The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  William Moss moved slowly, meticulously, trying to untangle the snarled reins entangled in the traces, until at last, glancing up the hill once quickly, he slipped his buck knife from beneath his pantsleg and used it to cut the leather in two places. When the animal was nearly freed, Mitchelltree put a twistlock on the mule’s muzzle to keep him from running mad and wild the instant the collar eased off, never ceasing to croon the dirgelike chant in the mule’s ear all the while, and within a few minutes the mule was calm enough that he could release the twistlock and walk him on up the slope to where Fayette stood, still staring, not at the brown man himself, not at the lone living mule or the worthless dead one, nor at the jumble of orange rock slabs spilling crookedly from the broken wagon, but intently and longingly at the gracefully curved stock of the pistol, returned to its holster now, made visible to the thinning afternoon light from beneath the denim coattail by the lift and roll of Burd Mitchelltree’s massive shoulders.

  If there was but one person on earth whose actions and intentions drew Fayette’s full concentration, there was, as well, one object only that could snap his head around like an iron filing whisked to a magnet, pause him in his relentless pursuit of whatever notion or item he currently raced after—and that was a firing weapon of any kind. Just now, as he stood on the ridge watching Mitchelltree climb the remaining yards with a soothing hand to the mule’s quivering neck, there was a miraculous confluence of the two driving forces in Fayette Lodi’s existence, as two underground rivers might converge in the hidden depths of a cavern to rage and rise to the earth’s crust. A great stillness settled upon him—or rather an eerie calm appeared to descend on the surface: his cerulean eyes hardly blinked; the restless pacing and hand-flinging, the cursing, were now completely stopped—but beneath the sanguine surface, Fayette’s pulse thudded in his owns ears, his chest cinched tight as a tourniquet, his nerves were honed and focused, keen as a cat’s. The whole of his being was riveted to the curve of the gunhandle—for he was certain, or very nearly certain, that the thick-barreled pistol the man carried was one of three or four dozen powerful weapons called howdahs that had been skillfully, cunningly, illegally wrought by the hand of his brother. Guns, their power and mystery, affect different men differently; for some, a gun is but a tool, as necessary as the plow, for the gathering of food; others are drawn to a weapon’s mechanical nature, its cleverness and precision; and still others cherish a firearm’s ability to enhance not only a man’s actual power but his appearance of strength as well, so that men will fear him. Though Fayette Lodi’s fascination—one may say obsession—with firearms held a bit of all these, it was more singularly derived from the history he shared with his brother: it had been guns that unbalanced their bonded relationship; guns that had, as he thought, given his brother dominance over him in the eyes of the world. But it had been specifically the making of the big four-barreled howdahs, copied from a model filched by Tanner and carried into John Lodi’s barn by Fayette himself, with a promise of fame and mutual profit if John would but turn his skilled hands to their making, that had caused the Lodis to flee Kentucky. It was the weapon the big man carried—if indeed it was one of John’s—that had wrenched away the remnants of Fayette’s control over his brother, and that same weapon, he suddenly thought, watching the crosshatched grip rise and fall with the man’s movement, that could return him his power.

  “Good job! Fine job! Get on up here, fella, my Lord,” he shouted heartily at Mitchelltree as the man and the mule crested the rim. The threat in Fayette’s voice was completely gone now; he might have been welcoming a beloved, long-absent friend. “That goddamn Indi’n—” he said, and moved quickly toward Mitchelltree and the still-skittery mule, with his right hand thrust forward as if to shake the man’s hand. Not for a moment did his eyes sway from their hungry watch on the leather holster, and in the thoroughness of his self-absorption, in his complete lack of self-consciousness and the prodigious paucity of any ability within him to witness another human, he was ignorant of the directness of his gaze. Mitchelltree, on the other hand, had been alert to Fayette’s lean-eyed scrutiny almost from the instant he himself had pulled the pistol, though he had no notion of its source or meaning. What he did know, from long, violent experience, was the fact that a white man’s hungry eye on a black man’s weapon was nothing but a killing of some sort getting ready to unfold. He ignored Fayette’s out-thrust hand and eased the mule warily, quickly past him, keeping the dark flank between himself and the white man, making the move seem necessary, unintentional, until at last he stood a little above Fayette on the slant, his weight balanced, his hands free, the mule off to the side now and easy. Below the rim, a thick scuttling sound rustled in the winter weeds.

