Under the Mercy Trees

by Heather Newton

  Martin looked wary. “I was hoping you’d forget about that.”

  “No such luck.”

  “All right. Lay it on me.”

  She put her tea down. “In my truck are the semifinalists from our high school short story contest. The winner gets twenty-five dollars and publication in the school newspaper, for which yours truly is the faculty adviser. You, my dear, are my final judge.” She smiled at him, daring him to say no.

  He cleared his throat. “How many stories?”

  “That’s the good news. Only fifteen, none longer than twelve pages. Enough to torture you but not kill you.”

  He nodded his head slowly. “I can do that.” He seemed to be trying to convince himself.

  “Thank you. All you have to do is pick the winner and two runners-up. And maybe write an encouraging comment or two on each one. You don’t have to do a detailed critique.”

  “When do you need them?”

  “A month from today.” She gave a deadline six weeks before the paper actually went to press, so she could find another judge if Martin didn’t come through.

  He raised his mug in a toast. “It shall be done.”

  The waitress brought their sandwiches. Martin slid out of the booth. “I need to use the restroom. Back in a minute.”

  Liza bit into her club sandwich and turned to watch the overhead television set that was closest. The noon news was on, text running across the bottom of the screen for the hearing impaired. The word “body” jumped out at her. She swallowed her food and got up, standing on tiptoe to turn up the volume. A local reporter described the spot where a hiker had found the body of a male, on state land where the lower Jefferson River fed into the creek that flowed through Solace Fork and the Owenby farm. The site was less than five miles from Martin’s family home place.

  Liza glanced toward the restrooms. Martin hadn’t come out. There was a pay phone between the men’s and women’s bathrooms. She headed for it, fishing in her pocketbook for change and her address book. She tried Hodge at home first, but no one answered. She called his office, and a dispatcher put her through.

  Hodge picked up on the first ring. “Hodge Goforth.”

  “Hodge, it’s Liza. The body on the news. Is it Leon?”

  “No, it isn’t. This fellow was younger, looks about forty, a homeless guy. I’ve been here all morning, trying to reach the Owenbys before the story hit. I’ve tracked down everybody but Martin.”

  “He’s with me. He hasn’t seen it yet.”

  “Thank you, Jesus. Tell him it’s not his brother. It’s a good thing we don’t get too many unidentified bodies turning up in this county. I don’t think I could take the stress.”

  Liza hung up and returned to the booth. Martin came out of the bathroom and walked toward her. He looked up at the television, where the reporter was still talking about the body. Before Martin could register what he was hearing, she said, “It’s not Leon, Martin. I just called Hodge. It’s not him.”

  Martin watched for a few more seconds, until the reporter signed off and the weatherman came on, then sat down. “That could have ruined a perfectly good lunch.” His words were flippant but his voice shook. She let him eat his sandwich so he wouldn’t have to talk.

  The hostess seated another couple at the booth behind them. The man got up and changed the channel to a NASCAR race. Liza and Martin finished eating. When the waitress brought the check, Martin handed her cash, waving off Liza’s offer to pay the tip. They put on their coats and waited for the waitress to return with change.

  “Did I tell you Ivy bought a monument for Shane’s grave?” he said.

  “Hodge mentioned it.”

  “They’re having a ceremony next week to install it.” He looked at Liza and sighed. “I hate going to things like that.”

  “I know you do, sweetie.” She searched through the candy hearts at the base of the candle holder and nudged a pink one across the table to him.

  He picked it up and read it. “ ‘Awesome.’ ”

  “Go to the installation,” she said. “Be awesome.”

  “Hubba-hubba,” he said.

  When the waitress came back, Martin left the tip, and he and Liza walked outside. She got the folder of short stories from her truck and handed it to him.

  “I suppose the punishment fits the crime,” he said.

  “Don’t think of it as punishment. Think of it as an opportunity.” She pulled her coat tighter around her. “Don’t let them down, Martin. My budding authors are very sensitive.”

