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She is crying.
Click, click, tap, tap
are the sounds of teardrops hitting the floor.
“Mercy.”
That’s all it takes for the great rift between the past and the present to form a seam. Mercy gathers me in her arms.
She and I commence to repeating each other’s names. She’s crying sometimes when she says my name, and sometimes she’s laughing, and sometimes she’s saying it in that singsong way of hers like we’re back to being girls playing ring-around-the-rosy. I just say her name one way, the way you’d say
Jesus Christ
on that first Easter Sunday.
“You came back! You came back!” Her happiness is a faucet open all the way. Mercy handles me the way a blind person would. She runs her hands across my head and my face, rubs my hands. She touches my birthmark and smiles, like she can’t believe it’s all still there, every blemish, every fingernail. “You made it, Blythe!”
I do my own assessing. She’s a good fifty pounds heavier and has an enormous Afro instead of braids, but she is still my best friend, just the way I remembered. Same round-cheeked face caught in a moonbeam. No burn marks, no scars, no goiter or tumors. “You made it, too, Mercy. You made it, too.” And I figure we will grow old together the way friends are supposed to.
“I didn’t believe Arlo when he told me. And then Ginny Bowers sent someone over to tell me and I knew it had to be true. Blythe Hallowell!”
“Mercy Coleman.”
“You made it!”
Behind her, in a neat row of descending height, stand four children, the last still in diapers. Not one of them resembles Mercy, and each has disfigurement. I was mistaken in thinking Mercy had come through Diablo intact—missing from the bunch is the girl from the picture Dobbs brought me all those years ago.
“Come here, kids,” Mercy says. “This here’s your aunt Blythe.” She shoves the oldest toward me, a boy about twelve years old who is unable to hold his head completely straight. He offers to shake my hand, but
Mercy pokes him in the ribs, so he reconsiders and gives me the lame-armed hug of an awkward adolescent. The next boy has his mama’s Afro and her pluck. He barrels into my embrace and latches the stumps he has for arms around me. The other two crowd in.
And then Mercy goes stiff in front of Adam.
One of these days someone’s going to come out and say something along the lines of what an awful thing it must be to have Adam be Dobbs’s son, but I just don’t want that day to be today or that someone to be Mercy. I know the look on her face, though. I know she’s got that bitter taste of Dobbs Hordin in her mouth. I love her all over again like she’s my twin, but I will disown her if she so much as draws her tongue over her teeth.
Mercy reaches into her bosom and pulls out a handkerchief. She balls it against each eye, then tucks it away. “Come here you,” she says to Adam. “Come here so your aunt Mercy can love on you.”
Mercy has her arms around Adam, like he needn’t ever have to hold himself up again if he doesn’t want to, that she’ll be happy to do it for him. How brave Adam is to let someone do this. I look at the others. They are being brave, too—the children holding one another’s hands. Arlo and Marcus not saying anything at all, their silence is a kind of bravery, too. I can feel it, not just in this room, but beyond it, too—people bravely bearing each other up. The world is being held together with hands on elbows, tissues and tears, with soft words and sighs. When Mercy looks at me, I see the bearing up is meant for me, too.
Somehow, we are back on Main Street, Mercy and me arm in arm, a bevy of children behind us. What she says about me being back home and how she always knew this day would come she says loud. Even what she says about Arlo still being easy on the eyes and don’t I agree, wink-wink, is done at full volume. It’s when she gazes over at Marcus and leans in to whisper in my ear that I know she’s planning trouble. I know her, oh, how I still know her.
“Who’s Captain America?”
I shiver and open my eyes. No matter how many times I wake up to the smell of home, I am always surprised that it’s Grandpa’s farm that surrounds me and not a concrete cylinder. It doesn’t get old, the simple act of opening my eyes. It doesn’t matter that looters have taken everything of value from the house. Under the debris and dust, it is still a home, a home full of memories. I suppose with Adam living here, it’s a home full of promise, too. Marcus believes it would make a great place as a babies’ safe house, but that’s a decision for down the road.
