The Mercy Seat (14 page)

More than once I thought of turning and running in the thick mist back up the track to our yard. I don't know what kept me there. I wish I did know. Maybe I just thought I had that job to do, I believe that's how I looked at it, and a job in front of you left no choice but to get it done. What I had to do was to hold still and wait for the light to break enough so that even in that fog on the mountain I could see where I was. In time—I don't know how long: same as distance and sound and space in that murkiness, time was distorted—but in time the fog began to lighten, and by this I do not mean that it got thinner but that it began to turn white. Sun was rising, and my heart lifted with the whitening, but it was not what I could see but what I heard that made me know I had not gone down the mountain far enough. I heard a dog scratching, his foot hitting the dirt
thuthuthuthuthut,
his ears flapping when he shook his head. I heard the
wssssk
of Papa's suspenders as he slid them up over his shirt. I had not gone far at all, only fifteen or twenty yards down the track maybe, and my heart, beating so fast already, beat even faster. Hurrying, so that the dogs might not smell me and start in to baying, but with all stealth and quietude so those old hound dogs might not hear me, I rushed down the mountain on the faint two-lane track.

 

 

I hid myself the good way I knew how from hunting with Papa, blended myself up close to an old pignut hickory and held still like a piece of the mountain, waiting patient and stony as you'd wait for a deer. I had that feeling, you know, that excitement, that breath-holding, keen-eared anticipation, and the blood pounding and the smell of mist and dead leaves and earth and fresh pine, but my hands felt too empty. I wished then I had Papa's muzzle loader. I believe to this day if I'd had Papa's gun with me I would have shot that woman when she first came out from between the trees and it all would've been different, but for some reason I never thought of Papa's gun when I set out to catch her but only the bear trap. The other trap, the smaller one Papa used for muskrats and beavers, I took only because I saw it on the ground next to the bear trap when I was sneaking it away from Papa's tools, but it was a good thing I took it, because no matter what strength and force I put to the bear trap, I could not pry the jaws open, though I tried till I sweated in the cool white fog and grew faint from the blood swelling behind my eyes. So I set the beaver trap, which took as much strength as I had anyhow, hurrying, the jaws big around as my thigh, and I covered it up with oak leaves on the pathway and moved back through the gauze and hid. The small clump of leaves was hardly visible, but I felt it, hot and cold, burning in the white mist like it belonged to me, and I watched that place on the track.

When it came to be full light, the fog thinned some and fell back gray. I could hear Little Jim Dee above the trickling sound of the water, yelling that rebel yell he'd made up or heard along the way in Tennessee someplace, and once I thought I heard Papa's voice calling me, but I shut my ears to it and it didn't last long, and then it was just the crows and jaybirds and water in the early morning, not so very cold on that morning but just damp and gray like always, and I could not see down the creekbed very far. The shag bark of that old hickory was rough at my breastbone, even through Mama's thick wool shawl. My toes ached from where they were curled under against themselves, but I would not move to try to ease it but only chastened myself for going barefoot all summer and letting my feet get too big.
Hold still, Hold still, Hold still,
I told myself over and over in my mind like a song. I bit down on the inside of my jaw to stop the ache in my toes from getting so bad as to make me shuffle in the dry fallen hickory. I knew how to wait quiet for quarry. That was one kind of waiting I could do. I'd learned that patience from Papa. You could never be a good hunter if you didn't know that.

The shush of dried yellow pine needles, the hush of brushed homespun on pine boughs came to me long before I saw her. Through some trick of the mountain the sound shuffled up from deep in the forest, whispering at the edges of creek sound because it was of such different nature, and I listened with my head cocked, my breath quickening. I told myself it might be a ground sparrow feeding in the fallen needles and pinecones, because her step was so light, but the soft rustling came steadily on toward the place where the trees opened to the water, until I knew it was her.

