The Moon Over Mercy
For nearly six weeks, Eddie repaired ordinary things.
A gate.
The shed roof.
A wagon axle that had been mended badly enough to become a family argument before it became his responsibility.
He worked with his father in the mornings and helped Elias in the workshop when the light grew too poor for the yard. Sometimes his grandfather joined them, offering advice until someone put a tool in his hand.
The house acquired the sounds of another person learning where he belonged.
A chair moving before sunrise.
Footsteps in the garden.
The old man asking Mara where she kept something she had kept in the same place for years.
She answered each time.
Occasionally with patience.
Usually with affection disguised as irritation.
Eddie slept.
Not always well, but without the door.
The scar beneath his breastbone faded.
The road stayed outside the window.
***
Mary Jane arrived on a Sunday.
Eddie heard the wagon while he was fitting a hinge to the workshop cabinet. He looked up when the wheels stopped and saw her climbing down beside a stack of wooden boxes.
For a moment, he simply stared.
Then he put down the screwdriver.
She watched him cross the yard.
“You look better.”
“So do you.”
“Less mine dust.”
“Seems to agree with you.”
She smiled.
It was an easier expression than he remembered.
Behind her, the wagon driver began loosening the ropes.
Eddie looked at the boxes.
“My tools?”
“Most of them.”
“What happened to the others?”
“I kept the ones you borrowed from me.”
He considered objecting.
She raised an eyebrow.
He let it go.
***
They unloaded beside the shed.
The tools had been cleaned and wrapped.
His heavy wrenches.
The brace he preferred.
A little box of fittings he had saved because sooner or later something would need a piece just that size.
At the bottom lay the oilcan from the engine house.
Eddie turned it in his hand.
“I wondered where this went.”
“You left it on a hot pipe.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“I know.”
She looked at him.
He understood then why she had brought it.
Something returned to its owner.
Something left where he could recognize it.
“Thank you.”
Mary Jane nodded toward the final crate.
“Thank Collins too. He carried the heavy end.”
“Is the mine working?”
“The upper levels. With a new pump and a foreman who asks questions before making speeches.”
“And you?”
“I’ve left.”
Eddie set down the oilcan.
“For good?”
“Yes.”
“What will you do?”
She looked toward the open workshop.
“I know engines in places other than mines.”
He smiled.
“I expect you do.”
***
Mara made her stay for supper.
Then she made the wagon driver stay too.
By the time the dishes were cleared, Mary Jane had been asked more questions about her work than she had answered in all the months Eddie had known her.
Harlan wanted to know about the winding engine.
Silas asked whether the cage ever stuck.
Elias asked who had fitted the new pump and whether they had aligned it properly.
Mary Jane answered with growing amusement.
At last, Mara put a hand on the table.
“She’s traveled all day.”
The men fell quiet.
Mary Jane looked at Eddie.
“Now I understand.”
He shook his head.
“Don’t encourage them.”
Later, while the others talked inside, they walked to the corral.
Jack came to the rail.
Mary Jane held out an apple.
“You remember me?”
The horse took it.
“Apparently.”
Eddie leaned beside her.
For a while, neither spoke.
It was a comfortable silence until she reached inside her coat.
“I brought something else.”
***
The envelope had been forwarded twice.
Mary Jane’s name appeared on the front, written above an address at Ash Springs. Collins had added another destination beneath it.
Inside were two letters and a clipping.
The newspaper account concerned the six men recovered from the flooded mine.
Eddie read the first paragraph.
His name appeared beside Mary Jane’s.
Calder’s below them.
Nothing about the grave.
Nothing about the door.
He was grateful.
“Someone read that,” she said.
Eddie unfolded the first letter.
It came from a woman named Clara Mercer.
He stopped at the surname.
“No relation that I know of,” Mary Jane said. “Keep reading.”
The woman ran a boardinghouse in a settlement called Mercy, west of Blood Gorge.
She had written to ask whether the account of the rescue was true.
Whether Mary Jane knew the man named Edward Bone.
Whether he had ever spoken of being mistaken for dead.
The questions became less careful toward the bottom.
*I would not ask if there were someone nearer who understood.*
Eddie looked up.
Mary Jane watched him.
“There’s another page.”
***
Three people had returned.
Clara wrote the words plainly.
A freight driver buried during the previous winter.
A woman who had died of fever.
An elderly man whose daughter had been beside him when he stopped breathing.
They had come into town on separate nights.
No violence.
No threats.
The freight driver had asked for his horses.
The woman wanted to know whether her little boy had been fed.
The old man could not find the house in which he remembered living.
His daughter had brought him inside.
For two days, the town had tried to treat each incident as a mistake.
Then someone opened the graves.
Eddie lowered the letter.
Behind them, the kitchen window shone.
Someone inside laughed.
Mary Jane rested her arms on the rail.
“I wrote back.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That the mine rescue was true. That you might understand more than the newspaper said.”
