The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  She looked up at me and I knew I was changed then, I could see it in her, and I could feel it in my belly, this change in me, though I held nothing, my hands were empty, but I had something to hurt her with and I did not know what it was. Her eyes flicked up the mountain along the track, to the water on one side, the scrub brush on the other, just wherever she could look without turning her head. I thought she was looking for a place to jump up and run to, and I prepared myself to grab her if she tried to do so, but she did not tense up and gather herself nor let go of the awkward way she held her foot. She was hunked down in herself, holding still and tough like she meant to disappear, same as that slug thought it could hide from me by hunking itself short and fat. Her eyes were not on me but darting all around. Pretty quick she began to talk, and her voice too was shrunk down, a low shushing whisper, and I cannot explain to you what was in it except it was begging and not begging, and it meant to pull me in next to her and at the same time it wanted to melt.

  “Cain’t,” she whispered. “You got to tell him, some white person have to tell him, he ain’t going to believe me, I cain’t suck my baby no more, doctor ain’t going to let me quit with y’all’s baby, he got to have that milk, he a pig for it, he ain’t going to let me quit, beat me to death with them coat hangers first, I don’t care, but he beat my children worse with his fists. Missy, somebody have to tell him. He kilt my baby, he going to kill—” And then she stopped. She looked up at me in the way that she saw me, changed as I was, and her voice feathered up high and light. “I ain’t saying nothing against him, missy, he never meant to, just how he shook him, that’s all, snap back his neck, my baby died perfect, all at once, his little soul snap out sudden, quick like you snap your fingers, that’s how babies do, they souls too entirely fragile, they don’t hang on to life for nothing, some of ’em, mine don’t . . .” and her voice trailed off. Then a sound came, it started low and growling in her throat, like a hurt dog, and just in an instant the growl went deeper, and deeper, sank down to a low, wrenching moan somewhere deep in her gut, and then it was worse even, a deep, terrible groaning, like her breath was stopped, like the very flesh was being torn loose from inside her belly.

  I knew that sound. While I watched and listened I could not recall what it was, could not place it in the belly of my father in the hot circle of sunlight, but the sound wrenched me, tore open from me like it came out my own belly, and I thought, That sound don’t belong to HER, it ain’t HERS! I raised up and hit her with both fists all around her headwrap and hunked shoulders. I flailed at her like you’d beat a rug, and I don’t know what she did then, I don’t, except I know she didn’t fight me, and I believe she turned her back and shoulders to me, because I felt my fists pound soft on the wool shawl and it made that hollow back-beating sound, and I hit her head where her ears were to make them sting, and the bone was hard as stone beneath the knuckled bone of my fingers, and I hit her on the neck and wherever I could find. She hunked and rolled tighter, her soft belly hidden, and I just flew at her with all my rage and hit, and I hit, and I hit, and I was not afraid of her. And then all at once I quit, and my heart was beating so hard, my breath pounded and hurt, and then I was afraid again, but not of her. I was afraid Papa would come, Papa! And so I turned and ran away from her up the mountain toward our place, and I only looked back quick that one time, so fast, and saw her rolled tight in herself, not looking at me but her head turned to the side a little to wait for the next hit, not making that gut sound, her foot bleeding still.

  The track had grown steeper since I’d eased down it in dawn mist, and the fog that had thinned had somehow grown back deep. Wet leaves slipped and slid backwards, branches clawed for me, roots reached out to trip me, stones rolled and skidded sideways beneath the hard edge of my shoes. I could not run fast enough from what lay behind me, and yet, and still—and I don’t know how this happened, because I ran and ran as in a dream and could not get away—yet too soon I heard the children playing in the yard. I stopped. Another turn more and I would be where they could see me. A hundred yards more and I would be back in my home and my life again, and that meant my family, and I could not bear it. I could not look at Papa or hear Lyda or feel Thomas scrambling to climb up in my lap. I couldn’t. I stood still a moment, just waiting a moment, bent over at the waist with my hands on my knees to catch my breath and remember the lies I’d already made up and forgotten which I must tell to Papa and Jonaphrene about where I’d been gone. I was not looking at anything or thinking of anything except trying to call back the words to tell Papa, and I was holding still so around the curve of the track when I heard.

