The Mercy Seat (2 page)

I whispered to Thomas and slipped my arm from underneath him. My hand was asleep, tingling, buzzing on the inside like caught insects. Over my head the wood creaked in the loft bed. I pulled my finger loose from Thomas and wriggled out from under the feathertick, stood shivery and barelegged in my underslip on the cold floor. Thomas sighed and turned over. Jonaphrene rolled in sleeping to take my place.

I moved quickly over Mama's rag carpet and hunted in the dark until I found the iron poker. It stung cold in my hand like it would strip the skin back, and I traded hands, shifting it from one hand to the other while I poked the red embers. My hands and knees burned where I knelt on the cold hearthstones to blow. I picked sticks and twigs from the woodbox. The fire licked up yellow. I put two splits of kindling down crossways and stepped back to wait, dancing on the hearthstones, my arms wrapped around me. I thought then to run back to the bed and crawl under the covers, but the loft creaked again, and I waited by the fireplace, my breath small and smoky in the flickering light.

“Git dressed, Matt,” Papa said. He was standing at the foot of the ladder, stuffing his overshirt inside his pants. His face was ropy, saggy with shadows, and very, very still. I wanted to ask him how come we were getting up to start day in the middle of night—for it was night then, true night, not early dark morning like Mildred or some others would tell you—and I wanted to ask Papa, but his face would not let me. And anyhow, I knew. It was part of the same thing. What made Mama lie in bed crying. What made Papa stand on the porch with Uncle Fayette and Grandpa and Uncle Big Jim Dee, talking in low, tight voices late into the night. What brought the hard knot a while ago to come live in my chest. I went to the foot of the bed and reached under the covers to pull my dress and petticoat from beneath the cold footwarmer. I put my clothes on, watching Papa.

He crossed the house and bent to put one log only on the fire. Then he straightened and pulled his hat and coat from the peg. I thought he would tell me to start the fire in the cookstove. And then I remembered. I looked to the kitchen, where the empty stovepipe hung wedged from the ceiling, openmouthed, wrong-looking, emptying uselessly into empty air. Papa lifted the latch on the front door and went out.

I waited then. A long time. I remember. The house was quiet. Papa's fire burned blue at the bottom. After that long while, me waiting, Mama turned in the bed over my head.

“Mattie?” she called me. “Mattie? You awake? Mama needs you. Come up here a minute, hon.”

I climbed the ladder, my feet cold on the smooth logs. I could hardly see Mama in the heap of featherbed and covers. I couldn't see the new baby at all.

“Shhhhh,” Mama said. “Don't wake her. Listen. I need you to do something for me. Can you do something?”

I nodded.

She turned in the bed again, and a small sound, like a moan, slipped from her. She held out her hand. I could see the pale line of it, her narrow arm, standing out straight in the dark. I crossed the loft, shaking. The wood of the rafters brushed the light hairs on the top of my head. Mama's hand was warm, rough as cedar where I touched it, and then Mama wrapped her other hand around both our hands and pulled me toward her. “Listen,” she said. “I want you to get dressed.”

“I'm dressed, Mama.”

“Get dressed, Matt. Put your shoes on. Dress warm. I want you to do something for me. Go out back by the smokehouse. There's a blackgum. You know that old black tupelo tree? Look under it. Facing south. Scrape off the dirt there, you'll find something. It's not buried deep. It's just something, a tin box. I need that. Can you bring it to me?”

I nodded.

“Can you?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

Mama let go my hand then. “Hurry,” she said, and lay back, and the hurt sound came from her again. The new baby woke up crying. “Shhhh, shhhhh,” Mama said, turning, and the bedclothes rustled and whispered. The baby whimpered, grew quiet. I backed toward the ladder. The rafters tugged my hair the wrong way.

“Dress warm, Matt,” Mama said, as if she was sleepy. “Put my shawl on. Hurry, honey. And Mattie . . .” Real still then. “Don't let Papa see.” The bedclothes rustled once more and settled. Then there was just the soft suckling sound of the baby.

