A Question of Mercy (26 page)

“Don't be mad at me,” she said. She put her arm around his waist. They walked slowly to the boardinghouse. No one was on the porch; but Jess could hear Will and Miss Tut talking in the kitchen. Sam opened the screen door, but before it slammed he lifted Jess into the air, “I went crazy without you.” He kissed her so hard she cried out; but did not pull back.

Miss Tut heard them and came into the hallway. Jess introduced him to Miss Tut and Will, and they asked if Sam needed a room. Neither Jess nor Sam answered.

“Probably not,” Will said.

Miss Tut looked surprised. “Well you don't think that …

“Stop it, Tut. Let them be. This young man's been in a war. He's older than all of us.” Will waved Jess and Sam away. “Go on, he said. I'll take care of this.” As they went upstairs Jess heard Will speak harshly to Miss Tut. “Leave it alone. They need to be together tonight. My God, Tut!”

“I bet you won't call her daddy about this,” she said. “You gonna tell him about this too?” Will didn't answer, but by then Sam was opening the door to Jess's room. Before it was closed, Jess saw Frank's door cracked slightly, and she knew he had seen them.

That night they made love uncertainly, awkwardly, but with an urgent need to know each other again. As they lay together in the dark, Sam rolled over to look at her. “I guess you know Clementine moved out of the house. Your dad made her leave when she formally accused you.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“It means you'll have a trial when you get back.”

“What did my dad tell you?”

“He told me Adam had drowned in the river and that you had run away.” Sam waited. “That's all he said.” A car turned its headlights toward the house and lit up their room; the shadows whisked across the wall and ceiling before fading away. Jess ran her hands over the sheet and lay silent.

“The day before Adam was going to Cadwell, he wanted to go to the river,” she said. “He'd been begging us not to send him away. He wanted to tell the river goodbye. I told him the water was too cold, but he wanted
to go. I'd seen him do that before—wade in a few feet then come out to go home.” She started to tear up. She could not tell him everything. “But he didn't come out.”

“Tell the lawyer that,” Sam said. “When you get back home, just say that.”

Jess didn't tell him more. She didn't feel close enough to say all that she needed to say. She wondered if he felt distant from her too. They lay for a long time before she waved her hand lightly over his leg and the long scar on his thigh. “How did you get hurt?”

“That seems like another world now,” he said quickly. “I still have bad dreams though. Real bad.” He waited, allowing the light strokes of her hand to soothe his body.

“Will you tell me what happened? How you got hurt?”

A breeze blew the curtains back from the window and fell across them like a sweet breath. “I don't know. We'd been fighting for almost four months. We'd been out a couple of nights, but we hadn't seen anything to make us scared until our squad leader gave orders to go about a quarter-mile to where the enemy was waiting.” He stopped. “You want to hear this?” Jess said she did.

“It'd been raining for about four days straight. We were supposed to have cleats on our shoes so we wouldn't slip in the mud, but I didn't have any. I slid down into a gulley and landed in barbed wire. Everybody said, ‘Don't move,' because sometimes the wire was booby-trapped. Carl Hill came down and picked the wire off me. Took forever, seems like.”

“So it wasn't booby trapped?”

“Not that time. Anyway, when I got out, the squad leader said to get in a V formation but we didn't know the Chinese had formed a semi-circle around us. They opened fire and all hell broke loose. God, Jess. They had a heavy machine gun.” Sam stopped as though he were seeing it again. “They just chopped us up.” He lifted his arms out from the covers and sighed.

“The squad leader kept yelling orders, telling us to retreat. But I'm at the far end of the V flank. I thought for sure I was going to die.” He looked at Jess. “The others pulled out, and it was just me and two other guys. Then a Chinese soldier rushed toward me. He threw a grenade. I squeezed off some rounds and he fell. I rolled to get out of the way of the grenade. But it went off.”

Jess had her hands over her mouth.

