Under the Mercy Trees (3 page)

5

Martin

Sober. The sun skirted cloud tops and pinned Martin to his window seat. He was brave for the stewardess, declined small bottles, heeded signs not to smoke. He prayed to his estranged higher power that the bruise on his face had healed enough that Liza wouldn't notice it.

The flight attendant came by, offering tiny bags of peanuts. The man seated next to Martin was asleep. “I'll give him his when he wakes up,” Martin said, taking two bags. When the flight attendant was safely down the aisle, he pocketed both. He picked up the plastic cup that had held his ration of ginger ale and tipped an ice cube into his mouth. Smells settled in the cabin's circulated air, a mix of perfumes, peanuts, unbrushed teeth, the banana sandwich the woman across the aisle had produced from her carry-on bag. He looked out the window. The plane was flying west over North Carolina's flat Piedmont toward the mountains. Through holes in the clouds he could see the land below. Towns in this part of the state respected one another's space, spreading themselves out like strangers at a picnic ground, each centered on a miles-wide quilt of tobacco fields and curing barns.

*  *  *

In August 1954 he had taken a Trailways bus out of the mountains into the Piedmont, feeling the heat rise and wrap itself around his neck. Until that morning, when he'd climbed on the bus with his clothes and books packed into a mildewed duffel bag Leon had brought back from the war, Martin had never been out of Willoby County. He pressed his face to the grimy window. The bus zigzagged between stops, stitching a ragged line along patched and broken two-lane. An old woman in the seat behind him gave him a boiled egg, then moved forward to pester the driver. Diesel exhaust filled his nostrils, the smell of adventure.

The bus depot was in Whelan, the closest town to Solace Fork big enough to host a bus station. It was Liza who took him to the depot that day, one last ride in the Sunliner convertible that had elevated them to royalty as seniors at Solace Fork School. Liza's father, Dr. Vance, who bought her the car, also gave Martin the money to attend college at Chapel Hill. Martin's own father thought education was useless and had disappeared into the fields that morning without saying good-bye. His mother had felt too poorly to come with him to the station.

“Do you mind your family not seeing you off?” Wind rolled Liza's hair along her neck as she drove.

“No.” His answer was honest. Greed for newness had banished fear, and he couldn't get out of Willoby County fast enough.

At the depot, Martin handed his duffel bag to the bus driver to throw into the underbelly of the bus, then turned and hugged Liza.

“You'll come over to Greensboro to see me at college, won't you?” she said when they separated. She blinked back tears.

Martin touched a finger to the corner of her eye. “Now, don't start that.”

She tried to smile. “I know.”

He kissed her good-bye. Her lips tasted of mint folded into tea and ice cream churned on a hot day, the slightest lacing of rock salt.

From the bus station in Chapel Hill, he walked north to Mrs. Bowen's boarding house, where Dr. Vance had lived as a student thirty years before. The doctor had written and secured him a room. The house, like the landlady herself, had not aged well. Gray paint peeled off the wide porch. Bricks had worked themselves free and fallen into weedy flowerbeds. Young men who would once have taken a place at Mrs. Bowen's table now lived more comfortably in university dorms. The only other residents were two old men, retired salesmen with no families, and Mrs. Bowen's own sister. In Martin's room, water stains mapped continents on the ceiling, but he didn't mind. To have his own room, after sweltering with snoring brothers in the triangular space under his father's tin roof, was a luxury.

On campus, he joined a swell of students moving toward the gym for registration. The young men were confident, dressed in new khakis and saddle oxfords. The girls wore clothing in textures he had never seen before, linen and cashmere. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch them. He took his place in a line of students picking up course cards. Two men ahead of him were returning from Korea on the GI Bill. Martin felt like a baby beside them. He tightened his jaw and stood up straighter.

Once registered, he wandered toward tables set up along the gym walls, where student groups advertised for recruits. A thin, plain girl with a name tag that said “Margaret” manned the table for the Carolina Playmakers, the university's drama group. She eyed him as he approached. “Actor, right?”

“Playwright.” At eighteen, with life stretching before him in all its promise, authorship of a few scenes acted out in the yard of a four-room schoolhouse was enough to make him think he was somebody.

“We do need writers. Especially writers who know how to use a hammer and paintbrush.” Margaret pushed a sign-up sheet toward him and told him the date of the group's first meeting.

