The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  But the coiled hoop of time is not stopped for the dead or the act of death; it spirals relentlessly forward, and the living, willing or unwilling, must turn, move, perceive, open their mouths or shut them, locked each in the cavern of self, so that John Lodi, unaware of his daughters, walked in the still and gleaming light toward the body, aware only that his brother was dead by his hand; stood over the corpse knowing only that in the rushing eternity in which his brother fired at him, he, John, had gone cold with the familiar black and icy rage that allowed him, or forced him, in the same rushing instant, to pull up and fire the seven-barreled gun at his brother’s forehead. Jonaphrene started forward, stopped abruptly, seeing a young boy dash out of the mercantile and trip over her uncle’s body, seeing in the next instant the store owner come out onto the gallery wiping his hands on his bloody apron, and she whirled in the horror of her self-consciousness to run with the awkward carbine back along the ties to the place where Mewborn’s mare grazed, untethered, nipping the yellow grass in the ditch beside the track.

  The people of Cedar began to pour forth from the square buildings, drawn each to the place where death had been committed, the livery owner J. G. Dayberry in a sharp-faced rush of intent to protect his employee, and the others, in the excitement of news and event and the fading echoes of the sounds of violence, to gawk. Five miles to the north, the boy Thomas stood in the dirt road waving his arms and crying as his cousin Caleb, approaching with his brother Fowler and six of his sisters in the wagon, slowed the highstepping young team, while, two and three-quarters miles farther north along the old Butterfield road, Jessie, inside the store now, suddenly bent double at the waist, her gut stabbed with a searing pain. A mile east of Woolerton, Burden Mitchelltree turned his big stallion’s head onto the Fort Smith road. And on the train platform, a hundred yards from the bleeding shell left by a soul’s departure, two figures, facing each other, skimmed westward joined at the wrists.

  The woman moved smoothly, swiftly backwards along the platform, pulling the girl who was not girl, nor woman, nor any sexed creature but an incarnation of human will in a small, nut-hard body, unfathomably strong. And yet Thula Henry was stronger. The two glided along the platform, joined at stiffened arms’ length as two partners face one another over the momentarily stilled handle of a switchman’s cart while it glides along the rails. The gun was between them, still clutched in Matt’s hand, the muzzle pointing to the side wildly, and Thula’s hands were clamped around the girl’s wrists, snapped tight. When they reached the end of the platform, Thula rushed forward and grabbed the girl around the waist before she had the chance or perception to resist, and immediately half dragged, half carried her off the platform and around the side of the depot to the dirt track of alley that ran behind the buildings on the west side of the street. She didn’t hesitate before the gun, or fear it, or care about it, because she was compelled to drag Matt away from the town and the intrusion of white eyes by the same force that had made her drop her bundle and clamp her arms around the girl’s chest in the instant she’d known the girl would fire the gun: upon the crouched, thin figure in front of her Thula had seen a vision, an overlay of strange bone and flesh, and she had thrust forward in the very instant of expulsion of sound from the pistol, followed immediately by explosions from three directions, and Thula had found herself moving backwards along the platform without thought of what she was doing or would do, knowing nothing except to whisk the girl away from white eyes. Her fear was entirely broken, discarded, not dark and swelling but cut from her by the rush of blood and breath needed to move the girl. Awkwardly, bearlike, she trundled her as far as the back of Tatum’s Mercantile along the two pale tracks of alleyway behind the store, and there the girl suddenly twisted around, jerking out of her grasp.

  The two stood in the dirt alley, breathing hard, looking at each another. Muted sounds came from the other side of the building behind which the two stood: men’s voices, someone shouting, footfalls thudding in the dirt street on the front side of the store. The girl and the woman panted, their chests rising and falling in union. Thula said, “You come go with me.” There was a minute’s silence, or silence between the two of them, for the sounds on the street were swelling, rising in staccato excitement. But the girl answered Thula nothing.