Oh, I itched for Papa's gun then, my hands nearly hurt with it. I was excited because it was so much like hunting—crouched, hiding, waiting the way you must do: watching downwind in stillness for the single creature you've watched for since first light, and the creature comes and your complete soul and breath focus upon it, and all there is in the world at that moment is you drawing aim on it to kill it, or not kill it if your aim is not right, and so there is always that turning moment, and all I felt at first, watching her dark shoulders and light headwrap emerge from the darker space between the trees, was that excitement and the ache in my hands. She walked straight up tall. She did not have her baby. She stepped on the track like a doe placing its careful foot so, and just so, and she did not look down at where her foot stepped but kept her neck and eyes and shoulders tilted up a little so she could see straight ahead up the track. I was above her on the mountain maybe fifty yards, and still she looked tall, and something in that woke me and scared me and also made me mad. I could not hear the whisper of her skirts now for the gurgling of the water, but I could see her shoulders rise and fall with her hard breathing on the climb in the gray mist, and it was that, the rise and fall of living breath beneath dark blueblack knitting, that made her real beyond real, beyond quarry, and I wanted to run.

It came on me that I was alone with the nigger witch woman in the mist on the mountain, that she could turn in any way her power upon me and I had not even my sister or my family's things or my mama's trunk to protect me, that I could not even scream in time to help myself because she was now but a few dozen yards below me, and I could not run because she would see me and rise up to swoop down upon me, and I could do nothing but hold myself stiller than still, not even to breathe. I watched her. On toward me she came, and still more toward the salvation pile of oak leaves. Nearer her foot stepped, now the other, nearer, nearer still. I cursed myself for stupid, more stupid than to wash quilts in the short damp days of autumn, to allow so much to chance. Her foot could so lightly and easily step over the little pile of oak leaves.

The iron trigger sounded
ping,
I heard it in the stillness, I did so, less than a fraction of an iota of a half breath of a second before the trap snapped loud once
—snaak!—
like the jaws of a snapper and the woman let out a terrible yell. Only that once she yelled out, one long low deep gut-scratching holler, and she dropped straight down like a rock, and then she was still. The crows and jaybirds were silent. The creek even it seemed in that moment hushed up, and all I could hear was a throbbing like the beat of blood in my ears. Without thinking, I don't know why, I still don't, I rushed from my hiding place beneath the hickory to where she sat on the rocky dirt track. I can't tell you what I meant to do, wrestle her down or help her or make sure she stayed hushed so Papa would not come—I don't know even if I had thoughts to do anything—but I covered those few steps over rocks and around brush in no time, and when I got there I stood above her on the track and just stared.

Her skirts were pulled up, her one bare brown leg sprawled out straight, the other bent toward her chest at the knee, and she held her right foot in her two hands. Blood poured from between her fingers and ran down off her wrists, and it was red, yes, but showed not so red against the dark of her skin. Where it looked red was where it fell on the dirt track. She looked up at me. Her face showed nothing. She didn't look scared, mad, hurt, surprised, nothing, she just looked up at me and matched me stare for stare. I could smell her blood then above the earth smell of damp leaves. I could smell rust. My mouth swelled up dry as cotton and I couldn't swallow. Everything rushed in me, time and my own blood and fear and sorrow, how I felt when I watched Papa smash open a mud turtle's shell one time with his hammer, beating it, soft thud and crack, till it died, because it ate the bait from his trot line—only the woman was not dead but just bleeding, and I knelt down beside her like this.

I said, “My papa says for you to quit.”

She stared at me a moment and then her eyes and attention dropped away as if my coming and kneeling and talking was no more interesting than the lighting of a moth that attracted her notice for a wing beat and then disappeared. She pulled a hand away from her foot and lifted her skirt edge and I could see all the way up her thigh, hard and dark and smooth as a buckeye, and she pressed the dust-colored homespun against the sole of her foot. I saw then that the trap had not caught her but bit her, had made a deep bloody gash in the back of the heel, and the bottom of her foot was lighter than the dark brown of the top part, and there were dark fissures and cracks all along the ridged tannish edge of her heel. I did not think about her being barefoot in November any more than you think about a deer or squirrel or rabbit going barefoot, but I did think then for some reason how tough her feet must be, like saddle leather, to walk all the time on those little sharp stones on the track. Her skirt soaked up red like a woman's blood rags, and when she pulled it back and dabbed a new piece I could see the bite from the trap was a deep triangle the same shape as the jaw's tooth, and the wedge gouged out of her skin was pale pink, and then it filled up red, and the red spilled out over and began to drip on the ground.

