The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  “C.H.! Come over here and give us a hand!”

  The young man, a lanky sandy-haired fellow of about sixteen, stood in the crowd, gawking.

  “Come on now!” Dayberry called. “There’s two bits in it for you! I got nineteen head of stock to feed, and John here’s got to get back to work!” Then he spied another man. “Mounce! Where the devil you been? That nag of yours’s been finished an hour ago! Come get him or I’m going to charge you a stabling fee!” And Dayberry withdrew from behind the rail and circled out to the street, where he pushed his keen-eyed face in between the two men, saying, “John, just set it down around back anywhere; I got to figure out some type of a system a little better than what I got. Mister”—he turned his bright eyes and regal nose to the newcomer—“if you aim to board them mules you’ll have to talk to Culpepper yonder at the wagonyard; I’m afraid I am completely full up.” And he clapped a hand on Lodi’s shoulder, swelling with the strain of hoisting the manger, said, “Tell you what, John, set her down right here. I don’t aim to have my prime blacksmith toting hay if I can help it. Carston here can tote that manger around back. Here, son.” He turned to the young man who was then crossing the road in a low rising of yellow dust. “Go in yonder and get that little cart of mine I got rigged and drag it out here. A man don’t need to break his back toting hay to a handful of horses. Mounce!” he called back over his shoulder. “Come get that critter of yours out of my barn!”

  And J. G. Dayberry, with his jovial voice and spry movements and intelligent face of sharp eye and deep brow, altered the moment. The stifling air shifted and changed, became of a different variety, the tension focused on the livery owner himself now as he ordered folks around in his quick, good-humored voice, until at last Tanner ducked back beneath the rail and sliced the dust a quick step or two to where the lead mule was tied. From the halter he loosened the rope that connected the rest of the train to the big blue-nosed sumpter, and leaving the mule where it stood and looping the rope around one gloved fist, he untethered his gelding, mounted, walked the weary sorrel out into the street, and turned its head north. He did not speak as he drew the ragged long-eared slant-eyed multihued train in a great turning loop across the wide street, but as he rode north out of town on the old Butterfield Stage road, he shouted back over his shoulder, “It ain’t been fed in a couple of days, Son! You better give it some hay from that manger you’re toting!”

  When John Lodi finished work in the evening he came outside through the double doors of the livery, hatted, coatless, unarmed, an empty sorghum pail dangling loose in his fingers, and turned to his left without so much as a glance at the big black mule still tied to the hitching post. In the slanting shadows he walked north, as he did every evening, along the dusty road out of town.

  The sun had lowered itself beyond the mountains by the time he neared Big Waddy Crossing, and the withdrawing light, gold-glinted, greenish, seemed to trick the eye and impart glory to the dust-dulled familiar, to the powdered ribbon of road, the iridescent pines and empty oak trees, the driblet of creek, low-muddied, glowing, crawling away east. Even before he rounded the long curve he could hear the commotion—men’s voices, his brother’s bright and brusque, above the others. He neither quickened nor slowed his step but continued on at the same steady plod which was his rhythm, not rapid nor staccato but iambic, monotonous, like the slow beat of a tom-tom, or the pulse of blood. He heard first, and then saw, as the trees opened, the back end of the mule train once again lined through the town, this near-town, this community of white settlers with its five slapshod buildings raised on one side of the road only, their backs against the hillside, the sawmill in the failing light silent, and a dozen men gathered at the head of the mule train in the low swirl of pale dust in front of his brother’s store.

  No one had lit a torch, none had brought forth from an unlit interior a kerosene lantern, so that, as dusk came on, the figures ahead of him blended with it, silhouettes blurring and fading to blue, and then dark blue, purple, indigo, navy, sparked here and there with the red ends of cigarettes and white fireflies dancing. In the black line of trees along the creekbank the whippoorwills were whillowing. The men in their nearness to one another could perhaps see and distinguish faces, but from the distance he knew only his brother. He could feel the abrupt gestures, the tilt of head and broad hat brim, the voice; he perceived without having to strain through the darkness, knew him in the bones of his being, as a lover knows the beloved in a crowd at a great distance, as one knows one’s own reflection in a draped parlor mirror. Sound was muffled in the dusk, drowned in the relentless whillowing, but he knew without sound, as he knew without seeing, what his brother was doing.

