The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  The what of what happened is so simple. The what takes place in the warp of time that is God’s time, or perhaps it is not God’s time but only the peculiar distortion of the human mind’s belief in Time, forged and lived in each consciousness as it goes on forever retelling, shaping, trying to grasp and change the unchangeable. A man is killed. A man was killed. A man is being killed forever. And there is none but the eye of heaven, or the sun, or the all-seeing eye of the Creator to bear witness to the affluxion of lives and moment, drawn together in the mystery of unrelenting orchestration, for now, in the center of the khaki street forming the spine of the cross, its color paler than the transverse, bleached and aged with the numbers of coachwheels and iron shoes that have ground and parted its dust, the Indian woman hurries forward, seeing, on the far side of the tracks, the armed man halt the blue roan before the false front of the mercantile; seeing the wraithlike figure of the girl step to the side and conceal itself behind the red walls of the deserted brick depot. Now, thirteen miles away, in the swept yard of a small cabin a half mile south of Woolerton, a deputy U.S. marshal turns his smooth high-domed forehead to the eye of the sun, his burnished terra cotta skin seeming lit from within as he flips the stirrup over the fine leather seat of the saddle, the whorls and nubs at the back of his closecropped head now revealed to heaven as he bends to tighten the cinch around his stallion’s inflated copper belly. On the far side of Waddy Mountain, the white woman stands on the porch of her husband’s store, gazing south, her youngest child whimpering on her hip, the flattened ridge of her mouth deflated, and a dark tumescent swelling, unknown to her except in the deepest unwilling reaches of her consciousness, already rising in her belly, as the boy Thomas, in his pale dress hat and his father’s suspenders, runs south along the road toward the place where he has seen his sister disappear in the postmaster’s buggy, while within the dark sepulchre of the livery stable, John Lodi pauses, his arm raised, the great shaggy mallethead hammer poised, his ear cocked to the open door of the stable, where the bright still air stands yellow.

  Jonaphrene drove fast around the curve through the pine woods, but she slowed, pulling up hard on the reins as soon as she saw the buildings of Cedar ahead. An overpowering shyness swept her, a self-consciousness born of vanity and confusion, and the terrible isolation in the confines of the log house on the edge of the little fading community of Big Waddy Crossing. As she passed before the remains of the old courthouse at the north edge of town, its rock chimneys standing empty at either end of the pile of rubble, the charred columns on the slab porch holding up only sky, she thought she could go no further. The long yellowbrown street before her was empty except for the few tethered horses and, far in the distance, the moving figure of the Indian woman, whom the girl did not recognize. Her experience was so barren that she did not even think it strange the town was empty, silent; she only feared someone would come out of one of the buildings on Main Street and see her with her tangled hair and marred face, and so at the cross street just past the cotton gin, Jonaphrene turned the bay’s head to the left, and then, at the next corner, right again, taking the turns slowly, the mare walking, following a nameless side road parallel to Main Street through each of its small crossroads, south.

  On the floorboard beneath her highbutton shoes, in the well of the buggy, lay a carbine rifle—the very one Fayette had called out to his daughter Lottie to bring him from beneath the spoolbed in the front bedroom. The one Jessie had brought out of the frame house after her husband’s departure and carried, the crying toddler stumbling after her along the step-softened path, the rifle dragging muzzle-down and weighted through the bright motionless air, into the whitewashed and crowded interior of her husband’s store, where she’d laid it upon the oak counter for no reason present within her own mind. A simple carbine rifle in no way tied to Lafayette Lodi’s mired obsession with weapons of many chambers and barrels and complex firing mechanisms; it was merely another weapon he owned, as yet unblighted with the palm sweat and hunger of the man who owned it: a gun possessed of no more significance than the fact that it had been there, on the oak counter, when Jonaphrene went into the store because she could not find her father’s muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle inside the log house.