  It was clearer this time, more distinguishable and certain than on the first morning outside the lean-to, though it was not much like singing now, nor even like humming, but it was the same sound, high and thin and beautiful just outside hearing, and it was familiar, I knew it, I recognized it, and it made me sick with longing and sorrow. Hard, hard sick, and I stood crouched so with my hands upon my knees and the world rising behind my eyes, going dark, buzzing, until I heaved, sick to my stomach, and there was nothing to throw up, and I heaved again, but what it was could not be vomited out from inside me. I lay down, there, on the track that had been a road leading us into the mountains, sprawled forth bellydown in the damp dirt and small rocks and leaves.

  It was Jonaphrene found me. Maybe I slept, I don’t know. I know it was much later, deep morning or after, because the sun was warm upon my back, slanting deep. I know when she came my chest still had the shudders that would not stop or slow, that I could not control or push down, and I wanted to push them down, I wanted to make them quit. I did not want Jonaphrene to see. But she did see.

  “Mattie?” she said. I could hear it in her voice, how scared she was. My face was down still, hidden in the hoop of my arms, and I would not look. “Mattie? You hurt?” And she kept crouched there beside me, I could feel her, close, her smell and breathing, her voice small, saying, “Mattie? Mattie?” again and again. Then she touched me, her hand on my back, patting me the way I would pat Thomas to make him go to sleep at night, my little sister patting me like I was the little child, and my chest was shuddering, I couldn’t quit, and it made me mad so that I rolled over and sat up and said, “Leave me alone!”

  But it was too late. My sister was with me already. She was in me. She’d found me and witnessed me, and she would not let go of me, nor could she, because she did not have any choice, none of us did, ever, and so I said to her, furious because I could not make the shudders stop and so the words came out cut and weak and ragged, “Don’t—te-tell—him!”

  She shook her head, her eyes huge, their miraculous color more gray than green then, and she whispered back, solemn, “I won’t.” She never asked a word but just watched me, squatting upon the ground with her skirt in the dirt and her knees high beneath her chin, her arms wrapped around them, her hair haloed out like an angel’s but snarled and dark brown, until I chewed the inside of my jaw hard enough to make the shudders go slow and slower, getting farther between until they were eased almost gone. I felt tired. I felt I could lay back down in the track again and go to sleep forever. Jonaphrene said, “Know what? Papa’s loading the wagon.” She nodded her head. “He is.”

  It took some little while for me to hear her. No, I heard her, but I could not make the words make sense to me, but she went on, chattering, like it was any day or every day, except how big her eyes were, how she never took them off my face.

  “He sent me to fetch you. He’s plenty mad, you better watch out. We ain’t any of us had breakfast and it’s already ’most time for dinner, the woman never come to feed Lyda neither and she’s bawling—hear her? sounds like she’s fixing to bust—and Papa cain’t leave her inside, he’s loading everything in. He went to catch up Delia but she won’t let him, she run off in the brushes and he had to just quit and go to stacking the wagon—I think that’s partly how come him to be so mad. I told him what you told me to tell him, you went hunting muscadine
s, but he don’t care. He might lick you anyhow. I never seen him so mad.”

  Her eyes were big and scared for me, and I turned away, not to see it, because I had enough already to carry for the rest of them. I did not want to be connected up with my sister. I would have pinched her or something, but I just felt too tired. I said, “Did Papa put in Mama’s trunk?”

