The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The fading smolder of an old resentment licked up, breathed upon by memory; the image quickened in his mind of the charcoal mule, dead on the ridge, its forehead exploded by the .54-caliber shell. “You got some mighty strange notions, Son,” Fayette said, his voice balanced between ire and wonder. “Mighty strange.” Then, as if to extinguish the image with heartiness and false camaraderie, and unwilling to perceive the icy stillness in his brother beside him, Fayette slapped his hands together, saying, “Well, well. Enough about all that now—we got other things to look upon.” He spied the three boys climbing the incline of the rocky yard. “Caleb!” he shouted, trying to force into his voice the familiar joviality. “You get them mules took care of good like I said?”

  “Yes, sir,” the tallest boy answered. The three trooped up the steps, nearly identical in their swagger, and spread out to take their young men’s positions about the porch, moving confidently, the eldest with an inflated sense of his own manliness, his brother Fowler in perfect imitation of that self-importance, and their young cousin in wiry, awkward imitation of each. Caleb crossed the porch, his boots making an exaggerated sound on the rough wood, and squatted on his haunches beside the door. He tipped his hat to the back of his head. His brother eyed him briefly and then moved to the porch rail, climbed up to perch there casually as on a yard fence, and Jim Dee, for an instant torn between them, at last took his own position against a cedar post, arms folded in complete and unconscious imitation of the muttonchopped stranger leaning against the post by the porch steps.

  “Water ’em good?” Fayette asked, and the eldest nodded, and the younger two nodded. “Put out some shorts like I said? I ain’t going to stingy ’em on feed, never mind if they are going to belong to somebody else come Monday. I mean to see sleek livestock, I want to see me some fine muleflesh fat as fall taters when I put ’em up for sale—” He suddenly remembered the big black mule—not the dead one but the new one he’d gone to such worry and expense, as he just then recollected, to present to his brother. Despite his earlier intentions, Fayette turned impulsively in John’s direction, said, “I hope you fed him up good, that black mule I bought you, before you come off—”

  Abruptly he halted, confused. He could not comprehend why he suddenly felt as if he’d stepped out onto the porch naked. John’s face was turned away, looking east, hidden in shadow. Fayette felt it then, an absolute coldness there, a blackness beyond telling. He floundered a moment, felt he needed to get back in the house and put his boots on, though it was late, way past time for supper, time for sleep really, and he remembered the unfed females upstairs and his own unfed belly and the bacon growing limp in its own grease on the back of the stove. He had to get back into the log house, sit at the table, see his wife at the stove cooking, his daughters in an impatient row beside the washstand, his sons with their sleeves rolled back looking up at him over their saucers of coffee. He had to put his boots back on.

  “Lord have mercy!” he cried. “Don’t tell me I’m about to plumb forget to feed myself !”

  Only his brother heard the fear in the forced heartiness of the explosion.

  “Tanner, I told you I don’t like to talk business on an empty stomach. Man alive, we got to feed these boys. Got to feed ourselves. Son—”

  It was to his son Caleb he spoke, not his brother, and he saw no confusion or inconsistency in it, nor did any of them, even the two he called by the same appellation; Caleb knew his father meant him. In fact, there was only one among those on the porch who noted—was burningly aware at every moment—that Fayette called both his eldest offspring and his brother Son, and that one was Fowler, the younger, who longed to be called by that name and never in his life had been.

  “Get up from yonder,” Fayette said, “and y’all go on in the house.”

  Slowly Caleb stood, and as he did so the other two slid from their positions.

  “Tell your ma to get them flapjacks cooking,” Fayette continued, the heartiness gone from his voice now, the sound only gruff, domineering. “Folks are famished. We’re going to starve to death if she don’t put some food on the table. Tell her to get a move on. We got one or two things to clear up here, and then we’ll be on in.” He felt his woolen socks rooted to the porch floor, feared he could not move them upon his will to do so. Feared what would happen if he tried. “Git now!” he said, though the boys were already moving. “Tell her to hurry up with that grub!” Fayette felt the last remnants of his will surviving only in his ability to give orders, and he continued mouthing at the boys until they’d gone in the house and shut the door behind them. He could hear voices inside, the baby crying, his wife hollering down from upstairs, but the sound was too far distant. There was that coldness, that blackness swirling about him, and he was confused, terrified by his own inability to move. He heard a new sound, below him in the yard, a labored panting, and looking down, he saw his brother’s fat, aged beagle trotting heavily around from behind the house. Something in that sight inched his rising terror higher; his throat was dry, he could not make spit, could hardly speak, and he feared even his voice would be stopped in a moment so that he’d have nothing of self left, nothing left of will.

  “Son!” he croaked. “C’mon back out here!”

  In a few seconds the porch was sliced open with a square of yellow lamplight, widening, widening, and Fowler poked his head around the log door. He did not come out but stood craning his neck around the doorway, looking up at his father.

  “Bring me that jug yonder behind the safe,” Fayette said.

