The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  Dark dropped quicker because of the hillsides. Morning came later. Evenings after we’d camped I would sit for hours in shadow and watch the twilight stretch blue and starless, lingering late, high above. I knew the days were getting longer, were supposed to be getting longer, because it was well into spring then, almost summer, but I couldn’t feel the sun coming back to us in those mountains at all. The climb grew steeper, and each time we crested, all we could see before us were more mountains rolling dark blue into skyhaze to the south. We never came up over a hogback like Uncle Fayette said we would, to ease down again to a smooth valley and turn west. Each day we went slower. Each day my mama was paler. Each night Uncle Fayette’s mouth got worse.

  It started out him talking about Mama. He never said a word directly to her or to anyone, but spoke soft straight ahead while he jabbed the fire. Said he’d heard of some kind of weak-minded women scared of their own shadow, some kind of lily women—and this is how he called it, meaning only our Mama—scared of Injins in Eye Tee, scared of a little ole biddy copperhead snake. He would talk like that, poking the fire, not saying it directly to anyone but muttering in his beard for the whole world to hear, especially Papa. I’d see him cut his eyes at Papa all the time. Sometimes he’d get up and go off awhile in the dark behind the wagons, and when he came back to the fire again, his blue eyes would glitter and his voice would be loud. Yessir, these lily women, he’d say, poking the ashes, They ain’t no kind of pioneer women. Ain’t the same stock the Lodis come from. Scared of some pitiful old Injins getting fat in Eye Tee. Scared of a garter snake, he reckoned. Scared of a June bug squallylegged on its back. He’d heard that, Uncle Fay would mutter, and then he’d shake his head and turn his face away from the fire to spit.

  When he talked about the Injins in Eye Tee, Aunt Jessie would call little Pearline to her and stroke her scrawny head and lift her own head, looking brave, I guess she thought it, like she wasn’t afraid of anything on God’s earth or under it, including red heathen savages. I would get so mad then, just furious, because I knew Mama was afraid of Indians, because I was, and I would call Thomas to me and rub his head and lift my own face brave and courageous to the dark outside the circle of light from the fire, and it was all a lie. I was a fake in my heart, both then and later, because I finally understood that Eye Tee meant Indians, and at night in the wagon I pulled my feet up and tucked my knees tight under my chin so that Thomas beside me got nothing but hard bone to rest against, because I was afraid the Injins would sneak around the wagon and chop off my feet while I slept. Injins and Eye Tee and the darkness in those mountains were all the same to me then.

  The road thinned, became a hard rutted track growing thinner and thinner, until it was two faint rails fading to nothing beside a little trickling creek in the high cleft of those mountains. We stopped and camped in the early part of the afternoon, though the light was still good, but the road was fading. The two tracks went down and disappeared like a ghost road into dark pine woods below the clearing, you could not see where they went, and it was there in that clearing that Papa and Uncle Fayette had their knockdown-dragout fight.

  I know how they tell it now, Mildred and Pearline and them. I know they say Uncle Fay went on to prepare a place for Papa like Jesus going on to Heaven. I know they say the two of them made it up together, and it was all to protect Mama, but I was there, mind you. This is me here. Matt Lodi. I remember all of it. Every bit of it. Just this way.

  We were camped on someone else’s land, though we didn’t yet know it, and at first it was three days, and then four days, and soon it was a week, and then longer. Mama did not come out of the wagon except to eat a little bite in the evening, and then she’d go back with the baby and lie down. Uncle Fay didn’t even talk under his breath now but straight out, loud enough for Mama to hear from where she lay in the wagon. Loud enough for all of us. He’d put it like a question, like he was asking the ashes, and then he’d spit, the tobacco juice sizzling in the red underpart, Uncle Fay’s answer. What were we going to do for food when the supplies run out, did anybody reckon? Put in a crop on the rock side of a mountain with no sun? What were we going to live on till that lily woman got well, rocks and water? Spit then, and sizzle. Wasn’t but so-many miles fu’ther, just over the hogback and down again west, but no-sir, we got to sit and starve for a woman, he reckoned. Spit.

