A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  Tywanza’s voice rose over the screams: “Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”

  A child’s muffled cry.

  The voice, the one Gabe didn’t know, came back: “I have to. I have to do this.”

  Pressed behind the door, the cube clutched in one hand so tightly its corner pierced into his palm, heart slamming the sides of his chest, Gabe peered through the crack between the hinges.

  Something on the floor like a sack. Barely moving.

  The words from inside the room came muddy and garbled and monotone. “My mission. Somebody has to.”

  Tywanza spoke again: “You don’t have to do this. You don’t. Not this. You don’t.”

  More screams.

  There stood the boy-man with the dirty-blond hair, skinny back to the door. “Raped our women.”

  The arms were bent, holding something in front of him Gabe couldn’t see.

  “Taking over the country. I have to.”

  One arm jerked up.

  The flash of black metal. The mouth of a handgun aimed at sweet Mrs. Jackson.

  Tywanza Sanders launched himself to cover the woman, his aunt.

  “Ty!” His momma’s scream. Agony spiraling out from the sound. “Ty!”

  Ty’s body taking the bullets that sprayed from the gun.

  Nightmare, Gabe thought through a haze. This wasn’t real but just a nightmare beyond all believing.

  Or maybe he was asleep and waking up to his daddy watching a war movie, and the heroes turned out to be Ty and all the folks in this room, the kind of soldiers they made movies about giving their lives for somebody else and saving a city, a country, the civilized world.

  Then a hammer and hammer and hammer of bullets that went on and on. Red on the accordion pleats of the movable wall. Red on the ceiling, spatters and spatters and spatters of red. Red in bright, growing clouds on the floor.

  Gabe doubled over, but his feet would not move. Like the stones from the shop counter had gotten stacked on both his feet.

  Gabe’s vision had gone dark and rippled, like a curtain you could see through just barely—folds and folds of a fisherman’s net—dropping slow from one side of his head across. But he could make out bodies there on the floor. And a young girl’s feet, one shoe missing, sticking out from under the momma, who lay facedown in the spill of her son’s blood.

  Explosions. More of them.

  Shot after shot.

  Chunks of flesh blasted on chairs.

  The chairs gone red and running.

  The gun turning now. Mouth to the door. Black metal still hurling out death. Then it stopped. And the boy-man bent.

  “Let you live so you can tell what you saw,” he said to someone there on the floor.

  Stopping once to look back, he dropped the hand that held the black metal down to his side but still clutched it hard, like a child hanging on to the hand of a daddy who just might let go.

  Another shot.

  Gabe collapsed, legs buckling, the Rubik’s Cube tumbling down to the floor.

  Red side up.

  Everywhere, red. Red above and below and behind. Red flowing.

  And then there was no color at all.

  Darkness. Just darkness.

  Chapter 43

  1822

  Pandemonium reigned, the shouts of the crowd deafening, the militia firing into the air, the captain of the guard sitting his horse in a cloud of dust and gunpowder.

  In the blur of the moment, buzzards already swooping, Emily saw her father approach, pistol raised.

  Tom’s eyes were lit like his whole soul had caught fire—like the rage and the sorrow would burn him up from the inside.

  Jackson Pinckney raised his hand to aim at Tom’s face.

  The pistol fired at the same moment Dinah screamed.

  Emily buried her head in her own skirts, the wet red mass of them.

  “Water,” someone behind her was saying, “be one thing. Blood’s a whole other. This here’s more than just water bust loose. This colored girl here’s needing a doctor.”

  In a fog of gunpowder clouding twenty-two bodies swinging from ropes, Dinah was giving birth.

  The body of the blacksmith convulsed once more, the muscled arms twitching. Then grew still.

  Dinah’s teeth clenched through the last tearing and push and gushing of blood of the baby’s arrival. Another scream—of more than just pain. A scream powered by rage.

  A mounted guard galloped into the crowd, drawing back his arm and cutting down one body after the other with a slash of his sword. Each crumpled onto crushed shell as the crowd watched. Tom Russell’s body fell in a heap next to Dinah.

