Under the Mercy Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

hair red and curly. She passes through Eugenia’s chest and Eugenia coughs. “I must be coming down with something.”
    â€œIt’s just dust,” Bertie tells her. The yellow feathers on Bertie’s duster flick and dart, flick and dart.
    â€œShoo,” I say under my breath to the baby spirit, shaking a throw rug at her. “We’re nobody here but old women.”
    â€œSpeak for yourself, Ivy,” Eugenia says. “Don’t tell me you’re groaning about a little housework.”
    As each of my children was conceived I saw its spirit leaping beyond the haunches of the father, grappling past other babies for a chance at life. Before I missed a month’s bleeding I knew my sons and daughter from beginning to end. I saw Steven stocky and sweet, then a coarsened, bristled man. Trina, always a prankster in spite of want and battering. Shane, my oldest, twirling broken from a rafter in a last foster home. I catch sight of Shane sometimes now, always just behind the next doorway, ducking away from me when I try to follow.
    I take stock of the room we’re in. The old woman who was Pop’s mother, Alma, swaddled in black to her wrists, ankles, and chin, spins by the stove, heedless of Eugenia mopping around her feet. Three of her teeth have died and turned a blue paler than a robin’s egg, the only color about her. She is as hard in death as in life, the one spirit I don’t dare pass through. Her mother, the carrot-haired Missouri whose adventures I’ve heard in family tales and seen for myself, appears her favorite age of twenty-one today and huffs with impatience, waiting for the rain to stop so she can leave the house. Two old fellows share a jar of moonshine across a checkerboard. I notice Bertie sniff the air, her nose sensitive enough to detect corn whiskey even from another world. Fair-skinned toddlers play around a mouse hole that Leon never boarded up.
    Not every family member who passes on appears to me here. I don’t know why some linger and some don’t. But I wonder that Leon isn’t here, as hard as he roosted here in life. I ask the old men, “You reckon he’ll be coming soon?”
    â€œWho?” asks Bertie.
    â€œWho?” ask the old men.
    â€œLeon,” I say.
    â€œI reckon not,” one of the men says. “We ain’t got room. They’s too many of us as it is.” He spits a big gob on Eugenia’s clean floor, and I’m glad she can’t see it.
    â€œThere’s a spot for him there in front of the television, like always.” I point.
    The man looks at me queer, pondering what I mean by television.
    Bertie and Eugenia swap looks.
    â€œIvy, honey,” Eugenia says, “he might not be coming back.” She whispers to Bertie, “Poor old addled thing.”
    â€œI know,” I tell her. “I know it.” But I clean with one eye out the window, watching for Leon to walk up through the cattails that grow along the creek, to come in and start up a pan of hard corn bread to throw in the yard for the ghost dogs that circle and whine out there in the wet.

5
    Martin
    Sober. The sun skirted cloud tops and pinned Martin to his window seat. He was brave for the stewardess, declined small bottles, heeded signs not to smoke. He prayed to his estranged higher power that the bruise on his face had healed enough that Liza wouldn’t notice it.
    The flight attendant came by, offering tiny bags of peanuts. The man seated next to Martin was asleep. “I’ll give him his when he wakes up,” Martin said, taking two bags. When the flight attendant was safely down the aisle, he pocketed both. He picked up the plastic cup that had held his ration of ginger ale and tipped an ice cube into his mouth. Smells settled in the cabin’s circulated air, a mix of perfumes, peanuts, unbrushed teeth, the banana sandwich the woman across the aisle had produced from her carry-on bag. He looked out