A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  “Yes,” she said. “His words. I remember.”

  “Heyward convinced himself not only that there was a child out there somewhere that was your momma’s and some other man’s but also that Sarah Grace had been stepping out with other men even since they’d been married—which was nothing but the fear in his own mind eating holes in itself. Sarah Grace and Heyward didn’t just split—they exploded, him holding on to a cyclone of rage. You got to keep hate stirring around to keep it that full of storm. Heyward, he stirred it well.”

  “The rumors about the baby she’d left in the . . . that she’d had during college . . . you heard them, too?”

  “They made their way to us, Chloe and me, after a while. It was Chloe who heard them first. It was Chloe who knew we had to find out—and me who wanted to hide, pretend there wasn’t a problem. Pretend I’d not had a past that needed a present.”

  Kate waited.

  “I never knew there’d been a baby born to her until then. Been in foster care by that time for maybe three years. Slow to walk. Slow to talk. Biracial. Hadn’t been adopted. Records said—based just on the anonymous call from a pay phone—that the momma was a girl who’d run away scared but was never tracked down and the father was dead.”

  “But the father wasn’t.”

  “No. He was not. Just in the dark that he was the father. And then the rumors found their way back to him, and him hoping the past would stay past. But the past never does, Kate.”

  She turned to face him. “So Daniel’s real mother was . . .”

  The judge’s hand came up. “Daniel’s real momma was Chloe, as sure as that woman breathed. That’s how adoption works, Kate—a child gets born in your heart, and every ounce of your bone and your flesh and your soul become part of that child from then on.”

  Kate nodded. She could not speak.

  “But he was no blood relation to her, if that’s what you mean. Lord, Chloe loved that boy something ferocious. Wrapped him in love that never let go—not even now that she’s gone. Still hadn’t let go.” His eyes filled. “In that woman’s last week of life on this earth, hospice already called in, she got worried about me, made me plan a party with her she said we’d hold down in Waterfront Park. Made me write up a long list of food we would serve, music we’d play. You know what that woman’s last words were? She asked would I like to dance.”

  Impulsively, Kate took his hand, the judge’s skin surprisingly calloused, as if he’d hoed as many gardens as he had turned pages of legal briefs. Dropping his hand after a moment, Kate stepped out of her sandals, the crushed shell at the base of the bridge rough between her toes.

  The two of them stood perfectly still as the walkers from the bridge strolled behind them. Stood as the breeze off the harbor cooled. As the shadows from the live oaks inched longer.

  “So”—Kate formed the words slowly—“Sarah Grace’s sadness, the way she always seemed so shattered inside . . .”

  He nodded. “I contacted her once, just once, to let her know we were adopting Daniel. We met back behind the house she and your daddy had rented. I let her know Daniel would be safe now. And loved to the ends of the earth.”

  Kate couldn’t form the question she needed to ask, but she knew by his face he’d heard it there in the silence that lay between them.

  He shook his head. “I never heard from her directly again after that night. So we let her alone, Chloe and me. Chloe’d tried to make contact before, even after they married—which was perhaps why our number was written on the art-exhibit booklet. But your momma kept her distance.”

  “But that one time, you talked?”

  “Years later, I heard how Heyward saw us that night, Sarah Grace and me talking at the back of the lot under the oaks. The both of us crying. Her knowing she’d have to see Dan now from a distance every time we passed her in town—Dan in Chloe’s arms, Dan on my shoulders. She knew how hard it would be—your momma heart-gutted and grateful at the same time.”

  “My father saw you and her that night?”

  “Part of his thinking he’d caught Sarah Grace in her whoring around. She was wearing”—his eyes dropped to the side of Kate’s head—“the earrings you’re wearing now. He’d seen her wear them a good deal—but Heyward’d never realized they’d come from me. Until that night. He guessed at where they’d come from, and she let him know he was right.”

  “From you.” Kate’s right hand went to an earring. “These came from you?”

  He nodded.

  She could feel the edges of the birds’ metal wings, sharp and uneven, and pressed them into the pad of her thumb—the sting of hurt strangely welcome just now.