  “We not finish,” the woman said.

  Slowly their breaths calmed, slackened, their pounding hearts each began to settle. The girl’s eyes were not hollow now but alert, alive, glowing in their strange yellowbrown color of earth. Slowly she returned the twenty-two to its casing in the leather holster. Still she did not answer.

  “He aims us to do it,” Thula said.

  The girl’s narrowed gaze began to dart then, to the left, where there was an old corral behind the stable, to the right, in the direction she and the woman had just come, over Thula’s shoulder, where there were several frame houses set flat to the earth and wide apart, and beyond that the open sweep of the little prairie where the town stood.

  “The Lord knows,” Thula said. “It’s only the Lord knows what it is we didn’t get finish. We got to depend upon the Lord,” and she went on talking, nearly chanting, a mixture of English and native tongue. “He set it out for us to do it. You can’t mess with that, same as you can’t mess with medicine. You can’t mess with holy, holitopashke, it’s going to do you real bad.” Her voice was low, almost monotonous, but there was urgency in it, until she ceased all at once, staring hard at the girl’s face. A mask of bones lay across Matt’s features, and then, as Thula watched, the bone mask was supplanted with the softened flesh of a human infant. This was the same image she’d seen on the girl’s face in the instant before the gunfire, and it was her own vision, Thula understood that, given her by Shilombish Holitopa, the Holy Spirit. But she did not know what it meant. As quickly as it had appeared, the vision fled.

  For a time there was the ringing voice of silence, a bell of silence descended around the two figures, the Choctaw woman and the white girl in a dirt alley back of the mercantile in the new town arisen for its little time between blue humps of mountains on the face of the ancient and spirit-filled prairie. In the silence Thula Henry’s ear pulsed with her blood beating. She stood on the earthen track, listening, breathing.

  From a great, undeterminable distance, she heard a sound: tock-tock tock-tock tock-tock tock-tock, the clocking sound of striking-sticks, in rhythm, in rhythm, the old beat of blood. The sound changed then, and deepened. Thula heard a lone voice calling, the sound answered, repeated by many voices, and the rhythm and the song were the sound of her own blood. This was not a song of her father’s people, not a song from the Green Corn ceremony carried on, undiminished, at Nuyaka and Okfuskee, renewed in the saka-saka of the shell shakers, the singing and drums; but a sound more distant, beyond her own memory, to the remembering of her mother’s people, the Chahta people—to the sacred ceremony in the old homeland in the place the whites called Mississippi, the homeland Thula Henry had never seen.

  Slowly, Thula’s mind filled with a new vision, an ancient vision: an image of fire, and then daylight, and the people dancing. She heard the call of the singer’s voice rising in a song already forgotten, being forgotten, because the preachers said the people must—not the white preachers only, but Choctaw preachers, speaking in native tongue the Holy Word of the Lord, saying, We got to purge out the old leaven, that we could be a new lump. Saying, This cup is the new testament in Chisvs’ blood. Saying, We got one ceremony here now, Chisvs give us this ritual, it’s Chisvs’ blood, Chisvs’ body, His blood been shed for us, His blood been spilled on the mercy seat, that’s the Blood sacrifice from here on out, that’s all we got to know. Saying, If it had to be white people coming to take everything to bring us the Word of the Lord, so it is. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Saying, We got to forget all that old stuff, just not think about it, we got to depend upon the Lord.

  But within Thula’s bloodmemory the vision rolled forward.

  Though she stood in the co
ld bright sunlight, her sight closed down in darkness, a flickering darkness, and she saw men and women stepping, turning in the great hoop of the circle; she heard the striking-sticks, the gourd rattles, and the voice of the singer calling, the men’s voices answering, and the women’s voices, while the people went on stepping, stepping in the unending circle as if they would go on forever, as if the singer must sing forever this song of purification, of acknowledgment and honor and worship, singing in the voice of the people, the song given to the people, the dance shaped by the hand of the Creator to honor all that has gone before and will come after, as the Chahta people had done from the beginning—

  Abruptly the song stopped. The dance stopped. In the same manner that the mask on the girl’s face had fled, so disappeared the dancers: snuffed as a lantern wick clamped off by damp fingers.

