The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  It was not the proper time of year for brush arbor meetings, not in the cold teeth of winter—the proper time was the long lingering evenings of midsummer, when the crops were laid by—but Brother Jonathan Fingers, who called himself and was known as the Wilderness Preacher after his most often quoted text from Ecclesiastes and his passions for baptizing and for eating wild honey, did not pause in his soul-winning for the seasons to pass. Satan, as the Preacher knew, did not take a vacation in winter. The Preacher himself had just come from the recently opened Oklahoma Territory, where sin and corruption flowed as freely as the whiskey in the many saloons and dance halls, where the wild tribes of the west practiced their heathen rites before God’s very face upon the frozen wind-stung prairie, and so he had determined to go down into the mountains among the Choctaw, who were known to be more receptive to the Word of the Lord, and to live in well-heated and tended log cabins as well, and in any case the mountains were farther south. He sent word out before himself in the form of posted handbills in English and a Chickasaw runner among the Choctaw church communities, and by the time of the new moon in February, the people of the Sans Bois, black, white, and Indian, all knew the Wilderness Preacher was coming, and where he would set up his camp meeting, and when.

  On the appointed Saturday which was to be the first night of the revival, whites and Indians (not those of the African race, for Brother Fingers did not consider he had been sent into the wilderness to teach the Sons of Ham; that was left to their own preachers, because true Christian missionaries had all the flock they could tend to between the red heathen and the white sinners, and in any case, the communities were not to mix: it said so in the Bible somewhere) began to gather from all directions. They started out in the early morning in their buckboards and farm wagons, on horseback, muleback, entire families walking, to gather throughout the day and on into the evening beneath the leafless arbor set up on the banks of the Brazil, coming to receive the Word of the Lord from the mouth of the Preacher on the first frosty night of the February new moon.

  Of course, the white people of Waddy gathered with them. Fayette and his boys came for sport, his wife and daughters for loftier reasons—not excepting the notion among the four young women that the famous Wilderness Preacher’s Day of Pentecost Brush Arbor Baptism Revival & Camp Meeting would surely be the most apt place in the Territory to show off their new winter muffs. Several families started out well before daylight to drive the nearly twenty-five miles from Cedar, though John Lodi was not among them. On the first day of the revival he walked south at dawn from Big Waddy Crossing to work at Dayberry’s as he would on any ordinary Saturday morning; nor did he make any attempt to see to it that his children attended the camp meeting either. In fits and starts over the course of the past three years he’d made occasional stabs at civilizing his youngsters by cleaning them up for Sunday morning service at the schoolhouse at Big Waddy, but his efforts were without heart, because they were without faith, and so he did not persevere; he was not capable of sustained effort in that area, though his tenacity for all else was nearly beyond reason, and the youngsters did not fight him because they knew it would not last long.

  However, conditions had changed in the log house since the coming of Thula Henry. She did not bother with Matt, did not seem to make any effort concerning the girl in any manner, for Thula knew the time was not yet. But every Saturday afternoon she cleaned up the other three children and walked with them in the waning afternoon light two and a half miles to her log home near the Indian Missionary Baptist Church at Yonubby so that they might be present and ready when the bell in the church yard began to ring Sunday morning. The huge brass bell, standing free in the yard at the top of a wooden stilt-like scaffold, would begin ringing in the early morning, and from all directions the people would come walking, the three white children lined up before Thula Henry, along with six of her grandchildren, making their way the quarter mile from her home to the one-room log church surrounded on all sides by screenless frame cookhouses. The children had to sit still for hours and listen to the Choctaw preacher preach the Gospel in Choctaw, but this was acceptable to Jonaphrene, for there was a powerful ascetic streak in her that responded to the mystery of the Word spoken in an undecipherable tongue, and it was acceptable to Thomas because everything that came before the boy’s eyes in the world was received equally, and it was all right with Jim Dee because he could play games with the Choctaw boys around the cookhouses when church was over, and the food, when they finally got to it in the late afternoon, was good.

