The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  I looked for some kind of pleasure within me, to heave those two guns into Bull Creek, but the emptiness was on me bad, and I couldn’t find any. I climbed tired toward the barn, empty, separate from caring, because the old hollowness had swept me and sucked me dry. That is how I account for it. That’s why, when I looked up and saw Jonaphrene in her shirtwaist on the log porch with her hair down to wash it, saw my sister shoeless in the shade of the overhang with her dark hair spread across her shoulders, I only looked at her and through her and did not tell her to get on in the house. I didn’t stand a moment outside the barn door and watch and wait and listen. I took no care when I entered the darkness from the sunlight. The hollowness had come unbidden and settled upon me on the creekbank, as it had come from the first dawn when the cedars bled, to foist its emptiness upon my life and spirit, to leave me unprotected from living, from work I had to do, and that is why I was not in any way prepared or protected when I went into the barn.

  He stood against the west wall, at the head of the blue roan. He had walked the horse around to where I’d stacked the rifles, and for a minute I wasn’t sure I saw what I thought I saw, because I was deadened still, and hollow, my eyes were not adjusted to the darkness, and anyhow I didn’t believe it because it wasn’t possible. I stopped inside the mouth of the doorway, and I looked at him. He looked back at me. He was not blind now. He didn’t even appear to be drunk. The gun Papa made was in his hand, retrieved from his belt, from beneath his belly where I’d been too prissy to touch. The volleygun was strapped again to the saddle. He didn’t sway on his feet, nor did the gun waver. At first my mind couldn’t grasp it, I could not receive it, because I knew he couldn’t have dried out in the short time I’d been gone.

  “Oh,” he said, and his breath blew soursweet with old whiskey, his organs steeped in it like brine. “It’s you.” I knew then how close I’d come to dying in the instant I stepped from the daylight into the darkness of the barn. The emptiness poured out of me entirely, and I was alert.

  He’d expected a man when he heard my boots rustling in the dry grass, stobbing the dung dust of the barnyard. He thought it was a man who had robbed him, a man coming back now to catch him naked without his weapons, and I didn’t know which man he feared, or if it was all men, but, “It’s you,” he said, and breathed again. He was glad to see me. I wanted to laugh when I knew it, because if I had contempt for him, he had an equal portion for me, as female, as John’s daughter, and he was glad enough to see me to smile a little, breathing whiskey through the crack of his beard. He’d swum up out of his black stupor and found his whiskey spilled, found that which was God to him, his guns and his whiskey, gone from him, and the fear had clamped around him and brought him to his feet—not the gaping black fear he’d come in with, but a honed fear, particular, focused on one certain man or men, I did not know who, and it was that fear which roused him to a steady appearance. But he was drunk still, don’t mistake it—insane drunk, mad drunk—and the stink was bad in the barn.

  “You better watch sneaking up on a fellow like that,” he said. He swayed a little, standing in one place, the top of his body dipping a half circle.

  “Jessie sent me,” I said. It was all I could think of. “She wants you to come down to the store.”

  “What for?” His eyes showed blue and red even in the barn darkness, eyeballs soaked red and the blue parts dull within the red swimming. His nose was swelled to a ruddy blob between his cheeks. “Wha’s she want?”

  “I don’t know. She just said for me to come tell you.”

  He squinted, lifted the hand with Papa’s gun in it, and pressed the heel of it against his forehead, the four heavy barrels aiming skyward. I could see them wavering. He lowered his hand, coughed once, and cleared the phlegm from his throat. “Tell ’er—” Smacking his cracked lips. Trying to act normal, trying to say it normal, when his mouth was warped with slurs and sickness. “Tell her I’ll be down directly.” And of course he was lying, because he had no intention of going down there, because his store and wife and business were beyond him, even whiskey making was beyond him, even selling his guns, because my uncle was half the time too drunk to work.

  “All right,” I said, nodding, beginning to back toward the front of the barn, thinking, I’ll get my rifle and wait for him. Thinking, He’ll wander out in a little bit to hunt a bottle, I’ll wait for him out there. I turned to walk out in the daylight, and it was then, in the turning, that I saw the union of barrels rising.

  “Wait—” he said.

  My blood dropped. The dark barn went darker. Every thread of blood in my body sank to my feet, so that it felt my insides would fall through the barn floor. A sound hummed in my ears, a high skirring like gourd shells shaking, unceasing. I stood very, very still, my back half to him. I couldn’t turn, and yet I saw the angled black shape outlined in the barn darkness, lifted toward me. From the side of my mind I saw it, not with my eyes. I didn’t breathe, though even with my nostrils stayed and my chest unmoving, the rank smell seeped in me, bringing in me barnscent, horse lather, the odor of old haydust and manure; bringing in me, so I could not hold my breath against it, the sour taint of his smell. Slow, and slow, I turned my face to look at him, easing my eyes around. He blinked at me, the gun Papa made steady now, not trembling, drawed down on me. He was maybe fifteen feet away.

  “What’re you doing with them belts?” he said.

