Have Mercy (Have a Life #1)

by Maddy Wells

  “Come on,” I said. I waved the basket at him and he puffed himself up and pecked my arm.

  I was definitely not in the mood for this. I put the basket down, got up on my toes and flapped my arms and shouted “Stop It! Stop It!” until he backed down.

  The coop was a straw filled smelly room with shelves three high along the walls. Hens sat in their nests on the shelves, facing out. I approached the closest one and lifted her to one side to collect her egg. She bit me. “Ouch!” I said. She followed me with her little yellow eyes, head bobbing. I reached under her from the other side and she bit me again. Maybe this was a particularly mean chicken. I walked down the row a couple of hens and got bitten again. On the bottom shelf were two blue eggs in an empty nest. That’s probably how you did it. You waited until they went outside to go to the bathroom. I bent to pick them up and the rooster jumped on my back, taking vicious bites of my neck. I screamed, shook him off, kicked hens that were swarming at my feet out of the way and ran back to the house with two blue eggs in my basket.

  I showed Jonah where the hens bit me. “Your chickens are mean!”

  “Why didn’t you wear the gloves?” he asked.

  The gloves?

  “I only got two,” I said, sheepishly.

  “Don’t worry. Zina is meaner than any chicken.” He laughed. “She’ll get them later.”

  Jonah cracked the eggs into a bowl. “There’s nothing like free range eggs. Wait till you taste this omelet.”

  Too Hot to Handle was blaring from the living room. I wondered who Jonah’s metal head friend was and I thought how The Griffin would laugh if he could see me. Wait till I told him!

  “I love this group,” I said.

  “Not crazy about The Griffin,” Jonah said.

  “Well, I think The Griffin is really hot.” I knew I sounded like a punk girl but I had to say something.

  Jonah laughed. “You don’t look like a metal head. Personally, I think he’s a clown.”

  “A clown!”

  “Prancing around in that stupid outfit. Jesus, how old is he?”

  “Old is Neil Young,” Tim said.

  “He’s a perfect example of what I was talking about. If you spend three quarters of your life in a silly clown suit, you’re a clown, aren’t you?”

  “He’s a performer,” Tim said. “I don’t like metal that much either”—surprise to me—“but he’s one of the best at it and his bass player is as good as anyone in rock.”

  “Perhaps,” Jonah said. “We’ll talk more later. Both of you finish your breakfast. It’s past seven. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”

  I knew he didn’t mean to be insulting. He thought I was eighteen-year old Darcy Somebody, but almost-sixteen-year-old Mercy O’Reilly could barely swallow a bite of egg.

  Chapter 37

  I quickly found out what “having a busy day ahead of us” meant.

  The reclusive Zina made her entrance into the kitchen. She was six feet tall and a size two at most with long curly blond hair bound in a scrunchy at the top of her head, every tumbling tendril looking as if it lay precisely as planned on a blueprint. The glare of her blue-eyed blondness made me squint. She was wearing a Japanese robe barely closed because, I mean, why bother tying it? I could hardly look at her I was so envious. Tim, I noticed, wasn’t having the same problem.

  Jonah told us she was a Ukrainian ex-model who had left that business to do something meaningful with her life, which ended up being investing in him. She took care of the finances, so Tim and I would have to talk to her about paying for the cooking school. “I’m the artistic side, she’s the business side” he said, pointing heart to head.

  “I’ll take care of this… Karl,” I said.

  “You sure? Because I don’t mind doing the logistics,” Tim said.

  I had the hundred from Kirby. “I’m paying. Remember?” I said. Tim was mesmerized but snapped out of it and followed Jonah out of the kitchen, leaving me alone with Zina who ignored me as she pinched some brown twigs into a tea pot and poured hot water over them.

  “We didn’t sign up on the web or anything,” I said. ”But I have the tuition.”

  Zina poured her tea as deliberately as if she were performing a private tea ceremony. “At this late date we only take cash,” she said, finally looking at me. She licked her front teeth, took a sip, fixed her incredible blue eyes on me then said, “How old are you anyway?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Bullshit.” She had a deep voice with an accent.

