Book of Mercy (3 page)

“Obviously, you’ve done your research, Irene, as usual,” said Arabella, popping a petit four into her mouth, whole. The woman was scrawny, not a muscle left in her pampered body, but she could pack away French pastry like a sumo wrestler.

Irene balanced a pair of half-moon reading glasses on her nose and opened a dainty and expensive leather journal. In it was a nutshell description of every book in the pile. As she read the description of a book, she roamed the room, pulling books from the pile and tossing them at the feet of the members. Members scooted away as waves of “filth” edged closer and closer to their well-shod toes.

“
The Stupids Step Out,”
Irene said. “Describes families in a derogatory manner and might encourage children to disobey their parents.”

Arabella huffed in disgust. “That’s an absurd name for a family, fictional or otherwise. What if Tolstoy had called her Anna Idiot instead of Anna Karenina?”

Arabella got no argument from Irene, who constantly fought the battle for eloquent language with her own children. She thought “suck” should be something you did with a straw, not a description of your homework. She continued, “
Forever
by Judy Blume. Contains profanity, sexual situations, and themes that allegedly encourage disrespectful behavior . . . Personally, I don’t want my daughter reading any of Blume’s books.

“
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury. One California library gave students copies of the book with all the ‘hells’ and ‘damns’, pardon my French, blacked out.”

“Not a bad idea, if you ask me,” said one member.

“I agree,” Irene said then went on to the next book. “
A Light in the Attic
by Shel Silverstein. Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them . . .”

Irene paused for dramatic effect, watching the other members of the Study Club shift uncomfortably in their seats. She was a forty-five-year-old woman married for twenty years to a man who liked to get his way. She was also the mother of a sixteen-year-old son who thought he was smarter than she and a seven-year-old daughter, who, like her father, tended to bulldoze her way to her desires. In a family of power brokers, Irene had learned the value of controlled silence.

Julie cleared her throat and attempted a half-hearted smile. “Irene, surely when you were a child, you too hated doing the dishes.”

Irene peered over her glasses at Julie. “We had a maid for that. Even so, there is never an excuse to take a hammer to the Wedgewood.”

Julie looked to the others for help. Several members refused to meet her gaze. “But, Irene, some of these are classics—Faulkner, Steinbeck, Twain.”

Irene shoved William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
under Julie’s nose. “Masturbation and abortion.”

She pushed John Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
toward Julie. “Takes the name of the Lord in vain. Repeatedly.”

At Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
, Irene sighed. “Where do I start? It’s a challenge magnet. I think they ought to replace the N-word with the word slaves, just like that professor suggested.”

Mary Sue Hampton, a mother of five who refused to allow even her three-year-old to interrupt her afternoon reading time, sliced the tension in the room. “What is it you think we should do, Irene?” Forty-year-old Mary Sue was known to take a scalpel straight to the heart of a situation. She had time management down to a science. She made schedules of piano recitals, ballet lessons, and soccer games on her personal laptop computer, printed out copies, and posted them weekly in the kitchen, bathroom, and children’s rooms. She was a born CEO and could easily have taken over her father’s successful textile business.

Irene sat, tugged at the hem of her already neat jacket, and crossed her long, slim legs. Patting her hair, which was never mussed, she announced: “I think we have to ban.” A soft gasp went up from the group. “Remove them from circulation—permanently. At the very least, they should be weeded from general circulation and stored safely on reserved shelves. Where they can be controlled.”

“You mean checked out only with parental permission,” Julie said.

Mary Sue pressed her lips together in thought. “This is a serious action.”

“This is a serious issue,” Irene retorted.

Julie stuttered, “This-this is censorship.”

“Pornography is judged by the standards of the community,” Irene reasoned. “And
we
are the community. We set the standards. If your mother were alive today, she would agree with me.”

Julie reared back, as if slapped. Irene personally believed that the Masterson family gene pool had gotten watered down when it came to Julie. Irene wanted to shake her and scream: “Snap out of it. You come from doers not whiners.”

