My little sister Mercy

My sister is not like the other little girls.

On Sundays the girls of the village would put on their dresses. They would take a candy at the church door and laugh with sugar filling their mouths. They would walk down the road holding their mother's hand. Mercy did the same. She chose the mints, naturally. The ones that sting. She held them on her tongue with a patience the other children did not have, and nobody wondered why an eight-year-old girl needed to feel something burn in her mouth to stay still. When it was time to cross, it was not my mother's hand she reached for. It was mine. And then one Sunday, in the church, she opened her mouth. And everything changed in our lives.

Before that Sunday there was the farm.

It sat at the end of a dirt road in Marengo County. In summer the dust dried in plates. In winter the mud climbed to your boots and would not let go. Oaks lined the path. They were twisted and old. Older than me. Older than my father. They cast an indifferent shade.

My father said his father had bought the land piece by piece. He said it without pride. He said it the way you say a thing that must not be forgotten. Under his bed there was a chest with the deeds and receipts. A padlock. He slept above it. At night he rose barefoot and laid his hand on the metal. The key stayed on him even to go out and piss. When he came back down the hall the key made a sound against his belt. That sound, I had heard it my whole life. It belonged to the house as much as the walls did.

They had tried to take the land from him. People from the county. People from the state. He gave no names. A name is a handle. Someone can turn it. But they were there. In the way he held himself. In his stiff neck. When he looked down the road in the evening he was not watching the sunset. He was watching to see if someone was coming. Once I had seen a folded paper on the table. A notice with a stamp. He put it in the chest without a word. That evening he drank his coffee more slowly.

The well water changed that summer. A taste of nail that stayed on the tongue. The pigs drank less. They blew at the surface of the trough and backed away.

Men came up the road in white pickups. Rolled maps under their arms. Clean boots. My father stayed on the porch. They spoke from the bottom of the steps, letting their sentences hang in the hot air like ropes thrown to a man who does not want to be saved. My father watched them talk. When he said no he did not raise his voice. They came back. He said no.

At night the ground trembled so softly that only the dog heard it. He whimpered under the bed and my father did not hush him. A crack split the west wall of the barn. Thin. Like a signature. Not the catastrophe, not the collapse. Just the earth saying: I have begun.

Behind the barn the pigs knocked against the wood. Every evening. A dull, steady sound. It never really stopped. Even when it stopped you still heard it. We did not give names to what would end up meat.

I learned the lesson at eleven.

There was a small pig with a folded ear. A small defect. He came toward me snout first. One afternoon I called him Bishop. The word came out. Bishop. I did not know where it came from and I did not try to take it back.

I fed him from my hand. He came when I called. His warm snout pushed against my palm and I laughed. He smelled of heat and straw. He made a small sound when he breathed out. The sound of an animal that fears nothing. I was eleven and I believed a name carved into the air could hold like a roof above an animal.

My father saw. He said nothing. He looked at Bishop once. A long time. Then he turned his head. That silence weighed more than a slap.

He killed him on a Tuesday morning.

I was at school. All day I felt something empty inside my body. When I came home I knew before I passed the gate. The silence around the house was not the silence of calm days. It was a silence that had eaten something.

I stood in the yard with my bag on my shoulder. I looked at the pen. I did not cry. There was no room for that. Not here. Not for something I had never been told I had the right to love.

The mud near the trough had changed color. A darker brown, almost black, drying in fine cracks like burned skin. There was a boot print, my father's. Flies already. I crouched down. I touched it. It was still warm, mixed with the earth, and under my fingers it made a thick paste that clung, that resisted, a substance that refused to let go. The chickens walked past. The wind blew from the south. Everything was exactly as before except nothing was.

I believed that giving him a name could protect him. Naming just gives pain an address where to find you.

That night I dreamed of him. The pen. The sun on his back. He came toward me. He pushed my palm with his snout. Then there was a weight in my hand. Cold. The knife. It had not been there and then it was, as if the house had made it. Bishop nosed for food in my other hand, eager to live. The metal gleamed. My wrist moved on its own. As if the gesture had been a law of the house since forever and had been waiting for my hand.

I woke with my jaw clenched and a taste of blood in my mouth.

The next day I no longer went near the pen. I took the long way around. What you learn on a pig farm is not how to kill. It is how not to get attached.

Mercy was eight. The smallest in her class. When she sat at her desk her feet did not touch the floor.

