The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The town grew silent, listening: no longer did it murmur its soft chorus of gossip and judgment. Particulate selves melded into the whole, as individuals may lose self in a gathering of souls come together to commit violence, or to worship. The town of Cedar was joined to bear witness to that which no individual could have preserved: the whole forged as one to give testament to what none outside the closed shell of the family, facing itself within that gathered circle, understood.

  In the purpling twilight, in the center of the circle, the woman looked at the brother who had killed his brother, and beyond him to the three offspring who stood linked together behind him, blood of his blood; blood of her husband’s blood, and her children’s. She held herself in that calm stillness as if this were no more than she expected, accepted; as if she’d known her whole life that each breath and heartbeat within the cage of her chest would lead to this moment, no more escapable than the truth that one day those very breaths and heartbeats would quit. The distant argument of jays on the creekbank was silenced by dusk’s coming; the nightbirds had not yet begun to call. In the quiet of the town’s watching, Jessie stood, her face shadowed by the navy bonnet so that only those nearest and in front of her saw the change coming. As those few watched, the calm stillness began to depart from her, and what settled over her expression was even then beyond the unified mind of the town to comprehend. Never did she take her eyes from the children, and now Jonaphrene’s fidgety gaze held steady, looking back at her, as Matt looked at her, and the boy Thomas, watching her, and yet the woman knew they did not perceive what she remembered, unwilling, in that moment: that she had wordlessly, four hours earlier, handed the carbine rifle to her niece, knowing, even then, what would come next.

  Slowly, John Lodi raised his head. His eyes—the shape and cast of his eldest daughter’s, the ungraspable color of the younger’s, and none like, none like the guiltless pallor of his son’s—met the woman’s. They stood a long time, forever, eternity; stood no longer than the pulse of one heartbeat, one breath, recognizing each other: each knowing the other and the whole, all that had happened, not in the details of bullets and barrels and who had fired in the moment of killing, but that truth beyond particulars as it was made manifest in themselves and their children: that law which says we shall tear down in the same portion with which we forge and hone and make; and the second law, its equal: the old baffling determinant whose truth is that we have been given power to destroy life yet not to create it—but only to act as the vessel for it, a little while, sometimes. Jessie’s eyes went to the children again. They stood tightly bound, the strange boy on one side, the awkwardly beautiful younger girl on the other, her lips silent now, subsumed to the will of her sister, and in the middle, her thin arms tight around each of them, the eldest: small, wizened, unmercifully strong—and yet her eyes as empty as they’d been when she lay curled, hollow, on the pallet years before. As she looked at the children, and remembered, Jessie’s chapped knuckles began to whiten against the clasped pocketbook.

  In the street, as the town watched, the woman began to tremble, her slatted bones heaving beneath the shirtwaist as if she could not get her breath—in wrath, the town thought; in an outraged paroxysm of grief. Only Otis Skeen, whose gift and curse had been compassion, saw, in the trembling slope of the woman’s shoulders, in the knotted bones beneath the gray cotton on her back, that it was not rage, not personal loss or sorrow that made her tremble so, but a terrible, hopeless grief at humankind’s ruthless paltriness on this earth—and her part in it. Her terrible part in it. Jessie turned away from the children and began to walk toward her husband’s body. With each step she seemed to sink lower, as if she were melting, as if the thin legs beneath the gray skirt were dissolving into the earth. Within four steps she was on her knees; with the next gesture of propelling herself forward, she sprawled flat on the ground, the shiny patent-leather purse caught beneath the white apron as her arms stretched, her hands opened, closed again, clutching her husband’s legs.

  “Ma!” Caleb leapt from the wagon, covered the distance in a few bootclops to bend over his mother, saying, “Ma! Mama! Ma!” And he put his arms across his mother’s arms, his hands on her hands, his head lifted, saying, “Ma! Ma! Ma!” like a distressed crow cawing, and after a breath, “Mama!” and then, again, “Ma! Ma!”

