The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  No. That is not true. That is not true either. I have made up my mind to tell it, and I will not lie if I can help it.

  I was set already, my nature and my will. Papa was too much in me, which I wanted, which I chose of my own doing, or I allowed. I’d seen Mama create our lives in our home in Kentucky, watched her set her jelly jars here, her crocheted doilies there, her violets in a half-moon in the yard, and I carried none of it with me, except in words. It was my job to teach them, Mama had given me the words to teach them, and I believed it was words only I was meant to pass on.

  I took them with me, down into the low secret places, to sit on the flat stone where the creek widens and deepens. I gathered the children around me. I said, Your mama was married in a dress of white linen and there were seventy-three guests at her wedding, and on the night we all left Kentucky, when she had to leave behind the cherry chifforobe her brother Neeley made her for a wedding present, it was another aspect that helped crush her heart.

  When your mama was a young girl, I told them, she suffered from nose-bleeds, and she had one so bad one time she lay in the bed three days bleeding and they all expected she’d die. (Hush, now. Hush.) They cut your mama’s hair (yes, as they cut ours: the same: listen) and made her to lie with her head back and stuffed herbs and poultices in her nostrils and not one thing helped. Finally an old nigger woman, a house nigger who then belonged to some neighbors, told them to fashion a lead necklace in the shape of a hog’s liver and hang it from a leather thong about her neck, and your mama’s papa did so, and they hung it around her and she quit bleeding and lived and never had another nosebleed again.

  Your mama’s name was Demaris.

  (Demaris, the crows calling, Mama’s name singing south in the water.)

  She had small hands and brown flyaway hair that fell to her waist when she brushed it.

  (Like your hair, Jonaphrene, you got your dark hair from Mama.)

  Her skin was the color of milk with the cream skimmed, and her name was Demaris.

  (Demaris. Demariss. Demarissss.)

  A girl of fourteen. She was a girl of fourteen when her papa died at Vicksburg, which seems a long time ago to your young minds but it is not long at all. On the night of the day her papa died in battle, your mama woke in the darkness to the sound of knocking. She slept with her sisters then and the others did not waken, but your mama was the middle child and her papa’s own favorite, and what she heard was three slow knocks on the hard wooden footboard of the bed. In this way she knew her papa had been killed, though the family did not learn of it till some long time after.

  (Sit down, Jim Dee. Listen.)

  Your mama’s mama was Mary Whitsun Billie and she was a blind woman. She had lived forty years when she went blind from a fever at ten o’clock one autumn morning (of a sudden, I told them: do you see it? like the closure of Heaven) in the year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred Sixty-seven, and she was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking people lived.

  On the bank beside Bull Creek I taught them. On the great slab of rock by the water. I told them, Your mama dropped dead before she ever stepped foot in Eye Tee because she’d made up her mind she was not willing to live here. I used to say, Don’t forget this: your mama died of a broken heart.

  We didn’t have Mama’s things, but I had my own mind’s memory—not Mama’s memory, mine!—every minute I had lived and seen and known that could not be burned away. Not word memory, not picture memory, but hand memory, a way of doing, because I was ten when we left Kentucky. I was big enough. I gave none to my brothers, but that did not matter. I think it did not matter. But I gave none to Jonaphrene, gave her words only and not work, not a way to set the jelly jar on the shelf so, and in this way I robbed her. She could have shaped a home if I’d taught her. That is not what I taught her. It is one of the ways I failed her, my sister, because she was the one most stained by it and I let it happen. Out of my own will, I turned my face away.

  Never did I tell about our belongings burnt in a black circle. Never did I mention Mama’s tin box, or what was inside it. I lifted the box from the burnt place, kicked the dog back, picked up Papa’s rifle. I carried the box pressed tight against my belly beyond Waddy Holler, past the Indian houses at Yonubby, deep into the long blue ridges of the Sans Bois. For two days I walked, to a place I knew I could find again because the ridge is naked. From a great distance you can see the tumbling rocks scattered on the south side of the hill. There, in a shallow cave, I laid it. I dug the earth with my hands, buried Mama’s box with my blackened fingers, to wait for the time of returning. I marked it with a small chunk of sandstone standing up on its end. Like her grave in the mountains of Arkansas. Waiting, like Mama herself, for the time I would have everything prepared and ready to go.

