The Mercy Seat (12 page)

I was trembling. I cannot tell you how it all swept me at once, my thoughts flapping like crows looking for something else I could order her to do because I wanted to say, Do this, nigger! and watch her do it, and at the same time hating her for how she'd witched Lyda to make her touch her like Mama, and I was frightened because I could not see why she did it, the woman clearly did not want my sister but held her like a feedsack, a lump of lye soap, a nothing, and that very idea scared me more than the witchery, and all at once I felt my brother Thomas beside me, how he used to feel, small in the featherbed beside me back home in Kentucky, how he'd put out his little palm toward me, sleeping, just to touch me, and I felt a pang for the way I used to be tender with Thomas and that pang started to swell so I had to push back at it, shove it down deep. I stood up.

“Lay her down!” I said. “You lay down my sister and get out of here!”

I couldn't stop my voice from shaking. I wanted to push her and her dark skin and stranger's smell out of my mama's lean-to, but I was too frightened to touch her, to even cross the little smoky space of distance between us. Her neck was still bent to me, and I watched her the way you'd watch a wild animal, like she might any moment jump and attack. Her skin and dark dress blended too much with the shake cedar behind her. I could not make out distinct lines, she seemed to just float in the darkness above Mama's quilts, but her head and neck I could see because of the light headwrap and collar. She was shaking, the same way I was shaking, and I suddenly thought if she spoke, her voice would tremble as mine trembled, but the woman did not speak. She slipped her finger in my sister's mouth, quick, trying to break her suck and peel her off the breast, but Lyda clung on. The woman pulled, her long finger wedged between the baby's lips and the nipple, till her titty stretched out from her chest like pulled taffy, and still Lyda would not let go. The woman made a little grunting sound, not the nose-blowing snort but something that came from her chest and sounded like stepped-on pain, and she jerked my sister off her tit like you'd pull a tick off your skin quick so as to not leave the head buried. Lyda balled up her fists and kicked and jerked her arms and started to wail. The woman paid her no more mind than a flea scratch, she just laid the baby down in the cradle, Lyda shrieking fit to burst, and stood up till her headwrap nearly touched the roof of the lean-to. Bending forward so she looked like a hunched-up old lady, though I knew that woman always walked standing straight up, she moved to the door opening.

“Wait!” I hollered at her, and I don't know why or where it came from, because I did want her out of there, wanted her gone from our lives forever, to quit singing below hearing, quit pushing back at me and smothering me with her dark invisible weight. But the word jumped out of my mouth, I think now maybe because I wanted to order her to do something else and watch her obey. I liked how that felt. Which she did, right as soon as I said it, she stopped close to the pink blanket over the doorway with her head bowed, her neck bent, and waited. Swooping and flapping, my mind hunted.

“Pick her up!” I said.

The woman hesitated, just a little bit, not even a breath's worth, but I was afraid she was going to quit doing what I told her and turn her witchery on me, and I shrank back against Mama's trunk, ready to scream worse than Lyda if she came toward me. But no, the woman turned smooth as lickins and stepped the step and a half across the empty space to Lyda's cradle and picked her up. She waited, holding my wailing sister. She didn't look at me, didn't put Lyda to her chest to try to hush her, but just grasped the baby around the middle under her jerking, flailing arms and held her straight out in front of her. Lyda kicked and cried, but she knew who had her and her cries tamped down some.

“Put her down,” I said. This time the woman didn't hesitate a little bit. She set Lyda back down in the cradle, and Lyda shrieked like I hadn't heard her shriek since the next night after Mama died. “All right, now,” I said. I could not get my voice to quit shaking. “You can pick her up.” The woman picked her up. “All right. Set down over yonder,” and I pointed to the quilt pile. The woman sat down with Lyda, still holding her like a piglet while Lyda hollered and kicked and squirmed. “Finish up,” I said, and I don't even know, really, how that woman heard me over Lyda bawling, but I guess she did because she opened up her shirtwaist and gave Lyda the titty, and Lyda immediately settled down and hushed up.

Many times I've thought of what happened next. I used to think I waited too long, kept my mouth shut too long and so did not keep up my power, or that I watched her too close and so allowed her to snag me. I didn't know how it happened, but before I could do anything to help it, my strength started waning. When I spoke, my voice came out paltry. “From here on out,” I whispered, “don't come back.”

