A Question of Mercy (3 page)

Last night Jess had awakened in the middle of a dream, or rather she was still asleep, but
dreamed
she was awake. She saw her mother, still alive, opening the bedroom door. She heard her say, “Breakfast is ready, Sweetie.” She saw her father, younger and smiling. Clementine Finney was not there, though Adam was sitting on the front porch. When she woke, the dream seemed perfectly reasonable. Jess heaved a sigh and shivered.

The next morning, waking completely, Jess wanted to bring back the happy dream. Make it true. She bargained with the day:
If I can find some food or a safe place to stay, I'll go back home
. She wasn't sure it was a bargain she could keep. Already she was a thief, a scavenger, a missing person sleeping under trees. She ate the third pear, two more pieces of bread, and a raw potato. Her life had boiled down to food, shelter, and trying not to be found.

She startled, when she saw a gray fox sniffing her shoe. She remained very still, not wanting him to go away—the small, young fox with its bushy tail, his eyes like tiny fires, steely in the early light. He stood for only a moment, then turned and was gone. Had she imagined it?

At home, sometimes, Jess might hear a door slam, or a flop-flop sound, like a fish inside the wall, and she imagined her mother's voice in another world trying to speak to her. Or sometimes she heard a movement down the hall, or saw a piece of light, something going around a corner, and expected to see her mother again.

But the fox was gone, and so was her mother's voice. All that was real was here. Jess put her face into her hands. Her palms smelled like burned ground.

She thought of her mother, what she would say to her. Before the illness, their life had been easy and sure. If her mother were still alive, none of this would have happened. If her mother had lived, Jess would have a different life now.

That's when it all started—her new and unimaginable life: with her mother's sickness, the smell of medicine in the house, those days of feeding her with a pewter spoon, then the funeral, the empty house, her father's quiet grief—and later, the entrance of Clementine Finney and her teenage son, Adam.

— 2 —

J
ess was only ten when her mother's illness began with a persistent cough. At night, when the coughing would not stop, Jess heard her go into the guest room, not wanting to keep Edward awake. Some nights her mother didn't even bother to go to his bed, and the guest room quickly acquired her accoutrements: hair brush, powder, lipstick, DuBarry Cold Cream, and the Este Lauder smell of her mother's skin. Edward believed she had bronchitis and urged her to rest.

As Daisy began to lose her appetite, fatigue formed around her eyes and mouth and Dr. Willingham came to the house to listen to her lungs. He prescribed penicillin and urged her to stay in bed; but she stubbornly persisted. She was trying hard to get well, pretending that she was already well—rising to prepare dinner for Jess and Edward. During those days everything Daisy Booker did felt like pretending.

In the late afternoons Jess sat in the kitchen with her mother, copying recipes. She loved to look at her mother's high forehead, her small mouth, and round blue eyes that put people at ease, her long arms and legs that moved like a dancer. Daisy had a delicate beauty that stunned anyone who saw her. Even without makeup her face glowed, and she walked with the confidence of someone who had been beautiful for most of her life. Jess hoped some of that beauty might rub off on her.

The recipes were kept in a brown box spattered with grease and food stains. “Edward likes a lot of pepper on his chicken, but not on his steak.” She told Jess to write that down. “Having meals together makes things seem normal,” her mother told her. She lifted a large ham and brushed it with a paste of orange juice, mustard, and brown sugar. She handed Jess the brush to baste the ham before placing it in the oven.

After several weeks, when the cough did not improve, Daisy went to the hospital for tests. The diagnosis came late on a Tuesday afternoon. Dr. Willingham arrived at the house to deliver the news in person.

“You have cancer,” he said. “It's leukemia. But, Daisy, it's progressed too far. Stage four.” Jess sat on the arm of her mother's chair, and as the doctor spoke, her mother did not look up. “Leukemia is a disease of the blood and bone marrow and, though sometimes we recommend treatment, this has moved beyond our ability to control it. I am so sorry.” The doctor looked embarrassed.

“What do you mean?” Edward said.

“It's just that we can't do anything for this kind of cancer. Maybe someday. I wish I could give you more hope.”

Edward dragged his gaze from the back door to the doctor's face, as though he might not have been listening. “I don't understand.”

