The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  Jessie said, “Supper’s near about ready, child. Hurry up!”

  Mattie tried to walk toward her cousin, but the log walls swooped and fell away from her. She hit the pine table where the men sat, walked sideways into it, and shook the coffee saucers splashing, the coal oil trembling in the lamp.

  Her father grabbed for her, said, “Whoa, now!”

  Jessie hollered, “Look out, child! What in the name of Pete is the matter with you?”

  Papa had her by the back of the nightgown, and she put her hand on the table, not because she knew to do so, but because she had walked directly into it, crashed into the pine ledge without bracing or flinching because she’d had no idea it would happen, and it was the weight of the table that stopped her. She touched the top of it, the flat plane of pine with the flat of her hand, held to it with her palm spread, Papa clutching up the neck of the nightgown—her cousin Lottie’s nightgown she had on—and in a minute the room settled. Her father’s eyes were on her, stern and nearly black in the darkness. Mattie looked up, and then quickly away, but she felt his eyes on her, and so she tried to take her hand off the table.

  Fayette said, “Ah, leave her rest, John, them kids have been mighty sick,” and he slurped a sip of coffee. The wood between his elbows was wet with slopped coffee. The lip of the saucer was sunk in the mat of his beard. The girl looked at the saucer, unseeing, without recognition, but feeling it as something familiar from long ago that erupted her soul. She heard a sharp tongue-to-teeth sound beside the stove, though she didn’t know if it was her aunt or one of the cousins. She did not turn to look; her father’s hand was still tight on the nightgown. The room was not rolling then because she was standing still, her hand on the tabletop, her head forward a little and tilted to the side, but she knew something was terribly wrong. Her father’s hand eased on her. He said, so softly she barely could hear him, “Go set down, Matt.”

  She turned her head, saw her brother and sister and Thomas on the pallet beside the hearthstones. She saw the milkstool and the fire burning bright, and she tried to walk toward it.

  The fire sank. The log room like a cave turned and tilted away from her, and she stepped where there was no floor.

  Her chin hit the wood, and her teeth jarred and stung to her eyeballs. She heard yelling, her father’s voice in a shout, “Mattie!” She couldn’t answer. She could not stand up. Her uncle said, “Y’all better let them young’uns rest,” and the girl hated him as she crawled to the fireplace and put her open palm on the flat stones. She pulled herself onto the hearth and lay across it, warm and smooth: the warm, smooth breast of hard stone. The room ceased to turn; the world settled. She heard the wooden legs of the milkstool clatter and roll on the puncheon, felt her sister’s hand, or someone’s hand, warm on her back. Someone was hollering, or talking, but the sound came from far away. The hand was calm on her back, and it calmed her.

  Inside, Mattie felt a slow warmth spreading, easing through her veins, along the trembling flesh of her back, into the well of her stomach. She turned her head and saw Jonaphrene crouched on the pallet with her knees tucked to her chin beneath the thin summer gown, her luminous eyes burning dark as a nightjar’s, the brown hair sticking up like scruff from the top of her head. Both of Jonaphrene’s arms were wrapped around her gowned legs, hugging them. Mattie slid her eyes round the room, and she saw them watching her, all of them: her sister and brothers watching her, and Papa half turned at the table with his eyes on her, Fayette’s eyes upon her, and his sons’ eyes, Caleb and Fowler, watching not out of interest but because the others were looking at her. In front of the cookstove, the girl cousins had turned and stood perfectly still in a blue-dark calico row, the eldest one’s hand in the air with the meat fork pointed up. Jessie stood perfectly still, half turned from the flour board, one hand on her hip and the tin biscuit cutter in the other, cocked in the same manner, caught up in midair.

  Mattie knew then whose hand was upon her.

  She felt it as surely as she had felt it warm on her shoulder to claim her that hot afternoon in the clearing. She was not afraid.