  Her sister had told her to borrow Mewborn’s buggy, bring the muzzle loader, not let Mewborn see it, and Jonaphrene had followed meticulously each instruction, but for the bringing of the muzzle loader, which was not in its place on the two iron nails above the front door, and which she did not spy in a quick sweep through the downstairs, and so she’d gone to the store, where she knew—or expected —there were rifles aplenty. Jonaphrene, struggling to comprehend a world no one would explain to her, had developed into a very literal-minded young woman—more literal-minded, in fact, than even her brother Thomas, who took all the world at its word. Matt hadn’t told her to bring Thomas, and so Jonaphrene had left him, running fast away from him across the field. Her sister had told her to hurry, and she had hurried, and yet when she couldn’t find the muzzle loader, it had seemed to her no betrayal or peculiarity to go to her uncle’s store. It had been, after all, Mewborn she’d been instructed to not let see the gun. Jonaphrene couldn’t hold within herself the division and loyalty Matt carried, because she did not understand it. She’d been taught words long ago about a dead mother she could not remember, had been told she must haul water from the creek when there was a perfectly good fount of well water a hundred yards across the pasture. To her mind it wasn’t betrayal to drink from her uncle’s well, to wear her cousins’ cast-off dresses, to go to Jessie and tell her she could not find the muzzle loader she was supposed to carry in Mewborn’s buggy to Cedar. It was Jessie who had lifted the shiny carbine rifle off the counter and handed it, wordlessly, to her niece.

  When Jonaphrene came to the junction of east-west crossroad hugging the train track, she halted the leather-trimmed buggy, climbed down with difficulty over the yellow wheelspokes in her ballooning volume of six overlayered skirts, and stood a moment looking west. She waited for the unfamiliar soreness to settle before she reached into the buggy and lifted out the carbine rifle and, holding it awkwardly before her in both hands, began to walk toward the depot along the bare rails. She walked slowly, stiff in the litheness of her limbs because of the violence of her fall: a girl of fifteen, beautiful, with no inkling of her own beauty but only an overweening self-consciousness that made her, even as she stepped along the crossties in a forced, uneven gait, believe there were eyes watching her from the houses on the far side of the road. She had no notion of the clownishness of her six layered skirts donned in lieu of petticoats, her face powdered with white flour, dusted on hurriedly in one quick, peering glance into the triangular piece of broken mirror wedged into a chink of log wall above her pallet in the dim upper room. She had no knowledge of the startling, nearly painful symmetry of form and bone and color beneath that flour-caked surface, the impossibly long fringe of lashes, straight, serge brown, above which the straight slash of brow seemed to give a scowl to the perfect features—a frown belied by the wide taking-in of the graygreen eyes, changing, transforming, shifting color as she walked, turning her head slowly, glancing self-consciously side to side at the invisible watchers she believed must be audience to her journey. For all the inward-turning of her awareness, she could have no idea of the strange juxtaposition on the creosote-blackened rails of girl and gun and awkward beauty, which alone would have captured all eyes to witness her part in the unfolding—had there been any human eye turned upon it.

  For not even Matt turned her head to witness; not even Thula Henry, who could have seen Jonaphrene from the moment the buggy turned the corner, had she not been so locked onto the thin figure kneeling on the wooden platform behind the depot. The Indian woman had been flung drowning into the place of her soul’s division, so that, watching in the harsh still glare of midafternoon sunlight, she saw not the bony nineteen-year-old in a man’s hat and breeches hunched behind the brick wall of the depot, but the f
ourteen-year-old walking from the east in the wanner light of midmorning, up the slope and into the clotted yard beside the log house, where she sat down on the dun grass and put her arm across the rolling back of the fat beagle: the fourteen-year-old Matt, thin, pale, parched-corn yellow, her hair pulled back tightly from her face in a leather thong at the base of her skull, and her eyes entirely empty. Thula’s fear was not dry now but a swamp like the black aimless sloughs of the Fourche Maline river bottoms, rising, changing, transforming solid earth to quagmire and bog.

  “Impashilup,” she said, out loud.