  “There was a scene that night—her coming from talking with me, which he’d seen. Her having been crying. And wearing those—which, for Sarah Grace, was her hanging on to the baby she’d lost, but for Heyward, looked like her hanging on to me. The scene was a bad one. Went from shots of the harsh and hurtful to carpet bombing. That’s when she took you and walked out.”

  The Spanish moss swayed again in a slow, sluggish breeze. “My mother’s bouts of depression. Her drinking. Her hanging on to me sometimes like she was afraid for me to walk one room away.”

  “Your momma had a soft heart. Sometimes the people with the softest ones can’t quit beating themselves for any hurt they’ve caused somebody else. Keep things churned up like that, there’s no place forgiveness can take a deep root.”

  Pacem, Kate had heard her mother whisper after a Mass—like a question. A longing for what she could not quite reach.

  “Judge Russell, you and my father—you didn’t see each other again?”

  “I went to him once. Tried to convince him that Sarah Grace had been young and scared and alone when she’d made some mistakes. That she’d always been faithful to him in their marriage. That Sarah Grace’s claiming you and she wanted nothing to do with him ever again came just out of pride and maybe revenge. That he had no business washing his hands of his family like that.”

  He shook his head. “I was trying to do a good thing, Kate. But I was still young myself—and self-righteous by then—and brash. I was a black man in law school and a man he suspected had been with his wife. When I assured Heyward Drayton of God’s forgiveness for his hard-hearted, bigoted, jackassed arrogance”—he shot Kate a smile, rueful and slow—“it did not go well.”

  “So your arguments with Percival Botts. That had to do with my parents?”

  “With your mother’s fervent insistence that Daniel’s biological parentage not be revealed. That Dan not ever know her name—not one thing about her.”

  “So you and Botts?”

  “Percy and I have crossed paths a few times in the legal arena, my being a judge and his being an attorney, but we’d managed to remain fairly civil—until your momma’s death. When I heard the news, I thought I’d give it a few months of mourning and then see if Dan wanted to know about his birth momma. I knew it wouldn’t change his feelings for the momma who raised him. But I didn’t want him contacting you up in New England while your grief was still fresh—and you getting blindsided with too much at once. That was my thinking, at least—how to be kindest to her memory and both of you.”

  He paused to let her speak.

  “Please, go on” was all she could manage.

  “When I’d heard Heyward Drayton’s daughter had shown up in town, the same week Botts came to me about something he had for Dan, that’s when he and I disagreed about how the truth ought to be handled. Ole Botts, in his own kind of grief over the death of your momma—I see that now—couldn’t let go of having made her a promise to never, ever tell about her first child. Then when the ring came to light—”

  “The ring. I’d forgotten about it.”

  “Sarah Grace sent a letter to Botts some years ago letting him know where she’d stored her diamond engagement ring, the only significant asset she had, and that after her death, it was to go”—his voice dropped here, softened—“to her son. The ring’s value, at lea
st. But he wasn’t to know where it came from. Drove down herself last winter and took it out of the bank—like she knew somehow she didn’t have long.”

  He watched a pelican dive far out in the harbor. “After she passed, Botts started in, trying to figure out a way to deliver the value of the ring to Daniel while still keeping his promise to Sarah Grace. I’d let Botts know this was a foolish consistency. That it was time for light to shine in the darkness of too-long-kept secrets. Truth is, though, when you walked into Emanuel that evening”—he winced at the reminder of the church—“it turned out I didn’t know quite how to get started myself with the full airing out of so many years of quiet and covering up. All I knew was it had to get done—somehow.”

  “So,” Kate said as she traced the letters SARAH GRACE in the sand with one toe, “Daniel knows that there was another mother besides the one who raised him?”

  “He’s known there was some other good and giving woman behind his getting born—just not who it was.”

