The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The shush of dried yellow pine needles, the hush of brushed homespun on pine boughs came to me long before I saw her. Through some trick of the mountain the sound shuffled up from deep in the forest, whispering at the edges of creek sound because it was of such different nature, and I listened with my head cocked, my breath quickening. I told myself it might be a ground sparrow feeding in the fallen needles and pinecones, because her step was so light, but the soft rustling came steadily on toward the place where the trees opened to the water, until I knew it was her.

  Oh, I itched for Papa’s gun then, my hands nearly hurt with it. I was excited because it was so much like hunting—crouched, hiding, waiting the way you must do: watching downwind in stillness for the single creature you’ve watched for since first light, and the creature comes and your complete soul and breath focus upon it, and all there is in the world at that moment is you drawing aim on it to kill it, or not kill it if your aim is not right, and so there is always that turning moment, and all I felt at first, watching her dark shoulders and light headwrap emerge from the darker space between the trees, was that excitement and the ache in my hands. She walked straight up tall. She did not have her baby. She stepped on the track like a doe placing its careful foot so, and just so, and she did not look down at where her foot stepped but kept her neck and eyes and shoulders tilted up a little so she could see straight ahead up the track. I was above her on the mountain maybe fifty yards, and still she looked tall, and something in that woke me and scared me and also made me mad. I could not hear the whisper of her skirts now for the gurgling of the water, but I could see her shoulders rise and fall with her hard breathing on the climb in the gray mist, and it was that, the rise and fall of living breath beneath dark blueblack knitting, that made her real beyond real, beyond quarry, and I wanted to run.

  It came on me that I was alone with the nigger witch woman in the mist on the mountain, that she could turn in any way her power upon me and I had not even my sister or my family’s things or my mama’s trunk to protect me, that I could not even scream in time to help myself because she was now but a few dozen yards below me, and I could not run because she would see me and rise up to swoop down upon me, and I could do nothing but hold myself stiller than still, not even to breathe. I watched her. On toward me she came, and still more toward the salvation pile of oak leaves. Nearer her foot stepped, now the other, nearer, nearer still. I cursed myself for stupid, more stupid than to wash quilts in the short damp days of autumn, to allow so much to chance. Her foot could so lightly and easily step over the little pile of oak leaves.

  The iron trigger sounded ping, I heard it in the stillness, I did so, less than a fraction of an iota of a half breath of a second before the trap snapped loud once —snaak!— like the jaws of a snapper and the woman let out a terrible yell. Only that once she yelled out, one long low deep gut-scratching holler, and she dropped straight down like a rock, and then she was still. The crows and jaybirds were silent. The creek even it seemed in that moment hushed up, and all I could hear was a throbbing like the beat of blood in my ears. Without thinking, I don’t know why, I still don’t, I rushed from my hiding place beneath the hickory to where she sat on the rocky dirt track. I can’t tell you what I meant to do, wrestle her down or help her or make sure she stayed hushed so Papa would not come—I don’t know even if I had thoughts to do anything—but I covered those few steps over rocks and around brush in no time, and when I got there I stood above her on the track and just stared.

  Her skirts were pulled up, her one bare brown leg sprawled out straight, the other bent toward her chest at the knee, and she held her right foot in her two hands. Blood poured from between her fingers and ran down off her wrists, and it was red, yes, but showed not so red against the dark of her skin. Where it looked red was where it fell on the dirt track. She looked up at me. Her face showed nothing. She didn’t look scared, mad, hurt, surprised, nothing, she just looked up at me and matched me stare for stare. I could smell her blood then above the earth smell of damp leaves. I could smell rust. My mouth swelled up dry as cotton and I couldn’t swallow. Everything rushed in me, time and my own blood and fear and sorrow, how I felt when I watched Papa smash open a mud turtle’s shell one time with his hammer, beating it, soft thud and crack, till it died, because it ate the bait from his trot line—only the woman was not dead but just bleeding, and I knelt down beside her like this.

  I said, “My papa says for you to quit.”

