The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  I couldn’t bear to breathe a moment longer the air of her presence. She had witnessed me in the black shade behind the depot, even as she’d seen me in the red darkness, the same: her eyes open, her arms clamped round me the very instant my finger began pressing lightly, squeezing gently, so easy, the smooth plate of the trigger easing back —and then it was her two hands pulling me away from the place of killing, the dirt street of Cedar, where the voice of my uncle’s blood cried out from the ground. Her two hands holding me in the dirt tracks behind the town, her mouth in the other tongue saying, Come go with me. I would not go with her. I would never go with her. I would have to kill her if I did.

  I turned to run. I thought if I could get to the creek bottom on the far side of the fence rails, she couldn’t keep up with me. I knew the creek bottoms of Eye Tee, the tangled depths and mudwater sloughs; I could weave among the grapevines and swamp willows as clean as a river snake. If I could make it to the water, she couldn’t grab me again.

  It was them, whoever they were. In the dirt square Thula held me, her strong hands clasped round me, but I would have broken free. I could have. I would. But the men came, and it was not what they did to me but to her when the one locked his arm on her throat, took her life’s breath and Thula fell back into darkness, so that for a dying instant I fell with her. Unwilling. As I had ever been.

  I stood on the rib of earth in the crimson darkness. There was someone with me, a presence with me, to the left of me, and I did not know what it was. It was not to hurt me or help me, but only to be with me. I faced north and west. Below was the red roiling place, lit crimson with the light of earth and heaven, and the earth was glutted with its live things, its teeming curl and scent, living, blood dark. From a small rounded place there rose up long-legged birds lit red in their own light, shooting toward heaven, streaking as stars streak toward heaven, until I knew they were not birds but spirits flying heavenward without wings as the soul moves in arrow flight, lit red from within in the red darkness, and behind each, others rising, in an endless eternal stream.

  For this there is no translation.

  I fought then, cursing, railing, crying out against it. It was not men I struck against. My uncle’s blood cried out from the ground. I fought the unspeakable mercy.

  Burden Mitchelltree sensed a killing before he’d even ridden close enough to the town to see the crowd. A half mile ahead, at the crossroads, he saw a lone figure dash across the road from the north side to the south side; behind that figure, a few moments later, another one darted. Above the drumming of his horse’s hooves he heard a rising thrum of voices, off to the south a little, out of sight behind the buildings on that side of town. Killing or bank robbery, he thought. Or both. Those were the two events that could put that rise in the air, that particular high-pitched murmur of turmoil and excitement. He pressed his heels tighter against the stallion’s belly, though he was already pushing the sorrel at a steady lope, much harder than he ordinarily would just heading out for Fort Smith. But he’d got a late start—a peculiarly late start to be setting out on that sixty-mile journey—and he meant to stay over at a boardinghouse on the far side of Wister operated by a certain light-skinned, sweet-faced daughter of a Choctaw freedwoman. Already he was going to be hard-pressed to get much past Fanshawe before dark; this little sidetrack would set him back further, and cursing silently, glancing a hundred yards ahead at the blank bank building where no crowd stood about, and so satisfying himself that it was indeed a killing he was looking at, not a bank robbery—which was something at least, he thought—he chucked softly at the sorrel as he dug in his spurless heels.

  Thus it happened that the nearest deputy U.S. marshal, unsent for, galloped into Cedar from the west in a swirl of dun dust within an hour and a half of the Lodi killing. The deputy wheeled his tremendous copper-flanked stallion around the turn by the brick depot, rode into and scattered the clutch of gawkers gathered around the corpse sprawled faceup on the street. Mitchelltree ignored the scowls and glares of resentment from the scattered onlookers as he gazed at the dead man from his great height astride the quivering, sidestepping stallion. He could see that the man had been dead for a while. A blood-soaked handkerchief had been spread over the face, and it was black and fidgety with flies even this early in the year. The pooled blood in the dirt road had already sunk into the dust, jelled mulberry. The handkerchief didn’t cover the ragged neck, flagged with scraps of torn flesh, or conceal the blood-matted brown hair spreading flowerlike from the blasted scalp. Mitchelltree dismounted, handed the reins to a boy standing by the hitching rail, and made his way through the knot of onlookers who had regathered around the dead man as turkey buzzards, scattered but unmolested, will return quickly to the scavenged kill. The deputy’s resonant voice rumbled over the rising buzz from the townsmen.

