A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  The proprietor blinked.

  “My good man,” said the guest, “infidels.”

  “Oh. Well, then.”

  “And I’d wager this man is one. Do you really want his sort staying in a respectable establishment?”

  The proprietor considered a moment, watching the Spaniard wave away the boy who scurried to try to help him with his valise. A rip at the top of the valise near the handle spoiled the look of the thing—and would let in the rain on a day like today if those clouds kept gaining ground.

  As if reading his mind, the guest sniffed. “One would think that a gentleman with that kind of money would have his bag repaired.”

  “Funny you saw that, too. Saw it first thing myself and tried to take it off his hands to send out and get fixed. Fellow wouldn’t hear of it. Acted like I’d offered to saw off his arm. Don’t much matter, though. He’s leaving today. On the Heron—fancier clipper than most is—headed up Boston way.” The proprietor shrugged. “And I tell you what, his money worked good here as any.”

  The guest sniffed a last time. “If financial reward is your only criterion for whom you allow to stay in your hotel, then so be it. You might want to notice, however, that young lady near the front entrance keeps glancing the Spaniard’s way. No doubt she’s as uneasy in the man’s presence as I. Infidels can have that effect, you know. When one chooses to welcome them in one’s door.”

  But the proprietor only squinted up at the sky, the clouds digging in over Charleston, pressing down, the sun gone slinking away. “Hell if there ain’t some kind of storm comin’.”

  Chapter 46

  2015

  Thunder rolled off in the distance, and Kate touched Gabe’s cheek, his face a mannequin’s lifeless stare since the shooting. As she leaned against Beecher, the big horse shifting in his harness traces, Gabe looked up once from his seat on the driver’s bench—then lowered his head again. He’d not spoken a word since his release from the hospital two days ago.

  From his daddy’s arms the night of the shooting, the medics had whisked him to Roper St. Francis to be checked over. Physically sound, they’d pronounced him. But suffering badly from trauma.

  I was only outside the church, and only there after it happened, Kate thought, and still my nightmares wake me up in the night, screaming and sweating and gasping for air. And I lie there for hours, unable to sleep. What must it be like to have been there when the horror erupted?

  They’d come here today to Calhoun Street to see what people from not just all over Charleston but all over the world had done and said and sent in response to a blind, festering hate. Kate turned to take in the towering banks of flowers and letters and signs and wreaths that mounted Emanuel’s base, and her eyes filled all over again. Coffee in one hand, Scudder swung himself up onto the buggy to sit beside Gabe, Daniel on the child’s opposite side. Gabe let Scudder take his hand but said nothing.

  Judge Russell, standing a few feet away, raised the newspaper he’d held tucked under one arm. Unfolding it to its front page, he read, voice catching, to the cluster gathered around on the sidewalk outside Mother Emanuel. “Here is what the New York Times had to say yesterday about the bond hearing Friday: ‘One by one, they looked to the screen in a corner of the courtroom on Friday, into the expressionless face of the young man charged with making them motherless, snuffing out the life of a promising son, taking away a loving wife for good, bringing a grandmother’s life to a horrific end. And they answered him with . . .’”

  The judge paused, blinking hard.

  “‘Forgiveness.’”

  Elijah Russell read on from the Times, behind him bank upon bank of flowers and balloons and American flags piled on the sidewalk up to the wall of the church: “‘It was as if the Bible study had never ended as one after another, victims’ family members offered lessons in forgiveness, testaments to a faith that is not compromised by violence or grief.’”

  Sliding from his seat, Gabe walked slowly down the banks of flowers and bent to run a finger across the petal of a pink rose. His small hand shook.

  Kate, setting down the spray of lilies—Sarah Grace’s favorite—she’d brought, stood close to the child and felt him lean into her. She leaned back against him and felt something ragged and raw inside sweep to still for the time being.

  He scanned the flood of flowers and signs and balloons.

  “Lots,” he said, barely audible. Only that. But he let Kate hug his shoulders.

  She walked with him to the block’s end and paused to read aloud to him notes from all over the world tucked among the flowers. Someone had propped up a poster board with the names and pictures of the nine victims.

