door. Martin reached the bottom step and passed them, pushing through heavy doors out into the sunlight in front of the building. A bench faced the parking lot and the iron box where people could deposit their water bills. He sat down and put his briefcase on the bench beside him. On the other side of the parking lot, an old man got out of a dirty white Cadillac. He looked enough like Leon that Martin froze for a moment, then felt embarrassed at how fast his heart was beating. The man came toward him and dropped his water bill into the depository, nodding to Martin. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Up close the man looked nothing like Leon. Martin watched him shuffle back to his car. The man opened his door and scraped the car next to him before folding himself into the seat and pulling the door closed. He wasn't Leon. Leon wasn't coming back.

Martin walked down the block to where he had parked Leon's truck and drove to the community college for his afternoon class. The last of his students' oral presentations were due today, a thorough and well-considered report on the twentieth-century poet of their choosing. He wished he had a flask to see him through it. He hadn't had a drink in five days, not out of self-discipline but because he had no money. Adjunct pay stretched only so far.

When he opened the classroom door, his students were waiting for him. They were slack-jawed and uniformly white—there were no ethnic minorities to speak of in this part of the state. Their oral presentations were worth a big chunk of their grade, and a third of them hadn't bothered to do it or even to show up. Martin actually preferred the ones who weren't interested at all to the ones who thought they were poets. The rhymers. Girls who wrote their poems on torn-out notebook paper with big circles or hearts dotting their
i
's and brought them to him after class, the paper bits from their spiral notebooks dropping all over his desk like confetti. Encouraged by publication in their church bulletins. Christians weren't allowed to tell each other they stank. No one could laugh at you in church.

“So. Whose turn is it?” Martin sat down behind the teacher's desk. Silence. He checked his grade book to see who hadn't gone yet. “Eldon, go for it. Who's your poet?”

Eldon Mayhew was one of the few males who came with any regularity, and Willoby County's only punk rocker. He wore a black leather jacket and leather bracelets with studs, and had dyed his dirt brown hair green and spiked it up in a Mohawk. Martin had to respect him for trying to reach beyond the county's boundaries for someone to be, though he didn't think Eldon would ever physically leave this place. Martin could tell by the scabs Eldon picked on his head and the back of his neck, the mange sores of a dog who would chase his own tail here forever.

Eldon slouched at his desk. “Allen Ginsberg.”

“I met Allen Ginsberg once,” Martin said. All but Eldon stared at him blankly. They had no idea who Allen Ginsberg was. Martin felt a secret satisfaction. The one time he'd met Ginsberg, in a smoky coffeehouse in New York City in the late 1960s, Ginsberg told him his work reeked of Faulkneresque putrefaction, of the conventions of a decaying southern aristocracy, that the time for Martin's style of writing had passed and he ought to try LSD to loosen up. Ginsberg's friend Bill Burroughs was with him and tried to soften the criticism by talking to Martin about their mutual hero, Thomas Wolfe, but as much as it stung, Ginsberg's criticism was right. Martin's success was fleeting. It went the way of crew cuts and Buddy Holly eyewear. By the late sixties it had danced away from him, disappearing in a swirl of psychedelia, and he couldn't sell a thing.

Eldon swaggered to the front of the room and stumbled through his report on Ginsberg, drawing a titter from the class when he detailed Ginsberg's drug use and homosexuality. Behind Martin, an oversize institutional clock ticked on the wall of the classroom. A headache wedged itself between his eyes and began to spread outward to both ears. He needed a drink to make it go away. Eldon finished and sat down, his long body sprawling, pleased with himself.

“Thank you, Eldon.” Martin marked an A in his grade book. Why not. Just one more report to go. Mary Lacy Morgan was the worst of the rhymer girls, her love poems like fingernails on a chalk board, her ambition in life to start her own greeting card line. “Mary Lacy, you're next.”

She stood up. She was overweight, her not-quite-blond hair held back with a thin wire hair band that had to hurt. She smelled of gardenia perfume. “My report is on Helen Steiner Rice, the poet laureate of inspirational verse,” she said.

