The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The raftsmen had made us get out of the wagons. From our wagon they took out Mama’s trunk and the iron cookstove and a few wooden crates and placed them around different places on the raft, and that wooden strapped-together raft looked too flimsy for the whole family and our animals, and the four men with their beards and slouch hats and burnt faces frightened me. I did not trust them, how they could get all of us to the far side and not lose any of us, not with the memory so close of the swirling, rushing waters behind us, and them smaller, them nowhere like this water, and in the smaller waters the whirling push and chance and struggle, the dogs swimming, and the time Bertha’s calf got loose and was swept downriver bawling and Uncle Fay threw the reins to Caleb and jumped off and waded to catch her by the loose rope and pulled her kicking to the far bank. This place here was so much wider, longer, more powerful than any we’d crossed over, the smell of it strong beyond all imagining, and the day was dropping down, the sky turning purple and lowering, the air growing still. There was no wind. Cold seemed to press down on us from the heavens and rise from the earth to press us squeezed together in the middle with cold.

  I hoisted Thomas on my hip. He was getting too big for it, his legs dangled nearly past my knees and he was too heavy, I could hardly hold him, but I did. I’d put Jonaphrene and Little Jim Dee to stand together near the dock where they could see, and I’d wrapped a scrap quilt around them to keep them warm together, but Little Jim Dee could not ever be still. He darted in and out among the raftsmen till Papa hollered at him to Git Over Here Right Now, and Papa’s voice so hard that Little Jim Dee obeyed him and came all the way back over onto the bank and even stood still for maybe two minutes before he took off again, but he never did go back onto the raft. Jonaphrene whined over the cold, but I paid her no attention, not even to tell her to shut up, because I could not take my eyes off the water. It was purpling down in the dropping cold, a sick swirling bruise color, and I wanted to say, Papa, Papa, let’s don’t go, let us wait until tomorrow, and I wanted to say, Oh, please, Papa, let’s go now, let’s cross now and get it over before night comes and all is worse.

  When it was ready finally, our goods and animals strapped to the logs, and the wagonwheels stopped with stones big enough of themselves, it looked to me like, to sink that raft of sticks, and Uncle Fayette’s raft ready the same, and the two men began to pole Uncle Fayette’s raft out into the current, and the two on ours motioned with their long poles, both men wrapped now in blanketcoats and high beaverskin collars so their faces hardly showed—but I knew that the one was with us, the one with black, black hair and beard and no teeth and his eyes just like slits—and when all was ready and Papa held Mama’s elbow through the thick shawl and blanket and guided her out onto that pier like cordwood and over the wooden ramp to the raft, I wanted to shriek. I wanted to scream for all of us to go back, to wait for tomorrow, to do some thing or any thing other than go into the river. I did not shriek. I carried Thomas over the slatted ramp onto the raft.

  The men worked in silence, their poles in the water now sliding, now lifted and rested in the iron locks, and the raftsmen not talking even in idleness, doing nothing except to watch through slitted eyes and spit. Bertha wouldn’t quit bawling. The water swept us down and fast, so much faster than it looked from the bank. Out in it, where the men poled us, the river took us up like drift and swept us down, and I looked to the opposite bank where I could see tree bones outlined in the purpling twilight, but we were not going there, not going across but down the river and Uncle Fay and the others rushing on ahead, always ahead of us even in the rhythm of the water not our water, and I did not know why. I had a hidden smolder against them, even then, in the fear and thrill of not going across the water as I’d expected but down, because it should have been Papa. I believed always it should have been Papa and not Uncle Fayette in front.

