The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  I could not tell you the precise moment when it happened. It was just a slow waking—me waking to the change within Mama, her waking to what Papa was doing—but it changed, sure enough, how she watched him; it was not less fierce, but there was no expecting in it now, no waiting for something, and she no longer sat on her hollowed-out tree stump when she watched him, and it was not Papa only she watched.

  It was that that first made me wake to the change in her—how Mama watched me. How she watched all of us children, like we were strangers, like every word out of our mouths, every gesture—the way Jonaphrene cocked her forehead and made faces, the way Thomas sucked his two fingers or Little Jim Dee tried to back up and lean against her—like all of these were ways belonging to children from some other country. I did not know what it was she marveled at in me, but she stared at me not only when I was with Papa but any moment I came in front of her eyes, and it was the same with me as with all of us—as if she had not ever seen a one of us move or speak in this way before.

  And in a short time, not long after I first saw her so watching us, Mama got up from her tree stump one morning and put the baby on the pallet in the shade, and from that minute on, she followed Papa. Whatever he was doing, Mama went right behind him, her eyes fierce on him, and I thought she was helping, or trying to, but I believed she was just unabled from being sick and still and out of practice for so long. She was furious, though, you could tell that. I thought it was us she was mad at, me and the children, and I tried to do right, but I did not know what would make her not mad. I thought, too, that my mama had forgot how to work. The day Papa strung the rope for the washline, Mama did a load of washing with cold creekwater right there beside him while he was hanging the pulley. She never put the tub on the fire but just rubbed cold lye soap on the cold clothes—and her arms so thin it did not even seem she could hold a rub board, but she would not let me help her but looked me back hard—and then slap! flap! she flung the wet clothes, not even wrung out, just sopping in fury over Papa’s newly strung washline till it sagged deep from the weight. Then she stared at us—me and Thomas and the children—dazed and furious, while she pressed her hand to her chest and caught up to her breathing, and then she turned and went after Papa to whatever he was doing next.

  Every day she did like that. The evening Papa planted violets by the fence row, Mama poured the dirty dishwater on them till they drownded. When he weeded the truck patch, she went behind him with the broken pieced-together hoe and chopped the squash vines so close we lost nearly all of them. When he split shingles with the froe for the lean-to because the pine bough roof was leaking water, Mama climbed up on the bows of the overjet above the wagon—and they were not iron but just bent sapling wood, how Papa had fixed them, and I didn’t know how they would hold a child’s weight, but I believe my mama did not weigh much more than a child anyhow—she climbed up and balanced there, Papa frowning so with worry, but he did not stop her, and Lyda shrieking in the lean-to, hungry, and my mama perched like a bird atop the tarp-covered bones of the wagon, laying those rough shingles before Papa could hardly finish splitting them and hand them up to her, and oh, I was afraid for her then, so thin and breathing hard, balanced on the high, dirty puff of the wagon, reaching, pounding nails with the claw hammer like she would pound that fragile lean-to into the earth.

  I heard them one night. We still slept in the wagon, me and Thomas and the children, but Mama and Papa slept with Lyda in the lean-to. The dogs were restless, not baying steady but howling every now and then, long and lonesome, and then they’d settle down awhile, snapping and ornery, only to raise up and howl again because of something they smelled outside in the dark. I believed it was Indians they were smelling. The children were hard asleep, Thomas snoring his tiny soft snores beside me, and I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe nearly, and I didn’t know why. I had my legs pulled up and folded in front of me like always, because I was ever more afraid of losing my legs from the knees down than of losing my hair. So I was awake, hugging my knees and breathing lightly, and afterwhile the dogs settled down completely, and it was quiet. I heard my name. Papa spoke it.

  “Take Matt then!” he said. “Take Matt and the baby!” He was whispering loud, though you could tell he was trying not to, his voice scraping harsh through the papery wood and blankets of the lean-to.

  “How, John?” Mama’s voice was so thin. Thin like the bones in her arms. “How can I? You know I can’t.”