“Edward,” Daisy said.

“I want to know what he means.”

“I can't give you much hope.” Dr. Willingham touched Edward's shoulder. “She probably has six to eight months.” He paused. “That's just an educated guess though. It could be longer.”

Edward stood up. “Are you saying we can't do
any
thing?” He didn't believe the doctor. “It was bronchitis. That's all.”

“Edward,” said Daisy, some irritation in her voice.

Edward could not stop. “I know you're not telling us to just give up. Are you?”

Dr. Willingham looked tired. “I'm afraid that the disease has spread too far. I'm sorry.”

Daisy nodded and kept nodding. “I don't want be in the hospital,” she said. She turned and leaned her forehead against Jess's arm; and Jess's life, at age ten, began to crumble and shift. Edward sat on the floor and put his hand on Daisy's knee. Dr. Willingham rose to leave, but suggested that Edward hire a nurse to help them at home.

For the next months the nurse, Joan Landry, came to the house. She cooked and cleaned and tended to Daisy. On many days Edward found excuses to stay at home, but when people in town began to call, the constant sound of the telephone drove him back to work.

One day a childhood friend of Daisy's, William Brennan, called. Daisy had let him know about her illness and Jess heard her mother say, “No, don't come, Will. It would be better if you didn't.” That night, Daisy told Jess to call Mr. Brennan
when the time came
. Jess never told her father that Mr. Brennan had called.

Before leukemia was diagnosed, when Daisy's coughing was just a nuisance, Jess and her mother had taken a trip together to visit William Brennan, who lived in a boardinghouse in Lula, Alabama. They had visited him when Jess
was four, then when she was seven, and again when she was nine. Edward usually objected to their going. He felt suspicious of Brennan and accused the man of being in love with Daisy.

“He's like a brother to me,” Daisy said. She said it every time. “He taught me how to drive a car and made sure I dated the right boys.” She laughed. Her face turned bright whenever she talked about William Brennan. “Everybody in school knew he was my protector, not my sweetheart.”

“Doesn't mean he didn't
want
to be,” said Edward, but Jess and her mother took those trips anyway. They invited Edward, but he refused to go.

On their last trip Jess and her mother rode in their new Buick sedan with the radio playing. They sang songs and ate olives from a jar, keeping the windows rolled down, and following the yellow line from morning to night. They spent one night in a motor hotel. They had an Orange Crush for breakfast. When Jess thought of it later, that day seemed more dream than reality.

The first time Jess saw Tut's Boardinghouse—a tall, shaggy, nineteenth-century structure with turrets on four corners—she thought it looked haunted; but, inside, rooms bloomed bright with sunshine and cheerful curtains. Miss Tutwiler, the owner of the house, greeted them with an attitude of both welcome and suspicion. Jess believed that she, too, was doubtful about the relationship her mother shared with Mr. Brennan. Jess wondered if her father had been right.

Jess and her mother usually stayed for two nights and three days in an upstairs room. A Latin teacher lived in the room next to them and they shared a bathroom with a lady who always checked to make sure they did not leave makeup on the sink or a towel on the floor. At the end of the hall a mother and father lived with two little boys. The parents were always arguing about something.

Jess could see her mother's fondness for William Brennan, and Jess felt fond of him too, like a favorite uncle. He got up early to make breakfast for them, calling from the bottom of the stairs: “Waffles!” or “Bacon and eggs!” and they came down in their bathrobes. At night Jess heard Will and her mother talking late into the night. She heard them laughing.

On the way home she asked her mother if she had ever had a date with Mr. Brennan. “Not like that,” her mother said. “But he was always around.” She smiled.

Six weeks after their trip to the boardinghouse, after the coughing took a firm hold and Dr. Willingham made his bleak pronouncement, after Daisy took to the bed and Joan Landry came to the house every day, Daisy began to look thin and weak, slipping away in both body and mind. Jess fed her
rice with butter every day, or sometimes applesauce with cinnamon, from her mother's favorite spoon.