  She stared at me a moment and then her eyes and attention dropped away as if my coming and kneeling and talking was no more interesting than the lighting of a moth that attracted her notice for a wing beat and then disappeared. She pulled a hand away from her foot and lifted her skirt edge and I could see all the way up her thigh, hard and dark and smooth as a buckeye, and she pressed the dust-colored homespun against the sole of her foot. I saw then that the trap had not caught her but bit her, had made a deep bloody gash in the back of the heel, and the bottom of her foot was lighter than the dark brown of the top part, and there were dark fissures and cracks all along the ridged tannish edge of her heel. I did not think about her being barefoot in November any more than you think about a deer or squirrel or rabbit going barefoot, but I did think then for some reason how tough her feet must be, like saddle leather, to walk all the time on those little sharp stones on the track. Her skirt soaked up red like a woman’s blood rags, and when she pulled it back and dabbed a new piece I could see the bite from the trap was a deep triangle the same shape as the jaw’s tooth, and the wedge gouged out of her skin was pale pink, and then it filled up red, and the red spilled out over and began to drip on the ground.

  I slid my eyes away, up toward the rim of the hogback, where the sun had climbed over but had not the strength to do more than burn a bright coin in the day mist, and then I looked down at the matted tumble of leaves on the track. I did not care to witness further the little chunk of gouged flesh. I carried on talking, squatting on the track beside her, paying no more mind to her bleeding than you do to the wounds in a squirrel you are fixing to skin.

  I said, “My papa said for me to tell you to quit. He don’t aim for you to come up to our place not even one more time.” I picked up a stick and dug in the damp leaves. “My papa wants to know what way you been witching my sister.” I didn’t look at her but stirred the leaves like cornmeal mush bubbling. “My papa wants to know what you aim to do with her. You ain’t aiming to turn her into a nigger, are you?’Cause if you are, my papa says we’ll just have to kill you. Here, this little trap here this morning”—I looked around for the trap, but I didn’t see it—“that’s just a warning. We didn’t even aim to do no more than that,” and I pointed with my stick to her foot, but I still didn’t look at her. I went back to stirring leaves and turned up a slug big around as my thumb and three times longer. I poked its rubbery back awhile, and the slug shrank up fatter and shorter and got real still. I jabbed its back, but the skin rolled. I kept jabbing until the stick went through finally, and I picked up the speared slug and flung it off the end of the stick toward the water. “Go on back down the mountain, hear?” I said. “Don’t come back tomorrow. And don’t you try witching her from down yonder, because . . .” and I could not think of a good threat, so I coughed the words down into faded nothing and smeared my stick around some more in the leaves. I started again. “My papa said for me to tell you he’s going to take the muzzle loader after you next time. You hear?”

  She made no more response than a tree stump.

  “My papa said,” I said, and looked at her quickly, then back down at the leaves, and went back to poking them with my slime-smeared dirty stick. I shifted my weight on my haunches, scooted around some, still crouched and half sitting, and looked out over the creek. She was making me mad. “You hear?” Still she didn’t answer me, and I was getting madder and madder, so I had to then, no matter the danger, I had to look at her.

  Her eyes were straight on me. They were not white circles like
moon rings but dark brown like blackstrap gone solid, nearly black. Her lips were the same dusk color as her baby’s, the same smooth, the same big, they had the same little hitched-in dip at the top of them, but they were clamped tight over her teeth, you could see it, and beneath her skin, all along her jaw and under her eyes, the muscles shook. She held the skirt to her foot and looked at me, silent, and I could see tiny, tiny bumps along the broad, smooth side of her nose, her nostrils were flared wide open like a horse running, and all was different and changed in the gray daylight that bronzed the oak leaves and turned the dead pine needles bright orange in the track where they lay. The skin on the woman’s face was not dark only but the color of deep rich cherrywood like the chifforobe Uncle Neeley made Mama, only it did not look hard like cherrywood but warm and smooth and soft, and I wanted to touch it. The feeling was strong in me, I knew she was witching me, same as she witched Lyda, but I could not make it stop. My hand just moved without my will or say-so, dropped the stick I was holding, and reached up toward her face.

  The woman flinched and fell back like I’d hit her.

