The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The men sat as they had sat before, Fayette in the back-turned ladderback, talking, the other tipped against the wall, eyes closed, silent, and the anger and fear multiplied in the woman so that she nearly spat as she said, “Y’all come on and eat now!” She hoisted the crock of buttermilk to pour it.

  “Wash up, Matt,” John said, and grunted a little as he stood his chair down on four legs, unfolded himself slowly, seeming to fill the vaulted room, though he was not a tall man, the force and size of him contained entirely in the bulk of his shoulders as he moved across the room toward the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Jessie blurted. Buttermilk sopped over the snuff glass onto the pine.

  “I’ve got to unhitch the team.” He did not seem to be answering her but speaking to the girl crossing the room alongside him, the top of her head at his elbow. “See to it the children wash up good, and y’all go on and eat. I’ll be in directly.” He paused a moment in the doorway, the girl never yet peeled from his side, the baby big-eyed on her hip, gazing around the room. “Say it’s back up yonder that way?” John asked, and nodded his head in the direction of Fayette’s barn on the little rise behind the house, and his brother proceeded to give him elaborate directions for the simple distance to the barn.

  Jessie thumped the buttermilk crock on the table, dread and anger passing over her in waves laced with loathing for the man who would see to his mules before he would look after the fevered boy on the counterpane. And what could she do? She could not put the sick child out in the cold wagon; she could not make her husband deny his brother—not that she would not, but that she could not, for she had not that strength of will within her, nor that power with him, and so she did what women without power do. “Your food’s getting cold,” she snapped at her husband, the words spliced and drawn as if spat through a sieve; she turned back to the cookstove, hoisted the kettle of water to heat for the dishes, said harshly over her shoulder, “You young’uns sit right where you are. I’ll bring you a plate in a minute,” and proceeded to the remains of her own work and that of her daughters. She heard the log door open, felt the cold enter.

  “No, now, Mattie, I’ll take care of it.”

  When she turned, she saw John in the doorway with the sky washed lavender and indigo behind him, and the girl, unbonneted, uncloaked, trying to walk beneath his outstretched arm wedged against the door-post. The baby sat glassy-eyed and silent on the bare puncheon floor by the door.

  “You stay here with the children. Wake Tommy up, he needs to eat something.”

  The woman knew then for the first time that her brother-in-law did not know that his son was dying.

  “Matt! I said no, now.”

  For an instant there was the terrible tension of the child in rebellion, and then it was gone as the baby fell over sideways and cracked her head on the wood floor; the sound popped in the vaulted room, there was complete silence, and then a high thin wail rose. Jessie, impelled by a force separate from her fear, and stronger, stepped across the room and picked up the baby, and the wails crescendoed in hysterical shrieks. The child stank of urine and mildew and sour baby-smell, and the jerking, flailing flesh beneath the soiled gown was burning hot. The woman cradled the baby in her arms, unwilling, unable not to, and paced the floor, patting the foul bottom gently, saying, “There’s some sweetmilk left out yonder in the cold box. You better fetch it in before you go off tending to your mules.” She didn’t look at her brother-in-law as she said it, but at the children themselves, her eyes sliding around the dark high-ceilinged room as she paced with the infant, to the back wall, where the unconscious boy lay on the bed, perhaps dead or dying this moment; to the west wall, where the little girl and fidgety boy crouched on wooden crates near the fireplace, the little girl’s eyes glittering bright already with fever; and near her, just before her in the doorway, the eldest girl with her stubborn face standing at her father’s elbow: motherless, Jessie did not have to be told. Laid upon her by God’s will, perhaps to spread their sickness to her own, and nothing in the world for her to do but accept.

  “Martharuth,” she said, “cut that nonsense and get in here and take this baby. I’ve got to see to that boy.”

