After a two-week duel with the death flu that's been going around, I'm back! If not as good as new. But I'm upright, and getting my stalls cleaned without help (thank you, Mom!), so that counts for something.
If Chapter Sixteen was a line crossing, then Chapter Seventeen is the tipping point. Once could be considered an indiscretion, but twice is a decision, and now there's no going back.
We start at Green Hills, the Dartmoor Inc. nursery. Obviously, as the author, I know what lies ahead, and I know that Carter will end up being a loyal and respected member of the club, and I genuinely like him "as a person," if you will.
But Ava takes some time to see Carter for who he truly is. Just as her bullies are locked in their prejudices, so too is she. She's lumped Carter in with his friends, but this scene here, where he comes to check on her, and show his caring, proves that was short-sighted of her. Their conversation out by the mulch pits is the start of their friendship.
Personally,
Ava thought Carter should have taken a plastic cafeteria fork to his friend’s
eye in the fifth grade, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in situations like
this.
This line here offers a teasing glimpse of that ferocity of hers that's partly her upbringing, but mostly just hers. Maggie's legacy. In anyone else's mind, it could be an idle statement - people say outlandish things like this all the time without really meaning them. I don't even think Ava, at this point, knows how much she means it in a literal sense.
With Maggie, I talk about her being the soft power in contrast to Ghost's hard power; she's just as brutal, but her methods are clothed in smiles and "bless your heart"s. With Ava, she's the precision, bladed weapon paired with Mercy's brute strength. Mercy has this very natural violent streak, and so does Ava. With Mercy, given the sheer size and strength of him, that violence is a blunt instrument. But Ava can't brawl, and wrestle, and punch her way out of a dangerous situation, so she's always going to use a knife or a gun when it's time to get her hands dirty. Her violence is barbed and bladed, and, on the page, it sounds more wicked than Mercy's, at times.
From the nursery, we hit the road for **Plot Development.**
Re: Tammy's FB question about the designer drugs: I did do a good bit of research. Kids will take literally anything, I fear. In high school, there was a girl sharing her epilepsy pills with her friends. Why, I don't know. But for the purposes of the book, the drug is meant to cause significant harm, and therefore paint the Dogs as villains.
Then back into the good character stuff.
“He’s not the kind of boy
she needs to be dating. Thank God she’s not interested in that kinda thing
yet.” His little smirk across the table said, Not like you, huh?
Maggie forced a smile. Oh, baby, if only you knew.
I'm Maggie in this situation, only less loving. Oh, Ghost, you dumbass.
There's a line in Lord Have Mercy, from Ava to Aidan there at the end, at the St. Louis cathedral, when Ava tells him, paraphrasing here, that "the way I would do absolutely anything for Mercy is the way Mom feels about Dad." That's true, and the whole series bears it out; but in this book, specifically, Maggie's hiding things from him on Ava's behalf. The text never delves too deeply into the emotional toil this subterfuge takes on Maggie, but she handles it more gracefully than most.
(Side note: I see some readers describe the other couples' loves stories as not being as "epic" as Ava and Mercy's, and I'd argue that the sentiment itself is there; the love is every bit as strong. But the two people who love each other are just very different people from Ava and Mercy, and so that love is going to look and sound different.)
Walsh
sat sideways in his chair, facing…God knew what…and sipped his beer, a mostly
silent drinking buddy.
Walshie, you'll always be my favorite.
Sin, Mercy reflected,
came packaged according to severity, to color, to regret. There were those
deep, red sins, all bloody and irretrievable, tasting of murder and betrayal, a
hint of the satanic on the back of the tongue, tickling the throat with fire.
His usual brand of sin, if he was honest.
Then there were the sinuous curves and loops of
silvered, uncertain sin; the kind whose consequences were a dim shadow against
the bright backdrop of the here-and-now. The kind with slow-eating jaws. A
malignant sickness of a sin.
The real meat (ha) of the chapter is, of course, Ava and Mercy.
I say each week how startling it is to go back and see this version of Mercy compared to later-it-the-series Mercy. Fearless Mercy is a vague shadow of his true self. And, like Ava, we won't know until much later just why he sees himself as "warping" her.
Diving
into the swamp with him like this brought up the same old questions; she wanted
to pick at the scab, pry up the boards and find out what dark thing had
happened that made him hate Louisiana. She always asked, and he always dodged
her and sent her off on another topic before she realized what he was doing.
Dee took everything he cared about, and still, there's her voice in the back of his head telling him he's defective and wrong somehow, just like his father; that he doesn't deserve anything good. No other woman could have convinced him to take this kind of leap; it had to be someone he loved completely and unconditionally, and that's Ava.
“Now, Daddy never caught
him, no,” Mercy said, his voice a lullaby. His accent thickened when he told
swamp stories, the Cajun flavor shoveled on in spades. “No one did. But the
story went that Big Son was like a pet gator, and he mighta been too smart to
take a bait, but he’d eat right out of your hand if you fed him. There was this
spot, this shady place in one of the glades, and a deep pool, and you could
find Son there, if you’d a mind to feed him. He’d come up if you called him.
Three rocks in the water, one after the next. It had to be three. The first one
– that coulda been a fish jumping, a frog diving in. The second – after the
second, Son would start listening. He’d think about coming up. And after the
third, there he was. ‘Come get it, you big son of a bitch,’ and he’d swim right
up to you. I heard murderers fed bodies to him, so no one would ever know…”
Mercy's storytelling is one of my absolute favorite elements of the novel, and it's one of the things that I think earns the book its "Southern epic" categorization. Every epic needs a mythological figure. In Mercy's mind, that figure is Big Son. But in Fearless itself, that figure is Mercy.
There are many scenes in Lord Have Mercy that I would consider favorites, that I really enjoyed getting to write. But the scene I'm proudest of is the one that brings the above quote full circle, when Mercy, and his fillette, and his son, and his brothers are all on the dock, and Colin gets the honor of doing the calling this time. If you know, you know.
