The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (7 page)

“For
les feux follets
are the souls of unbaptized babes,
ma fille,
and they haunt those who wander the swamps and forests. With a knife to the heart of the night, the traveler had released the children out of purgatory, out of their ghostly state, and into hell.” She looks at me over her glass, her long fingers wrapped around it thoughtfully. “Pray for that baby, but say a prayer for yourself, too,
ma fille.
” I can see by the light of the hurricane lamp propped on the floor that her eyes are glistening.

I've never seen her eyes wetted except by full sun. I stand from my chair and walk toward her, but she shoos me away, dabbing at the corners of her eyes.

“You were so close to being one of those pitiful creatures,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I bargained for your soul, child.” She takes a long draw from her glass, and in the quiet, I can hear her swallow. “She was going to get rid of you, had an appointment at a clinic in Houston. For a thousand dollars, she agreed to keep clean and bring you to term. Marry Witness, too, so you wouldn't be born a bastard. I couldn't allow her to put that burden on you right from the start.”

The truth lands like a punch: if Charmaine had her way, I'd have been nothing more than cells scraped off her womb by some doctor. To know what your life is worth to your mother and that it is a dollar amount. The physical pain of the news surprises me, the way it roots between my ribs.

Maw Maw sniffles softly. “There is no greater evil in the world than a wrong done to a child,” she says, and I wonder if she's thinking of me or the LeBlanc baby. “I'm scared for this town.” She looks ahead into the night that is just starting to come alive, sounds sharpened by the blanket of darkness. “With every sin comes retribution.”

As we pull into the gravel parking lot at church, kids charge back and forth in a game of tag, illuminated by the wobbly headlights of arriving cars. I'm glad to be here in this familiar place. More than the stilt house, which feels lonesome sometimes, this white clapboard church is home.

Weeks after Paw Paw Gaspard died and Charmaine hitched out, we left the Catholic church and joined up here.
Abandoned you and killed her own father, did that woman,
Maw Maw says. I was still a baby in a Moses basket, and the way she tells it, she needed God direct, not on a priest party line. She'd heard about a nameless church lodged in a copse of warty toothache trees outside of town, how the pastor knew to fear the devil as much as love the Lord, and how the Lord called on people right there during the service. After losing half her family, that was the kind of faith she was after, so she swaddled me up and drove out to see what was what. Maw Maw had her first vision that day, birds falling out of the sky. The next morning, that Sands tanker ran aground and leaked millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, the worst spill in history. Thousands of white egrets and blue herons and gulls died glued to rocks or drowned by sludgy water. Thousands more died of starvation because they couldn't fly to hunt with their blackened wings.

Inside the church, there's the familiar piney smell of wood soap and, faintly, coffee from the kitchen that sits just off the worship room. Maw Maw wags her finger impatiently in the direction of our pew, and I hustle past the other worshippers to take a seat. Usually people are animated before services, but today the room has the subdued feel of a funeral service. The heaviness in the air that death brings. News of the baby has hit everyone hard.

Maw Maw and I sit, room enough for another body between us, and she bows her head in prayer. Because I've spent years crammed in a locker room with nine other girls, pinballing up against their bodies, sharing clothes and sweat and menstrual cycles, I understand her need for space. Tonight I'm glad of the distance because of Charmaine's letter. I'm scared to think what Maw Maw would see if she laid hands on me. I picture Charmaine rising from my blood like a summoned ghost.
That woman,
the one who was ready to hand my soul to the devil. I close my eyes to pray thoughts of her away, but instead of the peace of darkness, I see that tiny bloodied corpse, arms stiff with death, reaching upward for deliverance.

I look around to see if anyone else has seen what I have. A few rows back, someone is groaning softly. It feels wrong to look at people's faces while they pray, they're so vulnerable. Some are open-mouthed, some are pinched in concentration, many sway gently, that quiet dance you do as you find the rhythm of your prayer. Nothing out of the ordinary, but that heaviness I felt when we walked in seems worse, the air before a storm. Briefly, I lock eyes with Marilee Warren, a girl from my grade. She looks beseechingly at me, her large green eyes striking against her black dress. It's not just any black dress, I realize then. It's the shapeless sackcloth that girls wear when they've been caught violating the promise of chastity made at their purity ceremony. I feel a fluttering in my gut, imagining what it is she's done. If she's already wearing the dress, it won't be secret for long.