Arabella huffed. “I agree with Irene. As it says in Proverbs, ‘Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it.’ My goodness, we can’t have children running around with primers on how to cast spells and make babies. I won’t allow those
Potter
books in my house, and I had to take a Harlequin away from my thirteen-year-old granddaughter the other day. Thirteen and already a head full of sex. Things are getting out of hand.”

Irene turned to Julie as if to say, “See?” and was surprised to find Julie had recovered. Her chin was lifted, and there was something close to determination in her eyes. Maybe there was a streak of her mother in her after all. “My mother would
never
have climbed on this bandwagon.” She stared down Irene. “She knew when something smelled rotten, just as I do. Whatever happened to free speech? Americans don’t censor.”

“We don’t torture either,” Irene said. “But sometimes there are bigger issues at stake.”

“A bigger issue than freedom?” Julie exclaimed. “We protect speech so people can get the information they need to make decisions, so they can participate in change, so they can have a say in their own lives.”

“So, you put the rights of some sleazy pornographer over protecting your own children,” Irene said.

Julie’s mouth snapped shut. Then she turned pleading eyes to the group. “Of course not, but . . .”

“Then you agree we have to control offensive literature,” Irene said.

“No.”

Irene flung up her hands. “Then which is it, Julie? Make up your mind.”

Julie seemed to shrink in her seat. She studied the hands clasped tightly in her lap.

Sensing victory, Irene leaned forward. “Julie, someone has to protect the children.”

“Yeah,” Julie muttered, “from us.”

Irene sat back. She was about to launch another salvo at Julie, when Mary Sue interrupted, “Do you have a plan, Irene?”

“Of course,” Irene pulled her stare away from Julie and faced Mary Sue with a smile. “It’s simple. We just instruct Nancy Sandhart to take the books off the shelf.”

“Just like that,” Mary Sue said with skepticism.

“I
am
the president of the school board. But I think it can be done quietly—like all of our projects. I believe Nancy will be cooperative. She doesn’t strike me as the type of woman eager to invite confrontation—or attention.” Irene thought of the nervous woman who sneaked smokes in the women’s rest room. Last year Nancy was caught smoking in the teachers’ lounge—four times. The principal, who had a stern policy about maintaining a tobacco-free campus and about teachers setting an example for students, warned Nancy that if he caught her smoking on school property again, she would be suspended without pay. While volunteering, Irene had learned about all of Nancy’s little hiding places, the cigarettes stuffed in the back of her bottom desk drawer and stashed behind the dusty old slide projector in the supply room.

“Yes, I’m sure Nancy will be delighted to help us.” Irene grinned.

Mary Sue gave a curt nod. “Then I call for a vote.”

“Wait!” Julie cried. “We must discuss this . . .”

But there was no further discussion by the Mercy Study Club. Its members voted: fourteen for and three against. The motion carried. Satisfied, Irene smoothed the lapels of her jacket. “Then it’s agreed. I’ll contact Nancy today and give her our list.”

As the Study Club filed out of Irene’s spacious home, Irene closed the massive front door behind them. She leaned against the solid oak wood. Turning her eyes to the foyer’s impressive cathedral ceiling, she recalled the words of her mother, who often had implied that they—the O’Connells—
might
be related to the Kennedys (another good Irish Catholic family). “The Kennedys always accepted that with great privilege came great responsibility. Something we must remember, Irene.”

Irene came from governors, senators, mayors, men who would be kings in their own circles. Manners and privilege had been drilled into her. And if, while growing up, she sometimes wished she could just throw a fit, she smothered the urge. She’d been an obedient child, until she met Arthur Crump, a man with nothing who dreamed of having everything. She was swept up by Arthur’s passion for life, such an unrestrained energy like she had never known. She married penniless Arthur over her parents’ objections and was shocked when they cut off her inheritance.

“What will we do?” she’d cried.

