The Mercy Seat (10 page)

This is hard now. My memory is hard here.

You would think that day would be seared tight above all others and it was—it is—in the first part. That morning. But once Mama died, everything just runs together like dreams or what you remember from when you were very little, and all I can recollect are different parts and pieces: the stink of bear's head, the smell of blood in the clearing, that terrible groaning sound Papa made, children bawling. I remember the sun burning a hot circle on the top of my head. I remember flies everywhere buzzing, the chink of metal upon rock, rock and metal.

I have one picture of the man Misely bending over me, his eyes bright blue, his skin pale as soap. The cracks in his cheeks ran like wheelspokes in all directions. The yellow hair on his chest jumped up from between the buttons of his shirt collar, jumped up like corn shocks, touching his beard, his voice was burred and lilting, and I was thinking not of Grandpa Lodi but of corn people, of scarecrows, of the man Misely as a haunt made of cornsilk and shocks and hard little pale kernels, and he was telling me something I could not seem to hear. This was before he made me go in the lean-to to get Lyda. This was when I stood up once to go to my dead mama and Thomas fell off my lap.

I didn't know much of human death then, only Granny Lodi laid out on the bed at Grandpa's house in Kentucky when they took me in to see her, and her mouth and eyes were sunken and she so dried and old that her dying could not seem to matter. I never saw the twisted baby born between Jim Dee and Jonaphrene that died after two days, though I'd heard my cousin Melvina tell it in whispers in the dark beneath the covers and had taken the picture I saw when she told it as my own memory—but that, too, could not seem to matter, because that baby's head had been only the size of a possum's. Yes, I knew John Junior, I knew how he coughed and coughed and coughed until at last he shuddered and lifted up a little, rolled his eyes up a little, and then was small and dead and perfect. I knew John Junior, but at Mama's death I forgot him. What I believed of death then was something of smell and red violence. I'd helped at hog killing since I could remember, had shot and skinned squirrels, had wrung the necks and plucked the guts from the insides of chickens, had watched Papa shoot Sudie between her brown eyes. I'd seen and smelled the bear's head. I had a recognition for death, but to me it was not real unless the body was broken. I saw my mama dead on the pallet, and I knew she was dead, I understood it, but still I wanted to go to her because I thought I could touch her back to life. But the Miselys would not let me. And though they were good to us and though I don't know what would have happened without them, I hated them—truly hated them—for that.

I remember sunset, and I think it was the next day but it might have been the day after, and one of the whiteheaded boys came and hopped over the gate, panting, and said to his mama, “She won't come.”

I was sitting on the wagonseat where I'd climbed up because I could not abide to sit in the yard. Thomas was playing with my braids, pulling at them like reining horses. I wanted him to pull harder. I wanted him to pull till they would come off stinging in his fists. I was staring at that strange yellow twilight, looking up, my neck aching, at the strip of yellow sky streaked pink and mauve and crimson, long threads of clouds too pretty to look at, delicate, like somebody had painted them, and I was hating those clouds the way I hated the Miselys. Mama was under a mound under the pine tree up on the ridge. Papa was sitting beside her, quiet now, just sitting. I could see his outline darker against the dark hill rising above. The children were quiet in the yard.

The Misely boy shook his head, whispering to his mama. She looked up at me, and then back down at Lyda mewling in her lap. She was trying to get Lyda to drink from the cup again, but Lyda just kept crying and nuzzling the woman's chest, the cup milk running out sideways. Misely's wife surely didn't have any milk—her youngest was nearly as big as Jonaphrene—and I guess she never did have any such thing as a bottle and nipple because people didn't much have them back then and anyhow those Miselys were too poor. Lyda's crying was getting weaker and weaker, but I didn't care because Lyda was Mama's baby and I thought she might as well die too.

Misely's wife got up and came to me. She said, looking up at me, her face freckled like Mama's, “Martha—” and I hated that she called me by that name. “Martha,” she said, “we sent for someone to nurse the little one. We sent for somebody, we did, but she's not able to come.”