  Emily drew a handkerchief from the sash of her dress and pressed it to the blooming hole in Tom Russell’s forehead. Blood soaked into the monogrammed silk, the ERP going dark first, then the whole ivory square turning scarlet.

  “Awful,” said someone behind her.

  Numbly, Emily nodded as she wiped her face, eyes and nose running, with the bare skin of her left arm and drew the handkerchief back from Tom’s head. “Yes. All of it. Awful.”

  “I meant your pretty little silk there. Got to be throwed out now. Burned, what I’d do.”

  Emily did not lift her head to see the speaker’s face but wiped the wet of her face again with her arm. With her free hand, Emily reached for the still form of the infant, lying limp and lifeless in the tangled mass of his mother’s skirts.

  “Don’t touch it,” said a passing white woman, face dirty, erupting in sores. She bent over the body. “Thing’s dead. Just as well, seein’s when it got foaled.”

  Eyes still shut, Dinah rolled to her side.

  “Well, I’ll be,” said the white woman. “Look at them little black fists start to move.”

  Emily gasped. “Dinah, look!” she cried. “Look!” Blood had soaked through her petticoats and onto her legs, and she did not care. Frantically, she pulled the child from inside Dinah’s skirts and laid him against her chest.

  Wearily, Dinah opened her eyes.

  “Look!”

  Dinah raised an unsteady hand to grasp five small dark fingers against her own lighter hand. “Ours,” she breathed.

  The baby bawled.

  Dinah, weeping and rocking the child close against her breast, held his tiny hand tight in her own. “Black,” she said over and over again. “Thank you, Jesus. His hands are black.”

  Chapter 44

  2015

  Far up ahead, sirens shattered the night.

  Murmurs rose from passersby on the sidewalk as Dan and Scudder and Kate hurtled past, ignoring the oncoming cars and plunging into the street.

  “A shooting.”

  “What? Here? Couldn’t be here. Those sirens?”

  “Where, damn it?”

  “Some church, they’re saying.”

  More sirens. Wailing. Shrieking.

  Even the couples strolling to a nice dinner stopped, high heels poised in midstep. Heads dipping to cell phones. Cars failing to go on green. Failing to stop on red. Block upon city block listening. Straining.

  “What happened?”

  “Who? Where?”

  “No. Dear God, please no.”

  Kate did not know she’d lost her shoes until she stopped, doubled over to try to breathe, and saw her feet bare.

  She ran on, flesh slapping the cobbles and bricks, tears coursing together with sweat down her cheeks, down her neck, down her chest.

  Crowds milling. Cell phones to ears.

  “On Calhoun.”

  “God. Oh God.”

  “Anyone hurt? How many?”

  “No. God.”

  “No.”

  A middle-aged white woman on her cell phone dropped to her knees in the middle of crossing the street, the wine bottle she’d carried crashing. Both hands folded into each other. As if the prayers she needed to make could not wait until she reached the other side.

  Kate ran on, Daniel a block ahead of her now, Scudder just yards behind him.


  Kate willed her bare feet to move faster, pressed her lips hard together against the stone and slivers of shell that cut through her skin. Faster. She had to run faster.

  Now there was the church up ahead, its white steeple glowing against a dark sky. Red and blue lights flashing into the darkness. Sirens shrieking. A crowd gathering. Trembling. Holding hands. Reaching for someone to touch. Someone to walk through these moments beside.

  Medics charged out the lower doors of the church with a stretcher, a man on it. A grown man. An old man. Not Gabe. The man still alive. Was he still alive? Thrashing suddenly in pain.

  The crowd silent. Only breezes of whispers. Choked sobs.

  “More inside. Dead.”

  “In the basement. Bible study. Basement. Dead.”

  “So many.”

  “Everyone in the church. Dear God, everyone, not everyone dead.”

  “So many. So many dead.”

  Kate saw Daniel barrel toward the lower doors, where the medics had just emerged with another stretcher.

  Leaping over the yellow tape, he was nearly to the doors, Scudder a few seconds behind him, Kate after that. A medic reaching for one of the stretchers was saying, “Hollow-tip bullets. Seen it one time before. Enters the body, comes apart there, and rips it to hell.”