He looked at her.
“I didn’t tell her what happened to you.”
“I know.”
“She sent the second letter last week.”
Eddie unfolded it.
***
The handwriting was less steady.
Word had spread beyond Mercy.
People had come to see.
Some brought photographs.
Some brought names.
One man had arrived with a wagon and offered to pay for the returned people to travel with him.
Clara had refused him rooms.
The town’s marshal had placed the three in an unused stable behind the public hall.
For their protection, he said.
By the time Clara wrote, the doors were being locked from outside.
The freight driver had tried to leave.
A shot had been fired.
Clara did not know whether it had been meant to hit him.
Eddie’s hands tightened around the paper.
Near the end, she had added:
*They are frightened of what they have become. The people outside are frightened of what they might become. I do not think we have much time before one fear gives permission to the other.*
Mary Jane looked toward the house.
“That’s why I came myself.”
Eddie kept reading.
The final paragraph concerned the moon.
It had appeared red above Blood Gorge on the night the first man returned.
Clara said it had remained there afterward.
Not everywhere.
Travelers approaching Mercy saw an ordinary moon until they reached the gorge road.
From that point onward, it looked low and red.
Some said it never moved.
Clara had watched from her porch three nights in succession.
She believed them.
***
Eddie folded the letters.
He did not speak for some time.
Jack pushed his nose between the rails, looking for another apple.
Mary Jane rubbed his forehead.
“I’m going west,” she said.
“To Mercy?”
“Yes.”
“For work?”
“Perhaps.”
He looked at her.
She met his eyes.
“I can tell when someone has locked a door and begun calling it help.”
Eddie thought of the stable in Clara’s letter.
Three people inside.
People who might remember a grave.
Who might be ashamed of being cold, or frightened by the spaces between their own heartbeats.
He remembered Calder placing a canteen in his hands.
Ruth making him sit.
Neither had required him to explain himself before giving him somewhere to belong.
“When were you planning to leave?”
“Three days.”
Eddie looked toward the workshop.
His tools stood inside.
Clean.
Returned.
Available.
“I’ll speak to Elias.”
Mary Jane nodded.
She did not smile as though she had won something.
That mattered.
***
His uncle read both letters beside the repaired clock.
Then he turned back to the paragraph about the moon.
For several minutes, he studied it.
Eddie waited.
“What do you know?”
“Less than I’d like.”
“Have you heard of it?”
“Yes.”
Eddie looked at him.
Elias placed the letter on the bench.
“When my father first wrote from Dead End, one of his letters mentioned a red moon.”
“What did he say?”
“That people were gathering beneath it.”
“Living people?”
“He didn’t say.”
His uncle reached toward a drawer, then stopped.
Eddie saw the old impulse.
Find a book.
Find an answer.
Make the warning complete before allowing anyone to act.
Elias withdrew his hand.
“We can ask him in the morning.”
Eddie nodded.
He had begun to understand the value of morning.
Of questions asked while everyone was rested enough to answer.
His uncle looked toward the packed tools.
“You’ve decided.”
“I’ve decided they shouldn’t be left alone.”
“That leaves several ways to help.”
“I know.”
Elias watched him.
Then he nodded.
“Good. We’ll begin with those.”
***
Eddie wrote to Clara that night.
He kept the letter short.
He asked that the three people be given food, water, and someone willing to speak to them without a weapon in hand.
He asked for their names.
He asked whether anyone was injured.
Then he wrote that he and Mary Jane intended to come.
He made no promise to explain what had happened.
He knew what such promises could cost.
Before sealing the envelope, he added one sentence.
*Please tell them that being frightened does not make them dangerous.*
He read it again.
Then sealed it.
***
Far to the west, Clara Mercer sat outside the locked stable with a bowl cooling in her lap.
The old man inside had eaten a little.
The woman had asked again about her son.
The freight driver sat near the door, listening whenever footsteps passed.
Clara kept talking.
About the boardinghouse.
The weather.
A fence repaired badly enough that her hens had begun treating it as a suggestion.
Sometimes someone inside answered.
Sometimes they only listened.
Above the roofs of Mercy, the moon burned a deep, steady red.
Clara did not look at it.
At the end of the street, beyond the last lantern, a dog began to bark.
Then another.
Inside the stable, the freight driver stood.
“What is it?” Clara asked.
He came closer to the crack between the doors.
For a moment, she thought he was looking at the moon.
Then she heard footsteps on the road beyond town.
Slow.
Uneven.
More than one person.
The woman inside rose from her blanket.
The old man whispered something Clara could not hear.
Out beyond the lanterns, a voice called into the street.
“Is there somewhere we can stay?”
Clara set down the bowl.
She looked at the lock.
Then at the key the marshal had left with her until dawn.
For a long moment, she stood between the people inside and the people coming up the road.
Then she opened the door.
Hello World!!! 2