A Question of Mercy (27 page)

“I imagined the police would be here to pick me up,” she said. “I guess I might have to go to jail.” It was a question.

“That's what I hope to prevent, Sweetie.” Her father looked uncomfortable. “And your lawyer got the judge to give me custody of you until tomorrow. But tomorrow …” His voice trailed off. On the phone Edward had so many questions that Jess would not allow him to ask; but now that she was here, Edward didn't ask anything.

“Do you want to know what happened?” Jess said.

“I don't know,” he said. “It's all I've thought about for months.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a pitcher of milk. “I
did
want to know. But seeing you, I mean, you can't take the blame for this, Jess. I won't have you do that. None of this was your fault.” He poured three glasses of milk and set them on the table. “Let me just be glad you're home.”

“Will I have a trial?” Jess wanted to know everything. Nothing inside her was running away now.

“First, we'll have the arraignment,” he told her. “Strickland will see you tomorrow.” They made sandwiches and ate slowly. Jess took in the feeling of being home again, but the atmosphere of the house had changed. Cobwebs hovered in the corners, and the doorknob on the kitchen door was gone.

“Jess, I don't blame you. Just don't tell me anything right now. Strickland wants to talk to you first.” He coughed. “Part of the evidence against you was when you said that Adam would be better off dead than in Cadwell. Did you say that?”

Jess nodded. “But I didn't mean that I would hurt him.”

“Well, I don't want you to lie, exactly. I just don't want you to go to jail. Do you hear what I'm saying?” He leaned in toward her. “I couldn't bear it. I blame myself more than I blame you.”

It had not occurred to Jess to lie to the lawyer.

Edward finally asked how Jess had survived alone all those months and she told him about Ruby and Pug, the hard days of living in the woods, getting sick, and stealing the oranges. She told him about people at Tut's Boardinghouse and the man who had followed her in a muddy brown and white car. Edward listened intently, but his face looked slightly misshapen. He didn't comment.

Sam appeared around the door jamb to say that he was going to bed. Jess knew that tonight, here in her house, they would sleep apart. She cut a piece of cake, and dropped some on the floor for Hap.

How's Buckhead?” Jess asked, expecting the worst.

“He's good,” her father said. “He's fine.”

That night Jess slept in Adam's room, where his smell still lingered: the odor of stale cinnamon and tree roots—not always pleasant. Hap curled up on the rug beside Adam's bed, and headlights of cars roamed over the bedroom walls. Adam had liked the patterns made by the passing lights: shafts that brushed across the wall, making the room bright as day—but only for a moment. He imagined driving those cars.

Once, Edward had taken Adam on back country roads to let him drive, teaching him to shift gears, to go in reverse, which he found hysterically funny. When Adam mentioned it to Jess, he said “Don't tell.” He said it twice.

Jess felt the two strains of her life coming together. Some nights in the woods Jess had felt a small dark place within her. She lay very still until she was sure that the dark place inside would not join the black of the air, and swallow her whole. When she felt safe, she would doze off, falling into a hollow place inside her chest; other nights she wondered if she had died and awakened inside a coffin built too large for her body—a coffin with trees and sky. She took the edge of the sheet between her forefinger and thumb, pressing down, not letting go; and she cried out, as Adam used to do when he woke in the middle of the night.

Clementine said Adam had always done that, even as a baby. Jess imagined that Adam was calling for a life he couldn't have. She hoped he had not suffered too much in the river. She hoped he had finally found the harmony that lived in his tall body.

On that day three months ago she was pushed by a question of mercy; now she had to focus on the matter of truth. Everything centered around an accident of birth, her own quick decision, and the absence of choices. She grabbed the sheet with both hands, and realized that she had been holding her breath. All of these thoughts had come in so unexpectedly from such a slight provocation—as Adam's old words.
Don't tell. Don't tell
.

