The Mercy Seat (20 page)

The female cousins jostled and talked on the far side of the room. Their backs were turned again, they'd returned to the task of cooking, Mildred's arm elongated where she stretched it out to turn the fat-spitting meat in the frying pan, and the others shoving their elbows to try to stir the beans or the turnips, but Mattie could see them just as well; she knew them, the three eldest all brown-headed and freckled and nearly the same size, and the least one, little pale Pearline.
Half-blood,
she thought. It was nearly a snort in her silence, an unsounded laugh, because it freed her, knowing that they were not like her, their mama was not her Mama, and she was bound to them no more than half. The six cousins, male and female, receded to their place of no importance, no more worth her notice than her uncle's coon hounds in the yard. Papa and Fayette were talking at the table, but still Mattie did not look at them. She would not look at her father. Suddenly a new thought came to her, chilling her, wiping away her contempt, turning her legs and shoulders shivering like the fire of the fever. She began to tremble on the hearthstone.

Her father said, “Matt, get up from yonder if you're cold. Wrap up in the quilt.”

She could feel him turned toward her. She didn't move or answer. Her eyes were on the four trousered pairs of legs under the table, crowded in the dark with the many chair legs and the lone dark hoop of flour keg. She thought the words again, and she pushed them away, but still they came back to her:

Papa is only half blood,
the words said.

Mattie looked to the pallet. Thomas was sleeping, his tongue bulging pink between his lips. Jim Dee and Jonaphrene were sitting close together, the boy fidgeting, picking at the cotton batting leaking from a torn seam in the pallet quilt, his legs twitching.

We are the only ones equal from Mama and Papa both together. Only us. No!
(She would not think about Lyda. She shut the picture of the baby lifted away by brown hands, the tiny legs dangling, legs sticks of bones nearly, and dead. She shut it.)
My two brothers, my sister, they are the only others the same as me,
she thought.
It is us. We four together. Only us who have Mama's blood now.

She watched Jim Dee lean over and pick at Jonaphrene's nightgown, Pearline's summer gown they'd put on her. He plucked at the muslin hem, tugging lightly, and Jonaphrene ignored him, and then he pulled her sleeve, and Jonaphrene said, “Quit!” The boy climbed into a crouch, ready to spring, to jump, to do something, and Mattie knew he would get up in a minute. He would have to. His skin itched deep to the bone. He would get up and go to the rest of them, the half-blood and no-blood, and Papa would growl at him, yes, but only a little, and Fayette would say, “Have a seat, son,” and Fowler would turn his fierce scowl upon him, and Jim Dee would get his place at the table on an old flour keg or firkin, but Mattie knew he would not be able to sit there. He would get up again and roam the room and poke into things until Jessie would holler, “For the love of Pete, child, can't you for one minute be still!” And he would sit a while longer, and then he would be gone. He was her brother. She struggled a long time. But she knew she could not keep a rein on him, never would she be able to hold him, and so she let him go finally—though he had not jumped yet, though it would be years yet, she didn't know how long—but she could feel it: that it was only time and a little of what Jim Dee didn't know yet that kept him with them, his taut muscles trembling beneath his pale limbs.

She had to keep Jonaphrene. Jonaphrene and Thomas. Mattie knew it, looking at the sleeping toddler with his tongue bulging and her sister wrapped inside the sheath of summer gown like a cocoon she'd tried to spin round herself because there was no one to put a shawl on her shoulders or a quilt. Even with her hair gone, Jonaphrene was the exact image of Mama—but for her eyes, which were the gray-green of Papa's, lined in a thick fringe of straight, dark lashes.
Jonaphrene is Mama's. (Not Lyda!) Jonaphrene is Mama's own child in Mama's image, as I am, for how Mama claimed me.
Mattie felt her mother again, not as a hand upon her but as a presence, the way she'd felt her when Mama rocked her and nursed her as an infant, her mother's scent.

She knew at once what she must do. She must hitch Sarn and Delia to the wagon, take Mama's trunk and her linens and quilt tops, she must wrap the children warm.

No, but first she must find Mama's tin box—for it was somewhere, Mattie knew it, inside Mama's trunk, or hidden somewhere in the wagon: a secret square, an invisible door—and she must find it and carry it with them. She mustn't tell Papa.

It was the old dream and it had never been completed, and so she had to go on and do it, with her sister and brother, Jonaphrene and Thomas, her most kin, Mama's most kin, just as she'd dreamed it all those months in the mountains. It could not be burned away by the red darkness. She must load their possessions, as she'd loaded and unloaded, loaded and unloaded and loaded them again so many times. She knew how to do it. In secret she must do it, and then she must drive the mules east over the twisting wagon tracks, past the log cabins and shacks, past the Indians in white people's clothing standing in their empty gardens, and east out of Eye Tee, back up into the mountains, and get Mama. She had to take her mama back home.

Mattie jerked suddenly and looked up at her father. She thought he had heard her. She thought he knew what she was thinking, and she flinched backwards in guilt, looking up at him, but Papa's eyes were not on her. He had turned back to the table, his hunched shoulders in brown homespun toward her and the children. Mattie knew where her father's eyes looked.