Maw Maw follows my gaze to Marilee and clucks her tongue. “They let her go around in those dancing-girl costumes. Hypocrisy in the parent breeds hypocrisy in the child.”

Pastor Parris clears his voice and a hush descends on the room. “Let us pray,” he says. “Lord, today evil has shown its face among us. Today we have learned of a baby treated like common trash, a life tossed out as if your greatest gift had no value. A child who could not speak to defend itself, who could not lift a finger to fight for its life. Only the truly evil would treat the defenseless so cruelly!”

I think of Charmaine, how she would have dissolved me before my heart even had a chance to form. Once you're firmly rooted in this world, it's strange to consider that it might have been otherwise.

Pastor Parris continues: “I want all women of childbearing age to stand up.” He watches us expectantly. “Come on, now. No one's in trouble. But I want every woman between the ages of thirteen and forty to please stand.”

We're slow to follow his order. After a pause, a few women, mothers with babies on their hips and some of the older married women, stand. Arms crossed over chests, they shift nervously from foot to foot.

“Go on, Mercy child, you've got nothing to hide,” Maw Maw says. Reluctantly, I get to my feet. Those still seated look around at us, eyebrows raised over questioning eyes. How many of these people know who my mother is and what she's capable of?
Daughter of a whore, must be one herself.
Mrs. Warren prods her daughter, and when Marilee rises, everyone stares at her, standing there in that ugly dress. They know what it means, and a whisper travels through the congregation as the sight registers with them. I feel sorry for Marilee, she looks so small and pale, swathed in the telltale black cotton.

“Take a look at these women,” Pastor Parris continues. “Your wives, sisters, daughters, friends. While I'm certain that none of them is responsible for what happened to that child, I want to make an important point.” He pauses for effect, walks to the front of the stage, and looks from left to right, nodding at each row of people. The pastor's a nervous man with cornmeal-colored skin, a swatch of steel-wool hair, and darting pale eyes, as if he can see the angels and demons he says are battling in the air around us. Though I'd never tell Maw Maw, I don't like him. He relies on the pulpit too much, something to lift him above the rest of us, and there's dark talk about why he left his church in Nacogdoches, some girl hurt during a cure.

At last he starts up again: “That point is this: when a child suffers, all of us must bear the guilt and shame of it, all of us are tainted. Let us remember, too, we are all of us sinners, no one is immune to evil.”

Amen amen amen,
people chorus. A chill chases down my neck, causing me to jerk my head back. A voice:
Speak for me.
Mouth open, a low note escapes,
Uhhhh,
like the start of a hymn. People shift around me. I hear Maw Maw's voice, “Child, what—”
Pay them no mind. Speak for me.

Eyes closed, heart and head up to heaven, arms at my sides. I don't recognize this voice singing, but I feel its vibrations in my throat, it can only be mine. Sounds like the language of a far-off land, but it makes perfect sense to me. The child, too, must understand. I know with clarity it's a girl. I tell her she's loved, that she contains all the innocence of the world in her child-heart, and for that, her place in heaven is already secured. I tell her the Lord waits for her.

No bigger than a grapefruit. I raise my arms, cup my hands overhead. The flow of words bubbling up like a spring. Strange sounds that sift through my ears, so I have to translate myself. I don't feel scared. I put my trust in God, and I speak louder.

We are sisters, you and me. You think no one understands, but I do.
Pastor Parris's voice, “Yes, Mercy, let the spirit of the Lord fill you, speak His message.”

Find the one who did this.
Something pushing from inside my skull, little jackhammer hands against the bone of my nose, behind my eyes. Shouting now, chin jerking up, up to send the words higher, farther, that everyone might hear and obey.
Find the one who did this
. Someone's hand—Maw Maw's?—on my wrist, but I shake it off.