  The room was still, the only movement the flicker of firelight and shadows dancing, the coal oil burning steadily in the lamp on the table, the rock hearth swelling, receding, warm and smooth beneath her. She could see her own blood joined up with her, watching, not afraid yet: Thomas drowsy, wanting to sleep again; Jim Dee restless in his muscles; Jonaphrene shivering, her eyes big, trying to know if it was all right. She could see the six cousins, half-blood and curious, and her aunt, who had no blood in her, fearful and furious, and it was Jessie at first Mattie knew best because her aunt’s energy was strongest and thrown at them, because she did not want them; she had no say-so but to take them, but she didn’t choose them, and Mattie saw that. She looked at her aunt, caught in the half turn: a gaunt woman with bad teeth and a rising belly in a sack apron and patched dress, glaring in the lamplight with her hand up, the tin loop of biscuit cutter like a weapon in her fingers cocked in the air. Mattie saw the two swellings inside her: fear for her own children—especially her sons; the girl could see the fierce mother-love of sons for the two who sat impatient and hungry at the pine-slat table, and of those two it was Fowler she feared most for, her fear like a claw thrown round him—and the other swelling an aimless, useless, empty anger which had no place to land but upon the unwanted children against the log wall by the hearth. The girl did not see the unborn child her aunt carried.

  Stranger, Mattie thought. Not blood kin. She shut her eyes from the woman, turned her head.

  Her legs were long on the hearthstones, long and bony, extending off the hearth to the cold dark past the fire. She felt herself awkward, her feet big, her legs too long for her body, and she thought she had grown in the red darkness, grown long while she slept in the fever. The others were talking. She heard Lottie say, “Mama, what’s she doing?” and Sarah in a loud whisper, “Mama! They’re still sick!” Jessie said, “You girls hush up and tend to your business.” Fayette said, “Somebody pour her a cup of coffee, when’s them biscuits ready? A man’s liable to starve to death before somebody puts supper on the table around here.”

  Mattie opened her eyes again, turned toward the sound. She could see the men’s legs, their boot tops beneath the table. She didn’t look up for a bit, and when she did, it was to the boys Caleb and Fowler her eyes drifted. She understood then, gazing at the two brothers, what it was that made the younger one turn his scudding scowl on the elder: the dark envy that forced him to watch his brother every instant, to crave his every joy and gesture; she saw how Fowler hungered after even the cold coffee Caleb slurped from a saucer, believing in his secret heart that it was better than any coffee given into his own hand by their father, and she saw him in that moment thirsting after it, with Jessie’s fear and fierce love dug in his heart like a claw.

  They are half-blood, she thought. The blood of their father and our father is the same from Grandpa Lodi, the same from Grandma (a wisp of sticks dying with black sunken mouth on the bed back home in Kentucky), but their mother is not blood to us. None of hers is ours. They are half-blood, that’s all.

  The female cousins jostled and talked on the far side of the room. Their backs were turned again, they’d returned to the task of cooking, Mildred’s arm elongated where she stretched it out to turn the fat-spitting meat in the frying pan, and the others shoving their elbows to try to stir the beans or the turnips, but Mattie could see them just as well; she knew them, the three eldest all brown-headed and freckled and nearly the same size, and the least one, little pale Pearline. Half-blood, she thought. It was nearly a snort in her silence, an unsounded laugh, because it freed her, knowing that they were not like her, their mama was not her Mama, and she was bound to them no more than half. The six cousins, male and female, receded to their place of no importance, no more worth her notice than her uncle’s coon hounds in the yard. Papa and Fayette were talking at the table, but still Mattie did not look at them. She would not
look at her father. Suddenly a new thought came to her, chilling her, wiping away her contempt, turning her legs and shoulders shivering like the fire of the fever. She began to tremble on the hearthstone.

  Her father said, “Matt, get up from yonder if you’re cold. Wrap up in the quilt.”

  She could feel him turned toward her. She didn’t move or answer. Her eyes were on the four trousered pairs of legs under the table, crowded in the dark with the many chair legs and the lone dark hoop of flour keg. She thought the words again, and she pushed them away, but still they came back to her:

  Papa is only half blood, the words said.

  He is full blood to himself. Full blood to Fayette and Uncle Big Jim Dee, to Aunt Lottie and Aunt Myrtis, Aunt Helen Alzada, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Lovey and Melvina Jane. But he is only half blood to us.

  Mattie looked to the pallet. Thomas was sleeping, his tongue bulging pink between his lips. Jim Dee and Jonaphrene were sitting close together, the boy fidgeting, picking at the cotton batting leaking from a torn seam in the pallet quilt, his legs twitching.