  “I can’t, Demaris. I can’t. I can’t go back, you know that, but you won’t ever hear it. All right then, take the wagon, take Matt and Lyda, go back. We won’t wait for any damn crop. I’ll take the others on.”

  “In what?”

  It was quiet just a heartbeat, and then I heard Papa say, “I’ll hire out from Misely.” Quiet a little longer, and then Papa’s voice coming softer, without the harsh scrape in it. “I don’t know what else to do. What do you want me to do?”

  “Take me home.”

  A rough sound, a disgust sound from Papa.

  “Take me home, John.”

  “Are you deaf, woman? Are you stupid?”

  “Take me home to my family, John. I want to go home.” Mama’s voice came low and steady and relentless, like she really couldn’t hear him, or like she had only those words crowding her mind, no room left in it for hearing. “We’ve come far enough, we do not need to go farther. Take me home.”

  “I ain’t! I done all I could, woman.”

  “What? What have you done but tear me from my family to bury me in these mountains? I cannot breathe, John, I can’t stand up straight.”

  “—stopped here for you to get to feeling better—”

  “—cannot breathe, you are choking—”

  “—put us in a crop—”

  “—me, this dark is choking me—”

  “Take ’em and go back! Go on back if you think you’re just going to die for your mama. I mean it. Mattie can drive them mules. Y’all go on back.”

  I thought I heard that old sound then, the sound like Sudie’s pups crying beneath the porch steps, but I could not be sure, and my heart was squeezing so tight with that thought then, me going home to Kentucky with Mama, and Papa kept on, but softer a little. Only a little.

  “I got to go on. I got to. If you got to go back awhile yet, you could. I believe Mattie could drive ’em.”

  “Not a while, not while, John.”

  “I’ll just go on and get settled. When I get us a house built, I can send word. It won’t take more than a few months maybe. Y’all can come by train. Won’t no law be looking for you on a train, you can come easy on the train, ride it right into the Territory, I heard that, somebody said it at Booneville, they’re laying tracks plumb across the Territory. Or else . . . y’all could . . . you could just come on with me now.”

  It was quiet a real long time, and when she spoke again, I heard it, the ferociousness in Mama’s voice, like the look upon her in the days since she’d got up from her tree stump, like how she would work and destroy everything in fury, the sound thin still, seeping out of her like a leak in an earth dam. “They’re little savages already, John! I do not intend to raise my children amongst a bunch of heathen.”

  “Ain’t only heathen in Eye Tee.”

  “I guess you count your brother.”

  “Hush up about Fay.” Papa’s voice scratching deep in his throat, him holding it, holding it. “Don’t start on Fay.”

  “Start,” Mama said. “Start?” And I heard her move in the bedclothes and a little harsh breath sound from her, though I did not know if it was a half-laugh or half-cry, and then her voice came back with the same wiredrawn fury. “They’re hungry, John! Your children are hungry and you don’t see it, they’re turning wild, and you don’t see that either. Look at Jonaphrene! Look at her hair snarled a rat’s nest full of cockleburs! Your son spins around like a tongue-talker, you can’t make him sit still one minute or do a lick of work, Mattie’s turning into some kind of pinched-up li
ttle hull of I-don’t-know-what. Look at her! Look at your daughter. She hasn’t got an ounce of meat on her, she runs around here on spit and spite, lugging that baby and worrying the rest of them to death trying to boss them, the baby can’t walk nor talk right, he’s going on two years old, John, his legs bowed out like elb—”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Whose fault what? Tommy’s bones too soft to carry him because you let our cow die?”

  “That your firstborn has to be mother to your children.”

  “Whose—?” Mama’s voice so high and frail it could be a wisp rising through the shingles. “Whose fault but yours—to carry us—carry us off from our home—to live like the very heathen of the earth—”

  “You’re my wife. I didn’t put you in no tow sack.”