After a while, a minute, an hour, the words dry up, my mouth is empty. This time the silence a blanket around my shoulders, God-given. Closed eyes bathed in darkness, the tiny, reaching corpse gone. I think of
les feux follets,
my words a knife to the heart of the night, only this time, instead of hell, the baby's soul has been released into heaven, I know it has.

When I open my eyes, everyone is turned toward me. Some are praying in low voices. A few women wipe tears from their cheeks. Legs shaking like I've run a fast mile, I swoon backward and the bench hits me at the knees.

“The gift of tongues!” Pastor Parris says, reaching for my forehead. Someone shouts: “She's falling, catch her!” Time slows: the curtain of Sue Chessly's auburn hair filtering the light; the deep scar in the pine bench in front of me; at last, the concrete of the floor cold against my cheek. Then: nothing.

I
LLA DOESN'T WANT
to go downstairs. It will mean seeing Mama—no,
smelling
her—and being forced to confront the fact that in the last week, for reasons unknown, her mother has stopped bathing herself. When they heard about the baby on the news last night, Illa was horrified to realize she was glad for the distraction the grisly discovery provided. So long as the world delivered new crises, Illa and Mama wouldn't need to address the small one developing in their house.

The midmorning sun has already rendered Illa's bedroom stuffy, and soon it will be unbearable, the heat rising as if even physics is in conspiracy against her. How is it they have managed to survive with nothing but a single window unit in the kitchen to take the punch out of the bruising Texas summer?

She pushes open a window, hoping for a breeze, but all she gets is the unfiltered smell of the refinery, which hulks just beyond the tree line. Sometimes Mama sits on the front porch sniffing the air, trying to identify the chemicals.
That's benzene,
she'd say.
That's toluene. That's nitrogen oxide.

Smell of money, my ass,
Illa thinks. Money, real money, smells like the cosmetics floor of the Dillard's department store in Houston—spicy perfumes with ingredients like sandalwood and saddle leather, fresh-cut day lilies, marble floors mopped to a mirrored shine with citrusy cleaner. Often Illa thinks of Mama's settlement money sitting in that Houston bank, a million dollars, and dreams of all the things they could buy with it. Four years of college, for starters. Smaller things, too: nice clothes to fit Mama's new, larger body instead of just Walmart sweatpants; that pair of tan and turquoise boots Illa saw in the display window of Buck's; a real nurse to help Mama so that Illa could move into the college dorms next year. But Mama refuses to touch the money, claiming she let Sands buy her too easy.

About a year after the explosion, around the time when Mama, under pressure from her lawyer, settled with Sands, she was arrested for trespassing on refinery property. Furious and regretful over the settlement, wanting to make some kind of statement, she'd called the paper, then wheeled herself two miles to the refinery docks and started ranting that Sands got away with murder, that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fine was a joke, and that Beau Putnam and the rest of the Dallas suits should go to criminal court for gross negligence.

After the arrest and the story in the paper, people started calling Illa and her mother the Strange Starks. It didn't help Mama's case that some folks in town viewed Beau as a hero for pulling people, including Mama, out of the wreckage before the first responders arrived. The Port Sabine
Flare
ran a front-page photograph of him cradling her like a bridegroom, emerging from behind a curtain of smoke and flame.
Refinery manager Beau Putnam pulls his secretary, Meg Stark, to safety.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Chemical Safety Board and internal reports cited only “organizational failings.” OSHA handed down the largest fine in its history, but Mama said it was pennies to Sands, which pulled in billions every year; that of course they would go on pumping oil in a death trap, when forty-seven lives could be bought that cheap.

Illa has failed to convince Mama many times that they needed the settlement money, so every Friday, she pockets her twenty-dollar allowance and tries to adjust her dreams to fit reality. After graduation, maybe she can get a part-time secretarial job, leave the house for a while each day, and earn some extra cash. Maybe she can scrape together enough to rent one of those sagging Craftsman cottages off the downtown strip so at least she'll have some time alone, eight or nine hours to pretend she has a life of her own.