 

 

The slivered moon was high and small and very white in the night sky when I stepped out the door. Frost covered the ground, twinkling dark in the starlight. A harness jangled in the barn. The sound leapt at me frozen across the frozen yard, and I jumped. I wrapped Mama's shawl tight about me and edged around the side of the house, watching the thin line of light around the barn door. The knot in my chest burned hot-cold now, like the sting of the iron poker. I hurried. Behind the smokehouse I found the blackgum and knelt on the glinting earth. Frost held the dead leaves and dirt together in clumps where I scraped. My palms hurt. But, just like Mama told me, it was not buried deep. My palm brushed across cold metal, and I dug with my fingertips and found the edges of the tin box and lifted it. It was square and silver-colored and too burning cold to hold in my hands. I wanted to open it. I wanted to know what it was that Mama kept hidden. But the box was locked tight with frost, and it was secret. Something only for grown-ups to know, like their privacies, or babies dying, and it was cold and forbidden, and it belonged to my mama. I wrapped it inside the shawl and held it close to my chest, close to the burning hot-cold place, and the knot seemed to ease or to be sucked away from me, drawn by the cold metal. I hurried back to the house.

 

 

There were seven of us in the wagon. Little Jim Dee and Jonaphrene leaned against me on either side under the quilts. Thomas was in my lap. Mama and Papa were up front, and the new little one, and the air was still dark. Do you see? We had loaded the wagon, Papa'd hitched up the mules and we'd started, and the air was still dark. We'd left the chifforobe and the pie-safe. We'd left the oak frames of the two beds. Papa's big forge stood in the empty barn behind us, his bellows squeezed shut on the floor, but all the rest of it we had, and Bertha tied at the back, and her calf following, bawling. Papa's hunting dogs trotting beside. I was excited then, I'd forgotten everything, snug on the featherbed with the blankets and children. Forgotten then. But later I remembered.

The weather was changed, had gone strange, just since we'd started. In that short a time. I thought back later, and it seemed to me that the very breath of the world knew where we were going: it was not crisp, cold, and clear now, but wet, somehow warmer. I listened to the chickens cluck mildly in their crate tied to the back of the wagon, and once the old redheaded rooster crowed. I thought,
It's going to be dawn soon.
But the sky was thick black, and there was no moon now, no stars. The coal-oil lantern hung on a hook and made a yellow light pool around Papa. It dipped and swayed with the sway of the wagon.

And then there was another wagon behind us. I didn't know when it came, I was looking at the sky maybe, or talking to Thomas. But just at once I became aware of a creak and a jangle and the soft snuffle of horses in the roadway behind us. I couldn't see anything, but the sound followed, like a ghost wagon, clopping, creaking softly, hidden in the dark.

“Papa!” I whispered. “There's a wagon!”

“Yes, Matt,” Papa said. That was all.

 

 

Grandma Billie stood in the yard. Her eyes looked out at nothing. Mama stood in front of her, holding the baby. Papa stayed in the wagon and wouldn't let me or the children get down. “We don't have time!” he said. He sat facing front, his hat pulled over his forehead. He wouldn't look round when I said, “Just one little half minute? Papa? Can I, Papa?”

“Hush, Mattie,” was all he answered. His voice was harsh, but low and quiet, and it didn't sound like Papa. He did not look at Grandma Billie in her yard at all.

Grandma and Mama stood silent. The day was seeping gray then, opening thick and misty, with no streaks of pink in the dull sky behind us. The other wagon rolled in. I could see now. It was Uncle Fayette, Aunt Jessie, the six cousins. And all their belongings strapped and draped and dangling from the wagon. A new tarp puffed over the bed, rose up like a cloudbank against the gray sky.

A rooster crowed back somewhere behind Grandma's house, and then the old rooster in the crate started crowing and wouldn't let up. The sound of it shrieked and shrilled in my ears. Thomas laughed, and then his face fell together and he started crying.

“John!” Uncle Fay's voice came from the other wagon.

Then I heard Mama and Grandma talking. I couldn't hear the words for the riot of the roosters and Thomas bawling in my lap, just the high sound of Mama talking and Grandma's thin voice behind, and then I heard my mama say, “Mama!” and the two of them pushed fumbling together with the baby caught between them, and the baby started crying, the weak bumpy cry of a newborn, and the hard knot came back sudden inside my chest.

“Demaris!” Papa said.

