Under the Mercy Trees (28 page)

40

Martin

After Liza left, Hodge rooted around in his kitchen cabinets and pulled out a skillet. “I'm in the mood for eggs and bacon. How about you?”

“Is it included in my rent?” Martin said.

“I'll put it on your bill.”

“Two eggs, sunny-side up.”

Hodge opened the refrigerator and got out eggs and bacon wrapped in white waxed paper. He peeled strips into the skillet. Grease began to pop.

“Is there any species on earth that doesn't like bacon?” Martin said.

“Bacon is a gift from God. This is the real thing. I get it every year from a fellow up the road who keeps hogs.”

“It smells like my mother's.” Martin breathed deeply. He remembered waking up to that smell on cold mornings, trying to get downstairs early to claim his share before his brothers did.

“She could cook some bacon.” Hodge poked around the skillet with a fork. “Your mama would be proud of you, Martin.”

Martin shook his head. “I did not do well by my mother.” Hodge was facing the stove, and Martin couldn't see his face. It was easier to talk to him with his back turned. “What kind of son was I, not to be there with her when she died?” Bacon smoke filled Martin's eyes.

“She kept it from you.”

“What?”

“She kept it from you, how sick she was, because she didn't want you coming home.”

“How do you know that?”

“I went and saw her about every weekend. I could see she was failing. She forbade me to tell you. I respected that.” Hodge turned around, a pudgy middle-aged man holding a fork. “I'll never forget what she said, the last time I saw her. Your mama was a person of words just like you, even if she didn't know as many big ones. We were out on her porch. She pointed to how red clay had crept up the sides of the house and outbuildings. She said she had seen it creep up the legs of people who stood still too long, and I wasn't to call you back, lest it stain you, too.”

Martin stared at him.

“She was glad you got away, Martin. But that doesn't mean you can't come home again.” Hodge turned back to the stove, pushing the bacon to one side of the skillet and cracking eggs into the grease. “Did I ever tell you about the time I heard the voice of God?”

Martin groaned.

“Don't worry, I'm not going to witness to you, I'm just telling you about it.” Hodge touched the edges of the eggs with his fork, testing to see if they were cooked. “It was the end of my first year at the farm school. First time I'd been off on my own, and I had not behaved myself. I had lost my way. Too much drinking and wildness, and then there was a girl who thought I might have got her into trouble, she didn't know for sure yet. I was out by the fountain at the school. I thought my life was over. It was five in the morning. I remember there was a little wren bathing in the fountain. I was watching it, and all at once I heard a voice say, clear as day, ‘None of that old mess matters.' ” Hodge slid the eggs and bacon onto two plates. “People always want God to repeat Himself when He says something. I listened for it again. I went around the fountain to see if somebody was playing a joke on me, but no. I didn't hear anything else. God just said it the one time, but I decided that was enough. I've never forgotten it. Every time my own mistakes pile up on me like manure, I remember it and the burden is lifted.” He brought Martin his plate and put a hand on Martin's shoulder. “None of that old mess matters, Martin.”

Martin felt the sureness of his friend's touch, the love it contained. Hodge gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Eat your breakfast,” he said.

They finished their food. Hodge got up and took their dishes to the sink. “I think I'm ready for bed. You going to turn in?”

“No.” Martin stood up. “I've been thinking I'd like to go to the clearing. I haven't been there since I came home.”

“Do you want company?”

“Not this time.”

Hodge nodded. “It's different now,” he warned. “Don't be sad at how things have fallen in.”

“I won't.”

“All right, then.” Hodge stood in front of Martin, his arms at his sides. On impulse Martin reached out and hugged him, the way men were supposed to hug other men, quick and hard, as if they could imprint all their love in one squeeze. To his surprise, Hodge turned it into a real hug, holding him long enough to make it matter. When they stepped back, Hodge wasn't embarrassed at all. “You go on, friend,” he said. “I won't worry about you till morning.” He walked down the hall toward his bedroom.

Martin went down the narrow basement stairs to his apartment, to change out of his funeral clothes and get a coat and the truck key. Next to the key on top of his refrigerator was the almost empty bottle of Scotch that had been there since before they found Leon's body. He hadn't touched it. He could look at it and not want it. He didn't know if it was finding Leon that had dampened his desire for alcohol, or if he had finally just had enough. He knew the not wanting wasn't likely to last, but for now he didn't have to drink.

He went out the ground-floor entrance, turning on the porch light for his return and closing the door quietly behind him. The night was damp and hazy. The almost-full moon shone bright but out of focus. There were no stars out. A few frog voices rose from the grass around Hodge's house, but he didn't yet hear the excited cacophony of peepers that would come with full spring. Leon's truck sat in the yard. In the moonlight its shadow loomed against the grassy bank behind it.