  I could not get my balance. Thomas was on the wet raft floor, clinging to my skirt bottom and wailing to be picked up. I couldn’t hold him and hold to the iron front of the cookstove. Mama was sitting upon her trunk near the back where the raftsmen stood swaying, and Jonaphrene was beside her with her face pinched but not crying, but the new baby surely was. I couldn’t go back there and sit among their spread knees and Lyda crying. There was nowhere to sit but the raft floor, which I would not, and anyhow I could not, because I had to stand ready, there, near the front of the raft where I could see. I had to be ready in case the whole thing tipped and rolled skyward and was sucked down to the river’s muddy gut. Papa walked back and forth in the narrow space in front of the wagon, and he looked from the corner of his eye sometimes back at the raftsmen, and sometimes to the opposite shore where the tree bones were darkening, and sometimes downriver to where Uncle Fayette and the others were getting on ahead. I tried to ease toward Papa to see what his face said, but the raft seemed to roll more if my feet moved, and Thomas wailed louder, and so I had to stand and hold tight to the cookstove, and I could tell nothing except frown and concentration in the way Papa held his head.

  Bertha stood on the strapped logs, bawling, her nose tied to the near side of the wagon, her bony legs spraddled, and each time the raft dipped, she did a little jerking kind of dance. Her calf bawled as badly as she did but was better in balance, and old Sarn and Delia, too, stood on the raft better, their knees braced and hooved flat, and not braying either, Papa’s mules, but messing bad on the raftwood, their eyes wild and rolling, and you knew you had better not be anywhere close around them if you didn’t want to get kicked or bit. Because it was wrong for those animals. I could see it. They thought they were falling through heaven. And I too, that is how I felt in the rolling unsurety of the raft in the water, like dreaming of falling, like the sure clamp of earth beneath us had been ripped away and replaced with floating chaos and dread. In the other crossings, even in the swift push and rush of water, our wheels and our mules’ feet had still touched the earth.

  So that’s how we went down the river, with Thomas and the new baby and Bertha and her calf bawling, and Papa pacing, and the air growing colder and the men silent and spitting and the evening darkening down. But there were three who loved that raft ride, and those three were Little Jim Dee and Papa’s hunting dogs, Ringo and Dan. Dan wouldn’t move from up front where he stood tall with his nose lifted and his tongue lolling and the tan underside of his ears showing light in the backsweep of river wind. Ringo trotted everywhere on his dumpy legs, with his nails clicking the raftwood, sniffing the raftsmen and their poles and gear and the wind and the raft’s mossy cracks, getting right up near the raft edge one time to dip down and smell the water, and then backing up, trotting around again on his business to sniff our belongings, as if he thought there was danger that the raft and the river could change our family’s smell. Little Jim Dee went right behind him, trotting everywhere on his short legs, and I knew Papa must be concentrating something awful because he never even told Little Jim Dee to quit.

  It kept getting colder and darker. I could not smell the mud-and-fish smell, I think because it had swelled up to suck in the whole world and so now could not be separated out as river smell. The far bank did not get closer or farther but seemed to stay always the same distance, and the only change in it was how the dark sky behind the skeletons of trees began to glow red and the trees themselves jumped outlined into black. The river went bloody for a few minutes and then fell back brown, then dark again, purple, and the sandy-bearded riverman came front and lit the lantern and went back, and then the only change on the raft was how Thomas wore down to a whimper and then so did the baby Lyda, and Bertha’s bawling slowed some and the calf hushed up and went to suck.

  There was a time then, just a few heartbeats maybe even was all it was, but I remember it: that little blink of time when the rhythm was right. We rolled and floated in the dusk. I lost sight of Uncle Fay’s raft for a while, until there was a glint far down the river in the gloaming and I saw the lantern light on the pole on the other raft swell and grow white. My hand was
not so tight to the cookstove. It was cold but not shivering, not icy, and I reached down and patted Thomas the gentle soft drumming like he liked on his back. I was thinking about him, about how he would be wet on his bottom because the damp from the raftwood would be seeping up through his diaper square and blanket and gown, and I began to worry because I did not know how long we would be on the raft. I couldn’t change him or lift him, not with how we were rolling, and the bit of peacefulness vanished and I began to be afraid for my brother. I looked back toward Mama. She had one arm around Jonaphrene and the shawl wrapped around both of them and the baby Lyda swaddled in her lap. It was then, when I raised my head and looked back at Mama, that I first marked the presence of the blue wind.