  “No, really….” I could feel the air leaving my body.

  “I don’t give a damn, mind you,” she said. “As long as you’re not running from something. We get that sometimes. I don’t want the school implicated in anything illegal, cause then immigration starts swarming all over the place, asking for papers and all that bullshit.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, are you? Implicated in anything illegal?”

  “I don’t think so. Not that I know of.” She was like kryptonite. The skin of eighteen year old Darcy peeled off like a snake’s and went slithering under the stove. “I mean, my mother….”

  “Your mother what?”

  “She’s in trouble.”

  “Drugs?”

  I paused, considering. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “And you?”

  “Of course not! It’s why I ran away.”

  “I can deal with that. I ran away from a bad situation, too.”

  “No kidding.” Zina looked like the type who caused bad situations then walked away from them without cleaning up the mess. Like someone else I knew.

  She finished her cup of tea, rubbing her finger over the fine blond hairs on her upper lip.

  “And exactly how are you going to pay?” she asked. “The tuition is five hundred dollars each person a week.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s a business, not the county home for orphans.”

  Which made me wince.

  “Look,” I said, “I can do dishes or clean the… hen house,” although I actually couldn’t see that happening, “And wait, I’m good at doing laundry. I’m practically a professional at that.”

  She frowned.

  “Captain Kirby said sometimes you let girls do that.”

  “Captain Kirby is your friend? Okay, we’ll try you out in the berry patch.”

  Which is how I ended up weeding rows of strawberries and getting a sunburn. Here’s the thing about organic farms—they don’t use pesticides or fungicides or herbicides or bug zappers or anything that’s not authentic, so they have lots of weeds not to mention half of the leaves and fruit are eaten by birds and bugs and ground hogs. It was definitely not the tidy rows of whatever I saw growing on the way in yesterday. Zina told me those were Amish farms.

  “They look authentic but they pour the same crap on their crops the corporate farms do,” she said disdainfully. “I don’t know how anyone can eat that garbage.” I pretended to agree,

  although the truth was that the Amish fields looked a heck of a lot better than Jonah’s. She and Kirby must meet for tea regularly.

  “Their filthy chemicals leach into our garden.” She made a face. “It can’t be helped.”

  Not enough of them, in my humble opinion.

  A ground hog followed me all morning, eating the fruit which I thoughtfully exposed for him plucking weeds. When Jonah came out to the field to check on me I pointed to the ground hog who was lazing a half dozen rows away waiting for a fifth breakfast. Jonah trotted back to the mill and returned with a chunk of cantaloupe which he handed me, telling me not to eat it. He went to a tool shed and returned with a contraption called a Havahart Trap. He explained that he’d been forced to trap ground hogs because a reporter from Organic Matters Magazine was sitting interviewing Zina on the kitchen porch when he dispatched a groundhog with a shot to its head from his 22. rifle. The reporter freaked, and since then for PR purposes he would trap the pests, drive them a few miles away and rel
ease them. He even filmed himself doing this and sent the video to the Organic Matters reporter who then wrote a feature piece about Jonah’s quest for perfect authenticity. He put the Havahart on the ground, put the cantaloupe in the back of it, and we retreated to the kitchen porch to watch. After ten minutes of poaching strawberries and suspicious sniffing the ground hog went through the trap door which snapped shut behind it.

  “Just like The Hotel California,” Jonah said. “Want to come along for the ride?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll stop in Kutztown on the way back—for supplies—so it won’t be a total waste of time.”

  I stumbled on the way out of the field. “Give me your hand,” he said and led me to his pickup. He threw the trap in the back and motioned for me to hop in. I saw Zina watching us from the porch.

  “Where’s…my boyfriend?” I asked loudly.

  “Karl’s milking the goats.”

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Goat milk molecules are easier to digest than mother’s milk.” He waved to Zina and off we went, Jonah spouting the glories of goat milk.

