A Question of Mercy (11 page)

Papa B. told Adam that touching himself was not a bad thing, and that lots of boys did it. He suggested that Adam touch himself in the bathroom, so his mother wouldn't have to change the sheets
.

Adam did not know what came over him when he felt struck by beauty, wanting to ease the pangs with his own hand. He calmed himself on sleepless nights with his ritual of imagining a voluptuous face, or breast. When he made himself come, he thought he had experienced an exquisite thing, an unexpected pleasure
.

In Adam's mind, people talked about the word Love, as though he didn't know what that word meant. He could read the word Love, and he could say it, and he thought that maybe they were the ones who didn't understand what that word meant
.

When he rode bikes with John Beaner to the middle of town, Adam's chest heaved with pride beneath his thin jacket. He felt warmth settle on his shoulders and legs. He rode beside them until, at the park, the boys seemed to disappear into thin air. He rode home alone
.

When that policeman came, he wasn't mad, but Mama was mad and said he could've been sent to jail, and that he was lucky. Papa B. told him not to steal and gave him money. John Beaner stopped telling him dirty jokes or calling him Buddy
.

But in the drugstore, when Billy touched Jess's hand, a lonely shaft entered Adam's body. He understood something about how far his life could go—not loving, only sitting beside those who could love. When Jess smiled at Billy's touch, her eyes looked soft, and Adam pushed away from the counter-stool hurrying toward the door. Jess waved good-bye to Billy. When they got outside, Adam broke into a run. He wanted to run away, fast—to run and run. He wanted to run off the edge of the earth
.

— 13 —

J
ess sat down on the grassy roadside to drink water from a thermos Pug had packed for her, when a man in a yellow Packard stopped to ask if she needed a ride. He looked to be in his mid-forties, wore glasses and a slick suit.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm not going far.” She put her small suitcase in the back seat and kept the satchel with her as she climbed in front.

“Well, I can help you with a few miles.” The car smelled of tobacco. “Where you headed?” he asked.

“Lula, Alabama,” Jess said.

“That's more than a few miles. I thought you said you weren't going far.” As they drove away, she could smell alcohol on his breath. He was driving too fast.

“I have kinfolks to see before that,” she lied. She didn't want him to think she was alone. “That's just where I'm ending up. I thought that's what you meant.”

The man was smiling, but his smile looked crooked. He wore a white shirt with a bowtie. He had age spots and his skin looked gray. “You be careful who you let give you a ride.” He sounded like somebody's father. He said he had a job selling
Encyclopedia Britannica
, and expressed how worried he was about his wife, who wouldn't go out of the house anymore. “Not even to the grocery store,” he said.

Jess pulled her satchel onto her knees and offered sympathy about the wife. But, as she talked, her voice stuttered. They rode for about thirty minutes before he suggested they stop somewhere, get a bite to eat. “No, I'm fine,” she said.

“You're fine.” The man's voice, in this moment, changed. “I wonder.” Jess looked at him.

“I'm just teasing,” he said. “I thought you might be hungry.”

“I guess I am,” she said, changing her mind. She should get out.

“We have about twenty more miles before we'll find a place.” Jess was thinking how she might get out before those twenty miles, when she felt his
hand on her knee. She jumped. “You know what I re-ally think?” He pushed breath through his nose. “I think you're a girl who's running away, and I'm wondering just how wild you are.” He rubbed her leg.

Jess pulled away, leaning against the door. “What're you doing?”

He had not stopped grinning, and drove the car, now, with one hand, his other hand on Jess's thigh. They swerved from one side of the road to the other. “You don't want to fall out,” he said, then jerked the satchel off her lap, and threw it into the back seat. He touched between her legs. The car moved into the other lane; he pulled it back. He was grabbing her hard. He was stronger than he looked. She could smell his breath.

“Listen,” Jess said, trying to seem calm. “I have some whiskey in my suitcase. Want me to show you?” She was smiling. She sounded promising.