I get up on one elbow and admire the house from the porch. It is already getting that lived-in look. Mercy’s the decorator, turning feed sacks into drapes and vines into door wreaths. She’s tireless. I suspect she’s hoping all her efforts will entice me to sleep indoors. I haven’t the heart to tell her paper doilies and old newspaper comics for wallpaper aren’t going to do the trick, not when there’s this—a panorama.
I get up from my bedroll on the porch. On newborn colt legs, I greet the day. The earth has kept its promise. Splendor knows no bounds. Over my right shoulder, the sky is a ridge of gray clouds, an old washboard. To my left is a clearing so blue whales could breach from it. Out yonder is a field of little bluestem and switchgrass swaying to and
fro, their conductor the gentle spring breeze. The fields run all the way to the line of sycamore trees. Beyond them are the buffalo.
It takes several moments to decide what the yellow flecks twirling above the garden are. Is it my eyes, still spotty from too much light, or is it really confetti? One of the pieces drifts over to me. A butterfly. Grandpa always made sure to leave milkweed in the soybean rows so the monarchs would lay their eggs on them. And here they are, paying him tribute. A public service announcement that the earth is recovering. Some said the
Mona Lisa
was the most beautiful thing in the world, but I bet it’s only because those folk never went to Kansas in May when the newly hatched butterflies shimmy their wings and lift off out of the field. Reverend Caldwell used to talk an awful lot about the Second Coming of Christ, how two people would be in a field and one would be taken and the other left behind. He’d say it in such a way that we all knew it was the worst thing to be left in the field. Not me. Not on a day like today.
I fold up the blankets and stack them on the porch swing. Oracle is pawing at the screen door. I let him out and stick my head into the dark house. It still smells of smoke. Last night, Adam collected wood and built in the hearth a fire big enough to melt rocks. It was warm and toasty, and we were some family out of a Norman Rockwell picture—for about five minutes. And then smoke filled the air so thick we had to open all the windows and doors and pull up our sweaters over our noses so we didn’t choke to death.
There are no sounds of Adam stirring. I won’t wake him. Instead, I sit on the top step of the porch. The dog takes up his post beside me and noses me until I rub his head. We listen to the robin trill its morning salutation. You can almost hear the land sigh, not quite ready for the day. It lets out its breath, and the mist rolls across the range. I wait, and soon enough Grandma and Grandpa come out. As ghosts, they are still early risers.
Grandma is wearing one of her flower-print dresses, the pocket bulging with tissues. Having just taken off her hairnet, there is a thin, red ring around her forehead, as though the top of her head has a hinge,
like you could pop it open and take a look inside. No telling what you’d see, but I suspect it wouldn’t be all pie recipes and Bible verses. Grandpa comes behind her, bringing the kitchen stool. On an ordinary day, Grandpa will wear the blue collared shirt and britches held up with suspenders, but today is a special day, so he has on his mustard-yellow cowboy shirt with the mother-of-pearl snaps. He sits on the stool, wraps an old towel around his shoulders, and ceremoniously hands Grandma a sharpened pair of scissors. “Not too much off the front this time, Mabel,” he says. “Don’t want to go to the service looking like a shorn sheep.”
“Oh, hush up. You going to let me do this or not?”
Here we are on a crisp morning, the pinch-pink sky reflecting in Grandma’s bifocals, the first of the day’s rays glinting off the edge of the scissors. Grandpa has his head tilted to the side, doing as he’s told, getting his “big ol’ ears out the way.” At his feet is the scruffy gray cat, rubbing its head against who-knows-what smell on Grandpa’s boot. Everyday missing is for the easy things, but a day like today brings back the forgotten things: a cat they call No Good, Grandpa’s front curl and the way he fusses over it, Grandma dusting her hands against her apron because she’s not one to gush and hug like grandmothers in storybooks. Missing can make a day take forever to end; remembering, though, can make it fly.
Dawn is rising out of the fields as though the lid of a simmering pot’s just been lifted. I head over to Grandpa’s shed, collecting dew on the hem of my nightgown as I go. Oracle trots ahead. I’ve come to rely on the dog’s companionship during my early-morning rounds. Several times, he has to stop and mark his territory. What’s a dog to do when there are all these trees?
