The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  Through the fasting days and nights she’d sat beside the empty shell upon the pallet, and in the silence she would hear a stick crack or a rustle or a small thud on the opposite side of the room in the darkness, and she would know it was Bohpoli, the Thrower, one of the ancient ones who had followed the Chahta people from their homelands to the new Nation, and she did not know why the Thrower, who lived only in the woods and deep forests, was in this house. Another time she heard the low, scuttering sound of the little bantylike spirit, the lokhi, of her father’s people, as it came into the house and ran past the curled figure on the pallet, calling softly, lokha, lokha, lokha, scuttering around the room beneath the cookstove and washstand in search of ways to make its little mischief, quickly past the pallets on the far side, and then, as if discovering it had no business here, on out through the back wall, calling the whole time its soft lokha, lokha, lokha. Thula had been deeply troubled by these ones coming into a white house; that would not happen. That had never happened, so far as she had ever heard. Now, sitting in the flickering darkness on the dawning of the seventh morning, as she held her Choctaw Bible open in her lap, watched the girl’s eyes roam about the room, Thula understood it did not matter about those white people; white people would never know or hear them. It was her own presence inside these walls, and the unease within her, that drew them. She had been taught they were of the Devil, or the old superstitious ways of the people, and the Choctaw preachers said the people had to turn away from such things, they had to forget about all that. Thula knew she must turn her face away, she must not believe them. And yet they were here, in this house; she knew the purpose of their presence as surely as she knew the white girl on the pallet journeyed in the other world. The ancient ones had come to bear witness of the Unseen, that Thula Henry might not forget.

  “Chotokaka ma!” she cried out. “Sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik a sai yimmo ya is svm apelvchaske! ”

  Through the morning and noontide and afternoon she repeated the words, knowing, even as she prayed, that it was not for the girl’s lost soul wandering on the other side, or that Thula’s own faith and prayer and fasting might bring that soul home, but that the surety of that faith might return to her. The peace of the Comforter had departed her, and she did not know why or when; she was left unbalanced, divided in her spirit, and the cause was the Fourth Part, the existence and truth of the Fourth Part, which had been within her always, but never had it caused her to be caught in this place of disequilibrium and doubt. Chotokaka ma! sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik a sai yimmo ya is svm apelvchaske. Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. The words were a dry, empty pleading, and then the words of her prayer changed, became a Creek song, one she knew of her father, but it, too, was cracked and dry, and it was not for the unconscious stick form on the pallet, but for her own unity, her oneness, her balance, that it might return to her. And then the song left her, and all sound left her, but she did not stop praying; in silence she prayed. Night came, and the woman went on praying, and even as she prayed to That which she could not help but believe in, she doubted that her prayers would be heard.

  Late in the night, at about the third hour, Thula arose to put wood on the fire. It had begun to rain, she did not know when, for she had been deep in the place of wordless prayer, unaware even of the girl’s slow, steady breathing beside her, unaware of the sounds and creaks and rustles within the house or the calls of winter night creatures without—the tortured screech of an owl, the yip of coyotes. But now, as she came to wakefulness in the physical world, the drumming on the roof above the upper room entered her from a great distance; she heard, nearer, the harsh patter on the porch roof, the sound small and quick, needlelike, the rain hovering at the point of freezing. In her bones, her joints, the places her muscles wrapped around her backbone, she felt the rain’s ache and knot, and it took her a long time to unfold herself, for she had been sitting crosslegged a long time. The room was cold and pitch dark, the fire down to a few embers bedded in a deep mound of chalky ash; she had not shoveled the grate since the man left. The woman could see nothing, could not even see to make her way to the woodbox. She couldn’t see the girl, but now she could hear her, the slow, deep breaths that were like a sleeping child’s.

