A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  But the woman handed back the coin. “Child, you listen to me. You think now, ’fore you do this. One more dead body tossed on the pile of this world don’t change none of the ugly, don’t shift none of the pain. You hear? More ways to be free than this.”

  Dinah had already looped out of her way, East Bay not the closest path back to Meeting Street from the market. But walking a few blocks east, assuming she could still make it back before the tolling of the curfew bells, meant she might catch a glimpse of Tom inside the shop. To stop and talk would be too much to hope. But even just to make out his form through the glass, she would risk the bells.

  Turning as if to inspect a barrel of rice and holding the cup and its contents steady, Dinah lingered outside the shop on East Bay where smoke curled from a crooked brick chimney. The windows dusted with soot, she could just see to the back of the forge.

  Tom looked up just then from the fire. Dropped his hammer on the floor as he flew to meet her.

  Looking both ways and careful to balance the cup in her right hand, she slipped through the door. “You should be in the Neck by now.”

  He pressed his lips hard to her forehead and his body hard against hers. “And you should be back at Meeting Street.” He was nearly choking on the last words. “What’s this?” He ran his hand down the bare of her arm all the way to the cup.

  She shook her head. Knowing a thing could be awful enough, a knife deep past the skin. But putting a thing into words was lye in the raw of the wound. His, she wanted to cry, this thing inside me, it could be his.

  His hand ran gently down her side, across her waist. Then stopped at her middle.

  Eyes on hers, he rested his palm on the rounded bulge there and drew her closer.

  Only once did she see something flicker across his face—a question. And a storm behind it.

  “Ours,” he whispered into her ear. And then more fiercely, as if the strength of the word might assure that it would be true. “Ours.”

  Dinah shuddered in his arms but did not pull away. And waited until she could raise her face back up to his and smile.

  “Ours,” she agreed. “Ours.”

  God, if only she could know for sure that was true. If only.

  Her right hand still grasping the cup by her side, she gripped it harder, its contents sloshing only a little.

  Tom covered her mouth in a kiss, and she sank against him for one final moment. “You got to go,” he said hoarsely.

  She ran a finger down the strong line of his jaw. “You too.”

  He caught the finger, wrapped it in his. “Ours.”

  With a final brush of his cheek, she flung herself back into the dusk of East Bay, and with one jerk of her right arm, she hurled the cup across the cobbles as she ran, even as a carriage careened toward her down the street.

  Chapter 16

  2015

  With the jangling of its harness and the clopping echo of its Clydesdale’s hooves, the carriage rolling to the curb pulled Kate’s attention from the two men and Gabe chasing one another in and out of the fountain.

  “Rebellion has often found root in this city,” the carriage driver was saying. Kate stepped back from the fountain to hear as he formed his words tentatively, perhaps not firm enough yet in his memory for airing. “During the American Revolution by the patriots who chafed under British rule. Before the Civil War by the slaves who dreamed of freedom.”

  He stopped to take a question from one of his passengers.

  “These bolts in our houses she’s asking about,” he repeated for the group. “Earthquake bolts they’re called, and they held Charleston’s buildings together when the city was too poor to tear anything down after the Civil War and for decades following. While Boston and New York demolished the old and erected the new, Charleston had no choice but to keep, by whatever means, its structures standing. Which is how, ladies and gentlemen, our former poverty gave us the largest and architecturally richest historic district in the United States.”

  The driver pointed back up Vendue.

  “And if you can see back up the street to the corner, it was a joiner’s shop next door to a blacksmith, both shops run by slaves hired out by their white owners. And the crates and coffins that the joiner made . . .”

  Something about what the guide said before the carriage rolled forward caught Kate’s attention—some link in a chain she couldn’t quite see. She drew out her scrap paper and scribbled:

  Next door, a joiner—made crates, coffins.

  Passing the fountain, where Scudder, Daniel, and Gabe were playing leapfrog at the edge of the spray, Kate pried off the heel of each of her Keds with the toe of her other shoe and felt the pier’s boards warm and smooth beneath her bare feet.