“Come on, you.”
We pass the small vegetable garden that I’ve started with some of the seeds from Dobbs’s repository. When Adam was still little, I got the urge to teach him about planting and growing and harvesting. I convinced Dobbs to bring down bags of topsoil and some wooden planks, and I set up a sandbox of sorts. The seeds weren’t fooled for very long by
the lamp. Straggly stalks tottered from their dank bed and, finding their surroundings more bleak than they could bear, collapsed before putting out so much as a leaf, so I planted other things—the head of a spoon, passages clipped from the Bible, a lock of hair, an old key that fit none of the locks. It was a garden, and I tended the hope buried in it. Now, hope takes the shape of tomatoes.
A hoe and a rake and various other gardening tools cluster in one corner of the shed. Bags of cement are stacked in another. In the middle of the hut is a workbench with a hacksaw, a table saw, and a mess of other rusting tools. A sawhorse holds warped pieces of lumber. Along one wall are shelves stacked with extension cords and gallon drums of paint, electrical wires, and countless jars of nails and screws. Anything of real use, the tractor and all the other farming implements, are long gone. But there are plenty of provisions. Arlo’s deliveries from the silo are stacked up on wooden pallets—toilet supplies; untold toys still in their boxes, which Dobbs kept hidden; enough seed for dozens of harvests. Dobbs is providing for us still. I’m sure he rolls in his grave every time Arlo goes Below, especially when the historical records and Krugerrands get hauled off to the police station, the new Fort Knox.
Last night’s delivery from the silo is a cardboard box. Arlo didn’t ask questions—he never asks questions. He simply set this box aside and said, “You might want to look at this.” I lift the lid, and almost close it just as quickly. To think I lived with this smell for seventeen years. I take out an empty IV bag. I’ve never seen it before. There are two empty bottles of children’s cough syrup, a third still sealed. A child’s nebulizer, a dropper, and a palm-size notebook. The page I turn to has several entries, all of them dated more than fifteen years ago. “Charlie shows no improvement. He took in very little fluids. Will increase dosage.” In another entry, Dobbs writes of my deteriorating mental state, that I still have not asked about Charlie’s whereabouts, and how I sleep almost constantly. “Once she is stable, she might be able to assist in his care. Despite being weak, he fights treatment. Administered Albuterol three times today.”
I drop the book. I fold my arms around my waist and squeeze to
make the ache go away. I want to hate Dobbs. I want him to be in the wrong, about everything. How much easier it would be for me always to be the one harmed. He did try to keep little Charlie alive. What am I to do with that except forgive him a little? He took baby Freedom Above, as he said. Forgive a little there, too, I suppose.
Maybe forgiving him a little at a time is the only way I’m ever going to be truly free of him.
When Oracle and I get back to the house, the sun has gotten itself caught in the lowest branches of the sycamore trees. Adam is sitting on the porch steps, peeling an orange. He hands me a glass of water.
“Did you open the box?”
“Yes.” I tell him about its contents, and although he tries not to give himself away, I can see how relieved he is. It’ll do him good to feel something for his father other than scorn.
We wander over to Adam’s workstation. The picnic table is filled with various bicycle and lawn mower parts. This prototype—a rather dubious-looking mode of transportation, if you ask me—is intended for himself, but the next one is to be traded at the swap meet for enough gasoline to travel to and from Lawrence a hundred times. My son, going a-courtin’.
“Is Arlo coming by today?” he asks.
I take a big slug of water. “I don’t know.”
Each time Arlo comes, it’s with a reason. He’ll make a delivery at the shed, then swing by the house to see what Adam is building. Or he’ll come by to fix the roof and end up spending half the day talking with Adam. He misses his own kids something terrible, I can tell. Sometimes, he’ll take Adam down to the station for a few hours, and sometimes they’ll go on patrol together. Every once in a while, I can be persuaded to ride along, too.