At dinner that evening, Mrs. Bowen gushed on about Dr. Vance. “The most intelligent young man I ever had stay here. And such good manners, too.” Her eyes flitted to Martin's elbows, which were planted on the table. He moved them. The two old salesmen and Mrs. Bowen's sister ate without talking, their dentures clicking in unison.

Mrs. Bowen put more mashed potatoes on Martin's plate without his asking. “And his daughter. What's her name? Elizabeth?”

“Liza,” he said.

“Beautiful girl.”

“Yes, she is.”

“I almost forgot.” Mrs. Bowen got up from the table and rifled through a pile of mail on a sideboard. She handed him a package wrapped in brown paper. “Dr. Vance sent this for you.”

The old people stopped chewing, watching Martin. He didn't want to open the gift in front of them, but it seemed he had no choice. He pulled off the paper. Inside was a dictionary, so new the thin pages stuck together. A note in Dr. Vance's handwriting said, “Something every playwright needs.” Mrs. Bowen beamed. “Didn't I tell you the doctor was thoughtful?”

Martin excused himself and went upstairs to his room. He unpacked his few other books and placed them on a shelf above the room's scratched desk. A Bible from his mother, worn copies of Thomas Wolfe's
Look Homeward, Angel
and Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!
stolen from the county library and never missed, and a crisp new copy of Eugene O'Neill's collected works. His high school teacher, Mr. Samuels, had called the O'Neill collection a school prize for the play Martin wrote as his final English paper, but Martin knew Mr. Samuels had paid for it with his own money. Martin put Dr. Vance's dictionary with the other books and arranged and rearranged them, imagining how they would look to new friends coming to visit him, the conclusions they would draw about him from the titles. When he was satisfied with the display, he opened his billfold and took out the registrar's receipt for the $123 he had paid for his first semester's tuition and fees, and tucked it into the Bible, preserving it like a holy thing.

*  *  *

The Fasten Seat Belt sign above Martin's head dinged twice, and the plane lurched under his feet as the pilot began the approach to the Willoby County airport. Foliage and buildings gained definition as they descended. The plane turned and the mountains came into view, red and gold leaves vibrant on the trees near the base but already patchy at the higher elevations, where strands of gray cloud settled on low peaks. Martin's throat tightened with loss. Dr. Vance had thought him a man of honor and promise. Martin was glad the doctor had died before he could realize that Martin had failed him.

6

Bertie

The day after cleaning Leon's house with Eugenia and Ivy, Bertie sat at her kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, waiting for James to come home for supper. She had a meatloaf in the oven. The trailer was clean, every piece of bric-a-brac dusted, afghans lined up straight with the backs of the chairs and sofa. She had clipped all the articles about Leon out of the paper and set them aside to save for the family, and made her weekly calls to her grown daughters, who both lived near the coast. She was glad not to have to go anywhere.

She expected James to come home and eat, then head outside to escape the press of the trailer, finding excuses to stay out as long as he could, piddling with his tools and fixing small things that didn't need to be fixed. She and James used to sit in the living room after supper and watch
MacGyver
or
The Golden Girls
on television, but they couldn't watch together anymore because he had to turn the volume up so high. The lathes at the furniture plant had sanded down his hearing. Giant lathes that fashioned bedroom suites named after some French king, with carved mahogany pineapples on the bedposts. The company offered employees a discount, which was a joke. The bed alone was bigger than their living room and so heavy it would make the trailer floor separate from the walls.

She heard the wheels of James's truck kick gravel and the engine turn off. She waited for the sound of his door opening, his step on the little porch, the pause while he took off his boots, something he did for her to keep mud off her floors. When she didn't hear those things, she got up and went outside and saw James gripping his steering wheel, his seat belt still on.

He had brought home Leon's dogs.

Leon never named his dogs, just called them “dog” or “pup.” When one died he got another. Every day since they'd discovered Leon gone, James had fed Leon's dogs at the home place, where he'd penned them up so they wouldn't bother the searchers. James treated it as temporary, as if Leon would be coming back to rouse the dogs out of the dirt and sit again with them on his porch, picking ticks off their necks. Now the dogs panted softly in the back of James's truck, just waiting for the next thing the way dogs do.