  John Lodi, emerging from the stable then, walked alone in the street toward his brother. He was not afraid, walked without anger even in that moment, but merely in weariness at the relentlessness of the trouble between them, which was not hatred, to John’s mind, but only the old tie of brotherness, raveled and worn raw by the chafing of Fayette’s sickness. He carried the seven-barreled pistol he’d taken off Fayette five hours earlier; he didn’t believe his brother meant to kill him—had not thought it five hours before, didn’t consider it now—but he carried the pepperbox anyway, as both pacifier and threat. He might hoist it and brandish it when the other began waving his guns around, or he’d offer to give it back to him as a sweetener to get his drunk brother to settle down. Even when Fayette, standing perfectly steady, apparently perfectly sober in the dirt street beside the blue roan, pulled the big four-barreled howdah from his waistband, John did not change expression or pause but came on at his steady, unchanging rhythm.

  It was in the soul of Fayette Lodi himself that the turning of the moment began. The man stood in the harsh sunlight manifest in the soiled flesh of his body, but his mind was locked away from that world in a darkened place, a cavern of pictures, words, imagined slights, and the profound, spitting, unsatisfiable outrage at what others had done to him. The words wrung themselves out in his shriveled being, inescapable: a ceaseless, monotonous rant against his sons who’d betrayed him with their worthlessness, against his wife who’d betrayed him with her lack of faith, against the community of Big Waddy Crossing which had betrayed him by not becoming the big town he’d wanted, against his partner Tanner who’d betrayed him by quitting him altogether. Above all, first and last, most ancient and new and forever, the litany belonged to the brother walking toward him on the dirt street, whose very skin and eyes and hair, whose very tilt of head and living bones were an effrontery to Fayette’s soul. He aimed to kill him. To kill him now in the final blasted outrage of his soul’s festering, or to die trying, or to do both. Fayette was perfectly calm, perfectly placid, as he raised the heavy muzzle of the howdah in the still sunlight.

  And the girl was with him. The two were joined as one—not yoked in a bonding as it existed between the two brothers, but as if their souls’ impermeable borders, having touched in the dark remains of the shed barn, must now merge with one another, overlapping, united in the void of consumed self never to be filled. And yet there was a difference: in the man the soulsickness was enlarged by the alchemy of whiskey past the certain sin of envy, beyond his first belief that his brother would forever have something he did not, into the pure unsatisfiable lust of hatred that made him aim the four-barreled howdah at his brother’s face and pull the trigger. But it was a separate cause whereby the girl Matt slowly squeezed the trigger of the twenty-two pistol a full heartbeat before the howdah’s first explosion—a full half second before her father fired the seven-barreled weapon at his brother’s forehead, just as Jonaphrene, the literal-minded and self-conscious Jonaphrene, raised the light carbine to her shoulder and, another heartbeat later, while her uncle turned in the still, cold light, falling, fired the shot that blew out his neck.

  She was coming behind me. I turned my head a little maybe, or I he was coming behind me. I turned my head a little maybe, or I didn’t turn it but only glanced over my shoulder with my eyes, or I don’t know what I did but I knew she was coming along the street, trailing me. I could see her skirt stirring little dustdevils, I could see the tiny, tiny cobwebs of hairs escaped out of her braid. I didn’t care. I crossed the road and went on, and I went up the little slope of bank to the tracks, the little embankment, a mild raised place of black cinders and dirt to hold the bed of rails, and the rails were shining dull in the sunlight but the crossties themselves were slag black, and I could smell the creosote and the iron leavings of trains that had passed and would pass over them, sparking steel, a splinter coming in my sole because I did not lift my foot high enough, and I didn’t care. I could see him pulling up on the reins, his shoulder raised, though the roan would have stopped if he’d only just let him, because that horse was spent. He stopped in front of the mercantile store this side of Dayberry’s, and I could hear the leather creak when he put the weight on his left side, put his drunken weight into the stirrup so that I hurried as fast as I might, I did not care about that splinter, though later when I took it out with Papa’s hunting knife it was three inches long. I hurried to the next building, the depot, to hide, and why, I don’t know, I don’t know that either, because I tell you I was not afraid.

