Under the Mercy Trees (20 page)

29

Liza

The horses snorted a greeting when Liza entered the barn. She could hear Sandra's horse, Jaybird, moving around in the far stall. Alissa's Baby Doll stuck her long brown face over the door of her stall to say hello. Liza loved the smell of a barn, sweet hay, leather, even the manure.

“How you feeling today?” She rubbed Baby Doll's nose. The vet had been out the day before to drain an abscess in the horse's left hind foot. Liza picked up the antibiotic ointment and gauze he'd left and entered Baby Doll's stall, gently lifting the horse's hoof and unwrapping yesterday's bandages. The wound was clean. Baby Doll didn't seem to be in any pain. “Good girl.” Liza applied the smelly ointment to the hoof and rebandaged it. Baby Doll's skin twitched and her tail stung Liza's face, but she let Liza finish. Liza had just set the horse's foot down and was wiping ointment off her hands with a rag when the barn door opened. Blinding sunshine flooded the dim barn. Raby and Martin stood in silhouette against the light.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Raby said.

Martin stepped into the barn, wrinkling his nose. “Pungent.”

“Don't act like you never smelled manure before. You're forgetting your roots,” Liza said.

“Trying my hardest.” He held up a folder. The short stories. “I did it. They are judged. I want you to know my own students' papers are still sitting in my apartment ungraded, but I have done what you asked of me.”

She accepted the folder over the stall door. “I'm thrilled. Thank you.”

“You didn't think I'd do it, did you.”

“I had all the faith in the world,” she said.

“I bet.”

Raby peered into the stall. “How's Baby Doll?”

“She looks good. We need to tell Alissa to be more careful when she rides on gravel.” Liza gave Baby Doll a last pat and stepped out of the stall, closing the door behind her.

Raby opened the barn's double doors all the way and propped them with bricks. “The weather's so nice today we can air things out.”

“Feels like May, not March,” Martin said.

“Good day for sitting on the porch,” Raby said. “Y'all come on up to the house. I'll get us something to drink.”

“Can you carry these inside?” Liza handed Raby the folder of stories. He took them and left.

She washed her hands in the double sink by the door and walked outside with Martin. The day was truly gorgeous, the temperature in the low seventies. She lifted her face to enjoy the feel of warm sun after the long, gray winter. Beside her, Martin walked without speaking. He looked tired, bluish smudges under his eyes, his mouth tugging downward.

“How's your family?” she said.

“All right, considering. Bobby and Cherise had a baby girl.”

“Really? What did they name her?”

“You would ask that. Something with a crazy spelling. Kylee. Raylee. Something with a
lee
in it.”

“It'll be good for Bertie.”

“True. She needs a hobby.”

They walked around to the front of the house, a one-story gray ranch with a railed porch. The wind chimes Liza had hung murmured softly above their heads. It would soon be warm enough to put her hanging plants back outside. Raby came out onto the porch with two bottles of beer and a glass of iced tea for Liza. He passed out the drinks and pulled three rocking chairs into line so they could sit. Liza took the middle chair. Martin sat on her left, closest to the steps. On her right, Raby stretched out his long legs and put his feet up on the porch rail, letting out a long, satisfied “Ahh.”

“Where are your daughters today?” Martin said. Liza wondered if he remembered her daughters' names.

“Alissa had a soccer game, and we made Sandra drive her,” Raby said.

“I'm sure she loved that.”

“If I'm paying the car insurance for a teenage driver, I'm going to get some benefit out of it.” Raby drank his beer and belched. “Look at us. Me, my wife, and my wife's old boyfriend. Who'd have ever thought we'd be sitting on the porch together at this point in our lives, having a beer?”

“Raby,” Liza warned.

“I'm serious. It's a beautiful thing.”

Liza looked over at Martin, not sure how he would take Raby's teasing. An amused twitch played at the corner of his mouth. Liza was the only one uncomfortable. Raby and Martin were enjoying themselves at her expense.

“Did Liza ever tell you how we got together?” Raby said.

Martin smiled at her. “I don't think she ever did.”