  She went to the foot of the pine stairs, still cradling the shrieking infant, and yelled, “Millie! Get your sisters ready!” then called back over her shoulder, “Shut that door! You’re letting cold air in!” She turned again to the narrow flank of stairs. “Put your coats on! Wrap Pearly up good!” There was a chorus of blurred voices from overhead, drowned in the sound of the crying baby, and Jessie hollered, “I don’t care if you got your nightgowns on already, I’m telling you to get dressed!” She turned to find the girl Mattie directly behind her, and paused not a breath but shoved the baby in the girl’s arms and said, “Take her and sit down on that chair yonder. I’ll tend to her in a minute. Hitch up the wagon,” she said to her husband, though she never looked at him; one would hardly know she did not offer this direction as well to the child. “You got to take the girls over to Mewborns’,” and her husband, confused, entirely oblivious to all that the sudden rush and noise meant, sat in his same position in the ladderback, tamping tobacco into the bowl of a cob pipe.

  Jessie went for the first time to the bed and stood over the boy. He was still breathing; she could see the shallow rise and fall beneath his filthy woolen shirt. His pale lids stretched like egg membrane over the eyeballs, and when she touched him he was fiery hot, but he was not sweating; his veined skin was dry as corn husk. The scarlet mask on his face had spread to his throat. She felt someone behind her, and she did not have to turn to know it was the father, standing back a little, reluctant, looking at the child with open eyes now. She heard wood scrape wood, her husband’s chair shoved back on the puncheon, and then Fayette, too, was standing there. “Oh my Lord,” she heard him say, and she turned on him in fury: “Get the girls out of here!”

  John gazed at his son in the same kind of stupor with which he had watched his brother’s face before; he said dreamily, “My team is still hitched, Fay. I reckon they won’t drop dead to go another mile or two, if you want to take the wagon.”

  Jessie whirled on him now, the one, as she felt it, who had brought God’s curse upon her household. “No! My daughters are not touching a thing in that wagon!” She lifted her head, craned her neck toward the stairs, nearly shrieking. “You girls get a move on! Quick! Fayette, go catch up the horse, now! Martha, run out—no, you do it,” she said, meaning John, though she did not again look at him, never taking her eyes from the toddler boy on the counterpane. “Go fetch some cool well-water, we got to get this boy’s fever down.” The baby still wailed on the girl’s lap in the corner.

  Fayette said, “Jess, don’t you know the boys are gone in the wagon?”

  Jessie turned slowly, her arm draped across her belly; she looked at her husband as if she could hardly place him. “Well,” she said at last, “borrow Witlow’s buckboard. Or saddle that mule you’re so high and mighty proud of and ride them over one at a time. They’re not touching that wagon. They’re not staying in this house.” Without turning, she again screamed toward the attic: “Millie! Get your sisters dressed!”

  The upstairs was low and slanted, with a small window at one end for light. Jessie had intended us to sleep in the wagon until Papa got a house built—she said as much later, spit it once in anger—but instead she laid a bed for us beneath her own roof, put us together on a big pallet of blankets in a corner upstairs. She kept the six cousins away from us. She did not give us their beds. There was a lamp, but my aunt wouldn’t light it. She would not waste the coal oil. I don’t care how they tell it. She expected us every one to die.

  I would swim up sometimes in the darkness, and the darkness was red. I felt myself sweating, freezing, my bones hurting, my throat swollen, stuffed like there was a sock in it, my arms and legs trembling, and I couldn’t stop. I could feel them around me, one on one side, one on the other, their little bodies burning, Tho
mas and Lyda. I’d hear Jim Dee ask for a drink of water, hear Jonaphrene whining, and always it was in the strange rust-colored darkness. The world before my eyes was black standing water at the bottom of a rusty bucket.

  Above me I saw the face coming down. Coming down slowly. Round and flat as a skillet; round, and flat, and brown. Soft brown. Like doeskin. Like chewed leather. Her eyes tiny and glistening, and the red darkness welling, and then black, and then nothing.