Bertie hurried around and opened the driver's-side door. James looked terrible. The muscles of his face looked like they were about to turn loose, about to let his eyes and nose and mouth slide right off like candle wax, on down his front. She undid his seat belt and took his arm to make him get out. “Leave the dogs in the truck,” she said. “They'll be all right for a minute.”

She walked him toward the trailer. Mud and rotten leaves caked his boots. At the porch, he tried to take the boots off, but his hands weren't working right.

“Stop. Just leave them on. Come on in the house,” she said.

Usually James looked too big for their sofa, but he seemed to have shrunk. “The sheriff's calling off the search.” He wiped his hand over his mouth, then started to cry. When men cried the sound had to force its way up through muscle and thick bone. Men didn't learn how to cry the way women did. It scared them when it happened, the same as if they'd looked down and noticed they were gushing blood.

“Oh, God, he's gone.” His voice was all out of control.

It was only the second time Bertie had seen her husband cry. The first time she had caused the hurt, and when she saw James break down over Leon she felt the guilt well up again, as if she'd caused the second pain as well. She sat down and pressed against him. Even with their bodies touching it felt like she couldn't get close enough to do him any good. “It's okay, baby.” She scraped her fingernails through his hair, pushing it off his forehead, the way she would do a child with a fever. In the ridges of his corduroy coat she could smell his whole week, the smoke of barrels lit to warm searchers, metal from the sling blade he used to cut underbrush as he looked, the single paper-bagged beer she knew he had snuck on his way home, a thing she didn't begrudge him.

Outside, the wind came up. Dead leaves shook off yesterday's rain. James lifted a shoulder to wipe tears and snot off his face. “The sheriff wants to meet with all of us tonight over at Eugenia's, so he can tell everybody, announce it officially.”

Bertie's mind started turning, trying to find an excuse not to go, but she knew she was stuck.

James stood up and moved away from her. “Let me see about them dogs.”

From the kitchen window she watched him tie up the dogs, far enough from the house that they couldn't dig up her flower beds. Gray clouds tapered down into points, faking tornado shapes. James moved around the yard. She wondered which Leon James was grieving for. When they were all younger, Leon was something, with that full head of black hair and smart grin always forming around some tall tale. But as he got older he talked less and less, until his mouth rusted shut like an old mason jar lid.

Of course, maybe Leon just didn't have anything to say to her.

7

Liza

Liza's husband, Raby, got home from work just as Liza was about to leave to pick Martin up at the airport. She waited for Raby to get out of his truck, watching him duck his head slightly as he climbed out. The jeans he wore for his job selling farm equipment showed off his athletic body.

“Where you headed?” he said.

“To pick up Martin Owenby. Leftovers are in the fridge.”

He closed his truck door. “Martin Owenby. Your old flame.” Laugh lines creased the corners of Raby's eyes. “Why doesn't one of his relatives pick him up? You can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting an Owenby.”

“They're all meeting with Sheriff Metcalf. I volunteered to bring Martin.”

“Does he know they've called off the search?” Raby said.

“No. I'll have to tell him.”

Raby crossed his arms loosely over his chest. “Maybe I ought to come along to chaperone.”

She knew he was teasing, mostly. “You're welcome to. I have nothing to hide.”

Raby unfolded his arms. “I guess I trust you.” He walked over, put his hands on her upper arms, and gave her a long deep kiss. “Just marking my territory,” he said when he let her up for air. “Tell Martin I said hi.”

*  *  *

Liza drove toward the airport, rehearsing what she would tell Martin about his brother. She visualized Leon Owenby in a ball cap with the local feed and seed's logo, large old-man ears with lobes that dripped down, his peculiar habit of wearing black dress shoes with overalls and polishing them on the backs of his pants legs when he thought no one was looking. She stopped herself before she could imagine further, Leon lying lifeless on that property somewhere, within shouting distance of the decrepit house or in the dark woods behind it, where even this time of year the undergrowth grew with sinister speed.

*  *  *

The first time Liza saw the Owenby farm she was thirteen. Martin had been to her house but never invited her to his. Liza's father kept a real home. When her mother died he refused to give in to depression or the male tendency to let things get dirty, mildewed, unaired. He hired a housekeeper, Mrs. Evans. Her baking and the oil she used to polish the dark wood in the doctor's study covered up the faint antiseptic smell that sometimes clung to his clothes. Martin loved their house. He stayed as long as he dared, talking to Liza in the lush backyard among her father's ferns and native orchids, or sitting with her father in the study's comfortable leather chairs, where light came in through French doors and a bay window. Her father's books and her own lined the shelves. Martin seemed bigger there.