  “Done good,” Fayette continued good-naturedly, as if the slick sidestep hadn’t been executed or, at least, as if he himself hadn’t noticed. “I thank you for putting the poor critter out of her misery. Don’t believe I coulda got any kind of purchase from here.” His tone was intimate, jovial, seeming to say that, truth was, just between friends, truth was, the loss of a forty-dollar mule was really no more woesome than the inconvenience of having to shoot the pitiful thing. “Say, that’s some pistol you got there, ain’t it, let me have a look at her,” and he took a step toward Mitchelltree, who, already balanced, instantly spread his coattail and put his hand to the butt of the gun.

  “Whoa, fella, hey, hey,” Fayette chanted softly, backing slowly, hands raised, palms out, the expression on his face flickering between fear and genuine bafflement. “Whew, man, I don’t mean nothing!”

  The scrambling sound below, which was only the heavy-footed Moss climbing toward them, stopped abruptly. The land was as silent as it had been in the seconds after the gunshot, and in the silence there grew an awareness within the men along the ridge that others were standing present. The sun was nearly down behind Bull Mountain, the shadows slanting long across the silent sawmill on the creekbank below; topaz light spread east over the orange and brown grasses twigged here and there with coming green. Nowhere in the whole of the valley was there the lonesome call of a meadowlark; nowhere the jangle of harness or the scolding of crows. The three men felt others’ eyes standing ready as witness, watching, unseen.

  William Moss hulked spraddlelegged on the hillside, one leg braced higher than the other on the steep part of the slope below the rim. In the amber light, his eyes, hair, skin, coat, overalls, felt hat, all seemed to melt into the side of the mountain, blending each, dust-colored, with the colors of the winter-dulled earth. He looked along the ridge west. A small round figure stood outlined in the afternoon sunslant. The figure, draped in a clay-colored blanket, might have been a stone statue, so still was it. Unmoving. Watchful. Moss himself did not move in any direction. He dropped his gaze to the slaughtered mule and the great square sandstone bones, hacked free and dragged from where the Creator had placed them in the earth, to be clustered and spilled wrongly by these men down the side of the ridge. Moss couldn’t see above the rim, but he didn’t raise his eyes anyhow. The tension between the white man and black man above him receded from his mind, unimportant. His shame was complete, and there being nothing he could do to hide it from the gaze of the woman on the horizon, he sat down at last in the crackling weeds and pulled his hat over his eyes, mourning, despising the too-big portion of white blood in himself that made him so crazy. Never, he thought, had it been strong enough in his heart to allow him to grow fat with cattle and dollars like Peter Conser or Robert Jones or Green McCurtain, other mixed-bloods whose white inheritance permitted them to gather the earth under their dominion. Moss’s portion seemed only thick enough to make him wrongheaded and crazy, too easily influenced, a grief to himself and his grandmother. Under Thula’s eyes, William Moss understood the waste of the killed mule driven dead by a white man’s relentless impatience. He knew it was desecration to dig up and scatter from their rightful place the bones of the earth. The shame burned him. Tonight he would find a bottle and burn the shame deep i
nto his gut.

  The two men squared off with one another on the crest of the ridge did not feel the watching eyes of Thula Henry. She was female, an Indian, her presence on the western rim no more relevant than the warm breath of the charcoal-colored mule. They perceived, rather, a presence suited each to his separate story. Burd Mitchelltree knew suddenly in the stillness that the white townsmen of Big Waddy Crossing were gathered at the back of the roughcut building which housed the post office and stage stop. He didn’t turn his eyes, but he felt them, lined up as they were in their broad-brimmed hats in the store’s crooked shadow. He knew they’d been there for some time, that they’d begun to gather even before the gunshot, had drawn together behind the storeback with the first rumble of rocks from the wagon. Without looking, without the need to look from this distance, Mitchelltree felt their white skins, their light eyes watching in anticipation and judgment, and in that awareness he perceived the surface of his own skin, acute and tender, like a smoldering surcoat laid over bone and muscle, a warm membrane stretched taut across cheekbones, sheathing ears and neck and lips, encasing the brown hand holding the grip of the gun. Although his own broad-brimmed hat covered him, and his high-heeled, arched boots braced him, and his heavyweight denim jacket cloaked him, Burd Mitchelltree felt himself naked on the bare ridge.