She had a way of finding animals. A sick cat under the porch. A fledgling with a crooked wing in the grass. She did not look for them. She passed and they were there. She stopped. She laid her hand on them. The animal stopped fighting.

And then one day a piglet.

The smallest. The last born. Its mother had nearly crushed it in her sleep. My father called that nature. He said the word the way you close a door.

Mercy found it in a corner of the pen. It was shaking. Milk on its snout. She crouched. Then she took it in her arms.

The piglet stopped shaking.

I was behind her. I said nothing. It was already done. The same line I had crossed at eleven.

She called her Junie.

After that Junie went where Mercy went. The yard. The oaks. The porch steps. Mercy scratched her belly and Junie closed her eyes and kicked her legs as if she were pedaling through a dream. I watched them from the kitchen window. And I thought of Bishop. Bishop who came when I called. And the knife in my hand in the dream. A law of the house.

At the table Mercy talked about Junie the way other girls talk about a friend. Junie likes apples. Junie is scared of thunder. Junie doesn't like it when I'm at school.

My mother said once:

— Mercy, leave that pig alone.

My father chewed. He did not look up. He listened to his daughter lay a heart inside a body he would eventually open.

One evening Mercy put Junie in her bed. She pulled the sheets over both of them. She fell asleep with Junie's head on the pillow against hers. I walked past in the hallway. It made a soft sound. A sound that did not know it was condemned. Me, standing in the hallway, I knew. I did not go in. I should have.

The next morning I knew before going downstairs. In houses where killing is done, there is a particular way the air thickens.

The blood comes after. Always after. First there is that thing in the air. A sweetness. Greasy. Like cooking. It could be cooking. It could be a normal Sunday. But the body is not fooled. Somewhere in the throat, it scrapes. Metallic. It is the house saying: it is decided.

My mother stirred the sauce. She stirred and stirred and the spoon made a steady sound against the pot and her shoulders were perfectly straight.

My father was at the table. His Sunday shirt. He drank his coffee. When he set the cup down the sound was sharp.

Mercy came downstairs barefoot. She crossed the kitchen. She went outside.

We heard her in the yard.

— Junie. Junie.

Her voice rose clear in the morning air. She circled the pen. She looked behind the barn. Under the porch. She searched in corners, as if the world possessed a secret lining where it kept the things you cared about.

Then she came back.

She stood in the doorway with the sun behind her. She was small in the light. Her eyes strained to stay open.

— Mama. Where is Junie.

My mother set the spoon down. She turned slowly.

— Come here, sweetheart.

— Where is Junie.

— Mercy. Junie is dead. Papa killed her this morning.

Mercy did not move. Her arms hung. Her bare feet on the threshold. The oven breathed. The sauce bubbled.

Then she cried. Not a pretty cry. The whole body breaking. The shoulders rising. The mouth open. The tears fell on the tile. Nobody wiped them.

My father drank his coffee.

— It'll pass.

She raised her head.

— You killed Junie. She's in the pot.

— Yes.

— Why.

— Because it's a pig, Mercy. That's what we do with pigs.

— She wasn't a pig. She was Junie.

— It's the same thing.

— No.

Mercy wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her lip trembled. She looked at my father one last time. A look that recorded. Then she turned and ran.

Across the yard. Along the pen. Toward the trees. Her bare feet struck the earth. The sound grew smaller.

My mother set the spoon down.

— Clayton.

— She'll come back.

— She doesn't have shoes.

My father looked at the door. There was something in his eyes. As if he were looking at the small crack in the barn wall. Then nothing.

— She'll come back. And when she comes back she'll know how things work here.

My mother picked up the spoon again. Her hand shook. The spoon knocked against the rim of the pot.

I was sitting on the stairs. I watched the open door. The morning light drew a rectangle on the tile. Mercy's footprints were inside it. Small. Damp. They were beginning to fade.

My father said:

— Go get your sister. We're going to be late.

I put on my shoes and went out.

The sun was high. The air smelled of warm earth. I went around the house. The oaks. The road. Nothing. Then I turned back toward the pen.

She was there.

Sitting in the dust in front of the planks. Barefoot. Dirty. Earth on the knees of her pajamas. On the other side of the slats Junie's sow lay on her flank. Her belly rose and fell. Mercy watched her. The sow watched nothing.

Mercy cried without sound. The tears fell into the dust. Her hands lay flat on her thighs. She did not wipe them.

I crouched beside her. I said nothing.

We stayed there. Mercy and I and the sow and the sun.