There were no books at his own house, except his mother's Bible. Not even a piece of spare paper to draw on.

Liza's father got the call just after breakfast one morning to come and deliver Ivy Owenby's baby, her first boy, Shane. School was out for the summer, and Liza convinced her father to let her come along. He shouldn't have allowed it, but he rarely said no to her. They drove up into the Owenbys' patchy yard. Chickens scattered. Martin's mother waved from the front door, then saw Liza.

“I hope you don't mind me bringing Liza,” the doctor called, getting his bag out of the car. “I thought she could visit with Martin, or if he's busy, she can just read a book.”

Mrs. Owenby walked to the end of the porch and looked around the corner of the house. Liza got the uneasy feeling that Mrs. Owenby thought Liza being there would get her in trouble. “Martin's out back, hauling rock. You can go talk to him, I reckon.”

Liza's father followed Mrs. Owenby into the house, and Liza went to look for Martin. She found him on the far side of his mother's garden, in the middle of a large rectangle of plowed earth, tossing rocks into a wheelbarrow. He was shirtless, covered with red clay dust, sweat striping his wiry torso. Scratches on his arms beaded blood.

“What are you doing?” Liza called.

He turned around. She could tell he was happy to see her but also embarrassed, of the house, his bare chest, the dirt. “Mama wants a bigger garden space. Leon tilled it up, now I have to clear the rocks out, dump them over yonder.” He pointed to a big pile of jumbled stone near the edge of the woods in back of the property.

She eyed the wheelbarrow. “It looks heavy.”

“It is.” He lifted his hair out of his eyes. “You having a good summer?”

“It's all right. Boring. You need to come over so I'll have something to do.”

“Maybe Sunday afternoon I can come into town.”

“Come for dinner. Mrs. Evans is cooking a roast.”

As she spoke, Martin's brother Leon walked up from the direction of the lower field. He wore overalls over a dirty white shirt and was as sweaty as Martin.

“I need the wheelbarrow, Martin.” He didn't bother to acknowledge her.

“You can't have it. Pop told me to get these rocks cleared.”

“I'm taking it.” Leon grabbed the wheelbarrow by the handles and dumped all of Martin's rocks out onto the ground.

“What are you doing!”

“I said I needed it.” Leon started to push the wheelbarrow away. Martin grabbed the front. As they tussled, Martin's father came around the corner of the house. “Quit that!” Martin and Leon both stopped where they were.

Mr. Owenby was tall, like Leon. His farmer's hands were permanently dirt stained. Martin appealed to him. “He just dumped my whole load.”

“I need the barrow to take that seed down. You told me do it today,” Leon said.

“Take it,” Mr. Owenby said. Leon took the wheelbarrow and left the way he had come.

“How am I supposed to clear the rock?” Martin was so frustrated he was close to tears.

“Carry 'em by hand.” Mr. Owenby looked at Liza, then back at Martin. “And get back to work. You ain't the one having the baby.”

Martin's face reddened with humiliation.

“I'll just go in the house,” Liza said, not wanting to cause him any more grief.

“Best you did.” Mr. Owenby headed toward the lower field.

Martin wouldn't look at Liza. She walked back to the front of the house and went inside. Through the closed bedroom door she could hear Ivy moaning and her father and Mrs. Owenby murmuring. She found a tub of unshelled peas Mrs. Owenby had left on the kitchen table and took them outside to the porch to make herself useful. The porch boards were bowed and cracked, all moisture sucked out of the wood. The only thing to sit on was a high-backed chair with a frayed cane seat. The Owenbys didn't even have a rocking chair. She sat down in the chair and snapped the peas, popping one or two in her mouth as she worked. Sweat trickled down her face. The chair's hard slats dug into her back. She heard Martin throw a rock on the pile behind the house. She imagined him working like Sisyphus in her Greek mythology book, pushing a boulder uphill only to watch it roll down again. When her father finally came out of the house, displaying Ivy's newborn baby in a blanket and announcing, “Now, isn't he a fine big fellah?” Liza was never happier to see him.