  It didn’t bother me at first—I did not understand it—but it did get my notice, how it pushed down on us from upriver, gusting off and on at the beginning, getting stronger and more insistent until it made me turn north to face it to keep the little hairs that had slipped out of my braids and bonnet from beating me in the mouth. And the more the wind rose, the more I forgot about Thomas’s wet bottom. The more the wind rose, the more the animals got excited, with Bertha dancing and bawling again, and the chickens waking up to mutter and rustle, and the mules, too, shuffling their hooves on the raft floor and twitching their tails and ears. Dan did not leave his place up front nearby Papa but he turned around in a circle a few times and sat down on his haunches, whining and facing upwind. But it was that old rabbit dog Ringo who got craziest from the wind change. He trotted around the raft faster and faster, whining and jumping, with Little Jim Dee at his tail like a trailing pup, until Ringo stopped at the raft rear and started to bay into the wind.

  The man with the black beard and slit eyes flicked his foot out and kicked Ringo. That quick. Ringo yelped like his ribs had been broken, and slunk tail-tucked toward Papa, yelping, and Little Jim Dee shrieked and yelled something which I could not make out on account of the wind and the animals and Thomas too now carrying on, but Little Jim Dee, right there underfoot, hollering, pulled back and kicked that riverman in the knee, and kicked him again. The man took his hand off the riverpole and did not even bend down but swatted backhanded through the darkling air like Little Jim Dee was an insect, and sent him tumbling, his shrieks cut off, Little Jim Dee rolling silently backwards, not making a sound.

  “John!” Mama’s voice split the wind, pierced the cries of Thomas and Ringo and Jonaphrene and the new baby, all four of them howling, and flew up to me and Papa at the front of the raft.

  I looked at Mama. She was standing by her trunk, her shawl a dark heap on the wet raft floor beside her. Mama’s fist was not in a ball at her chest but clenched at her side, and the baby Lyda was tight in her left arm. Even in the deepening dark I could see Mama’s face was ferocious, and my heart jumped up furious like Mama’s, and I was glad. I looked up at Papa. He did not move and I couldn’t see his expression for his hat brim pulled down and the lamplight above him shadowing his mouth, and I looked to the back again, where the raftsmen did not move either, and none of us moved but for the children crying. Little Jim Dee lay just still on his back. His chest went up and down, up and down, but he didn’t try to get up, and he never let out a sound that I could hear. It scared me that Little Jim Dee did not cry.

  I wanted to go pick him up, but of course I could not, and I waited for Mama or Papa, one, to go to him, but they did not. I thought then Papa would rush to the back and jump on that ugly raftsman and beat him for backhanding my brother, or holler or shout or do something, but he didn’t do anything. He just stood looking at Mama standing by her trunk looking at him. That was all.

  At last Papa hollered, loud and furious above the wind and all the rest of it, and the sound made me jump, on account of how close he was and how I’d been holding my breath. But it was not at that raftsman Papa hollered but at Little Jim Dee lying splat on his back. “James Davidson! Git up here and set down!” He yelled it like Little Jim Dee was still running around on his banty legs getting in trouble, and Little Jim Dee just lying there hit by a stranger, silent, his little chest jouncing like he could not get his breath. I could not fathom it. I wanted to go kick that ugly man my own self, I wanted to pick up Little Jim Dee, I wanted to do something, something, and I wanted Papa to do something, but not what he did. “Git up now, Jim Dee,” Papa said, his voice in no way softer, and then he turned around and looked down the river where we were sweeping fast into the dark.

  It might have meant nothing. Everything stirred and rushed after that, and it might’ve melted so easy into just one of the so many times Little Jim Dee got in trouble, if not for Mama’s face when she went to him. She bent just from the waist a little, holding the baby in her crooked arm, said, “Here, son,” and reached down her free hand. She looked up at Papa then, and I saw it in Mama’s face, how she held her eyes and mouth upon him: our Papa was wrong.

