The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  Now, hold on, hold on. I’ll tell you why. You look how the streets were empty then and later, how they wasn’t no customers around. God cleared the platter for them in the morning, and then my dad mixed up in it and changed everything. I believe that. And then the good Lord had to go to work and bring Fate on back later and arrange it all private, the streets empty, all over again. So then it happened and they wasn’t no witnesses. I believe in my heart the Lord intended it like that.

  But, now, here is what I don’t know and won’t never know, I don’t reckon, till come time to meet my Maker, but this is what I been wondering for seventy-five years: Did the Lord use Dad as His instrument to make sure the right one got killed? Or did Dad mix in it and mess up the Lord’s plan?

  BOOK FOUR

  Revelation

  Then shall he kill the goat of the sin-offering, that is for the people, and bring his blood within the vail, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy seat . . .

  LEVITICUS 16:15

  I was standing at their well turning the windlass when I first heard him. The sun was high overhead, still too far south yet to crack the treebuds, but coming. Small black strips of shadow ribbed the dead grass at the foot of the well. I stood in the cold sunlight, turning the shaft by rote motion, my mind stale and inward, my eyes seeing nothing though they were turned toward the bare back of Waddy Mountain before me. The day was bright and still. I heard the hoofbeats, a ragged canter around the base of the mountain where the road curved, and I turned then, still cranking, and saw him coming along the road from Cedar on the back of the blue roan. He was still far off yet. I didn’t think anything then except to crank faster, because I didn’t like any of them to see me draw from the well. There was only the one well and we shared it, though I hated it, because it was another way he tied us to him, another way Papa allowed it because he did not dig us a new one when the first one ran dry, and I didn’t dig one because I believed, always, we were not going to be there that long. I made the children use rainwater for washing, and in the months Bull Creek ran high I toted our drinking water, too, when I could, because I hated drawing up that bucket in sight of their front door. But I’d watched the cousins drive off together in the wagon in the early morning and I knew Jessie would stay in the back of the store the whole day, so when I came outside for Jonaphrene’s washwater and found the rain barrel tipped over, I had allowed myself, out of sloth and haste, to come to the well.

  My uncle was drunk, leaning heavily in the saddle, which I could see even from such distance, but I didn’t think anything about it. Not yet, in the still, bright sunlight, did I think this day different from any other. I watched him as I turned the crank so hard that it sang, and still I turned harder, until the full bucket rose on the slimy rope to the lip. I pulled it to the side, watching, my thought only to finish quickly and get back to the log house. He leaned forward like he was asleep nearly, but he was not too drunk to think to turn the roan’s head away from the boggy place and walk him on the high ground toward town. The horse had his head down, but Fayette pushed him, coming over the rough ground at a fast walk. I poured the bucket into the wash pail quickly, the water splashing my shirtfront, and they came on, past the closed mill and the livery, and I could see something odd but I was in a hurry and I didn’t try to make out what it was. The horse was coming faster, so that Fayette bounced and swayed in the saddle, past the post office, the horse trotting on his own now because he smelled the barn.

  I saw then what was different. I stopped, let the well bucket drop, the rope singing, the hickory handle spinning around. I balanced the wash pail against my belly on the rock lip, held it in my arms, and looked at him. My uncle was laden with guns, weighted with them, his shoulder and chest and belt clotted with gun butts; he had rifle stocks shoved into saddleboots at his kneecaps, others wedged crossways before him like sticks. He came on, past the store, and I ducked down that he might not see me, spilled Jonaphrene’s water on the ground. He didn’t allow the roan to turn up the path toward the rock barn, though the horse tried, and Fayette jerked the reins viciously, held him to the roadbed, the roan’s head trying to twist to the left, so that he was nearly trotting sideways. They passed below where I hid myself behind the well, and went on beyond the log house toward the old path on the east side that climbed to the foot of Toms Mountain. Fayette bobbed in the saddle, and the guns were strapped and draped about him as their wagon had been strapped and draped with their belongings on the morning we all left Kentucky, which I did not forget, ever: Fayette’s ghost wagon, laden, seeming to follow but in truth driving us out and away from our home. And so when I saw him on the blue roan on the last morning of his life looking the same, decked and strapped hat to boot with a glut of guns in his drunkenness, I left the water bucket and went across the earth behind the log house and along the rise where he had disappeared, and I followed him along the path up the rise and into the ragged shed of the old barn.