  “All right, folks, all right. Let’s have a look at him.”

  Bound to be a white man, he thought, although he’d spotted the old Choctaw sheriff in the livery doorway nearly as soon as he’d rounded the corner. He’d love to find out it was an Indian shot by an Indian, so he could nod knowingly at Sheriff Moore, say, Well, if you need anything, and go on about his business. But Mitchelltree knew it had to be a white man. Two reasons, he thought: one, to make good and sure to mess up this little stopover at Miss Marilla’s; two, because the last bill passed by Congress in its ever-loving pursuit of control over the Indian Territory was so all-fired complicated already, demanding Mitchelltree to be in two places at once, plus keep track of which cases still belonged with Parker, which to the new district court at McAlester, that he sincerely needed a clear-cut white-on-white murder in a little white town with no law and no jail that had to be investigated right here late in the afternoon when he had to be in court the next day at Fort Smith to testify in a year-old murder case before Judge Isaac Parker as part of finishing off the loaded dockets under the old federal court’s authority—so just naturally it had to be a white man there dead on the street. Mitchelltree nodded at a bystander, who squatted down and peeled back the congealed kerchief. The deputy took a step forward, bent his knee and knelt beside the corpse. Shotgun blast to the skull. Another to the neck, it appeared like. Dead before he hit the ground. A white man.

  Mitchelltree stood up, brushed his neatly laundered corduroy trousers free of dust, turned and walked toward the livery stable, where he’d seen the old Choctaw sheriff Tecumseh Moore. He hadn’t recognized the man he’d hired on to for a day and a half nine years before, though he’d seen Fayette Lodi more than a dozen times since. That ill-favored trip with the sandstone-filled wagon had been one of his last wage jobs before he’d received his appointment as deputy U.S. marshal under old Jacob Yoes, and Mitchelltree had every reason to remember the man, even if he hadn’t seen him in the years in between. But the top of Fayette’s skull was gone, the brilliant blue eyes were closed—someone had thoughtfully weighted the lids with pennies before the kerchief had been placed—and the former mass of brown curly hair and the rufous beard had grayed considerably since the last time Mitchelltree had seen him, and grayed strangely: not in swatches at the temples or interspersed throughout with wiry strands of white or silver, as a brunette ordinarily grays, but the entire head and beard faded, washed out, the way a redhead grays, as if the pigment had been bled away. Then, too, the face, what was left of it, was nearly covered with blood.

  It was not until he spotted John Lodi inside the stable, sitting on a hay bale with his hands dangling between his knees and a blank, numb expression on his face, that Mitchelltree began to get a glimmer of what had unfolded here. This Lodi he recognized immediately as the man in the slouch hat who had climbed the ridge, shot the big charcoal mule, and handed the four-barreled pistol back to Mitchelltree without a word before he’d gathered the two strange little girls by the shoulders and guided them before himself down the path to the bottom of the ridge. Even before Sheriff Moore and the little hawk-faced livery owner emerged from the dark interior of the stable and came
over to speak to him, Mitchelltree began to perceive in a slow dawning that the dead man on the street was the other Lodi, the one they called Fate—the reckless impatient white man who’d had his barns built before he got his stones hauled, the old bootlegger and horsetrader that Mitchelltree had twice served warrants on for introducing ardent spirits into the Territory. And he knew just as well, in that same slow dawning, that it was the brother inside the barn there who’d killed him, knew it as perfectly as if he’d been told it would happen just this way that evening on the ridge behind Big Waddy nine years before. Immediately the deputy U.S. marshal began to relax, and he sauntered toward the sheriff and the livery owner with a pleasant, casual expression. This wouldn’t take much time, then. You had the dead man and the killer and the weapon, it appeared like, for the sheriff was coming toward him holding an old-fashioned pepperbox pistol, and the only question was self-defense or murder; it was just going to be a matter of having the brother bound over to go before the grand jury at McAlester—yes, this new killing would go to the Central District Court at South McAlester. Just a clean ordinary simple killing.

