The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The others climbed down the ladder in the early morning, her aunt first and then the cousins, to start the stove and sift biscuits, and her father would be already gone. The girl would lie still and watch in the dark with the fire dying. He would not light the lamp but always he’d put another stick of wood on the hot coals of the fireplace, and in time the gnarled blackjack would ignite and burn hot. She’d watch him put his hat on—not his own hat but a different one, a shapeless tan one which bore no more character in its folds than a turkey wattle—and place his hand beneath the clean cloth spread over the dishes on the table, take out a cold biscuit or a piece of saltmeat or whatever was left from the last evening’s supper, and turn and lift the latch and go out. Many times he walked out the door emptyhanded. The cold air would whirl in, and sometimes she could see stars shining. Her father left well before the others came down, well before daylight, and often he didn’t return until the house was quiet and dark, the others asleep overhead and the children breathing deeply beside her. Her father would take his plate from the stovetop, and sometimes it would be so late that the fire in the cookstove would have gone out and the gravy on the tin plate would be congealed. Mattie would watch from beneath veiled eyes as her father ate his cold supper and went to wrap up in his quilts and lie down on the far side of the room.

  She did not know where he went in the early mornings, why he came home late; she would not ask him, and no one offered to tell her. She spent her days crouched on the pallet or the milkstool, waiting for her father to come home. Fayette had nailed scraped hides over the windows to keep the cold out, and the back door was always closed, with a heavy oak bar laid across it, and so the vaulted room was close and dark even in daylight, and rank with the smell of cooking and coal oil and Thomas’s dirty diaper squares—and the others, how they smelled, she thought, because nobody could wash properly. She couldn’t take care of Thomas except to change him, and then only if he would lie still for her. Even yet she didn’t know what the fever had done to him, though she could hear how he echoed what she said, what anyone said, would say it back in exactly the same tone and words and inflection. She’d hear him scream and shriek when Jessie tried to make him sit on the chamberpot; see him drop suddenly to the floor sometimes and thump and crawl across the cold puncheon as if he’d forgotten how to walk. Scanning the dark arc of the log room, her gaze would settle on her sister sitting crosslegged in a cousin’s nightgown on the pallet, staring, rubbing her small hand again and again down the back of her shorn head. Mattie would quickly turn her eyes away. She’d see her brother Jim Dee tromp out the log door behind Fayette’s boys every morning, come home with them in the evenings and slurp his coffee from china saucers just as they did, but Mattie would not think about him, though he was a sweaty, knotted, softly snoring lump on the pallet in the night beside her; she shut him away as perfectly as she’d shut away the memory of her dead infant sister.

  Each day she watched from her milkstool to find a secret time when the boys were gone, and then she’d lean over and whisper to Jonaphrene to take her behind the curtain, until at last she began to eat and drink almost nothing because she didn’t want to go behind the curtain in the presence of any of them, not even the females. She waited, for her father to come home and take them out of the log house, for her mother to come again and touch her, for change of some kind, any change, and no change happened. The days and nights spun together. If she tried to walk, the room tilted crazily. She had to hold a chairback or press her hand to the table to keep from skidding sideways wild and loose across the floor. She began to believe it would be this way forever, that she would never be able to walk straight or take care of the children or go forward and do the one thing that must be done. She prayed, Heavenly Father in Jesus’ name, please, I promise, please, just let the room hold still a little while, let the floor stay put, for she believed fully that the disturbance was not within her but outside her: the world itself, falling. Each day when her aunt was not looking, when the cousins’ backs were turned, the girl would slowly, carefully, stand up from the hearth or the milkstool and take a step, and each day the puncheon slabs would fall away. She pondered it, even as it happened, even as she stepped, falling, or tumbled cockeyed in a looped circle, she’d think, Why would Mama come here to tell me, make me remember my job to do, and then leave me locked in this house of half-blood and no-blood? to be held in their ways and smell, only to swirl and skid in this dark room with the floor falling—

  The girl could not understand why her mother would leave her unbalanced, untethered, unable to go forward and do what must be done. She believed her mother had power to change it, that from where her mother was she could do anything, and so the girl asked, in the haze before sleep, she questioned, though she couldn’t have said who she asked it of, because it wasn’t God or Jesus; it wasn’t her Mama. The strangeness of the world falling was beyond source or telling, and she couldn’t fathom where it had come from, and so she asked—but she asked no one, unfocused, her chest open in the dancing dark.