  “Yours and your foul-mouthed brother with his big ideas, his big talk—”

  And then I did hear it. The muffled sound again. Like Sudie’s pups. I lay stiff and quiet, not breathing for sure now, waiting. Trying to hear. Blood beat in my chest, my ear on the pillow. Jonaphrene coughed, and I reached over and pinched her. She said No!, still asleep, and kicked me. I put my hand on her back, firm, and in a bit she got quiet. But still I couldn’t hear them. I stayed awake long after my parents’ voices went silent, long after I heard Papa snoring. Stayed awake listening, for what could never be heard or said anyhow, holding my legs safe from the Indians, quiet, hardly breathing.

  From that night there grew to be an edge in Papa, a jagged rough thing like the ridges all around us, and it was worse in him, and different, from his hard voice on the porch steps with Grandpa Lodi and Uncle Big Jim Dee, worse even than his face coming through the ice. He was short with me and the children—especially Little Jim Dee, it got to where he stayed on Little Jim Dee all the time—and then he’d jump all over any of us for being too loud around Mama. He worked fiercer and harder than ever I saw him, long before daylight, long, long after dark. He would grunt and move and sweat and not talk, but you could hear it in him, like breathing, like the sweat dripping from him: More work could work off the trouble. More work could wear away that look upon Mama.

  But more work could not do it. Our mama got worse.

  It wasn’t that she got weak again, exactly, but more like she fell back and began to disappear inside her own mind. She sat all day in the sun, like before, alone with the baby on her tree stump. She quit pretending to work, quit watching Papa, quit the rest of us. Her eyes turned more and more inward, to herself—and down, in her lap, to Lyda, the last baby. Her fist went back tight to her chest.

  And Papa just kept working. He couldn’t see that each touch he tried only made Mama fall back farther. It was such a ferocious thing in him. He wouldn’t get finished with one idea for that camp before he’d start in on another, and all of it to make it look like the homeplace, and none of it, none of it could do what he wanted. I could see it, but I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop her disappearing and I couldn’t stop Papa, and so I just watched and tended Thomas and tried to make the children mind and be quiet and stay out of the way.

  Sometimes I helped him when Mama’s back was turned. I didn’t know then why I hid my helping from Mama, but I did and only worked with him when she was resting in the lean-to and Thomas was down on the pallet in the shade for his nap. Alone with Papa I worked hard. I pretended to believe the same as he did, that somehow we could make it right or please her or make time go backwards, though I knew in my heart we never could. Because the earth in that place was high and jagged and completely unyielding. Because it held back the sun. There was no house there, no graves there, we’d left the pie-safe and the chifforobe. It wasn’t Kentucky. But I went on and helped him, Lord help me, in secret, even though it was melting my mama. I was young then. I was ten then. I didn’t understand.

  Well, you know then my mama saw me.

  I remember it. How she stood in the arc of the lean-to, holding the ragged pink blanket to the side. I don’t know what woke her up. She stood there, one half of her, half her face, in shadow. Looking at me and Papa. No. Not Papa. Only me. There. Where I crouched with my hands on the great wedge Papa used for a chisel, keeping it steady for Papa while he carved out a new seat stump. Stood a long time, still and quiet, just looking. Then she turned slow and went back and disappeared in the dark inside the lean-to.

  So that was when the last change began.

  It wasn’t something sudden you could see in one minute—no more than there’d been an earth mark in winter that said Now You Are Gone From Kentucky; no more than there’d been one moment when she’d known, and so I’d known, that Papa was trying to shape the old homeplace out of those mountains—it was just change slow and gradual, growing in her the same as the green crops were creeping up slow out of the earth. For a time I don’t think anybody knew it but me and Mama.

  It started that she kept me with her. Where for months she had sent me off with the children to keep them quiet and away for her, now she’d call me if I was away from her doing something, no matter if it was chores or cooking that had to get done. She’d ask me to get her a cool drink of water. She’d let me brush her hair. She still couldn’t abide the children, even Thomas, but she held Lyda and nursed her and called me to come to her a dozen times a day.