She made no sign like she heard me.

“You hear me?”

Still no nod of the light headwrap, no bent neck, no answer. I wanted to tell her to do something else, I could feel that power draining and I did not know why. It was all drifting back, seeping back to what it had been when I first crawled into the lean-to, quiet but for Lyda sucking, and too dark and close and full of that woman and earth rot and the smell of Papa and the baby, and I thought it was because of how she nursed Lyda, I made that connection, and I knew she must stop. “Quit,” I whispered. She did not look up. The bones in my hips burned against Mama's trunk. I thought I would smother. “I mean it,” I said, louder, and I put my hand over my nose and mouth and said through my clamped fingers, “Quit doing what it is you been doing to my sister, quit nursing her, quit witching her, after this morning, I mean it, you hear me, don't you never come back.”

Her head lifted, and she looked at me. “Miz Misely say that?”

“I
say it.”

“Miz Misely say it?”

“No, Miz Misely don't say it! She's not our mother, she don't have no say-so. Me,
I'm
telling you. Don't come back.” My words were strong, my voice thin as water and I couldn't help it. I pushed the words out squeaking into the choking air.
“I'm
going to take care of my sister.” I meant it. I believed it. The woman snorted.

“Feed her with two little titties like acorns, unh-huh, fatten her on dog's milk an' cornpone an' field peas till she swell up and bust.” The woman laughed. She looked at me and held me to the trunk with her white circles of eyes like moon rings, and she started to whisper: “Tell him, child, y'all don' need me, you tell him, he ain' about to let me, she too big, you tell him,” and she went on telling me to tell him, and I didn't know what it was. Mama's trunk burned against me and the burning licked up hard in my bones, the room swelled, going dark, and darker, until I saw something and it was color, and the color was red and then blueblack and then whiteness, and then it was a white man in a dress coat on a street corner and I did not know why he was a white man and not just a man with a watch and a yellow mustache and red suspenders beneath his coat, and the white man pulled the watch fob from his pocket and looked at it and clicked it shut and slid it into the slit of pocket at the side of his suspender clasp, and the pants he wore were striped. Shifted, and I saw a little boy, and then a girl child, and their skins were dark like deep winter earth, and they chased each other in sweaty light, and a different girl then, her skin red as copper, her hair red, but she was a nigger, and she jumped from a yellow clay bank into brown water flowing thick and slow as blackstrap, she grabbed for a knotted rope thick as a fist, a long dangling hair rope trailing in the water from a tree limb, and the girl missed the rope so that the oozing water carried her on down, on down in the slow seeping brown, her red nappy head shining like a scuffed penny in easing molasses, and she changed and became smell, became smell only, I could not see anything, all dark, and this smell was the smell of mother, not Mama but
MOTHER,
like sweet sweat and skin and milk, and I began to weep and tremble until the light came again, became form and shape and color, and I heard a child crying and the child was me and not me crying but the grief filled my chest, filled my throat until I thought I would choke down smothered and burning, until I thought I would die from it, I tried to twist free. The earth held me, the way your foot feels sucked tight in mud, sucked down tighter and tighter, and the smell became dank rot of earth lain too long under water, became clay, became fathomless soft silt on a silken river bottom and I twisted, I cried out, but I could not pull free.

I was not dreaming. My bones burned against Mama's trunk, and I could feel it. I could taste copper or iron or some harsh taste in my mouth beneath that morning's burnt-corn coffee. I could feel the dank weight of my braids on my back. It was still me, Matt, there—but it was that colored woman's memory. I believed she was witching me, holding me spellcast, as she held my sister in her arms spellcast, because there in the choking smell of her and Papa and Lyda, who was Mama's last baby, who was Mama's last remnant of soul on earth, the woman took me inside her. I saw it. I heard it. I smelled it, these things I have told you, and I could not make it stop. I cried out, but my tongue did not make any sound. When I came to the light again, Lyda was asleep in her cradle, and the colored woman was gone.