  He faced me in the barn darkness over the back of the blue roan. The horse was outlined against the square of daylight which was the opening at the back of the barn, and he was lathered and trembling, you could smell the fear on him. My uncle stood on the back side of him and wallowed drunk across the saddle, hung over it with both arms, one hand holding tight to a whiskey bottle. He heard me, raised his eyes and looked at me, his eyes filmed, and then he lifted his whole face and the bottle, raised both, and both empty as dry retching, and he looked at me, did not see me, but I saw him. You could be dumb as a fist and still see it. You could be blind even and smell it: his fear. I recognized it but I didn’t know what it meant and so did not respect it, for the reason that I had seen him wallow and slur for too long. He raised his bleared eyes to me, not seeing, and then he threw the empty bottle down, lurched away from the horse, and stumbled to the remains of the front stall. I heard him slamming the wood, cursing, because he’d forgot what he’d done with it. And then he remembered, and I waited, quiet, while he came out of the front stall and stumbled toward the back. I could hear him back there flinging the old moldy hay about, and then I saw him against the square of daylight showing the foot of Toms Mountain, lurching toward us, me and the roan. He came clutching in his fist a brown patent-medicine bottle with the label still on, and he sat on the three-legged milkstool and pulled out the cork stopper so that it popped weakly. The stool was the old one I’d sat on beside the hearth throughout the dark swirl in the beginning, which from that time forward never served beneath the warm flank of a cow. Fayette had brought it up here for drinking when he buried his still. The still was long gone. He’d had Moss dig it up and haul it off someplace when he heard the law was coming, and they filled the floor in. I don’t know what they did with it; the thump barrel and copper cooker are still boiling and reeking somewhere up on Toms Mountain, I guess. My uncle tipped the milkstool back on two legs and leaned his shoulders against the stall slats to raise the bottle, his horse still saddled and sweaty and laden with guns, and then my uncle fell off and sat on the barn floor in the moldy dust, drinking. Within only a few swigs he’d drunk himself blind. He sat with the bottle dangling from his hand and his eyes open, seeing nothing. The bottle dropped and lay on its side, spilling liquor, and Fayette did not rouse even to save his corn whiskey, so I knew he was blind and would not wake up.

  I went to the roan and began to unburden it of guns. The horse stepped and snorted, jerked his head up, but I just held to the bridle ring with one hand and slowly lifted a cartridge belt from the saddlehorn with the other and eased it over my shoulder. The horse calmed some, still trembling, and I slid the rifles from their boots and leaned them against the west wall, unstrapped the shotgun and the great unwieldly volleygun and stacked them, loosed the remaining cartridge belts and holsters from the saddlehorn and dropped them in the straw. I went over to where Fayette sat staring blind. He roused himself, or tried to, rolled his eyes up toward the place I was standing. You old goat, I thought. I wasn’
t afraid of him. I reached to pull the pistols from his belt, and the stink of whiskey and vomit knocked me back. I held my breath long enough to pull the two Colts butt-first out of the holsters, but the gun Papa made was locked under his belly, his white shirt bulging over it, round and swelled up tight as a dog tick, hanging bloated dirty white over it and down over his belt so that I would have had to lift and pull, and that was enough. I quit. The gunbelt, too, I left on him. I tossed the pistols I could reach easily on the soft, black barn floor, loamy with decomposed straw and old horse dung, so that they made only two mute little thuds, but I didn’t take the gun Papa made, I wasn’t thorough and I should have known better, and this is a mistake I made because of contempt. I just went on about what I was doing, turned to the stack of rifles and hoisted the volleygun, sighted along that ancient contraption, that enormous old thing, which I also held in contempt because it was Fayette’s prize he cherished above all others—or above all but the gun Papa made—because it was the first one and no other owned one like it, because no normal man would hold and treasure such a useless gun: too heavy to carry, too heavy to aim, its mouth partitioned and multiplied to spit twelve balls at once like the teeth of a manyheaded serpent spewing brimstone. Pah! I laid it back down and reached for the others.

