The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  She stood a moment. The dog went snuffling and sniffling around, but soon lost interest and trotted over to the shade beneath a pine tree and lay down with his tongue out, panting. The girl looked at the charred circle impassively, blinking slowly in the hot sunlight, hardly curious: in the great self-absorption that closed her eyes to all but that which served her secret purpose, she nearly missed the very thing she’d walked the hills and valleys endlessly seeking. She did not know it or recognize it but merely gazed at it a moment and turned away, turned to walk on down the slope toward the road curving at the base of the mountain, thinking nothing, thinking only that she might go back along the road, no matter about the dust and the terrapins and perhaps people passing, because it was just too hot. She stopped, caught by the smallest bit of sunglint off metal. It did not show perfectly, blackened as it was with soot and ashes and dulled in the tan dust, but some part of it, the edge maybe, caught the bright sunlight in one narrow streak, and Matt saw it even as she was turning, like quartz in a roadbed far off. She was caught and held by it, nearly as if the glint on the earth were singing, and she knew in the same breath and heartbeat what it was.

  The dog stood up and stretched, shook his ears flapping, ready to trot off in whatever direction he sensed in her, and then he too stopped. He stood quite still, looking at the charred circle, whining. Matt lowered the rifle to the ground barrel-first, the stock sliding heavily in the crook of her arm; she placed it flat in the dry weeds before she turned to walk barefoot over the crunch and shift of ashes to where the box lay, tilted sideways, in the center of the sooted pile. Still she did not understand what she was standing on, but she knew what that black square was, shaped square still, holding the boxed shape of its integrity, not melted but only blackened like a sooty lamp chimney, and warped a little along the bottom edge. Somebody had laid it there—or thrown it—after the fire was nearly dying.

  The girl knelt in the filth and the crumbling cinders rank with the smell of charcoal. Her hand trembled when she reached for it. She dug quickly in the ashes, her fingers turning black, to free it, and picked it up, cradled the box to her belly, where it blackened the knot of calico and the flat pane of shirtfront. The tin was warm from the sun’s heat in the cold ashes, like living flesh. The girl understood then what she was kneeling on. She turned her head slowly, looking at all of it, the whole blackened circle: her mother’s embroidered pillowslips and linens, the cedar wood from the trunk, their crockery and wool blankets and the seven quilts pieced by Grandma Billie, all the objects of her family’s lives brought with them from Kentucky, burnt in a circle of fire while she had slept in the red darkness. And she knew it was the same as the circle of white ice, coming through it with Papa, the same and its opposite, for both were the point of no turning back forever, but the first had been ice and white and eternal, and the last black and fire and small. The first of God’s making, and this—she knew it, she had no hint of doubt about it—from the hand of her family.

  It was not Papa only, the girl thought.

  She could see then the aunt’s raw, red knuckles folded over, the hands lifting a straw-filled crate away from the pile of goods on the ground, setting it to the side before the coal oil rained down, shaken like rain onto the pile by her uncle’s hands, and her father’s. She saw the fire lick up quick and yellow, burning nearly smokeless in the cold November light.

  The girl held the tin box tightly in the wedge of her left arm, and with the other hand she dug in the ashes, past the crumbling, hot, dry surface, deep into the black muck where even the hot May sun could not reach. Her fingers scraped past the shards and shreds of what would not burn, past melted shoe eyelets and her father’s chisel and the iron clasps of her mother’s trunk, past the formless chunks of charcoal, into the dank mass, cool and black and stinking, in the depths of the black circle. For a long time she knelt so, with the tin box warm against her left side and her right hand buried, trying to feel what these lumps were, trying to read with her fingers, as the blind would, with the sweat running in her eyes and the hot May sun burning the back of her head through the slouch hat. She stirred the damp remains, the sift and silt of what they’d made their lives from, charred and melted past all knowing, each lump with no more form to it than a clump of river-rock or stinking clay.