The woman's face was shut tight in the middle, and I knew she was worried, but I just looked at her and said finally to Thomas, “Quit that!” The woman stood in the yard, by the wagon. I looked at her, staring hard, full of hatred.

Little Jim Dee sidled up then. He stood close to the Misely woman, and then slowly, shyly, backed into her. That was his way with Mama, how he used to do with Mama, back his skinny behind into her skirts and lean against her where she was sitting. I was furious. I didn't know what to make of it. I hollered, “Jim Dee, get over here!” But Little Jim Dee didn't move. He just looked at me, big-eyed, filthy, his bony arms and legs still for once, his rusty fingers in his mouth. The woman touched the top of his head with her free hand. A look came over her. I don't know if I could name that look even now, but it was something like helplessness, something like sorrow, but it didn't belong to her. It wasn't like the grief was her own. She sighed and disentangled her skirt from Little Jim Dee. She went back to her son and bent down and talked in his ear.

The next day—this I know, it was the next day, because I remember Lyda screaming all through that night, her mewing cries grown fierce and hysterical, like she was being stuck on the inside with common pins—the next morning a colored woman came to the gate. She stood there, thin and silent, and waited for somebody to come open it for her. She had an infant slung sideways in a blue bandanna across her chest. I knew what she was there for. I'd never been around colored people because we lived far from town and we didn't have sharecroppers, but I knew of them in the same way you know about Indians and panthers and other things you don't hardly ever see. I knew she was a nigger woman, and she'd come to nurse my baby sister. I went to the gate and pulled it open. She never looked at me. She came in the yard and went straight to the lean-to where Lyda was yowling, and bent her neck and went inside.

In a short time the crying stopped. In a little while after that the woman Misely showed up and walked through the gate like it belonged to her and went to the lean-to and flipped back the doorway and disappeared in there in the dark.

 

 

We did not salt that bear carcass like Papa said. I don't know what became of it, if the Miselys went and got it or if it rotted in the sun, because no one ever mentioned it again. The dogs kept dragging the mauled head back into the yard to chew on it, and Misely or one of his boys would throw it back over the fence, and the dogs would find it and drag it back in, until finally somebody took it off into the woods and buried it, I guess. We lived on cornmeal and squash and sweet potatoes once the beans were gone, because Papa did not hunt at all now, and me, I didn't have time. The Misely woman came daily. I don't know how she got her own work done, unless her many whiteheaded children did it, because it seemed like she was always in our yard. She was strict on me, stricter than Mama ever thought about, and she made me wash the children, made me sew up the holes in their clothes. The colored woman came once in the morning, once in the evening. Lyda thrived on her and opened her gums laughing when she saw her, and I hid every time I could somewhere and watched.

Most usually the colored woman had her own baby with her, though sometimes she didn't, but either way it didn't matter. She'd take Lyda in her arms. She held her like she was nothing, like she was—I don't know. Like she was a part of her clothing or something. Not like she was anything bad, not like she was good, but like Lyda was just something the colored woman wore. Often she'd have her own baby and my sister together, one nursing from each breast.

I had a secret fear, and there was nobody to tell it to. I watched Lyda's mouth, pink and eager and hungry. I watched it open for the long brown breast coming to it, the dark nipple, almost black. I watched the woman's baby, his rounded cheeks, his lips soft and sweet like my sister's, but brown and not pink. I remembered how I had sat and watched Mama nurse Thomas, and John Junior before him, remembered Mama turning Thomas to the cup when Lyda was born, and I saw her nursing Lyda. I remembered how even when her face and hands turned brown from the sun, Mama's breasts remained white, blue-veined, her nipples large and pink and bumpy, how the color of Mama's nipple matched the color of Lyda's mouth when she opened and clamped over it. I thought my sister might turn brown from drinking from that woman.

At night I unwrapped Lyda, checked her soft folded places, looking for a change. But of course no change happened except how she got more and more attached to that colored woman and would smile with her two teeth and jerk her arms in the air when she saw her and cry whimpering when the woman handed her back to me and walked out the gate.