  Every thirty feet or so on the pier hung bench swings long enough for six people. A family of five sprawled, squealing and crawling over one another, on the swing just up ahead. Two teenagers on a swing at the end of the pier fit themselves to each other’s bony angles. Clumps of people wandered hand in hand, the last of the sun’s glow slipping past the wharf pilings.

  Two police officers strolled the length of the wharf, one of them redheaded and round-faced, grinning and nodding at every person they passed—and calling several by name. The other was built in hard, muscular squares, like a tower of concrete blocks. Even his head, with his hair flat across in a crew cut, was a square that sat directly on top of his shoulders.

  At the edge of the very center of Waterfront Park, a short balding man, a green Celtics T-shirt hanging loose from his frame, had set up a tripod and camera and was photographing the harbor, pelicans balanced on the wharf pilings and gulls swooping low over the harbor, its ripples tipped with gold. Every minute or so, the photographer shifted a bag at his feet that was exploding with lenses and at least one other camera.

  Not sure she should stay, but with no reason but a tall stack of books in an empty motel room to convince her to go, Kate dug again in her pocket for the scrap of paper and this time turned it to its back, to the blank side. Twilight fuzzed the lines of the pier and the sea. But the boardwalk was lit nicely by lanterns, and the fountain glowed in the gaslight, the last of the children coaxed out of the water by mothers holding towels open to wrap shivering forms. Daniel and Scudder and Gabe dropped, winded, in a pile on the ground, one on top of the other, like puppies, the spray of the fountain glistening on their skin.

  Kate roughed out the fountain, the figures, the sheer play of the scene. Her chest ached again.

  Gabe abruptly leapt up and ran full speed at a tall figure in a dark suit, the white of his clerical collar bright against the dark of the man’s skin, a young girl on either side of him, holding his hand. Daniel and Scudder jogged to meet the clergyman and the girls, the group of them exchanging hugs and handshakes. Kate included that, too, the way the rounding out of the clergyman’s cheeks pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose when he smiled.

  The sketching had begun when she was small. Her mother would scour ball-field grime off Kate’s cheeks on Saturday evenings. Up the steps to Mass she hauled Kate, Sarah Grace’s face still pretty, but strained now, caved in under the cheeks by the big-fisted hardness of life.

  But inside the nave, Sarah Grace’s stooped shoulders straightened, her head lifting as she collapsed to the kneeler. Kate had wanted to draw her mother’s face at these times, preserve the look of the woman she didn’t know, the one not eaten away by despair and regret.

  Afterward they would return to the house, where Kate would curl up with a sketch pad while her mother dozed on the couch, splinters of the liturgy cutting through the thin skin of her sleep. Ink pen in one hand, her pad clutched in the other, Kate let her fingers teach her about life: the shadows and sharp, unlovely angles of even the kindest, gentlest figure. The lines of a face that spoke loudly of pain, even with the mouth still. As a child, Kate had first sketched the truth in charcoal before she’d let herself actually see it: her mother collapsed on the couch, one hand flopped with its fingertips
just brushing the floor.

  “You’re really good,” said a voice over Kate’s shoulder, making her jump.

  Leaning farther forward, Scudder Lambeth dripped water from his hair onto her shoulder. “You’re actually very good.”

  Gabe sprinted past, laughing, his father in hot pursuit.

  “No, I—”

  He held up his hand. “I hate false modesty in anyone, but especially women. You always give your sketches Latin captions? Pacem,” he read.

  “What?” Kate held up the sketch to the glow of the lamppost. Sure enough, she’d penciled in the word she’d been remembering her mother whisper those nights after Mass, Pacem—sometimes with longing or hope but more often like a frightened child’s question: Peace?

  Scudder Lambeth tilted his head at her. “Have you always liked to draw?”

  Looking down at the sketch, Kate nodded. She could see her mother asleep after Mass on the couch, with Kate sketching on through the night and lining out what she had seen so far of the world: most of it more dark than light, more pain than peace.