  Then he saw the two girls and the big hulking blond boy in shabby suspenders and a snap-brimmed dress hat emerge from the shadows within the depths of the stable as the sheriff and the livery owner walked out. The three young people glided in union over to where John Lodi sat with his hands dangling between his knees. At once Mitchelltree knew the two females were the same two rat-headed little girls in gaping gingham dresses who’d stood accusing him in singsong on the ridge that evening, and the absolute strangeness of them then complied with the strangeness of them now as they gathered behind their father, the short one in britches, the other in many-layered petticoats, and the boy hulking between in unraveling suspenders and the new-looking hat as if his body were too big for himself.

  “Had us some little excitement here this evening,” Tecumseh Moore said.

  “That was self-defense, now. I’m a witness,” the liveryman piped in. “You just ast anybody. See if you don’t find out how crazy that Fate’s been acting, he was looking to kill somebody. He was bound to kill somebody before this day was over if somebody didn’t kill him first.” And the livery owner turned to the crowd standing now in front of the dead man so that the body was obscured. “Am I right?” Silence from the onlookers, who’d begun to weary of the livery owner’s self-proclaimed proprietorship over this murder, but the small man waved his arms, thrust his face forward at his neighbors. “Y’all going to back me up on this, or am I going to have to do all the testifying myself ?”

  There was a low rumble from the crowd then that could have been mumbled agreement, could have been grumbling, but Mitchelltree paid it no mind in any case, and he reached for the gun the sheriff held.

  “This it?” he said.

  “Might be,” Moore said.

  Burd Mitchelltree examined the pepperbox. Certainly this contraption could have done that kind of damage at close range, but when he checked the barrels there was something troublesome about it. The pepperbox was an old seven-barrel percussion-cap muzzle loader, and only one barrel had been fired. Inconceivable that the man would have paused to reload the one barrel before he fired a second shot. Yet clearly Fayette Lodi had been killed with two powerful gunshot wounds. An inaudible groan rose from Mitchelltree’s belly as he realized this was not going to be as simple a little killing as he’d thought, and he swerved the sound into the soft tremolo of his bass voice, saying, “Mm-huh. Must be some kind of gun to make two holes like that with one shot, say?”

  “Must be,” Tecumseh Moore said.

  “Well, look here,” the livery owner nearly shouted. “You ain’t seen the other’n, the one Fate pulled. That’ll explain you a thing or two.”

  And he marched on banty legs toward and through the crowd of townspeople, the big Negro deputy marshal and the shorter, broad-backed Choctaw sheriff following until they stood rimming the body again, and the livery owner Dayberry began to shout, “Where’d that gun go? What went with the gun, it was laying right here a little bit ago!” He looked up at Mitchelltree, his bright blue eyes comprehending and furious. “I seen it not ten minutes ago. Laying right here!” and he tapped the rounded toe of his boot up and down in the dust a half-dozen times. “You can’t trust nobody in this town.” His eyes swept the clutch of onlookers. “I tell you what,” he said, addressing the two lawmen but never taking his eyes from the circle of neighbors. “Before all these farmers and squatters come in here, you didn’t hear of such stuff. You didn’t hear of some little weaselly thief going into a dead man’s house while the family was all gone to the funeral and stealing that dead man’s carpentry tools and his prize fiddle like somebody”—his eyes swept the circle again—“somebody done to Jemson Lovett last Wednesday was a week ago, and this whole town knows it.” Then he seemed to catch himself. His face relaxed a little; he tilted his head up, peering through half-closed eyes at the crowd. “Before we had all these white people come traipsing in here,” he said in a low, confidential tone to the sheriff and deputy, as if the crowd around him were not listening; as if he himself were not white as a biscuit, with sparkling blue eyes and sandy hair and a faded dusting of freckles that swore his kin had come from Scotland by way of Ireland not many generations before, “you only had one kind of thievery in this country: plain old out-and-out bank robbery and murder. A man’d shoot you to take your boots off you, but he wouldn’t come sneaking around filching tools off your widow’s front porch like a old weasel while you laid up at the churchhouse, dead in your coffin.” He looked at the crowd again, spoke clearly. “Jem Lovett was my friend, and not a man in this town but knows it. I ever find out who took that toolbox and fiddle, somebody’s going to be mighty sorry.” He narrowed his eyes again, stood with his hands on his hips and his intelligent face thrust forward. “Not to mention I hear tell of who picked up that dadgum gun!” Then he turned, disgusted, looked at the deputy marshal with a shared sense of their lone, mutual integrity, said, “Reckon you’ll have to inquisite ’em yourself, mister. I’m liable to bust somebody’s nut.” And he marched off to stand by himself a short distance from the gathered townsmen, noble, dignified, fed up.

