Under the Mercy Trees (4 page)

8

Ivy

My daughter, Trina, drives us to Eugenia's house in the low-slung black Corvette that is her pride and obsession. My son Steven squeezes in the back, and I sink into the front seat, afraid I won't be able to get myself back out. Trina keeps her car clean. She washes and vacuums it twice a week and won't let anybody eat or drink in it. I understand her care, this girl who for so long didn't own a nice thing to tend to. At twenty-eight she looks like she did as a youngster, with dark brown hair she cut into wings in front of the bathroom mirror, corduroy Levi's and a plaid shirt hanging out at the tail. Her pug nose leads her fierce and hopeful into life. She has always kept her head above water, a dunked dog bobbing, intent on surviving. She does Steven's books at the body shop. She and Steven neither one can keep a boyfriend or girlfriend, because they are more loyal to each other and to me than they are to any mate.

At Eugenia's, Trina helps me out of her car, and Steven climbs out behind. Hodge Goforth stands on the porch, here to support the family and explain things to us. “Y'all come in.”

We go inside, and Trina whispers in my ear, “This house smells like old lady.”

I swat her arm. “Hush.”

Eugenia has furnished her living room with the laminate furniture they make at the furniture plant where her husband, Zeb, worked before he retired. Flat olive green carpet with a wave pattern covers the floor. Her shelves are full of pictures of her only daughter and her grandchildren, who don't come visit much but who send her pictures to put up on her fridge. Eugenia doesn't put pictures on her fridge, of course. There is nothing on her fridge but a magnet shaped like praying hands. Nothing out of place in her house. She has not made coffee for us or the sheriff, and there aren't even enough seats for all of us to sit down. She doesn't want us to stay long. I expect she is suffering particularly to have me here. Eugenia has not spoken to me any more than necessary since I was seventeen and got pregnant with my first boy, Shane. I embarrass her, hard as I try not to. The ghosts must feel unwelcome here, too. I only see one, a baby spirit tumbling around the room, looking for somebody to pester.

Steven finds me a place on a love seat at the far end of the room, facing the door. He and Trina stand up behind me. I can feel Steven protecting me, the way he's done ever since his big brother, Shane, died. I lean my head back and look up at him. Steven's hair is wiry, the gray ones poking out above the brown. His arms are strong, and there is auto body paint under his fingernails. He is scowling at my brother and sister. He feels their slights more than I do. I want to reach up and smooth out the groove between his eyebrows. He sees me looking up at him upside down and smiles.

James and Bertie's boy, Bobby, has come. My Steven can't abide Bobby. I hope they can both behave themselves tonight. Bobby slouches against a wall. His baseball cap is on backward and lifts up every time he leans his head back. James and Bertie sit in metal folding chairs. Bertie's arms are crossed against her chest. When Bertie wishes to be somewhere else, she can't take it off her face. Eugenia and her husband, Zeb, claim the couch, leaving room for Hodge at the end. The sheriff chooses to stand. We are all of us here but Martin, who is supposed to get in this evening but hasn't appeared yet. Martin is the baby. The family has never counted on him in weighty matters, any more than they've counted on me. Sheriff Metcalf goes ahead and starts without him.

“I thank y'all for coming. There's so many of you, I wanted to say things just once so I didn't have to repeat.” The sheriff looks around at us, making eye contact with those of us that will let him. “Y'all may have already heard, we're discontinuing the search for the time being.” His jaw kind of clenches, like he's expecting an outcry from us, but he hasn't said anything we don't already know. We stay quiet. He looks relieved. “Now, that doesn't mean we're giving up. It just means we've covered everywhere we can think of to look. If we get any new information, we can start the search again. I'm going to summarize what we know, then y'all can ask questions.”

We all nod. The baby spirit, hair curling reddish gold all over her head, settles on Bobby and pulls on his ball cap. Bobby doesn't notice.

“The first Monday of the month, Leon cashed his Social Security check at the bank, so we believe he had some cash on him. His wallet wasn't in the house. Maybe he had it with him, though James says he didn't generally carry it when he worked around the property.”

“That's right,” James says. I picture Leon's wallet, shiny with wear, a ring worn in the leather from a condom he's had in there ever since I can remember.

The sheriff goes on. “That same day, Alvin Richards saw him at the Piggly Wiggly. The next day, Tuesday, James saw him when he went over to borrow a tool. That's the last sighting we know of. When James went by again a week later, Leon wasn't there and the front door was hanging open. The dogs were hungry. That's when y'all called us.”