  The girl was out there somewhere in the darkness. Her presence was as distinct as the sound of the dog wheezing in the yard, though John Lodi could not see her, did not know where she was hidden; he knew she would not come in until the porch was cleared. He looked at the moonlit sideyard, east along the strip of road to the low, rocky ford where the trickling remains of creek crossed it, twisting away into shadows. The trees were bare, not with the coming winter but with the drought that had stripped them before August was well ended, and their limbs cast a grotesque web over the exposed stones of the creekbed, the sunken trickle glinting in moonlight. He heard the log door open again behind him, the pock of the boy’s boots on the porch floor, the unstoppering of the jug close by, nearly at his elbow, and then his brother’s throat moving, a choked, chugging gurgle. In his nostrils the smell of liquor burned, and above it the sweet, pungent drift of tobacco, the rank odor of old dog, the dust-dry crumble of oak leaves. His senses were grown suddenly acute, so that he tasted even his own spit. He heard lungs breathing, the swallowed phlegm in his brother’s throat; felt the crack and pop of cartilage in his own knuckles as his hands curled and uncurled at his sides. It was as if he’d awakened from a long sleep—not as one wakes luxuriously at morning, drawn unwilling from the familiar country to that other landscape beyond dream, but as one jerks awake in the night, snapped alert by the sound of something crashing, glass breaking on the far side of the room in the dark. His heart beat in staccato rhythm. In the yard below him he saw the marked hairs, coarse and distinct, on the dog’s back. His tongue was bitter with the taste of iron, metallic and foul, from ingested ore, smoke, solder; from not having eaten for many hours. Always, in and around the other sensations, was the sound of the ceaseless whillowing: whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill

  He could feel her out there somewhere in the darkness: hidden behind a tree’s silhouette; crouched in the black shade of the rain barrel. Without turning his head from the clear wash of moonlight, he said, “I have sworn once to make no more guns. I’ll make no more.” He turned, moved past his brother, with the jug upturned on his shoulder, past the boy with scowling face in porch shadow, past the man with arms folded beside him, and stepped down off the sandstone slab of step.

  The dry ground was lit blue in the moonlight, so bright you did not need a lantern. I came down the path slowly, stopped beside the smokehouse when I first heard their voices. I wo
uld not go forward into their air and breathing. My thought then was only to wait awhile, until they had all gone to bed. I could see them on the porch, the three man-shapes outlined in the darkness, and the slimmer forms of Fayette’s boys slouching, though they didn’t matter, and Jim Dee, my brother, whom I could feel. Papa was beside Fayette, and back a ways beneath the porch overhang stood the stranger, but I thought that he, too, did not matter. I recognized him from before, back home in Kentucky, when he would come slinking around our barn where Papa worked the bellows, the fire hot in the forge, and the barn bitter with the smell of iron and solder. Slinking like a skink, Mama said, because she did not like him. I could see him outlined against the lighter space in the yard beyond the porch ledge, his arms folded and his drooping mustache covering his skink mouth.

  It was Fayette I knew first, from where I stood beside the smokehouse —my uncle trying to throw his web around Papa, slinging it out from his gut as a spider spews silken threads from its belly. I could feel Papa his prey, trapped, kicked softly in a spinning circle, a cocoon of soft silk wrapped tight so that the life juice could be sucked from him. Papa’s hands clenched and unclenched in the shadows behind the porch rail.

  I forgot to hold Ringo, and then I wouldn’t whistle softly to make him come back when he waddled away from me down into the yard. But it did not matter, because Papa knew I was there. So I came on, closer, moving slow in the shadow of the smokehouse, fast across the bluelit yard to the ribbed, narrow shade beside the well. I saw the boys stir, Caleb and Fowler rising to go in the house, and my brother in his caught way behind them. I told myself I would go back up along the path to our wagon waiting in the moonlight behind the shed barn, our wagonbed empty except for the cookstove, which I slept next to sometimes when I could not make myself go in the log house. But I knew I would not go up to the wagon, though I wanted to, I longed for its splintered, hard emptiness, bare in the moonlight, but I did not go there, because it was then that the mystery came on me, as I crouched beside the dug well. I had known that it would. I’d felt it coming, the way you feel season-change coming on a new wind.

  The picture was dark at first, darker than the shadowed place beneath the porch roof, much darker than the yard, but I knew what it was: the gun Papa made, the big four-barreled pistol, sandwiched in a dark place, hidden. I saw the mule’s forehead explode red. I could smell it, the taste of iron and powder, and I didn’t know which one of them held this in his memory. It was not my memory, though I had witnessed it, yes, but I’d seen the back of Papa’s elbow, his hand stretched forward with the gun at the height of my eyes; the image in the dark place was from someplace directly across, and higher, standing close. I let the pictures and the smell wash through me—that was the only way; you could not fight it—and then I understood it came from both of them. At once and together. I had entered the two of them at the same time, Fayette and Papa, because the remembering could not be separated, because they held it in union between them, as two parents hold equal between them the memory of a dead child.