  Officer Mulligan, his round Irish face twisted now and without color, was blocking Dan’s path at the church door. “Oh God, I can’t, Dan. I’m so sorry. Can’t let anyone in.”

  Daniel lunged to knock Mulligan out of the way, but rather than raise an arm to him, Mulligan raised a hand to his own face. Swatted tears from his own cheeks. “It’s orders,” he said, voice splintering. “Jesus, it’s bad. It’s so bad.” He straightened, as if reminded of all his training. But his shoulders, even squared to attention, still shook, his chin clenched hard against words he could not cry out.

  “Sean. Please. I have to get in. My son is in there. Listen to me: my son is in there!”

  Mulligan shook his head, tears coursing over his cheeks.

  Daniel leaned his head in. “Sean. You and me, we been friends for years. You got to let me through before I break through myself.”

  “Hale!” Mulligan shouted. “Get your butt over here to this door.”

  Daniel surged a step forward, looking betrayed.

  But Mulligan lowered his voice. “Dan, I’m going inside. Where would your boy be? I’ll find him. I swear I’ll find him for you. Even with all the—” Choking on his own words, he stopped there. “I’ll find him for you. I swear.”

  Dan shook his head miserably. “Inside. With Pastor Clem.”

  Mulligan’s face went more ashen still. “Pinckney.” He laid a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Dear Jesus.”

  Kate could not breathe. “We let him go,” she murmured, the words fractured. “He was . . . and Sarah Grace never . . . oh God, Dan.”

  Daniel’s whole body shook under the cop’s hand. “Sean. If you know, tell me. That’s who Gabe went looking for. Where’s Clem?”

  Taser in hand, Nick Hale was ramming his way through the crowd. Reaching the door, his square form blocked off the opening. “Back,” he barked. “Everyone back.”

  With a nod to Daniel, Mulligan ducked inside the church.

  Daniel did not step back. He met Hale’s eye. “I got a son in that basement.”

  Hesitating, Hale rounded on Scudder and Kate. “Everybody but families, get back.”

  Daniel nodded over his shoulder. “Those two stay here with me.”

  “Everybody but family, damn it!”

  “That’s right,” Daniel said. “Those two. With me.”

  They stood dizzied by the cyclone of red and blue and white light, the shriek of sirens, the squeal of tires. A dark Honda screeched up to the yellow tape, and Elijah Russell leapt out of the car. Barreling through the crowd, he found Daniel, and the men buried their faces in each other’s necks and held on.

  From the street, a tide of low notes was rising. Single cries of fear that crested and crashed and ebbed. And under that, a tune flowing forward. And words somewhere in the wash of it, sometimes drowned out by a sob.

  “Through many dangers, toils, and snares . . .”

  An officer emerged through the church doors, his arms covered in blood.

  “I have already come . . .”

  Now a stretcher. Carried slowly by medics whose faces had drawn into themselves, lips pressed into straight, quivering lines. The body they bore covered fully with a white sheet.

  “’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far . . .”

  Another stretcher. Another body whose face was covered. Blood leaking through the sheet.

  A woman covered in blood gripped the side of the stretcher, reaching up for its end, pulling the sheet, and cradling the head of a young man.

  “Son.” She wept, her arms around him, her words, her whole body suffering: “My hero, my son, my sweet child.”

  Someone’s cry echoing now from the walls of the church. “No. Please, God, no. Not . . .”

  Behind the woman the song was rising. Broken and off-key and splintered by sobs.

  “And grace will lead me home.”

  Another stretcher. Another body not moving.

  “A child,” somebody called from the edge of the crowd. “There was a child in that Bible study tonight. I know for a fact . . .”

  Daniel and Elijah linked arms, Scudder on one side and Kate on the other, the four of them leaning in hard.

  Kate stared at the blood soaking the sheet of the stretcher that had just passed and felt her knees begin to give way. The swirl of the red and blue lights. The scream of the sirens. The hymn rising up from the street. Daniel’s face, his whole body rigid. For Daniel’s sake and for Elijah’s and for little Gabe’s, Kate spread her feet, stiffened her arms, willed herself not to collapse.