The sheriff's focus on timing makes me nervous. Time confuses me. I worry about saying the wrong thing, getting it wrong. As the sheriff starts to ask his questions, I keep my mouth shut.

“Do y'all know anybody who had a reason not to like Leon?” The sheriff doesn't look at me, but an answer forms in my head all the same.

Did I have a reason not to like Leon? Yes I did.

*  *  *

I had just turned thirteen. It was April and the air was warm, but the water in the creek that flowed down from Spivey's Bald was so cold it hurt my toes when I dangled them in. Pop had put a pipe where a spring ran out of the rock and into the creek, so we could get water without dirt or leaves in it. I kept a jelly jar down there so I could get me a drink when I wanted. The water out of that pipe tasted sweet and clear. I felt it clean me as it went down. This was my special spot. I sat on bright green, star-shaped moss. This was the only place on the property where such moss grew. Its springy softness was worth the damp that eventually seeped through the seat of my dress. I was building stick houses, using two Y-shaped sticks to start a tiny lean-to, then cutting out a piece of moss as sod to fit the roof. Underneath, in the rectangle hole I'd left, roly-poly bugs panicked in the light, rolling into balls. I was flicking them like marbles when I heard young men's voices hiking up toward me, on the other side of the creek.

First I saw their heads, bobbing as they walked. Leon and two of his friends. Leon was tall, like Pop. New spring sun had pinked his face and neck. Dale Mabrey, as tall as Leon but heavier, carried a big stick he'd picked up and whacked at saplings as he walked. Skinny Nathan Coffey followed behind like he always did, not saying much. They were already in their twenties. All three had been in the service during the war. They rarely gave children like me the time of day. They came out on the rocks across from me.

“Look here.” Dale Mabrey grinned at me across ten feet of shallow water. “That your sister, Owenby?”

“One of them.” Leon looked bored.

“Which one are you?” Dale Mabrey asked me.

“Ivy,” I said.

“What kind of name is that?”

“I don't know.”

“Ivy, Poison Ivy, Creeping Ivy.” Dale looked around at Leon and Nathan, grinning, showing off for them. He splashed across to my side of the creek and poked at my dress with his stick. “What you doing, Ivy?” He lifted up the edge of my skirt with the stick.

I moved away, smoothing it down. “Nothing.”

Nathan Coffey stood nervous on the opposite bank. “Come on, Dale. Let's get going.”

Dale waded back across the creek. He took out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out for himself, tucking it in his overall pocket. “I think I'll stay here.” He held out the whole rest of the pack to Leon. Leon looked over at me and then took it. There I was, sold for half a pack of Salems.

“Come on, Nathan,” Leon said. He walked away. Nathan looked at me across the water and hesitated for half a minute, then he followed Leon. Their sound faded into the laurel, and Dale Mabrey came back across the creek.

He sat down next to me, squashing one of the little houses I had worked on so hard. I didn't say anything, for fear he'd call me a baby. He grinned at me. Pimples covered his face and neck. He fiddled with the fly on his overalls, and his thing popped out and waved around. I had seen male things before, when I took baths with my brothers when we were younger, but this was big and red and ugly looking. When he grabbed my hand and wrapped my fingers around it, it was warm and sticky, and it smelled bad.

“Don't.” I tried to pull away, but he was strong.

“Up and down, Ivy,” he said, his hand over mine. Our two hands rode up and down, faster and faster. Dale's jaw slacked and his breath came quick. His eyes closed. “Faster,” he said, though it was him making our hands move. I felt his thing get wet, and then white stuff squirted out, all over my hand, some on my dress. I got my hand away then. He went up and down a few more times on his own until his thing wilted over. He opened his eyes.

I backed away and bent down to wash the white stuff off my hand in the creek. Dale jumped up and grabbed my wrist. “Don't waste it, Ivy.” He slung me back down on the bank, pulled up my dress, yanked down my drawers. With one finger he collected the white stuff from the end of his thing and off my hand. Then before I knew what he was doing he jammed the finger up me. Jammed and jammed. It burned and I cried out. I tried to get away, but his left hand dug into my collarbone.

He finally stopped and let me go, wiping his finger on his overall legs. “I'll see you around, Creeping Ivy.” He left me there on the bank.

I lay down with my cheek against moss and stared at the creek, focusing on orange rocks polished round by the burbling water. Waxy laurel leaves floated upside down like little boats. Long-legged water bugs skimmed the surface.

My great-grandmother Missouri appeared on the bank as a seven-year-old child. A tight braid tried to tame her red hair. She carried a homemade rag doll that she took no care with. She flung it around, dashing its head on the rocks.