  MRS. CYNTHIA GRAHAM HURD

  MRS. SUSIE JACKSON

  MRS. ETHEL LANCE

  REV. DEPAYNE VONTRESE MIDDLETON

  HON. REV. CLEMENTA PINCKNEY

  MR. TYWANZA SANDERS

  REV. DR. DANIEL SIMMONS, SR.

  REV. SHARONDA COLEMAN-SINGLETON

  MRS. MYRA SINGLETON THOMPSON

  Kate touched the corner of the first photograph, the librarian’s black bob framing a smile that was easy and warm as always. “See you tomorrow,” Kate whispered.

  Not listed were the three survivors who’d been in that room, but they were victims, too, Kate knew, having to live with those moments of horror forever: Felicia Sanders, Tywanza’s mother and the grandmother of the young girl she’d shielded under her own body, both of them pretending to be dead; her granddaughter; and Polly Sheppard, the woman the shooter had purposely left alive—to tell the world what happened, he’d said.

  And the world heard what happened, all right. But it was a story like nothing the shooter could have ever imagined.

  Because he knew about the history of this place—that’s why he’d picked it—but he did not understand it. He did not understand its long journey, unbroken through a vortex of hate. He did not understand its people’s refusing to return violence for violence.

  Kate ran a finger down the edge of the librarian’s picture.

  That shooter did not calculate on a love and a strength that could live on after gallows and floggings and flames and a barrage of hollow-tip bullets.

  He did not understand.

  At the top of the board were these words in purple:

  THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH . . .

  And at the bottom was written:

  I WILL FEAR NO EVIL.

  Kate stood beside Gabe as he brushed his finger over each picture, each name. He wiped his eyes with the inside of his wrist.

  In a tumble of roses, a wooden rectangle framed the image of a smiling older woman with a younger one, words hand printed across the top: I’ll miss you, Granny, and I’ll continue to make you proud. A massive easel with the words CHARLESTON UNITED sat propped against a cardboard support, both the easel and the cardboard crammed solid with signatures in red and black and blue and green: a Jackson Pollock, with the dribbles and swirls turning to letters as the viewer approached.

  “Gabe, you able to get any sleep last night?”

  He shook his head.

  Kate knelt by a large spray of yellow lilies and put both hands on his shoulders, the sweet, weighty scent of the flowers filling the hot summer evening.

  The pictures of the nine gazed out at the river of people passing by, kneeling, arms around one another. At the base of the board of photos, Kate pulled several photocopied pages from her backpack and propped the pages below the portraits of the nine.

  Daniel leaned forward to read the names there. “Peter Poyas. Ned Bennett. Rolla Bennett. Batteau Bennett. Denmark Vesey. Jesse Blackwood. Gullah Jack. Mingo Harth. Lot Forrester. Joe Jore. Julius Forrest. Tom Russell . . .” He looked up. “The names of the thirty-five men executed over the course of more than a month of hangings during the summer of 1822. Many of them members of this very church.”

  Kate nodded.

  None of them spoke for some time, the street hushed, full of shifting shadow
s and silence. The banks of flowers hemming Emanuel had grown again even in the past hour, their height up past the mourners’ waists now. People coming and coming, stopping to hug. Black arms, white arms twining around each other. Knees to the sidewalk. Tears falling unchecked onto the flowers and the American flags, onto the front page of the Post and Courier propped there. Its headline read,

  Hate Won’t Win

  And onto the poster board with a quote that Tywanza Sanders had posted on Instagram only moments before the Bible study began—and before he stepped in front of a bullet to block it from his aunt:

  “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

  —Jackie Robinson

  Kate turned back toward the church, its steeple bright, startling even in the waning sun. Up there was where her mother had sat for the picture so long ago, Sarah Grace wanting maybe to claim, at least for the snap of a shutter, some sort of connection. Maybe, too, to draw peace and strength from this place—the sorrow that it had survived, the courage that could not be hanged or beaten or burned.

