A Question of Mercy (7 page)

She squeezed by the men and walked toward the rack of crackers and gum. The men looked her over—with pleasure, she felt, more than suspicion. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a man's plaid shirt from somebody's clothesline. Her hair, still wet, was clean, and she smelled like soap.

“You're new around here,” one trooper said, smiling.

“Just passing through,” Jess told him. “I'm staying with some folks down the road.” She hoped they wouldn't ask for a name. On the wall calendar, next to the phone, a girl in a red bathing suit sat on the hood of a car. She held a Coca-Cola bottle near her breast. The day was May 29, 1953.

The owner was listening to a radio broadcast, and turned it up.

The body of a young man was found in the French Broad River fifty miles from his home in Goshen, North Carolina. The cause of death was drowning. The man, identified as Adam Finney, was almost twenty years old. His body floated downriver for four days before he was found by a passer-by who said that he saw the young man's body lodged against a tree. His clothes were torn and he had lost one shoe
.

“Could I:

The mother, Clementine Finney, claimed that the boy was retarded, and that he had disappeared the day before he was being committed to the Cadwell Institution, near Raleigh, North Carolina. When asked if the death could have been a suicide, Mrs. Finney said no, she did not think so. The young man had been with his step-sister, Jess Booker, who has also been missing since that day. Miss Booker is seventeen years old. The police are searching for her now
.

Jess wondered if this day might be the end of her running. She felt slight relief at the thought of regular food, or shelter—even in a jail cell.

The cause of death was drowning, but the coroner is looking for any other signs of trauma. No suspects have been named. Anyone knowing any information about this incident, please call your local police station
.

As Jess paid for the packs of gum she could not make her hand let go of the two nickels, then she dropped them; but as she leaned down to pick them up, her eyes went blind for a moment. She brushed her hand on the floor to find the nickels; then stood, not even blinking. She handed the man the change and reached to take the packages of Juicy Fruit. She opened one stick of gum and moved it to her lips. While tasting its sweetness, her sight came back; but her mind quivered. As she left the repair shop, she felt herself moving quickly past the two troopers; but, in truth, she moved deliberately, like a turtle—one slow step, then another.

She imagined Adam's shy face floating above the water. She saw his muddy shoes, his hair fixed flat against his head. Then her mind saw him
running down the stairs to dinner, hiding in the yard with his dog, or letting a blue balloon float across the river. Her mind held images like a box of coins.

A woman drove up in a large Studebaker with the engine smoking and the car making a grinding sound. She screeched to a stop in front of the troopers. “Looks like you got some work ahead of you there, Charlie,” one said, pointing to the smoking car. They told Charlie goodbye, and did not look back. As Jess left, she heard the woman say she had to get as far as Rome, Georgia. Charlie lifted the hood of the Studebaker, and steam roiled out.

Jess walked behind the repair shop and waited. She leaned against the brick wall, unable to think of anything but Adam's body on the riverbank. One shoe gone. Her legs shook and she wanted the image of him to leave her mind. Everything was her fault. She should have told those troopers that it was all her fault. But the thought of the boardinghouse was stronger than the need to turn herself in. She waited almost thirty minutes before she heard the hood slam down and Charlie call to the woman that her car was ready. Jess walked to where the woman was paying for the repairs.

“I forgot to get a map,” Jess said. “I need a map, and I need to make a call to my aunt. She's real bad sick.”

“That phone won't work,” Charlie said. “Been broke for couple a days.” He brought out two old maps. “Might not show some of the new roads,” he said. “Pretty old.”

“Where you going, honey?” the woman asked.

“My aunt lives right outside Rome, Georgia,” Jess said. “I need to take care of her.” She gave the woman a fake name.

“Maybe I can help,” said the woman. “I'm going twenty miles the other side of Rome.”

“Your car really needs a new transmission, lady,” Charlie said.

Jess opened the car door and put her satchel on the floor. “That would help a lot.”

The woman turned on the ignition. They both heard a scraping sound, but ignored it. “Don't you have to go to school?” she asked Jess. “Where's your mother?”