  Fayette, for his part, locked as he was in his word-rant, his obsessed focus on the howdah, might not have been aware of the townsmen for some time, if not for the one who had walked up at the last and joined the mute, watching line. As the silence seeped past Fayette’s rattling voice in his own mind, he sensed the one who stood off to the side a little at the end of the row of men, with his hobnail boots planted wide in the tan mud and his slouch hat pushed to the back of his head, looking up. Fayette turned his eyes from the armed man facing him and looked below at the town. All he could think of was to wonder how his brother had managed to come along the road from Cedar without Fayette himself seeing, for he believed he had watched with a hawk’s eye the whole afternoon. Mystified, pondering, he slowly dropped his upheld palms and reached to his back pocket for his flask.

  Immediately Burd Mitchelltree’s hand tightened on the gunhandle, the smooth plate of the trigger, but he could see the flared grip of the Colt tucked unmolested in Fayette’s waistband, and for an instant he waited. He was a black man naked on the ridge. To draw the gun was to fire it, to fire it was to kill the man and be instantly picked off by a Winchester from below, or chased and lynched if they could catch him, and for the minutest flickering instant, Mitchelltree calculated the distance to the mule, thinking to draw, shoot, and roll under the mule simultaneously, cursing the terrible weight of the gun even as he determined the density of briar thicket and scrub oak down the back side of the ridge and the likelihood of escape through it; he prepared completely for death or a killing in the seconds it took for Fayette to reach behind himself and pull the flask from beneath the back of his coat. Mitchelltree had no more than a heartbeat to halt the half-drawn gun when he saw it was whiskey and not a weapon that Fayette reached for; he froze then, his skin burning beneath the white eyes lined up below, his hand spasmed on the gunhandle, rage and contempt mingling, a muscle twitching along his jawline. He felt a change below, a flicker of movement. Caught by the jagged motion at the edge of his vision, Mitchelltree turned his watch from the Lodi before him to the one who had broken off from the line of men, torn free like a piece of riverdrift, and now made his way alone to the foot of the rise, where he began slowly, methodically, to climb the ridge.

  The earth, which had paused for a moment on its axis, now rolled heavily forward. A chorus of crows could be heard cutting the air above Faulk’s not-yet-plowed cornfield, mocking one another, languorously laughing. A low murmur arose from the line of men behind the post office. Girlish voices grated high and harsh in the dirt yard behind Fayette’s log house, for the Lodi females, too, having heard the rumble and muleshriek and gunshot, having crowded one another in a phalanx of sack aprons and crossed elbows from slit of window to open doorway to back porch, now emerged fully from the log depths to witness the unfolding of events on the ridge. William Moss stood up on the hillside, slowly, never raising his hat brim or looking at his grandmother, and walked off away from her watching eyes, east, in the same direction and at the same steep angle taken by the yellow man. He skirted deeply the four chattering, bonneted faces, the silent, gaunt woman, the two short-haired little girls standing off to the side with their arms around each other in the yard; he stumped across the muddy road and disappeared on the far side into the creek bottom.

  The man in the slouch hat continued to climb the rise, seeming in no hurry, and yet he covered the ground swiftly, his head bowed in the honeyed light. He paused at the spilled wagon, stood awhile looking down at the dead mule, disappeared briefly from Mitchelltree’s sight as he negotiated the steepest part of the slope just below the rim, and then his tan slouch hat and suspendered shoulders appeared again, and he came on, mounting slowly, his eyes never leaving his brother’s bloodshot blue ones. Without shifting his gaze, Fayette slipped the tin flask back beneath his jacket, wiped his thumb and forefinger down either side of his mustache, seeming to grin tightly at the man cresting the rim. It was then that Mitchelltree understood that he himself was no longer in it. From the instant the slouch-hatted man had broken from the line of watchers, he—Mitchelltree—had ceased to exist for them. He knew that whatever intention Fayette Lodi may have had when he came at him, it was gone now, disappeared in the blazing focus on the one who stood now, unblinking, shoulders heaving slowly, on the bald ridge between them.