“I want a drink,” she demanded.

I stared at her, dazed.

She stamped her foot. “Get me a drink!”

I got up off the bank and brushed leaves and sticks from my clothes. I found my jelly jar, walked slowly over to the pipe to fill it and brought it back to her. She grabbed it and took a loud drink, handing the glass back to me with a sigh. I drank what was left, my hands and lips shaking, while Missouri kicked pebbles into the creek. No amount of water could wash away what had happened.

After that day, I moved my spot. I left my jelly jar at the pipe but found a new place up the hill, hidden by bushes and long grass, where I could see down but nobody could see me unless I wanted them to.

Did I have a reason not to like Leon? Yes I did. Do I begrudge him selling me out for a half pack of smokes? I do not. I can't hold onto resentments any more than I can hold on to a long thought. Both slip off my mind like a silky ribbon loosing itself from a girl's hair and falling to the dirt on her way home from school. And at least Leon didn't judge, as mean and thoughtless as he was. He was the same to me and my kids always, unlike the back-turning of the others. And lately he had helped me out with something.

No, I didn't keep a grudge.

Sheriff Metcalf is finishing up. I'll get Trina to tell me later what I missed. Eugenia asks Hodge to lead us in a prayer. I am not the only one who doesn't bow her head. We are all watching each other.

Eugenia's front door bangs open. We hear a loud wiping of shoes and smell cologne. Martin leans in the living room doorway, looking older than last time. The grin on his lips is half-desperate. The baby is home.

9

Martin

His family. The faces that turned toward Martin were all like his parents' in some way—his mother's ears sticking out from his sister Eugenia's head, his father's nose on the faces of his sister Ivy and nephew Bobby, a certain turndown of the mouth that afflicted them all. If Martin walked down Main Street in Whelan today, passersby might recognize his own unoriginal face and stop him to ask if he was Rory and Nell Owenby's boy. He lifted his hand in a wave. “Hello.”

“Martin!” Eugenia got up from the couch and ran to him. Her head barely came up to his collarbone, but her wiry arms were strong enough to hurt when she hugged him. The others merged toward him, hugs from the women and handshakes from the men.

Hodge grabbed his shoulders, grinning. “Good to see you, buddy.”

The sheriff, polite, waited for the greetings to subside and for people to take their seats again, then Hodge introduced him. Martin shook the sheriff's hand. Wally Metcalf had a pleasant, intelligent face. Martin liked it all the more because it bore no family resemblance.

“We were about to wrap it up here. I've got to get to another meeting across town,” the sheriff said.

“Hodge can fill me in.” Martin wasn't sorry to have missed the meeting. How was one supposed to act at such events? What face did one put on as law enforcement gave the briefing?

“I'll be in touch, folks,” Sheriff Metcalf said. He showed himself out.

Eugenia planted herself in the living room doorway so no one else could leave. “Y'all heard what he said, now. If you hear of anything, you're to tell him. And us, too.” Then her face crumpled and she started to cry. “This is all so terrible.” Martin was nearest to her, so he put his arm around her. Her husband, Zeb, a tall lurch of a man whom Martin had heard say maybe a dozen words in forty years, got up from the couch and came over to pat her on the shoulder. With a big sniff Eugenia composed herself and moved away from Martin, clearing the exit.

Hodge spoke up. “Eugenia's right. If you think of anything at all, tell the sheriff. You never know when something small will turn out to be important.”

Martin's nephew Bobby leaned against the wall, one dirty boot resting on Eugenia's clean paint. “There's people in this room that do know something and they ain't telling.”

Steven bristled. Ivy reached a calming hand back and touched his wrist.

“Now, Bobby, you don't need to be saying that. I'm sure if anyone here knows anything, they'll tell it,” Hodge said.

“Not if they're the one did it,” Bobby grumbled.

James, looking uncomfortable, spoke to his son. “That's enough, Bobby.”

Bertie sat in her chair, her pointer finger drawing the same circle over and over again on her thigh, beading the pink polyester of her pants.

“No, let's hear what he has to say.” Steven walked around to the front of the room and stood between Bobby and the door, his arms crossed. “I'm inclined to agree that somebody here ain't telling the truth.”

Bobby spoke without looking at Steven. “You didn't like it that Leon was favoring me now. You knew he was going to let me and Cherise put a trailer up there on his property, behind the house.”

“You a damn liar, Bobby. Leon wouldn't've let you do that in a million years, and he was getting tired of you asking.”

“He was going to let us.”

“All right.” Hodge held up a hand. “Nobody's going to put a trailer up there now, anyway. Not until we know something for sure about Leon.”