  It was only then I realized I still wore them, the empty holsters stiff against my ribs, because the hollowness had come on me unbidden so that I didn’t finish my work. I cursed myself—even in that moment, yes; even with the blood draining and the sound buzzing and the fire twisting in my chest—for being so stupid as to walk into the barn darkness unprotected. To stand now, unarmed and dumb, outlined against the bright day in the doorway with the cartridge belts and empty holsters draped around my neck. I had nothing to answer.

  “You been scheming on this for years. Ain’t you?” His blue eyes narrowed in the poor light. “Answer me!”

  “Found them,” I said.

  “You been planning it.”

  The muzzles were not quite leveled at me but aimed just a fraction above my head. I gazed at the four barrels as my uncle lowered his hand and lined them up with the place where the fire was burning in the center of my chest.

  “Where is he?” Fayette said.

  “Who?” My voice came from a great distance.

  “Your pardner,” he said, slurring the word out a little.

  “Partner?”

  I thought for an instant he meant Papa, or Jim Dee maybe, though Jim Dee had been gone for two years. But his eyes squinted down tighter. “Where’s Tanner?” he said.

  That, too, came from a great distance. “Tanner?” I felt like my brother Thomas, to echo his words so, but I couldn’t find any core within myself to think. It had been years since I’d heard the word Tanner. I saw the outline of the skink stranger on the porch in the blue moonlight, but the memory was from so long ago, floating.

  “Y’all been hatching this up a long time, ain’cha?”

  I was silent, staring. The memory was flickering in me, but I couldn’t grasp it.

  “Ain’cha!”

  I shook my head.

  “Y’all think you can catch this old boy napping”—and now his torso swayed a little, but the gun did not waver—“you got another think coming. Blow your damn head off.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed again, filmed over, shining. He wagged his head and the gun side to side, shook his head and the four barrels in unison. His voice was slurred and gleeful when he said, “Tell you what. Blow your head off with your own damn gun. How you like that?”

  My voice was stopped. I couldn’t answer him. I was looking at the red webs of veins across his cheeks, at his eyes filmed like uncooked eggs. I was looking at the way the yellow scarfskin drawn across his bones quivered, how his pores leaked sweat and whiskey. We were caught in a tunnel, which was the dark length of barn open at both ends, dotted here and th
ere with those still, white spots of daylight. I could see even in that darkness. And yet the fear never left me. It is hard to explain, because I saw all this, and felt it, and I could feel the smooth handle of the gun in his hand, sleek, balanced, I could feel the power in that hand. At the same time I understood for the first time what it was that made him crave guns with many barrels—and it was because of what I felt not in him but inside myself, because the death in the four barrels was plainly visible in the four muzzles yawning black and plumbless toward me, perfect circles for killing, made powerful, made perfect and complete, by the hand of my father.

  “Kill you with your own damn gun,” he said. “Call it suicide.” He laughed once, a terrible sound, and then he threw back his head, stretched his neck, gobbled deep and wet in his throat.

  Still I didn’t understand that in his twisted, besotted brain he thought I was Papa. There were other things I didn’t understand because I could not think, because just then, standing with my uncle facing me in the shabby shed barn, mad-dog drunk and drawed down on me, I felt and knew only one thing: that he would kill me. If you have stood unarmed with the open muzzle of a gun aimed hard on you, then you know what it is, and if you have not, no amount of telling is going to proclaim it, but I will say it anyway, tell you how black terror swells on you beyond the blood drop of the first moment because you comprehend helplessness, because you know in the fullness of yourself the truth of your complete and abject powerlessness, which if you had a gun you could at least be calculating to shoot first, you could just shoot. You could shoot. So it is powerlessness swelling on you, and terror, and disbelief, because you cannot fathom you are going to die, and yet it is complete belief that you will die, in the next second, in the next instantaneous union with all men who have died thus, all men and women who have died thus, in terror, disbelieving, believing, facing the mouth of a gun. I did not think about God. I didn’t think about Mama, Thomas, my sister, anything of my life, but only the dead mule—not Delia, the other one—because I saw my father turning in washed amber air, the gun lifted, the flat side of it strange because it was like the flat tang of a Winchester because there was no cylinder to bulge out, the four barrels welded as one when Papa raised them, turning them in the sunset air, and the big mule’s forehead exploding red.

  I waited, my body numb, and when the gun fired I waited still, to learn where he had shot me, because I could feel nothing. I waited to feel the warmth of blood oozing, so that I might know where the wound was. I waited to fall down. The gun fired again, the sound thundering, and the shriek of wood splintering, exploding behind me and a little above my head, coming more sudden than the thunder ceased. I could smell the salt smell of gunpowder so I knew I wasn’t dreaming, but I was not joined with my body then but floating a little above it, and so I thought I might be dead. Still, my body remained upright, and the gun fired again, and the loamy barn floor exploded to the side of where Jim Dee’s boots stood.