  Whenever you’re feeling the sad coming on, I got your back.

  And now Sean Mulligan’s face behind a medic. Mulligan moving this way. Mulligan, tears streaming down both of his cheeks, his hands not swatting them away now, not bothering anymore.

  Mulligan weeping.

  Mulligan carrying something. Someone.

  A boy.

  Daniel leapt forward. Hale raised an arm to hold him behind the yellow police tape, but then pulled the arm back, waving Dan on. Roughly, Hale drew the back of his hand over the hard square of his face, wet and pinched with what he had seen—and even more he had not.

  A boy lay limp, lifeless in Mulligan’s arms. Head dropped back. Eyes closed.

  Gabe. Unmoving.

  Another siren’s wail filled the dark now. Another ambulance screeched to the corner of Calhoun and careened toward them.

  In the blue-and-red scrabble of light, EMTs raced toward the little body of Gabe.

  And then silence.

  While the sirens howled on.

  Daniel reached for his boy, the name on his lips a shattering moan. “Gabe.”

  Scudder fell to his knees, tears tumbling over his rough jaw.

  Sodden black curls fell back from the child’s face, his lashes long and lush, his skin the same cinnamon-stick color as his daddy’s. A beautiful child.

  A child who was not breathing at all.

  “He’s . . . ,” Mulligan managed, choking.

  Gabe opened his eyes. Reached one hand out for his daddy, who clasped the boy in both arms, Daniel’s own back braced over him like a shield.

  “Okay,” Mulligan finished. “He’s okay. Found him passed out behind the door of the room where . . .” He swallowed hard, tears coursing. “Jesus, the hell inside that room.”

  Gabe was trying to lift his head now, Daniel gripping him close, Elijah holding Gabe’s leg like he might never let go.

  “They did,” the boy murmured. “Just like he said.”

  Daniel pressed his cheek hard alongside his son’s. “Who did, big guy? Who?”

  A medic staggered out through the door, his hands and his pants covered in blood. Another str
etcher behind him. Another face covered.

  Gabe’s head fell back again, black curls on his daddy’s arm, the blood draining again from the boy’s face, his lips only just forming a handful of sounds before his eyes closed again: “They welcomed a stranger right in.”

  Chapter 45

  1822

  Clutching a black valise, the gentleman stepped to the threshold of the Planter’s Hotel. As Emily watched, he lifted his face to the sky, only moments ago a deep, dazzling cerulean, now turning a deep navy as storm clouds gathered in the west.

  She did not stare at the man at the threshold. But she could tell by watching the faces of passersby what they saw in looking at him.

  Immaculately groomed, he wore a morning coat that cut away at the waist, and his black hair was oiled into curls that fell over his forehead. A bandage covered his neck and one side of his face. His right hand, too, was thickly bandaged to the wrist. Small boned for a man, there was something almost feminine about him, about the way he swung the valise, bent toward it as if to peer inside, then changed his mind and swung it again, all in one elegant movement.

  “Spaniard, that one is,” said the proprietor of the Planter’s Hotel, following the gaze of a guest just checking in. “Don’t speak the language none. Touchy about having to have a private room way to the back of the place. Got hisself injured somehow—on the boat over, I reckon. Can’t hardly talk with the wound he got, and his hand’s bandaged so bad couldn’t hardly write his own name. Nothing but scribble. And you know them foreign names.”

  The guest brushed dust from the beaver skin of his top hat. “An unfortunate injury. Poor man.”

  The proprietor smirked. “Not too awful poor. Didn’t say a thing, not a whit, at the price for the best room. You know them Europe types. Got money to burn.”

  “Hmm,” said the guest, unimpressed. He turned to examine the Spaniard for himself. “If you ask me, he needs a better tailor.”

  The proprietor looked blankly back.

  “And,” the guest continued, “I’ve never much trusted the swarthier denizens of Europe. Some of the Spaniards, you know, are infidels.”