  On he came walking, one foot set rhythmically, unerringly, in front of the other.

  From the time of his arrival in the Territory he had held to this rhythm, his mind empty of words, only marking the cadence, one foot in front of the other, eyes never looking at anything except the ground where his foot stepped. He saw almost nothing but that narrow space before him, as a man with a growth on his eyeball can see only where the growth has not spread. In this way he was able to live, this means he had discovered, not from will but from necessity, from his nature, which resisted words, resisted thought in language; which, in the twisting of grief, was unwilling to allow even that which is most human—the ability to plan and look back, project and regret—as if the meted portion had all been doled to his brother, to make his brother fired with language, paralyzed with future, locked in past, and these not genuine past or future but only that imagined in the volcanic language of Fayette’s own mind. His brother’s voice in the dusk was nearly a constant. A flip-lipped blur as of an auctioneer, a distant swarm of insects, and John Lodi walked on, hearing without listening, seeing without sight.

  He neared the weary line of mules, strangely still in the growing darkness. Holding to the right, he could feel the road surface change beneath his boots as he traversed the clay portion of curve that would turn boggy in wet weather; he could smell the mulesweat and leather, the droppings on the cracked crust. The droning voice in the darkness heightened and changed. He knew that his brother was aware now of his coming, and he intended, without word or pause, to continue past the glut of men and mules and restive horses to the log house some twenty rods distant, mount the stone step and go in at the log door. He intended, but he could not. Without a glance or an acknowledgment, his brother drew him. The droning voice ceased the selling, paused and waited, and the air shifted. The men standing about in the road parted. John Lodi walked in among them, his eyes on the square of log house nearly black in the distance, walked forward in the tricking purple of first dark, in the night sound and murmur of men and tree frogs and the snuffled stirring of horses, until he was nearly on a parallel with the crowded storefront, where, scourged and lashed on by the despairing cry from the creekbank to whip poorwill, he looked up at his brother. His step faltered. His eyes were turned up to Fayette on the east end of the porch above the roadbed, one arm about a cedar post, the tight-gritted grin showing white in the twilight, yet he saw his brother not present on the porch but darting behind a weathered barn playing dare goal, pulling him with him into the hayloft, the pigeon’s nest falling, straw raining, the nest in his own arms, upside down, cradled, pushed from the rafter by his brother, and in the nest of straw and bird mess and feathers when it was turned over a tremendous coil of black snake, and Fayette running, running with the pitchfork to kill the rat snake. There was the sound of a baby crying.

  “Son,” Fayette said from the porch darkness, “what the Sam Hill are you doing walking? I ain’t expected to see you afoot.”

  A light was lit then, swelling yellow inside the store, so that Jessie was made visible, backlit within the open doorway, and behind her the white-collared blur of dark bodices which defined her older girls. Her infant was crying, and she stood in the doorway, bouncing and patting it on her shoulder. Because the light was behind her, he could not see her face. He
saw his daughter Jonaphrene on the porch above the top step, with Thomas hoisted at her chest. The boy’s legs dangled to the porch floor. His daughter’s hair had grown out so that it nearly reached her shoulders; her limbs and torso had grown long and thin. Fayette’s boys were perched on the porch rail, their hats tilted forward, cocked each at the same angle over one eye, and he saw his own son Jim Dee among them, indistinguishable from them but for the restless energy that made him unable to hold his swaggering pose; his son’s leg jittered up and down, jiggling against the swimming dark below his booted feet.

  “Where’s that blame mule I just bought you?” his brother called down.