  Not one thing to keep here, she thought. Nothing to save. She knew the completeness with which those hands had piled every item, soaked each piece with kerosene, how thorough and deft they had been. There was no grief in her, only the beginnings of anger, rising in small, hot waves from her stomach through her chest and face. She turned over a clumped mass that crumbled black between her fingers and fell open, smoke white, where the feathers sifted out: a lump of Mama’s featherbed, too thick and damp with down to burn properly, too dense. Matt touched the singed feathers with her finger. She smelled the burnt animal smell. At once she knew where the tin box had been hidden all those months, riding soft and discreet, like the unborn, from Kentucky into the mountains where her mother died, and then on along the pig trails, in secret, unknown, into Eye Tee, sewn tight in the ticking seams.

  The heat of the box burned against her, and she set it down on the black pile. With her clean hand, her left hand, she tried to pry the lid open. There was no lock on it; there had never been a lock: not on the morning she’d uncovered it from the frozen earth beneath the blackgum, never while it rode a thousand miles, buried again, soft in the featherbed where her mother rode swaying and sick above; it was not locked by a human lock of tumbler and iron, but sealed with heat and rust. Sealed with the closure of her mother’s death. And her sister’s.

  “Lyda.” She spoke the name aloud: the dead name, unspeakable. She thought suddenly that the child’s remains, too, were buried here on the pyre with the rest of it. If she dug deeper she might touch the fragile crisps of burnt flesh, the stripped bones, the tiny arcs of ribcage and scoop of plated skull no larger than a turtle shell.

  The girl scrambled to her feet and wiped the muck from her blackened arm on the knot of her cousin’s dress, the fear rising and, beyond that, or above it, or beneath it: the rage. She wanted to kick her mother’s tin box, wanted to smash or break it. She picked it up with both hands and threw it, but the pile of ashes was soft as mush, the ashes would not resist it, and so she looked around quickly and spied the gun where she’d laid it at the edge of the circle. Stepping quickly over the coal and ash, the sound crunching beneath her bare feet so that she thought even then she could be walking on the bones of her infant sister, Matt moved toward her father’s rifle. She picked up the gun, turned and sighted along the long barrel, quickly, too quickly, and pulled the trigger. The tin box jumped and tumbled a few feet. The report rang through the hollow, up the side of Bull Mountain.

  The box was only a half-dozen yards away, but she had barely grazed it. She was sobbing then, not in grief but in hot waves of anger, her shoulders shaking. Stupid! she thought. Stupid! She’d missed with the rifle from less than twenty feet. She’d been too stupid to figure out where her mother had hidden her secret. They burnt it all anyhow, she thought. It don’t matter. There’s nothing to carry. Nothing to load in the wagon, no team to hitch up, nothing to sell to buy a new mule, and the sun was too hot, she was sweating, and she hated them, all of them. She saw then her aunt’s hands unpacking the straw-bound stacks of white china from the slatted crate, Jessie’s hands setting each piece gently in a tin washtub, pouring a gallon jug of turpentine, gulping, over each milky plate and saucer, the thin lip of each cup decorated with a delicate print of rosebuds, to soak in turpentine on the back porch of the log house for three weeks. In winter. While the girl and the children slept upstairs. She knew how it was then, how it had been—She stole Mama’s china!—and the wrath swelled up more fierce.

  Tipping the gunstock to the ground, the girl took a step forward and reloaded by habit, with the barrel at an angle because she could not reach it standing straight up on its end; she uncapped the horn with her teeth, poured pow
der into the muzzle too fast, spilling black on the scoop of her hand, down her arm, filtering, sifting black grains to the charred earth; she licked the wadding with no spit in her mouth, seated the ball with the first thrust, and went on jamming the ramrod down the barrel, again, and again, and again. Her eyes were glazed, staring at the far side of the circle, where the dog had found an old mottled terrapin crossing the cold coals and was uselessly worrying it. With the cap set, gun loaded, Matt’s eyes cleared, and she could see the dog whining and sniffing pointlessly at the box terrapin. When his nose came close the creature would pull its leathery neck back and shut itself away, and when Ringo backed off, the old terrapin would emerge and move on again, slow and relentless, undaunted, following its own secret and imperative purpose. Matt hollered at the dog, “Quit that!”, the rage rising, settling its focus now on the hound’s animal ignorance, to sniff and paw at a useless land turtle when their very lives lay in a burnt circle around them. “Hyah!” she cried. “You, Ringo! Get over here!”