“It blew me and Carl Hill away from each other, caught me on the right leg.” He pointed to his leg. “Killed Carl, though. I hid under a bush when two Chinks came looking around. They went right past me. They were so close. Then, the squad leader came in and picked me up. I could hardly
believe it. He put me over his shoulder and worked his way down the hill. He went real slow. It was nighttime, and bushes were thick around us. While I was being carried down, I caught a bullet in the arm. We finally got back. There were lots of new guys standing around that I'd never seen before. They'd sent some reinforcements and there was some integration going on at the time, but we hadn't seen any colored guys in the outfit before that. They gave me to a colored guy from Mississippi, and he helped me all the way back to the outpost. Probably saved my life.”

“They had doctors there?” Jess asked.

“I woke up in a hospital, and remember being under an x-ray machine. I felt my dog tags and told the doctors ‘I'm still alive. Don't put these in my mouth.' You know, if you're dead they just put dog tags in your mouth and jam up your jaw.”

Jess listened without moving.

“So, they operated on me. I had that bullet in my arm and shrapnel in my stomach and in one lung. They kept worrying that I might get pneumonia. My leg was pretty torn up. I stayed for about a week before they sent me to Yongdungpo.

“Then some high-up medical Colonel said he was going to ZI me. I'm wondering what is this ‘ZI'? and he said, ‘Zone of Interior. We're sending you home.' The war was almost over by then. All I could think about when he said I was going home was that I would get to see you. Then I came home and nobody knew where you were. I swear, Jess, that was worse than being shot at.”

Jess had been crying. She wanted to comfort Sam, to soothe his mind; but she suddenly felt as if they lived in different worlds. “You think we'll ever feel normal again?”

“Just being here with you feels pretty good,” he said.

They slept fitfully the rest of the night. They were different people now, both of them, sleeping with a stranger. But the next morning they looked rested when they went downstairs to breakfast and explained to everyone that they were leaving.

— 36 —

“W
hy're you taking her away from us?” Zella asked when Sam was introduced to everyone at breakfast.

“It's time for me to go home,” Jess said. Past time, really.” She looked at Will. “From that day you saw my photo in the paper, I knew I had to leave.”

“I don't want Jess to go away,” Shooter whined. “Everybody always goes away.”

“What will happen when you go back?” Miss Tutwiler asked.

“They'll have a trial,” Sam said. “Her stepbrother drowned in the river and …”

“They're not blaming Jess for that, are they?” Rosemary asked.

“They might be. Her dad hired a lawyer.”

Ray hit Shooter, then cried.

“Eat your eggs,” Zella told him.

“I don't want any eggs,” Ray pouted. “I hate eggs.”

“No you don't,” Miss Tut said.

“You eat like I tell you to,” Zella said to the boy.

Will put his hand on Sam's shoulder. “You got to understand, son, Jess brought some light into this place.” The professor turned to smile at Rosemary, who looked lovely in some old blue-jeans and a t-shirt, her hair pulled back into a casual bun of curls. “Even Miss Tut started to like me,” said Will.

Frank bent over his plate and grumbled under his breath, then turned abruptly peering into the woods like it was a dream forest.

“You'll get over it, Frank,” Will said. “Won't be the first thing you have to get over.”

Jess looked carefully at everyone around the table, taking a mental picture in her mind of all of them, and then each one in a separate frame. She had become who she would always be, here, with them, strangers honed into an odd configuration of a family, but a family nonetheless. She would miss
them terribly. Will stood at the window looking out at the street. A long silence fell over them as everyone thought about saying goodbye.

They helped Jess carry her suitcase to Sam's car. Ray cried and Shooter walked away toward the stream. Jess called to Shooter, but he refused to turn around. She called again and he stopped, frozen in stubborn grief. She promised she would come back to see him.

Moths on the windshield dusted the glass with mica. Sam turned on the ignition. The car was old and the motor roared a few combustions before catching. Shooter turned to wave one hand. The professor held Ray, who had his head buried in the professor's shoulder. Jess was sure that they would take the boys somewhere fun today, distract them with ice cream, tuck them in bed with new promises.

