The Mercy Seat

by Rilla Askew

  He had to lay the pepperbox down in the street in order to use both hands, and as he lifted, the pennies slid off Fayette’s eyelids and plunked softly in the dust. Unseen by the deputy, the blue eyes slid partially open, and the townsmen standing nearest stirred uneasily, looked away from that empty gaze. Fayette’s head flopped sideways as if it could be wrenched from the trunk by no more than a light twist of the wrist, and Mitchelltree had to hold the skull up by the matted hair to keep the neck wound from gaping further. He grasped the left shoulder from beneath by one hand, hoisted the skull in the other as he scanned the wound; the deputy quickly saw what he looked for, was confirmed in what he’d suspected the minute he’d made that first swift appraisal of the body: the bullet that had made the neck wound was high caliber, high powered, and had come from behind.

  Or he thought so.

  It seemed so.

  But then, the ragged wound was tremendous, blood-covered, the flesh shredded and pulped mulberry where the blood had gushed from the pulverized artery. The shot could nearly as well have come from the front, or even, almost inconceivably, but not impossibly, from below. There was of course the option of hauling the body to Woolerton to be examined by Doc Boot for an opinion on the source’s direction, but that would have to wait until day after tomorrow, and by then the decomposition and smell would have set in. And then, too, there was the obvious choice to scout the area for the exploded cartridge, because clearly no .45 or .54 caliber cartridge was lodged in that gaping ragged mass of shredded flesh. But then Mitchelltree’s same dilemma of having to be two or three places at once: here, Woolerton, McAlester, Fort Smith—which was the consequence of the damn Congress and its incessant meddling in the jurisdiction and affairs of the Indian Nations—added its reckoning to his calculations. His casual, unruffled demeanor unchanged, Mitchelltree examined the neck wound without touching or probing, for even the hoisting of the body had made new pools of half-congealed blood ooze to the surface. But the old calculating thought process was firmly in place, and the deputy marshal weighed the evidence as he saw it in those few moments, giving credibility to one possibility, then another, trying to make up his mind what he thought.

  On the surface, Burden Mitchelltree kept always the calm, deliberate appearance that so infuriated some white men, drew respect from others, but in his mind he’d never changed from the essentially cautious, shrewdly calculating gambler he’d always been. It was only when he’d weighed his possibilities a dozen times and reached an ambivalent but final conclusion that he would burst forth with those abrupt, decisive gestures that some found galling. Just now, though, he was immersed in the weighing process, and he held himself still as a sunning lizard, eyes slitted, pondering, while the townspeople edged closer, trying to see what the deputy marshal was seeing in the exploded throat. The town’s secret mind knew that if the deputy was examining from the back, it was because he thought Fate Lodi had been shot from behind. With the same ease with which it had been persuaded by John Lodi’s implausible explanation, the town was now convinced that the dead man in the street had been shot in the back—and this without a word from the deputy, not even so much as a musing grunt. Craning, elbowing one another for position, they watched over Mitchelltree’s shoulder. None saw the small, neat hole in the back of Fayette’s skull, hidden as it was in the waste of blood and matted hair cradled in the deputy’s big hand; none, including the deputy, even entertained the possibility that there was a third wound, regardless of how many conflicting stories were already circulating about how many gunshots had been heard. The two apparent ones had been so clearly sufficient for the work.

  Lost in his unhurried deliberation, his narrowed eyes drawn by a flicker of movement, Mitchelltree glanced up to see the three young people emerge from the stable, the taller girl and hulking boy now on either side of the wiry figure in boy’s britches, their arms wrapped around each other as if to form a shield. They did not approach further but stood just outside the doorway. Watching them, watching in particular the small wiry one in the middle, whose yellow eyes glared at him now as they had in the sun’s dying flare on the ridge nine years before, Mitchelltree understood in a moment’s revelation why the younger girl had twisted around beneath the bone clamps of the elder’s fingers: if not for the dominance of her sister, the younger one would tell what she knew. The deputy recognized immediately the one he would have to cut out from the herd. But not here, not in the presence of the father, or the sister.

  Abruptly Mitchelltree made his decision, though he’d have to keep the man in custody until he could find an opportunity to speak to the girl. The deputy would have risen immediately and followed through with his habitual, unapologetic haste, if he’d not been holding the dead man’s head in his hands. With great gentleness, he eased the corpse back down, rubbed his bloodied palms against the dust of the street, clapped away the dirt. In one smooth decisive sweep then, Mitchelltree stood, scooped up the pepperbox, strode the few steps to his sorrel, untied the leather thong from the saddlebag, and placed the gun inside. He turned toward the stable just as the livery owner came out leading a pitiful-looking broken-down old white mare, saddled and bridled, with John Lodi following behind. Behind them came the Choctaw sheriff, smiling a wry smile that hardly touched his lips but made his obsidian eyes glint brightly in the ruddy light. They came on along the street, Dayberry scowling as he led the old mare, Lodi with his hat and a cotton jacket on, his face expressionless, and the half-grinning sheriff, followed at a slow distance by the three young people still linked arm in arm. Before they’d covered the fifty rods or so, the grin broke through on the sheriff ’s face, and then as quickly disappeared.