  In time, there was one change. Her aunt came to her one morning and said she must get up and make herself useful. Jessie said it was no use to send her outside to draw water or feed chickens or sweep the yard, because she wouldn’t do anything but pitch a fit sideways and fall down. But even a pullet lays eggs, her aunt said, or it gets eat quick for Sunday dinner, and she drew the girl up by the elbow and guided her across the floor and set her at the table to shell corn.

  The girl daydreamed about what lay on the other side of the door as she sat at the table scrubbing turnips or peeling potatoes. She had an image of the raw, slapped-together town laid out on one side of the road when they drove quickly around the long curve toward it, but the memory was from before the red darkness, and that town could have been any town they had come through on the long journey or tried to avoid. She couldn’t connect that memory with what lay outside the big split-log front door, which she could see when they opened it: a long scabby slope down to a creekbank with a wagon road running beside it. Sometimes the sun would be glancing off the water, making her eyes hurt, but then the door would shut quickly to keep the cold out, and the room would sink into darkness again. So the girl sat at the table and scrubbed turnips or lay on the pallet with her baby brother or hunched uselessly by the fireplace in the dark swirl and smell, thinking this was to be her life forever, thinking she was a cripple now, no good for anything. Thinking they might make up their minds to shoot her as they would a crooked mule.

  Then came a warmish day in deep winter. She didn’t yet know that was how it would be in this country; she couldn’t fathom that the earth could turn warm of a sudden in the hard edge of winter, and then, in a day’s time or an hour’s time, turn back brutally cold again. She thought it must be spring.

  The back door was propped open with a chair wedged against it. The front door was wide to the south wind. The cousins were doing wash on the back porch and they had her sister helping, though Jonaphrene was smaller than even the youngest, Pearline. Jessie had set the girls working before walking off to take dinner to her sons clearing ground on the far side of the creek. Jonaphrene was standing on the porch cranking the handle on the wringer. Mattie could see her through the open door. Long threads of wrung clothes and bedsheets spilled flattened through the clenched rollers into the tub. Thomas was outside on the porch with the rest of them, crawling on the split logs. Air came through the house. Sitting by the fireplace on the milkstool, she could smell light and air for the first time. Through the front door she could see the naked branches by the creekbed, the sun sparkling on the water, or, turning her head, she could see her sister cranking the wringer in the porch shade at the back. Life outside the log house slanted in from either side and split the dark room; she wanted to go out there. She craved it nearly. She could taste the soft-soap smell, and warmth and air and sunlight like God’s breath where she couldn’t touch it. Mattie made up her mind she was going to go out there; she told herself in that mome
nt that she could walk forward in the strength of her own will.

  She stood up very slowly. The floor shifted, as always, the room swooping and falling. She didn’t try to take a step. She knew what would happen. She could hear her cousins’ voices, and the chickens below them scratching and cackling in the yard. A horse whinnied in the distance, and another one answered from the rise behind the house. The empty space swooned between her and the table, and she slammed toward it, aiming wildly at the rough-pine table covered in white cloth, until she landed against it and knocked down the near chair. She didn’t cry out when the table struck her in the low rib, sharp and stunning as a wasp sting. She didn’t look up—though she knew the others on the porch must have heard—but shoved the cloth back with one hand and edged around the table, her palms flat to the surface, her eyes looking where her hands crept, slowly, one over the other, until she reached the far side near the back door. There was no chair.