“She's already there.” Jess had a spasm of coughs and the woman reached into her glove compartment to get some Kleenex and a box of Luden's Cherry Cough Drops. “My aunt's real sick.”

“Sounds like you are, too.”

They rode for two hours while Jess slept, then she woke to make conversation. Riding and sleeping made Jess relax; but, when the woman asked questions about her family, Jess began to forget what she had already told
her. When they reached the outskirts of Rome, Jess asked to get out.

“You want me to let you out here?” The woman's head wagged back and forth trying to see where they were. “No houses around here.”

“It's just down this road,” said Jess, pointing to a long dirt road. She gathered her satchel and moved out of the car. “This is fine. I know just where to go now. Thank you.”

The woman left, telling her to be careful. “And take care a'that cough.”

Jess walked along the road for almost a mile before entering the woods, where she found an abandoned shed. She opened the broken door to see a large rat and three squirrels scatter through a hole in the wall. A mattress lay twisted in the corner and she unfolded it, brushing off leaves and dirt. She could not stop coughing, and felt a chill deep in her bones.
I cannot be sick
, she thought. She willed the fever to leave her.

She gathered some sticks, tore pages from an old Marshall Fields catalogue that lay beside the wood stove, and lit a fire. In only a few minutes the small room grew warm. She reached into her satchel and took out a bag of oranges someone had left in the bottom of a grocery cart. Jess had whisked the oranges underneath her coat before running away. Behind her a girl had yelled, “Hey! Stop! Stop her!”

The oranges were an unexpected bonus. She imagined they were an answer to prayer, if she had been able to pray. I used to pray, she thought, as she shifted sideways on the mattress. I used to be able to pray so easy. Jess opened a can of corned beef hash and ate with a smooth flat stick. She stuffed the hole with the catalogue, then lay on the mattress, trying to ignore the stains and mildewy odor. It was the softest bed she had slept on in weeks. The air smelled of rain, but May rain felt more like summer than winter. She took a few crackers, some of Sam's letters, and drank an RC Cola. A spray of birds blew across the tiny window and landed on the shed's roof.

Sweet Jess
,

I've had more time to think about you, since we're having three days of rest camp. We've got clean clothes, showers, haircuts, and, also, we've been fumigated because of fleas and lice. It feels good to be clean again. And to shave. There are times when I would not want you to see me, but never a time when I don't want to see you. Yesterday we found some time to hunt. Me and Carl Hill and Billy Keifert (all of us southern boys who grew up hunting with our dads) went bird hunting. Billy dropped a bird and when it fell, it set off a land mine. We were hunting in an old mine field and didn't even know it! We left fast, and won't ever go there again
.

We get so hungry, and had planned to eat the birds we shot. Did I tell you about the South Korean service guys (choggis)? They stay in their own tent (not far from mine) and they have a little stove. I can smell food they're cooking, and one day I went over to their tent. They were cooking a big pot of rice, with fish-heads. It smelled good, but I could see little bugs in it. I motioned to them that I wanted to eat and they moved over and we all ate together, with our fingers. It was good, I tell you. I didn't care what was in it. The other guys said they would never eat that stuff. I kept telling them it was good
.

Here's something else. I found a guy here (in the next camp over), somebody I went to school with named Petey Ross. We went to grammar school all the way through high school together. We weren't friends or anything, but I wanted to see him real bad. I asked my Capt. for permission to go. He said I probably shouldn't, but I kept insisting and finally, he let me visit him. Petey was in a mortar unit and we met in the Mess Hall. We talked about high school mostly. It started getting dark, and I had a hard time finding my way back. I had to say the password to get back in my camp. The password was “Hopalong Cassidy.” I said “Hopalong” and the guy on guard duty said “Cassidy.”

When I get home I want us to get married and live in a nice house somewhere near a fire station. I want an American flag to fly on holidays, even Christmas. I want our kids to know what America is. I don't know what's wrong with me. I guess thinking about Hopalong Cassidy makes me homesick. Seeing a friend from grammar school meant the world to me, and I think about Roy Rogers and Hopalong and I get a lump in my chest. When I think about you all I want is to hold you. Remember when we spent long mornings together? I keep remembering
.

