A Question of Mercy (12 page)

“Don't go near Emily,” Clementine kept telling Adam. “You can't do that anymore, Adam. You're too big.”

“She likes me. She calls me Buddy.”

“I know. But you can't go into that yard anymore, Adam.”

“Buddy. I'm Buddy.”

“You can't go into that yard, Buddy.” Clementine tried to convince him. “Her parents say no. And when parents say no that means no.”

“Maybe she comes to
my
yard.”

“Adam …”

“Buddy!”

“Buddy, her parents say no.”

“Say no.”

“Yes.” Clementine sighed.

“Say yes?”

“No.”

Even after three weeks Adam woke at night calling for Jess. Nothing comforted him. Edward took him to the zoo and bought new hubcaps for him, and Clementine prepared his favorite meals.

“I've never seen him like this.” Clementine said. “Not even when Calder left.”

Then one night, a fierce thunderstorm sent wind humming around the sills, and lightning haunted Adam's room. Adam yelled out. He would
not stop yelling until Clementine sat on his bed and talked his head into a good place. She could do that for him. She talked about leaves, rabbits, and streams. Little stories. Little songs. Then she told Adam to go back to sleep, tucked the sheet around his neck, and put his blue raggedy horse on top of the covers.

The next day Edward took Adam to choose a puppy from a litter at the pound. Adam chose a yellow dog, medium-sized and eager, with a long tail and wagging tongue. They named him “Hap,” after one of Edward's generals.

Clementine sat on the front steps and watched Adam in the yard racing Hap, trying to teach him to fetch a stick, or roll over. Adam demonstrated what Hap should do then fell down laughing when Hap didn't do it. Edward kept saying how good it was to hear him laugh again.

Adam

When Jess was not in her room and nighttime became too lonesome to sleep, Adam felt that his world had turned suddenly crooked and everything right was struggling against itself. Why did people go away? Everything Adam feared seemed to be taller than he was, and when that crooked world came in, what was real seemed dreamy and dreams seemed real. Sometimes he dreamed of animals coming in the door, big and small: a blue horse, one elephant, and two kitties with sticky feet. Adam wanted to pick up the dream kitties. He wanted to ride that horse back into his waking life. When he woke crying, his insides felt jumpy. At those times, an odd kind of splitting took place, tearing at his mind. When Papa B. gave him Hap he had to clean up when the dog peed. But at night, Hap slept in his room. Even on rainstorm nights, Adam pulled Hap's soft body onto the bed and, together, they hid under the covers. They lay huddled with eyes closed and slept inside a loose happiness
.

— 15 —

F
or Jess, moving closer to Alabama had turned into an ambition. She had called the boardinghouse once, but Mr. Brennan was not there. She had wanted to hear his voice. “He'll be back around suppertime,” the woman told her. “Who is this?”

“I'll call back,” Jess did not want to leave her name, and she did not want Mr. Brennan to call her home. Last night, she called again from a phone booth outside a diner. The phone rang four times before she heard a voice say, “William Brennan here.” Jess introduced herself.

“Jess,” he said. “Were you the one who called before? Miss Tutwiler said some girl called. Where are you?”

“I'm with a friend from school,” Jess said, “but I'll be leaving in a few days.” She told him she would travel there by train.

He sounded glad to hear from her. “I'll let Miss Tutwiler know that you'll be here. I've missed seeing you. And I've missed your mother,” he added. “Can I pick you up at the depot?”

Jess said she would call again and let him know her time of arrival. The idea of a finalized plan made her feel in control of her life, such as it was. She was a long way from Goshen, North Carolina.

Jess felt tired, but it was not the kind of tired she had ever felt before. The hope she had was like a tiny light seen from a long way off, though Lula was not a long way off now. Lula seemed within reach; still, her life in the woods was a challenge. She knew how to find a place to sleep each night, but, as the tyranny of dark came on, she kept a mental list of possibilities:

1. If the police find her, would she tell them everything?

2. What if she runs out of money?

3. Is jail worse than this?

4. She could go home or she could keep on until she reached William Brennan in Alabama.

5. She could starve to death in these woods.

She still had a few dollars left from her time with Pug and Ruby, and she sometimes had the company of dogs who joined her on the road; though, at a particular moment, they usually swung from the path—going back to where people cared for them. She waved them off, but liked their presence.

A station wagon with a mother and two young girls stopped to offer her a ride. She put her stuff in the back and imagined she might be driven all the way to Lula. She hoped they might take her to the front door of the boardinghouse.

The girls sat in the back seat. They dressed paper-dolls, wrapping small tags behind the cardboard figures, so that they could wear shorts or an evening dress. The girls smelled like candy.

“Where're you going?” the mother asked Jess.

“Lula, Alabama.”

“Well, I can take you part-way.” She smiled and seemed to want someone to talk to. “We're going down to LaGrange. My mother's house is down there.” The way the woman said it made Jess think that they might be leaving a bad situation.

“Well, that's nice.”

The woman told Jess about her husband, what he did and where they lived, but not his name.

“Are we divorced?” the oldest girl said.

“We're divorced,” the mother finally said, but she whispered it.

The girls talked about what they liked to do at their grandmother's house, and showed Jess more clothes for their dolls. They were well-behaved, except for one round of fighting over a blue ball gown.

“Do you have someone?” the mother asked.

“He's over in Korea,” Jess said. “We plan to get married when he gets back.”

When they stopped for lunch, Jess figured they had driven almost thirty miles. She saw a sign pointing to Lula, but the sign didn't say how many miles it was. Jess asked the waitress, who said Lula was about sixty miles west.