  Every night he said it, sitting on a tree stump, poke, poke, poking at the fire. I’ll never forget that, the image burned harder and brighter in my mind’s eye than those mountains: Uncle Fayette in his big hat with his pine stick jabbing every word from his brown mouth into the fire’s spark and ashes. His boys then, Caleb and Fowler, they’d act just like him, poking and spitting, though they knew better than to speak it, but Uncle Fay just kept on and on in a singsong about food and Mama, food and Mama, like it was food and Mama that landed us up there in those mountains with the road fading before us and nowhere to go but back down like we’d come, and my papa saying nothing, saying nothing, like he never heard him, till I thought I would scream or puke from rage, and I could not understand why Papa would not do something. But all he did was ignore Uncle Fay like he was deaf to him, or else Papa would just go off to hunt. Every dawn and dusk he went out, and when he’d get back and had finished cleaning whatever he’d shot—mostly squirrel, sometimes rabbit, one time a slick, stringy old coon—he’d put it down by the fire for me to cook and go over to the wagon to check the supplies bin. He’d look in the box at so-much cornmeal left, so-much beans, so-much molasses, and none of it enough, and he wouldn’t say a word about it but just turn away then to do some little piece of work. In the high part of day, Papa tended the animals or went off by himself and stayed gone for hours. At night he sat off away from the fire by the lantern and mended harness, sharpened tools, such niggling jobs as that.

  When we’d been camped for ten or twelve nights maybe, a man showed up one morning. He wasn’t an old man, I think now, but he looked old to me then, his skin washed out and wanly freckled and his hair where it curled out beneath his hat so pale it looked silver. He had great tufts of bright yellow hair growing out of his chest that stood up startled and met his reddish beard, and that was the only color upon him—that and his blue eyes—for even his clothes were washed out and pale. His voice was burred and lilting, and he scared me a little, but Papa was not scared. He went out behind the wagon with the man to the place where the woods were thinnest and squatted on the ground with him and talked for a long time. The next morning I woke up when I heard the sound of wood chopping. Papa never said a word to any of us but went to cutting trees, and in the afternoon he took Little Jim Dee to help him.

  That night Uncle Fayette picked up a stone, gnawed it like a corn ear, tossed it off into the darkness. “Corn don’t grow on rock,” he said.

  Papa said nothing.

  “Some folks are fools,” Uncle Fay said. He picked up his green pine stick to poke the fire with. “Some folks are fools for a woman, some are just jackasses in general, I reckon.” Poking, talking loud. “Can’t see it matters much, seeing as we’re all going to starve like dogs anyhow. Seeing as there might be enough cornmeal and grits left to get us to Eye Tee.” Jabbing like the fire itself was Eye Tee. “Ain’t enough to wait for some lily woman to get some gumption about her. Ain’t enough to wait for planting.” Gold sparks whirling, spinning skyward to disappear in the dark. “Provided it’d do any good to wait for planting to start with, seeing as what mule-killing land I seen around here ain’t going to yield a crop worth pulling nohow, which any fool ought to be able to see.” Jab the flames. Spit. “Any fool but a blind ignorant jackass fool like God seen fit to give me for a baby brother.”

  And Papa quiet such a long time, through all of it, letting Uncle Fayette go on and say it, how we’d all (jab), every last one (jab) of us Lo-dyes (jab jab), flat starve to death (jab) there in Ar-kan-saw (jab jab jab). We’d flat (jab) well (jab) never make it to Eye Tee (jab jab), where the pickins was so easy. Spit. An
d on and on, jabbing, bits of fire swirling, that same night, that worst night, when Mama did not go to lie down in the back of the wagon but sat with us in the circle of firelight with the baby Lyda upon her lap and Uncle Fayette raving on about Eye Tee, where there was no law but Injin law which was no law, and Eye Tee, where Papa could make his guns, wouldn’t nobody threaten to flay the hide off him and then shoot his skint corpse over a blame gun patent in Eye Tee, where it was good land, milk and honey land, you could take it slick, like plucking apples from the roadside, like picking persimmons, just over the next ridge and so-many miles west, to Eye Tee, where Uncle Fayette had it all mapped out for us to live.