Mama came toward us. She held the baby in the loose crook of her left arm. Her right hand was a fist pushed hard against the center of her chest. She climbed up beside Papa.

Papa clicked at the mules and turned their heads hard to the left and headed them out to the roadbed. Uncle Fay's wagon turned in behind us. I looked back to see Grandma Billie in her thin dress. Her eyes were empty circles looking after us.

T
he light was pale and sickly as we went south through Kentucky, through glittering gray fields with the frost stinging and once or twice snowfall. I didn't know when we left Kentucky. There was no mark on the earth that told us Now You Are Gone, only the hills that began to hump higher and rounder and closer together, and the dirt darkening deeper brown. I thought those hills were mountains, but Papa said no. His voice was like his own voice again, and that was another way I knew we were gone from Kentucky, though his face was yet sagging and still. He called me before first light every morning, and I cooked and we ate and loaded up all we'd unloaded the night before and went on. Mama swayed dull-eyed in the wagon beside Papa, and always her hand was in a tight fist between her breasts. She never spoke except to shush the new baby or tell me to come get Thomas. Papa hardly talked either, and because they were silent, the children were silent, and whole days we'd spend with no sound but the creak of the wagon and the chickens, Bertha's calf bawling, a squirrel scolding in a tree maybe if we passed under it. In the settled areas, dogs would start barking miles ahead of us, hearing the creak and groan of the wagon, and Dan and Ringo would bay an answer, and they'd keep that up, Papa's dogs and the unseen dogs of strangers, for a long time after we'd passed. We went fast through the towns. They were small brick and shakeboard towns, the streets in them muddy, the muffed women stopping in their big skirts on the wooden walks, staring, and the men inside the wide-open doors of the livery stables lifting their heads. We went through fast because the road did, but we didn't stop in them, not even to buy feed for the livestock. Uncle Fay would stop at a farmhouse sometimes when we saw one, or he'd send Caleb ahead on one of the team horses after we'd made camp of an evening, and when Papa called me before first light next morning, Bertha and old Sarn and Delia would have their big tongues to the earth, pulling into their mouths the clumps of hay spread on the sparkling ground.

In the same way that there was no sign when we left Kentucky, there was no single moment I can remember when we began to turn west, just the slow slide of sun to where it slanted left over the wagon in the daytime and hung a red ball in red sky before us at night. But it was after the sun moved and the land began to flatten and change that we started to come to the waters. Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins would have to wait for us by a river so we could all cross together, and then we would splash over the ford, the children wading in the icy water where it was shallow and the water swirling over the wheel rims and frothing and Mama's face going white. Sometimes if it was a small creek they would just go on over alone. They went faster in their spring wagon with Uncle Fay's horses and no cow to trail and Aunt Jessie never needing to stop and rest like our mama, so they kept getting farther and farther ahead of us, and we'd sometimes travel long after dark, with the lantern swaying yellow on the hook beside Papa, until we caught up with them camped by a creekbed and their supper already eaten and washed up after and the cousins asleep by the fire.

And then it would be the dark before first light again, and Papa would call me. I was young then, I was ten then, my life took on that rhythm. I cooked in the mornings and at night and washed up and set the children hunting firewood and tended Thomas, and when he crept to Mama and patted his hand on her breast and pulled at her, I took him away and gave him the sugartit and rocked him in my lap in the bed of the wagon. After a time I forgot to think about the homeplace in Logan County or the two little graves out back of the barn where John Junior and the dead baby between Jim Dee and Jonaphrene were buried, or Grandma Billie in her thin dress, or Grandpa Lodi's white eyebrows jumping and Uncle Big Jim Dee's eleven children who were also my cousins but whose faces I couldn't seem to keep separate or remember, and I forgot to think anything about my old life at all.

Mama didn't look back, but I did. Days we traveled I sat in the back of the wagon watching where we'd just been fall away backwards, retreating always behind us, but I didn't regret it or care about it because the rhythm of my life and my family's life was the slow rhythmic step of Papa's mules. We were seven in the wagon and our animals went with us, our belongings were covered and safe beneath the tarp Papa had rigged over us—all but the chifforobe and the pie safe and oak bed frames, and Papa had left those behind on purpose, so they could not matter—and our life journeyed one life together, and so I had no reason to question or care.