  “I won’t.” He squinted against the glaring sun. “Hey, Liza. Thanks for calling Hodge like that.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He raised the folder of stories to his forehead in a salute and got in his truck. Liza climbed into her own truck and drove behind him to the parking lot entrance. Cars streamed past on the four-lane road in front of them. No one would let them out. She could hear the throb of Martin’s engine even with her windows closed. Black smoke from his tailpipe puffed around his one good brake light. When there was finally a gap, his truck leaped left into traffic, its wheels almost lifting off the ground, leaving her behind.

  27

  Ivy

  Today is the day Shane died. Every year on this day we put his picture in the paper. As my other two children’s faces age, Shane’s face in the photograph looks younger and younger. This year we’re adding a nice poem Trina wrote about him. I wish I could write my own poem that would tell more of his story. How sweet he was as a baby and as a big brother to the other two, teaching Steven to ride a bike and Trina to tie her shoes. How he loved me even when he was giving me lip. Then the drugs that he must have thought would make the pain go away, but all they did was weaken whatever it is that makes us fight to stay here.

  It would be hard to make all that rhyme.

  There’s another thing we’re doing this year. Thanks to money Leon gave me, Shane’s monument is finally paid for, and we can put it over his grave, instead of the little flat marker that’s been there up until now.

  Shane isn’t buried in the family plot, high on a hill back of the home place, where my brothers and sister sometimes picnic for Decoration Day. When he died Eugenia called to say she considered it a sin for Shane to have killed himself and I ought to bury him somewhere else. Of all the meanness Eugenia has flung at me with her skinny little arms over the years, that one stings the most. I don’t reckon she told the others she said that to me. I guess I could have told them and called for a vote, but Shane’s dying had pressed all the argument out of me. So I buried him in the funeral home graveyard, which is between the funeral home and a Methodist church. The church doesn’t have anything to do with the graveyard, but people driving by on the road don’t know that. It looks like a place that God thinks is all right, not just dirt full of sinners who don’t deserve a real resting place.

  We are installing the monument at noon, but I drive to the cemetery early. I pass through the gate and park along the road. When I slam my car door it echoes. It’s always quiet here. This graveyard has been here awhile, and the sidewalks that run in straight lines between the graves are cracked, some pushed up uneven where tree roots grow. I have never seen a ghost in this cemetery. Maybe they have too much else to do to stick around, or maybe the wind that blows through the shade trees, hot or cold depending on the time of year, wafts them away. Today the March wind is fierce and makes my nose run, even though the forsythia blooming yellow around the edges of the graveyard says it’s spring, and robins are fighting worms out of the ground. I walk to Shane’s grave. The monument people haven’t delivered his stone yet.

  Social Services had custody of Shane all those years, but when he died they said I could afford to bury him and handed him back to me. I rounded up pallbearers. Steven, Hodge Goforth, Leon, a teacher of Shane’s, Martin came home for it, and then there was a man the funeral ho
me lent for a fee. The coffin was a pretty cherry stain and heavy. I set a framed photograph of Shane on the lid. When he died I didn’t have a recent picture of him. The principal at the high school gave me his eleventh-grade school picture, the one stapled to his permanent record, for me to enlarge and frame. It’s the same photo we run in the paper every year.

  I thought I’d never get the funeral paid for, much less be able to buy a monument. With everything, including the little flat plaque to mark Shane’s place until we could get something better, the funeral cost me four thousand dollars. Four thousand dollars is hard to pay off at twenty dollars a week, with interest. Every Friday I went by the funeral home and made a payment, which meant that every Friday I had to remember Shane dying. It about wore me down. And that flat marker got me down, too. I wanted a real tombstone, so people wouldn’t forget where Shane was buried. Then, when I finally got the funeral paid for and went to see about a monument, the monument people told me I had to pay for the whole thing in full before they’d start on it. I wasn’t able to start paying on it at all until I got my disability money. Then I was back to paying a little bit every month.