  I woke again, and Thomas was very still beside me. Too still. Too still beside me, like Mama dead on the ground. I heard Jonaphrene cough. Lyda was crying. Behind me. Somewhere far behind me. Toward the log wall. And Thomas did not move. The round face was there. It said something, and I did not understand. Black swimming, I could not, I could not swim up. I fell back. Later I swam again, and it was not a dream again, and I could smell him.

  I put my hand to his chest. He was breathing. Tiny breaths like butterfly flutter, and his heart like a bird’s beating in his shallow hot chest. No size at all, he had no size to him, bones only like sticks without flesh and nothing to him but fire and beat and flutter, and I tried to rise up, the swelling red pushed me back, laid a hand a cloak a smothering blackness upon me, and it was a dream then and in the dream my brother crawled about the pallet, crawled blind and weak and struggling like the bones of a bird without feathers, his chest inside out and the bones sharp and showing, and he whimpered, crawling, he crawled upon me and lay across my chest, no stronger than breath, than delicate eyelid flutter, crying weak like a newborn, and I could not come up, I couldn’t help him, I prayed, I believed God, I believed God would save him because I could not, I could not, and he lay on the bones of my chest like breath like a bird and raised back his head lifted his face a little toward the angels like John Junior, lifted up his eyes blue and the breath left him the spirit left him and I tried to scream, my chest shrieked with scream my mouth open my face exploding with scream, and no sound could leave me because my brother’s tiny dead body lay upon me, and when I woke again Thomas was crying, fullthroated crying, and Papa was standing over me, and Lyda was dead.

  The face came again, dipped low over me and lifted Lyda’s body to carry her away.

  That was all. That was the shape of our coming. In time I could sit up and the room was not rust black but shape-filled and breathing, the slow even breaths of my brothers and sister, and in a little more time Jim Dee began to kick and scramble and pull away the covers, and in a little while more Papa picked us up one by one and carried us downstairs. That is how we came into the life and world of Eye Tee, in darkness. Buried upstairs together in that room without light. Through a black womb fevered into daylight. New. Getting born in darkness all over again.

  The father carried the girl on his back down the steep stairs, her thin legs dangling, her bare heels thumping the shaved wood. He set her on a milkstool by the hearth and went back for the others. She watched him carry her brother Jim Dee, and then her sister, and set them down on the pallet, each of them looking strange, unfamiliar, their heads peaked and bare. Her brother’s scalp showed in two or three places. Bits of her sister’s hair stuck out from behind her ears, brown and ragged, chopped short as a man’s. Mattie touched her hand to her own head, felt it, light and numb and stubby, like a nail clipped too short. She had not known when they cut it, had merely drifted up once in the darkness and felt her head slick, without weight, hard and tight and feverish on the floor. It was only when she’d awakened entirely that she knew what had been done to them. She did not care. Her fingertips caressed the short, coarse hairs along her scalp line as she watched the movement in the room.

  She saw her father’s legs coming down the ladder, and she knew it was Thomas he carried. She wanted to stand up and go to him, but there was a stillness on her that kept her. Her mind told her to go get her brother, but she was too light in her body, her arms and legs hollow. She could see the toddler’s small hands locked around their father’s neck, and his skull like an egg shining in the lamplight, but she made no move to get up. The father brought the boy and put him on the pallet where the other two children were curled together, lying quiet, blinking their eyes. Mattie could feel the blank space on the pallet that should have been her baby sister, an empty scalded place where no one would look. She knew the truth as she waited with the others by the hearth for their supper, watching the empty space like boiled pigskin in the center of the quilt, but she would not let herself think about it. She turned sideways on the three-legged milkstool, away from her living brothers and sister, away from the barren place on the pallet, and looked at the high dark arc of the room.