  So it was Thula Henry who insisted that John Lodi’s children attend the Wilderness Preacher’s brush arbor revival, but when she got the children ready for the journey, she somehow did not deem it necessary to tell their father, who in any case had left the house at dawn before she began her ear scrubbing and hair plaiting, that they were traveling not to Yonubby this morning but nearly all the way to Bokoshe, on the banks of the Brazil, a day’s ride away. She did, however, tell the girl Matt. In English she told her—not the broken English of Thula’s Creek father, but the form as she had learned it from the Presbyterian missionaries at Wheelock Academy forty years before.

  “We’re going to church now,” she told the girl. “Won’t be back till day after tomorrow.” Thula stood in the road in front of the house with her hand on the halter of an ancient fat white mare she had borrowed from one of her sons for the journey. The three younger children, scrubbed and red-faced, perched dangle-legged on a blanket on the mare’s back. “You come go with us,” Thula said.

  The girl stood at the edge of the yard, looking down at the four in the roadbed. She had just come from Toms Mountain, and she was dirty-faced, in a pair of trousers and a felt hat, holding a leather thong twisted around the tail of a dead coon. She stared at her siblings, especially her sister, saying nothing, but in Matt’s eyes was accusation. She answered nothing, and Thula, looking hard at her hard eyes, shrugged her shoulders and turned to walk east along the road, walking before the mounted children in the cold early morning with her hand on the halter, the braided circlet on the top of her head hardly reaching the mare’s nose.

  They walked nearly eighteen miles on deeply rutted roads, and in some places no roads at all, through the valleys of the Sans Bois to the appointed place below Latham’s Store. Sometimes Thula rode, but she feared for the old pony’s endurance, and so, riding, they did not go much faster than the woman—or the girl coming behind them—could walk. They stopped twice to eat from the leather satchel Thula carried, and so it was well dark by the time they arrived in the place of the brush arbor, and she could hear already the singing, see the lantern light from a great distance. Coming nearer, she saw the many glass bottles tied to the trunks of trees around the cleared space of the brush arbor, the bottles filled with kerosene, rags stuffed in them, burning, and she smelled the cut wood. Thula tied the mare to a tree at the rear of the conglomeration of buggies and wagons, lifted the children down one by one from the mare’s back, drew a feedbag from her satchel-of-many-things and hung it around the mare’s muzzle, and walked forward toward the light, holding the little boy Thomas tightly by the hand.

  The brush arbor of the Wilderness Preacher was made in just the same way as the brush arbors on the stomp grounds at Kialigee town, though here the arbor was not four separate ones laid out around the square in the Four Directions, but one, and the covered space was much larger: a great open tabernacle of post oaks hewed into forked poles and placed equal distance apart, smaller poles laid across at two-foot intervals, and brushy limbs and bushes laid over all. Thula thought it was through the smiling grace of God that the night was dry, frostbitten, the stars twinkling in the black sky above the leafless branches, for if it had been a night of sleet or cold rain, that discomfort surely would have fallen through the barely clothed sticks onto the worshipers gathered to hear the Lord’s Word. But the making of the brush arbor, though it was winter, was the same, and the purpose was the same, even if the white preacher kne
w nothing of purifying the body, preparing the body to heal it so that it might receive the spirit, but that was all right, because Chisvs, the Great Physician, had known that part, and Thula knew it, and all was well, as it should be, in the woman’s eyes.