We don’t go too far on those drives because gasoline’s hard to come by, even for a sheriff. Only once did we swing by the house on Fall Leaf Road, what’s left of it, that is. Without Mama and Daddy, without Suzie, Gerhard, and Theo, it’s too painful to get any closer than the
curb. And only once did we go to Oaksview Cemetery. Grandpa got his wish and is buried under the old oak tree on his own property, but Grandma has a boilerplate headstone along with hundreds of other graves, many of which share the same year of death. I’d hoped to find the baby’s grave, but Dobbs wouldn’t have buried her there. She’s someplace close, of that I have no doubt. I scan roadsides, and sometimes I’ll have Arlo stop the car so we can walk in a wide-open field and look for a grave marker. Someday, I’ll find her.
On those drives, we stick to the city limits mostly and make up stories about the people who used to live in the houses we drive by. It’s not unusual to be flagged down by someone tending his garden. People want to talk about the past, but they want to talk about the future, too. They’ll talk about the little signs that give them hope. They’ll point to Adam and say, “Young man like that, now there’s what I call hope.” Good wins out in the end, is what they say, even though they’ve had to bury their kin, even though they have cancer crawling up around in them.
Adam loves to spend time with Arlo, but it’s with Mercy where I find my company. She lives now in Miss Winter’s old place down by the creek. She’ll send the kids down to the water with their fishing poles and then fry up a feast for us when they come back with their baskets full. Only once has she mentioned her firstborn, the little girl from the photograph, and it was a long while before we could take up shelling the peas again. When everyone’s asleep, her children in their beds and Adam on the couch, she’ll take me into her bedroom. She’ll lift up her shirt and have me measure that big dark blemish on her back. Every day, it’s bigger. I’ve seen the scars from where she’s cut out the other moles. “This one’s different,” she says of the one on her back. “I cut it out, but it came back. This one means business.”
Looking at that growing stain on Mercy’s white skin is like standing on the rickety platform of the silo and looking down. Losses are going to keep piling up. Mercy says this is one way to look at it, but it won’t be telling the whole story. Got to see the others piling up, too, she says, the blessings. And then she’ll have me crawl under the covers with her and
we’ll talk long into the night, sometimes laughing just like the girls we once were. No matter how late, though, I always want to be home before the sun rises.
“I’m going out to Grandpa’s grave,” I tell Adam now. “Want to come?”
Adam nods. He dashes inside and returns with Grandpa’s old fob watch. “He should have it, don’t you think?”
Both hands are missing and all that’s left of the inscription is the last line:
Not a stone tell where I lie.
I fetch my own gift for the grave.
Oracle, Adam, and I form a solemn procession. The saints and all the company of heaven fall in behind us. We march past the pond where the walleye are the size of barrels, past the weather-whipped hay baler, past the sunflowers that stand exactly like schoolgirls—hips out, heads cocked to one side. I find the massive oak tree. The grasses stop tittering, the boughs of the trees cease their gossiping, the sky draws in its breath as we gather around his grave.
Beside the cross, Adam makes a hole in the ground. In it, he puts the watch and another one of Dobbs’s keys. Putting to rest some of the past is what we are doing. I pick up the trowel and dig a furrow around the grave. I sprinkle some of Ginny’s seeds in it, careful to leave enough for when we go back to visit Charlie’s grave, and cover them over with soil. Not a stone, Grandpa, but peonies.
When the ritual is over, I tell Adam to go on back, I’m going to sit awhile. I lean against the oak tree, watch the man-boy throw a stick for his dog, then gaze at the mound of soil. I suspect the dead find me better company than the living.
If I am ever to be granted the luxury of a tombstone, I would have it say simply:
MOTHER
. Somewhere along the line, I stopped being the abducted girl. Forget Blythe Hallowell. Remember me only as a mother to three of the finest. If ever there is to be an obituary for me, I hope it will say more about my children than me. The child named Freedom, whose whereabouts I will do my best to find. There is the boy I mothered for only a short while. Much of that mothering was madness, I admit, but over the years, I have loved him wholly, with wishing-prayers and
worry, just as surely as any mother does for any child. And then there is Adam, child sprung from the dirt, whose every breath has given this old clay shell a reason for being. Because of Adam, I face each new day with high hopes.
