Under the Mercy Trees (26 page)

35

Martin

The Dumpster Martin frequented was behind a gas station on the way to downtown Whelan. Hand-lettered signs taped to it said No Public Dumping, but no one had ever bothered to come outside to tell Martin to take his empties elsewhere. He pulled into the parking lot and drove around to the back, planning to toss his bag of bottles and head downtown to the liquor store, but he braked when the Dumpster came into view. His nephew Bobby stood next to the Dumpster, his pickup truck idling beside him. As Martin watched, Bobby's right arm arced and he threw something small and black into the Dumpster.

Martin thought of turning around and leaving, but he couldn't drive around Whelan with a bag of liquor bottles in the bed of his truck. Word might get back to Eugenia or Bertie. He parked behind Bobby's truck and got out, holding his breath against the smell of rotting garbage. Bobby turned around. When he saw Martin he froze for a second, glancing back at the Dumpster.

“How's it going?” Martin said.

The passenger door of Bobby's truck opened, and Cherise LaFaye heaved herself out, holding the new baby. She came around to where Bobby and Martin were standing. James would have said her stretch pants made her rear end look like ten pounds of potatoes stuffed into a five-pound sack. The baby slept, her strawberry hair curling in a spiral around the top of her head.

Bobby eyed Martin. “What are you doing here?”

“Just dumping my trash.” Martin reached into the bed of Leon's green truck for the bag of bottles. He lifted it out as gently as he could and held the bag against his leg, to minimize the telltale noise of glass on glass.

Bobby stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. He looked tired, the skin under his eyes puffy. The baby was probably keeping them up all hours. Things hadn't gone Bobby's way lately, and Martin almost felt sorry for him.

“Hey, Bobby, about last night with Steven and Trina, I hope it all worked out,” Martin offered. He didn't want to make an enemy of Bobby.

“Whatever. They didn't catch up to us,” Bobby said.

“You heard what we found out about who owns the property?” Martin said.

“Yeah. I don't get shit.” Bobby kicked a tin can that lay at his feet, sending it clanging against the Dumpster.

Cherise shifted the sleeping baby in her arms. “It's not right. After all we put up with from that stupid old man. Jumping every time he needed to go somewhere, taking care of him up in that filthy house.” She looked at Martin, narrowing her eyes. “Hey, what about your share?”

“What?”

“We could put a trailer up on your part. Everybody knows you don't want it.”

Bobby took his hands out of his pockets. “That's an idea, Martin. Why not?”

Martin thought of Leon. Whatever his brother had been when they were younger, he was nothing but an old man when he disappeared and Martin felt protective. He wasn't going to let Bobby live on the property. He could do that much for Leon. “It's not going to happen. I'm sorry.”

“I should have figured,” Bobby said, disgusted.

The bag of empties was getting heavy. Martin switched it to his other hand. Glass shifted, giving him away.

“Your family's useless, Bobby,” Cherise said.

Martin swung the bag up over the side of the Dumpster, listening to the bottles break as it landed inside.

*  *  *

On Main Street he found a parking space just down from the liquor store and slid across the seat of Leon's truck to get out on the passenger side. In front of the antiques shop next to the liquor store he stopped to get out his billfold, to calculate exactly how many bottles of Scotch he could afford. The antiques store was open. A woman inside was dusting a display of vintage picture frames in the front window. She smiled at Martin through the glass. The picture frames were lovely, some gilded, some silver. A small one in the corner caught Martin's eye, ornate sterling silver with a bead border where the picture would fit, a picture the size of the photograph of Liza he kept in his wallet.

He couldn't read the tiny price tag from outside so he stepped into the shop and asked. The shopkeeper told him the cost, almost as much as he had on him. She lifted the frame out of the window and set it on the counter in front of Martin.

“It's more than I expected,” he said.

“Would it be a gift?” she said.

“Yes.”

“For your wife?”

“A friend,” he said.

“It'd be money well spent,” the woman said.

He should have been able to buy it for Liza without a thought, but he could feel the liquor store to his right, like a human being standing next to him, close enough to warm his skin with body heat. This was the last of his money. He could taste the Scotch it would buy, that first swallow especially, soothing on the back of his tongue.

“I can gift wrap it for you,” the woman said.

Martin's fingers knotted around his billfold. He felt ridiculous. It was a simple matter of motor control, his brain instructing his hands to count out the money and his hands obeying, but he couldn't do it. He was pathetic. He tried to laugh at himself but couldn't force air past the tightness in his chest. Instead his eyes teared up.

The shop owner smiled at him. “Sometimes I get nostalgic about these old things, too.” She rested her hands on the counter, perfectly patient, waiting for him to make up his mind.