  Thula Henry lived in two worlds simultaneously—not just Creek and Choctaw, Christian and medicine, church and stomp grounds—but in the presence of the Unseen in every moment, more real, as her heart knew, than the Seen. She understood that all had been formed balanced by the Creator from the beginning, that it was only humans who tipped and unsettled the balance, that Chihowa’s gift of grace allowed for even that. She walked toward the square of the brush arbor as reverently as she had stood outside the sacred circle of swept leaves and dirt at Green Corn forty-three years before; this was not duality in her but union, because she believed it had been given to her to see all things not as separate, but as one. Taking the white children with her, she walked forward without acknowledging the several white men, including the children’s uncle, scattered here and there among the shadows outside the square of light, surreptitiously sipping from jugs drawn quietly from beneath blankets in the backs of their wagonbeds. Nodding only once or twice, she walked past the Indian people sitting in their wagons or on homemade stools or standing around outside the rim of the tabernacle. She didn’t acknowledge the woman Jessie, seated halfway down the aisle, when she turned her drawn face and looked up, shocked, her mouth open with singing, stopped open, as if she would say something. Thula ignored the little boy dragging on her hand, pulling, his head turning this way and that as he tried to shrink away from the numbers of people, the light from the kerosene lanterns hanging on poles inside the arbor, the smells. On in between the rows of hewn, backless pews filled with white people the woman walked, her eyes forward, leading the ragtag row of children to the very front of the tabernacle, where sawdust was spread on the cold earth beneath the empty log pews directly in front of the pulpit.

  She made the children to sit down beside her, and they did so without grumbling, even the wildly restless Jim Dee, and Thula opened her mouth, singing “There is power! power! wonder-working power! in the blooood—of the Laaaamb!” along with the congregation. When the many voices swung into a chorus of “In the Sweet By and By,” Thula Henry sang the words in Choctaw. The children, having heard it for more than three months then, sang “Kanima-a-ash inli ho-o-oh” right along with her, and the Preacher, who had, after all, been sent to save heathen, nodded benevolently at them from where he sat on the raised platform behind the pulpit—though the song leader, a short red-faced white man from Dog Creek with hair in a fringed circlet around his bald pate, frowned horribly at them, not because they sang in Choctaw but because Thula and the children were sitting on the mourners’ bench where the wicked were to kneel in repentance of sin at the end of the service, and where those baptized with the Holy Spirit were to roll in the sawdust when they began to talk in tongues.

  The Preacher stood up. The congregation hushed to silence, a slow fade of coughs and rustles and closing songbooks among the few who had brought them. The song leader retreated to the back of the platform and then, under the quick glance of the Preacher, descended entirely from the pulpit area to seat himself on the far end of the same mourners’ bench where Thula and the children sat. The Preacher stepped to the pulpit, which was no more than a post oak stripped and hewed square, topped with a flat piece of pine. It, like everything else at the camp meeting, had been quickly hand wrought by the deacons and devout members of various white congregations of numerous denominations—Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, Pentecostal—for several miles about. In a territory so new to white settlement, there was as yet little condescension and tension between denominations, though that time would come. The Preacher, tall, crow-thin, shaggy-headed, handsome, placed one long thin hand on the pine pulpit, raised his head, flashed his eyes, and began in a resonant, rich voice to pray.

  “Our Father and our Great God, as we approach the Throne of Grace this evening, we’d just ask that You’d look down upon Your poor Servant—”

  Heads quickly bowed, eyes closed, most caught unawares by the unexpected invocation, and then hardly had the congregation entered a state of prayer when the Preacher shouted, “Vanity!” and the consciousness of the crowd lurched abruptly awake.

  “ 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity’!” the Preacher cried. He lifted up the great black leather Bible he carried, one long-boned finger caught near the center in the Book of Ecclesiastes, though he had no need to open it and read from it, for the words of his most favorite and illustrious text were inscribed on his soul. “ ‘I have seen all the works that are done under the sun,’ ” he boomed, “ ‘and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit’! And what meaneth the Preacher by that? Useless! That’s what he means. Useless. Everything on this earth is useless, every small or large thing under the sun is useless, without the Lord. There’s no getting around it. I don’t care what you do. Oh, you can try to get around it: you can gather unto yourself the wealth of David. You can get the wisdom of Solomon, wisdom’s not going to do you a bit of good. Listen!” and he opened the Book and laid it flat open in his great splayed hand, but he never looked down at the printed words. “ ‘For in much wisdom is much grief ! and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow! For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, seeing that which now is, in the days to come shall all be forgotten! And how dieth the wise man? as the fool’! You hear what the Word of the Lord is saying? Wise man dies just like a fool! Y’all might just as well be fools. The Book says that. Y’all might just as well set down and quit working. It doesn’t make a bit of difference to God, because it’s all vanities to the Lord of Heaven, and He says it right here!” The Preacher raised the Book over his head. “ ‘I gathered me also silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings of the provinces! and whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them! Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold! all was vanity and vexation of spirit! and there was no profit under the sun’! You hear that? ‘No . . . profit . . . under . . . the sun . . .”’