  It was a rough log room the same size and shape as the one above, where they had lain sick with the fever. The walls were not whitewashed or plastered. She could smell pine sap, see it oozing from the peeled pine flesh in the warmth behind the cookstove. The ceiling seemed far away to her; it vaulted high and distant in the dark, but the room close by was crowded and full of smells. Sap glittered on the log walls in the firelight; the humps and backs and faces of people were lit ragged, winking and dancing in shadow, and the room was jammed with supply boxes, furniture, the plenitude of her aunt and uncle’s worldly goods. The whole of the house consisted only of the one room and the upper room above, dark and crowded, the walls chinked with mud. It’s only just us, she told herself. Just our family, that’s all. The room seemed crushed with too many people, and she didn’t know why.

  Her eyes scanned the room, settling at last on her aunt’s profile where she stood punching out biscuits at the flour board laid over the washstand on the far side of the room. Jessie’s mouth and the side of her face were lined and drawn; she punched the flour dough as if she would kill it. The female cousins were at the cookstove in a jostle, the backs of their skirts to the room, their shoulders in navy calico, the bodices all cut and sewed the same. Mattie could see them shoving each other’s aprons with their elbows in secret, even the youngest one, Pearline, whose job it was to mind the flies off the table while the men ate. But there were no flies, it was winter, and the youngest one tried to belly in with the others, whining for them to quit. Papa sat at the rough-pine table with Fayette and his boys, their sleeves rolled back on their arms from washing.

  The girl looked at her father’s back, his thick shoulders hunched beneath suspenders. The shirt he was wearing was not his own but one stitched together of brown homespun that she’d never seen before. Her uncle was on the far side with his elbows cocked on the pine slats, his hands tipping a saucer of coffee, his mouth hidden in the clot of hair curled round it and the saucer lip buried in his mustache and beard. His sons slouched at the sides of the table, the younger one, Fowler, on a flour keg and Caleb, the eldest, across from him in the canebottom chair. Fowler’s dark face was turned on his brother, the scowl like a storm boiling, and Caleb, in a half turn, was looking at his father, trying to shape his lips like him while he sipped his own saucer of coffee. She knew it was real coffee they drank, not burnt-corn coffee like she and her father had been drinking for months in the mountains. She could smell the dark, rich odor, and her stomach cramped around it. What she did not know, couldn’t see then nor understand what it indicated, was that her uncle and cousin drank their coffee from saucers that had belonged to her own mother’s set of white china dishes with the rose print on the edge.

  She looked away from the crowded swirl of the room to her brother and sister and Thomas snuggled together on the pallet on the puncheon floor. For the first time she saw that it was Pearline’s old summer gown her sister was wearing, a light gown of thin muslin, though the floor beneath the pallet was cold as stone. She saw that her brother Jim Dee had on a nightshirt a dozen sizes too big for him, and Thomas wore only a diaper square and a piece of blanket pinned together. Jonaphrene looked up then, her dark eyes enormous as she scrambled and twisted around to sit up. Jim Dee began to fidget and twitch, picking at loose threads in the quilt top, and Thomas lay on his side, curled around himself. Too still, Matt
ie thought, too still again. She saw her brothers and sister changed: thin, liver-colored and hairless as newborn possums—and still she did not see all that the red darkness had done.

  “Martharuth!” her aunt called. “Jump up here now and help Sarey set the table.” And Jessie went on punching the powder biscuits, laying them rapidly in the pan.

  The hollowness was yet in the girl’s bones, but the place behind her eyes was not filled with the black swimming; the fever was gone now, she was not even cold, and so she didn’t know it would happen. When she stood up, the rock hearth and the fireplace beside it fell away. There was no pain, only that lightness upon her and a little stuffed feeling deep in her ears. But the room fell away, and she didn’t know what to think. She sat back down.

  Her aunt called again, her voice sharp. “Martharuth!”

  “Mattie,” her father said, “git up and help now. You’re all right.”

  Again the girl stood. Again it happened. The floor fell away. She held herself very still; she didn’t know what it was.