The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  “All right,” he said. “We got started, let’s finish her up. Say what’s on your mind.”

  The man at the table drew hard on the cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger, said, “All I mean to say, you aim me to be the one risks his neck bringing a string of animals through the Territory, you better have some buyers waiting at the end of it or we got no deal.”

  “You’ll get your buyers,” Fayette said.

  “That’s what I know.” Tanner dropped the cigarette to the floor beneath the table, ground it with his boot. “Question is, when. Might leave the both of us wishing different if a U.S. marshal happens along about day after tomorrow wanting to know where you come by such a pretty mess of mules for sale marked by that peculiar-looking brand.”

  “Ain’t no U.S. marshal going to happen along day after tomorrow, or no time.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know it, that’s all. Listen here, you keep to your end of it, I’ll keep to mine. I said I’d take care of the selling, I’ll take care of it. Selling’s my middle name, and you know it. I just need a little time. Not every Tom around here’s got sixty or a hunnerd dollars to plunk down on a good mule. We got to get the word around.”

  “You’re supposed to get the damn word around before I got my neck on the line holding ’em.”

  “You get a little more specific about when you’ll be pleased to show up, I might do so, yessir, I just might.”

  “Hell, I can’t get any more specific. What you want me to do, send up smoke signals? Took me a damn week just to find a opportunity to wade those animals across the river. Thirty mules is not exactly invisible.”

  “Well.”

  “Well.” Tanner began spitting the little front-of-tongue sputters that were his habit when irritated. “All I know is, it’s a good way for the law to get wind of what become of thirty missing army mules.”

  “Law ain’t going to get wind of it.”

  “I don’t aim to be here when that happens.”

  “I said the law ain’t going to get wind of it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Ain’t no law here—hadn’t you figured that out?”

  Tanner laughed. “You tell that to the sixty men Parker’s done hanged.”

  “All right now, hush up and listen. Sol Clayton’s the deputy for this district. He ain’t going to bother us, all right? Now, that’s all I’m going to say about it. You can’t be comfortable with that, why’n’t you run on up to Eufaula or somewheres, come back when you got your mind a little more at ease. I’ll give you your cut then.”

  “Oh, hell yes. I’m sure about ready to do that.”

  “All right then. Bide your time and leave me take care of my end of it. Now, what I asked, how long you reckon before them mules are missed from off that trail drive? We’ll just calculate from there.”

  “Don’t you hear nothing? I said it took me a week to cross the Red; they been missed a helluva long time before that. On top of that, you got me stringing the whole mess of them right up before God and the whole damn town this afternoon—”

  “Whoa, now, I didn’t tell you to take them mules into Cedar—”

  “Said for me to leave that coal-colored one for your brother, how else am I going to do it—”

  “Coulda left the rest of ’em hid someplace—”

  “Oh, yeah, twenty-nine mules is easy to tie up and hide. Come back and find every damn one of ’em stole and all the risk I took gone for nothing, you and your damn charcoal-black mule.”

  That black mule was an old bone of contention between the two men. It had been Fayette’s specific request on the July afternoon they’d first hatched up their plan together; it accounted, in fact, through no fault of its own, for the partners’ first venture in stolen horses turning out to be stolen mules instead. Fayette had insisted on that big black sumpter. “Wherever you find one,” he’d told Tanner, “I don’t give a damn how long it takes. Big and charcoal black, them’s my two requirements. Don’t bother to come traipsing over the border without one,” he’d said, and Tanner had bellyached and griped and finally agreed, and when at last he’d located the animal, all the rest of the twenty-nine had been there alongside it, and so he’d just taken them as well. Now, however, he felt he had some justification for resentment—and blame if things didn’t turn out right—because mules in general had not been their original deal.

  “If it was horses and not a mess of ornery mules I was dealing with, we’d be sitting a whole lot prettier, I can tell you that. Wouldn’t be having to beg for buyers, hang around and wait a week.”