  She nodded. I went down the list, all I’d made up in my mind to carry with us to Eye Tee, and I felt so bonesick and weary then till I was relieved—but only right then, because later I got mad about it—but right then I was glad Papa was taking up to do all my tasks and chores and last bits of packing like he’d meant to do it all along. I never for one second questioned why he all of a sudden was ready to head on to Eye Tee, right then, on that very same November morning. I believed I’d broken the colored woman’s spell. It was the most natural thing in the world to me, when I stood up finally and brushed myself off and climbed with Jonaphrene the last hundred yards of track to the clearing, to see Thomas’s hands filthy in the cold campfire and his mouth black with soot and Little Jim Dee running through the yard yelling and shooting a stick at Ringo and Ringo chasing him and baying and Lyda shrieking on the pallet and old Sarn nodding in the harness and Papa loading his pickaxe and shovel under the seatbox like it was his own idea.

  The clearing stood empty and full behind us. I saw it when we turned—the rail fence crosshatched useless around bright air and Papa’s grief furniture, the lean-to pulled loose and left tipped broken upon its side. Mama’s bonnet lay crumpled half beneath it, but I didn’t tell. I did not want to say anything to get Papa’s notice. He didn’t lick me—he never licked any of us, only Jim Dee—but he was gruff and disgusted and in a hurry, and it was the same hurry as the night we left Kentucky. We went fast, as fast as we dared to and not run up on the mules’ haunches, going down, me up front beside Papa, holding Lyda, and Thomas bawling inside the wagon, and the wagon creaking and swaying like it would shake apart going down the worn track in the filtering sunlight toward the pine woods.

  This was all the same day.

  I did not see the beaver trap nor the pile of oak leaves nor the bear trap nor the colored woman nor her blood, though I did look, but there was nothing. I had not really expected there would be.

  The pine woods were dark, they rose up around us and bowed closed overhead. Tall. The smell of turpentine stinging. The afternoon sunlight shut off like a light turned out. I was not afraid. My heart was lifted, I was light in my body, the gray weight raised off me even in the darkness of the pine woods because we were going, and the going was the good thing. I crooked my head back, jouncing, trying to hold it steady to look at the brightness of light, the piercing sky, high up through the treetops. The deep part of the woods was only a ways anyhow, as I’d known in my secret heart it would be, if only I’d been able to believe it, because we passed through them and out in a short time, going so fast, the mules clopping like horses, and they were poor, the skin sagging on bones, like us all, even Ringo, but the wagon was light. We were fleeing Satan’s Army and so I carried myself steady, I was glad, holding Lyda, and I did not look back at the children, though their faces swayed and bounced behind me, peeking out. We came then—and this quickly, this no more than a mile past the deep edge of the pine woods—to the Misely place.

  I knew it from afar off, though I’d never seen it, because even from a way up the track I could see the blond Misely dozen-or-more children running, sitting, standing, leaning all about the porch and the dogtrot and the yard. We came fast. Papa stopped the team and got down to go speak to the man Misely. The woman Misely came out one of the doors then, her hands in her apron. She came and stood on the ground close by the wagon, frowning up, her eyes on the baby. Lyda was not crying but sitting up in my lap, watching, and she liked the going in the wagon, you could tell. She was getting so big then, she was already nearly as big as Thomas, and her hair was coming in.

  The woman said, “Your father sent word on, I guess. It’s better, isn’t it?”

  Frowning, that troubled look upon her, and she went on, her eyes sweeping from Lyda to me to the children’s dirty faces poking out from the wagon flaps, and around again to Lyda, talking to herself.

  “. . . before winter sets in? Your aunt’s waiting for you, I guess you’uns need to get on?”

  Wiping her hand in her apron and frowning in the sunlight and the sun edging down now so the air had that blue November tinge.

  I felt strange. I’d never in my life had a grown-up talk to me in questions. I wanted to go. But I would not, could not, call Papa. It did not matter anyhow, because just in a minute he came on and before he’d finished climbing up hardly, the woman sent one of the boys into the smokehouse and he came running out with a little slab of salt pork, and she took it from him and handed it up. It was slippery when I took it, but I didn’t think to do anything but just take it and hold it. Lyda bent down and put her mouth on it to suck it, her spit running down my wrist and the greasy salt smell stabbing my throat and empty belly.

