Under the Mercy Trees (2 page)

Some trees had rotted and lain down tired in the undergrowth, but some still sat. She counted them in her flashlight beam, eight calm ladies murmuring a welcome. She touched the closest one, running her fingertips over dry bark. She wondered if the ladies minded the kinks in their trunks. Did they remember the trauma that bent them, or had they gotten on with things?

3

Bertie

Bertie Owenby stood at the mobile home's kitchen door, smoking a cigarette, waiting. Lately it was hard for her to leave the trailer. The sky outside strangled her, while the close walls of the mobile home were more comfortable than skin. Her husband, James, was just the opposite. He felt squeezed when he was inside. His shoulders were as broad as their hallway, and he made the floor shake when he wrestled the bathroom's accordion door back onto its runner.

Bertie would stay inside all the time if she could, but her sister-in-law, Eugenia, was insisting they clean Leon's house. She said she wanted it nice in case Leon wandered home, and she was worried that vandals or even the people helping search would break in and take Leon's valuables. There weren't any valuables. Eugenia was just embarrassed that other people might see how nasty Leon kept the place.

Bertie dreaded it. When Eugenia pulled up to the trailer in the new Mercury her husband, Zeb, had bought her for their anniversary last year, her bitty self barely peeking over the steering wheel, something in Bertie just put its head down and cried. Having to go out at all was bad enough. Worse was having to spend the whole day listening to Eugenia's critical comments about the size of Bertie's trailer, her and James missing a week of church, or some past mistake she'd said she was sorry for a million times. She put out her cigarette and picked up her cleaning things to meet Eugenia at the car so Eugenia wouldn't set a foot in her home. Even so, she caught Eugenia's superior glance across the road at the house where Bertie's parents lived.

“How your folks doing, Bertie? I heard your daddy was ailing.”

Bertie got in the car. Eugenia knew full well that what ailed Bertie's daddy was the drink. “They're fine.” She watched to make sure Eugenia didn't back over her azalea bushes getting out of the driveway.

A few raindrops plopped on the windshield. Eugenia turned on her wipers. “Your family is certainly blessed with longevity.”

What Eugenia meant was, weren't Bertie's mama and daddy ever going to die off so Bertie and James could move into their house? Was it really the natural order of things for them to raise three children to adulthood in the single-wide they'd bought the week they married? The road opened empty in front of Eugenia's car. Bertie felt exposed. Her fingers itched for a cigarette.

Eugenia turned on her car radio to some preacher yelling. She pushed her silver wire-framed glasses higher on her nose. “You'll have to help me find Ivy's new place.”

Ivy was James and Eugenia's sister. Ivy's son Steven had built the house for her more than a year ago, so it wasn't all that new, but neither Bertie nor Eugenia commented on the strangeness of not ever having been out to visit. “James said it's two down from Stamey's Feed and Seed, off Old Buncombe Highway,” Bertie said.

“I called her, and of course her directions made no sense at all. We'll just have to look for her car.”

At the Feed and Seed Eugenia slowed down, and they started looking. They found Ivy's beige Pontiac parked in the front yard of a cute little yellow wood-frame house. Eugenia pulled in, and they saw Ivy wave through the screen door.

“This house is precious.” Eugenia sounded surprised. Bertie knew she was thinking Ivy didn't deserve such a nice place.

“I guess Steven's doing pretty well with his body shop. Whatever else anybody might say, he does take care of his mama,” Bertie said.

“Humph.”

Bertie didn't judge Ivy the way Ivy's own sister and brothers did, though she'd followed James's lead all these years and not had much to do with Ivy and her children. You could say Bertie didn't have room to finger-point at Ivy the way Eugenia did, or thought she did.

The rain was coming down a little harder now. Ivy lumbered out of the house, wearing a large dress too thin for the cool weather and a shapeless blue sweater that had seen too many washings. She smiled the wide dreamy smile she'd worn forever. She climbed in the backseat, causing the car to rock. There they sat, a generation of Owenby women by birth and marriage.

