everyman

by M. Shelly Conner

  “Mercy—” he began.

  “You ever think this ol’ well ever worked?” Mercy interrupted.

  James knew the stories of the well. Everyone did. He knew that one of those stories belonged to Mercy’s father, Hezekiah. He knew enough to remain silent, as silence had earned him this walk and Mercy’s companionship for an undisclosed amount of time.

  Mercy sighed. “I think it’s always been just what it is . . . a graveyard.” She turned and peered over the edge into its darkness. “But even graveyards got endings, don’t they?” Without waiting for a response, she continued, “I don’t think this . . . thing ever end.”

  James was confused as to what role he was playing in this discussion. Clearly, his input was unnecessary. He wondered why he was here. Why had Mercy specifically sought him out for reflections that seemed too personal to share with anyone? Before he could fully process the thought, the words tumbled from his mouth: “I could go down there.” He immediately wanted to recall the words. What was he saying? No one goes down there, not alive anyway. But Mercy’s eyes shone as she seemed to actually see James. He noticed that she was looking directly at him.

  Bolstered by this attention, James continued, “I’d do it for you, Mercy. I’d do anything for you.”

  She smiled and placed her hand against his cheek. “You’re sweet . . .”

  James felt the rebuttal but resolved to press on. Years of repressed feelings surged as he grabbed her hand and placed it on his bare chest. “You know I have loved you from the time we was little . . .”

  “Well, that’s just a crush, James . . .”

  “It’s not a crush, Mercy!” He paused, searching for an entrance into the place where she held things most dear. “I’ll do whatever it is you want. I’ll give you whatever you want. Just tell me what it is.”

  “I don’t know what it is, James.”

  His heart pounded beneath her palm still pressed to his chest. Mercy looked at her hand, brown like nutmeg against his pecan chest. The hairs bristled between her fingers, and she caressed the smooth skin, allowing her hand to trail downward to his stomach.

  James inhaled sharply but kept quiet and still as she continued to explore his torso and arms. Her gaze and touch were coordinated as she felt his biceps and shoulders. He watched her, fascinated by her exploration. Although he ached to touch her, his arms remained at his sides.

  Mercy gently pushed him onto his back and lay beside him with her ear to his chest, tapping out his heartbeat with her index finger.

  James wrapped an arm around her, and they lay in this way until his heart rate slowed considerably. He wanted to stay this way forever, feeling like Mercy belonged to him. As he watched the clouds drift lazily across the sky, he felt his trousers being unzipped. Every muscle immediately stiffened and his jaw clenched. She freed him from his pants, and he lay exposed to the warmth of the sun and intensity of her gaze.

  James was too surprised to be self-conscious or feel much of anything beyond arousal. Her hand was soft on him, and her eyes watched her handiwork. When his breathing intensified, she watched his face, correlating her actions to his responses. A smile played at the corner of her lips, and her own breathing increased. With her free hand she unbuttoned her dress, pausing her caresses just long enough to disrobe. She returned to his side and pressed against him, resuming her touch. Mercy grabbed his arm and placed it around her. James looked into her eyes, and she planted soft lips against his own. It was all the invitation he needed. He gently placed his weight atop her and allowed her to guide him inside her.

  They lay naked, with the breeze drying their sweat. James thought of how they would announce their courtship. Would Mercy want him to speak to Big C and Gertrude first? He propped himself against the well. “I been saving up a little. In ’bout another six months or so, I should have enough to make a real nice start for us . . .”

  “James . . .”

  “I don’t ’tend to be workin’ in my daddy’s funeral parlor all my life, Mercy. It’s a ’spectable profession, but . . .” James faltered looking at his hands. They were well manicured. He trimmed and cleaned them obsessively. They were smooth, free from calluses because he always wore gloves when working with them. Still, they were dead hands. Jealous of his family’s large home and the other comforts afforded by having the only funeral home in Ideal, that was the nickname given to him by his peers: Dead Hands. But when he was with Mercy, they felt alive.

  “I cain’t be wit you, James.”

  “I don’t understand. You jes—you jes did. I mean, you was jes wit me, Mercy,” he stammered.

  “I guess I’m still lookin’ for what it is I want,” she explained. “I jes don’t see it being this.”

  “But you got to give it another try. It ain’t ’posed to feel good the first time. Did I hurt you? I’m sorry.”

  “Nawl, James. You ain’t hurt me. It was . . . it was nice.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” He took her hand, but it felt limp in his. “This was yo’ first time, right?”

  “Don’t matter none, James. I guess I jes wanted to . . . not . . . feel something. I cain’t be wit you, and that’s all there is to it.” Mercy rose and placed his crumpled shirt in his lap. She slid into her dress and left him propped against the well.

  There is magic in love lost. Spirit in unrequited love binds souls. Had Mercy stayed, the story would have been different, as stories are when the what-ifs in life are explored. They mentally play themselves out to resolution. In James’s mind he could imagine courtship and marriage, but before children came, a fuzziness clouded things. It would not facilitate his imaginings. They violated its own reality, and so James was not allowed to “see” what could have been, because it was not a possibility in any realm. He was unaware, but this is exactly how Mercy saw her existence in his world, in the world as it was at the time. She simply could not see herself in any of the available roles.