“But Leon said we could!” Bobby's boot scraped down the wall. Eugenia flinched.

“Son, this is not the time.” James's quiet voice was firm.

“Shit. You stupid—” Bobby stomped toward the door. As he passed Steven, he stumbled over Steven's foot and almost fell. Martin couldn't tell whether Steven had helped Bobby trip or not.

Bobby recovered and got up close to Steven. “You're asking for it, man!”

Steven didn't budge. “Get out of my face, you sorry bastard.”

Bertie crossed her arms and legs and closed her eyes. Martin could almost hear her counting to calm herself.

Hodge moved between Steven and Bobby, using his two arms as a wedge. “Y'all cut it out.”

“There's stuff missing from Leon's place, and I think you took it,” Bobby said.

“I don't have nothing but what Leon gave me.”

James took Bobby by the arm and led him out of the house. Bobby protested all the way out into the yard. Steven headed for the door, but Hodge stopped him. “Let him get on the road first, son.”

Eugenia heaved a sigh and looked at Martin. “Are you going to stay with us?”

Bertie spoke up. “I have a bed all ready for you, Martin.”

Martin was trapped, bound to hurt someone's feelings. “I'll go in alphabetical order, starting with Bertie. Then I'll be back over here tomorrow night to stay with you, Eugenia.”

“Must be nice to be fought over,” Hodge said. Eugenia didn't smile.

Trina and Ivy joined Steven near the door. “Martin, come by the house while you're here,” Steven said.

“I will,” Martin said. Steven always had good dope. A night partying with him and Trina was a tradition Martin made time for on his rare trips back to Solace Fork.

Once Ivy and her children had left, Hodge turned to Martin. “I hate that it took this to get you back home.”

Martin didn't remember a time without Hodge, whose family had lived a half mile away from the Owenby farm, easy walking distance, even barefoot. Hodge was a little pudgier, his hairline slightly more receded than when Martin had last visited, but his good nature hadn't changed. No matter how many years passed, Hodge welcomed Martin as if Martin were still the shining star he'd been as a boy and Hodge was his trusty sidekick. Hodge's loyalty was more than Martin felt he deserved.

“We're doing all we can about Leon. Wally Metcalf knows his stuff. We'll find him,” Hodge said.

Martin nodded. “Thanks for being our liaison.”

“Happy to do it. Now listen. I know you've got to make the rounds to see all your family, but after that me and Claudie want to get you out to our place. There's something I want to run by you.” Hodge looked over at Eugenia, who was making Bertie stand up so she could put away the folding chair Bertie was sitting on.

“I'll give you a call,” Martin said.

Martin told Eugenia good-bye and walked outside with Bertie. James was standing in the yard, alone. The three of them got into James's pickup truck, with Bertie in the middle. Martin could tell Bertie needed a cigarette. He did, too. Nobody spoke. James was usually an easy talker, but he seemed distracted. Martin felt guilty that Leon's disappearance hadn't affected him the way it had James, but James and Leon were closer in age. And Leon hadn't bullied James.

James and Bertie's trailer hadn't changed in thirty years. Bertie kept it immaculate. Eugenia disdained the trailer, but it was nicer than the house they had grown up in. It had indoor plumbing and heat. Martin took James's cue and removed his shoes on the porch. Inside, it was sweltering. Bertie liked it warm. Martin took off his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his dark purple dress shirt. He could feel sweat stains starting to form under his arms. James stripped down to his undershirt.

“You want something to drink?” Bertie said.

He wished he could ask for a Scotch, but Bertie didn't allow liquor in her house. “Just water, please.”

Bertie filled a glass from the tap and handed it to him. The water tasted the way he remembered, delicious, the no-taste of cold rocks.

They walked into the tiny living room. Martin and Bertie sat on the couch. James sank into his recliner. Martin set his water glass on Bertie's polished coffee table.

“What's the name of that firm you work for again?” James said.

“Glenkinchie, Talisker and Craggenmore,” Martin improvised.

James had worked for the same furniture company for decades. He didn't understand or respect self-employment even when it was done well, and Martin didn't do it well. Martin appreciated James. James had treated him decently as a kid. When James and Bertie were courting they took Martin places, once to the state fair in Raleigh. Got him gloriously sick on cotton candy. Bertie was easier then, just a sweet, uncomplicated girl. Now she sat on the sofa, her white hair pulled back with a bow-shaped barrette that was too young for her, so tense that if he reached over and touched her with his finger she would jump.