  “I didn’t ask you for no thirty mules,” Fayette said. “I asked you for one, damn it, you were on your own what you stole after that. And I blame sure didn’t tell you to string the whole bunch of ’em through Cedar—”

  The two went on for some time, carping at each other like an old married couple, and neither noticed John moving until the door opened and shut quickly and they looked up both at once to find he’d gone out. As one, the two men scrambled to their feet and followed to the porch, where John stood on the east end looking out over the valley at the three-quarter moon rising, low-slung, side-tilted, on the horizon. Fayette came in his stocking feet to the porch rail, said, “Son, just listen. All right? Hear me out, would you grant me that?”

  John did not answer but neither did he make a move to turn and step down off the porch and leave, and so Fayette took the stillness for acquiescence.

  “All right then,” he said. “Now. I ain’t asked you about that mule, and I’m not going to. That’s your lookout. Whatever you done with it’s your own business. I give it to you, you can turn around and sell it, give it away, shoot it in the head like you done the other one, I don’t care.” None who knew Lafayette Lodi would believe he’d give anything freehanded, unconditionally—even the youngest in the household knew he gave with the left hand only to take back with the right—but Fayette himself believed it in that moment, and the jovial tone in his voice rose as his head swelled with his own largesse. “I bought it and Tanner brought it,” he said, as if it were a gift from the two of them. As if John had not heard their carping. “That ought to even us up square on the mule business. All right?”

  He looked east along the moonlit road, empty, and then west, where he thought he saw figures approaching in the distance.

  “Now,” he said, the urgency coming on him, “we got a little something else to parley with you about. No, now, listen, listen,” he said as John stirred, seeming ready to move to the slab step. “Listen. I am not asking you to do a thing in the world that’s illegal. Hear me? I’m not. What I’m thinking, I’m thinking about getting into manufacturing. Right? I’m not talking about that howdah—that’s a good weapon, that’s a fine weapon, there’s need for just such a weapon right here in this country. Now! Now!” He held a hand up, spoke faster as John grew increasingly restive, though it was not any particular movement his brother made, but a shifting in the shoulders, a tension Fayette felt twisting as in his own body. “John, listen, they’s a thousand patents have run out years ago—Smith and Wesson, Colt double-action, I don’t know what all. We’re not talking about infringing no more patents. Hear?”

  He felt the tension in his brother rise to a peak and hold still. Tanner shifted weight on the dark porch behind them. Boot leather creaked. Fayette heard cigarette papers sifting one against the other, a faint whisper back by the door.

  “I don’t aim to do that,” Fayette said. “We had our little go-round with that, didn’t turn out too pretty.” He eyed the figures approaching from the west, three of them, coming in the moonlight but still too distant for Fayette to recognize. Absentmindedly, entirely heedless of what his words meant or the cost his brother had paid for their previous venture, he went on. “Lawsuits is one thing. I don’t give a damn about lawsuits, it’s them blame death threats I’m not too partial to. We’re going to do it different this time.” He turned to his brother, clearly v
isible beneath the porch eaves but for his hat-shaded eyes, for the moon was still low. Fayette said, “We can’t make no real money with you building one measly gun at a time for a fellow. We got to get into manufacturing like Remington, Smith and Wesson and them. I been studying on it, I know just how we’ll go about it. We got to get a little capital ahead, that’s all, start slow.”

  He could feel his brother listening. Still, he knew him so little—though he felt him keenly and genuinely—that he misinterpreted all that he felt. In Fayette’s mind, his brother’s rapt listening was tied to interest in the possibilities as Fayette himself saw them, inextricable from the garnering of money and prestige in men’s eyes. Never could he dream that the listening was in his brother’s hands as he stood in the moonlight, the memory in his hands working intricacies—not the rough broad-stroked work of shaping horseshoes and pounding wheel-rims, but hands with precise strength forging the mechanisms of weapon, the many chambers of revolver balanced and sleek to spin freely, line up perfectly; powerful fingers honing smooth the brass plate of the trigger; deft wrists turning, rifling the barrel; and the beauty of the piece when the creation was finished, held and balanced in the hands for no more than a few moments before it must go off to live where it would in the world, the hands turning then to another bar of iron, a new piece of hardwood. Fayette had no means to comprehend the past now rising in the one who would not look back, coursing through the living joints and fingers so that they clenched and unclenched in the blue darkness at his brother’s sides.