  1972

  Twenty-two years later, James sat in his shed, hidden away with port wine and broken appliances, reflecting on Mercy’s desire to not feel. He still didn’t understand how she could not feel something—or anything—especially while she was physically feeling him move inside of her. This was, he knew, his prideful reason for pushing those thoughts back into the past.

  James was not fixated on Mercy. It had been first love, sometimes called puppy love—not to trivialize it. Nothing compares to it. It is the first, and as such, it is the only. No matter how brief, it remains a constant yardstick for its successors. First kisses establish kissing protocol. First highs are always chased and never recaptured. It’s never as good as the first time. That didn’t mean James didn’t love Geneva or wasn’t in love with her. It simply meant that he would never forget Mercy. It meant that she would creep into his thoughts throughout the years. Briefly taking him unawares during his courtship of Geneva, at uncomfortable moments on their honeymoon, and now, mostly in his shed as he tinkered with things that were not so much beyond repair as uninterested in it. Sometimes he could replace every part of a vacuum or clock and it would still refuse to operate, as if its essence had vacated.

  This process was a type of grieving. After the moving on. After the death of the relationship. Left with the lifelong mourning of living. Living with and without. James was not fixated because there was nothing in his dealings with Mercy to have been fixed. Dead hands could not fix dead things. The shed was a mausoleum of memories.

  When James heard farewells, he emerged from the shed and crossed the yard to the back door of the house. He entered the kitchen, where Geneva was placing meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and creamed peas on two plates.

  “She didn’t want to stay for dinner.” Geneva placed the plates at the small kitchen table. There were four chairs crammed around it, yet they rarely needed more than two of them. Although they had tried, they hadn’t been able to conceive children. James sat at the
table and waited for Geneva to join him. She sat across from him. “After all this time, how could you not even want to share space with her?”

  He lifted his eyes to meet hers. Geneva held his gaze unblinkingly. Of course she had known within five minutes of looking at the girl. Geneva had recognized the eyes as well. They were the same as the ones she had gazed into every night for the past twenty years. They were placed in a face that mirrored one that she had spent years dreaming about so long ago. The eyes that she had stared into belonged to lips that she had kissed until it had been disrupted by the pestering of a lover’s sibling, as is often the case. But her kiss bore added weight. It hadn’t been a smooch behind a house with a local boy. It had been a passionate lip embrace with another girl. With Mercy.

  Mercy and Geneva never discussed the “it” between them. Small town idioms made room for intimate relationships between girls. They were two peas in a pod, peanut butter and jelly, molasses and biscuits. It was perfectly acceptable for girls to walk hand in hand, play with each other’s hair, and whisper in each other’s ear. This behavior was expected and encouraged because the alternative boy-girl intimacies appeared far more dangerous by comparison. So Geneva and Mercy’s affections lived within the loopholes of social decorum—their public displays appeared no different from those of girls who pined for boys instead of each other.

  It had been so natural that they had to remind themselves it was wrong, to take caution against the excitement, to leash their souls and stifle their spirits, which lunged for each other every time they were near. Natural is what they told themselves in the confines of the wood shack. They took to each other like fish to water and calf to teat. They had been drawn to one another without exposure to anything that would have encouraged such behavior. It had been uncharted territory, yet they had responded to this land as if born to it, already fluent in its language and culture. The foreign land had been Geneva’s marriage to James. She, too, grieved.

  James said nothing at first. His shoulders slumped slightly, and his hand trembled as he sliced into the meatloaf with his fork. They sat in silence for a moment, each with their thoughts on Mercy. Each thinking of her lips, soft and moist. Her hair in plaits brushing against them. Her smile. Her laugh, so easy in spite of their illicit activities, as if she knew what they would only later come to realize: That nothing compares. That some things will always be unfixable, so enjoy them while they work. While they function. While no one is there to judge.

  James lowered his fork. “I ’spect you ain’t share your . . . closeness to Mercy either?”

  Geneva’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “Geneva, we been married nigh on twenty years. You think you the only one get to learn somethin’ in it?”

  Geneva gently slid her plate away. “It don’t do anybody any good to go speculating . . .”

  James waved her off. “If I talk to her . . . it’ll never be just about me. It’ll lead to you. To Big C.”

  “That poor man. My God, James . . . what we allowed happen to him.” Geneva shook her head.

  James slid her plate toward her. “Eat, baby. Just eat for now.”

  So Geneva ate dinner with her husband and thought of Mercy. Her fork slid a little slower in her mouth, depositing the meatloaf a little gentler. She chewed a little slower. Savored.

  And James did the same, allowing his tongue to encourage the food to the roof of his mouth and down his throat. He closed his eyes and felt every spice and every texture.

  And they ate dinner. And memories. And Mercy.

  Fifteen

  desiderata, or how to build a well

  Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,

  and remember what peace there may be in silence.