She reached for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on an end table next to the couch, shook a cigarette out for herself and handed Martin one without his asking. “You can sleep in Bobby's room.”

“Where will Bobby sleep?”

“He stays at his girlfriend's house.”

“Ah. What's her name again?”

James leaned back in his chair, raising the footrest. “Cherise. Cherise LaFaye.”

“Good lord.”

“She made it up. She cuts hair. She must think it makes her sound fancy for her customers,” Bertie said.

“Ah. Her
nom de cosmetologie
.”

Bertie didn't smile. “People ought to use the name they're given. That goes against my grain of salt.”

“What's her story?” Martin lit up with his own lighter, not waiting for Bertie to get through with hers. He imagined them both relaxing a bit there on the couch as the nicotine hit.

Bertie inhaled. “She's not much good.” She exhaled and looked over at James.

“She'd sooner climb a tree and lie than stay on the ground and tell the truth,” James said.

Bertie passed Martin a plastic ashtray. “She's going to get Bobby in trouble.”

Bobby had never needed help getting into trouble. Martin could tell by Bertie's face that she knew it.

“What was that about Bobby putting a trailer up at the home place?” Martin said.

“He got this idea in his head of selling that big pile of rock back behind Leon's house, and him and Cherise putting a trailer back in there,” James said.

Martin remembered the heap of stone, between their mother's garden and what used to be their father's corn field. It was huge, made up of all the rocks his family had ever turned up plowing. The pile had been there so long that grass had grown up through it and the snakes considered it theirs. “Who'd buy rock around here? Doesn't everybody have plenty of their own?”

“You'd be surprised. New people moving in want it for walls and such. There's a man parks a truck full down at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, gets eighty dollars a ton for it,” James said.

“Selling the rock isn't the problem. Talking Leon into it is,” Bertie said. “Bobby told us Leon was still thinking on it, but I don't know.”

Martin couldn't see Leon going along with Bobby's plan. It would have required Leon to make a change. Getting Leon to do anything different would be harder than moving that pile of grassed-over stone. Martin wondered how pissed Bobby had been when Leon said no. He looked over at Bertie. Her index finger was scratching a circle on the fabric of her pants again. He wondered if she even knew she did it and thought of the pills he could get her, cheap, to smooth out the bumps in her road.

Bertie set her cigarette in the ashtray and got up. She picked up a long manila folder from the top of the television and brought it over, opening it on the coffee table to reveal a collection of newspaper clippings in various shades of yellow. The clipping on top was about Leon, with a picture of the home place, more dilapidated and overgrown than when Martin had last seen it.

“I've saved all the ones since Leon went missing,” Bertie said.

James made a small sound in his throat and stood up. “I'm going to turn in.” He walked down the hall toward the back bedroom.

The corners of Bertie's eyes pinched with worry. “All he's done since Leon went missing is search and sleep.”

Martin didn't know what to say. He lifted the top clipping and read the sheriff's plea to anyone who might have seen Leon, then moved the articles about Leon aside, curious to see the rest of Bertie's collection.

“You can look at all of them if you want. I don't know why I save them. I guess because no one else in the family cares to.”

She had created an archive of Owenby memorabilia, including every mention of their family that had ever appeared in print. Martin's fingers stopped at his father's obituary, with a muddy snapshot someone had taken shortly before he died. He looked ancient. In contrast, his mother was young in her photograph, barely a girl. Dots of ink fragmented her young face.

“She was a pretty woman in her day,” Bertie said, watching him.

“She looked nothing like this,” Martin said. It seemed dishonest to have put this picture in the paper when she died.

“I don't know that anyone ever took a later one. Your mama wasn't one to call attention to herself.”

Martin thought of the one time his mother got a break from her work of tending the men. She and Martin caught the mumps together. His father had never had the mumps and feared what it would do to his manhood. He let Martin's mother sequester herself with Martin in their bedroom, and he slept on the porch. She may have been miserable trapped in bed with an eight-year-old, but to Martin it was heaven to have her to himself for long quiet days at a time while his father and brothers were in the fields.

Bertie gently moved the clipping of his mother aside. “Here's one about you.”

The piece she pulled out was about one of Martin's plays. The town librarian had organized some locals to come to Chapel Hill to see it his senior year of college. His mother was dead by then and his father had refused, but Eugenia and Zeb came. Bertie and James didn't. Bertie had left James that year, briefly, and she and James weren't facing anyone yet. Martin never knew the details, just Eugenia's righteous condemnation of Bertie for running off with some man to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. It was months before Eugenia would even speak to Bertie again. Martin wondered if Bertie was thinking about that now as she showed him the clipping.