  He paused long and lingeringly between the words, his great shaggy head lifted toward the arbor roof. “Vanity,” he whispered. “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. And then he thumped the Book closed and began to stride back and forth on the platform, his long shoulders humped beneath his black frock coat, his voice winding up to preach. And the Preacher did preach. He preached high and preached low, preached Sin and Salvation, slid from Hellfire Damnation to God’s Forgiving Mercy, from Joel crying “Awake, ye drunkards, and weep! Howl, all ye drinkers of wine!” to Christ promising the disciples He would send the Comforter to abide with them till He should come again. If Brother Fingers knew a mighty lot of Scripture, it would have to be said that his biblical scholarship was a bit slippery, in that he freely blended the Old Testament with the New and could not seem to get settled between Judgment and Grace. It was not only Ecclesiastes he fancied himself after but John the Baptist as well, trying in all desperation to make straight the path of the Lord. He knew he was a Voice Crying in the Wilderness—it said so right on his handbills—and he wore, not camel hair, camels not being native to that country, but a leather girdle about his waist at least, and a buffalo robe in cold weather, and he ate wild honey when he could get it (though he eschewed locusts, which were more than plentiful in the Territory), and he went about baptizing many Indians and a considerable number of outlaws in the name of the Lord. On the other hand, the Preacher’s primary method of baptism—especially in cold weather—was the baptism of the spirit, which he invoked and exhorted in his sermons, whereas a Bible scholar would have noticed that John the Baptist did his baptizing with water and in any case had lost his head long before the Day of Pentecost, when the true believers began to talk in tongues. Still, the order and references mattered little to his congregation, and the Preacher carried o
n, crying out to the Holy Spirit to come lay hands upon them, and every few moments punctuating his sermon with the phrase “Vanity of vanities!” (without an iota of irony, for he had not a clue in the world he was vain), because he understood, along with Ecclesiastes, the pure, dull emptiness of life without the Lord.

  Before the two-hour sermon was finished, Brother Fingers had reduced himself to sackcloth and ashes, quite literally, through a bag of props he kept at the rear of the platform, and if he’d had a coat of camel hair he surely would have put it on. By that time, too, the front of the open-air temple was crowded with believers raising their palms to God, faces thrown back in ecstasy and the reception of the Holy Spirit, many speaking the jaw-tight, back-teeth-gritted glory of God in the language of the Spirit, and even on that frostbitten February night there was a considerable amount of sweat balling up the sawdust at the front of the tabernacle, and there was much shouting and singing and praising the Lord, and the Holy Spirit was so manifestly present at the camp meeting that many wished in their deepest hearts for summer so that they might find a good long serpent to handle, as had been promised to the true believers in the Book of Mark, though of course the local reptile population was all well denned and asleep. The Preacher had not yet even begun to give the invitation. There might be many more dozens of poor sinners, he knew, still nailed by sin and hardheartedness to their log pews, resisting the call, and the Preacher, sensing the hardheartedness and corruption still out there in the audience, began to try to make a sign to the song leader to come up to the platform and lead the remnants of still-seated congregation in the powerful invitational hymn “Just As I Am,” which never failed to pull a few nails from the recalcitrant rear ends of unbelievers still tacked to their seats by sin and self-will, and the Preacher did look yonder to the song leader, who was somehow not intent on the pulpit as he should have been but peering off at something to the side beyond the square of light. It was not only the song leader from Dog Creek who felt the presence outside the brush arbor in the darkness. Thula knew her. Jessie, seated far back behind the raised hands and lifted voices, knew her. And the girl Jonaphrene.