  “You goin’ to show me just right precisely where you put ’em.” His tongue was thick, but the words came clear enough. “You goin’ to walk out in front of me, in case your pardner gets any fancy ideas, and we’ll just go fetch my own legal property before you make me go ahead and shoot you. I didn’t mean for it to have to happen but you been at it for years and years. I told Daddy I might have to kill you. I told him ever since you started setting yourself up so high and mighty, but you and him won’t neither one listen.” His eyes narrowed. “Y’all think you can rob me blind, you think I’m too dumb to see it. Been robbing me for years, haven’t you? Taking what’s rightful mine. Make a jackass outa me right out in the damn street. Hush! Hush now. It’s a damn rat snake, that’s all, shut up. Quit your sniveling before I whup you. Shut up now, Daddy’ll hear. You want me to lick you?” And then he stopped abruptly, blinking slowly in the barn darkness. His tongue snaked, liver-colored, out between his cracked lips, from beneath the coarse hairs curling, swiped sideways across the lips’ creviced surface, and he narrowed his eyes. “Stand right where you are.” He was quiet a moment. “Th’ow me that belt.” He waved the gun at the cartridge belts around my neck.

  Still I didn’t understand what was in him. I was stupid with fear—and yet fear is better than emptiness. I tell you it is. I knew only that he was crazy drunk and I wasn’t dead, and if I was not dead yet, maybe I would not have to be. I was at once rejoined with my body, and when my uncle motioned again, said, “Th’ow it here!” I lifted the top cartridge belt over my head and tossed it toward him. It thunked on the soft barn floor.

  “Not that one!” He waved the gun again.

  I lifted the next belt, and the fat cartridges lined up in their strip pouches of leather clinked a little metallically when they hit the belt on the floor.

  “All right now, turn around,” he said.

  There was something worse about the gun in his drunken hand trained on my back instead of my belly, and I began scheming again, trying to think. I said, looking straight at him, “They’re just right out yonder,” and I nodded my head, easy, toward the daylight behind me, thinking now that it could be in my power again, the power of my mind and my words, that I could bend him to my will if only I was smart enough, quick enough, because it was my pride again coming on me, and my contempt. And then for some reason I turned my head to look out the door. My sister, barefoot on the cold stubble of grass, was climbing the path toward the barn. Before I knew I would do it or had done it, I shouted, “Jonaphrene! Get back to the house!”

  She looked up at me, her eyes that slow slate gaze, stubborn, and yet uncomprehending.

  I screamed, “Right now! I’ll be there in a minute!”

  My sister paused for just an instant, hardly even perceptible, and then she came on, picking her way barefoot up the rise along the path. In the relentlessness of that gesture I saw the whole of our lives, the threads pulling as they had been pulling from far back, as long as I could remember, and even before, back through my mother’s and father’s memory, and their mothers’ and fathers’ before them, infinitesimal threads raveling, drawing together, relentless as my sister picking her way up the path. I saw cedar trees bleeding their smoked seed into the cold dawn air as the blond specter coughed, bending over, holding a pencil in unfleshed fingers, and my cousin Fowler’s eyes slitted deep in envy, deeper, disappearing, and then I saw the black woman’s pink bitten flesh, which I had caused, the triangular wedge gouged from her flesh by the force of my own driven will, and behind me my uncle reeling into the abyss.

  “Jonaphrene!” I screamed, helpless. “Get back to the house!”

  “What—?” Fayette said.

  I turned to see him, and knew that he’d been whipped suddenly to the log barn, jerked back from black time and distance by my voice or Jonaphrene’s name or the cunning tricks of the whiskey, I don’t know. He held the gun Papa made loose and reckless in his hand, no more controlled by him than the cold eye of the sun outside crossing heaven.

  “What—” he said again.

  Blinking, and the word not even a question really, not to ask anything of reason in the still, rank air of the barn, but an empty echoing word of void and despair. The word came again—“What?”—and its echo, rasped away, dying as the last voice of locust dies in the distance, fading, thinning, to become air and silence, and I wanted to move, turn and run to my sister or walk backwards away from him out of the barn, but I did not and could not move backwards, because I reeled forward, dark, into darkness, swept in. I was sick, roiling, trembling, in my soul and my body, the taste in my mouth foul, reeking poison from my tongue inside my mouth, the backs of my nostrils, my rotted teeth and belly, blinded, my head split across the front like an axe in it, and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to lie down but I could not because of the terror because something would happen in the next breath, the next instant, irrevocable and hellish, the end of the earth forever because the gates of hell would groan and the earth beneath the rise on which the barn stood would split open to swallow my hated sel
f in my skin hating my bones reeking with the scent of me wanting to die and not dying but only the earth opening to explode me out of my guts and the sordid sinew of my body into hell when there was only one thing to save me, and it was not God—

  Fayette turned.

  I fell back, stumbling, and he stumbled, but only a little, and then he went carefully, as if he were not sick, as if he were not drunk even, to the side of the blue roan and lifted the leather flap of the saddlebag with the butt of his hand, the gun loose in it pointing wildly sideways and then up toward the shed roof. I turned quickly and went out the open door to stand in the acrid dust of the old barnyard and breathe deeply the still, bright air.