The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The girl unfolded each crumpled note. Some of them sifted to ash beneath her fingers, as if, having been brought to the point of combustion and unaccountably halted, called back from destruction by an icy breath, now, touched by human warmth and the sun’s heat, they must at once continue their disintegration into dust. But even as they crumbled, she read the numbers: hundred-dollar notes, five hundreds, fifties, all stamped with the mark of the Confederacy, all worthless, as even the child knew; as even the raw, red-knuckled hand that had pulled the roll from the leather purse and sifted hurriedly through the bills before crumpling each in a furious wad and cramming it back in the darkness, as the intelligence behind that hand, had known. Worthless even on the day of their printing.

  In the heat and sound of a thousand rasping cicadas, the girl was transported to the hot clearing in the mountains of Arkansas, to the repetition and voice of her mother, and the girl heard what she had been lessoned by rote so that the rhythms and words were an eternal present, her mother’s voice chanting, rising, falling like the asking voices of locusts: James and Thomas and Oliver, William, Alexander, Obediah, called Bede, and your grandfather Cornelius who died at Vicksburg in the War. That was Eighteen Sixty-three, which seems a long time ago to your young mind, but it is not long at all, I was fourteen when my father died, and he was thirty-nine, I was fourteen which seems a long time ago to your young mind but it is not long at all. Matt stared at the Confederate note. Richmond, Feb 17th, 1864. your grandfather cornelius who died at vicksburg in the war that was eighteen sixty-three which seems a long time ago.

  From the cluster of letters amidst the treasury notes she plucked a thick piece of paper folded in thirds, and opened it to discover that it was not a letter at all but a child’s penmanship practice, the scrolled alphabet repeated in upper case and lower case between stiff lines ruled with charcoal. She folded the thick paper and placed it in the box lid, reached for a folded semitransparent sheet, brown and thin as the skin of an onion, through which she could see dark blue scratches. Her breath held as she unfolded the friable page. The hand was beautifully penned in slanted o’s and sweeping tails and elaborate curlicues, the indigo ink faded in places and smudged illegibly in the creases, but yes, it was a letter, dated in the upper corner Oct 21st, 1861.

  Dear Wife,

  We are camped near Leesburg where on this day since I have witnessed the awful spectacle of a thousand bluecoated lemmings leaping madly routed down the bare face of Ball’s Bluff to their deaths in the swollen waters of the Potomac and have rejoiced to witness victory fierce and sweet as Manassas and to cherish the knowledge that though it will be finished soon I have not missed the fight. The regiment will receive orders within the hour I’m told and so I write in haste, though my grieving spirit tells me had I a thousand hours, a preacher’s tongue, a poet’s pen to ink my sorrows, I could not begin. Look you to Proverbs where the Creator’s poet tells us of a virtuous woman whose husband’s heart doth safely trust in her and he shall have no need of toil, it is not thy virtue wife I suffer fearing but thy willingness to loyalty & trust, and what will you tell our children when their kinsmen call them traitor? Shall you tell them to deny their father as you have denied your husband? To deny the will of Logan Co. and all its patriots who know where our allegiance lies? My grief that your brothers have turned blind eyes to the True Cause, have thrown their lot with the North when our very souls & wills & manner are southern bred, this bitterness is nothing to the sorrow of my life to have a wife who sets her face against me, and with no more somberness of mind or wit of thought than the platitudes of those who deem it Christian to take a man’s property and grind his will beneath their feet. But I would not constrain you wife, nor vex your spirit when you are soul ma and pa both unto our children, it is only when I see the ladies here in the land of my birthplace who would fight before their men and at their sides to death, my grief renews. But thou wert always a contentious woman, the Holy Book tells us that a continual dripping on a rainy day and a contentious woman are alike, whoever restrains her restrains the wind and grasps oil with his right hand. I would not be a fool besides all else, and in any case will return soon and then we will dress this wound to heal it or cut it out but meantime I will not desist to write and do you so the same for separation of will is not severance. I carry my Testament and pray daily and would admonish you to do the same, and so saying and prayerfully I remain,

  Your Husband

  Matt folded the thin sheet along the creases and placed it beside the other items in the box lid. She unfolded another, thick-coated and stiff. In a different hand, one blocked and bluntly square, someone had written on a torn piece of wallpaper:MY BELOVED I HAVE HIRED A FELLA TO PASS TO YOU THE NEWS I AM LIVING AND NOT KILLED. WE PAST A STREAM WHERE A PANTHER DRANK BY A DOE BOTH JUST DIPPING THERE HEADS AND BREAKING THE SURFACE AND I THOUGHT TO MYSELF THIS IS HOW IT IS GOING TO BE OR HOW IT SHOULD BE WHEN THE LION WILL LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A BATH OF KILLING.