Illa slides the window shut and latches it. With the air smelling perpetually of rotten eggs, it's easy to attribute the new odor in the house to some refinery project. But whenever Mama wheels past her, Illa has to hold her breath against the stench, which doesn't waft in Mama's wake so much as knock into Illa's nostrils like a swift uppercut, a dense mix of sweat and piss that reminds Illa of the Salvation Army men's shelter on Rangeline, or the backyard petting zoo in Orange that Mama took her to once when she was too small to be put off by stink or by small, mangy farm animals kept in cages. Back when she and Mama still spent time together. Back when Mama still left the house.

Illa hasn't been able to bring herself to ask her mother what's wrong, because it frightens her to consider the possibilities in any detail. From Mama, she has learned that so much can go wrong with a body. Pushing the wheelchair, doing errands, driving Mama to her doctors' appointments, even trimming toenails—these are tasks Illa has grown accustomed to. She has not, however, seen her mother's naked body, even when it was beautiful: a courtesy every parent owes a child, in Illa's opinion. But the violent new funk trailing behind Mama threatens to breach this last remaining boundary of decorum. Either Mama can no longer bathe herself or she's lost the will to, meaning Illa will have to intervene.

Illa pulls on a pair of jeans, noting with satisfaction that they seem looser this week. The jeans are already a size zero. What if she shrinks below that? Is there a size subzero, a denim category for the less-than-nothings? It would be a PR nightmare for clothing brands, all those self-esteemy parents in a tizzy over the message being sent to their shrinking daughters. Thankfully, Mama isn't one of those parents; she's too caught up in her own body woes to concern herself with her daughter's. Which is just fine with Illa. Because so what if she wants to be light as cotton candy, a puff of cloud that can soar on the wind? What is so wrong with wanting to be small? It means you're that much closer to invisibility, and invisibility can be a superpower. Her entire life, Illa has relied on it to protect herself. So long as she kept under the radar, no one could see to hurt her.

Mama calls from the base of the stairs: “Illa?”

“Yeah?”

“You coming down? I need my shot.”

“Yup,” she says, mildly annoyed to be rushed on what is, after all, the first day of her summer vacation. Still, she knows the shot is time-sensitive; how often has Dr. Lawrence warned her to be sure to administer the shots at the same time every day, speaking slowly like she's a little girl or perhaps a nonnative English speaker? Meanwhile, she's never missed a dose, has been a damned shot-giving machine.

She slips through the bedroom door and jogs down the steps, where Mama waits for her at the base of the stairs. Taking hold of the wheelchair's handles, she pushes Mama toward the kitchen. The television is tuned to one of those morning news shows where the anchors wear jaunty skirt suits and talk about fad diets and celebrity books. When Mama talks about these smiling women, she uses their first names as if they're personal friends.

“Come here, girl,” Mama says, pulling Illa into the hard plastic arm of the wheelchair in her version of a hug. That's when Illa gets a sour whiff, the unmistakable smell of an unwashed body.

“Ma, stop.” Illa squirms free in knee-jerk distaste.

“Ah, yes,” Mama says. “Can't be taken for a mama's girl.”

“Right,” Illa says, pulling a grapefruit from the fridge and slicing it open with a serrated knife. She remarks the pleasing tug of the knife's teeth against the fruit's peel and wonders if this will be the most satisfying thing she does all day. During the summer, her allowance goes up to cover the extra hours she works, but it isn't enough to compensate for the boredom. These endless summer days, just her and Mama, the clock on the wall ticking away the seconds, the card games abandoned for long naps from which they both wake grumpy and dry-mouthed.

“They're talking about that baby,” Mama says, pointing at the TV. “Turn it up.”

Sure enough, one of the anchors, the blond one, is standing in front of a map of Texas, pointing to the little red dot in the southeastern corner of the state. Illa finds the remote and cranks the volume.

“Some of you will remember a couple years ago when we reported on the baby born at the prom in New Jersey left in the trash by its mother, who kept on partying. Well, we have a story almost as horrifying, this time out of Texas. Yesterday a fetus was discovered stuffed into a beer box in a convenience-store dumpster . . .”