Jess woke the next day to geese calls and Hap barking at whatever lurked in the yard. Her appointment with Mr. Strickland was at eleven o'clock, and the arraignment was scheduled for the afternoon. Her father was still asleep. She stood at the window and felt bound to whatever would come next. The pungent air of fall was just beginning. Sam called to her from downstairs. Jess dressed quickly and found him waiting at the table drinking coffee. “Your voice sounded like something was wrong,” she said.

He shook his head. “That's an understatement, don't you think?” He spoke with a chill in his voice, and she didn't know how to react. She made some toast and sat at the table with him.

“What do you think the lawyer will say today?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “I feel guilty, but I don't feel guilty of manslaughter.”

“I know about manslaughter,” Sam said.

“You ever heard of Scots Law?” Jess asked. She did not say that Frank had explained the law one night when he was trying to get information out of her. “It says a person can be proven ‘not guilty,' but the verdict doesn't ‘presume innocence.'”

“What do you mean?” Sam said. “Being ‘not guilty' and being ‘innocent' are two completely different ideas.”

“Some things aren't reasonable like that,” she said. “Let me ask you something, Sam. If I were proven guilty, would you still love me?”

“Don't you think I wonder the same thing?” he said. “If you would love me?”

“But I do. I do love you.” She didn't know if that was true. “How can you say that?”

Sam's hands fidgeted nervously. “I'm going to tell you something,” he said, but then he waited so long that Jess thought he had decided not to say it. “Remember that guy I wrote you about? Billy Keifert? Well, we stood by each other through some bad stuff. We were friends. I won't ever have such a good friend, but in the end …” He hesitated.

“In the end … what?”

“It was on the day we moved into Soyang Valley, and Billy's feet were hurting. He could hardly walk.” Sam seized her arm. “Everywhere the mud was deep, like glue. You'd see tanks stuck, with mud to the top of the tracks. At first, we got just light shelling, then some mortars started coming in. Made us real jumpy.” He stopped and Jess sat very still.

“That's when Billy got hurt,” he said quietly. “He was hit by a mortar. He was hurt bad, I mean, real bad. Should have been killed, Jess. I was about a hundred feet away, but when I got to him I saw his stomach split wide open. I tried to stop the bleeding with my shirt. Took it off and stuffed it into the wound. He was saying he couldn't stand it.” Sam looked like a blind man seeing things in his mind. “I could see his insides, everything just right there. And he was screaming so loud, Jess. I'd never heard a sound like that. Then he started begging me to kill him. To shoot him. ‘Just let me die,' he kept saying. He kept saying, ‘Please, please.' I told him the medic would come. He lay like that, I don't know how long. I've never seen so much blood.”

“Where was the medic?” Jess asked.

“We had a lot wounded that day. When the medic finally got there, I had so much blood on me he thought I was the one hurt.” Sam paused, “I should have been. It should have been me.”

“Sam …”

“I thought about shooting him—maybe in the head. He was begging me to end it, begging me, Jess. I couldn't do it. He finally died. Keifert. Fuck! Fuck it all! After that if anybody tried to touch me, even once, I thought I'd kill 'em. Even the doctors trying to help me. I couldn't stand to be touched. Sometimes even now. I don't know what that is.”

He didn't speak for a full minute. Everything was tainted by the memory of blood and buddies. He could not reconcile the Sam he used to be with the man who ran blindly into a skirmish ready to drive a bayonet into the heart of a man his age with a different face, a different language. He had not known he could do the things he did and he had not asked himself what the war would cost him. “I'm just not the person you loved, Jess. I'm different now.”

Jess thought about being without either guilt or innocence, and what their actions had cost them. “Oh, Sam. I'm so sorry.” She waited. “Maybe your feelings for me have changed.” She waited again. “Have they?” She tried to push down the resentment rising inside her. She needed him today, but he couldn't help her.

“My feelings for everything have changed, Jess.” He could not stop shaking his head. “If things had just been different.”

Jess stood up. “We have about a thousand
ifs
right now, Sam.” Jess was the one who sounded angry now. She clenched her hands together, then unclenched them. She could feel the unevenness of the wood floor beneath her feet.