  Mind reeling, Kate traced a picture of two stick figures in the sand with her toe: a ponytailed girl on a bicycle with a taller boy running just behind her. “You know, as a kid I always envied the girls with an older . . .” She paused there to focus on forming the word. “Brother.” Her eyes widened at the sound she’d just made, and a smile spilled slowly over her face—her eyes wide and surprised at the smile’s coming. “Brother.”

  “I’m sorry you had to grow up without that, Kate.”

  Underneath the stick-figure children, Kate wrote the words KATE and DAN in block letters with her toe. “But here’s the thing: if I could have picked all the things I’d want in a brother, Dan Russell would be that guy.” She looked up at the judge, both of them brushing at tears. “Thank you to you and Chloe for making him that.”

  “And he has a sister. Such a fine one. Sarah Grace may not have planned it this way.” He waited until she met his eye. “But she gave Daniel and Gabriel Ray a great gift in you.”

  Together, they watched the river and the harbor beyond sink into black.

  “My nephew,” Kate exclaimed, suddenly laughing through her tears. “I’ve never said that before. My brother. My nephew. My family. Gabe was my very first friend in this town, you know. With my mother’s curls and my mother’s wide forehead and big eyes. I couldn’t see what was right in front of my face.” She tipped back her face to the sky, her hands clasped together behind her head.

  Kate pictured the notes scrawled in the margin of her mother’s history book:

  But Tom Russell

  SURVIVED

  “Judge, did my mother know your family’s verbal history—about possibly being descended from Tom Russell?”

  “She was enthralled by it, yes.”

  Then the last portion of Emily’s journal can be trusted, and Dinah’s child was Tom Russell’s, and if the Russells are descended from that little boy . . .

  “In a way, then,” Kate said aloud, “Tom Russell did survive the hangings, didn’t he? In you. And Daniel. And Gabe. My mother may have hoped it was the blacksmith who somehow escaped, or maybe she guessed he had a child, but either way her theory turned out to be right: Tom Russell survived.”

  Judge Russell nodded.

  In the sand, Kate drew a question mark with her toe. Then struck it through.

  Daniel and the judge and Gabe and Scudder were in the shop later that day when Kate came in with red but smiling eyes. Daniel, whom the judge had told just a few hours before, greeted her with a hug that nearly crushed her.

  “But Gabe doesn’t know yet,” he said in her ear. “Scudder took him out for ice cream while my dad and I talked so you could be here when he’s told.”

  Gabe listened to a shortened version of the judge’s story with ever-widening eyes, then flew at Kate so hard it nearly knocked her to the floor. He did not speak but buried his face in her neck, his arms locked around her shoulders.

  And no one tried to make him let go.

  Scudder sat quietly along one wall of the shop and looked from one to the other of them as their drama played out.

  Finally, Daniel returned to his worktable, an iron wing spread across its width.

  Kate strained to see what he was doing, but he waved her back. “Strictly top secret. Just something I wanted to do—because of what happened here.”

  “We are,” said the judge, pausing to choose his word, “healing.”

  “We are mad as hell,” Daniel returned hotly. “Homegrown terrorism, that’s what it was.”

  His father paused. Then nodded. And nobody argued.

  Daniel swung a hammer down onto the iron wing. Then looked up, his voice softening as his gaze settled on his son. “And yeah, we’re healing, too.” He set down his hammer. “Only for some of us, maybe forgiveness is more a journey than a moment in time. Me, I won’t be getting there fast.”

  Kate found herself studying the far wall of the gallery, a new item hanging there between raku mirrors: a hand-drawn sketch of the Battery, the long-armed live oaks and the mansions and canons and carriage. Around the sketch was a carved cypress frame with ceramic-tile accents. “That can’t be what I think it is. Is it?”

  Daniel did not even glance toward the wall. “Yep. You left it here—which I think the good judge would tell us makes it legally this gallery’s to sell on your behalf.”

  Elijah gave an amused nod.

  “Your work’s good, Kate. Wouldn’t let it hang in Cypress & Fire if it weren’t.” One arm swept toward the others in the shop. “All these folks will testify to my being particular.”

  “You know that’s right,” said the judge.