The woman goes on to say that the discovery has shocked Port Sabine, a
deeply religious, severely economically depressed swampland presided over by the sprawling Sands Oil refinery, the fourth largest in the nation.
She rattles off some depressing statistics about unemployment, teen pregnancy, poverty, and pollution. “This isn't the first time the town has known tragedy,” the anchor starts, doing that weird frown-smile they must learn in newscaster school when they're trying to reflect gravitas. On the screen, the photo of the crumbling Pleasure Pier with its decrepit carousel and sagging Ferris wheel is replaced by that all-too-familiar shaky home-video footage that ran on every news station in the wake of the disaster. Into the gray February sky the fireball roars, billowing a hundred feet up, the force of the blast knocking the amateur cameraman on his ass. Illa gropes for the remote, trying to shut out the terrible whooshing sound that must roam through Mama's nightmares. Mama covers her ears and folds forward as if trying to duck and cover.
Three years ago this February, Port Sabine got hit by one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history . . .

Illa clicks off the set, then blurts: “Mama, I think it's time for a bath.” Anything is better than seeing her mother reminded of that hellish day, even the shame that shadows her face now. Though it cracks Illa's heart to see her like this, she's thankful for that look. It reassures her that Mama hasn't lost pride altogether—that somewhere inside the folds of flesh that cling to her like the layers of a failed cake, the woman she once was still exists.

“I'll need your help,” Mama says, sighing.

“Yes ma'am,” she says officiously, glad to be able to steer Mama away from the TV. In the bathroom, Illa plugs the drain and opens the hot-water tap.

“You can go out and I'll get myself ready,” Mama says. “It's really just the lowering down that I need help with.”

“Sure,” Illa says, slipping back out the door and pulling it closed behind her.

Her mother's body, with its bear-in-winter metabolism, its cascades of pale flesh that she seems doomed to wear like some great, cushiony straitjacket, baffles and embarrasses Illa, so it thrills her to witness, day in and day out at the gym, bodies that work. With their rangy arms and loping legs ending in mean little calves, the girls on the basketball team are another species altogether. When they're on the court, they are serious and strong. After the games, people talk to them and about them like they matter.

Illa knocks on the bathroom door. “Ready?”

“Okay,” comes Mama's muffled voice. “I'm ready.”

Illa takes a breath, pushes open the door.
Don't close your eyes,
she admonishes herself. Mama would be able to see her flinch in the mirror. Her mother has situated herself at the lip of the bathtub and looks poised to dive in. Rising pale and broad above the blue plastic back of the chair, her shoulders melt into bulging upper arms, which are demarcated by a dark seam where the two seas of flesh meet.

“If you want to stand up, I'll pull the chair back and get you under the arms,” Illa instructs. Wordlessly, her mother rises, and Illa shifts into position. She wants to avoid seeing the contours of Mama's deformed body, but she rubbernecks, steals a glance downward. On Mama's left hip and buttock, a bruise large and purple as a slab of steak spreads outward, sustained perhaps during her last attempt at a bath. Her legs are a mass of pink and red scar tissue from the burns. Illa chokes down a gasp. In all the trips to the doctor, through all the shots administered and medicine doled out, Illa has never seen the ruined legs. The sight speaks of suffering so intense that Illa feels a stab of sympathy pain shoot through her femurs. Spontaneous tears form at the corners of her eyes.

“Illa?” Mama says, bringing her back to the task at hand.

“Sorry,” she says. Pressing into the soft flesh of Mama's back, she positions her arms like bars beneath the armpits, and together they move the single step to the tub. She can tell Mama is trying not to lean all her weight on her, but even so, Illa strains beneath the heft, face growing hot from exertion as Mama lifts first one leg and then the next into the water. Bracing her back against the strain, Illa helps her mother into a squat, and from there, Mama sinks into the water. She lets out a deep sigh, and Illa moves quickly past the sink, back toward the door.

“I'll call you when I'm done,” Mama says.

“All right,” Illa says over her shoulder. “I'll finish making your breakfast in the meantime.”