  I heard a little chink sound and her shawl fell back open and her own hand came up in front of her face—this all in one movement, one moment—and I saw the pulse beating in her throat. She’d let go of her foot and it was bleeding all over the brown leaves in the pathway, and I saw then the trap lying snapped shut on the leaves where her skirts were, with a little red piece of her flesh in its mouth.

  I don’t know what happened.

  She was too big then, too big on the pathway, she flinched away from me, huge, a grown-up, falling back away from me. She scared me worse than anything and I wanted to throttle her, I wanted to put my hands on her neck and choke her, and I wanted to run. I wanted to make her, make her, I was going to make her tell me, though I did not know what it was but I knew it was something, and I suddenly realized I was standing, that it was me taller than her now, but she did not flinch again nor look up but held herself still as God’s breath, her foot bleeding, and she looked at the water gurgling and rushing down the hill.

  I said, “How you been witching my sister? Tell me how you witch her! How?”

  She said, “You talking ’bout something you got no knowledge nor notion,” and it was like a sigh when she said it, a sough of wind, an exhalation. No eyeblink, no rise or fall in her voice sound, she did not look at me, I was not even sure for a moment if I heard it, and she went on like she was talking to the air or rush of water. “I don’t ’spire to come up here,” she said. “It ain’t me or my mind. You tell him. Somebody have to tell him—he ain’t going to allow me to just quit.”

  “Who? Who ain’t going to allow you?”

  But I already knew who it was, and I knew why too, because I saw him, what he did, his yellow mustache flecked wet and moving like a hump of yellow caterpillar and her skin beneath like the black breathing mound beneath the lips of my sister, and I could see it but I didn’t have words for it because it was too dark and too secret, what I could not know and should not, but I asked anyhow, and it may be I whispered, I believe I did whisper, there in the washing creek sound, because you cannot speak such secrets in daylight, but I asked it to the smoked and speaking air because the words had already been thought, I said, “How come he won’t let you?”

  She looked straight at me. Her face muscles shook again, or had never quit maybe, I wasn’t watching, but when she looked at me I could see the skin spasm and tremble the way mule flesh ripples to twitch off biting flies.

  “Hunh,” she said. “What you think? Fool don’t want my milk to dry up.”

  She looked back out at the water and went on in the same monotony as if she’d never stopped. “Somebody have to tell him,” she said, and this time she shrugged her shoulders. “Tha’s all, I told you, I done did all I could, suit me plenty fine never have to come climb this damn mountain one single more morning, child like to bite me to pieces anyhow, she plenty big,” and she went on sort of muttering so, her voice mostly even but every now and then lilting a bit in the air, and then she’d give that little shrug, and it was just how it was on the morning in the lean-to, like she was not aware in her full self that I was there. She’d tricked me with her blood and gouged flesh, I thought, because she could not feel anything and talk lightly so, and I thought it was because she was a witch woman that she did not cry or rail or scream with her flesh bit and bleeding, and her acting like she didn’t much know it or care, and then I thought of the white man with the yellow mustache and my stomach pitched up sick, and the urge was coming on me again to choke her and make her, and also the fear. The woman’s eyes lit like she’d just thought of something, but she went on looking at the water and her voice went on in the same even sound. “Your daddy got booklearning. He know how to write.”

  “Papa don’t know,” I said, my fists and mouth clenching. It was rising bad in me. “I know.”

  She nodded. “That be all right then. You write it,” she said. “Have your daddy to sign.” She nodded and nodded, like she was agreeing with her own self. “Tell him to give it to Miz Misely out his own hand. Make sure she say that, she have to see to it the doctor know that, it come right out of y’all’s hand,” and the woman carried on nodding to herself, looking out over the water. It was that word again, doctor, and it jumped stinging at me across the sparkling air, because the doctor was the white man and he was not dead, and I knew it and had known it and only just then remembered. “No sense to come down and talk direct to him,” she was saying. “I seen him, he’d talk the skin off a lizard, he might talk y’all back.”

  “Who is he?” and this I know I whispered, because I heard my own s sound like her s sound sighing in the air, and the woman did not answer, and I said it louder, and it was a threat then, my fists balled so tight the nail stubs stabbed my palm. “Who is he? What kind of doctor?”

