The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  He reached with clumsy fingers into the leather pouch at his waist and drew out a lead ball, dull and pewter gray in the lamplight, and with several tries managed to align it with the round rim of one of the barrels, pushed it in, reached for another from the pouch. He’d poured a tremendous load of powder in each, and Thula saw him put two balls in some of the barrels, none in others. Several times he fumbled the one he was trying to place, and the ball would drop from his fingers, thunk, and roll cleanly on the wood floor. He withdrew the rod from the pipes beneath the nether barrel and rammed it down the twelve, sloppily, missing some of them, doing others two and three times, as the tone of his words changed from boyish thrill to the bitter whine of accusation.

  “Could jus’ lay this in a man’s face, I reckon a man might do about whatever you ast him politely to do then. What kinda hole you believe twelve barrels at onced is gonna make in a man’s belly? ’M’ona show ya right here in a little bit. I come to give you a little demonstration.” And he continued jamming the ramrod hard, haphazardly, hit or miss, into the barrels. “Blasts ’em all ever’ one at once, this thing does. Course, somebody knew what he was doing, he could figure out how to make him a twelve-barrel shotgun could just fire however many barrels a fellow wanted, nine or seven or the whole blame bunch if a fellow wanted to blow somebody to holy hell and be done with it. Couldn’t he?” Fayette turned the glistening moistness of his eyes to his brother again. “Somebody been given a talent he don’t even want to use it for the betterment of himself or his children who been living in a pigsty without even no decent furniture, won’t use it even when his own blood and kin asks him, asks him polite as a gingerlady, that’s the kind of fella’s about as stubborn and stupid as a pig himself. Y’reckon? Son?”

  John spooned a pale clump of hominy into his mouth. His eyes were on his brother, his features without expression.

  “Man with that kind of talent, he wouldn’t even have to use his brains that hard.” Fayette paused in his ramrodding, gazed steadily, evenly, across the room, his bloodshot eyes still glistening but the sway of trunk and slur of tongue, for the moment, calmed. “He could just forge a good simple type of a weapon people could use in this country, let the other fellow distribute it like he wants to, make ’em all a living. Make everybody a decent way to live. But no-sir. No-sir. Man like that, he don’t care a damn what’s to become of his family. Man like that, he’s got to run off at the first sign of some little old patent trouble, some stupid little no ’count thing.” Thus had Fayette twisted in his mind the old trouble that had caused them to leave Kentucky. The sway was back in his torso, and he spat once on the floor, returned to jamming the rod again and again, remembering, in the blaming necessity of his besotted mind, that it had been John who’d fled fearfully across the land, driven by phantasms, he himself who’d been dragged along in his brother’s wake.

  Thula Henry, watching, understood that the man Fayette had been naming something in his mind’s language for a long time; she did not need to listen to the words in their harsh tongue to hear. This one had nurtured and built and nourished something until it swelled up big, fully grown, but it had become something different from the seed that had begun it. Watching the two men, she saw the children’s father standing before the cookstove with the hominy plate in one hand, eating steadily in a slow, unvaried rhythm, lifting the spoon without pause from plate to mouth, back to plate, the sound of tin scraping tin making a ticking, monotonous rhythm in the room. On his face was a shadow of the black, cold look she had seen as he started out into the predawn darkness on the morning before the girl had awakened from the other world. Thula turned her eyes to the face of the drunk man again; she watched him draw the ramrod from the last barrel, fumble to replace it in the pipes, give up finally and, with an oath, drop it clattering on the floor, among the loose musket balls, the powderhorn cap, and spilled powder, all the while watching from slit bloodshot eyes as his brother ate in that slow, undeviating rhythm. Thula saw that the man Fayette was nursing a very old wound. She saw that he’d been feeling and re-feeling that same grievous wound for many years. It wasn’t formed from outside himself, hadn’t been given to him that way, but was a remembered stab-hurt entirely of his own making, and Thula saw this in the same way she saw that the liquor was not, as she’d thought (as she wanted to think, because of her grandson, her father), a separate bad spirit come into the man’s soul to make him act so, but a sly force that knew how to trick the bad thing that dwelt there already to come out.