  We are the only ones equal from Mama and Papa both together. Only us. No! (She would not think about Lyda. She shut the picture of the baby lifted away by brown hands, the tiny legs dangling, legs sticks of bones nearly, and dead. She shut it.) My two brothers, my sister, they are the only others the same as me, she thought. It is us. We four together. Only us who have Mama’s blood now.

  She watched Jim Dee lean over and pick at Jonaphrene’s nightgown, Pearline’s summer gown they’d put on her. He plucked at the muslin hem, tugging lightly, and Jonaphrene ignored him, and then he pulled her sleeve, and Jonaphrene said, “Quit!” The boy climbed into a crouch, ready to spring, to jump, to do something, and Mattie knew he would get up in a minute. He would have to. His skin itched deep to the bone. He would get up and go to the rest of them, the half-blood and no-blood, and Papa would growl at him, yes, but only a little, and Fayette would say, “Have a seat, son,” and Fowler would turn his fierce scowl upon him, and Jim Dee would get his place at the table on an old flour keg or firkin, but Mattie knew he would not be able to sit there. He would get up again and roam the room and poke into things until Jessie would holler, “For the love of Pete, child, can’t you for one minute be still!” And he would sit a while longer, and then he would be gone. He was her brother. She struggled a long time. But she knew she could not keep a rein on him, never would she be able to hold him, and so she let him go finally—though he had not jumped yet, though it would be years yet, she didn’t know how long—but she could feel it: that it was only time and a little of what Jim Dee didn’t know yet that kept him with them, his taut muscles trembling beneath his pale limbs.

  She had to keep Jonaphrene. Jonaphrene and Thomas. Mattie knew it, looking at the sleeping toddler with his tongue bulging and her sister wrapped inside the sheath of summer gown like a cocoon she’d tried to spin round herself because there was no one to put a shawl on her shoulders or a quilt. Even with her hair gone, Jonaphrene was the exact image of Mama—but for her eyes, which were the gray-green of Papa’s, lined in a thick fringe of straight, dark lashes. Jonaphrene is Mama’s. (Not Lyda!) Jonaphrene is Mama’s own child in Mama’s image, as I am, for how Mama claimed me. Mattie felt her mother again, not as a hand upon her but as a presence, the way she’d felt her when Mama rocked her and nursed her as an infant, her mother’s scent.

  She knew at once what she must do. She must hitch Sarn and Delia to the wagon, take Mama’s trunk and her linens and quilt tops, she must wrap the children warm.

  No, but first she must find Mama’s tin box—for it was somewhere, Mattie knew it, inside Mama’s trunk, or hidden somewhere in the wagon: a secret square, an invisible door—and she must find it and carry it with them. She mustn’t tell Papa.

  It was the old dream and it had never been completed, and so she had to go on and do it, with her sister and brother, Jonaphrene and Thomas, her most kin, Mama’s most kin, just as she’d dreamed it all those months in the mountains. It could not be burned away by the red darkness. She must load their possessions, as she’d loaded and unloaded, loaded and unloaded and loaded them again so many times. She knew how to do it. In secret she must do it, and then she must drive the mules east over the twisting wagon tracks, past the log cabins and shacks, past the Indians in white people’s clothing standing in their empty gardens, and east out of Eye Tee, back up into the mountains, and get Mama. She had to take her mama back home.

  Mattie jerked suddenly and looked up at her father. She thought he had heard her. She thought he knew what she was thinking, and she flinched backwards in guilt, looking up at him, but Papa’s eyes were not on her. He had turned back to the table, his hunched shoulders in brown homespun toward her and the children. Mattie knew where her father’s eyes looked.

  Fayette was talking, as he always talked, never ceasing, about his plans, his big doings, he was always going to do this and this and this, and Mattie did not listen, his voice only the hum of a dirt dauber in her ears, unless the words meant something about her father—or her mother, as it had been in the mountains. She saw the image then: her uncle in his big hat poking the fire. Talking. Talking. She remembered, looking up at Papa looking at his brother, and it was only Papa’s back she could see, but she knew the look on him, like Fowler’s, and yet not Fowler’s because it was not envy but just the same manner of being captured, caught by the full and equal portion of blood from their own father and mother, caught by his brother, caught and held by his brother, as he always had been. She did not look at her uncle. She didn’t have to, for she could see him, the picture of him talking, talking, talking, poking the fire with his green pine stick, and her stomach curdled around it, the sound and smell of him, spitting. A sour taste rose up in her mouth.