The man turned onto the shoulder of the road to a full stop, but he did not let her get out. He continued to rub her leg. Jess stayed very still, not looking at him. His hand kept kneading her thigh. He leaned to kiss her hair, and she reached for the door handle.

“No you don't,” he said. “I'll get it.”

Jess couldn't breathe, but didn't want to seem hurried or frightened. “Wait, I know just where …” She pushed down the handle and the car door opened. Jess opened the back door, grabbed the suitcase and hooked the satchel onto her arm, running toward the trees. She ran blindly, stumbling, but not falling. The man got out, cursing. He said some word she had never heard before. He started to chase her, but a pickup truck was coming from the other direction. He yelled again. Another curse. Then Jess could hear gravel banging the undercarriage of his car as he slid onto the road and sped away. She saw him give a brief wave to the person in the truck.

As she entered the woods a soft summer rain began to fall. She thought of what could have happened and kept running. Her heart had been racing since she pulled her things from the back seat. She couldn't stop crying—still feeling the man's hand on her thigh and smelling his breath in her hair. The rain on her face felt good, but the sky had turned gray, and a dark archipelago of clouds coming toward her meant that she needed to look for shelter.

Jess wouldn't ride in a car again, except with a woman. She couldn't trust the world around her or believe in the goodness of people. She thought of Mr. Brennan and the boardinghouse. She thought how good it would be to eat a dinner prepared and hot, or get into bed with clean sheets, or have the luxury of a glass of water on the bedside table.

Adam had believed that people were basically good; but he also believed he could touch the sky, or ride the rivers, and eat the ocean like it was a cookie. She pressed her lips together. The thought of what Adam believed kept Jess going.

— 14 —

B
y the time the school year ended, Edward had decided that Jess could spend her last two years of high school at Mt. Chesnee School for Girls, near Asheville. She would leave in the fall.

“Your mother wanted that for you,” Edward said. Jess liked the idea of breaking away from this new configuration of family, but she would miss her father and she dreaded the thought of maybe running into Marie Coggins at Mt. Chesnee. Betty would have graduated by now.

Clementine objected to the idea. She thought Jess's departure would be too difficult for Adam. “I don't see why she has to go
this
year. Are you sending her away because of Adam?”

“This is where her mother wanted her to go to school,” Edward said. “Don't make it into something big.”

“But Adam is going to be even more unmanageable,” she said. “He can't even play next door anymore. Nobody understands him.”

Mr. MacDougal, next door, had been the most recent person to complain about Adam—even though MacDougal and Edward were friends. Their friendship had formed around a common interest in World War II Generals. They talked endlessly about Omar Bradley, “Hap” Arnold, McArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton. They could name every battle as well as the theaters of war in which these men fought. They spent many congenial hours together.

So when MacDougal came one afternoon to talk about Adam, he had waited as long as he could. He knocked on the back door and walked into the kitchen as he always did; but this time he told Edward and Clementine that Adam should not come into their yard to play with Emily anymore. “It looks strange,” he said. “I mean, Adam being so big.”

“What has he done?” Edward asked.

“Nothing. Not really.” MacDougal did not sit down. “But I hear stories. I'm sorry about this. I just can't take a chance.”

“You don't really believe …” Clementine began, but Edward held up one hand.

“We understand.”

“I thought Emily liked Adam,” Clementine said.

“She does.” MacDougal shook his head. “She does.” He reconsidered. “Maybe if Jess comes with him it would be all right.”

“Thank you,” Clementine said. “He really has no one else to be with.”

“I didn't want to say anything,” MacDougal said, in way of apology. “I want to do what's right.”

After MacDougal left, Clementine walked back and forth in the yard in her bare feet. When she got to the end of the yard, she propped her arms on the back fence, and stared down toward the French Broad River. She did not cry. She did not feel like crying anymore.

That evening Adam poked at his dinner then went out the back door to see Emily in her sandbox. Clementine told him that if he wanted to go over there, Jess had to go with him.

“Why?”

“That's Mr. MacDougal's rule from now on.”