  One evening last August I was leaving the monument company after making my payment, and Hodge rolled up beside me in his truck, with Leon in the passenger seat. It was hot, but Leon wore a flannel shirt under his overalls. The arm that stuck out his open window was buttoned at the wrist. He wouldn’t even roll his sleeves up.

  “Who died?” Hodge called through Leon’s window.

  I waved hello. “Nobody.”

  Hodge pulled over to the curb to talk. He was never in a hurry. I bent down on Leon’s side so I could see Hodge. Leon was quiet between us. It took a lot to make Leon talk.

  “Picking out your tombstone ahead of time?” Hodge said.

  “No. I’m paying on one for Shane.”

  Leon spoke. “He ain’t got a stone?” Leon hadn’t been out to see Shane’s grave since we put Shane in the ground.

  The leaning was hurting my back. I straightened up. “Just a flat marker. I have a nice monument picked out, but they won’t cut the letters until I pay for it.”

  Hodge said, “I reckon it’s like a birthday cake. Once one person’s name is on it, you can’t sell it to anybody else.”

  Leon’s mouth worked. He looked mad, but that was pretty normal. “How much you owe on the monument?”

  “Eight hundred ninety-five dollars,” I said. “I’ll get it paid off one day.”

  Hodge shifted his truck gears. “Well, I’m glad nobody died today. You worried me, Ivy, walking out of there. I thought somebody had passed without me knowing about it.”

  Leon didn’t say anything else. I told them good-bye and walked to my car. The next time I went to Leon’s to get his laundry, he handed me twelve hundred-dollar bills, some crisp and some that looked like they’d been wadded somewhere for a while.

  The day after Leon gave me the money, I went back to the monument company. The monument company is next to a hair cutting place. It’s small. Sample headstones sit in a little yard outside, behind bars and barbed wire, leaning different ways in shallow dirt and crabgrass. To the side of the building is a big pile of mistakes, leftover granite scraps with one side smooth and the other rough, some with one letter carved in them. It makes you wonder whose name they’d been trying to spell when the chisel slipped.

  I went inside. They had paneled off a little front office, but the thin wall didn’t keep out the noise of saws and sanders, or the granite dust. There were no ghosts here. If there had been, the dust would have made them visible even to other people. I breathed shallow so I wouldn’t choke.

  The owner’s wife, who ran the front office, knew me well by now. I knew exactly what I wanted. Granite that was so deep a gray it was almost black, with these words:

  SHANE ABSHER OWENBY

  JUNE 20, 1949–MARCH 2, 1966

  We will always remember,

  We will always be true.

  I plopped down my cash, proud to finally be able to place my order.

  “He’d a liked this stone,” the lady said, counting my money.

  “He was a good boy,” I said.

  “He had a good mama,” she said.

  * * *

  And here the headstone is. Three men from the monument company drive their truck through the cemetery gate. The older man driving sticks his head out and says to me, “Owenby?” I tell him yes and point to Shane’s plot. They park and unload the monument off the back of their truck onto a big dolly. It’s wrapped in a brown quilt.

  I’ve seen the stone, in the dusty dimness of the monument company’s workshop, but I can’t wait to see what it looks like in the sunshine. “Can you unwrap it?”

  The two younger men take the quilt off and work to position the stone on Shane’s grave. The monument is beautiful, more so because the grass around Shane’s grave has had so long to grow. The stone is wide and as high as my waist. Its polish throws the sun back to heaven.

  The driver hands me papers. I sign where he points and hand them back. Trina and Steven drive through the gate in Trina’s Corvette. Hodge and Martin are right behind them in Hodge’s pickup. They all get out and walk over to where I stand. The monument men step back so we can do our thing.

  “It’s nice.” Trina touches the stone, tracing the words I took from her poem.