  “What time you say you got to be at Fort Smith tomorrow?” Moore asked when they’d drawn near enough that he did not have to shout. His tone was gravely serious, but the wryness still crinkled about the eyes. “Looks like you going to be riding about all night.”

  “What is this?” Mitchelltree said, and for one of the few times in his life, his smooth, decisive action petered away into an indecisive, flailing halt. He eyed the white mare.

  “This,” the livery owner answered, “is Vergie.”

  “And what, you don’t mind if I ask, you got a saddle on that piece of pitifulness for?”

  “You told me to give him a horse. All right, I give him one.”

  “That ain’t a horse, that’s a piece of dog meat or something. Give the man something he can ride or—” Mitchelltree suddenly turned to the crowd. “Anybody got a horse they care to rent and can get saddled quick? I ain’t got time to mess with this fool.”

  “He can ride that horse,” Dayberry said. “She’s done saved his life once this day, I reckon she can take him to meet his Maker.”

  Mitchelltree, unwilling to waste time and breath explaining he was taking John Lodi to Fort Smith not to stand trial but simply to keep him in custody till he could get him to McAlester, ignored the livery owner. He glanced at the blue roan in front of the mercantile, saw instantly that the animal was too ill-used to set out on a fifty-mile journey, and turned back to Moore, ready to make a deal with him. But the bright crinkling about the Choctaw man’s eyes, coupled with that too-serious expression, made him unwilling to ask the sheriff anything, and the frustrated deputy turned to face the crowd again. But the livery owner went on in his reedy voice, unstoppable:

  “You ast anybody in this town what happened ten o’clock this morning! Ast anybody. That durn Fate Lodi come in here on that blue pony armed to the teeth and soused to the gills. He stood right in the street yonder and gobbled like a turkey. What do you think he had his mind on, a nice little play party? He come down here to shoot his brother, and everybody in this town knows it—I don’t know why they got their durn tongues gummed to the roof of their mouth.” His eyes raked the little crowd of townsmen, turned, glaring, to the deputy again. “I had to come out here and use this poor old mare for a shield to see if I couldn’t talk some sense into him, which you can bet I could not. She s
erved that purpose good enough, I reckon she can take a man to his hanging, if you so all-fired sure you got to take him—because I never seen a man yet go to Hanging Judge Parker’s court and come home to talk about it—so if you ain’t going to listen to me when I tell you and tell you Fate Lodi was aiming to kill him, been looking to kill him the whole durn day, which I might’s well be talking to a pinestump, then you just go on and take him to Fort Smith then, but you needn’t get in such a damn hurry to get him there. Vergie’ll get him there plenty quick enough to suit me.” And the livery owner reached up and stroked the scraggly yellowed mane while he glared at the deputy, his chin lifted, blue eyes blazing, their brief moment of shared integrity, for Jim Dayberry’s part, now entirely a thing of the past.

  “Oh, for the love of—” Mitchelltree started, and then broke off. He turned his eyes to the north side of town, the far side of the railroad tracks, where the eyes of the townspeople were turned, focused on the new-looking flatbed wagon with two erect figures in it approaching in the distance.

  “Jiminy Christmas. Here he comes again,” a voice said behind him. “Going to be fireworks this time, you hide and watch.”

  “That ain’t him, that’s the other’n,” a second voice answered. “And one of them grown girls.”

  There was silence in the street a moment as the people watched north along the road.

  “No, sir. That’s that wild one, sure as I’m standing. Marshal, you better get your prisoner back in the stable if you want him strung together in one piece when he goes before Parker. That boy’s liable to tear him to pigfeed.”

  “That ain’t him, I tell you, it’s the other one.”

  “Which other one?”

  “One got him calmed down.”

  “Hunh. You want to call that calm. You hide and watch.”

  “Y’all hush. Who’s that coming behind ’em?”

  And the eyes of the townspeople and the liveryman and the sheriff and the U.S. deputy marshal all squinted through the coming dusk and rising dust at the buckboard clattering along behind the wagon.

  “That’s that Waddy preacher driving. Man alive, he made good time.”

  “What I tell you?” a voice whispered. “That’s the oldest boy in that wagon. Look there, he’s dressed common.”

  “Tell you one thing, I never seen the like of that other’n, swooping around here like a old tom turkey in hat and spurs. I thought they never were going to get him calmed down enough to get him back in that wagon. I thought we were just bound to have another killing before evening.”

  “Hnnnh. Ain’t evening yet.”

  “What I want to know, did that gun of Fate’s disappear before that wild boy left or after?”

  Silence a moment as the wagon neared the crossroad in front of the bank.

  “Oooh, Lord,” someone breathed.

  “That’s not no grown girl, now. Is it?”

  The three offspring of John Lodi did not look at the approaching vehicles but at their father, who stood with his head bowed, almost as if in prayer, so that he might not have to look at his dead brother; they did not see when the flatbed wagon, springs squeaking, box swaying, crossed the train tracks and came on, rolling to an easing stop a hundred feet above where the many denimed legs had shuffled and drawn closed in front of the body when the crowd saw, as one witness, that it was not one of the daughters in the wagon but the dead man’s wife seated on the spring seat beside her red-eyed son.