  We dumped the ground hog a mile away, drove to Kutztown, and were back in less than an hour. So much for playing hooky. But instead of exiling me to the strawberry field, Jonah came with me and showed me how to dig in with a pitch fork to get the weeds by the roots so they wouldn’t grow back and explained the obvious, which was that strawberries ready to pick were a deep lipstick red. He ate some as we worked, telling me to do the same. “That’s what they’re here for,” he said.

  We worked in tandem for a couple of hours and I relaxed into the pace he set, and after we filled a 25 pound bucket he got a dipper of water from the rain barrel which he shared with me.

  “This feels pretty good, you know?” I said surprised.

  “I wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t,” he said.

  The sun was hot but the air was still spring cool. My body hurt from the bending and lifting, but it was a good hurt. I hadn’t felt the compulsion to update my boxes since Tim saved me from the greenhead flies. Was that just last night? So much was happening right now. Strawberries and weeds and ground hogs and blue sky, hot sun and cool rain water. Everything was new, not the same old same old.

  After we filled another bucket, Jonah stuck my pitch fork in the ground and we walked back to the mill for lunch. Another ground hog ran past the hen house and into the strawberry patch.

  “You think he found his way back here already?” I said.

  “Not the same guy,” he said. “Younger. Maybe one of his children. I’ll deal with him later.”

  “You must waste a lot of gas taking them for rides,” I said.

  “The people who make me famous live in cities and think nature is like a Disney movie and I do what I have to do to keep them happy.” He made an angelic face and I laughed.

  “Thank you for letting us stay, Jonah,” I said as we were washing up at a trough under the porch.

  “I had to leave a kind of bad situation in a hurry.”

  “I figured.” He held out his hand and pulled me up the stairs. “You kids’ll work it out. And call me JW. It’s easier.” I smiled at him. I was definitely wrong about him. I liked him and I felt really sorry that Tim and I had lied about who we were because you couldn’t start a friendship with lies. And I thought now that I could probably learn stuff from him like from Mr. Dow. A thousand questions were churning in my head, like for instance whether gimmicks like the berets I wanted Have Mercy to wear or The Griffin’s costume meant you couldn’t be authentic. But before I could ask anything, we were facing Zina on the porch and she didn’t look happy.

  Jonah dropped my hand, pecked Zina on the cheek and went into the kitchen, whistling.

  Zina stuck her foot in front of me.

  A sucker-punch happens to you when you’re so dazzled with your shiny self that you don’t see a smack-down coming.

  “What is it, Zina? Is something wrong?”

  “I saw you two out in the field.”

  “Yeah. You told me to weed the strawberries. Jonah was teaching me how to do it.”

  “There’s only one thing I don’t tolerate around here,” Zina said. “I don’t care about your druggie mommy or that asinine friend of yours who came into the mill three times this morning so he could moon at me.”

  “Hey!” I said.

  “I just better not hear you’re hot for teacher.”

  Chapter 38

  Six other students arrived late in the afternoon. While they were in the barn getting unpacked, I helped Jonah get a tray of sandwiches together which Tim delivered. After we sent the sandwiches over, Jonah made us something he called “amuse bouche” from leftovers

  in the refrigerator and Zina went to bed with a migraine. Jonah and Tim were arguing about what was more important the woofers or the guitar connected to them, and I was looking at the surrounding landscape through Zina’s noose when Captain Kirby pulled up in front of the mill in her mother’s van. I ran down to meet her.

  “I am so so so so so glad to see you,” I said, hugging her.

  “I couldn’t leave right away, sorry Mercy,” Captain Kirby said. “I got here as fast as I could.”

  We went upstairs. Jonah and Tim had put on head phones. They both waved at Captain Kirby.

  “Doesn’t your mom need the van?” I asked.

  “Naw. She’s staying at your house, by the way. I knew you’d be cool with it. An empty house should never go to waste, don’t you think? I’ll clear her out before your mom gets back. Don’t worry.”