  “Capital’s the key, Son,” Fayette said. “Me and Tanner’s got a little proposition going to take care of that end. You don’t need to think a thing about that.”

  John continued silent, unmoving. Tanner came forward then, leaned against a porch post, one boot crossed over the other at the ankle, arms folded, cigarette dangling, unlit, from his mouth.

  “There’s three things a man needs in this country, John, am I right?” Tanner said. “Four if you count women, but we ain’t elected to go into that business. Not yet we haven’t anyway. So not counting women, it’s three things men need: guns, whiskey, and horses. Am I right?” His voice in the bluelit shade of the overhang was almost musing, philosophical, and he looked up into the blackness of the eaves, oblivious to the growing menace in Fayette’s glare. “Now, some would say otherwise. Some would say a man’s got to have a little excitement thrown in, and they may have their point for the likes of them, I suppose. That’s the type would be given to wanting to rob a bank, you know, or a payroll train, something like that. There’s those say that’s a good way to go, they’d say it’s easier to hide a saddlebag than a herd of horses, and certainly they got their point. But banks are a dangerous business, John.” He spoke like a teacher. “There’s so much gunplay involved, which some are partial to, I know that, but I never have been. Let me just get in, get out, do my business when folks are sleeping.” He struck a match to the cedar post, cupped his hands. His mustached and muttonchopped features jumped briefly in the flare. “My opinion is,” he said, speaking tightly as he puffed rapidly, several quick inhalations to ignite the tobacco, “the three of us make a good team. We were good in Kentucky, we’re going to be better in this country. Quit laying all our eggs in one basket, use what different talents we got. Three things a man needs, and we got every one of them covered. Fayette’s got the whiskey business covered, I just leave that to him, he knows all about that.”

  Fayette said, “Tanner. Shut up.”

  But the man had warmed too keenly to his subject. “I’ll handle the horses. That just leaves you to make up your mind: are you with us or against us?” Tanner flicked the spent match into the darkness, turned to face out toward the valley, with his forearms propped on the porch rail. “Everybody’s got their own talent, John. Sometimes they don’t even know about it till the right opportunity shows up. Now, you take me, I been an entrepreneur in many areas, you know that, but I have to say I found my calling in horse trading. Or mule trading, I don’t care. Whatever’s available. It’s just a knack. I guess you’d call it that. I always was a good hand with stock, but I don’t believe I ever would’ve guessed my real talent if I’d never left Kentucky. Opportunity’s like that.” He chuckled. “Y’all should have seen me slip in that line and cut them mules out, and never a bawl or a whimper.” He went on chuckling deeply, almost silently, in his throat as he brought the cigarette to his mouth; once again his features seemed to jump in the brief ruddy illumination as he drew on it, long and deep.

  “Tanner,” Fayette said. “Shut the hell up. I mean it. This don’t concern you.”

  Tanner rolled his eyes, pursed his lips beneath the drooping hair, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Your business, and grew quiet, looking out over the valley. The three figures had neared enough that Fayette recognized his sons and nephew now, coming along the road, but the recognition did not ease his urgency; rather the imperative increased, not because of who approached but simply out of their proximity, the fact they would soon climb the stone step and enter the blue darkness beneath the overhang and, in coming, shift the timbre, the air. Fayette felt he must get an agreement out of his brother before the change came; he felt vulnerable in his stocking feet, and he spoke rapidly, without pause for breath or thought.