As Sam drove off, Jess could see the grass in front of the house disappear in the side mirror, and felt the morning drag behind her. She heard the church bell toll the hour and knew that her life had come down to a decision, for good or bad. They would drive all day, spend the night in a hotel (where they agreed to sign in as a married couple), then drive part of the next day.

The road in August became a blazing strip of heat and a car in the distance looked like a liquid shape that took hard form as it got closer, then turned liquid again. They rode almost an hour without talking. Sam's eyes held a sadness, and just below the surface, anger. Something thick lay between Jess and Sam.

“You want to talk about anything?” she finally asked.

“Not now,” he said.

Jess looked at the woods where she had spent so many nights. They passed houses with clothes-lines: dresses, towels, shirts, and pants she might have stolen, if she had still been running. She reached to touch Sam's leg, an expression of closeness, but he jumped, his arm rising, as if to protect himself from harm. This was the second time he had jumped when she touched him.

Sam lifted a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and tapped it against the heel of his hand. “Take the wheel a minute, would you?” He lit the cigarette turning and cupping the match in his hand. Jess watched the smoke curl around his head. When did Sam start smoking? He held the smoke in his mouth, and let it out. She was fascinated.

By the time they were in the north Georgia mountains the western sky had reddened and a yellow moon came up through shards of clouds. Sam blew the horn three times and Jess jumped. He looked happy now. He blew it three more times and laughed, then three more. He yelled her name out
the window, celebrating the fact that they were together. The sound echoed and rattled out over the valley, then faded into the trees and creeks.

That night Jess slept with Sam beside her; but at midnight she moved carefully from their bed to step out under the stars—the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, Orion rising up elegant, circling this world and other ones. Jess felt that she, herself, had been set in motion, like the planets spinning through space. Her new center of gravity was sending her back home, where there were things she would never tell anyone. She had wanted to give Adam something, anything. But looking back, she wondered if maybe everything she had done was a mistake. The world, it seemed, had its shoes on the wrong feet.

Jess was standing outside the motel room still watching the stars, when Sam called to her from their room. “Jess? Where are you? Come here,” he said. “I miss you.” Cars on the highway rolled by, a train somewhere kept announcing itself, and Jess felt suddenly large, as if she could wear those stars for a hat, or step out into the wild dark air singing.

WHAT REMAINS

— 37 —

T
he last time Jess saw her father he had seemed younger, more energetic. He was waiting on the front steps, but he rose quickly when he saw Sam's car, and hurried toward it. He appeared stooped, his face thinner, his sparse hair whiter. Seeing him come towards her with his arms wide open, Jess felt she had been away longer than four months.

“Jess,” he said. “Oh, Jess.” He couldn't stop saying her name. He thanked Sam, but barely looked at him. Hap greeted her eagerly, with his paws on her waist. Jess still carried her father's satchel, the one she had taken the day she left home. Edward touched it, as though he had never seen anything more beautiful. “I don't know where to begin,” he said. As he stood back to look at her face, she held him tighter. She didn't want to let go.

Sam picked up the old suitcase given to her by Ruby and Pug. “We can throw this out,” he said, inspecting its shabbiness.

“No.” Jess took the suitcase from him. “I'm keeping that—to remember the people who gave it to me.” As she entered the house, she felt the absence of Adam. The hallway seemed darker, the air smelled of concrete and dust. Her father followed her inside. Jess held the door open for both men. All three of them were thinking of the days that lay ahead.

Sam took his own suitcase to the bedroom off the kitchen. He had moved again into himself, a private mood. Jess assumed she would need to get used to these mood changes and blamed them on the war.

“We'll meet with the lawyer in the morning. The arraignment is tomorrow afternoon,” Edward told Jess.

In the kitchen her father brought out makings for sandwiches, and placed a bowl of potato chips on the table. A large store-bought sponge cake sat on the counter. The place was different without the smell of Clementine's cooking, and though Jess was glad she was not around, the house seemed lonesome for her father.

“Who is the lawyer?” Jess asked.

“James Strickland. A good defense attorney. I began looking for him right after you left. I wanted you to have the best.”