  Before Jane gets back. I had been calling the court house from my window seat all afternoon. All I got was a confusing vectoring system and voice mail boxes that I’m sure no one ever retrieved messages from, although I left messages on all of them, saying I was Jane’s sister in case someone was looking for me so I wouldn’t leave a trail. At the end of two hours of calls, I had no idea what Jane’s status was, when her trial was going to be, or anything.

  “I’m Darcy now, by the way,” I told Kirby.

  “Got it. Who’s he?” She pointed to Tim.

  “Karl.”

  “That was smart,” she said. “I got caught once because I used my real name.”

  One of the new students, a girl as tall as Zina, joined us in the living room. Her jet dyed hair had a giant blue streak in it and was pulled into two braids that reached her waist. She wore a short calico cotton dress that showed her long legs and white anklet socks under patent leather Mary Janes. I don’t get women who dress like little girls as if girlhood was this precious time, not a stage in your life to be gotten through as quickly as possible. Or maybe it was supposed to be ironic or something to be a six foot tall woman pretending she hasn’t reached puberty. Anyway, she had a proprietary air like she’d been at the mill before. She plopped down next to Jonah. He lifted off his headphones long enough to give her a kiss on the cheek and tug a braid. No wonder Zina got migraines.

  Satisfied that she had staked her claim to Jonah, she turned her attention to us.

  “Hi Janet,” she said to Captain Kirby.

  Captain Kirby grunted.

  “I’m Clarisse,” she said to me.

  “Clarisse?” I couldn’t help blurting out. Why did groupies always have odd names?

  Captain Kirby laughed.

  The girl squinted at me. “Do I know you?”

  “I can’t imagine from where,” I said.

  “No, really. I know you. You live in Milltown, don’t you?”

  “I’m from Akron. It’s in Ohio.”

  “Okay.”

  Bored with me, Clarisse went to the turntable, removed what was playing, put on a new record and started playing with the controls.

  “Jesus,” Jonah yelled, yanking off his headphones. “Turn it down, Clarisse.”

  Clarisse unplugged Jonah’s headphones and Jump Naked was suddenly bouncing off the walls. She shimmied toward Jonah and stuck her tongue out at him. He shook his
head and laughed. So this was his metal head friend. I could see an evening stretching out in front of us where we had to watch Clarisse dance, watch Clarisse be cute, just watch Clarisse.

  I walked over to Tim and whispered in his ear. “I want to go to bed. I’m tired from all that weeding and stuff.”

  “You sure?” he asked. “It’s still early.”

  “It’s all this fresh air, you know?” I put my hands on my hips and leaned backwards to stretch my back. The truth was that I was worried that Clarisse recognized me, because I definitely recognized her. She was in the Trap when The Griffin came last week. I faked a giant yawn and shook my head like a wet dog.

  “I’ll see you later. I’m not ready to turn in yet,” Tim said.

  “Sure.”

  I wandered over to the barn kind of enjoying the end of day sky. Yeah, there were bugs, and snakes were probably just waiting for dark, but if you didn’t obsess about things that could bite you, if you just let your skin tingle from the cool air kissing it and watched the sun sneak away to China or wherever, you saw that Jonah was definitely on to something. I was thinking that every time I pictured Milltown I saw a black and white photograph when a tap on my shoulder made me jump.

  “Hey,” Captain Kirby said.

  “Oh, hey.”

  “I couldn’t take the Clarisse show any more either,” she said. “I know her from last year. People who need that much attention make my head hurt, you know?”

  “Yeah, what’s with the little girl play clothes?” I asked.

  “She’s trying to fool us so we don’t notice her vampire fangs. She knows I don’t like her so she makes a point of vamping when I’m looking.”

  I laughed. “So, does she want to be a chef, or what?”

  “Naw. Being around JW gets her off because he’s famous. That’s the way she gets her nachas.”

  “Nachas?”

  “Jewish slang for pleasure.”

  “You’re Jewish?” There were maybe four or five Jewish families in Milltown and the kids had a club at the high school called a Hillel that met in the library once a month, plotting to get extra holidays off, I always thought.