Liza reached over and took Raby's beer bottle away from him. “Give me a swig of that. I think I'm going to need it.”

“Liza was rooming with my sister, Sally. Your junior year, was it?”

“Sophomore,” she said. The fall after her father died.

“I'd met Liza, but my sister said she wasn't available. Some fellow named Martin had just broke her heart.”

Liza's face burned. “Raby, honestly.”

Martin tipped the neck of his beer bottle toward Raby. “The best man definitely won.”

“My sister was student teaching. I got a call from her saying Liza was deathly ill and could I come check on her while Sally went on some overnight field trip with the Future Homemakers of America.”

“Flu,” Liza said. “Sally didn't want to leave me, but I told her I was going to die anyway, there was nothing she could do. I've never been so ill.” The whole awful time had dissolved her immune system, leaving her wide open to the bugs Sally brought home from school. It started on a Friday afternoon. Liza felt “peaked,” as Raby would say, and restless. By her two o'clock class, she couldn't hold her head up without propping her chin with her hand. The professor sent her to the infirmary, where a nurse took her temperature and called Sally to come get her.

“Vomiting, diarrhea. Spewing at both ends,” Raby said.

“Raby, you are destroying Martin's image of me as the perfect woman,” she said, giving up any hope that her dignity would survive this story. The flu sapped her of every bit of energy and motivation she could ever remember having. On Saturday morning after Sally left the house, Liza crawled on her hands and knees down the hall to the bathroom. She couldn't stand up without fainting. She made it to the toilet to throw up water, the only thing she'd been able to swallow. On her crawl back to the bedroom she passed out.

“I found her unconscious in the hall. Got her back in bed. Found some chicken soup in the cabinet and spoon-fed her,” Raby said.

“I threw up all over the poor man,” she said.

“It was worth it. That flu was my excuse. I knew Liza was too sick to put me off. I left my daddy's farm during haying season to go over there to Greensboro. My daddy about killed me for that, but when he met Liza he understood why I did it. Liza Vance was going to be mine. Good thing you'd left the picture, Martin, or I would have had to kill you.”

“Good thing,” Martin said.

Liza handed Raby's beer back to him. “Sally claimed afterward that she was matchmaking all along, but I think she saw how green I was and didn't want me to die and stink up the apartment while she was gone.”

“Liza was talking out of her head that weekend from the fever. She said all kinds of interesting things,” Raby teased.

“Stop right there.” Raby would never tell her what she said in her delirium those two days. With all she had on her mind, God knows what came out about her and Martin. Over the years, to kid her, Raby had threatened to tell all if she ever left him. She wasn't going to leave him.

“I got to pee. Another beer, Martin?” Raby offered.

“No, I'm due at Eugenia's for supper.” Martin sounded regretful.

“Call ahead next time and we'll feed you,” Liza said.

Raby went inside.

Martin picked at a piece of the paint flaking off the arm of his rocking chair. “Shane has a headstone now.”

“How was that?” she said.

“Sad.”

“Who was there?”

“Ivy, Trina, Steven, me, and Hodge.”

“Not Eugenia and the rest?”

“No.” He brushed the chipped paint to the ground with his hand. “I kept wishing my mother could have been there. She loved Shane. She'd cradle him on her lap.” He showed her with his arms. “Even after he got so big his arms and legs hung over the sides.”

Liza looked sideways at him. “She held you like that, too, you know.”

“I suppose.”

Raby came back out. “Martin, Liza's got tickets to the symphony next week. You'd be doing me a favor if you'd go with her so I don't have to,” Raby said.

Martin raised his eyebrows at her.

Liza sighed. “You really would be doing us a favor. If Raby goes he'll just squirm the whole time.”

“I can't stand that scratchy violin music. Makes me crazy,” Raby said.

“I'd love to go.” Martin stood up and set his beer bottle on the porch rail.

“That your truck?” Raby pointed to the green monstrosity parked crooked in the yard.

“It was Leon's.”