  In early summer a white man named Tanner crossed the Red River near Tulip, Texas, and traveled north through Indian Territory leading a train of thirty mules. He skirted the active coal-mining settlements around McAlester and made his way through the dry, crackling valleys over the course of several days to the crossroads town of Cedar, where he dismounted at noon, tethered his sorrel gelding to the rail next to the wide-open doors of the livery stable, and tied the lead mule beside it so that the train of thirty mules was strung north along the street in a balky, messing, multihued line nearly to the new depot in the heart of the town. He entered the darkened door of the livery, where John Lodi was bent at the back end of a plowhorse, fitting a shoe. Tanner nodded to the livery owner pitching hay from a small stack into a manger near the archway and started across the dirt floor.

  “Help you?” the owner called, but Tanner waved one gloved hand behind him as if to say, No, that’s all right, I can get it myself. He paused a few feet away from where John Lodi hulked with his head down, the horse’s left rear leg lifted, the hoof caught between his knees. It was some time before Lodi looked up, though the measuring ordinarily would take no more than a few seconds, but at last he raised his head as he eased the hoof to the floor. He nodded once at Tanner, without expression, and with the tongs carried the cooling horseshoe to the forge, heated it a moment and laid it on the anvil to mold it with a stroke or two. He turned to the horse and lifted the leg again and placed the shoe. The smell of burning hoof scorched the stable air. There was a faint sizzling sound, soon lost in the cling of the hammer, and the shoe was quickly set and nailed, the nails trimmed off, clenched, and rasped smooth, and John Lodi had already begun to loosen the clenches from the worn shoe on the horse’s other rear hoof before Tanner spoke.

  “I seen waste in my life,” he said, “but this beats anything.”

  Lodi picked up a pair of nippers and pulled off the old shoe, dropped it on the floor so that it made a dull pluck in the dirt as it hit, withdrew a straight-edged bone-handled knife from his apron pocket, and began to trim the sole.

  “There’s pearls before swine,” Tanner said, “and gold in a tin mine, but John Lodi doing farrier work is about as useless a proposition as I’ve seen in a while.”

  The livery owner, a small, spry man with a long mustache and a face like a Cooper’s hawk, stepped from the hay pile and said, “Wha’cha need, mister?”

  Tanner didn’t look at him; his eyes followed the deft movement of Lodi’s scarred hands as they scraped the outer edge of sole, trimmed the frog deep in the cleft, and in a twinkling, replacing the knife with the nippers, began to trim the hoof wall. The owner sauntered nearer. He leaned on the pitchfork tilted on its end, prongs bedded in the dirt, seeming casually interested in the present job, as the stranger was interested, though the owner doubtless had seen his employee shoe a hundred horses, oxen, mules. J. G. Dayberry’s front-thrust face matched Tanner’s in focus and direction, but his bright eyes beneath the overhanging brow were keen on the newcomer. He understood three things about him: one, that the man had traveled far, and had done so recently and in the company of considerable horseflesh (the stranger’s scent alone could have told this fact); two, that he was a cl
ose acquaintance of John Lodi, had known him from his pre-Territorial past, and called on a familiarity John Lodi had no wish to renew (his words and Lodi’s insistent ignoring of them, and him, told that fact); three, that the man was crooked as a dog’s hind leg. This Dayberry knew without knowing precisely how he knew it, but he was more sure of this last fact than of the other two put together. J. G. Dayberry had a sixth sense as acute as a redbone’s sense of smell, honed on nearly two decades’ worth of experience as a liveryman in a territory peopled almost entirely by law-abiding Choctaws and outlaw white men—and women, if you counted Belle Starr, which Dayberry did, for reputation if not accuracy, for most folks knew (as Dayberry’s sixth sense knew) that Belle Starr was not much of an outlaw but only a hellion who traded in borrowed horses from time to time. Dayberry knew, too, of the truth concerning honor among thieves, and who kept it, and who didn’t unless it was to his own best advantage, which was hardly true honor, and he knew who had not an ounce of it in his veins, and this muttonchopped stranger here who stood in his creased hat and foul clothes watching John Lodi shoe an old plowhorse was one who bore not a driblet.