*  *  *

That night with Liza at Rendezvous Falls, she snatched the car keys out of his hand and drove the two of them back down the mountain, gunning it around sharp turns until Martin felt sick to his stomach. At the bottom, when the road straightened out, she finally spoke. “Where are you staying?”

He had planned to stay with her. That was impossible now. “I don't know.” He would rather sleep in the road than go to his father's, and it would frighten Eugenia if he showed up at her place this time of night.

Liza drove toward her house. Moonlight striped her face, illuminating her mouth and cheekbones but leaving her eyes in shadow. “You can sleep in Daddy's infirmary tonight. I'd appreciate it if you'd leave in the morning.”

“I will.”

They reached her street. The cars that had lined it earlier were gone. Clouds rolled over the face of the moon, obscuring it. Aunt Fran had left lights on, on the porch and inside. They could see her though the dining room window, putting china away. The infirmary was dark.

Liza turned off the engine. “The infirmary's not locked. I'll put your bag outside on the porch.”

Martin couldn't think of anything to say. He had come home to comfort her and had only caused her more pain. He opened his door to get out.

“In case you wondered,” she said.

He stopped.

“He left you the money to finish school. We read his will today.” She was crying again. Her hands slid from the steering wheel to her lap.

“I don't have to accept it,” Martin said. The doctor had based his gift on the expectation that Martin and Liza would marry.

“He'd still want you to have it. I'll have Aunt Fran handle it.” She pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car, closing the driver's-side door quietly. She walked up the porch steps into the house, and a moment later put his bag out on the porch and turned the light off, leaving him in darkness.

The next day Martin went to the doctor's funeral. He declined Aunt Fran's invitation to sit up front with the family, instead taking a seat in the back, where women's wide hats blocked his view and he didn't have to watch Liza suffer. No members of his own family came to pay their respects. When the service was over he skipped the receiving line and headed for Whelan to start the long, lonely bus ride back to Chapel Hill. Every month for the next three years, Aunt Fran mailed him a check, each envelope bringing with it a mix of guilt and resignation that he hadn't had a choice.

* * *

*  *  *

The antiques shop owner was still waiting politely. Martin flexed his fingers and found he could move. He counted out bills one by one. He extracted Liza's picture from its place in his wallet, holding it by its frayed edges, and had the shopkeeper put it into the frame before she wrapped it.

Outside, he walked toward his truck, head down, deliberately not looking back at the liquor store. He put the wrapped gift in his glove compartment for safety and drove home. At Hodge's house he pulled into the driveway. Hodge and Liza were in the yard. They walked toward him, Liza raising a hand against the sun that glared behind Martin, concern carving a deep crease between her brows. Hodge looked flustered, his thinning hair mussed. Martin turned off the truck's monster engine and got out.

“They found him, Martin. They found Leon's body,” Hodge said.

Martin would not have predicted the sick, falling feeling that coursed through him, the vacuum created in the space vacated by a brother he hadn't known he cared about. Liza reached for him, her familiar scent of wildflowers touching his nostrils, allowing him to breathe.

36

Bertie

When Bertie answered the phone in the kitchen and Hodge said, “Bertie?” she knew why he was calling. She could hear it in the careful way he said her name. They had all been expecting such a call.

“Where was he?” she said.

“At the home place. Down by the sawmill. A hunter found him.”

“How did he die?”

“Can't say yet. There's a hairline fracture on the left side of his skull. Wally thinks it could have been caused by being hit, but also by falling. Animals and bugs had got to him, so there wasn't a lot left to tell how he got the crack on his head. I'm sorry, Bertie.”

She fought back moving pictures in her head of Bobby and Cherise hitting Leon with something and said, too quick, “He must have had one of those strokes and fell, don't you think?”

“Could be. We'll know more after the autopsy.”

“James is at work, Hodge.”

“I already called him. He's on his way to the morgue.”

“Why didn't he call and tell me himself?”

“He's taking it hard, Bertie.”

“How in the world did they not find the body before, when everybody was looking?”

“He was under a bush, with leaves over him. Still, it's hard to understand. We must've passed by him a dozen times.” Hodge sighed. “Do you want to call Eugenia, or do you want me to?”

“I'd appreciate it if you would.” Bertie didn't want to deal with Eugenia. “Tell James to call me.” They hung up, and Bertie sat down at the table and lit a cigarette.