  The hair-rope hoop coils around and down, as it must, each season dropping looped upon self: the curve of hoop spiraling toward winter, cresting pale, coiling downward toward spring, the long green arc of summer, and each year, irrevocable, rising toward winter again. It was late fall—metal skies, dark brown tree limbs: November—three loops from the time of their coming, almost four from the night the Lodis left Kentucky, when the woman Thula Henry came again. She came this time not across the land, walking, but in a buckboard carriage driven by Jessie’s son Fowler in yellow spats and a new bowler hat. It was Jessie who’d sent for her, as it had been Jessie who’d brought her to the log house the first winter, but for a different reason—and yet in its essence nearly the same. She meant the Choctaw woman to do what she herself could not, to heal a mystery she could not understand.

  For three years Jessie had watched in silence, from a distance, as John Lodi’s children grew wilder and stranger. She’d thought that when she and her family moved out of the log house and left John and his children to it, her mind would be shed of them. She’d thought that her new five-room home, framed out and finished with kilned lumber and real glass freighted from McAlester, which Fayette had hired built, grandly perched on the slope above the store, would remove thoughts of the unwanted and undisciplined children. But each day she watched from her front-room window or the steps of the store and saw the condition of the log house deteriorating, the yard unswept and growing up with brambles, trash lying about in the dirt, on the porches, and every morning her brother-in-law walking off to work at Cedar while the filth spread and the children grew more untamed. She watched the girl Martha take her sister and the younger boy down by the creekbank, where they would disappear for hours among the sycamores and peach willows, to emerge at dusk in a pitiful little procession climbing the rise to the log house. The older boy, Jim Dee, was sometimes with them, more often not, and he ran wild through the town, would bowl a grown white man off the wooden walk in front of the post office or follow her own sons when they went to Wister to the depot, running along behind the wagon until they stopped and allowed him to climb up. Jessie didn’t know what the children ate or how they kept themselves. They did not attend the new subscription school and she believed they didn’t wash often, though the few times John brought them to church meeting at the schoolhouse they were clean, the two boys in starched overalls and the girls in clean, plain gingham dresses with their hair braided and bowed, the boys’ hair parted and slicked down. But something was very wrong at that house, the town knew it, Jessie knew, and at last, when the old beagle dragged a rotting opossum carcass into the yard and it lay stinking for two days before John found it and buried it in the field across the road, Jessie determined she would take matters in hand. She’d gone to the log house in the early morning before the children could scatter, had crossed the log porch with the strange sensation of entering her own past, and knocked at the door.

  It had been the younger girl Jonaphrene who answered, and Jessie stared at her, wordless. The girl was starkly beautiful, as a colt is beautiful, but with an unnaturalness about her that made the woman exceedingly uncomfortable, because it was a long-boned and aquiline beauty, an adult beauty, not that of a nine-year-old child. The little girl stared at Jessie rudely—without even a word of greeting, because the children had no manners whatsoever—and failed to ask her in. Hemming and hawing, Jessie had finally stuttered out that it was high time for the children to go to school, that their uncle would pay the dollar subscription for each of them if their father could not manage (though she had already determined that she would save out the money and pay it herself), and it was then the girl Martha had come to the door. She’d stood behind her sister and lifted the door hanging loose on its leather hinges, scraped it open wider, silently staring, as rude and unmannered as her sister, and Jessie had stammered her message again. She could see through the open doorway that there was no furniture in the room beyond what her own family had left behind when they’d moved out: the rusted iron cookstove John had hauled down from the old barn, a busted ladderback and two wooden crates turned over to sit on, a flour keg, a pile of folded quilts on the floor by the back wall. She’d been stunned for a moment; it was one thing that had never occurred to her, though she’d known they were uncouth, but she’d never dreamed John had not brought another stick of furniture into the house. There was not even a table to eat at, though she could smell beans or peas cooking, saw a black Dutch oven steaming on the stove. She saw, too, that the house was dirty—not unsanitary, not filthy, but cobwebbed and dusty, the floor covered in soot and dirt and wood leavings, what a woman must strive against every minute because of carrying in stovewood and toting out ashes, because of yard dirt and leaves tracked in with every coming and going—but clearly no one had striven here. The girl Martha stood staring up at her from behind the door. She was small, hardly taller than her sister, though she must have been almost fourteen, and tough and yellow as a
corn kernel. She’d remained silent as Jessie spoke again of school, and then she’d answered politely, “Yes’m, I’ll speak to Papa.” Then, without a word of pardon, she’d lifted the log door and pushed it closed in Jessie’s face.

  The following Saturday afternoon—almost as if by design or purpose, Jessie thought later, for the Henrys did not often come in to Big Waddy, almost never traded at her husband’s store—but the very next Saturday, the Indian woman had come into the store for flour and a tin of molasses. The idea had struck Jessie from nowhere, watching the woman ease sideways along the crowded aisles with her head tilted back, looking up at the tinned goods and plow points and bolts of cloth on the shelves. Jessie had come from behind the counter almost immediately; she gave no thought to what she was asking except to hurry up and finish with the business, for Fayette or one of the boys would be back soon, and she had negotiated quickly and efficiently, promising her five yards of quality cotton from one of the finer bolts behind the counter, and the woman had agreed. Jessie did not consider that she’d hired Thula Henry once again to heal sickness—the woman, in any case, would not take payment for that, or she hadn’t three years earlier anyway—but Jessie thought she was making a simpler agreement; she believed she had hired her to come clean the log house.