*  *  *

The morning Martin left for college his mother had made him a special breakfast, a double serving of bacon and fried eggs cooked as he liked them, runny, instead of fried hard the way his father insisted. The simple task of standing up to cook seemed to cost her breath, and she stopped every few minutes to lean against the stove. When she carried the skillet to the table and slid the food onto his plate her wrist strained to hold the weight.

Leon came into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt. Martin wolfed his bacon down before Leon could steal it. Leon ignored him, speaking only to their mother. “I'm going to town. You need anything?”

“I don't believe so.”

A car horn honked in the yard. “That's Liza.” Martin jumped to his feet. He reached around his mother's waist, hugging her hard, making her wince. “Bye, Mama.”

“God bless you, Martin.”

His packed duffel bag sat by the door. He grabbed it and stepped out onto the porch. As he paused to lift its strap to his shoulder he looked back inside the house. His mother was at the stove again, her back to him, cooking Leon's breakfast. Leon stood beside her, his hair combed into a perfect duck tail at the nape of his neck. As Martin watched, Leon put a hand on his mother's upper arm, his fingers encircling it, squeezing it gently, then letting go. She turned her head to look up at him. Her profile was sharp. The smile she gave, just for Leon, crinkled the thin skin around her eyes.

Liza honked her horn again, and Martin walked out into the yard. He didn't see his mother again.

*  *  *

He opened the heavy passenger door of Leon's truck and slid over to the driver's seat. A spark of static electricity shocked him when he turned the key in the ignition. The truck rumbled horribly, the noise bouncing between cornfields and houses all along Hodge's road, but no lights came on. The people here ignored loud truck motors at midnight the way New Yorkers ignored car alarms.

He drove to the dirt parking lot of what used to be the Solace Fork school grounds and pulled in. Orange plastic netting blocked off the construction site. The concrete foundation of the new book depository was half-poured. Two portable toilets loomed in the darkness. He dug a flashlight out of Leon's glove box and climbed out of the truck. The old deer path was still there. Animals didn't change the way people did.

At one time Martin could have walked this path blindfolded. He started along it, holding the flashlight low. Small pink and white flowers had stuck their heads up along the trail, groundhog style, to test the weather. He imagined them shouting the all-clear back to their brethren in the ground. The air held the not-quite-warm wetness of spring. Then he heard the sound of the creek. He left the path and walked toward it. The water was so cold, ice had formed tubes around small saplings that leaned too far over into the stream. If Martin stuck his hand in, his fingers would ache with cold. He made his way through a canopy of winter branches, noting here and there the light green of new growth on the forest floor. May apples formed droopy green umbrellas under the trees. He saw wild orchids, jack-in-the-pulpits, trillium. He arrived at the clearing. The trees were still there, though they leaned or lay at different angles.

Liza had called them church ladies. She should have been the writer instead of him. Looking at the trees, he wished for her metaphoric eye. Or, more, for his sister Ivy's glimpses of people who had passed. He turned off his flashlight and invited the moonlight to trick his sight, imagining bowed trunks as backs, bark as sun-roughened skin, hanging vines as sundries bought for trimming at Riddle's general store. And then he saw them, sitting in a circle. He searched the crowd, and there was his mother among them. She smiled at him. He put his cheek down on the nearest tree, which grew sideways in front of him like a gate, and watched her. She was quilting. She chatted around the straight pins she held in the corner of her mouth. Her face was rested.

“Where was I when you needed me?” he asked her out loud as she talked to her friends.

She looked over at him, surprised. “Law, Martin, you were right where I wanted you to be.”

He thought of the sheets he lay on the night she died and felt a laugh hopping up his throat. “I don't think so, Mama.”

“You were. You were at school. I wanted you at school, away from here.” She put down her sewing and gestured him over. “Come here, boy. Stop your aching.” He walked over, and she pulled his head down to her ear. She smelled of rose hips and clean laundry hung on a line. He sat down beside her on the ground and put his head in her lap. The other women, polite, averted their eyes while he cried.

41

Ivy

At the home place the morning after Leon's funeral, the porch has caved in on itself. The porch roof hangs almost to the ground. The rotten corner post that supported it lies in the yard, light morning rain dampening the splintered wood. The house has given up, has crumpled to its knees like a cowboy dying slow in an Old West movie.

I am back again to clean it, this time to clean it out, to get the rest of Leon's things before the whole house falls in. Eugenia is supposed to help me, but I don't see her yet. Rain mists my face. I lift a cardboard box of garbage bags and cleaners from my car. The fingers of my yellow rubber gloves wave over its edge. I go around to the side door so the porch roof won't collapse on my head. I enter the kitchen and leave the door open behind me for light, set my box on the kitchen table. I am glad this is the last cleaning, that I won't have to come back here anymore. The house, usually so crowded with spirits, is empty and dark, and still no Leon. I wonder if he will ever come.