  Slowly Thula unfolded her legs, pushed herself up from the floor, grunting, and as she did so her blanket dropped from her shoulders. She stood at last and made her way by feel to the far side of the room, where the lantern stood on a small square shelf above the man’s pallet. By feel she picked it up at the base, carried it across the room slowly, feeling with her soft leather soles before her, to the shelf above the washstand where the tin of sulfur matches stood. In the dark she set the lamp down. In the dark she struck the match, and the area around the washstand leapt quickly to detail in the small yellow flare. When she’d lit the blackened wick and placed the globe over it, the room swelled to a brightness that seemed out of proportion to the strength of the one lantern, and Thula’s eyes squinted at the sudden light. It hurt to bend at the woodbox, where there were only a few sticks of stovewood left amidst the cluttered twigs and bark at the bottom. She was faint with fasting, faint with the too-quick return from the place of silent, hopeless prayer, and she lost her balance as she reached for them, had to catch hold of the cold edge of the cookstove to keep from falling. When she turned with the two sticks of stovewood cradled in one arm, the handful of twigs to feed the embers in the other, she saw the girl’s eyes watching her. The fragile body still lay curled on its side, but the limbs were no longer crooked inward. One hand had slipped from beneath the quilt she lay under, rested on the edge of Thula’s red blanket where it had dropped on the floor. The girl’s breath sounded in the room, deeply drawn and even. The woman moved forward, slowly, watching the ocher eyes as they followed her, the slow rise as they tracked her approach, and Thula knew the girl was not looking at something in the other world but at her, Thula Henry, as she came, knelt on the puncheon floor beside the pallet, placed the dry twigs on the orange coals, and blew on them until they began to smoke.

  By the time the man returned with the small children at evening, Matt was sitting up on the pallet with the red blanket wrapped around her, sipping broth from a clay bowl. Jonaphrene ran toward her the instant she came in the door, but then stopped shyly a few feet from the edge of the pallet and stood with her hands behind her back. Matt looked at her sister, said nothing. She turned her eyes up at her father, looked at him a moment, glanced then at her two brothers, and went back to sipping the brown broth.

  And the world returned to normal—to what was normal within the realm of that home and family: the older boy ran and played in the woods as usual, or chased after his male cousins, with the younger boy stumbling along behind until the teasing would become too unmerciful and Thomas would run back, silent and panting, not crying, to the log house. The father continued to leave the house before daylight and come home well after dark; the younger girl sat in her dreamy reverie beside the hearth or the cookstove, or followed her older sister’s directions as she bossed her in how to clean a squirrel or sweep off the front porch. Matt herself seemed unchanged, but for the bone thinness and the pallor that had come to her in the winter darkness, painting her skin an ethereal bloodless yellow. But even that disappeared in a short time, and within a week and a half the deep amber color of her skin was back, and she’d returned to the restless, ceaseless roaming that marked her existence, sometimes hunting, sometimes not, occasionally taking the aged beagle with her, as if the time of her near death on the pallet had never been. Every few days she would take the younger children and disappear the whole afternoon into the brush along the creekbank, and Thula would watch them from beneath the porch overhang as they trailed singlefile across the road, and each time she watched she thought she would go back inside the house and gather her belongings in the leather satchel and go home. But each time, when the children came in at first dark, they smelled the meat roasting and the tanfula
cooking and found Thula Henry sitting with her handwork beside the fire.

  Jessie did not come again, but often Fayette would be there, following John through the door as he came in from work, or showing up a half hour later, and the children’s uncle would sit on the mended ladderback tipped against the wall for only a moment before he’d get up to rove restlessly about the room, prowling and pawing at their few pitiful belongings—the shaving mug and razor propped on the top shelf, the chipped china saucers, the metal pitcher on the washstand —though he seemed not to really see the things he picked up and handled but to be touching them thoughtlessly, unconsciously, as one caresses an old scar. Always, he would be talking. Talking. The Indian woman watched him. She recognized the unnaturally bright eyes, the overloud voice, as he blustered and tried to cajole his brother; often she could detect the faint sour-sweet smell. When he was in the room the unease within her would stir up, get stronger. This was still a house of sickness, which Thula knew if none of the rest of them knew it; in her soul she knew it, and she knew it was very bad, very dangerous, to bring the destructive power of liquor into a sickhouse. She watched the children’s father as well, not understanding why he would let that bad force come around his frail and vulnerable children.