  And Papa quiet for just a little while longer. Then he said, his voice level, soft nearly, looking at him, “Yes, Brother, you have a way of mapping things out for all of us pretty damn good.”

  Then they were both quiet and it was just the fire snapping and the peepers peeping on the black creekbank, for it was already that late in the season, and then the two of them at once rose up together from opposite sides of the fire and clashed together like goats butting. They fought all over the cleared space between the two wagons, with the children crying and the cousins shouting and Aunt Jessie screaming and the dogs barking and Mama saying soft, No, John, No, John, No, John, like he could even hear her over that yelling and yapping and him and Uncle Fayette grunting, and me, I’m probably the only one who heard Mama because I was standing beside her from the moment Papa and Uncle Fayette rose up in silence, butting.

  While it was going on it seemed to go on forever, and then when it was over I couldn’t believe it was over so quick. Before I could realize it, Papa was on his back in the dirt, winded, with his shirt bloody, holding a hand up, palm open, in the air.

  To this day I believe he let Uncle Fay lick him. I know he did. He had to, because Fayette was never big in his back and shoulders like Papa, he never had the same strength in his arms. He couldn’t swing a sledgehammer like Papa or carry a deer on his neck from the deer woods nor in any way hold a candle to Papa, because my papa in those days was strong.

  The next morning at first light when I got up to start breakfast, Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins were gone. They’d left in the middle of the night, the same way we’d all left Kentucky. I didn’t think anything about that then, but later I did.

  The first thing Papa made—-he began it the next day, I remember, because his lip was swelled up like a hog bladder, his eye shut nearly, and he would grunt every time he bent over—but first thing there in those mountains, Papa smoothed down a tree stump and set a back to it and rolled it to the place at the side of the wagon where the sun touched first and stayed longest. All day Mama would sit there, her eyes following Papa back and forth while he cleared and broke ground. There was more color in her face then, her fist was loose then, though she still seldom said anything but just held Lyda and nursed her and was quiet on the tree stump and watched.

  It was only a truck patch, no more than a quarter acre, but it took him a long time because that ground was so rocky, the tree stumps were many, and he broke the plow point and had to borrow Misely’s anvil to make a new one, and we had only the singletree and so he could only plow one of his mules at a time. Papa put in squash and beans and sweet potatoes—he said it was too late for corn, which it wasn’t, or at least not any too much later than for the rest of what we planted, and that’s something else I didn’t think about then—and I helped when I could. I’d go bent behind him with our seeds and potato starts, Thomas crawling in the furrows behind me, trying to pull himself up on my skirt, and Mama watching Papa with that fierce look on her. Intent. Hopeful. Like she expected any minute for him to do something other than what he was doing.

  The tallow-faced man, Misely, came around every day or so and talked to Papa. It was his land we were camped on, but he let us plant there, only too glad, I guess, for the work of clearing Papa was doing, and to my knowledge he never asked so much as a half bushel of nothing for pay. He had a wife and a passel of children who were white-blond and palely freckled just like him, and shy and silent, the children more than anything. I don’t recollect hearing hardly one of those children say a word. The old man’s bright chest hair and his faded red beard danced and sparred with each other when he talked, and it reminded me of Grandpa Lodi’s white eyebrows, how they would jump up and fidget on his forehead when he got going good talking, and in this way I liked and feared the old man Misely, and he seemed to belong to us somehow, though his tongue was so strange.