  Just like Uncle Fay said—and the truth of this galled me, oh, it galled me, for him to be right—it was not so very far. We drove down and down a ways, bumping and shaking, Papa pulling back on the brake to not over-run the mules and at the same time hyahing them on fast. And then not long—it was not the same day, for we left in the deep afternoon and camped on a slope at pure dark, but the next one, late the next morning—we came to a place low on the mountain where the faint two-lane track met up with a deeply rutted, hard-packed wagon road running east and west. We turned onto it, and it snaked low between mountains, going west.

  We are given signs, and we do not know them.

  I was looking at everything, everything, but what I should have. In the beginning I held my head tipped back, looking up. You will not credit it, that I could have forgot sky, but I did so. We lived in those mountains most seven months, and that is all the time it took for my soul to forget sky. And we came down and the world opened out, the mountains peeled back away from us like ripe edges of plum quartered and falling away from the pit, and above us the sky opened, the pale, washed November sky, and all of me lifted toward it. I wanted to shout almost. I wanted to sing. And in that I knew what it was in my mama.

  This part is hard to explain.

  I was not in her, as I had once been in her. I could not be. My mama was dead. But coming down from the mountains I understood what it was in her—and this for the first time, and this in my mind and being, not from inside her as I was on the day she died—I knew the hurt she held in her cavity twisted tight in the dark. The long valley we went through, the sweep and roll and breadth of it, was some like Kentucky, the sky was like Kentucky, and always the moon. I’d forgot even the moon in such little time, because it is not moon that molds night in the mountains—shadows do, and sound, the life of trees and the animals—and so I’d forgot to even know it.

  But no. The moon was mine. I don’t want to misremember.

  It was not the waxing half-moon that made me think of Mama but the escape of gray rolling-away land and farms and fields in the daylight, all mixed in with trees, yes, more trees than back home in Kentucky, but they were unclothed at the approach of winter, and still you could see. The land was settled. It was tamed, mostly. There were farms with smoke rising and crops plowed under to wait through winter, the earth split open and brown. To the north and the south purple mountains humped on the horizon, but near us the grasses in the field were orange and the stumps of bushes dark brown, the daylight gray, the air and distant slopes and sky blue, and the earth, all of it, was blue and gray and brown except for the orange grasses and, dotted on the hills, the deep green of pine, and these were the colors back home in late autumn. The same. My heart pounded so fierce every minute, us going fast and the pain of Mama in me, her sickness for home, and sometimes it would rise up in me a little as if it were my own because this place did look like back home in Kentucky, but it would fade again, because it was not f
or me to long backwards but only Mama. My job was to honor it for her, that was all.

  Four months. She’d been dead four months then. It seemed like forever.

  And I knew, or I believed I knew, that if she’d only lived a little while longer, if we’d just gone on a little longer and not camped in the jagged dark of those mountains, if Papa had listened to Uncle Fay about how it was just over the next hogback and down, or if he had not listened to him about turning south away from Fort Smith to sneak into Eye Tee, or if we’d never left Kentucky, or if only, if only, if only there’d been a doctor, if only Mama had understood we would come down again to opening-out land that was some like Kentucky, if only any one other thing had been different, my mama might could have lived. And I knew, or I believed I knew, that if she’d lived long enough to see sky and fields again and smoke rising, she would have stayed with us. I believed I ought to have been able to tell her, and so the sore of her dying woke up again and I couldn’t stop it or heal it, and us going so fast, and I just held on to Lyda, up front, beside Papa, and looked out around us to open land like I was looking for Mama, like I was being Mama, to look through her eyes, and this is what I was doing and how come I never saw the moon waxing ragged-edged in daylight’s washed skies, or heard the whippoorwills crying at night in almost-winter when they should have been gone, or noticed the red mark like a mask upon Thomas’s face.