  The town, its eyes on the prone woman and son sprawled over the body, was silent a moment longer—only a moment, but long enough for Burden Mitchelltree, seeing the man’s shoulders heaving, to hear the working out of the sound. It came hard and deep at first, from a place unused, frozen inside him, barking into the air in short hard chops, as of an axe breaking ice. John Lodi was not bound, and yet he stood with his hands clasped at the wrists, his feet together, as though both were shackled. The great shoulders heaved with each chopping sound. And then the barks began to run together, rose from the frozen chest and spilled from the throat in harsh, dry shudders, the sobs of a drunkard on his knees in the garden, but still John Lodi stood upright in the street, hands and feet together, as if he were powerless to move. The blond boy began to sob. Beside his sisters, joined without expression in the violet dusk, in his new felt hat and ragged suspenders, the boy sobbed in the manner of the father, tearless, shoulders shaking, hands and feet together. The town began to move again, and softly murmur, the circle drawing tighter, while the son Caleb went on cawing in the twilight, “Ma!... Ma!... Ma!... Ma!”

  Coda

  The descent is quick from the bony blue ridges of the Sans Bois to The descent is quick from the bony blue ridges of the Sans Bois to the open prairies in the heart of Oklahoma—quick, and yet gentle, for the Sans Bois are the most northern of the great Ouachita Mountains, and they long earthward toward the sweep of plains from which they arose. A rider on horseback can travel north from the hidden caves and rock ledges of the Sans Bois, winding down in a slow, sloping decline, and within no more than a few hours find the surrounding land gently rolling, the horizon arcing away above a sea of goldentop grasses. It is hardly thirty miles from the deep mysteries of the Fourche Maline creek bottoms to the broad, meandering sand banks of the Canadian River crawling west to east across the prairie, where lone sandstone bluffs rise above the grasses and the few trees are of the short, clawed variety: blackjack and shinnery; where the ocher earth begins to darken, taking on the rusty hues that will deepen to blood red farther north and west along the ruddy waters of the Cimarron and the Deep Fork.

  Here, to this prairie landscape, the remains of John Lodi’s family came and settled in late summer, 1896, taking up residence in a Creek freedman’s abandoned cabin a half mile north of the salmon-and-buff-colored sands of the Canadian. They never returned to the log house at Big Waddy Crossing, for there was nothing to retrieve there. Together they traveled in a buckboard borrowed from J. G. Dayberry, directly from the hearing at the Central District Court at South McAlester to the town of Eufaula in Creek Nation, where John Lodi entered first the feed supply and then the local livery stable to purchase with his last earned dollars a used turning plow and a mule.

  The court had ruled, based on the findings of the grand jury, which had been lullingly swayed by the testimony of Deputy U.S. Marshal Burden Mitchelltree, that the killing of Lafayette Lodi in the town of Cedar, I.T., in early March of that same year, had been a case of justifiable homicide. According to the deputy’s interpretation of the evidence, the deceased had been in the process of reaching toward his saddle for a tremendous twelve-barrel volleygun he had strapped there, for the clear purpose of murdering the defendant, and although in the court’s opinion there was an unsatisfactory amount of contradictory testimony, and though there was a great deal of suspicious whispering in the crowded gallery and a strange resistance on the part of the widow to testify against her brother-in-law, nevertheless the jury found that there was insufficient evidence to hang the man, and the court, unwillingly, ruled the killing self-defense. The accused himself never took the stand.

  John Lodi, in fact, t
ook no part in the proceedings whatsoever, but sat with his hands folded on the polished oak table before him, silent, throughout the hearing, and when it was finished, he gave no indication of gladness or relief. He merely stood, looked to his eldest daughter, seated with her siblings on the hardback bench in the front row, and walked out of the hearing room with his offspring trailing an odd, formal tail behind. They climbed at once into the waiting buckboard without a nod, without so much as a satisfying glance at the little ragtag crowd of citizens who had traveled by wagon and horseback fifty or sixty miles from the communities of Cedar and Big Waddy Crossing to attend and bear witness to the end of the story. The Lodis left the mountains, disappeared from the lives of those communities—but never from their minds or memory—and traveled to the prairie country east of Eufaula, where the earth speaks with different voices, planted themselves in a cabin near the Canadian’s changing sands.

