The Mercy Seat (16 page)

I
t was Jonaphrene found me. Maybe I slept, I don't know. I know it was much later, deep morning or after, because the sun was warm upon my back, slanting deep. I know when she came my chest still had the shudders that would not stop or slow, that I could not control or push down, and I wanted to push them down, I wanted to make them quit. I did not want Jonaphrene to see. But she did see.

“Mattie?” she said. I could hear it in her voice, how scared she was. My face was down still, hidden in the hoop of my arms, and I would not look. “Mattie? You hurt?” And she kept crouched there beside me, I could feel her, close, her smell and breathing, her voice small, saying, “Mattie? Mattie?” again and again. Then she touched me, her hand on my back, patting me the way I would pat Thomas to make him go to sleep at night, my little sister patting me like I was the little child, and my chest was shuddering, I couldn't quit, and it made me mad so that I rolled over and sat up and said, “Leave me alone!”

But it was too late. My sister was with me already. She was in me. She'd found me and witnessed me, and she would not let go of me, nor could she, because she did not have any choice, none of us did, ever, and so I said to her, furious because I could not make the shudders stop and so the words came out cut and weak and ragged, “Don't—te-tell—him!”

She shook her head, her eyes huge, their miraculous color more gray than green then, and she whispered back, solemn, “I won't.” She never asked a word but just watched me, squatting upon the ground with her skirt in the dirt and her knees high beneath her chin, her arms wrapped around them, her hair haloed out like an angel's but snarled and dark brown, until I chewed the inside of my jaw hard enough to make the shudders go slow and slower, getting farther between until they were eased almost gone. I felt tired. I felt I could lay back down in the track again and go to sleep forever. Jonaphrene said, “Know what? Papa's loading the wagon.” She nodded her head. “He is.”

It took some little while for me to hear her. No, I heard her, but I could not make the words make sense to me, but she went on, chattering, like it was any day or every day, except how big her eyes were, how she never took them off my face.

“He sent me to fetch you. He's plenty mad, you better watch out. We ain't any of us had breakfast and it's already 'most time for dinner, the woman never come to feed Lyda neither and she's bawling—hear her? sounds like she's fixing to bust—and Papa cain't leave her inside, he's loading everything in. He went to catch up Delia but she won't let him, she run off in the brushes and he had to just quit and go to stacking the wagon—I think that's partly how come him to be so mad. I told him what you told me to tell him, you went hunting muscadines, but he don't care. He might lick you anyhow. I never seen him so mad.”

Her eyes were big and scared for me, and I turned away, not to see it, because I had enough already to carry for the rest of them. I did not want to be connected up with my sister. I would have pinched her or something, but I just felt too tired. I said, “Did Papa put in Mama's trunk?”

She nodded. I went down the list, all I'd made up in my mind to carry with us to Eye Tee, and I felt so bonesick and weary then till I was relieved—but only right then, because later I got mad about it—but right then I was glad Papa was taking up to do all my tasks and chores and last bits of packing like he'd meant to do it all along. I never for one second questioned why he all of a sudden was ready to head on to Eye Tee, right then, on that very same November morning. I believed I'd broken the colored woman's spell. It was the most natural thing in the world to me, when I stood up finally and brushed myself off and climbed with Jonaphrene the last hundred yards of track to the clearing, to see Thomas's hands filthy in the cold campfire and his mouth black with soot and Little Jim Dee running through the yard yelling and shooting a stick at Ringo and Ringo chasing him and baying and Lyda shrieking on the pallet and old Sarn nodding in the harness and Papa loading his pickaxe and shovel under the seatbox like it was his own idea.

 

 

The clearing stood empty and full behind us. I saw it when we turned—the rail fence crosshatched useless around bright air and Papa's grief furniture, the lean-to pulled loose and left tipped broken upon its side. Mama's bonnet lay crumpled half beneath it, but I didn't tell. I did not want to say anything to get Papa's notice. He didn't lick me—he never licked any of us, only Jim Dee—but he was gruff and disgusted and in a hurry, and it was the same hurry as the night we left Kentucky. We went fast, as fast as we dared to and not run up on the mules' haunches, going down, me up front beside Papa, holding Lyda, and Thomas bawling inside the wagon, and the wagon creaking and swaying like it would shake apart going down the worn track in the filtering sunlight toward the pine woods.