“What you been up to, Ivy? Still working at the Days Inn?” Eugenia said.

“No, it got too hard on account of my knees.” Ivy raised her voice as if talking over somebody. “I do laundry for some old folks, like I did for Leon.”

“When's the last time you were up there to Leon's?” Eugenia's arms dragged the steering wheel as she turned the car around to get out of Ivy's yard.

“I don't rightly know.” Ivy wiped rain off her face. She was never one for dates and times. Days and months and years didn't seem to pass in a straight line for her the way they did for everybody else. Bertie caught herself feeling envious.

“Leon can't have had that much laundry to do. He always wore the same thing,” Eugenia said

“Overalls and flannel shirts,” Ivy said.

“We gave him a new shirt every Christmas. Zeb thought he'd come to church if he had something to wear, but he never did,” Eugenia said. “We gave him underwear, too.”

“He wore the underwear. Men's underwear can get right nasty,” Ivy said.

That remark shut Eugenia up for the rest of the ride.

They drove up the gravel road to the Owenby home place, passing cars and trucks that the searchers had parked along the road. The home place was a hundred acres. James's daddy had built the house himself, starting with two rooms, then adding on as the family grew, until the house wandered all over its clearing. A buckled porch circled it, keeping it in check. Red clay stained its walls to waist-high. Behind the house tall poplars and other decent timber grew so thick you couldn't tell you were at the foot of a mountain, but most of the rest of the property was worthless except for raising ticks and snakes. Only Leon had stayed on there after their daddy died. None of the other children were interested in the place. Leon had eventually put in electricity but not indoor plumbing, and an outhouse peeked from behind the house. Next to the outhouse was the shed where Leon kept his tools. Beside the shed a fenced pen held Leon's three dogs. The dogs watched them drive up, barking a few times before going back to their own business.

Leon's old Chevy pickup truck sat under a tree in the yard, its dull green paint flaking. Eugenia pulled up beside it, and she and Ivy carried cleaning supplies into the house. Bertie lit a blessed cigarette on the porch to calm her nerves, looking out at the vehicles parked along the road. Her husband James's truck was the first in line. He'd been out since dawn. Bertie tried to spot him along the ridge, but the search had moved too far off to make out any people. She exhaled, frost from her breath mingling with cigarette smoke. Rain ran off the porch roof, drumming on dead leaves and making furrows in the mud below.

Bertie got married in front of this porch, by the steps where a butterfly bush used to be. They had the wedding at home because James's mama, Nell Owenby, was failing so bad by then she couldn't get out. James and his daddy carried Nell onto the porch, her arms and neck wasted thin but her belly swollen with fluid. Bertie's parents came, her daddy not drunk for once. James's people were there, except for Martin, who'd gone off to college, and Leon, who was supposed to be the best man but took a job at a mill down east all of a sudden right before the wedding. The service was short and plain. James had his hair cut like James Dean. He'd bought a new suit, light gray, and cleaned up his work shoes the best he could. It was a happy day, it must have been, but when Bertie thought of it now, what she remembered was the smell of urine mixed with earth that rose up from the ground beside the butterfly bush, from years of Owenby men peeing off the porch.

She pressed her cigarette out on the wet railing and went inside to help Eugenia and Ivy. In the short time since Leon had disappeared, the house had already grown cold and vacant smelling. She surveyed bachelor filth made worse by the sheriff's fingerprint powder. Leon's kitchen and living area, where he spent the most time, were the worst. Years of baked-on spills crusted the old-timey cookstove. The few pieces of furniture—a hard, stained couch, a couple of straight-back chairs, and a wooden chest—were covered with unopened junk mail, plastic bottles, dirty dishes, clothes. The only clean thing in the room was the television on its metal stand. It was a man's house, no sign of a woman's touch anywhere. Nothing soft to sit on. Nothing pretty to look at. When James's mama died, his daddy had cleared every sign of her out of the house.