  The dog paid her no mind but went on nosing at the closed shell, snuffling beneath it with his snout as if to hunt the passage through its belly. Matt reached them just as Ringo turned the terrapin over and began to paw at the yellowed plate of its underbelly. Swinging the heavy gun by the stock with all her force, she swatted the terrapin shell with a dull thunk that sent it spinning and skittering across the ashes; she kicked at the dog, but he ducked back out of her reach, and crying and sweating so that she could hardly see, she went to where the tin box had tumbled and picked it up. There was a shiny silver gash, a small silver streak clean across the top where the lead bullet had nicked it. She held it tightly, her mind running pictures: she would take it to the dry creekbank below Bluff Hole where the still, slow water lay, deep, mud-colored, and throw the box in the unmoving water. She would clean it and shine it, and carry it, held high in her hands, above her head, into the log house and chunk it down on the puncheon floor before Jessie and Fayette and the six cousins; before the astonished and sorrowing eyes of her father. She would find a black tupelo somewhere in that dry, tree-clotted country, and bury the box in the earth beneath the gummed branches: she would hide it from their eyes, all of them, blood and half-blood and colored and Indian, the white people of Big Waddy Crossing and Eye Tee, the world. She thought, There’s this, then. I’ll take this when I go get Mama, though she hated the tin box as powerfully as it is possible to hate what is only dead metal. And she knew she would do none of what she saw behind her eyes, but only sit down with it upon the ashes (though she thought she couldn’t bear it, not here, on the burnt corpse of her family’s belongings): she would sit on the ashes and pry the box open. Or break it open. Or shoot if she had to shoot a hundred times.

  Both her hands were black now from soot and gunpowder as she turned the box over end to end. There was no clasp on it, no place visible where it should open, only a tight seam running square around. With one hand she unknotted the calico, and then she sat down on the pile of ashes and nestled the box in the scoop of skirt across her lap. The anger was seeping away now, draining, as a wound does. The dog had found the terrapin again, in the dry weeds beyond the circle; Matt could hear his little huffing whine. With the stubs of her fingers she dug into the seam and tried to work it open. She scraped the line clean with a stick, pressed against it with her thumbs, held the box like a canning jar in the crook of her arm and tried to pry apart one corner. For a long time in the sun’s heat, she didn’t look up. She could feel the sun sinking past its high point, hear the dog snuffling at wood’s edge, but she didn’t raise her frowning eyes from her work. Sweat beaded the curve above her tightly clamped lips; she worked slowly and steadily, without urgency, but the box would not open. It was only when she stopped finally, the sweat burning her eyes, and let the box fall still in her lap, when she sat with her fingers unmoving, touching lightly against the seam—only then did she feel the lid loosen. She picked the box up. Then it seemed to come too easily, one side sliding noiselessly against the other, without edge or friction, silently, and before she could realize it or stop it, the tin square came apart in two pieces in her hands.

  Outside, the box was smeared black still with ash and the sweat of her fingers, but inside, the tin walls gleamed clean and pure, silver. Carefully, the girl set the lid on the blackened earth beside her; she cradled the lower half on her lap. Nesting in the bottom lay a clutch of crushed papers and ribbons, some other items, whose reason or purpose she could not fathom: a penny snuffbox, a stub of pencil, a small oval eyeglass case the color of midnight sky. The box could not have been on the fire long, because the edges of the papers were barely singed. She sat for a long time, just looking, holding the base in her hands. She waited to feel something.

  Ain’t even burnt hardly, she thought.

  She sat still awhile longer, waiting.

  It was Jessie, then, the girl thought. She must’ve threw it on at the last.

  The girl tried to call up an image of the gaunt slit-mouthed woman, her aunt, slinging the gleaming box on the dying flames, but she couldn’t see anything. The dark place behind her eyes gave her nothing; she saw only this unfathomable clutch of yellow papers, the cheap penny snuffbox, a pencil: her mother’s secrets in the face of the real world hot and stinking and dust-crusted around her. She wiped her hands on the tail of her cousin’s skirt before reaching in to take out a little rolled wedge of newspaper. She unrolled it. Inside the yellowed triangle lay a twig of ashwood chewed to a round, ragged knob on one end. Matt recognized its character, what it was—somebody’s snuff stick—but she couldn’t comprehend its purpose, what reason it could have for lying in the secret place of her mother’s keepsakes and memory. She rolled the snuff stick back up carefully and placed it in the box lid; she reached for the cheap snuffbox and, with some effort, unscrewed the rusted cap. Inside were four used wooden match-sticks, the knobs of their heads spent and black. She screwed the cap back on and placed the snuffbox beside the wedge of rolled paper in the lid.