This was all the same day.

I did not see the beaver trap nor the pile of oak leaves nor the bear trap nor the colored woman nor her blood, though I did look, but there was nothing. I had not really expected there would be.

The pine woods were dark, they rose up around us and bowed closed overhead. Tall. The smell of turpentine stinging. The afternoon sunlight shut off like a light turned out. I was not afraid. My heart was lifted, I was light in my body, the gray weight raised off me even in the darkness of the pine woods because we were
going,
and the going was the good thing. I crooked my head back, jouncing, trying to hold it steady to look at the brightness of light, the piercing sky, high up through the treetops. The deep part of the woods was only a ways anyhow, as I'd known in my secret heart it would be, if only I'd been able to believe it, because we passed through them and out in a short time, going so fast, the mules clopping like horses, and they were poor, the skin sagging on bones, like us all, even Ringo, but the wagon was light. We were fleeing Satan's Army and so I carried myself steady, I was glad, holding Lyda, and I did not look back at the children, though their faces swayed and bounced behind me, peeking out. We came then—and this quickly, this no more than a mile past the deep edge of the pine woods—to the Misely place.

I knew it from afar off, though I'd never seen it, because even from a way up the track I could see the blond Misely dozen-or-more children running, sitting, standing, leaning all about the porch and the dogtrot and the yard. We came fast. Papa stopped the team and got down to go speak to the man Misely. The woman Misely came out one of the doors then, her hands in her apron. She came and stood on the ground close by the wagon, frowning up, her eyes on the baby. Lyda was not crying but sitting up in my lap, watching, and she liked the going in the wagon, you could tell. She was getting so big then, she was already nearly as big as Thomas, and her hair was coming in.

The woman said, “Your father sent word on, I guess. It's better, isn't it?”

Frowning, that troubled look upon her, and she went on, her eyes sweeping from Lyda to me to the children's dirty faces poking out from the wagon flaps, and around again to Lyda, talking to herself.

“. . . before winter sets in? Your aunt's waiting for you, I guess you'uns need to get on?”

Wiping her hand in her apron and frowning in the sunlight and the sun edging down now so the air had that blue November tinge.

I felt strange. I'd never in my life had a grown-up talk to me in questions. I wanted to go. But I would not, could not, call Papa. It did not matter anyhow, because just in a minute he came on and before he'd finished climbing up hardly, the woman sent one of the boys into the smokehouse and he came running out with a little slab of salt pork, and she took it from him and handed it up. It was slippery when I took it, but I didn't think to do anything but just take it and hold it. Lyda bent down and put her mouth on it to suck it, her spit running down my wrist and the greasy salt smell stabbing my throat and empty belly.

Just like Uncle Fay said—and the truth of this galled me, oh, it galled me, for him to be right—it was not so very far. We drove down and down a ways, bumping and shaking, Papa pulling back on the brake to not over-run the mules and at the same time hyahing them on fast. And then not long—it was not the same day, for we left in the deep afternoon and camped on a slope at pure dark, but the next one, late the next morning—we came to a place low on the mountain where the faint two-lane track met up with a deeply rutted, hard-packed wagon road running east and west. We turned onto it, and it snaked low between mountains, going west.

We are given signs, and we do not know them.

I was looking at everything, everything, but what I should have. In the beginning I held my head tipped back, looking up. You will not credit it, that I could have forgot sky, but I did so. We lived in those mountains most seven months, and that is all the time it took for my soul to forget sky. And we came down and the world opened out, the mountains peeled back away from us like ripe edges of plum quartered and falling away from the pit, and above us the sky opened, the pale, washed November sky, and all of me lifted toward it. I wanted to shout almost. I wanted to sing. And in that I knew what it was in my mama.

This part is hard to explain.