  “So is this what you do, Kate? For a living, I mean.”

  “No. Oh, no. I mean, I guess I thought about that sometimes as a kid. I had a fifth-grade teacher who thought that’s what I should be—the marvelous Mrs. Saucie, who wore black Converse high-tops with all her skirts.” Kate smiled at the memory. “And my mom thought I’d be an artist when I grew up. But she wasn’t a very practical soul. Never very focused on minor details like paying the bills.”

  Glancing up now to the father and son chasing each other, Kate turned to say something to Scudder.

  But Daniel had flipped Gabe upside down by the ankles. And Gabe, the tips of his fingers and the ends of his curls brushing the boards of the pier, was laughing and waving at them both to come play.

  Scudder gave a little salute. “Good seeing you, Kate. I am, however, being summoned by a higher authority.”

  “Hey, before you go, sorry, it’s probably none of my business, but sometimes Gabe mentions his mom—seems like a lot, in fact. But I thought he told me she’d . . .”

  Scudder frowned. “Talking about her in the present tense?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “He started that lately, talking like she’s around. And he’s taken to running off sometimes out of the blue, days he’s missing her extra. She died two years ago this fall, from cancer.”

  Daniel was twirling his son by the wrists now, Gabe’s little legs splayed out as he spun.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kate said.

  “That’s where Gullah Buggy came from. She was always telling Dan he ought to go on the road with his stories and songs, and then for her funeral he hired a horse and old-fashioned rig to carry the casket, and all of us mourners walking behind—like the old days. With all the medical bills that piled up, Dan’s been working two jobs and going to school and raising Gabe. Had his hands full.”

  Kate nodded, picturing Beecher pulling a coffin, little Gabe’s head hanging low, his daddy holding his hand, Scudder beside them, and a river of mourners marching slowly behind.

  “I guess I should be getting back,” she said at last. “Pages to go before I sleep and all that.” Reluctantly, she turned away.

  “Hey. Kate.”

  She half turned back.

  “You’ve got the advantage on me. You know what Daniel—and Gabe—do for a living, and me. I’m not sure I know what you do. Since it’s not art.”

  “I’m here researching . . .”

  Her words trailed off as her gaze rested on Gabe, who’d wandered away from his father several yards. Daniel had answered a cell call, and Kate could make out the strained patience in his voice: “Yes, and we will certainly check on the shipping confirmation. I can assure you, though, that I did mail your order on the date we agreed . . .”

  Gabe, meanwhile, had cocked his head at the photographer’s bag of lenses. Little by little, the child was inching closer.

  The man with the camera hanging down his front like a big necklace and a camera on a silver tripod had his back to them. On the ground a few yards away sat a bag full of gadgets and lenses and all sorts of things the man fit on his cameras and spun and clicked like puzzles you had to line up just right. Gabe took a step closer to see better. He could make out the man’s arms jutting out on either side of the tripod, scrawny and white as birch sticks. The man’s head ticked back, his eyes narrowing on Gabe.

  “Don’t even think about stealing that bag, boy,” the man growled.

  Ignoring him—Gabe knew you didn’t pay a man any mind when he called you boy in that tone—he thought of his own daddy’s arms, thick and strong as the steel cables they tied up the cruise ships to the wharf with. Gabe’s arms might be on the stick side themselves for now, but he was his daddy’s boy, everyone said. He’d be a big man like his daddy one day, and not long from now. And a good man, that’s what he’d be. A strong man and a good one, both like his daddy—but also one who liked to do math. Even someday when he’d be topping six five, he’d keep a Rubik’s Cube in his pocket.

  Even if he was mayor of Charleston, he’d keep the cube in his pocket, Gabe promised himself. Or leader of the Free World. You could do that now with brown skin. Or whatever color you had. So long as you knew whole mountains of facts about any ole thing somebody might ask, like how many euros went to the dollar today or how many hours of math more every week kids in China did than kids in the United States—although you didn’t see China sending kids to the NFL draft, now, did you?