  But John seemed to pay his brother almost no mind, and Thula watched that too, how the more John ignored Fayette, the louder and more restless the other would become, striding aimlessly about the log room, talking, talking, and she thought, watching him as he roamed, insatiable, unable to be satisfied with whatever he picked up or looked at or ate or spoke, that this was the same in the girl, in her restless, aimless walking, the same in the father as he worked, the same in the jittery limbs of the boy Jim Dee, and Thula Henry thought maybe it was the same in all white people; maybe Chihowa put that hungry restlessness in all white people for a purpose, though she could not see what that purpose might be, because it seemed to make too much destruction. But the Creator’s will and design had ever been unfathomable, and in her deeply troubled spirit, Thula did not try to comprehend. It would be like trying to comprehend why He sent His Son to such a little bunch of people in the desert, and then when that news went out, He let it be spread with so much killing—or why He let all these white people come swarming and devouring as locusts so that now there were three whites to every Choctaw in the Nation, taking the Nation’s coal and trees and unbroken earth—or what He meant her to do with that girl.

  Thula had given up trying to comprehend that portion; she was no longer patient and faithful, believing He would reveal to her His purpose, nor was she submissive, as she had been, to her part in that purpose—but still she did not seem to be able to leave. Nor did the children’s father ask her. Never once had John suggested, whether by word or silence or gesture, that she was not needed in this house, that it was time for her to go home. The two continued in their unspoken collusion—the man, without argument, allowing her to take the place of mother for his children because he would not take a wife; the woman staying because, when she was alone in the log house, when she would begin to gather her herbs and her second skirt drying by the fire and her red blanket in preparation to go home, a bad feeling would come on her, a strange, indefinite foreboding, which would not depart until she settled back some way to stay. Not that she found peace in staying—her peace had entirely departed from her in the seven days and nights of the girl’s sojourn—but the disturbance in her soul was easier when she did not try to fight.

  She would speak to the girl sometimes, in the evenings before the father came home, when the younger ones were asleep in the upper room and it was just the two of them alone in the quiet beside the fire; she would say in a facsimile of her father’s English, “You got some job to do. The Creator given you some work, you going to die you ain’t done it,” and repeat the same meaning in her mother’s tongue. Sometimes she would read aloud from her Choctaw Bible, or smoke the room with sage and cedar, make her offerings of tobacco, but even as she did these things she felt her own soul dry and barren; she had no faith in the words coming from her mouth, no faith even in the cedar smoke, the songs that seemed no longer to belong to her. It was as if she had been sucked dry of all forms to do the Spirit’s work. Once, she asked the girl, “What you seen yonder? What is it look like?” and then was shamed at her own question and immediately held her tongue. The girl looked back at her with almond eyes, answered nothing.

  One morning Thula’s eldest son George came and stood in the yard and called her to come out, and when she stood on the porch and looked at him with his big hat in his two hands and his black hair streaked with gray in the wintry daylight, and his face which was her own face gazing at her with that question, the longing in her to go home was so sharp she thought it would cut her breast in two. She went back in the log house and got her satchel, leaving even the chiggerweed roots she had just dug drying beside the fireplace, and walked with her son as far as the sawmill on the east side of Big Waddy—but the pull was too strong in her, that terrible sense that there was something she must do, and she was afraid. Thula stopped her son with a hand on his arm, looked up at him, and the two faces were equal in the gray light, the same round form and blackness of eye and glabrous skin, the woman almost two feet shorter and the son’s head grayer, but the expressions on the identically formed features just the same, and she said in native tongue, “It’s not finished. When it’s finished I’ll come.” She turned, leaving her son standing in the dirt road, and went back.