  Fayette grunted as he hoisted the volleygun. “You just need a little demonstration, Son, reckon?” He raised the heavy muzzle unsteadily, pointed the twelve barrels at his brother, held them there a moment, then swept the heavy aim in a wide, clumsy arc across the room to the west wall; he held an instant on the small square of window before he pulled the trigger and the poorly packed and excessive blackpowder in the twelve barrels exploded, and the smell and roar and splinter cracked beyond sound, reverberated in the log room, swirled and settled at last into smoke and silence. Then from the upper room there came the high thin wail that raised, spiraling, into a child’s scream. Through the hole, where the splintered wood jutted down like eye-teeth into the gaping place that had been solid log, the cold night air seeped in.

  For two days thunderstorms raged in the valleys of the Sans Bois as if God Himself were venting His fury. An enraged yellowgreen light followed and preceded each drenching, each rain of hail on the earth popping and dancing, each roar of wind. In the night, lightning’s fingers splayed and forked, heaven to earth, back to heaven, unceasing, so near in the blackness their crack and splinter was one with the light, and the aftermath of rumbling rolled for minutes until it was interrupted by the next crack. Trees fell, smoldering. Barnroofs blew off and tumbled toward Arkansas. The daywind blew hard, warm and wet and cool, from the southwest—the balmy mixed roiling winds that for eons have blown twisters into this quick-change, irascible country—and each time the wind paused in the charged light, Thula Henry would step out onto the porch and look to the top of Bull Mountain to see where the tail would drop from the black clouds. Twisters did drop to earth from that two-day spate of storms, all over the Choctaw Nation, at Skullyville and Honobia and Tuskahoma and Swink—but none here at Big Waddy Crossing. None here.

  For two days the family and the Indian woman were bound together in the shell of the log house. Not Fayette—he’d gone out soon after he’d blown the hole in the wall, immediately after John stepped across the room, took the volleygun from him, and said, too calmly, his voice controlled, icy, “Reckon you’d better go on home now.” Deflated, small in the gray smoke choking the room, his mouth working, Fayette had slid out the split-log door beneath his brother’s cold, calm, black stare. But John and the four children and Thula Henry were confined by the coming-one-on-top-of-the-other assault of storms. And it was like this—not one constant storm but a relentless series of different storms, each with its own wind and shape of hail and sound of drenching, with only the false promise of ending between each. The first had approached disguised as a cold spring rain within an hour after Fayette left. Matt had come in, driven by the rain, and found the little children sitting up swollen-eyed and wide awake beside Thula, the room still smelling of blackpowder, and her father carefully nailing a piece of blanket over the ragged hole in the west wall, his movements slow and precise. She did not ask, and no word of explanation was spoken. The girl slapped the water off her hat and hung it on the peg beside the door, went to the stove for her cold food.

  It was late that night that the temperature began to rise, driven by the southwind, and the sky split and began to pour water. John tried to walk to work the next morning, but he returned within a half hour, soaked, saying he could not wade through the boggy place on the curve, it had become a rolling swamp, and he would try again in a while. But he did not try again that day because the rain poured and drenched, pausing only long enough to gather more fury before it rushed to pound the ocherous mudd
y earth again. To the east Bull Creek raged over the road, spread an eighth of a mile wide, crawled moiling up toward the yard.

  On the second day the two girls emerged from the house about noon and stood just back from the slanting downpour that whipped beneath the porch overhang, and then the father came out behind them, then the two boys, and the woman last of all. The girls stood shoulder-to-shoulder looking down at the livid, moving water, the two figures almost exactly the same size, though the elder was fourteen, the younger barely nine, both of them with faces beyond their years and the bodies of children. Their arms were linked as they’d been linked when Thula first saw them on the ridge. They stood thus for more than an hour, while their brothers played about the porch and their father paced the far end, looking west for the glimmering of light that would signal the storm’s lifting. Suddenly, for no discernible cause, Matt pulled away from her sister, turned, and began to pace about the porch in the same manner as her father, though with less seeming purpose, gnawed, as Thula knew, with that terrible restlessness that made her all the time need to walk and walk.