I carry plastic garbage bags to the room where Leon slept. On the way I catch sight of Shane's back and legs disappearing around a corner. I call out, “Shane!” He ignores me.

In Leon's room I find a closet full of brand-new dress shirts, still pinned and wrapped in store plastic.

Missouri, my redheaded great-grandmother, appears at the foot of Leon's bed, her favorite age of twenty-one. She wears her pink dress.

“Save them shirts for Eugenia,” she says, a mean twinkle in her eye. She knows Eugenia gave Leon a new shirt every Christmas, hoping he would wear them to church.

“No, I'm not going to hurt her feelings.” I put them in a bag to carry to Goodwill.

Missouri lies back on the bed, her dress pleasingly tight around her slender rib cage. “You bore me to death.”

“That's all right,” I say.

Shane never owned a dress shirt, except for the one I bought for his funeral. The shirt was white. The funeral home people buttoned the collar high on his neck to hide the long rope burn and bruises. Somehow they fixed his swollen face. Still, most people who came by to view his body were afraid to look down and stared instead at the photograph I'd laid on the coffin lid.

I didn't see my son die, but I smelled it. I wasn't supposed to know where the foster home was, but Hodge told me, and I drove there before I went to the morgue. A police car was still outside the house, blue lights circling in the darkness. I parked behind it and got out. The foster mother stood in the front porch doorway, talking to the cop, fear of blame on her thin face. I couldn't hear her words, but her hands rolled over one another, listing all the reasons why it wasn't her fault. As I got closer I could hear the cop murmuring, “Yes, ma'am,” over and over. I went up the steps and pushed right between them, and was inside before they could do anything. I broke yellow tape and walked up carpeted stairs to the second floor.

The smell of death is terrible, even when there is no blood. The stench of Shane's last fear coated faded wallpaper. The rug stunk of all the things that are loosed when a body lets go. The policeman came up behind me and forced my arms behind my back, kicked my legs out from under me while the foster mother screamed. With my face pressed to carpet that was wet with my son's waste, I wondered if Shane had known how a body betrays itself, would he have tied that last knot, stepped up on that chair, kicked it away with the white rubber toe of his beloved tennis shoes?

“What are you moping about?” Missouri asks me.

“Nothing.” I tie shut the plastic bag that holds Leon's shirts, as Shane passes by the bedroom door once again and doesn't come in.

“Oh, for Pete's sake.” Missouri hops off the bed and stamps a small, booted foot, blowing impatience from her nostrils. Red hair flames down her back, then turns to cinders, and she appears as her oldest self, the age she left the world, an age she hates.

“You!” she calls to Shane. I hear his footsteps pause out in the hall, but he doesn't answer her.

In two strides Missouri rounds the doorframe and chases down the hall after him. I hear a struggle.

“Let loose of me!” Shane yells.

“I'll learn you to ignore me.”

They come back into the room, Missouri dragging Shane by his ear. She shoves him toward me. “I'm tired of you pining for him and him slinking off.”

I hold my arms out, but Shane ducks and runs for the door. Missouri starts after him, but someone else blocks his way.

Leon stands in the doorway, Leon as he was when he was young, when there was still some fun in his face along with the meanness. His hair is dark with Brylcreem, no strand out of place, and his black dress shoes are buffed to a high polish. Shane's head barely comes up to his chest. Leon grabs Shane's windbreaker at the back of the neck, almost lifting Shane up. He spins him around toward me, still holding on. And I get to see my son face-to-face for the first time since he died.

“Talk to your mama,” Leon says.

Shane squirms out of Leon's clutch but doesn't run.

Missouri, her work done, becomes young again. With a smile for Leon she prances out of the room, petticoat showing at the hem of her dress. If she had a hat she would toss it. Leon follows her, his step heavy down the short hall and out onto the porch.

I reach for Shane. I have had years to form the question in my mouth. “Was it me, son?” I quaver. “Was I the reason? Did I make you do it?” I hold onto his arm, feel nylon over hard bone, weep with the realness of it. I can't get ahold of myself.

Shane looks at me. He is so close I can count the shaving nicks on his face that never had time to heal. He reaches up and touches my hair, tracing the gray among the brown, letting his fingers rest cool against my cheek. “It wasn't you, Ma,” he says.

“Ivy!” Eugenia comes running. She finds me blubbering and speechless, holding onto air. My son has laid out his answer in a circle, a funeral wreath for me to treasure.

Outside, sun leans over the mountain, sucking rain back into the sky. On the porch, Leon whistles. Eugenia lifts her head. She takes my hand, and we listen as dog noises tear at the air. Excited whines, the scratch of toenails, the tickling sniff of warm noses searching for palm.