  Without pause, without a look to the others crowding at the door, Mattie edged back around the table to the knocked-over chair and went down into a slow crouch and touched it with one hand, hoisted it by the back, her left hand flat to the table, her right raising up with phenomenal strength the back of the chair. She stood the canebottom on its four legs and, hunched over to grasp the two sides of the seat where the cane looped around, she walked it, screeching and snagging on the rough puncheon slabs split from sawed logs with an old adze and never planed, because it was not her father who had laid that floor down; her father would have planed it smooth as a dresser drawer. She thumped and shoved and pushed toward the square of light, where she could see the four speckled faces peeking around the doorjamb and her brother with his two fingers in his mouth sitting on the porch floor at their skirttails, and her sister with her thin arms in someone’s old dress, without a shawl or a sweater, standing in the doorway with the light behind her and no bonnet on, her naked head bare.

  Jonaphrene said, “Mattie?”

  She didn’t answer but kept on, clunk-thunk, clunk-thunk, over the puncheon. The cousins clucked at one another like the gargle of chickens in the yard below. Jonaphrene stepped through the square of light, the cousins bahwking behind her, and came into the dark house, leaned over and whispered, “Hold my shoulder.” Mattie did not pause or look up but kept on clunking ferociously, an inch at a time, over the puncheon. Jonaphrene said it again, a whisper: “Hold my shoulder!” The younger girl came closer, dipped her thin shoulder a little, and it was then that Mattie understood. She let go of the canebottom, reached up and took hold of Jonaphrene’s shoulder, and stood straight up; she held tight to her sister. They walked outside that way.

  Mattie sat on the porch ledge with Thomas crawling and tumbling on her. The porch faced the north side so that she could not see the sunlight sparkling on the creekwater or the new roughsawed buildings of the town. But it was light and air for the first time, and she breathed it like a victory, though all she could do then was sit on the porch ledge while the others did the washing. She looked out at the mottled slope of stubbly field rising north and east to a rough gray structure on the rise at the foot of the mountain—Toms Mountain, though of course she did not yet know its name—and she breathed deeply. She knew something was changed. In a kind of secret, powerful rejoicing, she sat on the porch ledge, while the others worked faster behind her, her sister turning the wringer, cranking quickly with her thin arms, and the cousins rubbing halfheartedly and pinning the laundry hastily on the line because the clouds were already rolling in over the top of Toms Mountain, the temperature dropping fast. She didn’t think then of walking, of going forward any more in a straight line, but only that she had won what she had to. That evening, for the first time since her father had carried her downstairs, she ate a full supper; she ate as much red-eye gravy as her cousins. In the morning, with the wind howling from the north, the world gone back winter, she leaned over and whispered to her sister. Jonaphrene stood up, and Mattie stood, put a hand on her sister’s shoulder, and they walked outside together.

  In this way the girl emerged from the darkness of the log house joined tight to her sister. Not yet could she work or do the task she believed she was meant to do or go forward in a straight line. Alone she couldn’t, but joined to her sister, she could walk. And they did walk, never far, never to the town or along the road or even down to the creekbank, but tethered in a tight circle to the log house. They walked to the dug well or along the path to the privy, and later a little farther, easing singlefile down the slope almost all the way to Fayette’s store. The girl went with her arm stretched before her, touching her sister’s shoulder, and the little one walked somberly in front, tiny, her peaked head only reaching the top of the older one’s chest. They went linked in this manner through the fields and hillsides, along the pathways: a tiny solemn fairy without hair leading a blind person.