But Arthur was unconcerned. He simply shrugged and whisked her away from the mansion in Raleigh to a dumpy apartment in this little town. At first, Irene thought she would die. But she survived—not that she wanted to make a habit of clawing her way out of General Store flip flops and into Pradas. She was, after all, an O’Connell, a name back in Ireland that meant strong as a wolf. She and Arthur had built their own legacy. They’d scraped and worked together, creating their own world and their own wealth.

And nothing—certainly not a few bags of filthy books or a few weak-minded women—was going to ruin it.

W
HILE
A
NTIGONE BINGED,
S
AM
Thorne welded. The first time he’d lit the torch and cut into a 1980 Mustang was a week after their six-month anniversary. He’d known her history, how she cranked up the radio on her convertible, put it in gear, and didn’t come back for days. But he thought the binge driving would end once they were married. He was wrong.

It was their first fight, he couldn’t remember about what, and she went off in a huff to get a gallon of milk. She didn’t come back for a whole day. Twenty-four hours of calling the police and hospitals in a panic; checking with neighbors and friends; listening to his mother’s I-told-you-so’s.

When Antigone returned, he wavered between being too furious to forgive and deliriously grateful that she was safe. He marched out into the junkyard behind Sam’s Garage and began dismantling cars. He pried off hubcaps, pulled off radio knobs, and dissected other parts with a torch. Then with steel and hammer and welder, he began to craft a hubcap face that resembled a Picasso woman. When he was exhausted, he turned off the welder, threw down his hammer, stood back, and assessed his first sculpture. Then he flipped the hubcap face into the field like a Frisbee, smiled, and walked away.

Now, after five years of marriage, the field behind Sam’s Garage, an otherwise normal looking service station, was overrun with sculptures, a dreamy resting place for cannibalized automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles. Star, their neighbor, called Sam’s sculptures his visions. But he knew the truth: they were his therapy. Every sculpture sprouting in the tall grass, every creation propped against a tree or lying beside a rusted axle was an attempt by Sam to understand his wife. It was here, among the automotive art, that he felt less alone and better able to keep himself going until her return.

In the spring rains, the ice storms, the occasional snowstorm, and the relentless Carolina summer sun, the sculptures rusted and weathered. And it seemed to Sam that the elements became a part of the sculptures. He was amazed at their ferocity, at their will to claim life from cold steel and tremendous heat. His wife was like that: a determined piece of work.

On this warm April day, Sam worked just inside the large back doors of the garage, which he’d rolled open to catch the stray breeze. Inside his protective jacket, sweat trickled down Sam’s chest; it slid down his arms and into his leather gloves. He was waiting for his wife to return from parts unknown, and once again, he was controlling worry by commanding heat and steel. He fired up the welder, flipped his mask down, and pointed the welder’s electrode at the joint to be joined. White-yellow sparks, appearing eerie green through the light-sensitive mask, exploded like fireworks as metal surrendered to more than three thousand degrees. The only sound was the quiet whoosh from the argon gas tank and the low sizzle of metal transforming. The perfect weld was smooth, continuous, like a stack of dimes fanned on its side. From the nozzle of the welder flowed a tiny metal wire, no bigger than pencil lead, called a bead. When he touched the wire to the joint, an electric arc was formed and the intense heat of the arc melded both the steel and the bead into one. When he pulled the wire away, the arc was broken. The sparks disappeared.

Sam lifted the mask and leaned close to examine the seam. It was a slow and hot process, putting down a bead so carefully and patiently, keeping the oxygen at bay. Oxides in a weld created bubbles, pits, or inclusions that weakened the work and would be the first place to fracture under stress. His muscles strained as he alternately hammered and welded the body frame from a wrecked Mercedes. When he was finished, no one would know that it had once been part of a luxury car. It would resemble a tornado of lowercase E’s locked together, swirling out of control in a beautiful dance of alphabetic confusion. He studied the twisting shape and imagined this was how words in books looked to his dyslexic wife.