Fayette was talking, as he always talked, never ceasing, about his
plans,
his big doings, he was always going to do this and this and this, and Mattie did not listen, his voice only the hum of a dirt dauber in her ears, unless the words meant something about her father—or her mother, as it had been in the mountains. She saw the image then: her uncle in his big hat poking the fire. Talking. Talking. She remembered, looking up at Papa looking at his brother, and it was only Papa's back she could see, but she knew the look on him, like Fowler's, and yet not Fowler's because it was not envy but just the same manner of being captured, caught by the full and equal portion of blood from their own father and mother, caught by his brother, caught and held by his brother, as he always had been. She did not look at her uncle. She didn't have to, for she could see him, the picture of him talking, talking, talking, poking the fire with his green pine stick, and her stomach curdled around it, the sound and smell of him, spitting. A sour taste rose up in her mouth.

When they called her again, she lay still. While her aunt put the men's food on the table, while the men ate and the female cousins stood by the cookstove, piecing sneakily from the cooking pots as they waited. While the girls ate afterwards, standing, with their tin plates beneath their chins, while Fayette smoked and his boys and Papa and Jim Dee drank coffee from her mother's china saucers, Mattie lay longlimbed and silent, watching, though she pretended to sleep, her bones light on the warm hearthstones and her mouth full of yellow bile, as the people in the room spoke and moved and washed and spat and drank coffee.

It wasn't until the cold night air swept in through the door when it opened once and shut again quickly, until she heard Thomas cry and saw Jonaphrene shivering alone in Fayette's big chair at the table, until her father's voice called her, saying, “Come on here now, Matt, git up and feed your brother,” that at last she pushed herself slowly up from the warm breast of stone to her hands and knees. She crouched, her bare feet beneath her, to stand, and it took only that, only her feet crouched beneath her, and rising, and the world fell. She went skittering across the dark room to the line of blue-dark calico and sack aprons.

T
he time was not long that they were caught all together in the dark vault of the log house, but to the girl it seemed forever; it seemed longer than the crossing, the climb into the mountains, the warm months into autumn they had lived in the clearing. Later her mind would roll it out and spread it like black manure laid down before planting: the pull of her aunt's mouth and judging eyes on them every minute; her uncle's voice talking, talking from the roan mat of his beard, his big belly, and later the smell on him, which the girl did not yet understand. She would remember the boys taking in after Thomas, teasing him, mocking him, and the cousins in their new calico with their peppered faces watching her and her sister yoked together in the cousins' old hand-me-down dresses, and her father gone, and all of them crowded in on top of each other, the sour smell in the house, the days and nights reeling aimlessly in a circle forever, marked only by meals and her father rising and what little light came through the tanned-hide windows.

The others climbed down the ladder in the early morning, her aunt first and then the cousins, to start the stove and sift biscuits, and her father would be already gone. The girl would lie still and watch in the dark with the fire dying. He would not light the lamp but always he'd put another stick of wood on the hot coals of the fireplace, and in time the gnarled blackjack would ignite and burn hot. She'd watch him put his hat on—not his own hat but a different one, a shapeless tan one which bore no more character in its folds than a turkey wattle—and place his hand beneath the clean cloth spread over the dishes on the table, take out a cold biscuit or a piece of saltmeat or whatever was left from the last evening's supper, and turn and lift the latch and go out. Many times he walked out the door emptyhanded. The cold air would whirl in, and sometimes she could see stars shining. Her father left well before the others came down, well before daylight, and often he didn't return until the house was quiet and dark, the others asleep overhead and the children breathing deeply beside her. Her father would take his plate from the stovetop, and sometimes it would be so late that the fire in the cookstove would have gone out and the gravy on the tin plate would be congealed. Mattie would watch from beneath veiled eyes as her father ate his cold supper and went to wrap up in his quilts and lie down on the far side of the room.

She did not know where he went in the early mornings, why he came home late; she would not ask him, and no one offered to tell her. She spent her days crouched on the pallet or the milkstool, waiting for her father to come home. Fayette had nailed scraped hides over the windows to keep the cold out, and the back door was always closed, with a heavy oak bar laid across it, and so the vaulted room was close and dark even in daylight, and rank with the smell of cooking and coal oil and Thomas's dirty diaper squares—and the others, how they smelled, she thought, because nobody could wash properly. She couldn't take care of Thomas except to change him, and then only if he would lie still for her. Even yet she didn't know what the fever had done to him, though she could hear how he echoed what she said, what anyone said, would say it back in exactly the same tone and words and inflection. She'd hear him scream and shriek when Jessie tried to make him sit on the chamberpot; see him drop suddenly to the floor sometimes and thump and crawl across the cold puncheon as if he'd forgotten how to walk. Scanning the dark arc of the log room, her gaze would settle on her sister sitting crosslegged in a cousin's nightgown on the pallet, staring, rubbing her small hand again and again down the back of her shorn head. Mattie would quickly turn her eyes away. She'd see her brother Jim Dee tromp out the log door behind Fayette's boys every morning, come home with them in the evenings and slurp his coffee from china saucers just as they did, but Mattie would not think about him, though he was a sweaty, knotted, softly snoring lump on the pallet in the night beside her; she shut him away as perfectly as she'd shut away the memory of her dead infant sister.