  So he stood down, and I felt Thula crossing the empty road behind me, stirring dust, and I did not know her part in it, I didn’t believe she had a part in it, I couldn’t think that, she was not blood, not even half-blood, not any kin to me or my kin, and so she was like a spider in the road or an old terrapin, not even there for a witness because she would not see it any more than a terrapin would see it, and then I saw Papa. He was coming out the door of the stable, just walking out blinking a little in the light. I thought, He don’t know. He don’t even know Fayette means to kill him. I thought that so fast. Lightning. Faster than it could ever take now to say the words out loud. I just saw it in him, Papa, coming out of the dark square into the empty street with his hat on, and he had one of Fayette’s many-mouthed guns like it was just an old ancient thing that would go on forever in us, my uncle and his guns, that I could never find them all and drop them in creekwater, I could never uncover all the pieces of death he had stole and bought and bartered and garnered unto himself, nor ever bury them deep in the earth. There could be no pit of earth deep enough to take and keep all his guns. One would poke out or stick out somewhere, like bones buried too shallow that the dogs keep digging up, so I felt defeated, though I should have been glad my Papa was armed coming out into the street with his brother ready to kill him.

  The pistol was in my hand again. For a while, walking, it wasn’t, but there behind the depot it was again, the grip smooth and the keen weight of it balanced, and the back of my uncle’s head was only a couple of hundred feet away. And so I aimed again, pulled back the hammer, Papa walking in the still, bright daylight, and it was not to save Papa in that instant, though I have said for years that it was, because the black violence and rage in me was at Papa, there was no separation, Fayette’s hatred was mine in the gaping maw the vast open black emptiness so that I hated him with a lust of violence to KILL him to KILL him in outrage for the effrontery of his self to conflict with Myself and my self crying out to hurt, to kill that which would hurt would take from me rob me to leave me soulless barren and without, and it was not this joined portion of self I would kill but that other in the street coming as he had always come to rob me cross me deny me so that I fired as Fayette fired or before Fayette fired, the pistol making a fine sound an instant before the explosion from the mouth of the gun in Fayette’s hand, one barrel, and immediately the second barrel, Fayette’s aim going wild because he was already falling, because it was only accident or the hand of unseen forces that made the small neat twenty-two cartridge lodge in the back of my uncle’s skull on its way to Papa’s face.

  I didn’t know what the clamp was around me, the weight of something squeezing my arms and chest, tight, so tight to take my breath so that it was like the dream where I am locked in a corpse of body, the unwilling shell of body, paralyzed, that will not move, and I struggled to cry out because I could not breathe or move, thou
gh I saw Papa walking toward Fayette’s body in the dirt street with the gun in Papa’s hand hanging loose at his side, Fayette’s throat bleeding, the left side of his neck vanished where the red pulsed and spurted, and above his eyes the bone still showing white, a white visible sliver an instant before the red welled and drowned it, the red spurts from his throat becoming halfhearted, slower and weaker, and all of it clear before my eyes, going on forever, because I could not move, until the sound came when I knew it was not the dream but her holding me, Thula’s arms vised around my arms, pinning them, and the sound of her voice chanting, which I didn’t know what she was saying but I understood she was not talking to me because it was almost like her song when she smoked me, gave me the clay cup, but it was not that either. My strength returned then because I was not caught living in the dead unmovable shell of my body but only grasped around the chest by a little Indian woman of no strength, so I burst the clamp, raised both of my arms with all my power, twisting on the wooden platform to face her, twisting, breaking free, and she never hushed up chanting or praying, whatever she was saying, and the clamp was not on me, but in the next instant she had me by the wrists of both hands, pulling me along the platform on the track-side of the depot, pulling me, hard, fast, west along the platform, away from the center of town.