  “Forget that business, Son, that don’t have nothing to do with you. He’s just blowing off. Now listen, listen a minute. What I want, all I’m asking, is just help us at the outset, let us get started, half the profit’s yours—or no, I mean a third of it,” he said, as Tanner abruptly turned to stare at him. “What I mean, your equal share. We got to make models, you know, show ’em around, you’re the one can do that. We got to hire on some fellows to work for us, you’re the one can teach’em what they need to know. I can’t do that neither. You got complete free rein too—what I mean, whichever kind of pistol you want to make, rifle, whatever you like, it’s just up to you. Once we get going, you can do what you want, quit us or keep on, it don’t matter, the profit’s yours. I don’t believe you can ask for any fairer deal than that. I’ll get the capital, I’ll get the materials, whatever you need, just say the word, we’re going to get it—blackpowder, silver, ivory, you name it, you just tell me what you want. I’m going to build us a building, see, just as quick as I get that new house built, big long building right up there behind the sawmill. This little community’s going to be famous, you know it? And they ain’t a thing illegal about it; I’m through with all that.”

  He was entirely oblivious to the lie. Though he had, less than a month previously, caused to be buried in the straw-strewn dirt floor of the old barn a tremendous oak vat from which golden and extremely potent corn liquor could be withdrawn by a vinegar pump hidden behind a ruined horse collar on the east wall; and though introducing ardent liquors into the Indian Territory was a crime found by federal law to be nearly as heinous as horse stealing, punishable by stiff fines and imprisonment; and though there were close to two dozen stolen U.S. government mules at that very moment stabled in his new stone barn on the crest of the ridge, Fayette believed he told the truth. His intention was legitimate concerning the manufacture of weapons; he had no mind to re-create the kind of situation that had caused them to flee Kentucky. Bootlegging and horse stealing were merely means to an end, and so they could, to Fayette’s mind, be dismissed.

  “What say, Son?” he said. His toes curled against the porch floor as he watched his brother’s face. He sensed the wavering, felt him almost persuaded, and Fayette’s heart lifted—but once again he misinterpreted what he perceived; he believed it was his own assurances of legitimacy and the promise of profit that made John waver. If he’d understood that it was the work itself that tempted—the urge in the very muscles to return to what they knew best, the hands from adolescence craving the feel of file and chisel, iron and wood—Fayette might have said something that would have pushed his brother into a promise to do that which he’d sworn nearly two years past he would never put his hand to again.
John’s word, once given, would not easily have been withdrawn, and the old inextricable binding, Fayette’s dominance and the proper balance, as Fayette saw it, could have been renewed far more easily than even Fayette himself could imagine—if only he’d understood what he sensed. Instead, feeling victory in his grasp and believing it his, he said, “Patents is a nuisance, but we’ll act legitimate fair and square.”

  He did not see his brother stiffen, grow yet more coldly breathless and still.

  “No more borrying somebody else’s design unless we know a hundred percent sure it’s run out. You can’t make no money that way anyhow, fending off lawsuits and what-have-you, but I’ll tell you something—manufacturing is the way to go. I have sure figured that out. You were making, what, seven, eight guns a month there at the last? That’s nothing, that’s not a drop in the bucket compared to what we can do. We’re going to be rich, Son, and we don’t need no howdahs to do it.” His voice grew wistful with regret. “Too bad, though, if you think about it. That is a fine weapon.” He shook his head. “There’s some power in that gun, now. You can blow the top off a bear’s skull with one of them barrels and have three left for target practice. That one I got off that ni—” He stopped abruptly, slapped an imaginary mosquito on the back of his neck. “Lord,” he said. “You might reckon this dry heat’d kill a few of these critters.”

  He paused a moment, gazing out into the moonlit yard, his mind on the big four-barreled pistol he’d bought off Mitchelltree on the ridge and now kept hidden from his brother’s sight beneath the horsehair mattress in the crowded room upstairs. The fact that he could not brag and show it about to the townsmen of Big Waddy galled him. “Should’ve kept them.” Without even a glance at Tanner, whom he’d long suspected of selling that very howdah to Mitchelltree—of taking, in fact, more than a dozen of the weapons when he lit out for Texas, and selling them, and sharing not a penny of the profit—Fayette turned to his brother. John’s face was shadowed beneath the porch overhang, for the moon had now risen above the roof rim. “We should’ve kept one or two of them. I shouldn’t never have listened to you on that business. We could have hid them—just for our own pleasure, I’m talking about. I don’t mean to sell.”