  “But it’s just a sketch.”

  “Of Charleston. Which tourists can’t get enough of. Sketch me more scenes, or better still, paint me some views of the city, the swamps, the Isle of Palms, and I’ll have them sold by the end of the week, if you’ll give your permission.”

  Kate dipped her chin to rest on the top of Gabe’s head. “I was actually going to ask you today: If I stayed here in Charleston to write my dissertation, would you let me know if you need extra part-time help on the gallery floor? I could try and work on a good Low Country accent if that’s required for your sales staff.”

  Gabe looked up at her, his eyes warm as ever but his mouth not quite managing a smile.

  “Consider yourself”—Dan raised his head from his table, eyes as warm and earnest as Gabe’s—“hired into the family business.”

  “You’ve seen for yourself,” Scudder offered, “he and Gabe need more help than they’ve got here, especially with the tour company doing well, too.”

  “I’ll be trying to find a part-time adjunct teaching position, too, but meanwhile—”

  Dan twisted something on his iron bird’s wing. “Meanwhile this place could use your help as much as you got time while you finish that degree. And, who knows, you could be a full-time working artist by then and using that diploma for shelf paper.”

  Kate grinned back at him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I got to tell you: that day Gabe got ash all over his chin trying to look like me, and you and he had your heads together, laughing, I had the strangest feeling of your looking alike—the curls in your eyes, both of you, and the wide forehead and the mouth. And I thought I’d breathed way too much glaze back in the kiln, thinking my boy favored some Yankee white chick.”

  “The day you let me see the slave badge.”

  “Yeah, that was the one. Because I figured, however this kind of thing happens, we’d all got to be family somehow.”

  He gave a playful push to her head. “It may be too late for me to steal your toys in the sandbox or make fun of your braces, but don’t be thinking you’re too old for me to pick on.” He shot a look at Scudder, who was watching from his wall. “Or chaperone your dates.”

  They all laughed.

  Then suddenly, impulsively, Daniel hugged Kate’s head to his chest. “I’m sorry I never got to know her. Sarah Grace.”

 
“Me too,” Kate whispered. “Me too.”

  In this grown man, his chiseled features softened now with emotion, his broad shoulders and tall, imposing frame curved forward as he bent to her, Kate could imagine the baby he must have been: the milk-chocolate skin and round cheeks, the long lashes and wide, trusting eyes. She imagined the wrenching loss: Sarah Grace seeing the baby, umbilical cord still attached, wrapped in the sheets of the one unbloodied bed, hearing him crying for her.

  Sarah Grace desperate and despairing and scared.

  And driving away.

  The frightened teenager, barely able to walk, stopping to call from a pay phone so that someone would find the baby in time. So he would be safe.

  But then never forgiving herself for leaving.

  Kate lifted her face to the sea breeze as she tried to absorb what she knew now—what her mother had never quit thinking about, never quit hiding. How she’d never quit hoping she could create some sort of unbroken thread for her son from his present—through her, broken link that she was—back two hundred years.

  Based on the Polaroid pictures and the descriptions of Sutpen and Rose and Judge Russell, Sarah Grace must have tried for a time to become someone new and different in those last college years—to paper over the past with old money and new friends. Maybe the birth of a second child and a failing marriage had brought it all back. Maybe the anesthetic of old money and new friends had worn off.

  Kate conjured her mother’s face, and it all made so much sense now: the nights she’d sat with her Scotch and her tears, she might’ve been wondering just who’d found him first, that baby left in the Wayside Inn. Had the police come right away? Or had a maid found him first, nearly choked by his own sobs? Had he been rushed to the hospital by some night manager disturbed by muffled cries from room number five, lumbering in with a metal ring full of keys—then finding a writhing form on the bed?

  Elijah Russell was explaining more now, and Kate, her mind reeling, was trying to listen: Sarah Grace had tried to track the baby down in the foster care system. She’d lain awake nights wondering how he was growing and if he had enough food. Enough care. Enough love. What if he was one of those kids in the system passed hand to hand, never finding a real home?