*  *  *

After she and Leon came to their senses and she rode the bus back home to James, there was just one other time that Leon came around. It was during a winter storm, when Bobby was about two. Pine trees loaded with ice eyed the trailer. Branches popped off with a sound like rifle fire, making Bertie jump. It was just her and the kids at home. The storm had come up fast, the temperature dropping thirty degrees in an hour. James, patrolling the plant floor at work, hadn't noticed until it was too late to get home. He called and said he was going to work the next shift, to make some overtime. The electricity went out, and the trailer got colder. Smoke puffed from the chimney of her mama's house. Bertie could have bundled up the kids and taken them across the road, where there was a fireplace, except that her daddy tended to drink when he was stuck inside. Dacey thought it was funny when Papaw stumbled and lunged around the house, but Bertie didn't. It was too cold to smoke outside, but she did anyway. The cold stillness calmed her some, numbing nerves that were raw and bleeding from listening to children fight, smelling baby pee, feeling the trailer shake when three children chased up and down the hall in an animal stampede. Bertie usually didn't allow running in the house, but she was too tired to fight.

She felt trapped in the trailer and trapped in her marriage. James ducked his head whenever he talked to her. She just wished he would yell at her, hit her even, treat her like she'd treated him so they'd finally be even and could put things behind them, but he was too gentle a man to act like that.

She stared out on her ice-covered yard. Pines hurled widow makers. Grass frosted gray. Ice wrapped the bird feeder so that when songbirds tried to land they skidded, indignant, back into the air. And then came a man's figure tramping up the road. It was Leon, his good shoes sinking in crusted snow. He slipped now and again as he walked and put his arms out to catch his balance.

Bertie thought,
Lord, what is he doing here
. She was not in the mood for company. He made it to their porch and grabbed the post for support. His eyebrows and nose hairs had frozen silver, turning him old. He could hardly move his mouth. “Can I come in for a spell?”

“What in the world.” She put out her cigarette and opened the door so he could get out of the cold. “The heat's off,” she warned.

“S'all right.” He kicked snow off his shoes and stepped inside, shedding his coat and leaving a puddle on the floor. He flexed his fingers. “I think I'm frostbit. My hands are burning.”

She took his hands and examined them. His breath near her face smelled of cigars. His fingers were red, not white, and she let them go. “You're okay. Blow on them. I'll get you some warm water to soak them in.” She got a plastic bucket from under the kitchen sink and filled it with the last of the warm water in the pipes. “What were you doing out in this mess anyway?”

He sat down at the table. “I don't know.”

Another man would have had an excuse ready.

The kids came chasing into the kitchen, Bobby in just a low-riding diaper and pajama shirt, jogging along after his sisters. They didn't pay any attention to Leon.

“Out,” she said, but they were already chasing back down the hall. “You want a biscuit, Leon? They're left over from breakfast, before the electricity went off. I can't offer you anything hot.”

“All right.” He dipped his hands in the water.

She got him a biscuit and a paper towel and set it down on the table in front of him.

Leon took his hands out of the water and used the paper towel to dry them off. Biscuit crumbs spilled on the table. “I got a letter.” He reached his frozen hands in his coat pocket and fumbled it out. “A fellow I knew down east when I worked there, wants me to come to Kinston and run his sawmill.”

“That's something.” She brushed the crumbs off the table into her hand and put them in the garbage, then pulled up a chair and sat down across from him. “You going to go?”

“Depends.” He kind of bowed his head, creasing and recreasing the letter, then he looked up and held the envelope out to her. His Adam's apple rose and fell in a long swallow. “We could go together.” His mouth drew up and held still. Outside, the sky turned from white to gray with late afternoon. Leon's blue eyes squinted in the dimness of the kitchen, waiting for her answer.

What she mainly felt was mad. Mad at the loneliness that had made her run off with him in the first place. Mad that their time together hadn't been real. Mad that she'd ruined things with James. Mad at the smell of diaper bucket that surrounded her. Mad at Leon for pretending that they could start over, when it was so clear they never could. Anger rolled up out of her. Her hands started to shake, and it was hard to breathe. “Are you crazy?”

Leon reached for her hand, grabbing it hard, pleading. “Come with me, Bertie. Please, girl. I think about you all the time.” He had tears in his eyes.

“No, Leon. No. Absolutely no.” She pulled her hand away. Down the hall something crashed—the kids had broke something. Pain stabbed behind her eyes. She pressed the sides of her head. Leon's shoulders sagged. She saw that half of him had expected her refusal.

“Go home, Leon,” she said.

He got up and went, picking up his coat as he left, not putting it on until he got outside. She sat at her table for a long time after he left, staring at his uneaten biscuit.

*  *  *

Leon didn't go to Kinston. As far as she knew he never went anywhere again. He never said another word to Bertie about the two of them. When they talked after that, she watched for some hint in his eyes, any suggestion that he held on to a memory of her. There was nothing and that was fine by her.

She pondered it at her kitchen table now. How one man could be many. First young and spirited, worth sampling at any cost. Then old, swaddled in sameness. Then finally a bundle of bones lying quiet under a bush.