  Then, not too long—it wasn’t so very long though it seemed to me then so—my mama began to talk to me. It was just a little at first, just telling me this one thing, how her mother was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking peoples lived. But then more and more Mama kept me with her—she would send Jonaphrene to fetch me if I dropped out of her sight—and Mama touched me, put her hand on my hair, on my shoulder, and she talked to me, the words falling each day freer and faster, till at last it all came like a hymn or a history, like a waterfall she couldn’t stop or hold on to, couldn’t say fast enough; she said them, she whispered them, soft and low and furious, many of them the same words, again and again.

  And so Papa saw this change within Mama, and the change between her and me. He’d come upon me sitting in the hot sun with Mama, and he’d be still a long time. Then he’d say, Matt, here, put on these britches, I seen a late patch of blackberries back in that deep holler. He’d say, Matt, come with me to fetch water. Matt, I need you to come help me chop wood. Then he changed even that, and it was, Here, Matt, skin this rabbit. Matt, jump up here and load the rifle, we’re going for squirrel.

  Thomas, he was walking pretty good then, and he’d totter after me, whining Momo, Momo, and acting like I was his mama that didn’t have time for him, when in truth it was my mama who was his mama and didn’t have the will to be with him, and Jonaphrene and Little Jim Dee were turning wild as red Comanches with nobody to look after them, and that’s how it was then, and I didn’t even know it or see it or think a thing about it.

  I look back now, I see how that time set everything in me. Set me and determined me the way next year’s peaches get set in the silent buds over winter. Oh, it’d been coming a long time, I know that, but it was those days that settled everything—only then I didn’t know. I was just thrilled my mama talked to me, she’d never talked to me in all my life. I was glad Papa called me Matt and cut his brown trousers off at the legs for me to wear to go blackberry picking and taught me to hunt. I was glad even, though I swatted his little hands and walked off from him, that my brother Thomas thought I was his mother in this world.

  It was the last part of July—July the twenty-second—but it wasn’t so very hot yet on that morning because the sun had just climbed over the eastern rim. The dirt and leaves where I sat on the ground beside Mama were still damp. That’s how it was in those mountains. No matter how hot and dry in the daytime, at night the dew fell and the whole world got damp. Mama was stroking my hair with her left hand because her right hand now did not ever, not even when she nursed Lyda, my mother’s hand never left that squeezed-shut tight place between her breasts. Thomas and Lyda were sleeping. I didn’t know or even think abou
t where Little Jim Dee and Jonaphrene were.

  “The Billies,” Mama said, “came west into Kentucky from Virginia. There were seven brothers: James and Thomas and Oliver, William, Alexander, Obediah, called Bede, and your grandfather Cornelius, who died at Vicksburg in the War. That was Eighteen Sixty-three, which seems a long time ago to your young mind, but it is not long at all. I was fourteen when my father died, and he was thirty-nine. Now . . .” Mama’s skirt shifted, and her voice faltered, then she pulled her hand away from my hair. “Now,” she said, and her voice waxed strong again, “the Billies came to Kentucky in the year Eighteen Hundred and Forty, and that is where Cornelius Billie met your grandmother Mary Whitsun, who was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking peoples lives . . . Where . . . my mama was born . . .” Fading again. Faltering. Passing her hand down her face. Rising. “Born in London, England, in the year Eighteen Twenty-seven, and traveled with her parents and two sisters to the United States of America in . . . in Eighteen Thirty, settling first in Ohio and then in Logan County, Kentucky, where Mary Elizabeth Whitsun and Cornelius Billie were joined in holy matrimony in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Forty-eight. They had six progeny, and those were . . . those children were . . .” Mama’s voice trailed off into the sunlight and died there.

  “Uncle Thomas,” I whispered. I could feel the heat coming. “Uncle Neeley, Aunt Lizbeth, Aunt Minnie . . .”

  But Mama wasn’t listening. She was staring across the yard clearing to the pine brush on the other side. “When I was your age—” she started. She stopped again. Black flies whipped the air around us. Locusts whined in the hot trees. Mama stared at the brush, where there was nothing, her breath quick and urgent, as if she chased it, chased it, and could not catch and hold it.