  Martin stands back at first, like he doesn’t want to get too close, but then steps forward and rests a hand on the monument’s smooth top.

  Steven shifts from foot to foot. We give it a moment of silence. I breathe on my hands to warm them. The tips of Hodge’s ears turn pink. I look at Steven. He was supposed to say a little something, but I see now he won’t be able. He lays his palms on the tombstone, and the words he can’t say sink into the granite. I hope Shane can hear them.

  Hodge clears his throat, and I look over at him. “Hodge, could you say us a prayer?” I like Hodge’s praying because he knows better than to go on too long.

  “Surely.” He thinks a minute, then prays in one long string. “Lord, we know you have your arms wrapped around this family’s son, and, Lord, we pray that you will bless this family and heal the pain that they still feel, and, Lord, bless this hallowed spot and let this fine marker be a monument to your love and grace, in Jesus’s name we pray.”

  As Hodge finishes up I throw my own thank-you out to Leon, wherever he is, for the monument. I know the stone doesn’t really change anything, but it makes me feel better.

  “Amen,” Hodge says.

  Martin mutters another “Amen” as an echo.

  Trina and Steven move in front of the stone with their shoulders touching. Hodge goes and puts a hand on each of their backs. The smooth granite reflects their legs and the long blades of grass that blow at their feet.

  Martin comes over to me. His face shows more pain than Shane can account for. “What are you thinking about?” I ask him.

  “About all of them,” he says. “Shane, Leon. Mama.”

  He turns and searches my face, the way some people do when they know about me. They’re mostly sure I’m crazy, but there’s just the tiniest bit of wondering about the things I say I can see.

  “What happens to them, Ivy? Where do they go?”

  “Some don’t go anywhere,” I say.

  “What about Mama?”

  I take his arm and squeeze it hard, so he will believe what I say and never have to wonder again. “Mama is at rest, Martin. She’s in a better place.”

  The monument men move in closer. “You ready for us to install it, ma’am?” I tell them yes. Trina and Steven each take one of my arms, and we all walk back to our cars. We leave the men to sink Shane’s monument in cement, to make it permanent and real, a spot to mow around and take notice of, instead of mowing over.

  28

  Bertie

  Bertie took advantag
e of the first warm day in March to get out in the yard and coaxed James into getting out there with her. They’d about cleared all the rotten leaves from the front flower beds when Bobby and Cherise drove up. It wasn’t Sunday, and Bertie hadn’t made enough supper to feed them. James straightened up and leaned his rake against a bush. He’d lost weight since fall. His dungarees were too loose in the seat, and bony wrists showed between his shirt cuff and the top of his worn leather work gloves. It made Bertie think she needed to feed him better.

  Bobby got out of his truck and headed toward them. Cherise eased herself out of the passenger side, breathing hard. She had ballooned in the last month. Bertie remembered what it was like to be that pregnant and almost felt sorry for the girl.

  Bobby was carrying a paper. “We got something to show you.”

  James took off his gloves and took the paper Bobby handed him.

  “It’s a deed,” Bobby said. “We got it in the mail yesterday, from Leon. It must have got lost, just like that package Leon sent to Martin in New York.”

  Cherise waddled over to stand beside Bobby. Bobby had this big surprised smile pasted on his face. Bertie wondered if he’d practiced it in the mirror.

  “Where’s the envelope?” James handed the deed to Bertie to look at.

  “Cherise didn’t keep it,” Bobby said.

  “I threw it away when I opened it, before I realized what it was.” Cherise looked James straight in the eye when she said it. She’d had long years of practice at lying, but her eyes dropped when they got to Bertie.

  “Why would he mail it to you, instead of just handing it to you?” Bertie said.

  Bobby shrugged. “Maybe he knew he was going somewhere.”

  James tried to talk them out of the lie. “Bobby, if that deed is a fake and you try to claim it’s real, the sheriff is going to assume you had something to do with Leon’s disappearing.”