 

 

Papa was working fierce. If he worked fierce when we first got there to show Mama something, after she died he worked ten times more. He did not do smithwork, not even to shoe the mules hardly, but anything he could figure out how to carve from wood he would try. I thought he was still working to prove Mama something. It was like her presence hung over him, trying to make him show what he had done in the first place was right. The woman Misely said he was working his grief off, but I didn't think it.

He built furniture like he expected us to keep it, and for a time I thought maybe we'd stay in those mountains and never pack up again and head on. He built an oak bed frame that was too big for the wagon, that there was no place to put it and it stood out empty in the yard. He built little tables, some chairs, a new pie safe. He tended our puny crops, helped the man Misely harvest his own, and fished sometimes, though he never now hunted, and still came home at night and sat by the fire whittling pieces with his hands.

Little Jim Dee was getting terrible to handle. He was wild and rough, and there was a tension, a knotted hard thing, in his bony body that never would ease up, not even when he was sleeping. He'd hit me and Jonaphrene, and if I tried to make him do something, wash up like the Misely woman wanted, he'd pitch a fit and fall down yelling. I couldn't pick him up, he'd lay there dead weight, legs and arms kicking, hollering in the yard. I gave up on him. I wouldn't try to do anything with him, and if that Misely woman tried to make me, I'd say,
You
do it, and walk off.

Jonaphrene took up with the Misely woman's girls, but she was mean with them and would order them around, say, Stand there, Do this, when they played, and they would do it because she'd slap them if they acted like they had a mind of their own. I tried to keep a rein on my sister. I thought if we lost her the way we lost Jim Dee we might as well quit trying to be a family. But it wasn't easy with Jonaphrene, because she was like quicksilver, she'd run everywhere, be under your feet like a new pup one minute and completely disappear the next. She'd stay off and gone for hours. Sometimes she'd be sweet and helpful and smile to make your heart melt, and she looked so much like Mama. Other times she'd be a pure little snot. They all took it for granted that because there was no woman in the household, I was the woman, and it was up to me to do all woman things. I resented that sometimes, I hated it, really, because I would've rather been working with Papa, but I guess I didn't know any other way. And so I tried to rein in Jonaphrene, but it was hard.

Still yet—and this seems like the strange part, the way I remember it—still, I was more free than any time since we stopped there, and sometimes I'd just sit in the clearing and do nothing, just say Mama's memories to myself. Even with both Lyda and Thomas to change and look after now and every bit of the cooking to do, plus cleaning and washing and mending and trying to stay out of the way of that Misely woman, I still had time to just sit sometimes. Because Papa let me alone. He never asked me to go off with him or help him build things, never asked me for anything or hardly talked or looked at me either, and it might've been partly true what Misely's wife said, that he needed all that work to do to keep up his frenzy, but to me, what I knew was, with Mama gone, Papa had lost his need to make me his own.

 

 

One morning I woke up—it happened just that sudden—and the world had turned cold. Frost iced the top of the wagon where we slept, crimped the leaves brown, sparkled the sandstone. As soon as my eyes opened and I saw my breath in the dim light of the wagon, I remembered.

I began to search for Mama's tin box in secret. When Papa was off wherever he went to, I picked and pawed and pilfered through all Mama's things. Papa had never unpacked Mama's trunk or done anything with her clothes, and though the Misely woman hinted several times shouldn't he Rid Himself of Those Painful Reminders, Papa ignored her, and Mama's bonnet still hung by the tie straps from a nail next to the lean-to door. There came in those first cold days a driven secret thing inside me. Every time I was alone, I went in the lean-to and lifted the lid on Mama's trunk and pulled out her dresses, her undergarments, her embroidered pillowslips and linens. I patted them, crushed them between my fingers, as if that square box could be hidden in a small secret fold somewhere. I felt the sides of the trunk with the flat of my hand. I hunted with one ear cocked for the sound of Papa's dogs panting ahead of him into the clearing. If the Misely woman came in the yard, I hurried out in the daylight and got busy with Thomas, and when she was gone I'd duck back in the lean-to and search the same places again and again. I never doubted that box was somewhere in Mama's possessions. I thought there was just some tiny seam or corner I'd left untouched last time that would, this time, reveal Mama's secret to me.