  No signature. No date. She folded it and placed it next to the others in the silver square, reached for another paper, where a childish scrawl declared Roses are Red Violets are Blue Honey is Sweet And You are To. Another contained a recipe for chess pie. When she unfolded another, a lock of very blond, curly hair tied with a pale ribbon fell to her lap from a charred printed leaf. To the girl’s eyes it seemed that the burnt edges of the page were blacker, more distinctly charred, than the browned tinge at the edge of the others, and there were blurred blue marks on one side where a hand had underlined words and phrases. Matt looked to the top of the page, where the name EZEKIEL, the numbers <32 27> were inscribed. Quickly, uncomprehendingly, she scanned the passages marred with smearing blurred lines:20 They shall fall in the midst of them that are slain by the sword: she is delivered to the sword: draw her and all her multitudes. 21 The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of hell with them that help him: they are gone down, they lie uncircumcised, slain by the sword. 22 Asshur is there and all her company: his graves are about him: all of them slain, fallen by the sword: 23 Whose graves are set in the sides of the pit, and the company is round about her grave: all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which caused terror in the land of the living.

  The girl’s eyes darted back and forth and down, finding the same words underlined again and again:slain by the sword all of them slain fallen by the sword which caused terror in the land of the living

  unto the last lines:

  27 And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war: and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.

  Folding the Old Testament page along the creased squares, she slipped the lock of blond hair within and put it away. On another partially burned Bible page separated from its binding were the listings of family births and deaths and marriage dates, printed in a strong sweeping hand, the words and order just as her mother had taught her. Inside the last delicate and half-singed page the girl opened, in a hand unlike the others, another letter began My beloved—

  Without judgment, she read.

  —my dearly beloved, which you are not and never shall be, this I see as I have seen all else here among men, but it is not that which I put my hand to tell you but what is revealed within the torment bequeathed to me through no fault or petition, the Curse charged to me which I have in days past petitioned Him to remove and He would not, now I know it is not mine to ask. We are dying, we all are dying the flesh melts from our bones daily as snowwater drips from the eaves and I care not, for Thou art with me Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me Thou anointest my head with oil my cup runneth over, there is no goodness and mercy.

  Without wisdom, without comprehension, her earth-yellow eyes skimming back and forth, the girl read . . .We have killed one another in the violence of our souls. There is no reason else. All
that has been told us is falsehood and deceit. I have seen Cain’s armies and Laban’s armies and the sons of Jacob the thief, and care not, for that which now is, in the days to come shall be forgotten. Our very House is divided brother against brother not in God’s vengeance nor the Just Righteousness of Cause, for there is no Cause but Pride and Violence, which are meager in the unfolding of the Face of the Lord. Thus, the Will of the Lord that Kentucky lie astraddle the Cause each North and South which is illusion, so that we have owned the limbs of the Sons of Ham and yet not their souls and a curse is upon us, we have joined with the Might of the Union for the sake of Union to be united with our brethren, which also is deceit and illusion, for “if a man say he love God and hateth his brother he is a liar.”

  . . . until she began to know without language or comprehension, to hear with her soul what she saw in the place behind her eyes: a pale skeleton of a man seated upon the fetid earth in tattered trousers faded to no-color, shredded high above his ankles, flapping in a high breeze like the unsolid limbs of a scarecrow, and in his cracked fingers a stubbed pencil pressed to page, and in his shallow breath the urgency of the dying; she knew that he suffered the mystery, as she herself suffered it; that he carried unto madness the same gift and curse to breathe the soul of another; that he held, as she did, the rolling vision in the dark place behind his pale eyes.

  “Moreover your little one which ye said should be a prey and your children which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither.”

  Abruptly the child stopped reading. The paper fell, crushed between the small, blackened fingers, unattended in her lap. She sank, spiraling, into knowledge that was beyond her understanding, truth that was beyond her wisdom, seeing that the writer was a man kin to her—kin to her mother—a blond specter with yellow eyes, and yet his was not the hand that had penned the indigo script chastising the faithless woman, though the kinship was there too, so that the words were a distortion of the same cadences and rhythms from the same pulse of blood, and she saw within the spiral Grandma Billie, blind and heavy in her shapeless dress in the dawn fog; it was her grandmother who had been the faithless woman, the contentious woman who set her face against her husband, and he died at Vicksburg, died at Vicksburg in the war. The blond specter swam forward but he did not see Grandma Billie, and the girl knew the blood kinship was not there. She struggled, trying to twist free of the spiral, and could not, any more than she could walk naked on the earth freed of the very blood and breath within her, mingled within her in the burden and protection of blood, calcified in the carapace of family.