  Once or twice I glanced over my shoulder as I gathered the guns. He sat slumped with his eyes open, white spots of sunlight from the unchinked log walls mottled over him, and I believed him unconscious, powerless, sotted with drink. I gathered up all I could carry—but not the volleygun or the gun Papa made, which was still wedged beneath the bulge of his belly—and I went out of the barn with them, believing that in this, as in all things, I carried my family’s lives in the hold of my hands. You see what it is? I could laugh nearly. We have each of us our sin and our folly marked on us as clear as the print of bone beneath our faces, and pride is mine, and God will beat me down for it. He has done. He will.

  I waited a moment in the dust of the old barnyard, looking south toward Waddy Mountain, plucked bare and gray and pimply as the skin of a chicken. The barn stood on the rise north and east of the log house where my family stayed—no, it was not our house. Not ever. I did not ever in my life call it ours. I stood in the barn’s mouth with my eyes gazing south but my memory on the wagon where Papa had left it around the east side of the log barn. I could see the sumac growing up through the wheelspokes. I didn’t need to walk around there to see. An old awful sickness came on me, and I removed it in the way I had found to do, meaning I turned my mind stale. I looked south awhile, and then west, staring at the scattered paintless buildings of Big Waddy Crossing. I could see smoke from some of the houses standing still in the bright, unmoving air. The sawmill was quiet. They’d logged out the valley, logged Bull Mountain a long time ago and Waddy Mountain last summer, and now they were started on the line of Sans Bois behind us, but the mill only ran about half of the time. Soon it would be cheaper to carry the mill to the timber than to haul the logs in with oxen. Soon enough Blaylock would pack up his sawmill-set and go someplace where there were still trees.

  I laughed, standing there in that noontide, shaking away the gray taste, the staleness, turning my eyes south to the humped back of stump-ridden Waddy Mountain. I laughed for the sun coming back to us and the cold bright air and Fayette crumbling in his drunkenness so that I could strip him of guns and walk out and stand laughing in the yellow dust. I tried to think where to put the guns I’d taken off him. Nowhere in Big Waddy Crossing, surely, nor Fayette’s fancy frame house or rock barn. Not his store. Nor the corncrib or smokehouse or chicken coop nor anywhere around the old barn. If he wasn’t hunting weapons he’d be hunting his bottles, and no hiding place anywhere around close was safe. The log house was not a place I would even think to consider because I wouldn’t sleep with the taint of those guns even for so long as it would take him to come off his drunk. I looked west toward the dug well between the log house and their house, a few dozen yards from the back of the store. I could see the lip of it and the wash bucket on its side in the shade of the stone wall. I imagined standing beside that wall and dropping the guns one by one, to hear them splunk deep in the darkness, to dream of them rusting in that dark pit, shells softening and releasing their powder, cartridges greening with slime, reddening, blackening, spoiling their drinking water. The urge was strong in me to do that—not to hide his guns till he dried out, but to get rid of them completely, to sneak in the store in the night and take them from their nails on the walls, from the case behind the counter, from the locked room in the back; to gather his stores of blackpowder and smokeless powder, his carbines and rimfire cartridges and shells, to take all of it and destroy it so that there might be nothing for him to wave about when he cursed and threatened Papa.

  At once I knew what I would do, but not in the dug well, because I didn’t know what seven guns would do to well water but I didn’t intend to find out because I could never keep Jonaphrene from using that well—she was too lazy to tote water up the rise from the creekbank—and anyhow, come August, we would all have to drink from it. Come dog days, Bull Creek would lie stagnant with fever and none of us dare drink from it, and I had lived long enough to know that dog days would come. I laughed again, out loud, my arms full of weapons, because I knew where I would go.

  I made my way through the stubbly yellow grass down the slope. The cartridge belts and holsters were draped around my neck, and I carried both Winchesters in the crook of my right arm, the barrels weighing on my forearm, the two guns together heavy and unbalanced. The shotgun was beneath my left arm. I walked with the muzzles pointed to earth as a hunter walks, as Papa had taught me, the Colts tucked in my pantwaist and my hands free to steady the barrels of the long guns. It was just over a quarter mile to the place on the creek. I walked carefully, stumbling sometimes from the weight of the guns and the size of my boots, which were not my boots but an old pair Jim Dee left behind when he went. Down along the creekbed, easy, easy, to the great crumbling sandstone slab where once I’d taught the children.