  So the livery owner’s interest was piqued, not least because in the ten months John Lodi had worked for him he had never witnessed a Lodi acquaintance, friend, or family member coming around. It had never occurred to Dayberry that the man’s past would be of the shadier variety—though certainly it should have, he thought now, that being the condition of half the white men in this country—but John Lodi was just so plainly scrupulous, to a fault. To the point of peculiarity, really. For instance, if a customer came by to make payment on his stable fee or some kind of smithing or farrier work he’d had done and Dayberry didn’t happen to be in the stable, Lodi would tell him to come back at such-and-such a time, when Dayberry would return. If the fellow tried to leave payment, Lodi would ignore him, repeating to come back such-and-such a time, and would go on with whatever he was doing. He simply would not lay a finger on a dollar that didn’t belong to him. If the fellow insisted because he didn’t fancy to make another trip, he had his money ready now—this happened with Angus Alford and Jim Mewborn, a few of the more stubborn ones, before word got around—Lodi would seem at first to sull up and balk, but then he’d turn his slate eyes on the fellow, and the fellow would begin crawfishing, saying, yes, I believe I’ll just stop back by such-and-such a time. There were other evidences of Lodi’s acute probity. He wouldn’t shirk a minute’s work while Dayberry was paying him, would eat standing up working the bellows or some other job, and half the time did not even take a dinner break at all. Dayberry had never given much thought to this trait in his employee, except to be a little disgusted with him for his stubbornness sometimes: Dayberry knew the man was trustworthy; John Lodi didn’t have to work so hard, to the point of alienating customers, to prove it.

  Lodi went on rasping the hoof wall; the stranger watched him with the close eye of an apprentice learning a trade, and the owner watched the stranger just as closely.

  “Got a little something for you,” Tanner said at last, low, as if continuing a conversation. He was still hunkered over at the waist, watching, not moving an eyelash or a muscle.

  Lodi took from his apron a U-shaped iron level and placed it against the bottom of the hoof wall to check it, picked up the file and began to rasp again. The stranger was growing agitated, Dayberry could feel it, though the man still stood as before, unmoving, the rank smell of him swelling to overwhelm the odor coming from the far side of the unmucked stable where a half-dozen horses were stalled.

  “Your brother’s one told me to come by and leave it. Up to me, I’d leave it right in front of that fancy new barn. I got to go up yonder anyhow.”

  Lodi lowered the horse’s hoof to the floor, turned, took a side step, lifted the hoof front-first, rested it upright on his aproned knee, and began to rasp smooth the rough edges around the old nail holes on the outer edge. The maneuver put the horse’s behind between his face and that of the stranger, and Tanner straightened then and spat on the dirt floor.

  “You finish up this mighty important business you’re at, come on out front. I got to get on.”

  He turned and sauntered out into the bright noonlight, and Lodi lowered the hoof gently, turned and backed his rear to the horse’s rear, crooked the leg backward at the joint again, and cradled the hoof sole-up between his knees to fit the new shoe.

  Ten minutes and more passed, and Lodi made no move to lead the shod horse out to the corral in back of the livery, as he ordinarily would, but left the old dobbin haltered and messing where it stood while he turned to the forge to work up a new set of shoes. Dayberry, keenly curious now, returned to the manger and slowly, a quarter forkful at a time, filled it, sensing Lodi’s every move, though he never turned his bright, alert eyes toward him. From where he stood near the open archway, Dayberry could see the stranger leaning on the rail beside his spent sorrel, rolling a cigarette. He could see the lead mule, a big blue-nosed sumpter with haunches like a bull, and behind it the head and forelegs of the next one, though he could not see or imagine the train of thirty lined up through the town, until Field Tatum came scuttling in—Dayberry saw him in the street, scooping a wide berth around the muttonchopped stranger—and spoke excitedly in his ear.

  “Blocking entrance to my store!” Tatum whispered. “A damn forty-mule train lined up single file from here to the depot! Folks are gathering, but can’t any of them get to my door!”

  Dayberry had no doubt that it was not to enter the spanking new doors of Tatum’s Mercantile that the people were gathered but to gawk at the string of mules, though he knew there was no point in trying to convince the mercantiler of that fact. He eyed John Lodi, who never looked up from the clanging he was doing at the anvil, and suddenly the little hawk-faced man’s curiosity to know what that muletrader out yonder—if indeed he was that—had to do with his employee rose up so fiercely that abruptly he shooed Field Tatum out the door and, eyes bright, tone light, he called out in a singsong, “John, would you quit that a minute and come take this manger out back? I got a bunch of animals to feed this afternoon—I can’t get to all of them!”