Jess remembered too. She smiled and wished she could be clean, fumigated, or eating something cooked by someone else—without the bugs. She and Sam were sharing parallel lives, only Sam had an enemy trying to kill him and Jess was just alone. She wondered about the things he had to do, and all that he was not saying, and she wondered how different he would be when she saw him again. How different she would be.

She opened the sack of oranges and chose one, digging into the peel with her thumb. An orange mist sprayed her face. She ate the sections, relishing every bite, then licked her fingers and palms where the sweet juice had dripped. She wrapped Adam's raincoat tightly around her and lay back with the taste of oranges in her mouth.

— 9 —

O
n the first night that Clementine moved in with Edward, Adam wandered through the house like a restless wind. He kept asking where he was and, after a few unsettling nights, Clementine let him sleep in the locked basement. “Because sometimes when Adam goes to a new place,” Clementine explained, “he tends to wander off in the middle of the night. I think he's trying to get back to where he was, but doesn't know how to get there.” She spoke as though this had happened before.

They set up a rollaway bed, a table and lamp, and his stuffed animals, but Jess heard him whimpering every night; then she heard Clementine open the basement door—talking to Adam or singing until he felt right. After four days Edward suggested that Adam spend the night in his own room—the guest room they had fixed up for him. So he did, and the whimpering stopped.

“He's just different. He's been that way since he was born,” Clementine said. “But he always looked like a regular boy.” Adam was lean and tall, with thick hair—handsome, even. “He couldn't walk until he was three,” she said. “He couldn't talk right until he was six.”

He still can't
, Jess thought, but didn't say.

Those next few months brought a shift of roles to the house: Clementine embraced the chores that had been Jess's pleasure, Edward Booker took Adam to the zoo and to ball games, Jess spent more time with her friends. And even though Jess had not welcomed Clementine into their family, she was forced to agree with her father that the woman was a fine cook.

Clementine spent whole afternoons in the kitchen, and by six o'clock the house smelled like suppertime. Everything she made was good. She baked chocolate cakes and blackberry cobblers. She asked Jess what kind of cookies she wanted for lunch and sometimes made cupcakes, placing them on a square plate in the shape of a pyramid.

But Jess objected when Clementine moved the furniture to suit her own taste, moving the sofa and chairs to face the TV, and bringing in a rug from her own house. She took down a mirror out of the hallway. Jess remembered when her mother had bought it, and hung it there. She couldn't bear the changes, and complained to her father.

“She lives here now, Jess,” her father said; but the next day the mirror had been re-hung, though other tables and chairs were rearranged. Clementine told Adam he could arrange his room the way he wanted, and one afternoon passing by the room, Jess saw Adam bending over a framed photo of his father and Clementine and Adam (at about five years old) standing beside a picnic table. His father had one arm draped around Adam's shoulder. Jess had seen Adam touch the face of his father in the photo, moving his finger over the tiny face trying to feel the cheeks, the nose.

But the one still-sacred part of Jess's life happened each Saturday when she rode her horse, Buckhead, at some nearby stables. Her father was proud of Jess's riding skills. Over the years he had travelled to see her perform in shows, bragging on the ribbons she had won; but when he began to bring Adam to the stables on Saturday, Jess felt another part of her life slipping away.

“Maybe he could learn to ride,” Edward said. “Maybe you could teach him.”

“It's not that easy,” Jess said.

One Saturday, Jess let Adam mount Buckhead and, reluctantly, led him around the ring. Adam pulled back too hard on the reins and kicked Buckhead's sides, the way he had seen cowboys perform in the movies. When he dismounted on the wrong side, the horse spooked, kicked out his back leg, and ran to the other side of the ring.

“My Gosh!” Jess said. “Can't you do anything right!” Adam backed away. Jess approached Buckhead, calmed him and led him back. “Come here,” she said to Adam, and pushed a brush into his hand. “Whenever you ride you have to brush down the horse and cool him off with a hose. “Like this.” She moved Adam's arm abruptly toward the horse. Buckhead shied away again before allowing Adam to brush his back and mane. Adam brushed slowly, methodically.