  No matter what he became when he grew up, a Rubik’s Cube would stay in his pocket to help him stay calm. Help him sort out the mess people caused themselves.

  Lord, Pastor Clem would say from the carved wooden block of a pulpit the boy loved to study from down below, the mess people can cause themselves. And he’d smile at them with affection, with tenderness, too, all his flock fanning themselves in their pews, but he’d wipe his forehead right clear across, like even the thought of the mess people caused was wearing his good-shepherd self out.

  “The mess,” the boy said aloud in his best basement voice, “people cause.”

  A hand on his shoulder made the boy jump.

  “Now wouldn’t that be the truth, Gabe.”

  The boy pitched back his head to stare up into the clergyman’s. “Hey again.”

  Clementa Pinckney smiled—the kind of smile that blew a warm wind over whatever it was you were thinking, making some of the grit and the grudge of your thoughts spin away.

  “What,” Pastor Clem wanted to know, “did I catch you in the middle of thinking?”

  Gabe tipped his head in the direction of the photographer, who turned to glower every few moments. “Thinking how some people are real hard to think holy about.”

  Pastor Pinckney’s own eyes followed Gabe’s and then crinkled into a smile. “You know, people over the age of thirteen, if a preacher asks what they’re thinking, they make up something extra special sanctified sounding—right out of thin air. It can wear on a man.”

  “What if I said I don’t much like the looks of some people?”

  The hand Clem Pinckney had placed on his shoulder grew heavier now. “Then I’d say that I see what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  “And I’d tell you that changes nothing about how we should treat him if he came to us for help. We welcome the stranger. That’s what we do.”

  Gabe crossed his arms but made himself look back up at Clem Pinckney’s face. Even the mustache that dusted the man’s lip was gentle, and so was the warmth in his eye. His voice went booming from the pulpit and smacked you up straight in your pew to listen—a little scared, too. In the statehouse also, they said, his voice could go crashing big. And make whatever senators napping that day bolt upright, ready to vote—even before they’d woken up good enough to think for themselves—vote with the nice, gentle man with the big boom of a voice.

  “Yes, sir,” Gabe said. But he didn’t much mean it. He liked keeping
hold of the feeling of not liking the photographer man with the cue ball for a head.

  “I’ll see you soon, son. You tell your granddaddy hello.”

  Gabe hugged the preacher hard around the waist. Pulling the Rubik’s Cube from his pocket again, he twirled the lines of squares on their axes, his fingers flying. Then stuffed it back in his pocket.

  The bag of lenses and gadgets was wide open on the ground. And the photographer man’s back was turned. So it probably wouldn’t hurt just to step closer. Gabe knew not to touch, but a step closer would mean he could maybe make out how they worked.

  “Hey! You!”

  Bent over the bag, Gabe lifted his head at the shout.

  “Get the hell away from my bag, you little thief!” the man roared and ran straight at Gabe.

  Gabe’s heart stopped.

  Panicked, he reached in his pocket for what always helped him calm down.

  “Gun!” the bald photographer guy was screaming. “Police! He’s got a gun!”

  More shouts and the cops running and Gabe’s daddy leaping and a terrible bang.

  Kate screamed as Daniel dove in front of his son, the balding man lunging for Gabe, and there was some sort of crash.

  Gabe hit the brick pavers, his father falling on top of him. The photographer’s dash past his tripod had unbalanced it, and a long-lensed camera lay in hundreds of glass and black shards.

  The cops arrived panting, gripping their Tasers. “Where’s the gun?” the younger, stockier one demanded.

  “Yanked the damn thing out just now!” the balding man screeched.

  The older cop spun to the boy, who was still on the ground. A plastic cube of colored squares tumbled from Gabe’s hand.

  For several seconds stretched long, everyone stared.

  Fist on one hip, the older cop reached out a hand to help Gabe to his feet and rounded on the balding man. “Is this the weapon you saw?”

  “A kid slinks over to steal my gear and then goes for his weapon, I’m gonna kick his black ass.”