Under the Mercy Trees (7 page)

11

Liza

Liza stood with Martin in the yard of Solace Fork School. Heavy yellow demolition equipment circled the school. The building's roof sagged in the middle, the chimney separating from its base. Most of the windows were broken. The front door was propped open with a brick.

“It looks smaller than I remembered,” Martin said. “Shabbier.”

“It's been vacant nearly fifteen years,” Liza said. In their day, grades one through twelve somehow fit into this school's four rooms. Now three elementary schools and a middle school fed Willoby High, the concrete monstrosity where Liza taught. The high school had twelve hundred students. Its windows didn't open even when the air-conditioning broke down. Between classes the noise in the halls was almost unbearable, metal lockers slamming, students screaming profanity, the class bell going off. She missed the quiet of Solace Fork School, the smell of oiled floors, the miracle of the boards not bursting into flame under the stove in the winter, bird sounds through the open windows in warm weather.

Martin stepped up on the low porch and went inside. She followed him into the dim hallway that separated the classrooms. The old smells were gone, replaced by sour mildew and the musk of small animals that lived and died inside the walls. Martin went to the end of the hall and into the classroom that was theirs as seniors. Mr. Samuels's classroom. Liza stepped in after him.

The floor was discolored under years of polyurethane and scarred where desks had been bolted down. The stove was long gone, someone having finally realized the risk of conflagration. One broken desk sat in a corner, waiting to be cleared away with other trash, or not worth salvaging before demolition. Its hinged top leaned separately against a wall, covered with decades of carved initials and scratches of pen that had gone through paper. Liza sat down at the desk. Wads of chewed gum pressed into the corners of its lidless case. Her knees bumped the underside. “How did we ever fit?” she said. Martin was staring out a window at the woods behind the school and didn't answer.

*  *  *

The fall Mr. Samuels came to teach the upper grades, the students reported to class with a sense of expectation. Liza liked school anyway, and a new teacher represented possibilities. Mr. Samuels was writing on the chalkboard as the students filed in. She, Martin, Hodge, and the Gaddy twins, Nancy and Betty, were seniors that year and shared the classroom with a dozen ninth- through eleventh-graders. They all sat in their seats, staring at the new teacher's back. He wasn't tall, maybe five nine, his body solid and compact. The sleeves of his spotless white shirt were rolled up. His forearms were muscular and tan, the hair bleached light by the sun. His trousers weren't new but were pressed. As he wrote on the board Liza was not above joining the other girls in admiring his physique.

He turned around and smiled. The ear pieces of his gold wire-framed glasses left red marks on both sides of his head. “Good morning. My name is Robert Samuels.” His accent was neutral, not southern. He sounded like the people on the radio news.

He was new and they could have tested his boundaries, but they didn't. None of the seniors were troublemakers, except Martin when provoked, and the younger students took their lead from the seniors. Or it may simply have been that Mr. Samuels exuded authority.

He took the roll, staring at each student as he or she answered to memorize the name. Then he put his roll book down. “Today, class, we're going on a hike.”

The students exchanged looks. Some didn't have shoes, or if they did, the soles had worn through or separated from the shoes like flapping mouths. Mr. Samuels examined their feet. “A walk, then, not a hike. A half mile at the most. Bring a pencil and a piece of paper.” He picked up a canvas rucksack from beside his desk.

They lined up and followed him outside. It was the best kind of August day, not too humid, the sky a pure blue, the air so clear you felt you could see every little thing. Mr. Samuels led them down the deer path in the direction of the secret clearing. Liza worried that he had discovered it, but he took them left through the woods. They came out on a dirt road and walked along it until they reached a meadow surrounded by tall pines, former farmland. A tumbled chimney rose from blackberry thorns, the only memory of some family's homestead. Mr. Samuels led them over grass to a small spring. He knelt down, cupped his hands, and drank. “Have some water,” he invited. “Be careful not to stir up the mud.”

“It might pizon us, Mr. Samuels,” a ninth-grade boy said.

“I had some Saturday and I'm still here,” Mr. Samuels said.

Liza and Martin went to the stream and drank. The water was perfect, worth the risk of contamination.