  The man was not especially tall, though he gave that impression because of the way his shoulders curled in on themselves, hulked from the weight of their own mass and the unconscious effort to conceal it. He was unbearded, his olive skin sallow with lack of sun. Beneath the soft brim of tan hat his eyes were dark, nearly slate-colored, sober. Mitchelltree could see the resemblance now: the same brushy brows above long-lashed eyes the same ovoid shape; the same bluntness of feature shared from the same mold—tinted sapphire and copper and rouge on the lively one, dull with the colors of the earth on the stubbled plane of the other—and yet the two were clearly brothers, as nearly alike as two sides of a dollar. Mitchelltree released his grip on the gunhandle infinitesimally, sucked in a slow, steadying inhalation. If he did not relax exactly, at least he uncoiled the invisibly coiled springs in his hamstrings. This was theirs, then, something between these two white men, brothers. He took an easing step back.

  “Mitch!” Fayette said, the cajoling false heartiness returned to his voice now, though he never moved his eyes from the stern eyes of the newcomer. “This here’s my brother John. John, this is—fella’s name’s Mitchelltree, he’s a good hand, he—” and Fayette’s voice rose in volume and pitch as the other suddenly turned his back and walked over to where the big coal-colored mule stood. “Got him a peculiar-looking pistol you might—Hey. I meant to mention to you about that mule, Son, I sure did. Didn’t have time yesterday, you run off so everloving early. That stupid Indi’n—Listen here, listen, next drove comes through I’ll get you a fine big new one. She wasn’t worth a plug anyhow, too blame little. Too old. Say, what I wanted to tell you, this fella here, he’s got himself a powerful big-barrel weapon you might want to take a look at. Find it a little interesting, I’ll bet. John, listen, that mule . . .” And his voice trailed off. While his brother’s back was turned, Fayette slipped the flask out, took a long swig, capped it, returned it to his front coat pocket this time, wiped his mustache with thumb and forefinger again.

  “I’ll swun to my time,” he went on, fortified, his eyes bright, “that blame fool Indi’n, I’d like to take a piece out of his hide. You seen him run off. Listen. I didn’t have no choice, John. I had to send them boys on to Fort Smith yesterday morning, wasn’t nothing else to ride to the depot but that old yella mule of mine. I can’t trust them fool boys with my good saddlehorse, you know that, not t
o tie up at Wister for four days.” He paused a minute, waiting for some sign from the other, but John continued silent, back turned, examining the big mule. “I hate how it turned out, Son!” Fayette called out. “I really hate it!” His eyes followed the movement of his brother as he ran his hand down the big mule’s neck, along his coal back, touched the raw places where the harness had galled. “Listen.” Fayette kept on, talking loud and fast at his brother’s back, and John never saying a word or looking at him. “Listen. How’m I going to get them rocks hauled without I had to borry your mule? Tell you what, Son, you can just have that yella mule when them boys get back with her. She’s a hunnerd-dollar mule, she is, I don’t care if I did give but thirty. I could get a hundred for her from Clyde Coffy next Tuesday. You can have her, minute them boys get back from the train station! Worth ten of that little gray piece of dogmeat!”

  Still John did not look at him or speak, and Fayette kept on, unwilling in his soul, but unable to stop the words flinging themselves from his erupting mouth.

  “Tell you what, Son, what I mean, you can have that black’un right yonder! Now, that is some mule, he’ll go good with that old Sarn of yours, he might learn him how to act!” He pulled the flask out, no longer attempting to hide it from his brother, who, in any case, kept his back to him, checking the mule’s teeth, his ears, lifting each leg singly to examine the small neat hooves, as a man looks over horseflesh, preparing to buy. “I give Frank Slaughter fifty dollars for that mule yonder,” Fayette sang out, “and skinned him alive on the deal! The very damn day we come into the Territory! The very damn day, me and Jess and my boys. Plus I threw in that old sorrel we drove in here to boot!” He paused for a breath. “He’s worth a hundred if he’s worth a dime, Son! I’ll just give him to you, call it even! You can’t ask for no fairer deal than that! Tell you what, you put yourself to plowing some around here instead of calleywomping off to Cedar every damn morning, I’ll throw in that new harness, so help me I will! Set down to a little plowing maybe, help feed some folks around here ’stead of traipsing off to Dayberry’s, who ain’t kin nor friend, he don’t mean a thing in the world to me—” Fayette took another deep slug, the flask tilted way up, nearly empty. “You’ve got some mighty twisted notions, Brother, that’s all I can say—some pretty strange ideas our old daddy would not be too happy to see.” His voice turned mincing, mocking. “Got to go off to Ce-e-edar before daylight every morning. Got to work for Da-a-ayberry . . .”