This was what Martin got for not assigning them particular poets. He rubbed his temples, trying to press the pain back toward the center of his head. “Ah, Helen Steiner Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat.” Mary Lacy blinked her dull eyes. The other students were silent. Nobody around here got Martin's jokes. He really, really needed a drink. “Go ahead, Mary Lacy.”

“Mrs. Helen Steiner Rice was an independent woman,” she began. Martin couldn't take it. He didn't care how pioneering Mrs. Steiner Rice, queen of the rhymers, had been. He wrote an A beside Mary Lacy's name because he knew she would come find him if he gave her anything less, and tuned her out.

He owned a share of the family farm. Part of him wondered how much it was worth, and part of him just wanted to divest. He could certainly use some money, if Eugenia, James, and Ivy were willing to sell. Then he remembered Leon, who also owned a share. They might not be able to sell it without proof of what had happened to him. Martin had watched enough
All My Children
episodes to know they'd have to wait seven years before they could have him declared dead.

Mary Lacy walked around the room, handing out photocopied portraits of Helen Steiner Rice. She placed one on Martin's desk. Mrs. Steiner Rice glared up at him, proud and perfectly coiffed, as if to chastise him for thinking about property values instead of his missing brother. He turned her facedown. His thoughts always settled on self. It had been the same at the installation of Shane's monument. To avoid remembering Shane, he had focused on the piles of dried bird poop that topped the headstones, how the cold of the graveyard permeated his coat, where he might go and drink when it was all over.

The department secretary tiptoed in the classroom door and laid an envelope in front of him. His paycheck. Thank God. He smiled at her, and she tiptoed out again. Mary Lacy was finishing up her presentation by reading one of Mrs. Steiner Rice's more famous poems, from a yellow sympathy card with flowery gold lettering and glitter outlining a bouquet of calla lilies. Martin felt like he needed a sympathy card himself. Deep-felt regrets for the demise of your early promise and the subsequent ruination of your life. Our warmest thoughts are with you as you endeavor to locate a source of booze to ease your pain.

Mary Lacy was done. So was Martin, even though class wasn't supposed to end for another thirty minutes. “Thank you, Mary Lacy. Class dismissed. Don't forget the exam is tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.”

Mary Lacy waited until the others slid their books into backpacks and sauntered out. “Mr. Owenby, could you look over some poems for me? I'm going to enter them in a contest.” She held out three pages of typed poems bound with a paper clip. The words of the first poem curved around the page in the shape of a fish.

“Fancy typing, Mary Lacy,” he said.

She beamed beneath her hair band. “That took me a while.”

“I'll look at them tonight.” He tucked them into the breast pocket of his blazer.

“Mr. Owenby, are you going to review before the exam tomorrow?”

“We can take about a half hour for questions.”

“I want to do good on your test. This is my favorite class.”

“You'll do fine, Mary Lacy. I gave you an A for your report today.” He hoped that would satisfy her and allow him to escape. He picked up his things and started for the door.

“Thanks for everything, Mr. Owenby.” As he left she was walking around the room, retrieving the photocopies of Helen Steiner Rice that her classmates had discarded.

He went by the English department on his way out. Flora, the department secretary, was about ten years older than him, her short hair permed on top in painfully tight curls. She called everyone “hon” but was adept at deflecting students who came in with stories of dead grandparents, begging for a higher grade. Martin stopped at her desk. The dean had given him a copy of last year's multiple-choice exam to use as a model. He got it out and handed it to Flora with a wink. “Can you type this up for me and just put the questions in a different order? I need sixteen copies by tomorrow morning.”

Adjuncts were supposed to do their own typing, but Flora liked him. “I'll put them in your box, hon.”

“You're the best, Flora.” He blew her a kiss and left. Her giggles followed him down the hall.

He was meeting Liza at the symphony later, but he had a few hours to kill. He ought to be a good boy and go straight home, but one drink wouldn't hurt. He went by the college business office to cash his paycheck and called Steven—they said one shouldn't drink alone. It was almost quitting time. It didn't take much to talk Steven and Trina into meeting him at Cappy's, a bar downtown where he'd become a regular despite his best intentions.