A piece of yellow crime-scene tape fluttered in a draft that blew through a crack in the plank floor. Eugenia pulled the tape up and rolled it into a ball. “The dirt in here gives me the shivers.” She put the tape wad into a black plastic garbage bag and went outside to get spring water for mopping from the gravity-fed pipe behind the house. Ivy started to scrub Leon's stove with a piece of steel wool. Bertie got out her duster to brush the fingerprint powder off things before they did the floor. She worked without talking, using the rhythm of the dusting to keep herself calm.

Through the room's low windows she could see Leon's truck in the yard, rain misting its windshield. It was queer how Leon just quit driving one day. A man who had always loved gadgets and anything mechanical and who had souped up his truck with a race car engine. It took the family a while to notice he wasn't driving anymore. If he needed to get to town he'd walk in, and there was always somebody who could carry him back home when he got ready. After a while James realized that Leon's truck hadn't moved an inch from where he'd parked it in his yard. He asked Leon if it was broke.

“No.”

“Then why ain't you driving it?”

“I got out of the notion.”

From then on if Leon wanted to go anywhere, he'd get somebody, usually Bertie's son, Bobby, to drive him in his own truck and give him a few dollars for his time. Leon liked riding in his own truck. Sitting in the driver's seat of that green monster, Bobby looked like a young Leon. Bobby and Leon both favored James's daddy, Rory Owenby, though Leon's hair had been dark when he was young, while the hair that swirled in two long cowlicks down the sides of Bobby's neck was dirty blond. Bertie always itched to shave it.

Bobby acted like driving Leon around was the only work he needed. He quit his sometime job at the Tyson chicken plant and moved out of Bertie and James's trailer to go live with his girlfriend. In a way it was a relief to have him gone, since he came home drunk most weekends and never offered to pay any rent, but without Bobby around, the silences that settled between Bertie and James left her so on edge she wanted to rip her hair out by the roots. She and James rarely talked, not about anything real, and hadn't since Bertie left him that time, years ago. It was a mistake, and she came back after only four days, but James had treated her carefully ever since, like he was afraid she'd run off again.

Over by the stove, Ivy whispered, “hush, now,” to nobody in particular as she scrubbed. It was typical of Eugenia to leave Bertie alone with Ivy and her craziness. Bertie walked down the short hall to where Leon slept, in the bedroom that had been his parents'. The overhead bulb was burned out, but dim light from the window streaked the wood floor. The bed in the corner was made, a faint smell of sweat rising from the covers. To Bertie's right a rusty mirror hung above the dresser where Leon kept his toiletries. His safety razor lay beside a bowl of old water. Leon's whiskers, gray and black, bled out of the razor onto the dresser top. Bertie picked up the razor. The handle was surprisingly warm in her hand. She pressed her finger against the blade.

“What are you doing?” Eugenia's accusing voice made Bertie jerk.

“Cleaning,” she said.

Eugenia took Leon's razor out of Bertie's hand. “You don't need to mess with his things. I'll take care of them.”

The bad feeling that had lain in Bertie's stomach all morning started to rise. “I wasn't messing. You said you wanted my help.” Eugenia had no call to make her feel like a criminal. Bertie had belonged to this family for more than thirty years. She had as much right to touch Leon's things as anybody else, more maybe.

Eugenia set the razor back on the dresser. “I didn't mean it like that. I just need you to finish dusting in the other room. You missed some corners.” She herded Bertie ahead of her back to the kitchen and living area.

Ivy had wiped down the stove with paper towels. The surface gleamed. Eugenia set to work mopping the floor. When Eugenia's back was turned, Ivy smiled at Bertie and walked over to put her big hand on Bertie's shoulder. “Don't worry,” she said.

Bertie couldn't tell if Ivy meant, don't fret about the way Eugenia acts, or don't worry about Leon, or if Ivy was sharing a broader truth her simple mind had discovered. Whatever Ivy meant, somehow it made Bertie feel better. She started moving her duster, getting her rhythm back, and they got on with their chores.