  The place was unchanged, but for the soft bank and loose stones tumbling, eaten by water, but the sandstone slab was just the same, and the trees around it, echoing Mama’s memory. I stood on the rock above the water, the muscles in my back and neck burning, and let the rifles down slowly, touching the muzzles to the stone and allowing the barrels to slide along my arm to the face of the rock. I knelt as I lowered them, until at last they lay blueblack and shining on the sparkling brown slab. On my knees then, I raised up, kneeling, held the shotgun over my head, hoisted it prone in both hands like an offering to heaven, and heaved it into Bull Creek running then in the weeks of springtime swift and moiling clear. Triumph was in me in that moment, and I laughed in it, out loud, to the clear sky and bare branches budding. The shotgun tumbled once, stock over barrel, and lay in the creek bottom, wavering against the stones.

  So, I thought. There, and so much for your power, Uncle, which is not your power. Which exists in the strength of itself from the hands of another and only for a time, and it is not yours. See it lying snuffed and fouled in clear water, powerless in water, without purpose but for the stock to grow soft and green with slime to feed the nudging mouths of perch. Fool. Another man made it, Uncle. Another man pissed on the earth for his saltpeter and dug in the earth for his iron ore, another smoked wood for the charcoal to make the blackpowder which imparts it its strength, which gives the mouth its fire and its mystery, and it is not yours. Another man forged those barrels, as my papa could have forged it, as my papa would fire it and beat it into life with the strength of his hands if he chose to, and he does not choose to, and you cannot force him, Uncle, and you have no power but what explodes from the mouth of that which another created, which you can hold only for a time in your hands. It is not yours! You bought it to pretend to own it, but it is not your strength, it is not your might, and it can never be. See it cold and useless, stiff on the bottom, gelded. Let it release its power there. And this also.
I pulled one of the pistols free of my belt and dropped it in the water. It rolled a little with the current and sank to the bottom. I plunked the others singly, pulled them from the holsters, my pantwaist, held each above the roiling water by the triggerguard and released it, and one fell straight away and one tumbled and wedged against a branch and one rolled downstream a yard or more and settled in a shaded spot.

  I stood up then, and I felt the power in me as if it were righteousness. I lifted one of the Winchesters, raised it high, and heaved it as far out as I could. It hit butt-first against a log on the far bank and went off. The report sounded in the creekbed and repeated itself once against the mountain, but I didn’t care. By the time I looked, the rifle had already disappeared beneath the rushing water. I lifted the last gun, and in that gesture, in the cold sunlight with the creek singing to the fingering branches above it, the emptiness swept over me. That quickly, with that little warning. The air and joy and power were sucked from me in a twinkling, because it was ever that way, the emptiness; from the first day of its coming it could suck me hollow in a breath, like bones sucked clean of marrow: dried out, scooped out, brittle and useless as a brown locust shell. I flung the last rifle without looking. I heard the splash above the creek’s sounding, but I had turned away already and started back up toward town along the near bank.

  North from the treeline along the creekbank I walked, one foot before the other, by rote motion, the way you chop cotton, do the milking, churn butter, any tedious activity you go through without thought because it’s got to get done. I didn’t care anymore. I came up onto the road and turned toward the path up to the old shed barn, with the intention of carrying the volleygun and the gun Papa made back down to drown them in Bull Creek with the others. I thought of the gun Papa made, the big four-barreled pistol, with its flat casing jammed beneath the round mound of Fayette’s belly, and I tried to think how to retrieve it without touching him. It was my next job, I thought, to rid the world of them forever, those two that were old among us, Fayette’s treasures he prized above all others. When he was not drunk he kept them mounted on the rock face of the chimney inside his house, mounted together as if they were equals, and they were not and could not be, excepting only in how he went for them first to fire them when he got drunk. That volleygun was not true, it exploded and sprayed without purpose, would hang fire and misfire; it was nothing but an old blackpowder muzzle loader with a dozen firing channels to foul and clog, a worthless gun, the first of Fayette’s guns-with-many-barrels, and he kept it on iron hooks above his fireplace, where it hulked like something deformed, some distorted notion of weapon, above the gun that Papa made. The gun that Papa made. A perfect gun. A nearly perfect gun. Which caused us to leave Kentucky forever.