“Let me take a look at that thing.” Raby walked Martin out to the yard, asking him questions about the truck that Martin couldn't answer. Martin climbed in the passenger side and slid over to the driver's seat. The truck started with a roar. Martin gave Liza a last quick wave as he drove away.

Raby joined her on the porch. “You cold?” The sun was still keeping winter hours, and the air was starting to chill.

“A little, but I don't want to go inside yet.”

Raby went in the house and brought out a sweater, draping it over her shoulders. His thumb touched her cheek. “Don't stay out too long.”

“I won't.”

He walked toward the barn to settle the horses for the evening. A flock of starlings returning from their winter to the south flew overhead, some landing to rest on the telephone wires that ran along the road, others scolding them to keep up. Liza pulled her sweater closer around her neck and put her feet up on the porch rail.

*  *  *

After Raby finally talked her into getting married, she taught until Sandra was born, then stayed home. Alissa came a couple of years later. By the early 1970s, she and Raby were in trouble. They weren't bored like some couples, but they were out of sync, constantly hurting each other's feelings without knowing why, cats with fur rubbed the wrong way. Liza was tired, so tired, of the constant negotiation that was marriage, and found herself thinking about divorce at least three times a day. Divorce. She had no one to confide in, and she missed her father more than at any other time since his death. She volunteered at a women's center in Winston-Salem then, but couldn't talk to those women about Raby because they would tell her to leave him. It was a time of bra burning and women needing men like fish needed bicycles. She straddled two sides of an abyss, one leg on each bank, the sides moving away from her, forcing her further and further into a split. Too late to jump to one side, she was going to fall.

The women's center had a storefront on the edge of the nice part of downtown, in a strip that included a convenience store, a launderette, and a substance abuse counselor. Money from an anonymous donor paid the first few months' rent. The women were supposed to raise funds for the rest. Liza got involved through a woman named Cassie, whose daughter went to gymnastics with Sandra once a week—Liza's excuse to get off the farm. Cassie's husband was a junior professor at Wake Forest University. Cassie was younger than Liza, as were most of the mothers of Sandra's friends, because it had taken Liza and Raby a while to conceive. Cassie was thin and wore her dark hair loose down her back. She would have been pretty but for the intense, defensive look on her face. She didn't shave her underarm hair, something that startled Liza every time she saw her.

To celebrate the center's opening and to brainstorm about how to raise money to keep it going, one of the women hosted a potluck dinner. Liza stood in front of the mirror in the bedroom, trying to decide what to wear, finally choosing a white peasant blouse and a skirt of dark orange India cotton. She pulled her hair back and curled tendrils in front of each ear with a curling iron. She started to put on her normal makeup, thought of the pale faces of the other women, and almost stopped, then scolded herself for caring what anyone thought. Raby came in as she was applying lipstick. “Getting ready for your hen party?”

She knew he meant it in fun, but it still annoyed her. “It's an important cause, Raby.”

He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “Learn to take a joke, Liza. What time do you think you'll be back?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Sandra wanted to know if you'd be home in time to read her a story.”

“You'd better plan to do it.”

“She won't be happy.”

“She needs to learn I'm not the only parent who can do things for her. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard the word ‘mama' this week, I'd be a rich woman.” She blotted her lipstick.

Raby's eyes narrowed. “Something eating you, Liza? A little girl ought to be able to call for her mama without getting on your last nerve.”

“Nothing's eating me,” she said, ashamed.

Raby stood there a moment, looking at her in the mirror, then turned away. “You girls have fun.”

All she could think was that she was glad to have an evening away from him.

Marietta, the woman hosting the potluck, lived in a three-story apartment building in an older part of Winston-Salem. Cassie was getting out of her car as Liza drove into the parking lot. She waited for Liza, holding a pottery bowl. “What'd you bring?”

“Deviled eggs.” Liza showed Cassie the eggs, nestled securely on Aunt Fran's deviled egg plate. “What about you?”

“Hummus.” Cassie must have seen Liza's blank look. “Chickpea paste with tahini. I'm going to make it here. You eat it on pita bread.”