  He willed himself forward; he walked on, but his step was misweighted; he couldn’t seem to find his proper rhythm. His eyes were open, but the evening had grown dark. He moved through the shifting crowd of men until he was well past them and the house was nearing in the darkness, and he left the soft roadbed, climbed the rock-stubbled incline to the sandstone slab step, crossed the house porch.

  Tanner sat at the table, hat off, his taffy-colored hair mashed flat. He was eating a hunk of pie, washing it down with slugs of coffee. “Evening,” he said, his mouth full.

  John went to the washstand, set his lunch pail on the floor beside the butter churn, dippered water into the basin, and rolled his sleeves back to the elbows.

  “Fay get them mules sold off yet?” Tanner asked.

  John hung the gourd dipper on its nail, reached for the lye soap. The water in the basin turned grayblack and murky as he scrubbed soot and forge dirt from his hands, and still the flour-sack tea towel blackened when he dried his hands on it. He had not yet removed his hat. He looked to the top of the stove; there was no tin plate of food there. The cookstove was nearly cold.

  “They’re not the best in the world to feed a fellow,” Tanner said. “You’ll about have to make do. What I done anyhow.” He forked up another wedge of crust.

  John saw the remains of apple pie in the pie-safe through the open tin door dotted like swiss eyelet with pin holes punched in the homely shape of a half-moon and stars. Punched by Jessie. He had watched her, one Sunday afternoon in the summer, on her hands and knees in the shade of the porch punching the sheet of new tin laid out flat on the porch floor. Kneeling on the porch floor punching tiny holes with a homemade pick, her mouth gritted, dotting the tin with a half-moon and stars.

  “Coffee’s cold, even,” Tanner said. “He’s had her over yonder all evening.” He took a slurp of coffee, followed by a bite of pie. “Pie’s good, though.”

  John stepped over and closed the pie-safe door. He bent to the nearly empty woodbox and gathered a few splits of kindling, opened the firebox and poked around in the ashes till a glow started, then put the kindling in on the halfhearted coals. He went out, leaving the front door open behind him and Tanner visible at the table near the oil lamp, mashing the back of his fork on the pie crumbs and lifting them to his deeply mustached mouth.

  Standing in the dark beside the woodpile he saw his brother, trailed by the skirted covey of females, coming along the road from the store. In the distance he saw the boys driving the mule train up the mountain toward Fayette’s barn. John gathered an armload of stovewood and turned to climb the rise and go back into the house. When Fayette and Jessie and the daughters came in, John had the stove started and was stirring flour and eggs into batter. The woman did not acknowledge him but gave the infant to her oldest girl and immediately went to the washstand and lifted her apron from the nail and tied it on. She took the wooden spoon from her brother-in-law and stirred the batter, turned and spat on the stove once to see if it was hot.

  “Sell them all?” Tanner said from his place at the table.

  “Not hardly,” Fayette answered.

  “Not hardly,” the boy Thomas said.

  Fayette put his hat on a wall peg, sat down in a near chair to take his boots off. The daughters in a fluid motion moved each to a practiced task: one to grease the griddle, one to slice the bacon brought in with them from the well box; one held the baby on her shoulder as she set the table, while another went out the door with the empty bucket. Jonaphrene took the paring knife when Jessie held it out to her and sat at the table to peel potatoes. The smell of heating bacon grease slowly salted the air.

  Fayette grunted, pulling a boot off with both hands, one each gripped around the heel and toe. He set the boot on the floor. “How many days we got to get word around, you reckon?”

  “You reckon?” the boy Thomas said.

  Silence a moment as Tanner eyed the little boy at the the end of the table, leaning across his sister’s lap. “Not many,” Tanner said finally. “None, maybe.”

  “None baby,” Thomas said, looking up at Tanner. The boy’s head cleared the top of the table. He was big for a three-year-old, a blond, broadfaced toddler with a blandness in his features like a newborn, his forehead high and smooth, his eyes pale blue, wide open, almost devoid of expression, as if he saw everything around him new in each moment and had no experience to weigh it or judge its meaning. Tanner shook his head. The boy spooked him.