Edward, though, came unraveled. He sat in Daisy's sick-room murmuring her name over and over, as if that ritual might bring her back. He yelled at the nurse about the fact that Daisy wasn't eating enough. He wanted Daisy to sit up and not lie down all day. “She'll get bedsores,” he said. He propped her up with pillows until she told him to stop. He blamed Joan for everything, but this nurse was seasoned and expected to be blamed. She told Jess that her father's grief process was beginning.

Then Daisy began to see visions, or hear voices that weren't there. There were whole days when her eyes grew round, void of all recognition. She called out for people whose names Jess, or even Edward, had never heard.

“Medications dull her mind as well as her pain.” Joan sometimes stayed all night. She moved through the house like a competent, invisible person, disappearing when Edward and Jess needed to be alone with Daisy. She had seen all of this before.

On that last night, Joan slept downstairs on the couch. Jess offered to feed her mother. “Please Jess,” Daisy said, “I'm not hungry tonight. Just let me sleep.” So Jess laid her head on her mother's small, flat breasts and let her sleep. The next morning she was dead. Edward found the bowl of rice beside the bed, saw the applesauce uneaten, and he cried. Jess thought she had done something terribly wrong, but no one ever blamed her for anything.

For weeks after the funeral a smell of stale and soured flesh lingered in her mother's sick-room, thick as smoke. Nothing could air out the odor. Edward tried to infuse the house with normal talk; but at night he walked through rooms like someone in a dull stupor. He stared at the dark blue fabric that was the sick-room's bedspread and whenever Jess passed the room she saw him sitting in the dark. If she entered, a voice came out of the chair: “Don't turn on the light.”

Jess did not know how they would survive their sad new world. She felt more alone when her father was talking than when he was quiet. Windows everywhere were closing, and she felt like the doorknobs on all the doors in the world were gone. That's when Jess learned to live in the lonesome corner of her soul, that's when she began to seek the companionship of the French Broad River that ran along the edge of Goshen, North Carolina.

Jess was born in that river. Daisy Booker had believed that river-birth insured a prosperous life and, with the help of a midwife, had squatted in the river-shallows to give birth. Her own mother had done the same, as had her grandmother and great-grandmother. Edward objected with bitter arguments about this kind of birthing; and, in fact, when Jess was born he hired an ambulance with a doctor and nurse to stand-by in case anything went
wrong. Nothing went wrong, and Jess moved easily into the French Broad River. Even now, she claimed a clear memory of that birth: one long tunnel moving into open water and bleary-eyed fish who saw her first, and muddy broth to breathe. At birth, that river was her first mother, and, at ten, her only one.

So Jess visited the river every day and, with the absence of Joan Landry, began to take over her mother's chores. She made the beds, washed clothes, cooked dinner, and went to the grocery store with her father. Edward went down the cereal-oatmeal-grits-tapioca aisle and Jess chose the vegetables, fruits, and milk. She liked to imagine her mother's long arm reaching for a peach or a quart of milk from a top shelf.

— 3 —

F
or the first two weeks, Jess stayed close to the French Broad River. She stumbled, skinned her arm, and thought of her friends in Goshen, coming home from school, putting on pajamas. Her head was spinning and she felt nauseated. But the thought of the river, and what happened there, drove her each day until she dropped—tired enough to sleep anywhere. She did sleep, leaning her back against a tree; but, all night, she woke to strange crackling noises and whooshings above her. She tried to determine what to do next. She had begun to mark each day with a small pebble she carried in her pocket, the growing weight a reminder of time and distance traveled. She had been gone sixteen days, and all she could think about was what she would say if someone found her.

The next morning, she ate the last piece of bread, but wished for another pear. Most of the food stored in her satchel was gone, and she tried to eat as little as possible. At times, she couldn't remember why she wasn't at home; at other times, she heard sirens and her body grew rigid. That far-off screaming was more like a feeling inside than a sound outside. She walked all day, trudging through brush, the sun rising high in the sky—her clothes stuck to her body, her shoes filled with mud. She would need to scrounge for more food.

She took out one of Sam's letters, and his picture. She never liked to think of Sam fighting in Korea, but, instead, pictured him in his fireman's uniform—the way she first saw him. Each night, before sleep, she looked at his face and chose a letter to read. The letters stayed in the satchel's side pocket, but a few had gotten wet and muddy. She picked one written January, 1953, when he had been over there only a few weeks.