  In time, they began to climb the rise behind the house to the sandstone ridge that razored east and west, cupping the community of Big Waddy Crossing in its rough fold. The sisters wore a path to the top of the ridge, where they would stand for hours with their arms linked, gazing out at the long broken valley of orange grasses and blue cedar sweeping wide east and west between the humped hills. The ridge had no English name in that time, though later it was called Baldback, and to the east it rose abruptly and became the skirt of Toms Mountain; to the west the bony spine ran a mile and a half, descending, until it disappeared in the scrub oak and cedar deep in Waddy Holler. From the ridge’s open sweep the two sisters could see Bull Mountain kneeling in the west, stumps of pine and giant oak upon it where men had logged the trees out; or they could turn back to the east and see Bull Creek emerge from the far side of Toms Mountain and crawl toward Big Waddy, winding close enough to embrace the sawmill, lick the edge of town, before it abruptly twisted away to the southeast through the bare arms of hickories. Always, directly across, on the far side of the valley, the girls felt the enormous humped presence of Waddy Mountain. Below, the raw buildings of the town sat in their strange way, on one side of the road only. The rutted wagon road, which had once been the old Butterfield Overland Stage road, curved on past the town in a great boggy sweep at the foot of Waddy Mountain, and on around south, to the rest of the world.

  Sometimes the warm salt wind would come again, sift up from the Gulf around the hump of Waddy Mountain, slip between the hills in the hollows as the road snaked, grow big again in the prairie, and climb the ridge to touch them warm so they could remember summer. It was not spring yet, only the lying kiss of the south wind, but on those days the two walked back and forth along the bald top, pacing, tracing their steps back and forth again, or they would range in a great looping circle, the little one leading, walking slowly, her sister’s hand clamped to her shoulder, hardly a thread of daylight between them. Thus, through the winter, linked as plates in an armadillo’s shell, the two walked, or stood on the ridge for hours—as long as they could manage to stay out of the log house, away from the eyes and mouth of their aunt, away from chores and the stares of the cousins—gazing down at the log house below, built, not in two side-by-side pieces with a dogtrot between, as others in the Territory built their houses, but with one room hunched on top of the other, surrounded by log porch on all sides. They gazed down at the back of their uncle’s store below the log house and off to the side a little toward town: Fayette’s store of roughsawed lumber split clean and yellow, like the rest of the town—as if the Lodis were a part of them. As if they were in kinship with the people of Big Waddy Crossing, but the girl knew differently, because always from the corner of her eye she could see the hunkered one-on-top-of-the-other squares of the log house.

  Time doesn’t go in a line forward but around in a circle and down, looped with the seasons spiraled upon themselves into Past, which is not past but Now spiraling forever, deep, like a hair rope dropping loose on itself. The season was moving along the hoop at the top—one year from the time the Lodis left Kentucky—when the Indian woman came aga
in. It was winter still. The trees were bare, the earth smoke-gray and waiting. She didn’t come along the road through the town but came straight across the top of the ridge from the west, walking, the front of her skirt gathered in her hand to keep it from snagging on briars. The sisters were in their place on the craggy outcrop, watching. The day was cold, sunlit, bitter with wind. The girl knew the woman was coming to her, and she watched, afraid, her hand on her sister’s shoulder. Jonaphrene began to wriggle and squirm and clutch at her fingers, and Mattie at last made herself loosen her grip, but she could not make her chest slow, could not ungrit her teeth.

  The woman was small at first in the distance. Coming, she never did get big. She came without pause directly to where the two stood. Her dress was still gathered in her fingers, an ordinary muslin dress dyed butternut brown. She wore not a shawl but a draped Confederate army blanket the color of dried clay. Her hair was wound in a black braided loop around the crown of her head. She was not much taller than the girl was, standing, her skin brown and seamed, her face round, her eyes small. Mattie smelled sweetsmoke and something else, she did not know what the other smell was, but it was old and familiar, green-smelling, and it made her chest ache. The woman looked at her and spoke, long rapid words in her own language, unfathomable to the girl. The wind blew the yellowbrown skirt; the broken hairs cobwebbed loose from her thick braid. She didn’t squint in the sunlight but looked straight at Mattie, her eyes almost even with the girl’s eyes, and then she went around the two girls and on along the ridge, and down, toward the log house.