Jess followed Adam out the back door and waved to MacDougal as they opened the gate to their yard. “Hello, Mr. MacDougal,” Jess called.

Adam halted when Mr. MacDougal stood up on the porch.

“You with him?” he called.

“Yes, sir.”

“Only if you're with him.”

Adam stopped at the sandbox and squatted to dig a gulley of sand with his thumb. Emily wore a green checked gingham dress and was about five years old. She poured water into the gulley and they laughed. Jess sat on the corner board and looked into the woods behind the house. Through the woods she could see a single light, and a drift of mist that formed in the trees. As she dreamed of the Mt. Chesnee School and a life without Adam, the whole world seemed frail and beautiful; but her heart had grown full of tenderness for Adam, and she tried to imagine how his life would be without her in the house.

“I don't want him over here unless you're here with him,” Mr. MacDougal called again across the yard. “I've talked to your parents about this.”

“I know,” Jess said. Tonight she would tell Adam not to come back, and tomorrow, after their final trip to the drug store, she would tell him that she was going away to school. He had not been told.

The next day Jess packed her school uniforms, but included some dresses and skirts to wear off-campus. “Do you like this?” She held up a new red
sweater. Adam liked anything red. He helped her fold clothes and asked if she was going on a trip.

“I am,” she said and took his hand.

“Maybe I can go with you.”

They walked to town, entering the drug store with the tinkle of a bell. Adam stared at the bell when he walked in. Sometimes at home he looked for a bell, wanting bell-sounds to announce him through every door.

Some boys on the baseball team called for Adam to come sit at their booth. Jess declined, but Adam was happy to be asked. Adam had served as bat boy for their team. These same boys, last spring, had trapped Adam in the locker room—closing him in a locker until he broke the door off its hinges. Adam never told what they had done, but Jess had heard about it at school. The boys were friendly to him now, and Adam still had the job of bringing bats onto the field, and carrying them off when practice was over. He brought cold water and catcher's mitts and gloves for all the players. He came early and left late, and the Coach had praised his reliability. “Best damn bat boy we've ever had,” the Coach told him. That night at supper, when Clementine asked about his day, his smile spread wide, food inside his mouth visible.

As Jess sat at the counter she told Billy that she wanted a strawberry ice cream for Adam and a chocolate cone for herself. “When're you leaving, Jess?”

“Shh-h-h.” She tilted her head toward Adam.

“You're lucky, Adam. You don't have to go away to school,” Billy said.

“Lucky,” Adam said. He was lifting out strawberries.

As they left for home Jess told him. “You know Adam, I
am
going to leave. I'm going to school somewhere else. That's why I have those new clothes, and that big trunk.”

“Can I go?” He leaned to pick up a stick and break it.

“No. I'm going to Mt. Chesnee School for Girls. It's just for girls.”

“I'll be real quiet,” he said. His face contorted into a frown. “Ask Papa B. can I go too.”

“Would you wear a dress?”

“No,” he laughed. “No!”

“Okay then.”

“Is it far?” he asked.

“Not too far.”

“So then you can come back home?”

“At Thanksgiving, and at Christmas.”

“Okay.”

“You know what I'm going to do when I'm gone?” she said.

“What?”

“I'm going to write letters to you.”

“I can't read.”

“Your mama will read them to you. And I'll draw pictures of where I am.”

“I can read pictures.”

“You can. And another thing, I'll call you on the telephone.”

Anything Jess told Adam proved to be okay, even this; but on the day she left, he would not come downstairs to say goodbye. Clementine tried to coax him outside, but he wouldn't leave his room; so Jess went upstairs and whispered something through the door. The door opened. She told him goodbye and said to remember about the letters, and that he could draw a picture and send it to her. That night he stayed up late drawing a picture of a horse and himself beside the horse. He told his mother to write beneath it:
Buckhead and Adam
.

But after a few days Adam began to ask when Jess was coming home. He asked over and over, and grew inconsolable. He went next door to play with Emily, but Mr. MacDougal called Clementine to come get him.