  —Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”

  Before Cornelius Gaines set off to find his mother, Luella. Before he returned as Big C and killed Hezekiah. Before he was accused of impregnating Mercy. There was the well. The dry well had been a miscarried attempt at prosperity for the Gaines family. It had the misfortune of conflicting with the interests of the Railroad. It had been conceived under the mistaken belief that all men were created equal even as its birth occurred by digging through remnants of those whose deaths proved otherwise. The land was cursed, but this is an oversimplification.

  The dry well tunneled through the space-time continuum of a multiply colonized land. Its primary facade consisted of an overlay of bone fragments from those later described as Native Americans. Water is life, and the purpose of the well was to bring it forth, but a well dug in death cannot produce life. Even before the Railroad sought to poison it to prevent its use by Cornelius’s grandfather, the elder Mr. Gaines, the dry well was cursed by consequence.

  The Gaines family worked hard to move from sharecropping to ownership. Hard work would have meant the same amount of nothingness to them as it did to their hardworking neighbors had not the elder Gaines set his sights on barren land. No one could make it yield any crop. No one white could make it yield any crop. The land had been overused and exhausted of its resources like many surrounding areas. Like all of its abused workers.

  They let him have it, amused by his temerity but unaware of his knowledge. In 1906 the Daughters of the Confederacy were erecting a statue in Tuskegee while one of Tuskegee Normal School’s premiere instructors was changing the understanding of agriculture. They called him the Peanut Man because George Washington Carver traveled the rural countryside advocating to Black farmers the planting of peanuts as a way of rejuvenating their land. Carver, a castrato, was born in slavery. Some later historians would describe his castration as cosmetic, a way to secure a privileged slave position. Carver himself told people that it was due to a childhood incident that he could not take a wife. Both are a posteriori retellings of the white physician—or perhaps veterinarian (it was chattel slavery)—that had taken in hand the prepubescent testicles of one of the greatest minds in science and sliced them off for the purpose of ensuring a more docile house slave. Carver could not desire women—white or otherwise. He could not reproduce his Blackness, or his gen(i)us.

  Carver’s renowned high-pitched voice, withered yet sharp, pleaded a case for the peanut. And they derided him—not for the voice but for the suggestion. No one could live on the peanut. So the man without testicles produced a multitude of products from nuts. He began to be taken a little more seriously, especially by the elder Gaines, who leveraged the unfair wages from sharecropping by saving the seeds of the harvest. Farmers couldn’t afford to waste seasons planting anything other than cash crops—cotton, tobacco, vegetables. Mr. Gaines planted the peanuts on the barren land, successfully wagering that no one would want it or the peanuts. By the time he purchased the land and built his family home, the soil was vibrant and waiting. Ida Mae was his beautiful wife, and Luella was his blossoming daughter. At a time when others cursed the birth of a daughter as trouble, Mr. Gaines secured the future of his with his own wealth. She would be courted by only the worthiest colored gentlemen.

  Luella showed up pregnant the day Mr. Gaines found out that the Railroad had been poisoning his well. He had survived poverty and sharecropping and servitude only to be bested by the Trojan horse of his daughter carrying the seed of a white railroad manager. Mr. Gaines saw it as a casualty of war between men. Even the race war was couched in the opposing narratives of men. He refused to hear his daughter’s pleas that she had fallen in love. But she could not have fallen in love. She could only have fallen down the well of illusion to think that consent could exist between a white man and a colored girl in 1909. And further, that, even if this were possible, her desire as a colored woman could matter to the economic interests of her father and a suitor. If her mother, Ida Mae, had worried about Luella’s interest in men, she was in utter despair over her daughter’s ignorance about them.

  When the rumors started about the parentage, the family kept silent. They lingered on Mr. Gaines, who counseled Ida
Mae as he carved details into the wooden crib, “The world always prepared to believe the worst of a Negro man. This won’t be my legacy.”

  Mr. Gaines was surprisingly calm during the pregnancy and the rumors. He walked with an air of superiority even as his neighbors jeered behind his steps referring to him as “Daddy Grand,” a bastardized version of granddaddy that hinted at incestuous impropriety.

  The baby’s birth brought the biological father and his hopes that maybe Luella and the child would be passable enough to journey to New Orleans where miscegenation was more flexible. But the child was born with the mark of Cain, and Mr. Gaines watched the man’s face carefully as the baby was brought to him and the blanket slowly removed. He watched the man nervously assure his daughter that he would secure passage for them all on the train in a few weeks. He watched the man falter when Luella insisted on giving the child his name. And when Luella called out, “Cornelius?” he watched the man pretend not to hear, as if she were talking to the child instead, and take his leave.

  Eve felt overwhelmed with the amount of information uncovered. She sat in her room, flipping through notes and family charts that she’d begun to sketch out from her conversations. Tired of looking at her own handwriting, she wandered around her lodging until she returned to the framed photographs on the staircase. She’d been so taken by the picture of Claudette when she first arrived that she had neglected to pay closer attention to the other photographs. In one, she could see the large form of Cornelius hovering in the background while a man and two women sat cloistered at a small table in the foreground. Glasses of various degrees of emptiness and half-pint bottles crammed its surface.