The girls ordered hot dogs and said it was their favorite food. Jess didn't order anything, so the mother shared some French fries and ordered an extra hot dog for her, apologizing that she couldn't take her to Lula.

After lunch, Jess took her suitcase and satchel from the car and thanked the woman. She sat on a bench outside the restaurant, wanting to read a letter from Sam before going on. She knew them all by heart now.

Jess
,

I can't even say what your letters mean to me over here. You asked me to tell you what's happening. Last night we went to a new position. Things were quiet until about 2 o'clock in the morning, then all Hell broke loose. “A” Battery had more than half their men wounded. Just before dawn, hundreds charged about 30 of us. We ran for it. My feet felt numb from the cold and I fell down. Six bullets hit just a few yards from me. So close and so loud! I watched a good buddy die—he had a stomach wound. I have never seen anything like that. My God. I wanted to kill everybody. I couldn't do anything. My whole mind is going deaf
.

We had a truck carrying the wounded and, before I knew it, it was dark and the truck was surrounded. They killed the driver. After an hour we took our position back, and I drove the truck to the hospital. I was told that I might get a purple heart, but the truth is I don't know how I'm still alive. I'm sending a picture of myself and two other guys to show you that I am
still
here
. The guy beside me, with his arm crooked around the Howitzer, is Billy Keifert. God-damn, only an hour ago, he was firing it! Billy was the best friend I ever had
.

I think about the time we spent together. I don't want to forget you. I don't want you to forget me. I hope I come back
.

Sam didn't even sign his name to this letter, as if he were somehow disappearing. She thought how he was no longer getting any letters from her and he must wonder why. If she wrote, she didn't know what she would tell him. She stood and began walking. She felt resigned to maybe walking the rest of the way to Lula.

APART

— 16 —

J
ess arrived at the Mt. Chesnee School for Girls with her trunk of new clothes and the hope for a very different life. Her roommates, Katy Winborn, from Tennessee, and Doris Dodson, from Alabama, became her best friends. Marie Coggins was a senior and, though she had spoken to Jess briefly, she seemed not to want anything to do with her.

Katy, Doris, and Jess took French class together and, for almost two weeks, had a crush on their teacher, Mr. Fruget, who was blond, big-shouldered, blue-eyed, and wore plaid madras shirts with a tie. Most of the girls in the dorm had fallen for him and, at night, they speculated about the women he went out with—sluts or ladies. But their obsession ended when they learned that he was married, with two kids.

On the night their fantasy about Mr. Fruget dissolved, five girls huddled in one room and their late night talk turned to family secrets. Katy Winborn admitted that her father was having an affair with his secretary. “That's why they sent me off to school,” she said. Another girl spoke of her mother's nights of drinking then passing out on the bedroom floor. “Until she went into a hospital, and now she can't drink at all. Not even one.” Jess said that her mother had died, and her father had remarried.

“How did she die?”

“She had leukemia,” Jess said. “She lived for six months and finally she was on so much medicine she didn't know who we were anymore.”

“She didn't recognize you? That's really sad.”

“She went to Mt. Chesnee when she was young. That's why I'm here. She used to tell me about it. She was valedictorian.”

“My mom was too,” Katy bragged.

“What
is
leukemia?” Doris asked.

“It's a cancer, but the medicine she took made her really sick. I think she saw ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Doris said.

“My dad said it was normal. The medicine was doing it. She had to take a lot for pain.”

Jess did not tell them how her father sat all night, just waiting for a moment when Daisy might recognize him. She did not say how her father kept saying, “I love you Daisy. I love you more than life itself.” He wanted her to respond, because whenever he said that in their Before-life, her mother had laughed—not in derision, but just knowing that he told the truth.

And Jess did not say how she went sometimes to the river, just for the company of water, for the easy sound of currents racing somewhere else. She liked to imagine on those nights that her mother would be carried like that, floating easy into a place where she would be waiting for Jess, and for her father. The night her mother died, Jess had gone to the river to stand at the place where a line of water pushed against the ground and made kissing noises against the riverbank.

“So when my dad married Clementine Finney,” Jess told the girls. “I knew it was because she never saw anything that wasn't real. He knew she would never slip away into that other-world.”

The next day some of the girls whispered about Jess's dead mother, saying they thought that she had gone crazy. But Katy and Doris remained loyal to their friend. Katy warned the girls that since Jess's mother was a ghost herself now, they'd be wise not to make fun of the spirit world. Doris said that haunting had been known to happen, and that she had read about a girl whose hair had turned to broom-straw overnight because she didn't believe.

“It could happen,” Doris said.

The very next day a fire truck answered a false alarm at the school, and Sam Rafferty, in full fireman's gear (large hat and various tools hanging from his belt) strode into Jess's life. Jess and Katy and Doris were between classes when the fire bell rang and, soon after, three firemen came running through the doors. One nearly knocked Jess down, and Sam Rafferty stopped to see if she was okay. He held her arm longer than necessary. The principal announced that the alarm was false and told everyone to return to class, but the young fireman lingered to see if Jess would speak to him. When she did, he made a joke about the alarm, asking if she had set it off. He teased her about setting off the alarm and Jess grew irritated.

“Don't say that,” she said. “Somebody might believe you.” She turned away, hurrying down the hall toward class, but she looked back at him and smiled.

When Sam Rafferty asked a teacher standing nearby who that girl was, the teacher said, “Did she do something wrong?”