  Slowly, meticulously, the girl examined each item. She picked up the stub of pencil and studied the knife marks where it had been sharpened, licked the square of lead extruding from the end, placed the pencil in the box lid. She turned the eyeglass case over and over before she snapped open the hard navy shell. Within, delicate as gossamer against the blueblack velvet lining, nestled a little pair of wire-rimmed spectacles half covered by a soft strip of white cotton. She brushed the cotton strip off the lenses, gently, with the end of one finger. They were so dainty, so tiny. They’d fit Jonaphrene, she thought. Tiny little round eyeglasses the size to fit a doll. She reached for them with her charred fingers and held them in her palm. Then, with the slow, practiced gestures of sacrament, never taking her eyes from the sunglint on the thick lenses, she took off the shapeless hat she wore and placed it carefully on the ash pile beside her, opened the eyeglasses, and wrapped the wire crescents behind her ears. The spectacles were so small they pressed a tight seam against the girl’s narrow face. She turned her head from side to side, and her warped and misshapen eyes turned with her. She sat so for some time, turning her head slowly, an anomaly too old to be child, too slack-boned and tiny to be grown: a thin otherwordly creature in skirt and trousers with chopped-off hair and ocher eyes swimming large behind glasses. The girl held still and waited for her vision to clear, but the dust-coated trees down the mountain remained a drab swirl of verdigris. The blackened circle she sat upon stayed a blurred shadow. She couldn’t see the world outside herself—the dog, the outline of box lid, the clutch of papers in the silver bottom—any more than she could see the moving pictures in the dark place behind her eyes.

  As carefully as she’d donned them, the girl unwrapped the wires from behind her ears and removed the spectacles; she replaced them just as she’d found them, nestled against the velvet as in a miniature cradle, half blanketed with the wedge of white cotton. The case snapped shut with a popping sound that echoed along the ridge and startled silent for a hea
rtbeat the steady hum of insects, and Matt placed the eyeglass case on the box lid next to the other items. She stared at the several articles lined up on the tin lining, thinking at any moment their meaning would come clear to her. No clarity came, no revelation, not even a moment’s logic to explain the correlation of items or their reason for being within her mother’s life. Matt turned her eyes down to the cache of papers in the box bottom in her lap. She thought, This here will tell me.

  Again she wiped her hands on the skirt hem. She reached in the box and pulled out a handful of letters, released from their bond of ribbon, scattered in a loose cluster. The singed paper began to crumble beneath her fingers, and gingerly, with more delicacy than would seem possible to the hand of an eleven-year-old, she lifted the tin box and laid the letters gently in its place upon the filthy swatch of calico across her lap. As she turned to set the box to the side, her eye was caught by another something, half visible in the bottom beneath the scattered papers. Again Matt wiped her hands. She reached in and pulled out a cracked leather purse, unclasped at the top where the two tarnished brass heads did not quite meet. With two fingers she spread the mouth of the purse open. Crammed inside were several wads of crumpled paper, brownish knots aged and singed and crinkled, and when she drew them out and spread them on her knee, she knew them to be paper dollars, though they didn’t look like the few U.S. paper dollars she’d ever seen. Delicately she touched them, opening the fragile crisps with a fine, fingering touch. Printed across one, crinkled and faded but decipherable: the name VIRGINIA above a half-draped woman holding wheat shafts, seated upon a horn of plenty; in the corners, the numeral 10 and a round portrait of a beardless man in a high collar. On another, a man straddled a prancing horse beneath the words DEO VINDICE. In scrolled letters the crumbling paper declared that the Confederate States OF AMERICA would pay the bearer on demand the sum of FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, dated Richmond, Feb 17th, 1864.