Jess left Sam sitting at the table. “I have to get ready to meet Strickland,” she said. “My dad will drive me in.”

— 38 —

J
ames Strickland's office felt like a court. Edward and Jess answered questions, but finally Mr. Strickland stood up and walked around his desk. He asked Edward if he could speak privately with Jess. Edward could wait outside.

“Today,” he told Jess, “you'll be informed of charges made by Clementine Finney and you'll be asked to enter a plea of ‘guilty' or ‘not guilty.' I assume you want to plead ‘not guilty'?” He was walking the room.

Jess nodded.

“The state could charge you with negligence or involuntary manslaughter. Then the court determines whether or not to set bail or release you on your own recognizance.” He shook his head. “The fact that you ran away will go against you, I'm afraid. But even if you are sent to jail, I believe I can get bail set after a couple of days. Do you understand?” A car honked irritably and made them both jump.

Jess's whole body turned rigid. “I ran away because I thought I'd be in trouble for letting Adam go into the water.”

“Could you have stopped him?” he asked her.

Jess looked at Strickland for a moment. “No,” she said. “Nobody could.” She almost believed this was true. “He would have done
anything
not to go to Cadwell.”

Strickland sat down next to Jess. “Next time you're asked that question,” he said, “don't hesitate before you say no.” He leaned back. A shock of hair fell onto his forehead. “Let me tell you though, Jess, I believe we'll be all right. I don't see how they can find you guilty of anything other than just talking to Adam. The best they have is Adam's limited mental ability—and whether or not he was cognizant of the consequences when he went into the river. He couldn't swim, right?”

“That's right.”

“Let's take it one step at a time,” he told her, and patted the arm of her chair. “As I said, I think this will be a hard case to prove.” Strickland lifted his briefcase from the desk to indicate that they were leaving his office to go to the arraignment.

In the town square a September sky threatened rain. The flag was being lowered, and two dogs were barking in the street.

At the arraignment Jess pleaded not guilty, but the judge set bail higher than they expected. She was considered a flight risk so, for the time being, Jess had to go to jail. The policewoman cuffed her and Edward reached to touch her shoulder. As she was led from the courtroom, his hand slid down her arm and Jess thought he was going to ask her something, or try to come with her. Then she thought she heard him call her name—as he might have called her in from the yard years ago.

She was driven to the jail where she walked, dazed and stumbling, down a narrow corridor. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. She was led through two locked doors that shuddered closed behind her. A few of the cells were open and some prisoners stood in the corridor. They passed a heavy-set woman carrying a vile-smelling bucket. Another woman, in a cell with the door open, was bent over in a peculiar stance. Jess felt as though she might faint, but walked stolidly forward.

“You kill a husband, girlie?”

“Somebody fuck you without your consent?” Another one laughed. “You take him out?”

The policewoman ordered them to leave her alone, and they sauntered away, back to their own cells. Jess had been running from this day for nearly four months, but nothing in those months had prepared her for the Buncombe County Jail. The policewoman opened the cell door, and unlocked the cuffs before she gently pressed Jess's back, urging her in. The door closed and Jess sat on the hard metal cot. She heard someone whistling a familiar tune. Everything around her appeared lightless and fluid. The angles of the cell began to spin, and she could feel the substance of her own breath against her cheek. Her body shook in spasms.

Women in other cells yelled at her, cursed. Their words floated through Jess's mind like dust motes. The mattress ticking was soiled and sour, and she felt a chill coming through the walls, even though the day was warm. She pulled her jacket around her. The cell had nothing but the cot and a chair with one broken leg. She could smell the odor of urine and sweat and the lingering scent of the policewoman. Two roaches huddled in the corner beneath a stained toilet bowl that was bolted to the cement. Water leaked
from the edges of pipes, and a small high window allowed her to see that the afternoon light had softened into a purple gauze, almost dark.

Strickland spent two days convincing Judge Horn that Jess would not be a flight risk; then he made a motion for a bench trial. He liked this judge.