  “Or shot down,” Kate added aloud, tears welling all over again. And the judge, watching her, nodded. As if somehow he knew what she meant. Or maybe she’d been thinking aloud.

  Still unspeaking, Gabe moved back to her side.

  “Gabe,” Kate began, “about what happened here.” But she found she had no words to make everything better or paint the world as a place of kindness and goodness and warmth.

  Instead, they both squeezed shut their eyes and did not reach for the crutch of words.

  Kate’s tears splattered on the child’s hand. Fiercely, she kissed the top of his curls. “And just so you know, we’re all right here when you need us. Right here.” She lifted his hand and pressed it hard to her face. “You lean on me if the sad’s coming for you, you hear?”

  Pacem, Kate heard her mother’s voice say and saw Sarah Grace’s face lifting as it did only during Mass, when the crush of life would loosen its grip for a time, in the moments when the peace the priests spoke of was something she could believe—until the next onslaught of regret.

  Runnels of tears coursed down Kate’s cheeks. Pacem, she heard.

  Just that.

  No assurance things would be fine.

  No guarantees.

  Just a word, set there in the midst of a storm, like a rock you could rest on.

  Holding hard to the small hand in hers, Kate knelt near the lilies, which smelled of sweetness and death and compassion. And cried.

  Gabe held his daddy’s hand as they stepped off the shuttle that had brought them to the foot of the Ravenel Bridge, which spanned the Cooper River from Charleston to Mount Pleasant, Scudder and Kate and Elijah Russell one step behind. From her silver Mercedes, double-parked, stepped Rose Pinckney, lifting a cupped hand to them. They slowed to let her catch up.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Kate called to her, “that you’d come after all. It being so hot still, even this late.”

  Rose arched one eyebrow. “The truly great thing about aging is how much credit one gets simply for showing up and not drooling onto one’s chin.”

  “You have to admit, Rose, there aren’t a lot of white heads in this crowd.”

  The arched eyebrow again.

  “Or silver,” Kate corrected herself.

  “The most important votes, dear, that one ever places—”

  “Are with one’s feet,” Daniel finished for her.

  He and Rose exchanged a small nod.

  Police cruisers sat at the bridge’s base, blue lights flashing. Gabe’s head swung from the view up ahead, a solid river of walkers, to thousands more in the opposite direction.

  “Lots,” he murmured.

  Exchanging glances with Kate, Daniel laid a hand on his son’s back. “That’s right, big guy. Lots.”

  Scudder spun through his Twitter feed on his phone. “They’re saying they were expecting about three thousand for tonight.”

  From behind them came a voice: “We were just discussing the number.”

  Officer Mulligan was climbing out of his squad car, Hale already in the midst of the crowd. “Up above fifteen, maybe twenty-five thousand by now, we think.” He fell into step beside them.

  Watching Gabe’s face, Kate read aloud the signs others held as they passed on foot and on bikes, some with strollers. Blinking big eyes up at her, Gabe nodded for her to go on, as if her reading those words out loud, if only for those few moments, kept a constant replay of horror at bay: “Bridge to peace. We stand united. Forgiveness is key to unity. #IAmAME. Hate will not win. #CharlestonStrong.” Kate paused.

  Without speaking, Gabe pointed to a sign a walker had raised high overhead.

  “Need me to read that aloud, too?” Kate linked an arm through his. “Love never fails.”

  At the apex of the bridge, the two rivers of people met, cheering, boats blaring beneath.

  Rose blinked at the racket, startling a couple of times when a driver pounded a horn directly beside her. She half lowered her lids at these drivers. But she did not correct them aloud.

  Nine moments of silence followed, the Low Country breeze across the Ravenel Bridge sultry.

  “This little light of mine,” a woman began singing, her voice bluesy and gravelly and perfect, “I’m gonna let it shine.”

  Kate had heard Bruce Springsteen sing this once in concert, with trumpets and keyboards and sax and guitar. But here, nothing but one raw, hurting human voice, the woman’s song rose over the river and soared.

  The crowd joined in, black arms over white shoulders, white arms through black, hands keeping a two-beat time.