  “How many you get rid of?” he asked Fayette slowly, never taking his eyes off the little boy’s pale blue ones.

  “Five’s all.” Fayette grunted, tugging at the other boot.

  “Five, Saul,” the boy said immediately, almost before the words were finished and in just the same tone and inflection, but with that minute split in the placement of vowel and consonant, the slightest increase in the sibilance of s, so that the meaning seemed changed, and Tanner, growing ever more uncomfortable, shoved the empty plate across the table and leaned back in his chair to tug his tobacco pouch loose from the waist of his breeches. Glancing at John Lodi, motionless, still hatted, beside the front door, Tanner took papers from his shirt pocket and began to roll a cigarette. John stepped to the side when the middle daughter came in with the water bucket and carried it, her shoulders sloped with the weight, across the room to the washstand, but he did not make a move to come on into the room himself and sit down.

  “I figure we can sell a dozen or so Monday,” Fayette went on, “provided that idiot Moss’ll do like he says.”

  “Do like he says,” the boy said.

  “Monday? That’s day after tomorrow. I ain’t hanging around till day after tomorrow, pardon me, I’m sure not.”

  “Sure not.”

  “. . . said you’d have a bunch of buyers ready. You better get them here tomorrow, you aim to sell ’em, and you better aim to sell more than a dozen if you intend me in on this type of a deal.”

  “Type-a deal.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Fayette said. “Folks don’t buy on Sunday. You the one come lollygagging in here on a Saturday—”

  “Saturday’s the day folks come to town buying. They ain’t bought on a Saturday, they ain’t going to do it on a Monday!”

  “On a Monday, yeah,” the boy said.

  “Goddamnit, get that kid out of here!” Tanner exploded. “I’m going to wring his weird little fool neck!”

  “Fool neck.”

  The room was silent for a moment but for the hiss of flapjacks just poured on the griddle. Slowly, quietly, but with great menace in his voice, Fayette said, “Jess, take the girls and go upstairs. I’ll be there directly.”

  “Dreckly,” Thomas said, never taking his unblinking eyes off Tanner.

  Jessie opened her mouth but said nothing. She set the hot griddle to the cool side of the stove, the flapjacks still smoking, bubbles popping; she looked once at her daughter Mildred and stepped across the room to the table, where she took the boy by the hand. “Leave it,” she said to Jonaphrene, and without a word the girl left the milky potatoes to rust on the tabletop, the peelings curled in a pile beside them, and followed Jessie’s skirt and her brother’s toddling legs to the far side of the room, where the hems of the girl cousins’ dresses were already disappearing up the stairs.

  Tanner said, “Well.” He pulled a wooden match from h
is shirt pocket, struck it on the tabletop. He spoke from the side of mouth, around the cigarette. “I can’t talk business with some fool kid mocking my every word.”

  John made an aborted move, quickly strangled, seeming to half come at Tanner, half turn to go out the door, and then he stood motionless again.

  “We got to get some things straight around here,” Fayette said. The menace drained from his voice, slowly. “First place, that’s John’s boy, and he ain’t mocking you. He can’t help that, and I’ll thank you to keep your trap shut about it, or about anybody else in my family. You ain’t doing business with my family, you’re doing it with me, and maybe John here if we can persuade him, which you taking in after his boy ain’t going to help. Second place, there’s no call to start in on such stuff before we even eat supper.” The threat was entirely gone from Fayette’s voice now, or covered over, ladled with the familiar cajoling tone. “These kids are hungry. I’m hungry. I don’t like to talk business on a empty stomach.” He surveyed the room from his chair in the corner, his gaze coming to rest finally on his brother beside the door. He was sober, completely, Fayette was, and he seemed ready to say or ask something, his brilliant blue eyes questioning, but John’s eyes held steadily to a section of rag carpet about three feet in front of him. Fayette at last returned his scrutiny to Tanner.