  This in itself was entirely unusual, for Dayberry had hired the man strictly as blacksmith; he’d never called on him to do one thing about the livery that did not have to do with iron. He watched Lodi’s thick forearm pause an instant on the upswing, then continue down, up again, and down, rapidly, drawing out the heated bar. Dayberry stabbed the fork in the pile and crossed the floor, coming easily, gently, as one approaches a fractious horse, and when he was near Lodi’s elbow, he spoke again.

  “I’m asking you,” he said. “I need a hand.”

  Lodi finished turning back the heel calk on the new shoe before he set it to the side, placed the sledge neatly on the floor, leaning against the anvil brace, and moved, without a glance at Dayberry, to the filled manger. He hoisted the heavy cradle to his shoulder, though Dayberry’s flat cart stood ready nearby, and started out the door to the temporary corral around back. The owner followed, not merely from curiosity now but because of the strange sense of protectiveness that had passed over him as Lodi bent his head and shoulder to lift the manger. A foreboding was on him, on Dayberry, a sense that trouble was coming and he’d got his fingers into it and messed with it when circumstances would have been better left alone. He followed and stood in the doorway and watched Lodi in the bright sunlight move to the inside of the hitching rail, close to the stable wall, with the manger hoisted on his shoulder between himself and the string of thirty mules. The stranger ducked beneath the rail, limber as a garter snake, and planted himself in front of him. Dayberry moved quickly, but when he reached the two the trouble was already seething, for he could hear the contempt in the one and the anger in the other, and he could not get between them in the crowded space behind the rail.

  “What you do with it after that’s your business,” the stranger was saying. “Up to me, I’d give you a good horsewhipping, ’stead
of buying you a new mule.”

  “Out of my way, Tanner.” John Lodi’s voice was low-keyed, quiet, tight as a coilspring. Dayberry couldn’t see his face or the other behind him, the two men were so close to the same height, and in any case the triangular bulk of the manger blocked his view, but he heard the deadliness in Lodi’s voice. “I got work to do.”

  “Work.” The stranger’s voice was greasy with contempt. “You call it that, maybe.” He spat lightly and flicked the flattened end of his cigarette into the road, where it smoldered briefly and was soon snuffed in the thick dust. “Aim to muck out the stalls when you’re through?”

  “I said it once, I’m not saying it again.”

  “A man could be sitting as pretty as any man in this country, he wants to set around and shoe a damned old plowhorse for a nickel, I don’t know. I’d have to say he’s a fool or a coward, one.”

  “Go on.”

  “Or else crazy, might be. I don’t know. Strange-eyed to me.”

  “Go on.”

  “Ain’t nothing to go on about.” Tanner spat again, not a deep spit but a little picking one, as if to get tobacco flakes off his tongue. “Fay and me already got our deal settled, he’s the one so hot to have you in on it. I don’t give a damn, myself. You’re both weirder than Lucius.” Rapid-fire staccato as he spat several times again. “I can’t fathom either one of you, him or you neither. But that’s not my business anyhow. My business is to complete my little proposition here, which I just done.”

  Still, the stranger did not move to allow Lodi to pass. Dayberry could see the townspeople, male and female, white and Indian, gathering on the far side of the street at the edge of the wagonyard. The line of mules was clearly visible to him now, as fine a looking conglomerate of young healthy muleflesh as he’d ever witnessed, strung from south to north along the dusty main street of the little town, the new and old town: old with the Choctaw council house and the whipping tree and the Butterfield Overland Stage stop which had marked Cedar on maps of Indian Territory for years; new with the recently laid train tracks, the weeks-old redbrick depot and the mercantile, and Dayberry’s own livery, which had stood its place for nearly two decades, a long time—an eon in the quick life of the Territory—but changing itself now, growing: the new blacksmith shop already framed out on the north side of the stable where the old corral had been. The town, like the Territory, was transforming. White faces outnumbered brown in the wagonyard across the street. Dayberry’s sense in that moment was that, really, he’d already messed in it, he might as well go ahead and try to fix what he’d messed with, and as the other two continued to stand stock-still, the edge in the air rising, the livery owner called out to a young man he spied in the small crowd on the other side of the street. Even as he did so, the old curiosity welled in him: What business proposition? What kind of a deal? What did these many mules have to do with it, and what did that pearls-before-swine remark seem to mean? Dayberry was hankering for answers, but he tamped down his curiosity, swallowed it like cud to be chewed over later, as he called out across the street.