  Mitchelltree looked at the sheriff, who seemed to be studying a cloud formation off in the distance over the back of Bull Mountain. “You know what he’s talking about?”

  The sheriff, never taking his eyes away from the northwestern sky, nodded once. His face, unconcerned beneath the broad brim of his felt hat, told that he was a man in high prime, the eyes bright, the dark complexion entirely unseamed, and yet the thick hair that bushed out from beneath that hat was a fine silvery gray; he could have been anywhere from forty to sixty. He did not volunteer any further information, and Mitchelltree, figuring the old fellow would offer what he cared to when it suited him, gazed around at the circle of onlookers. There were forty or more, men and boys mostly, with a few white women in sunbonnets standing back near the mercantile’s porch ledge. Their eyes did not meet the deputy marshal’s eyes but seemed intent on the dead man or the dirt road or, like the sheriff himself, some peculiar cloud formation overhead.

  “Somebody want to explain to me what gun he’s talking about?” Mitchelltree gazed calmly at the crowd and waited.

  There were a few things he’d learned in his years riding for Parker. One was, no white crowd was going to jump up and join forces with a black marshal unless its interests lay with him successfully executing his duty. It didn’t matter what the law was, what crime had been committed, how many federal warrants signed by Judge Parker he had in his hand; that bunch was going to be cooperative if it was outraged over the crime, and entirely silent if it wasn’t. Another thing, when you asked a question from a bunch of folks gathered together, no matter what kind or race of folks that bunch was made up of, there was such a thing as wait-time that had to follow. Even if somebody was itching to volunteer an answer, you had to wait for him to get up the gumption to do it, had to wait for him t
o make up the words in his own mind, had to let the silence string out long and uncomfortable until that somebody would open his mouth and say something. If you didn’t wait, you were liable to step on what was coming, shut it down before it ever got started. A lot of times they didn’t intend to tell you what you asked, but whichever one finally piped up and said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, mister,” that was the one you cut out from the herd when nobody was looking and headed off by himself so he could tell you what he was secretly busting a gut to tell you.

  So Mitchelltree waited, and the silence lengthened, punctuated by the scolding of a raucous bunch of bluejays off south among the trees along the creekbank. The Choctaw sheriff gazed placidly at heaven, chewing on a pine splinter; the townspeople shuffled their feet, cleared their throats, now and then coughed a little. Mitchelltree held the pepperbox with the bouquet of barrels lying flat against his palm. At last a grizzled, barrel-chested, heavily mustached man in overalls stepped forward.

  “I guess I can answer that if everybody else’s memory’s too poor to remember,” he said. He looked around at his fellows with an expression that was half accusation, half a petition for support. The crowd met this one’s eye, as it hadn’t the deputy’s, though not with the support he seemed to ask for, but rather with a kind of detached curiosity, as if they were mildly interested in what he had to say about this business. Finally a voice called from the back, “Well, go on, Angus. The old lady’s got supper waiting.”

  Angus Alford glared at the voice’s source an instant, then turned to the deputy once more. “There was a pistol here,” he said. “Or I guess you’d call it a pistol, I don’t know. Wasn’t much like any pistol I ever saw. Flat-sided. Four-barrel. Appeared to be a high-caliber type of a thing, but it had a hand grip like a pistol, and I guess it was one Fate brought with him same as he brought that monster there,” and he nodded through the crowd at the weary blue roan still tethered to the hitching post in front of Tatum’s Mercantile. It took an instant for Mitchelltree to comprehend that the horse was Fayette Lodi’s, and then to realize that the monster the man referred to wasn’t the horse but the grotesquely fat volleygun strapped to the worn saddle on the roan’s back.