  When they called her again, she lay still. While her aunt put the men’s food on the table, while the men ate and the female cousins stood by the cookstove, piecing sneakily from the cooking pots as they waited. While the girls ate afterwards, standing, with their tin plates beneath their chins, while Fayette smoked and his boys and Papa and Jim Dee drank coffee from her mother’s china saucers, Mattie lay longlimbed and silent, watching, though she pretended to sleep, her bones light on the warm hearthstones and her mouth full of yellow bile, as the people in the room spoke and moved and washed and spat and drank coffee.

  It wasn’t until the cold night air swept in through the door when it opened once and shut again quickly, until she heard Thomas cry and saw Jonaphrene shivering alone in Fayette’s big chair at the table, until her father’s voice called her, saying, “Come on here now, Matt, git up and feed your brother,” that at last she pushed herself slowly up from the warm breast of stone to her hands and knees. She crouched, her bare feet beneath her, to stand, and it took only that, only her feet crouched beneath her, and rising, and the world fell. She went skittering across the dark room to the line of blue-dark calico and sack aprons.

  I did not ask about Lyda, and when the children tried I shushed them. I would not let them speak her name, any more than I would speak it, or the others. None of us did. I didn’t know for a long time where they had laid her. One day Thula showed me; she took me to the place far up in Waddy Holler, a cleared place where you could see down through the valley, looking east. There were other graves there. There were no markers with names, only slabs of sandstone facing heaven, each balanced on a ridge of raised stones: orange slabs cut from rock in the shape of a coffin, lying flat on raised stones to face the sky. Facing God. To press the bodies for eternity into the earth. Lyda was not under a slab but in a tiny sunken place the size of a cradle, with nameless sand-colored markers at the head and the foot. So I knew then, but I did not tell the children. I believed I understood what I was supposed to teach them.

  She is dead, I thought, let her stay dead. It is not like our mama. Mama does not have a headstone in the mountains of Arkansas, I thought, just a narrow wedge of sandstone standing up on its end. Under a pine tree.
High on a ridge. Lyda has two small squares of sandstone, chipped from nothing, though they are nearly perfect rectangles. That is how they break free from the earth. Two pieces of sandstone two feet apart in a field grown up with wild roses and brambles. In an old Indian cemetery in the cleft of Waddy Holler. No one is named there. This is as it should be, I thought.

  I forgot nothing else, but I forgot Lyda. In my living mind I did. She dropped like a stone in water, and they all were willing, Papa most of all, and Aunt Jessie, and I let them. I wanted to, I tried to. I knew.

  It was not even to escape Satan’s Army, which we could not, no matter how I worked, how I tried to arrange things, washed the quilts, caught the nigger, fled the darkness and witchery. No matter how Papa pushed the mules, how quickly we fled. It wasn’t hers anyhow, that colored woman’s curse upon Lyda. It was ours, the mark was on us, and I knew it. I knew there would be sacrifice. We carried it with us like the fever into Eye Tee, and that is why we seeped into this place in red darkness. We brought it with us, though the darkness, too, was already here. There would have to be sacrifice, blood sacrifice. Our blood, I thought then, though I did not yet know the half of it. In the closed upper room, with Thula’s brown face coming down to bear witness, with my infant sister and my brother on the pallet beside me, I did the first iniquity. I traded Thomas’s life for Lyda’s.

  In prayer I did.

  But that is not all I owe for.

  The time was not long that they were caught all together in the dark vault of the log house, but to the girl it seemed forever; it seemed longer than the crossing, the climb into the mountains, the warm months into autumn they had lived in the clearing. Later her mind would roll it out and spread it like black manure laid down before planting: the pull of her aunt’s mouth and judging eyes on them every minute; her uncle’s voice talking, talking from the roan mat of his beard, his big belly, and later the smell on him, which the girl did not yet understand. She would remember the boys taking in after Thomas, teasing him, mocking him, and the cousins in their new calico with their peppered faces watching her and her sister yoked together in the cousins’ old hand-me-down dresses, and her father gone, and all of them crowded in on top of each other, the sour smell in the house, the days and nights reeling aimlessly in a circle forever, marked only by meals and her father rising and what little light came through the tanned-hide windows.