Under the Mercy Trees
Page 30
He thought of the sheets he lay on the night she died and felt a laugh hopping up his throat. “I don’t think so, Mama.”
“You were. You were at school. I wanted you at school, away from here.” She put down her sewing and gestured him over. “Come here, boy. Stop your aching.” He walked over, and she pulled his head down to her ear. She smelled of rose hips and clean laundry hung on a line. He sat down beside her on the ground and put his head in her lap. The other women, polite, averted their eyes while he cried.
41
Ivy
At the home place the morning after Leon’s funeral, the porch has caved in on itself. The porch roof hangs almost to the ground. The rotten corner post that supported it lies in the yard, light morning rain dampening the splintered wood. The house has given up, has crumpled to its knees like a cowboy dying slow in an Old West movie.
I am back again to clean it, this time to clean it out, to get the rest of Leon’s things before the whole house falls in. Eugenia is supposed to help me, but I don’t see her yet. Rain mists my face. I lift a cardboard box of garbage bags and cleaners from my car. The fingers of my yellow rubber gloves wave over its edge. I go around to the side door so the porch roof won’t collapse on my head. I enter the kitchen and leave the door open behind me for light, set my box on the kitchen table. I am glad this is the last cleaning, that I won’t have to come back here anymore. The house, usually so crowded with spirits, is empty and dark, and still no Leon. I wonder if he will ever come.
I carry plastic garbage bags to the room where Leon slept. On the way I catch sight of Shane’s back and legs disappearing around a corner. I call out, “Shane!” He ignores me.
In Leon’s room I find a closet full of brand-new dress shirts, still pinned and wrapped in store plastic.
Missouri, my redheaded great-grandmother, appears at the foot of Leon’s bed, her favorite age of twenty-one. She wears her pink dress.
“Save them shirts for Eugenia,” she says, a mean twinkle in her eye. She knows Eugenia gave Leon a new shirt every Christmas, hoping he would wear them to church.
“No, I’m not going to hurt her feelings.” I put them in a bag to carry to Goodwill.
Missouri lies back on the bed, her dress pleasingly tight around her slender rib cage. “You bore me to death.”
“That’s all right,” I say.
Shane never owned a dress shirt, except for the one I bought for his funeral. The shirt was white. The funeral home people buttoned the collar high on his neck to hide the long rope burn and bruises. Somehow they fixed his swollen face. Still, most people who came by to view his body were afraid to look down and stared instead at the photograph I’d laid on the coffin lid.
I didn’t see my son die, but I smelled it. I wasn’t supposed to know where the foster home was, but Hodge told me, and I drove there before I went to the morgue. A police car was still outside the house, blue lights circling in the darkness. I parked behind it and got out. The foster mother stood in the front porch doorway, talking to the cop, fear of blame on her thin face. I couldn’t hear her words, but her hands rolled over one another, listing all the reasons why it wasn’t her fault. As I got closer I could hear the cop murmuring, “Yes, ma’am,” over and over. I went up the steps and pushed right between them, and was inside before they could do anything. I broke yellow tape and walked up carpeted stairs to the second floor.
The smell of death is terrible, even when there is no blood. The stench of Shane’s last fear coated faded wallpaper. The rug stunk of all the things that are loosed when a body lets go. The policeman came up behind me and forced my arms behind my back, kicked my legs out from under me while the foster mother screamed. With my face pressed to carpet that was wet with my son’s waste, I wondered if Shane had known how a body betrays itself, would he have tied that last knot, stepped up on that chair, kicked it away with the white rubber toe of his beloved tennis shoes?
“What are you moping about?” Missouri asks me.
“Nothing.” I tie shut the plastic bag that holds Leon’s shirts, as Shane passes by the bedroom door once again and doesn’t come in.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Missouri hops off the bed and stamps a small, booted foot, blowing impatience from her nostrils. Red hair flames down her back, then turns to cinders, and she appears as her oldest self, the age she left the world, an age she hates.
“You!” she calls to Shane. I hear his footsteps pause out in the hall, but he doesn’t answer her.