  When he came in the evenings to talk to Papa, his passel of children—boys mostly, but there were three or four girls too—would trail a little ragtag tail behind him. Sometimes there’d be ten of them, sometimes eleven or thirteen, I quit even counting, and the old man would leave them to stand around outside the split-rail fence Papa was putting up. He’d step over the rails and go off with Papa, the two of them together, to squat in the dirt behind the wagon and talk. His children would stand outside the fence and look. I’d linger on the near side of the wagon, acting to be busy sorting beans or something, and I’d listen to Papa and Mr. Misely. I never found out any secrets that way, because their talk was just crops and hunting and farm stock, how a man in the mountains needed a good brace of oxen—but it was Mr. Misely’s voice I listened for anyway. Just the sound of it, thick and burred and accented from somewhere which even now I can’t place. So I’d act busy and listen and keep an eye on the Misely children, because I did not in any way trust them. There was something big-eyed and hungry in them, the way they stood there, their fingers holding to the rails, looking at all of us, silent, like we were the strange ones. I was sneaky, how I watched them, and I told Jonaphrene to ignore them, but she would stand in the yard with her hands cocked on her hips and stare right back at them, because Jonaphrene knew who was strange.

  So the days just went on. The weather got hotter. Our provisions got leaner. Our new shoots came up slow. I knew it was on account of the poor ground and so little sunlight, though our clearing was broad and getting broader all the time with Papa cutting. I would take Thomas sometimes and go walking back along the road the way we’d come, or if he wasn’t with me, so I didn’t have his weight to carry, I’d climb the craggy sun-tipped ridge on the far side of the water, trying to see, trying to see, but all I could see was trees and mountains marching off in any direction. Once or twice I followed the two fading tracks along the creek to the place far below our clearing where they turned away from the water and disappeared into deep woods. I never went in there, because those were the woods that swallowed Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins, and it was the place the man Misely and his blond children walked in from, and those dark piney woods were a boundary to me. The mountains were strange, I could not fathom them, how they could be so scraggly and mean and hot in the daytime, the rocks keen with scorpions and lizards, the trees whining with locusts, little stubs of prickly pear and stunted cedar on the high ridges, and yet the water sang clear and cool on the rocks trickling by our clearing, the slopes around us hidden tall and dark and wet with sweet-gum and pine. At night it got cold. I would tell myself sometimes, looking up at the black wedge of sky or along the ridge eastward, This is not the same world as back home in Kentucky. That is not the same moonlight. Those are not the same stars.

  Jonaphrene whined at night with the bellyache, and me, my stomach cramped too, though I wouldn’t tell it. I’d give my portion to Thomas a lot of times to make him hush up, I had to, because we’d left Bertha dying on the ice sheet and even though Thomas was the knee-baby and needed milk, Mama said she could not nurse him, and he would cry and cry. Some mornings we’d find a sack of snap peas or early okra by the rail fence, sometimes a full milk bucket, once a big round cake of butter, and I knew one of the Misely children had been sent by the father and had come and left it in the dark. Papa hardly ever hunted, though there was good game in those mountains and we were all hungry, but I did not ask why. Never in our liv
es did we ask questions of our parents, you just did not do so, ever, nobody did. But I wondered sometimes. Like why, if we meant to go on as soon as we’d brought in our little crop, why was it Papa worked so hard, all day, every day, to make that camp look like the old place back home in Logan County?

  He’d built a lean-to out of rough-cut and blankets under a big oak tree beside the wagon and hauled the featherbed out of the wagon and crammed it inside. Then he went on and split rails for the fence, like the old one, to keep the mules out of the yard. He dug violets from the deep woods and planted them in a little half-moon in front of the wagon, dug an outhouse like our old one, strung a pulley rope for the washing at the exact same angle as our old clothesline had run, south and east from the house. Papa cut and sawed and toted and carried and hauled rocks and rocks and more rocks out of that clearing, and sometimes he’d call me to help him because Little Jim Dee was just too little and wild and distracted, he couldn’t stay put on any task Papa set for him but would chase off after a lizard or something until Papa would get mad and holler at him and tell him to go on then, get out from under foot. Then Papa would call me to come on and hold the pry bar for him or something, and I’d put Thomas down and go help him, feeling Mama’s eyes, watching.