  Toward evening the last storm retreated east, chased by the sun in the widening slit of western sky. It was too late for the man to walk to work at Cedar, and his restlessness matched his daughter’s, their faces turned each toward the retreating clouds streaked orange and crimson and deep muddy violet, or west to the beryl sky where the sun burned, or out at the very earth itself, transformed by the storm’s fury, unseen, the green infant leaves and grass blades sprung from the grayblackness. Bull Creek still roiled beyond its banks, the road below the house was a muddy bog crossed by yellowbrown rivulets, but everywhere the smell and sound of the transformation were evident: in the murmur of people’s voices on the porches in town, in the smell of verdure and the cacophony of songbirds and crows and bluejays announcing the storms’ departure, spring come. For the father and the daughter on the log porch the hour of release from the storm’s grip was almost worse than the two days of its holding, because it was followed too soon by the coming dark.

  But at dawn the next morning John walked off to work at Cedar, and soon after, Matt took the old slouch hat down from the peg beside the door and went out, descended the stone slab of step and started directly toward the moiling waters of Bull Creek, which had receded from the yard but still swelled beyond the bank. Thula stood on the porch and watched her, watched the old hound dog emerge from beneath the porch, slapping his ears, and begin in his feeble way to trot after the girl. She turned and hollered him back once, went on. The dog waited a little bit, and then he continued behind her, fat and slow and determined, trailing at a distance. But when the girl waded right into the brown waters of Bull Creek, waded to her thighs at the ford and kept on going, the beagle stopped. He stood a minute looking after her and then turned slowly and waddled back toward the house.

  The girl did not come home that night. She was not there at dawn the next day when her father left to walk to Cedar. He rose, shaved, dressed, and then stood for a half hour on the porch with the light coming, agitated, angry, not yet fearful. Thula came outside, looked off east where the man was looking. After a while she said, “She be here in a little while.” He nodded, neither of them looking at the other, and finally, as dawn was breaking, he stepped down off the stone slab and walked west.

  At midmorning Thula saw the girl coming. From the open doorway she watched Matt cross back over Bull Creek, wade through the water, lower now, still filled with tumbling sticks and brickle, muddy, but shallower on the road. The girl’s slouch hat was missing; her face was blank, her mouth thin and cracked. A terrible dread came over Thula as she watched Matt wade up from the water and into the yard. The girl walked directly to where the ancient beagle warmed himself in a patch of sun beside the woodpile, and sat down and put her arm across his rolling back. The straight dun-colored hair was pulled back from her face in a leather thong at the base of her skull; her skin was parched-corn yellow. Her eyes were entirely empty. Thula thought, looking at her, that the girl’s soul was gone. Not gone traveling, as it had seemed when Matt lay on the pallet, but gone altogether, disappeared: sucked from her form as the marrow is sucked from a chicken bone by a starving man.

  “Impashilup,” Thula said out loud.

  But she knew that was not possible. The ancient ones cared nothing for any human but Choctaw. It wasn’t possible that the girl had encountered the Soul Eater on one of her solitary roamings in the creek bottoms and, that little nick being there, Impashilup crept in to devour her spirit. That was not possible, Thula knew it. But she didn’t know what other encounter of the Spirit could strip a form so cleanly; she didn’t know what could have happened to this white girl. The trembling came hard upon Thula, and a strong sense of helplessness in the face of what was beyond her knowing; there were certain things the Creator had not given to the people to know—had not given to her, Thula Henry—and the trembling of doubt increased, quaked large, to include her own purpose, what she’d believed she had already known. Her eyes were on the hollow form in the yard, on the girl’s thin hand resting, motionless, against the dog’s flank. Thula could do nothing to retrieve hope for that emptiness; she knew no medicine for a thieved soul. The woman turned, not as if she had been released but as if she forced herself, one soft-soled foot set before the other across the porch, washed in the invisible trembling; she went back inside the log house and silently began to gather her herbs and cedar and tobacco and place them inside her leather satchel.

  BOOK THREE

  Plain Chant

  There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.

  I CORINTHIANS 14:10

  Grady Dayberry

  They tell it a hunnerd ways, as many ways as you’d care to listen, but I don’t believe there’s many still living that knows the real story nor even a fraction of it. Tales get blown all out of proportion, you’re liable to hear anything anymore. But if you want to know what happened, I’ll tell it. I witnessed a good portion myself, we all did, the whole town—well, what I mean, I didn’t see the actual incident but about as near to it as a person would want to. I was just a boy. Whooee, that’s the first man I ever seen killed. But what I didn’t see and what I’m fixing to tell you, I heard direct from my daddy, and you know my dad was a well-respected man in this country. You know he was never known to carry tales. It all happened right here on the street in front of his stable, what used to be my daddy’s livery stable, and I guess he seen more of it than any man living, and what he didn’t see he knew about in the first place because John Lodi worked for him nearly from the day him and his family come into this part of the country and in the second place because my dad was a perspicacious man.