4

Ivy

You'd think this house would have been full enough with the living, me and Eugenia and Bertie trying to stay out of each other's way while we dust and scrub. On top of them I also contend with the dead, crowding with bent necks under the eaves, warming their hands by the unlit stove, arguing, spilling out the door. And the yet-to-be born, baby spirits chortling, drifting by like the bits that float behind an eyeball. Kin mostly, I've gathered, both past and future, though few known to me in life. The weight of them all makes the house lean north with a sigh like an overloaded tinker. The mop water in Eugenia's bucket leans with it, threatening to spill out on the floor.

Is it a blessing or a curse, this seeing of mine? I've about decided it's neither, though it's made me look like a fool my whole life. Mama saying, “Ivy, what in the world,” when I dipped and curved around the room as a girl, trying to avoid the ghosts on my way to set the table. I learned later to breathe deep and walk right through them. Pop's stares when I slipped and answered a question he hadn't heard asked. Me unable, still, to tell when a sight or sound is real to other people, not just to me. My brother James asked me once when we were young why it was that I felt bound to open my legs to every rounder between here and Lenoir. The answer is this: that sex is all smells and feeling, two things trustworthy and all of this world. Like the smells of my children, first Ivory soap and dirty diapers, then warm oil at the roots of their hair after a summer night of play, then the years the county had them when there were no smells, and I grieved that the three of them had never been real at all.

A baby spirit floats by, laughing, her hair red and curly. She passes through Eugenia's chest and Eugenia coughs. “I must be coming down with something.”

“It's just dust,” Bertie tells her. The yellow feathers on Bertie's duster flick and dart, flick and dart.

“Shoo,” I say under my breath to the baby spirit, shaking a throw rug at her. “We're nobody here but old women.”

“Speak for yourself, Ivy,” Eugenia says. “Don't tell me you're groaning about a little housework.”

As each of my children was conceived I saw its spirit leaping beyond the haunches of the father, grappling past other babies for a chance at life. Before I missed a month's bleeding I knew my sons and daughter from beginning to end. I saw Steven stocky and sweet, then a coarsened, bristled man. Trina, always a prankster in spite of want and battering. Shane, my oldest, twirling broken from a rafter in a last foster home. I catch sight of Shane sometimes now, always just behind the next doorway, ducking away from me when I try to follow.

I take stock of the room we're in. The old woman who was Pop's mother, Alma, swaddled in black to her wrists, ankles, and chin, spins by the stove, heedless of Eugenia mopping around her feet. Three of her teeth have died and turned a blue paler than a robin's egg, the only color about her. She is as hard in death as in life, the one spirit I don't dare pass through. Her mother, the carrot-haired Missouri whose adventures I've heard in family tales and seen for myself, appears her favorite age of twenty-one today and huffs with impatience, waiting for the rain to stop so she can leave the house. Two old fellows share a jar of moonshine across a checkerboard. I notice Bertie sniff the air, her nose sensitive enough to detect corn whiskey even from another world. Fair-skinned toddlers play around a mouse hole that Leon never boarded up.

Not every family member who passes on appears to me here. I don't know why some linger and some don't. But I wonder that Leon isn't here, as hard as he roosted here in life. I ask the old men, “You reckon he'll be coming soon?”

“Who?” asks Bertie.

“Who?” ask the old men.

“Leon,” I say.

“I reckon not,” one of the men says. “We ain't got room. They's too many of us as it is.” He spits a big gob on Eugenia's clean floor, and I'm glad she can't see it.

“There's a spot for him there in front of the television, like always.” I point.

The man looks at me queer, pondering what I mean by television.

Bertie and Eugenia swap looks.

“Ivy, honey,” Eugenia says, “he might not be coming back.” She whispers to Bertie, “Poor old addled thing.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I know it.” But I clean with one eye out the window, watching for Leon to walk up through the cattails that grow along the creek, to come in and start up a pan of hard corn bread to throw in the yard for the ghost dogs that circle and whine out there in the wet.