  The girl sat on the blackened earth without presence in her body, without power over the images rolling behind her eyes, listening without judgment as a child listens to a tale that is told. The blond wraith had loved her mother, these scratched words had been written for her mother and to her mother in her mother’s girlhood from the long travail of a madness unto death, and the girl felt his hand shake with fever, not from a soldier’s wound, though he was a soldier, but fevered with madness and hunger; she saw the ghosts of men groaning nearby on the fetid ground, sprawled in acres in a great space around him, and he was blood-kin through her mother’s father, and the searing sight in him was the same behind her own eyes—the same and yet different; for in the blond wraith the vision was madness, and in the girl it was only like remembering: a deep and unfathomable memory in the blood. She remembered that the blond soldier had loved her mother, she remembered he was dying; she remembered the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth upon prison ground deep with the stench of dying, far away to the east, and the memory rolled back, and back, the numbers increasing, the voices crying, and the girl knew she could not know these thousand lives from before her borning, how they had spoken in the world or walked, not gestures, not scent or warm breath, but only that they were hers and she theirs, and kin.

  The vision rolled deeper; she was not she but one hiding, in fear, hiding; it was a cottage with whitewashed walls and a hewn oaken table, and one hid beneath the oaken wood of the table, for the enemy roamed without, and the one hiding, coward and afraid in war, crouched beneath the oaken table, trembling, heard voices, the voices of women; and one hid, afraid, shrinking in terror, the women’s voices coming to the door, entering, three peasant women in scarves and woolen dresses, moving about the cottage to prepare food, a mess of pottage, a mess of pottage for the one hiding, the coward, the soldier, until they became and had always been Holy Women, to protect and guide the one, to save the one hiding from the enemy on the fields, the green fields, the fetid fields all around, and as one watched, the faces of the Holy Women changed, darkened, became all the face of the Choctaw woman, and they held each of them out to the one hiding the clay cup.

  The girl’s eyes rolled back in her head, her head slumped forward, and she fell into darkness.

  Mattie stood at the top of dark stairs in a house that had belonged to her long ago, so long ago, and her mother’s voice called her from the root cellar.

  “Mattie? Mattie. Come here a minute. Mama needs you.”

  “Mama?”

  She stood at the top, staring down into the darkness where the wooden steps descended lower and lower and disappeared in blueblack velvet.

  “Come down here, honey.”

  She was afraid. It was too dark, the stairs too steep. She could not remember what the cellar looked like at the bottom. “Come get me, Mama!”

  “I can’t come there, Mattie.”

  “Come get me.”

  “I can’t. I need you. Come down here where I am.”

  “Who is he, Mama? That man?”

  “Nobody. A cousin. Come down, honey. Mama needs you.”

  “I can’t, I can’t, I’m too afraid, come get me. You come get me.”

  “I can’t.” Her mother’s voice was fading, moving deeper into the cellar.

  “I been waiting for you, Mama. Every day I been waiting.”

  “I can’t climb those stairs again, sweetheart.”

  “Come get me, Mama!”

  “I can’t.”

  Her mother’s voice faded into silence. Mattie opened her mouth to call her and she could not; she could not follow her mother’s voice into the darkness so that she might know the meaning of burnt match-sticks kept in a cheap snuffbox, a child’s pair of eyeglasses, worthless treasury notes in a cracked leather purse. She could not know who the blond wraith was, blood and not-blood, half-blood—a cousin, dying on bloodless ground—because she could not know her mother’s life, not lived nor told nor unfolding in the strength of imagination nor in dream or vision. Her mother’s life was locked away from her, eternal, as she was locked away from all others, as we each are locked away from one another in the pores of finite mind and skin, and though she was dreaming, or trancing, her eyes closed, the ocher irises darting and twitching beneath the pale film of her eyelids, her thin shoulders slumped, her head forward, palms open at her sides and the backs of her hands on either side touching the blackened circle of goods that had been their lives, now burnt and rank with weather, and though she did not know and would never know that she did so, for the first time since her mother’s dying, the child wept.

  We did not go from the home of our mother, living midst her salves and crockery and placement, into each of us our own home to create it newly born from our inheritance. We didn’t make a home of habits and objects. Ididn’t, and I should have, because I was the one who remembered, because I could see the pieced quilt like Grandma Billie’s with the B turned backwards which had lain on Mama’s and Papa’s loft bed. Inside me, in my memory, was the picture of Uncle Neeley’s cherry chifforobe and the clothes arranged as Mama arranged them inside it, and rows of canned cobbler juice in glass jars marked with pencil in hot wax as Mama marked them, as her mama had marked them and lined them up on cloth-covered shelves, which I did not think to note or question because in winter there was cobbler because there was always cobbler in winter because it always just was.
I could see Grandma Billie’s front room with the two tatted yellow doilies on the armchair and in the kitchen the curtains of embroidered flour sacks tacked up to close off the pantry, which Mama also bleached and sewed together and embroidered the same and hung them in front of the wood shelves off to the side of our cookstove because we did not have a pantry door. I remembered all of it, the placement and shape and smell built by Mama from her own mother’s habits brought and married to Papa’s, I remembered it but I did not re-create it, because I did not think it was important. I could have, I believe, if I had had Mama’s things to live among.