  A welling of grief came on Thula Henry, unfathomable, a stuffed and swollen sense of loss beyond sorrow at the soul’s edge of remembrance, and she didn’t know what it was. She stood a moment blinking, longing, praying for return, and she didn’t know what it was she would return to or have returned to her, but only felt it: the gaping, expectant sense in her of something gone. When Thula looked, there was only the girl standing before her. Just the thin, strange-eyed white girl standing barefoot with her back against the wooden building in her britches and man’s hat, the gunbelt dragging down on the narrow hips, the hard, flat chest rising and falling. Within Thula the dread began to rise again, dark and fingering, licking, even as the old unwilling sense of responsibility returned to her, called forth by the rumblings of men’s voices rising louder from the street. Without a word she reached a hand toward the girl.

  Matt stared at her, expressionless, her eyes not empty as before but with the meaning in them unrevealed, and Thula, helpless and urgent, aware then of a gray-mustached white man in overalls standing in the crevice between the mercantile and stable, where excited voices filtered from the street, knew nothing but to say the words again.

  “You come go with me.”

  The girl was silent.

  “It’s not too late,” Thula said. “We go up yonder to Yonubby, you come stay with me.”

  “No,” the answer came finally.

  “We ain’t done it!” Thula said. “We not fully understand. Chihowa not give us that understanding!” She could not say these things in the backwards language of English, the paltry language of English that did not have the meaning in any of its tongued and spitting words. “We are not finish!” she tried to tell the girl. “You going to die from it. Me too maybe. Or something worse.”

  The girl, staring at her as if she did not see her, as if she looked through the woman’s solid cotton-clad body to the sleeping weeds in the valley behind her, said, “You seen me.” The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper, again the hoarse sound of whisper, saying, “You seen me in the red darkness.” The focus of her gaze changed, though the ocher eyes never moved direction, but seemed only to pull back, to retreat behind themselves.

  Thula watched the girl in silence, in the slow opening of recognition, but what she saw was not revealed in the face of the yellow-eyed girl, not revealed in vision or memory but only in the glimmering of a soul’s reckoning, to be received for an instant and later forgotten in the word-mind but remembered in the soul’s hope. Thula understood in that glimmer the meaning of the bone mask and its afterpart; she remembered what her people had known from the early time: how the Creator had bid them honor the bones of the dead in the sacred baskets, had bid the people paint their living faces in honor of rising up from the dust for a little time—not separate from the bones of the ancestors or the unborn soft and new in their flesh to come, but the manifest union between each, in their unbroken place on the unbroken hoop in the eternal unfolding. For an instant her soul understood what the people, without their songs, were in danger of forgetting, and then the recognition was ripped from her as the girl suddenly turned and began to walk away.

  Matt moved quickly toward the crevice between the stable and the mercantile, and then as abruptly changed course, turned on her bare heel and headed toward the corral fence at the end of the wagon tracks. She shinnied over the top rail and jumped to the trampled dirt, headed across the open space toward the other side, and Thula, compelled by the force she could not comprehend, followed after. When she reached the corral fence she did not climb over but crawled painfully between the bottom and mid rail, hurried on, skimming swiftly through the skein of powdered dust after the girl walking away from her across the empty open square. Acting, not thinking, not understanding, Thula rushed forward and caught the girl by the arm and swung her around. She clamped on, snapped tight at the wrists once again, and Matt fought her, hard, pulling back with all the wizened strength in her calf muscles, her knotted forearms, but Thula Henry would not be shaken loose. The two jerked and swirled and turned about the dirt track, Matt Lodi twisting and whirling, and Thula Henry, unshakable, hanging on.