  Little Jim Dee did not know it. He got to his feet, and I could see how his chin was shaking, how he was trying to keep from crying, trying to hold his chest still, not looking at Papa, not looking at the raftsman, but stepping away from Mama, holding himself still and shamed and big. Then it all disappeared and was forgotten, that quick, in the rush of wind and the riversweep toward the far bank and the men hollering and working their long poles and cursing and Papa easing to the back of the wagon to calm the mules, and the men from Uncle Fay’s raft on the sandbar hallooing us in the dark. Little Jim Dee went right at Papa’s heels, and you could tell he didn’t have an idea in the world that Papa never should have let an outsider touch him much less cuff him, that it was not himself but Papa who had done the bad thing, because Papa never should’ve taken a stranger’s part. My brother just rushed when the others rushed and tried to act just like them, and Ringo, too, went around the raft baying his deep voice, and maybe nobody knew it except me and Mama. But I knew it, and Mama proved me, though she didn’t look at me but only hard-eyed in the dark straight at Papa. But I knew that we knew it, the two of us together, and there was a change between us in that moment.

  My mind could not wrap around and hold it, or did not want to, or I could not let Papa being wrong wrap around me, and so the knowledge washed away in the grit and grate of landing, and I was glad, I was willing. I squatted down and put my arms around Thomas. It was only later that I remembered. By then the fact of it had slipped into the new way of our lives together, no greater or lesser than the fact, maybe, that Papa never asked the blessing before we ate supper anymore.

  Papa did not pause when we scraped up on the sand and stilled. He hitched the mules and unstopped the wheels and drove the wagon off before he even lit the lanterns, before we hardly understood that the rolling had stopped, and then he began to load in the dark inside the wagon. The raftsmen helped him with the cookstove, but they went back upon their raft right after, laughing in their nasty language, and watched while Papa put in and took out and put in again, cursing, our wooden crates and Mama’s trunk.

  Uncle Fay came and whispered something low, and Papa answered short and sharp. Later I could hear Uncle Fayette down by the yellow light on the other raft arguing with the other raftsmen, and yowyowyow they went until Papa hollered down there, “Pay the man, Fayette!”

  It was late, late, I don’t know how late, when we moved creaking off that sandbar, and the bearded raftsmen wrapped around once in filthy quilts and lying snoring on the empty raftwood floor like dogs behind us, and the cramped space inside the wagon even more cramped and mistaken and backwards because now Mama and Lyda slept at the rear of the wagon and me and the children up front behind Papa, and the wind sneaked in upon us even with the tarp flap laid down, and I was bothered because I could not see Mama because the crates were piled up between us and the cookstove was cockeyed and Papa had loaded our possessions all wrong.

  I don’t know when we stopped, but when I woke the first time it was deep night and we were not moving. I raised up and eased the flap aside and looked out. Papa was nodding in the yello
w circle of coal oil light. The mules were asleep in the traces. There was no moon or stars for light, and that wind was still blowing, though soft.

  My heart jerked tight, and I said, “Papa?”

  His head snapped up and he slapped the reins on Delia’s back. Never said a word nor looked me back, and we began to move again. I could not hear the other wagon, but I laid that off to the soft drone of wind, and I snuggled back down. I was glad for us driving on in the night. It was warm under the covers with the children, the wind was the sound of forever and sky and distance and dark, and Papa and old Sarn and Delia could carry us, the wagon rocking, the wind humming, on through the night.

  When I woke at first light, the wind had died completely. As soon as my eyes opened I knew Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins were not close, not just because I couldn’t hear them but because I felt it, and I did not know how they could have got far ahead in such cold and wind, but I didn’t care. I was glad the wind had died. The cold now was wet cold, and stronger, seeping in through the wagonsheet. I believed we would stop then and camp, for the sake of the animals if not for Papa, but we just went on. In late morning the ice came. I understood then the meaning of the blue wind, but by then it was too late to stop and camp in a place of protection, too late to turn back.