After everyone drank, Mr. Samuels led them farther into the meadow. “Stop here.” They looked around, wondering what he had brought them to see.

“Pair up,” he said. Martin moved closer to Liza, leaving Hodge to look around for a partner. Mr. Samuels pulled a pocketknife and a skein of brown yarn out of his canvas satchel and began cutting lengths about three feet long, handing one to each pair. “Make a circle with your yarn. Then sit down and observe. Write down everything you see inside your circle, every type of flora and fauna, every mineral. Don't disturb anything. The couple with the most impressive list at the end of a half hour will win a prize.”

Younger students began running around, looking for the most diverse patch. Liza looked at Martin. “Do you have a preference?”

“Somewhere soft to sit.”

They walked over to the meadow's edge and draped their yarn in an oblong around an anthill.

“Can we count every ant?” Martin said.

“Start observing,” she said.

They peered at their little patch of ground and grass. Liza served as secretary. “Ant. Spiderweb. Wild onion. Grass.”

“Dirt,” said Martin. “Stinkweed. More grass.”

Mr. Samuels walked around the meadow, checking on each pair's scientific methodology. When his back was turned, Martin plopped down, rear end first, inside their circle. “Observe me, Liza.”

“You're squashing my flora and fauna,” she said. He scrambled out before Mr. Samuels turned around.

The world inside the circle seemed to grow bigger as they examined it, and louder, teeming. Blades of grass bent as insects crawled up them on their way to nowhere. Indignant ant scouts came out of the red hill and shook their little fists. A small clumsy beetle bumped up against the yarn enclosure and ran in a panicked circle until he reached the break and escaped.

“Stupid fellow,” Martin said.

Liza listed the rocks poking out of the dirt, some brown, some crystal white. Clover, the edges nibbled by rabbits.

Mr. Samuels came over with his field guide and read their list over Liza's shoulder. He fingered the tall weed flowering white in the middle of their circle. “Now, what are you calling this?”

“Stinkweed,” Martin said.

“Ah.
Daucus carota
. Wild carrot. Poetically known as Queen Anne's lace. True stinkweed is something else altogether.”

“It does stink, though. If you smell it for too long it'll give you a headache,” Martin said.

“Thank you for the warning. And what is this? We don't have these in Ohio, where I'm from.” Mr. Samuels squatted and hooked two fingers under the pinkish purple blooms of a small fuzzy-leafed plant, as if he were lifting its chin.

“We call it shepherd's whistle.” Liza pulled off one of the tiny, tube-shaped flowers, bit the end off and squeezed a drop of nectar onto her tongue. “Try it.”

Mr. Samuels copied her. “Very nice. The leaves look like something in the mint family.” He opened his field guide and began flipping pages. “Here we go. Henbit. A weed introduced from Europe. Latin name
Lamium amplexicaule
.” He showed them the picture. “But I like shepherd's whistle better. Thank you for teaching me the local name.”

Hodge called over, “How many things y'all got?”

“It's quality, not quantity, that counts,” Mr. Samuels called back.

“I'm waiting for a rabbit to come out of this hole,” Hodge said. The younger boy who was his partner got up and went searching for more interesting things to drop into their circle.

“That's cheating,” Martin said.

“You can't import objects,” Mr. Samuels said. “Just write down what's already there.”

Over to their left, Liza heard Betty, the slow Gaddy sister, observe, “Bird doo.”

Mr. Samuels was still crouched over Liza and Martin's circle. He poked at a piece of quartz embedded in the earth inside the circle, then pried it out of the ground.

“I thought we weren't supposed to disturb anything,” Martin said.

Mr. Samuels held the rock out on the flat of his hand. He had the callus of a writer on the inside of his middle finger, but his palm was hard. He was a man who worked as well as studied. “Look.”

They looked. The rock was an Indian arrowhead.

Martin raised his eyebrows, asking permission to pick it up. Mr. Samuels nodded. He held perfectly still, as if inviting a wild bird to feed from his hand. From where Liza sat she could see the vein in Mr. Samuel's neck pulsing faster than it should have. Martin took the arrowhead and held it up, testing its sharpness. Sunlight shone through the thin edges. “That's a nice one.” He handed it back to the teacher.