Then she stood.

We walked toward the road. The gravel under my shoes. The earth under her bare feet. The oaks made shade. We heard the birds and the wind and Junie's absence walking with us like a third child.

We did not speak.

At the church they had set the dishes on the long table. The food covered everything. Everyone said Loretta's pork was a wonder.

Reverend Graves opened his Bible. He spoke of grace. His voice rose and fell. The sun came through the stained glass and laid patches of color on the tile. Blue. Red. Living colors.

Mercy sat between my mother and me. She was not watching the reverend. She stared straight ahead. Her feet did not touch the floor. They swung faster than usual. Her hands were on her knees. Too still.

Then her mouth opened.

At first not a word. A breath too large for her chest. Then sounds. Caught and released and caught again. Her hands clenched. Her neck went taut. Her eyes blinked fast. Then they rolled back. There was nothing but white.

Someone laughed. A short, dry laugh. Someone whispered Lord. A chair scraped.

Mercy slid from the pew.

Her back hit the tile. Her legs beat the air. Her white dress crumpled. People stood and each one decided what they wanted to see. The believers saw a sign. The others saw a kid losing her mind. Nobody knew what to do with a pain that had no words.

My mother threw herself to her knees. She took Mercy's head between her hands. Her fingers shook.

— Mercy. Mercy.

She said the name as if it could do something.

My father rose in one block. My father never rose. My father stayed seated while the world came to him. He stood rigid. His hands on the back of the pew. The knuckles white. His usual expression, except it did not quite hold. Something slid beneath. Something he could not name and that, had he known, he would have refused.

The light changed in the church. A cloud maybe. And in my hand I felt the weight of the knife.

Mercy on the tile fought against something only she could see.

Graves looked at her and he took. That is what he did. He took the pain of an eight-year-old girl and made it his miracle. He set his Bible on the lectern and dropped to his knees. Not slowly. At once. He shouted hallelujah and the walls caught the sound and sent it back. His tears were sincere.

The congregation rose. They shouted with him. Everyone shouted. Everyone wept. Everyone thanked God.

My mother was the only one on her knees who was not praying.

The stained-glass patches on the tile began to tremble. The blue moved. The red moved. Then I felt the ground move beneath my feet, a slow, deep motion as if the earth below us were turning in its sleep.

Then the sound rose. The stained glass exploded and the shards fell on the pews and on the people.

I threw myself over Mercy.

The choir beam gave way. It found Graves on his knees.

The back wall opened. Not a crack. A mouth. And the mouth took someone.

My mother crawled through the rubble. Some people were standing. Some people were lying down. There was nothing in between.

My father stood. It was the last thing he did on his feet. He took a step. One. The wall took his body. He fell forward.

When I reached him his eyes were open. They were looking at me. Not a message. Not forgiveness. None of that. Just: you see. Then they closed.

The dust settled. The sky came in through the roof. Mercy was breathing. Her face against my shirt. I did not know where she was. Maybe somewhere you no longer need to name things.

The state sent geologists six weeks later. They drove sensors into the mud and read graphs on screens. Hydrocarbons. A fossil deposit beneath the limestone at a hundred and eighty meters. The pocket had been rising for years. The well water that changed taste that summer, that was it. The tremors the dog felt at night, that was it. The crack in the barn wall, that was it. And the men in white pickups with clean boots who came up the road with rolled maps under their arms, they were it too. They knew.

Seventeen dead. The church. Three houses. A stretch of road. Graves was under the beam. He had died on his knees with his mouth open on his last hallelujah. The crater still smoked the next day. The firemen hosed it down. The mud smelled of oil and iron and something underneath that nobody wanted to name.

My father did not die. He is in a bed in Selma with tubes. The monitor makes a steady sound. My mother goes to see him on Tuesdays. She sits. She does not know what to do. Nobody taught her what to do when the silence gives no orders.

She sold the farm. The land my grandfather had bought piece by piece. The pigs. She signed at a notary's office in Linden with a pen that was not hers. She did not read it over.

We took the road one morning. The trunk smelled of newspaper and heated plastic. Mercy was in the back. She was not crying. She was not talking. She watched Marengo County grow small, then become nothing.

Nobody ever spoke about what Mercy did in the church. Not the survivors. Not the county paper. Not the state report and its forty-three pages. The people of Marengo County had the gas to explain. The gas explained the walls and the dead and the hole in the ground. The gas said nothing about Mercy.

Nor about Junie.