I slid my eyes away, up toward the rim of the hogback, where the sun had climbed over but had not the strength to do more than burn a bright coin in the day mist, and then I looked down at the matted tumble of leaves on the track. I did not care to witness further the little chunk of gouged flesh. I carried on talking, squatting on the track beside her, paying no more mind to her bleeding than you do to the wounds in a squirrel you are fixing to skin.

I said, “My papa said for me to tell you to quit. He don't aim for you to come up to our place not even one more time.” I picked up a stick and dug in the damp leaves. “My papa wants to know what way you been witching my sister.” I didn't look at her but stirred the leaves like cornmeal mush bubbling. “My papa wants to know what you aim to do with her. You ain't aiming to turn her into a nigger, are you?'Cause if you are, my papa says we'll just have to kill you. Here, this little trap here this morning”—I looked around for the trap, but I didn't see it—“that's just a warning. We didn't even aim to do no more than that,” and I pointed with my stick to her foot, but I still didn't look at her. I went back to stirring leaves and turned up a slug big around as my thumb and three times longer. I poked its rubbery back awhile, and the slug shrank up fatter and shorter and got real still. I jabbed its back, but the skin rolled. I kept jabbing until the stick went through finally, and I picked up the speared slug and flung it off the end of the stick toward the water. “Go on back down the mountain, hear?” I said. “Don't come back tomorrow. And don't you try witching her from down yonder, because . . .” and I could not think of a good threat, so I coughed the words down into faded nothing and smeared my stick around some more in the leaves. I started again. “My papa said for me to tell you he's going to take the muzzle loader after you next time. You hear?”

She made no more response than a tree stump.

“My papa
said,”
I said, and looked at her quickly, then back down at the leaves, and went back to poking them with my slime-smeared dirty stick. I shifted my weight on my haunches, scooted around some, still crouched and half sitting, and looked out over the creek. She was making me mad. “You hear?” Still she didn't answer me, and I was getting madder and madder, so I had to then, no matter the danger, I had to look at her.

Her eyes were straight on me. They were not white circles like moon rings but dark brown like blackstrap gone solid, nearly black. Her lips were the same dusk color as her baby's, the same smooth, the same big, they had the same little hitched-in dip at the top of them, but they were clamped tight over her teeth, you could see it, and beneath her skin, all along her jaw and under her eyes, the muscles shook. She held the skirt to her foot and looked at me, silent, and I could see tiny, tiny bumps along the broad, smooth side of her nose, her nostrils were flared wide open like a horse running, and all was different and changed in the gray daylight that bronzed the oak leaves and turned the dead pine needles bright orange in the track where they lay. The skin on the woman's face was not dark only but the color of deep rich cherrywood like the chifforobe Uncle Neeley made Mama, only it did not look hard like cherrywood but warm and smooth and soft, and I wanted to touch it. The feeling was strong in me, I knew she was witching me, same as she witched Lyda, but I could not make it stop. My hand just moved without my will or say-so, dropped the stick I was holding, and reached up toward her face.

The woman flinched and fell back like I'd hit her.

I heard a little
chink
sound and her shawl fell back open and her own hand came up in front of her face—this all in one movement, one moment—and I saw the pulse beating in her throat. She'd let go of her foot and it was bleeding all over the brown leaves in the pathway, and I saw then the trap lying snapped shut on the leaves where her skirts were, with a little red piece of her flesh in its mouth.

I don't know what happened.

She was too big then, too big on the pathway, she flinched away from me, huge, a grown-up, falling back away from me. She scared me worse than anything and I wanted to throttle her, I wanted to put my hands on her neck and choke her, and I wanted to run. I wanted to make her,
make her,
I was going to make her tell me, though I did not know what it was but I knew it was something, and I suddenly realized I was standing, that it was me taller than her now, but she did not flinch again nor look up but held herself still as God's breath, her foot bleeding, and she looked at the water gurgling and rushing down the hill.