*  *  *

Liza turned in to the airport. How a boy like Martin grew at all in the rocky earth of the Owenby farm amazed her. She blamed his parents for giving him no soil in which to take root. His mother tried, but she didn't have the time, or didn't know what to give him in the moments she found. When he left here the wind so easily ripped him up and blew him away.

She parked and went inside to baggage claim. A voice behind her said, “Liza.” The fluorescent glare of the airport lobby yellowed Martin's face. He was too thin, but still good-looking, with almost no gray in the hair that fell rakishly over his eyes. When she hugged him, wanting substance, his body seemed to collapse backward into air, leaving her embrace unsatisfied. He felt boneless, like a baby's foot. He had always been like that, his physical self as hard to grasp as his mind and heart. There had been times when she had gone back and read letters from Martin that she had saved, remembering them as being long and full of heavy meaning, only to find a few scrawled sentences, his letters mere notes. She had filled in the rest.

He held her at arm's length. She could feel the strength in his hands. “You are absolutely beautiful.” His voice, tobacco roughened, made it true.

“So are you,” she said, laughing. Lines of sadness crossed the laugh wrinkles around his eyes, but the green eyes themselves belonged to the mischievous boy who had led her into the woods on her first day at Solace Fork School.

“It's so good to have you home,” she said, then wished she hadn't when she remembered what had brought him.

“Is there any news?”

“The sheriff has called off the search for now. He's taking a personal interest in Leon's case, out of friendship to Hodge. He's meeting with your family tonight at Eugenia's. I'm supposed to take you straight there.” She watched Martin's face but couldn't tell what he was feeling. “I'm sorry about your brother, sweetie.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

They claimed his suitcase and walked to her truck. Martin hefted his bag into the back, and they climbed in. It had been a long time since they had sat so close.

“How's my family handling it?” he said.

“Not so well.”

“Tell me.”

Liza pulled away from the terminal and out onto Aviation Drive. “From what I gather, Steven suspects Bobby, and James suspects Steven. There are probably other theories I haven't heard yet.”

She saw a familiar look on Martin's face. He would bolt if he could, but her truck was already in motion. They passed gray factories with half-empty parking lots and hit country highway. Corn browned in the fields on either side. In her rearview mirror, a last sliver of hazy sun dropped behind hills.

Martin tried the radio, then gave up when he remembered how the mountains blocked airwaves. “I should feel more than I do. I barely knew him.” He rolled down his window and stuck out an elbow. “When I visited, we ran out of words after three minutes. You can't have a conversation with a person who has no answer when you ask him what's new.”

“His life got small,” she said, thinking that Leon's life was best kept small. When his life was bigger he harmed people.

“I guess all of our lives have gotten small.” In the fading light, Martin's profile showed his years. The shadow of a bruise outlined the ridge of his cheekbone, and tiny veins broke along the side of his nose. Liza suspected that even as he navigated the broad avenues of cosmopolitan New York, his life was bounded on all sides by alcohol, guilt, self-hatred. She took his hand and squeezed it before letting go and turning her truck toward town.

They passed the turnoff for Solace Fork School, where she and Martin had gone to school through the twelfth grade. “Did Hodge tell you they're planning to tear the school down?”

“No.”

“Next month. They're going to replace it with a book depository.”

“Didn't any of our famous alumni raise a stink?”

“You're our only famous alumnus.”

“That's sad.”

“It's really falling apart, from being empty for so long. We'll go out there tomorrow if you want to.”

“Don't you have to work?”

“I have so much accrued time off I could play hooky for a semester and they couldn't say anything.”

They drove the rest of the way to Eugenia's house, catching up on safe topics. Liza wanted them to find the familiar groove of old friendship, to fall into the banter, the finishing of each other's sentences, but the ride was too short. She told herself to be patient.

At Eugenia's, the curb was lined with cars. Liza stopped her truck in the street and let it idle. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Don't you want to come in with me?” Martin's voice half-teased, half-pleaded.

“I'm not family. It'll be all right.” She waited while he lifted his suitcase out of the truck bed.

Martin's family didn't know he was gay. As he trudged across Eugenia's yard he seemed to remake himself, squaring his shoulders, losing the give in his limbs.

On Eugenia's porch, he turned around and waved. Liza waited until she saw him open the door and go in, to make sure he didn't flee.