  John Lodi turned his skilled hands to the tasks of farming, and the loamy soil in the bottomlands of the Canadian River were rich for that purpose, but whatever wisdom or grace had once been in the tough palms and blunt fingers, those gifts had entirely disappeared now, and the plow would not plow straight, the chopping axe glanced off the gnarled jackoak, and the ears of corn, when the hands reached to pluck them, shriveled brown-kerneled and hard within the green shucks. Whatever task the man turned his hands to, fruitlessness spilled from it, and yet he did not quit. All human will had departed from him with the flight of his brother’s soul from the broken body in the street at Cedar, and yet John Lodi had no power but to keep on in the motions of living until his own soul should do as the will had already done. It took seven years. The body is an incorrigible creature, driven to survive, sometimes, even in the loss of all hope.

  As for the girl who had never become woman, his daughter, Matt Lodi, she survived, as the father survived, and her will and power increased in direct proportion to the loss of his own. She carried the other two with her, fed them on corn pone and goat’s milk, directed their every breath. As the man shrank, growing smaller and older—incredibly frail and aged for his forty-odd years—even so, the daughter grew stronger, though no less wizened, but with a gristly, gnawed strength that allowed her to gather the others to herself and make them survive. It took so little to save them: shelter in the shape of a former slave’s cabin, two porched rooms with a dogtrot between; chopped wood for warmth in winter; wild turkey, quail, and rabbit, and the fruits of the earth for their bellies, preserved for the length of the short winters from her memory of her mother’s ways of canning and drying. The boy Thomas grew taller, put on weight, until he grew past his father’s former size and began to soften to a shapeless bulk. Jonaphrene, too, began to soften, though not in the doughy manner of her brother, but with the rounding of the angular adolescent limbs into the softer forms of womanhood.

  The hair rope hoop coiled, and coiled again, the seasons spiraling into years, into the unfolding of a new century, and little changed. Their lives were only lives now, hardly lived. In some way, for each of them, everything had ended on the dirt streets of Cedar. As John Lodi’s gifts had disappeared from his able hands, so had Matt’s gifts departed; no longer did she search in the darkened spaces behind her eyes but kept every particle of her being focused in the arid, sun-spun world, to the gathering of food, the filling of bellies, the making of crude wooden furniture: to the keeping of her family together in a hard-gritted penance, as if once, long ago, she had made a grievous mistake.

  Twice a year she hitched the plow mule to a neighbor’s borrowed wagon and drove the seventeen miles to Eufaula to trade for supplies. There were few goods that the family needed which could not be taken from the earth, but for those items—plow points, kerosene, turpentine, coffee—Matt grew a small patch of cotton; she carried two bales to the gin in autumn, saved back two bales to buy supplies in the spring. After the first season, Matt traveled alone to Eufaula, or accompanied only by her father, for she had seen how the bustling streets worked on her sister, how Jonaphrene would be stirred by the sight of white women in plumed hats and fine dresses, by the many rich odors, the sounds of jangling harnesses and the rumbling of the board sidewalks beneath the boots of men in broad-brimmed hats. Remembering the lost Jim Dee, Matt forbade her sister to go with them; she made Thomas, too, stay behind. The younger girl protested, but only faintly, and only for a short time. There was only one will in that household, Matt’s will, and it determined all of the comings and goings, the days of planting and harvest and which day should be wash day and which hog-killing or canning, which morning the cotton-filled wagon should set out for Eufaula. This is why there were only the two of them, the father and the daughter, in the borrowed wagon traveling west on the old Briartown road toward Eufaula on the cold spring afternoon in 1902 when someone shot John Lodi in the back.