  “Somebody going to answer me that?” a voice hissed, insistent. “Anybody seen that four-barrel pistol since that wild one left?”

  “Hush. Hush, now. That’s his wife.”

  The Reverend Harland Peevyhouse drew up his sagging dray behind the wagon, holding one hand toward the crowd, palm out, straight in front of him, in a sign either of halt or of benediction, and a tall shaggy-headed big-shouldered man with deepset brown eyes and a face lined with a great sadness and compassion climbed down from the buckboard and walked front to where the widow had one foot already on the hub, and reached a steadying hand up to help her climb down.

  Caleb sat in the wagon, staring straight ahead, his mouth working. The preacher struggled to ease his considerable weight over the side of the buckboard as Jessie came wordlessly forward. She carried a shiny black patent-leather handbag snapped together in her two hands in front of her. She wore a new navy calico bonnet and a freshly starched white linen apron over her gray skirt. Her mouth was collapsed flat. The man with the sorrowful eyes followed a few steps behind her, his hat in his hands, his eyes averted from the place where the curtain of men’s legs had drawn together. With the continuing approach of the widow, the curtain parted again, and Fayette’s body was revealed in its grotesque distortion, for, despite the gentleness with which Mitchelltree had laid it back down, the examination had left the broken body more damaged. The head lay at a loose, impossible angle from the torso, the jelled blood welling from the neck and the sharded gash on the forehead; the right arm was twisted beneath, the left cocked peculiarly across the chest, and the half-opened eyes stared blindly at heaven, the mouth dumb and open, spilling blackness, like a ripped-open scarecrow, unstuffed and unstrung. The woman walked toward it as if it were no more than that: a lifeless replica of humanness, come undone.

  When she drew within a few yards of her husband, the women on the mercantile porch began to ease slowly forward, their faces shadowed in buckram, as the townsmen drifted south along the street. The men settled at a comfortable distance near the hitching rail between the mercantile and the livery barn, close enough not to miss any words spoken, far enough to get out of the way if bullets began to fly. But the woman neither spoke nor pulled a derringer pistol from that patent-leather pocketbook to turn it on John Lodi, as more than a few of the men watching thought and muttered among themselves that she would. Rather she looked calm and still at her husband for only a moment, turned her eyes then, not to the brother-in-law, who stood with his hat on, head down, eyes not meeting eyes, but to the tall pretty sister with the bruise darkening her cheek, leaking its livid color from beneath the flour coating: the one, as Burden Mitchelltree instantly noted, who would have released her voice from beneath the clamps of her sister’s fingers. He saw then, watching the strange yellow eyes of the elder as she stared at the woman, that both of John Lodi’s daughters knew the source of, were privy and party to, the shot that had blown out their uncle’s throat.

  He’d known. Of course he’d known; the fact had simply not pushed through the cacophony of thoughts crowding the deputy’s mind. The younger girl did not return her aunt’s stare—not, Mitchelltree saw, because she refused it, as the father with his head bowed refused all eyes, but because her slate gaze was too occupied, the graygreen lights beneath the serge fringe now flicking sideways toward the townsmen on her left, now darting up to the townswomen on the porch, back around self-consciously to the men again, to see if they were watching her. Still the deputy waited—that age-old biding of time that was both his gift and his torment, for it was in near paralysis sometimes that he waited, caught by that unrelenting need to weigh and balance and figure, as if, could he only know more facts, perceive a situation from more angles, he might in some way comprehend the incomprehensible, control what was entirely out of his hands. Just so Burd Mitchelltree tarried, watching from beneath his quiescent surface, waiting for the players to act.

  A wiry auburn-headed boy in a red knit cap, with the same fierce expression and clear blue eyes as his father, sidled up and stood at John Lodi’s elbow, but J. G. Dayberry did not growl at his son Grady to go home. The livery owner stood with a gnarled clutch of knuckles twined in the mare’s halter, the other hand on her yellowed muzzle, his scowling gaze focused protectively on his employee, standing slump-shouldered, head bowed, off to the left and a little in front of him. The Reverend Peevyhouse, alighted from the buckboard now, came waddling toward Jessie, dabbing behind his round spectacles with a white handkerchief, but the man with the sorrowful eyes took a step backwards
, reached a lanky arm out to the minister to keep him from going any farther, so that they stood then a few feet behind the widow, each on either side of her, connected by Otis Skeen’s staying arm. Angus Alford, his thumbs hooked in the galluses of his overalls, detached himself from the clutch of townsmen beside the hitching rail and moved up to where he could see better, and in a bit Field Tatum stepped down off the mercantile porch, edged slowly forward, the bonneted women following, whispering, behind him, as the town, entirely unconscious of itself, moved slowly to re-form its loose circle, its great misshapen hoop, with the Lodi children, their father and dead uncle and their aunt, with her calm eyes, in the middle.