  Thula did not know when the two white men first appeared, was unaware of them entirely until her throat was locked fiercely from behind by a flannel-covered arm, choking her wind off, so that the white man accomplished what even the ferocious whirling and jerking of the girl’s strength could not do. Thula let go. There was no more than a heartbeat when she saw the bald short man bleating, as he circled the girl with a blood-spattered apron held up in front of him, “Behave now! Behave yourself, here!” and then Thula’s breath was gone completely, the world darkening, and she went down.

  When the light came again, she was lying on the feedlot floor. She was aware, as through a fog, a clouded mist, of the two white men. One of them—the mustached one in overalls she’d seen in the little alley—was holding the girl by the back of her trousers; the other still circled the girl helplessly, ineffectually, with his hands in the air. Coughing, gasping, the choking not from her lungs but from her throat where the man’s elbow had pressed tight, Thula pulled herself up to sit in the trampled dust a few feet from the strange, excited circling of the two men around the girl who was like a she-fox caught live in the teeth of an iron trap, leaping and snapping in pain and terror and fury. Thula knew that these white men did not see her. Her presence was nonmaterial to them, dismissed, a disappearance. For a moment she felt the old welling of rage at the men’s ignorance, at their mindless ruthlessness to nearly choke the life out of her and then dismiss her from their sight as if she were a whipped dog panting in the feedlot dust.

  But in the next instant, watching the girl snarl and spit and spin in her pitiful shrunken fury, Thula Henry was washed entirely of her hatred. She felt it ebb from her as cleanly as a lanced wound. What it was, she did not understand in that moment; she was aware only of a terrible sorrow for the thin form whirling about and cursing and lashing. From that sorrow, deep within her, emanated a kind of letting-go, a forgiveness, kashofi, so that Thula could not hold in herself the bruise of hatred. The washing away came not from inside her but through her, as the working of medicine came through her, and she understood her part had not been for the sake of the white girl only, but that she, Thula Henry, might remember in the fullness of knowledge what had long been given to the people—not separate from the Fourth Part, not in fear as the fear had been taught her—but in union, in oneness, as it had been given from the beginning of the world. In that moment, the woman’s peace was restored. Thula’s mind did not comprehend it, her tongue did not know how to tell it, yet her shilup, her immortal spirit, was one with it, so that she knew that whatever the joining-together had been, it was finished now.

  From a great, peaceful distance she watched them, heard the men’s curses rise above the girl’s curses from the little whirlwind of dust stirred by their turning feet. While the white men rattled their awkward tooth-filled tongue in loud voices and danced fearfully around the girl, trying to hold on to her without coming inside the range of her flailing arms, Thula Henry drew her weary legs beneath her. She lifted her sore and weighted body from the dust and li
mped slowly to the corral gate left standing open. She walked out of the feedlot, across the faint dun-colored wagon tracks behind the town buildings. The profane voices faded behind her as she started out north and west across the prairie to begin the long walk home.

  She’d seen me in the red darkness, her brown face coming down, She’d seen me in the red darkness, her brown face coming down, round and flat, soft as doeskin, while I lay fevered on the hard pallet. She witnessed me, saw me pray one into death, one into life. She knew it was Mama’s baby suckled by a black woman I turned back. To keep Thomas. It was only to keep Thomas, my brother, whom I loved. I have tried to say it, tried to make justice of it, but God turned back the bitter joke on me, made him an idiot, to stay a knee-baby forever, and not that only, not only that. Because I was charged with the gifts of the spirit, and it was not in the manner of the tongues of men and of angels nor the gift of prophecy, but to enter the soul of another, for the sake of union. For the sake of mercy. And I turned my face away. I chose first my family, and then my own will. And so it was stripped from me, scooped out of my soul when I shook my fist at heaven the dawn the cedars bled. Given against my will, taken from me against my will, returned to me in the barn darkness with my uncle, and you have seen what I did with it. Even as Thula had seen.