I stood up from Mama's trunk. I didn't know how long it had been—a little while or maybe hours. I felt my legs would buckle and fold under me, the muscles trembling, like Papa on the frozen earth after the ice storm, his legs and arms twitching as he lay on his back. I looked at Lyda sleeping with her thumb in her mouth, and then I went slowly, shuffling in the moist dirt, to the door of the lean-to and looked out. Jonaphrene was at the campfire, putting sticks on, and the smoke was billowing up thick and white because the wood was too damp. I could hear Thomas crying in the wagon. I didn't see Little Jim Dee, didn't see Papa, but I knew it had been a long time, because Jonaphrene was trying to build up the fire to cook. I looked at my thin, tangle-headed sister putting wet sticks on the campfire, and the fear choked up hard in me, so that I had to holler, “Sister! Quit that! Go get Thomas and hush him! He's going to wake the baby up!”

And Lyda did wake then and set in to bawling—not from Thomas, I know, but from me hollering in the door of the lean-to—but it was all right. I turned and went to her, and picked her up to hold her and hush her. I knew it was going to be all right then, because when I watched Jonaphrene stand up from the fire and push a snarl of hair out of her eyes and blink in the smoke at me an instant before she turned and went to the wagon, I made my mind up.

I
didn't care that it was coming on winter. Such a condition meant nothing to me. My mind was made up already. We had to go on. In myself there was one purpose only to all action and judgment—I had to get my family out of those mountains and on down to Eye Tee, because all was changed in the ways I saw Eye Tee, because what had been dread and void and terror in front of me became, in that time in the mountains, a place to flee to, because what was there in those mountains was too mysterious, too terrible to fight.

I began to work upon Papa.

In the beginning I thought it could be done with lies and questions, and I did so, in the early dark evening when he sat with his plate by the fire for moments, only still for those few eating moments, before he hunked into the lean-to and did not come out again until first light.

I said, Papa, that Misely woman pinched Jonaphrene today (and it was not the woman Misely but me who pinched Jonaphrene to make her hush and sit still and peel the damn potatoes). I said, Papa, Little Jim Dee hit Thomas this morning, hauled off for no reason and walloped him right off the stump (and that was true, because Jim Dee was getting rough as a cob and too mean to handle and we all knew it and stayed out of his way when we could). I said, Papa, how far is it to Eye Tee? Not far, is it? Two days on horseback? A week's ride in the wagon? It ain't far, is it? Them Miselys said it ain't so very far. I said, Papa, Uncle Fayette's waiting for us, you reckon? You reckon Uncle Fay's got us a house built already? Papa, that colored woman says she's going to quit coming to feed Lyda (oh, not true, that one, and I would not ever tell my papa the truth about Lyda and the colored woman, but to tell that lie, the urgency to hurry up and get past it would come on me so bad I'd have to put my hand on my chest to hold down the pounding). Said, Papa, the baby's acting poorly, what are we going to feed the baby with the cow dead when that colored woman won't come?

Could've told it to the tree stump, any lie or question, and it would've done the same amount of good. He couldn't hear me because he'd already quit us. You just couldn't see it. So I went around another way. I worked and prepared everything in secret from Papa, or tried to, but I was young and stupid and it was late in the year. One thing I remember, I dragged the quilts and blankets from the wagon one morning and washed them in the creek and hung them in the narrow strip of sunlight to dry. That was stupid—I told myself afterwards it was stupid, though I never let on a bit to anyone else—because it was already deep autumn, the sun was feeble as an old woman, it stayed too short a time overhead, and the air was so cold most mornings you could see your breath in it. That night we slept tight and shivering, all of us snugged up close together, and Jonaphrene whined till I pinched her and whispered in my teeth the Injins were going to get her if she didn't shut up. Our covers were still hanging outside on the line. That night the fog came and danked them down worse, but I didn't let that miscalculation stop me. I just went on.

I packed whatever I could find to pack and put it away in the wagon. I kept Jonaphrene with me working and threatened Little Jim Dee we would leave him if he didn't stay close by. I'd told the children we were going on to Eye Tee any day now, any minute, and so they had that excitement in them and it carried all through the camp. Even Thomas was stirred up, though of course he was too little to understand Eye Tee, but he followed me around talking that language he talked all the time then, and he'd try to do whatever I was doing and I'd have to slap his hands to keep him from trying to help. I hoarded food from the woman Misely and lied to her and said the field peas were all gone, we'd used up the cornmeal, was there any potatoes left? and on and on such.