  I knew the sound first, it could have been the explosion of voice in my own throat, a crack of sound from my own gut. I’d been hearing it a long time. I just didn’t remember what it was until it exploded a little ways back over my shoulder, and Papa fell. I did what you must do when there is gunfire, tumbled backwards and sprawled flat into the bed of the wagon, but not before I saw him. Not before I recognized the source of the sound. He had to be close, only a little ways off the road behind a little clutch of scrub oak. I saw his horse even, a chestnut tied to the clawed branches outlined against the clear sky because the horse was big and the trees small and scrawny, because he had to be close to the road in order to kill him. That was always the condition with the gun Papa made, whose sound I recognized as if it were my own shout, I’d heard it so many times. It did not have distance, did not have accuracy, its perfection was a lie because it was no good in a country of such distance, a lie of perfection, as so much had been a lie—but the sound did not lie, the explosion of powder, or its killing strength when Papa fell.

  I lay flat between the bales of cotton, waiting. I wasn’t afraid. I think I was glad nearly. The mule kept walking, her slow balking pace. I don’t think she was deaf but just stubborn, to not buck and run at that sound. I couldn’t see Papa. I thought maybe he had fallen off, knocked to the earth by the force of the explosion. I lay looking up at the pierced blue sky above me, swaying with the motion of the wagon. Waiting. I thought he would come on and kill me. I heard the metal jangle, the horse snort once as he mounted, and I thought, It will be finished now. Papa’s old muzzle loader was still beside the spring seat, loaded, yes, but I knew there was not time to reach it. I wouldn’t try. The mark was on us, each Lodi, unto the last one, and I was in no way surprised. I was only surprised when I heard the chestnut’s muted hooves against the road dust, loping away from the wagon toward the east. The sound faded to a soft drumming and then disappeared altogether. Still I didn’t sit up. I didn’t reach for the reins to stop the mule walking. I lay between the bales, looking at the sky arcing above me. I’d seen his face, for that one turning instant. Bearded. He had grown fleshy, as Fayette had done in his last years, the son’s face transformed in seven years into a mirror image of the father’s, even to the eyes, which I did not remember Fowler’s eyes blue like Fayette’s eyes, but they were, there on the road to Eufaula where he stood with his hand stretched out before him, the four-barreled gun dark in the cold sunlight, his eyes as light and clear as the plains sky.

  No one tells the story.

  The daughter drove home with her father’s body resting beside the bales of unginned cotton in the bed of the wagon, throughout the cold day and on into the evening. The sun sank winter-red and purple behind her, behind the bare reaching fingers of blackjacks low on the horizon, but Matt did not see it as she drove east, back over the wagonroad to the two-room cabin near the sandbed river, where her brother and sister waited. It was cold dark when she and her father arrived there. No official was notified, no death certificate issued. John Lodi’s death was never listed as a murder in the annals of Indian Territory, never recorded in any way at all.

  Acknowledgments


  My first thanks go to my family for their abiding faith and support, in particular my parents, Paul and Carmelita Askew, who willingly answered at all hours all manner of questions about guns, cookstoves, ways of living and doing and talking; my husband, Paul Austin, who from the beginning has given me faith, freedom, keen-eyed criticism, and love; and, especially, my sister, Ruth Brelsford, who received these pages in daily missiles sent south and west from the mountains of New York to her home near Tulsa. She read with commitment, openheartedness, and tremendous forbearance, for she’d agreed to make no comment but only receive the story as it spun forward, and to her great credit, she asked no questions, made no judgments during the years of messy and tortuous creation. Her silent partnership is all through this work.

  I’m deeply grateful to my agent, Jane Gelfman, whose enthusiasm and tenacious commitment are unparalleled, and whose gratifying first phone call will forever be the high point for me in this book’s journey, and to my editor, Courtney Hodell, who read with probing intelligence and a deep comprehension of the work’s intention; her contributions have without doubt helped to make a better book. Thanks, as well, to Jessica Treat for her skillful feedback and enduring friendship, to W. Roger Webb at Northeastern in Tahlequah for giving me the opportunity to come home and stay a while, and a special thank you to Ida Stallaby of Red Oak, Oklahoma, for sharing with me her language and her good company as she struggled, with great humor, across the gulf of two worlds and two tongues to help me understand The Word in Choctaw. Above all, my thanks to the Creator, for giving me this job.