In two strides Missouri rounds the doorframe and chases down the hall after him. I hear a struggle.
“Let loose of me!” Shane yells.
“I’ll learn you to ignore me.”
They come back into the room, Missouri dragging Shane by his ear. She shoves him toward me. “I’m tired of you pining for him and him slinking off.”
I hold my arms out, but Shane ducks and runs for the door. Missouri starts after him, but someone else blocks his way.
Leon stands in the doorway, Leon as he was when he was young, when there was still some fun in his face along with the meanness. His hair is dark with Brylcreem, no strand out of place, and his black dress shoes are buffed to a high polish. Shane’s head barely comes up to his chest. Leon grabs Shane’s windbreaker at the back of the neck, almost lifting Shane up. He spins him around toward me, still holding on. And I get to see my son face-to-face for the first time since he died.
“Talk to your mama,” Leon says.
Shane squirms out of Leon’s clutch but doesn’t run.
Missouri, her work done, becomes young again. With a smile for Leon she prances out of the room, petticoat showing at the hem of her dress. If she had a hat she would toss it. Leon follows her, his step heavy down the short hall and out onto the porch.
I reach for Shane. I have had years to form the question in my mouth. “Was it me, son?” I quaver. “Was I the reason? Did I make you do it?” I hold onto his arm, feel nylon over hard bone, weep with the realness of it. I can’t get ahold of myself.
Shane looks at me. He is so close I can count the shaving nicks on his face that never had time to heal. He reaches up and touches my hair, tracing the gray among the brown, letting his fingers rest cool against my cheek. “It wasn’t you, Ma,” he says.
“Ivy!” Eugenia comes running. She finds me blubbering and speechless, holding onto air. My son has laid out his answer in a circle, a funeral wreath for me to treasure.
Outside, sun leans over the mountain, sucking rain back into the sky. On the porch, Leon whistles. Eugenia lifts her head. She takes my hand, and we listen as dog noises tear at the air. Excited whines, the scratch of toenails, the tickling sniff of warm noses searching for palm.
Acknowledgments
So many people encouraged me while I was writing this novel. I am profoundly grateful to the Flatiron Writers of Asheville, past and present, especially Genève Bacon, Toby Heaton, Diana Stoll, Maggie Marshall, and Jennifer Fawkes. My deep thanks to Jill McCorkle for her thoughtful feedback at Sewanee and to the other members of the 2008 McCorkle-Earley workshop, especially Sarah Crow and David McGlynn, who gave me a second read on their own time; to my other readers, Suzanne Newton, Lynda Gralla Mottershead, April Spencer, Bill and Julie Latham, Joanne Ryan, Craig and Cari Newton, Mark Mennone, David Snyder, and all the rest of you who read all or part of it and told me what you thought. My appreciation to Walter Cox for his memories of four-room school houses and phone service in rural North Carolina; Jay Latham for his descriptions of cars and college life in the 1950s; Margaret Errington and my other lawyer pals for their expertise on probate law; Deborah Steely for Helen Steiner Rice-A-Roni; the Outer Banks History Center; Jenny Cox and the Castelloe family for entertaining my child while I wrote; Tommy Hays for helping me get on with my next project; and UNC Asheville’s Greatest Smokies Writing Program for its valuable support of me and other western North Carolina writers. I am i
ndebted to my agent, Liv Blumer, and my editor, Gabe Robinson, for going to bat for the novel. In developing the character of Martin Owenby I found two books to be particularly helpful: Stonewall by Martin Duberman and Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories edited by Patrick Merla. Finally, and by no means least, I thank my parents: Carl Newton, who always assumed I could do anything, and Suzanne Newton, who showed me the discipline and joy of the writer’s life.
About the Author
HEATHER NEWTON’s short stories have appeared in Crucible; Encore magazine; Lonzie’s Fried Chicken; O, Georgia!; and Wellspring, among other publications. She lives with her family in Asheville, North Carolina, where she is an attorney and mediator. This is her first novel.
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Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by Scan Justice/Getty Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
UNDER THE MERCY TREES. Copyright © 2011 by Heather Newton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition January 2011 ISBN: 9780062042392
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