“Do you find many of them around here?” Mr. Samuels said.

“Depends on the place. One of my daddy's fields turns one or two up every time we till.”

Hodge gave up waiting for his rabbit and came over to look. “We find some every summer in the creek.”

“What do you do with them?” Mr. Samuels said.

“Skip 'em in the water. They make good skipping rocks.”

“Next time you find one, bring it to me instead of skipping it.” Mr. Samuels pocketed the arrowhead.

“Does that mean we win the prize?” Martin said.

Mr. Samuels let the class vote. Liza and Martin lost to a team who put their yarn around a half-eaten frog. The winners got horehound candy to suck.

On the walk back, a boy grabbed the Gaddy twins' list and began making fun of Betty Gaddy's bird doo. “Stop it,” Mr. Samuels said sharply. “Miss Gaddy did exactly as I asked. Her observation of avian feces was entirely appropriate.” He reached in his pocket and handed her a piece of candy. Betty Gaddy had never heard praise from a teacher before. Her face turned a mottled red. She walked back to school sucking her candy, not looking left or right, her shoulders straighter than usual.

Liza and Martin fell back. “What do you think of him?” Liza said.

Up ahead, Mr. Samuels walked beside Betty Gaddy, talking to the students around him, pointing out plants along the side of the road. Afternoon sun turned his hair a dark gold. Martin studied him.

“Well?” she said.

He looked over at her, as if he'd forgotten she was there, then grinned. “Good,” he pronounced.

*  *  *

Now in the dusty classroom, Martin traced a finger over faint images that had been erased from the chalk board. He caught Liza looking at him. “What are you thinking about?”

She laughed. “Betty Gaddy.”

“Good old Betty.” Martin slacked his jaw in a perfect imitation of Betty.

“Don't be cruel.” Mr. Samuels never made fun. Liza appreciated that now, the temptation to single out one student to torment. She had seen her colleagues do it, choose one irritating, unpopular student to pick on, reaping the reward of having the other students laugh with you. Eye-roll about him or her in the teachers' lounge. All the others will love you, only one will hate you. In memory of Mr. Samuels she was careful not to do that.

She eased out of the desk and stood up.

Martin reached up to the top of the chalkboard, where a map was rolled up like a window shade. “I bet that's the map they had when we were here.”

“Probably.”

He grabbed the bottom of the map and pulled it down with a rip of vinyl, then screamed when something flew out of it. Liza jumped back. A small brown bat hurled itself at the water-stained ceiling, then at the chalkboard, then at Martin. Martin ducked and covered his head. “Jesus!” The bat slammed into a cracked window and dropped to the floor, stunned.

“Don't touch it! It might have rabies.” Liza made sure she stayed back several feet.

“Thank you, teacher. I was going to pick it up and give it CPR.” Martin grabbed a decayed cardboard box from a corner and put it over the bat. “I thought their sonar was supposed to keep them from running into things.”

“We must have panicked him. There the poor thing was, curled up between Ceylon and Basutoland, minding its own business. Look at all the bat droppings under the map. He must have lived here a while.”

The bat came to and started thumping against the sides of the box. Martin looked at her. “What do we do now?”

She started laughing. She couldn't help it. “You should have seen your face when that thing flew out.”

Martin started laughing, too. “Scared the shit out of me.”

The bat hit the side of the box hard enough to shake it. Liza and Martin both jumped, then got even more tickled at themselves. Martin had to lean against the windowsill. It had been a long time since Liza had heard him belly laugh.

“Oh, Lord.” He got his breath and wiped his eyes. “I can't leave him under the box. He'll get bulldozed.”

She went and picked up the desk lid that leaned against the wall. “If we slide this under the box, you can carry him outside.”

“I
can carry him outside?”

“It's a man's job,” she said sweetly.

They maneuvered the wooden desk lid under the box without letting the bat escape, and Martin lifted it up. He carried it toward the door, like a waiter carrying a tray.

She followed him out onto the little porch. “I'll just stay here while you take him into the woods.”