  Never looked at me, her eyes only to the water, but I could feel it, I knew it, she knew I was there. It was to me she told it, not the water, not the damp air. She said, “Hunh. No kind of doctor. He ain’t no kind of doctor, he lie on that how he lie on everything, but they all call him that.” She went on talking, and all she told me I remembered from the witchery inside the lean-to, I saw the pictures unfolding, and I could not stop them coming. She said, “He tell my mama he a doctor when she leaved me on the back porch after Ivy got drownded, after they chased and drownded my sister for sport pleasure down home.” And I saw the girl, her skin red as copper, jump from a yellow clay bank into brown water, saw her reach for the knotted rope thick as a fist, saw the water carry her down, shining, like a scuffed penny. “My mama could not survive it, she just want to die, she give me to him to keep me, carry me up on the back porch, we bofe of us crying, and then she quit when he come out the back door with the missus behind him—” And I saw the white man pull the watch fob from his pocket and look at it and click it shut, slide it into the slit of pocket at the side of his suspender clasp. “He say he a doctor, he going to pay me, and oh yes, he do. Pay me with coat hangers and tin scrap, I been saving ’em and selling ’em going on ’leven years, ain’t never going to pay back what they feed me, what they say my children eat.”

  She was quiet then, looking at the water, looking, her foot bleeding, whispering, and what she told me next I remembered, backwards, unrolling, though I didn’t know I remembered until the telling, she said, “Step out the back door first morning like God, and her behind him, and I knowed it right then—”

  The mystery came hard on me, too hard, so that I smelled the terrible smell, like old fish and rank tobacco, I saw the white man step onto the porch with his yellow mustache, his pale eyes, and I knew it was going to be him that hurt me, the missus no worse than any, I seen her before, she nervous and watchful, mouth drawed down tight like green ’simmons sometime, but it going to be him with his mustache like a yella caterpillar and ice eyes, how he crackin his knuckles, watching with ice eyes, and hungry, so the missus watch too, but her watching just s
ame old like any old white kind of watching, it going to be him and them long big-knuckle fingers of his the way they feel around in that pipe bowl, pokin and proddin, his eyes like his fingers—

  “Stop,” I said. “Stop it,” because I did not know what it was, I didn’t want to remember, but she wouldn’t quit it, until I cried out in a loud voice, “Stop!”

  The woman turned her head slow in the smoked air. She looked up at me. I don’t believe she was dying, to this day I do not, but she stared at me in the way the dying stare at the living, looked at me and through me, both at the same time, like I was a ghost child, a spirit, a wisp of nothing in the air. She shut her mouth and looked back out over the water, completely silent, her foot bleeding like a pig’s throat all over the track. In a little bit she looked down and it was like she just then noticed it, like the foot didn’t belong to her but was just some strange something she spied on the track. She reached a hand down along her leg and wrapped her fingers around the ankle, pulled the foot toward her, turned it heel-up and looked at it and went back to dabbing blood.

  That was what I could not abide. Don’t you see? She’d quit me. I felt how she quit me, and me here the one who’d hidden by a hickory to catch her, who’d laid out the trap and had caught her and wounded her, I don’t care if her whole foot wasn’t wedged in, and me here remembering, remembering, and she looked at me and through me and away from me in such way that I was no more than a day moth nor nothing and oh, oh, the anger swelled up bad. I had no fear then, I just yelled at her, I said, “It weren’t Papa, it was me, nigger, me! Matt! I did that!” and I waved my hands at her foot, and I wanted to grab it and shake it but I would not touch her because I knew what a danger it was to touch that dark skin. “You quit it with witching me!” I screamed so my throat stripped. “You quit! Don’t you be telling me to write nothing, nigger, I won’t write nothing. I got one thing to say only: You go give suck to your own baby. You leave mine alone. Don’t you come back, hear? You can’t anyhow, because we’re leaving tomorrow, we’re going to Eye Tee and you can’t stop us nor nobody and I aim to tell you to quit it with your witchery, you hear me? You quit it with my sister, she’s coming with us to Eye Tee,” I said. “Give her back!”