  “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . . Every day. Every day. Every day.”

  Even Rose, stiff at the too-chummy bump of the crowd, allowed her hand to be raised overhead by the black cyclist in Lycra shorts and neon-yellow Under Armour standing next to her. Just once, Rose glanced sideways, wide-eyed, at Kate, as if to say, Well, would you look at me now.

  Gabe did not sing with them but pressed close in. His eyes ran up and down the arc of the bridge on both sides as the sun set, turning the Cooper River a rosy gray. His eyes darted as if scanning logarithms. He was calculating, estimating their number, those thousands on thousands of heads. He did not smile, but Kate felt him press into her side.

  “Lots,” she whispered.

  Without asking if he was tired, Scudder bent double, and Gabe crawled up on his back, laid a curly head on his shoulder. Daniel walked alongside. Rose Pinckney, hesitating a moment, fell into step. And when Daniel Russell offered his arm, she took it.

  Elijah Russell walked beside Kate as they descended the bridge, neither of them speaking at first.

  “I wonder, Kate,” he said at last, “if now might be the time. If you’re ready. There’s a story I’d like to tell you.”

  Kate listened to the tread of the thousands of walkers over the span of the bridge, let the drumming of their feet fill the silence awhile, the lights of their cell phones and flashlights pushing against the dark.

  “You knew my mother well, I think.” Now that she heard herself say it, there was no question mark in her voice.

  His eyes closed, then opened again. “That’s right.”

  “You knew her very well.”

  He turned to face her. “Sarah Grace was an unusual young woman. I remember she loved things in pairs that made no sense together at all.”

  “Diet Cokes in glass bottles, never in cans,” Kate offered, “with big old vats of fried okra.”

  He nodded. “At eighteen, Sarah Grace wasn’t much bigger around than the oar of a boat and could eat a feed bucket of fried okra all by herself without looking up.”

  Kate felt herself smile. “She loved the English poets, their quiet, their reverence for nature. But for music, she loved Motown. And she loved it loud.”

  “Cranked up to a tremor of the earth’s crust.”

  They both laughed then. Looked at each other. Then l
ooked away.

  “Sarah Grace,” he said, looking down at the Cooper River beneath them.

  “She had someone take a photo of her at Emanuel. Not long after Hugo.”

  He hesitated. Then nodded. “I wasn’t the one who took it. But I can guess what she might have been thinking about at the time.”

  The judge did not hurry to fill in the gap he’d left yawning wide open.

  “You should first know, Kate—at least, I owe it to others to say first—how much I loved my wife. Chloe and I were married for twenty-seven years. I adored her, and Lord only knows why, she loved and put up with me. I was faithful to her every day, in thought and in deed.”

  Her eyes on the crowd still flowing down from the bridge, Kate nodded for him to go on.

  “But when I was eighteen, I loved your momma. As much as eighteen can love. Understand now, I’m not making light of love at eighteen—not the intensity of it. But the true intimacy—how wide and how long and how deep. There’s a beauty, and there’s a strength, you know, that grows only in a long walk together in the same direction.”

  Afraid of what he might say next—and afraid he might stop speaking—Kate watched his face.

  “I say that not to diminish the excellent woman your momma was. But she and I never had that, the long walk. Forgive me: I felt I owed it to my Chloe to start out with that.”

  Kate reached for a strand of the Spanish moss that had blown onto the bridge railing and studied it between her fingers. “I guess it’s time I ask what happened. That spring of Sarah Grace’s freshman year that she disappeared.” She turned her face back to him. “Somehow, I think that involved you.”

  “I’ll need to take you back a little further in time,” he said. “So the weaving of family and family and Charleston itself begins to make a little more sense.”

  To Kate, the quiet tread of the crowd was becoming a roar in her head.

  They were nearing the base of the bridge, the night heavy with the scent of salt water and sea grass and pluff mud and crepe myrtle all rising to meet them. Kate’s hand went to her stomach, already wrung tight, and now with the churn of these smells, too heady, too thick, twisted in on itself.