I was not
in
her, as I had once been in her. I could not be. My mama was dead. But coming down from the mountains I understood what it was in her—and this for the first time, and this in my mind and being, not from inside her as I was on the day she died—I knew the hurt she held in her cavity twisted tight in the dark. The long valley we went through, the sweep and roll and breadth of it, was some like Kentucky, the sky was like Kentucky, and always the moon. I'd forgot even the moon in such little time, because it is not moon that molds night in the mountains—shadows do, and sound, the life of trees and the animals—and so I'd forgot to even know it.

But no. The moon was mine. I don't want to misremember.

It was not the waxing half-moon that made me think of Mama but the escape of gray rolling-away land and farms and fields in the daylight, all mixed in with trees, yes, more trees than back home in Kentucky, but they were unclothed at the approach of winter, and still you could see. The land was settled. It was tamed, mostly. There were farms with smoke rising and crops plowed under to wait through winter, the earth split open and brown. To the north and the south purple mountains humped on the horizon, but near us the grasses in the field were orange and the stumps of bushes dark brown, the daylight gray, the air and distant slopes and sky blue, and the earth, all of it, was blue and gray and brown except for the orange grasses and, dotted on the hills, the deep green of pine, and these were the colors back home in late autumn. The same. My heart pounded so fierce every minute, us going fast and the pain of Mama in me, her sickness for home, and sometimes it would rise up in me a little as if it were my own because this place did look like back home in Kentucky, but it would fade again, because it was not for me to long backwards but only Mama. My job was to honor it for her, that was all.

Four months. She'd been dead four months then. It seemed like forever.

And I knew, or I believed I knew, that if she'd only lived a little while longer, if we'd just gone on a little longer and not camped in the jagged dark of those mountains, if Papa had listened to Uncle Fay about how it was just over the next hogback and down, or if he had not listened to him about turning south away from Fort Smith to sneak into Eye Tee, or if we'd never left Kentucky, or if only, if only, if only there'd been a doctor, if only Mama had understood we would come down again to opening-out land that was some like Kentucky, if only any one other thing had been different, my mama might could have lived. And I knew, or I believed I knew, that if she'd lived long enough to see sky and fields again and smoke rising, she would have stayed with us. I believed I ought to have been able to tell her, and so the sore of her dying woke up again and I couldn't stop it or heal it, and us going so fast, and I just held on to Lyda, up front, beside Papa, and looked out around us to open land like I was looking for Mama, like I was being Mama, to look through her eyes, and this is what I was doing and how come I never saw the moon waxing ragged-edged in daylight's washed skies, or heard the whippoorwills crying at night in almost-winter when they should have been gone, or noticed the red mark like a mask upon Thomas's face.

 

 

We crossed over into Eye Tee in the depths and blue brightness of a full-moon night. This is how Papa did, wordless, and the mules hitched at midnight, going on. This is how he did all the time, driven by demons, and Papa's demons were his own, which I know now, but then I thought they were the ones behind all of us, the ones belonging to the colored woman, who was now like a haunt to me but faint and past, without power no more.

I did not know why my papa was driven. He was silent. I was so far outside him. I thought maybe it was all in his mind. I believed I had vanquished the power of Satan's Army, and so I thought Papa was only imagining and he would be comforted later, when he at last understood. I could hear him on the ground by the fire when we camped in the night. He would talk to himself, talk to himself, all night in dreams, and then, snorting a ragged breath almost like snoring, but mean, threatful, like a furious bull, he'd let go a sound. A terrible explosion in the night. Once, I heard him get up from that sound and walk off from camp—and this deep, deep in the night—and when I woke up at first light his blanket was in a loose pile on the sparkling earth. I thought he might not come back to us, but he did, appearing at dawn from nowhere, it seemed like, his face thin and weary, sagging like our poor animals' loose skins. We were driving hard west by full light. He didn't whip Sarn and Delia, but his reins shook constantly on their backs, and his dogs ran with us, and it was as if the animals were driven too, not by Papa but by Papa's own demons. And so the night we crossed into the Territory he arose from the fire and hitched the team and they didn't even shake their long ears to complain. He did not reach in to wake me, but I wasn't sleeping anyhow, the blue night too bright and the blood coursing in me like three cups of coffee, though no real coffee had passed my lips in months.