  They lived up at Waddy, these Lodis, what we used to call Big Waddy Crossing—and it didn’t cross nothing, just a big boggy place on the old Overland Mail Line, but they called it that, I don’t know why. Might’ve been one of these old Choctaw names got knocked out of whack. Might’ve been on account of how Bull Creek runs through there, but Lord, Bull Creek wasn’t nothing to cross even way back then. But it was Big Waddy Crossing, or so they called it—well, it’s not even a ghost town now. Nothing yonder but the stone foundation of the school and a little piece of the teacherage. Sawmill burnt in Aught Six, and then that cyclone come through in Forty-five, blowed everything plumb to the other side of Toms Mountain, and that was all she wrote for Big Waddy Crossing. But it started out to be some kind of a little old town, and these Lodis all lived up around there. I believe according to my daddy it was the one brother come in first, the one they called Fate. Don’t know where they come from—well, you just didn’t ask a fellow where he come from nor why back then, everybody had a story and the majority of them might not’ve been too pleasant—but they just migrated into this part of the country and settled in their families, first the one brother and his family and then the next one and his. That’s how a lot of folks did. Now, my family is a bit to the unusual,
because my granddaddy come in here early, way back before the Civil War even—the War of Rebellion, was how he used to call it. Come up from Texas on horseback, Grandpa did, married his first wife and opened his little trading post up yonder at what we used to call Old Cedar when there wasn’t nothing but Indians and colored people hardly anywhere around here—but when these big batches of white people started coming into the Nation, a lot of times they’d trickle in one piece of the family at a trip. They tell me that’s how there got to be so many Tannehills around this part of the country. Tannehills didn’t breed all that many Tannehills once they’d got in here, they had a good headstart long before that. I heard it was six brothers all dribbled in here a piece at a time from somewhere, spread out over ten or eleven years, but a lot of families would do like that. First one bunch would come in from Alabama or Mississippi or wherever they come from, and then they’d send word back how good and easy life was here in the Nation—and it wasn’t, not so easy as all that, but I reckon it was easier than what some of them left—and here’d come the next bunch, and so on, and I reckon that’s how these Lodis did. It’s a pretty common story.

  But, now, John Lodi was a widow-man, and that was something a little bit unusual. There were plenty widow-women around in these parts, I expect, even then, but a man without a wife didn’t usually stay without one for long, especially not if he had young’uns, and John Lodi did. You’d need somebody to take care of your children, do the woman work, unless you had a big old grown girl—which Lodi didn’t have nothing but two little bitty ones, they tell me, and one of them never did act just right—but even if you did have a girl big enough she could take care of the young’uns, you’d still want a wife to answer a man’s natural instinct, unless you meant to ride all the way to Fort Smith. Now, when Lodi come in here there might not’ve been all that many white women falling all over theirselves to get a husband, I know that, because that’d been in Eighty-six or Eighty-seven, or anyhow John Lodi went to work for my dad in Eighteen Eighty-eight at the start of the new year, but there was bound to have been a few white widow-women around. Men died easy back then. Or you might send back home for one, for your dead wife’s sister or somebody, or a man could get an Indian wife if he had a mind to, and a lot of them did. Made your permit papers unnecessary, you didn’t have to go through all that rigmarole—they put you through the hoops, these Choctaws did now, you had to have a certificate of good moral character signed by ten citizens, pay a hunnerd-dollar license fee, renounce the protections of the laws of the United States, I don’t know what-all. But John Lodi, he come in here without a wife, white nor no color, and that little parcel of motherless children, which is unusual in itself, because a single man might come in here by his lonesome or a family man might lose his wife to birthing onced he’d got here and get him another’n right quick, but a widow-man with children would usually just piece them out to relatives before he come into the Nation, or else he’d stay home. John Lodi never so much as tipped his hat to a lady on the street, that I ever heard of—not because he wasn’t a gentlemanly man but more like because a female creature was something invisible to him—much less kept company with a woman, so far as I know. So that aspect was a little odd, but there was more to it than that.