  Thus the end of winter passed. The hoop was arcing toward the earth’s renewal when the man Fayette followed his brother in the door one night with a large powderhorn hanging from his neck and a grotesquely fat rifle of many barrels in his hands. Thula was sitting alone in the silence. Her Bible was open on her lap, but she was not reading the words. The younger children had been put to bed upstairs; the girl was not in the house, had not yet returned from her day’s roaming, and Thula felt herself waiting, as she was ever waiting. Sometimes she thought that this was all that was asked of her, to wait, in bewilderment and turmoil, because the Creator was testing her as He tested His children in the Old Testament; other times she thought the soulsickness in that log house had crept inside her skin.

  She paid little attention to the gun the man carried—though it was a tremendous weapon that held the force of great destruction within its iron pores—because it was sometimes Fayette’s habit to bring a gun into the house and show it about, demonstrating its mechanisms to his brother, who hardly watched, and as Fayette snapped open the breech or spun the smoothly revolving cylinder, he would keep a constant hungry eye on his brother, who seemed to take notice of that least of all. But Thula was alert to the man himself from the moment he stumbled in the door, exhaling the sour smell before him, because she saw that the liquor was on him bad this night. It was the same as she’d seen it in her grandson Moss, as she’d seen it in her father, in old Cinnamon John who lived at Yonubby and sat in the yard of the church with his eyes blurred, looking to heaven, weeping, and trying to sing the old songs: as if the liquor itself were a spirit that got into the drinker and walked in his form, though crooked, and spoke through his mouth, though slurred, but a bad spirit itself whose only purpose was to destroy the carcass it inhabited and any human souls around that the spirit could find a way to touch. She closed her Testament and set it to the side, but she did not stand when the men came in. This was part of the silent agreement she held with the father: she cooked for and tended only the children, and the father might eat the leftovers in the food warmer above the stovetop, but he would serve himself—which he did now, first washing up at the washstand—but Thula’s eyes were not on the father but on his brother as he roiled and raged about the room.

  “When you going to get some damn furniture?” Fayette said, and he lurched in a looping half circle toward the crate box in the corner. “Man cain’t even find a damn place to seddown!” But Fayette didn’t attempt to sit on the crate but rather upended the multibarreled we
apon on it so that the stock rested on the pine. “You gonna like this one, I reckon. It’s a damn blackpowder muzzle loader, like that blame ole contraption you got yonder,” and he waved a flapping hand at the longrifle resting on two big iron nails above the front door. “Fellow could make pert near any kinda gun on the face of the earth and still yet uses a old muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle, I reckon he just likes to mess with it, reckon maybe twelve times that many barrels to pack and load oughta satisfy him in a weap’n. Eh?”

  He winked broadly, held it like a squint as he turned a glinting sapphire-and-ruby eye on the woman near the fireplace and, seeing the impassivity of expression there, allowed that same lit eye to travel around the room, roving, unfocused, as if it were the eye that were drunk and the man chasing after it, until at last it found his brother standing in front of the cookstove with a tin plate in his hand. Fayette blinked an instant, and then he said, almost with surprise, “Looka here now, Son. Look!” Swaying a little, he lifted the powderhorn that hung from the thong around his neck. The large end of the horn, where it had once met the bull’s skull, was sealed with a leather skin stretched tight as a drumhead; the sharp point had been snipped from the tapered end, and that end was capped with a snug hand-carved horn cap. Fayette pulled the cap off with his teeth and spat it onto the floor, where it plinked against the wood and rolled, and he began to pour blackpowder from the horn into the many barrels, loosely, messily, the powder sifting in a fine black rain over the fist that held the muzzle end of the big gun. He kept up his rain of words as he poured, sometimes slurring, sometimes pronouncing them cleanly and carefully. “Got this off a ole boy ’tween here’n Fort Smith, old trader I don’t know what, some kind of prospector or something, said he was. Said he was. Volleygun. That’s what he called it. English volleygun. From England. I bet you this thing’s a hunnerd years old, y’reckon?” He righted the powderhorn a moment, squinted at the barrels, upended the horn again, and continued to pour. “Give ’im two dollars, ’s all he said he wanted. I th’ew in a quart of whiskey for good luck. You could scare the bejeezus outa somebody with this thing, couldn’cha? Man alive. Open up twelve barrels at once on their gizzard, just blow’em to holy hell.”