The Mercy Seat (26 page)

And on Fayette went, his voice sliding with the quick changes inside him as the warmth spread in his veins, not showing in expression or gesture but evident only in the tone of voice that slid from cajoling to ingratiating to a timbre harsh with contempt. His voice drummed down finally, turning threatful.

“What the hell you need a mule for anyhow?” he growled. He drained the last drops from the flask and tossed it off toward the north side of the ridge—though later he would retrieve it, scrambling in the winter weeds upon his hands and knees, craving what burning drops might have been neglectfully left. “You need a mule like you need a damn hole in the head. If you don't take the cake! Moping around about a damn dead worthless mule when you hain't had a bridle on her in six months!” This accusation despite the fact that the other had come driving into the Territory behind that very gray hardly four months before. “You ain't aiming to plow, don't tell me you aiming to plow, I haven't seen you step foot one in a field since you got here.” Never mind it was not the second week of March yet, the broken fields around Waddy an unplowable bog. “Got to run all off to
Cee-dar
and work for the other fella when you and me could be making money aplenty, and I don't mean setting on a little puly cottoncrop!” Here, Fayette's hands patted his front and back pockets without his brain even knowing they did so, searching for what was not there. “You don't do a thing with them mules anyhow but set 'em in the lot and feed 'em! A animal's got to earn its keep! All I'm doing, I'm letting that Delia mule earn her keep instead of setting in my feedlot eating my blame feed. I can't help how it turned out, that's no fault of mine, that damn Indi'n, I'm going to have it out of his hide before it's all over. Listen here! Ain't no law in this country says you can't make them same exact weapons and get a better dollar, get ten times the dollar we did in Kentuck! Ain't no law in this country period, so far as I can tell, but you don't somehow seem to want to hear it! You and me could make a fortune, but no, you got to run off to Cedar and work for pittance, leave my poor wife to take care of your pitiful young'uns, ain't a sickly one of them that's right in the head.” Now his voice softened, turned almost gentle. “Whyn't you put your very God-given talents to work for your family, Son? What the hell you think He give 'em to you for?”

John, throughout the course of this final rant, had made a slow turn toward his brother. He still bore no particular expression on his features, the smooth, bland aspect unchanged on the sallow plane of his face—but Mitchelltree saw at once the cold black smolder that burned at the back of his slate eyes. Fayette must have seen it too, for his voice transformed again, thinning, curling into a fine wheedle, but with the same relentless, out-of-control urgency. He held his hands up, palms out, bouncing them in unison in the air at his brother.

“Naw, Son, now listen. Listen. I don't mean nothing. I've talked till I'm blue in the face, you won't hear a word from me. But listen here, folks'll buy that blamed howdah in this country. I keep trying to tell you. This nigger here”—and now he gestured at Mitchelltree—“he's got aholt of one somehow or another. I'd swear to it. If it ain't one of yours I'll eat my Colt. Ask him. Fella, what I want to know”—Fayette turned to Mitchelltree, his voice and attention sliding as if one thought and word melted naturally to the next—“where'd you get aholt of the likes of that gun?”

It was the first time his eyes had left his brother. John Lodi, as well—as if the words about the weapon had at last registered—withdrew his dark smolder from Fayette's face, and the two of them turned as one to the brown man who stood nearly a head taller than each of them in his high-heeled boots and big Stetson, his powerful legs set, coat front spread open, hand clenched on the grip of the gun. Both pairs of Lodi eyes studied him, not battling each other now, but united, and Mitchelltree grasped that, if he'd been out of it for a little while, now he was back in it, grandly, the suspicion of the two white men turned on him at once in tense scrutiny, the suspicion of the row of white men down in town honed on him the same, all of it old and familiar. A peculiar glowing sensation descended on Mitchelltree, a dread recognition like the aura an epileptic receives in the moments before a seizure; he felt that what was to unfold in the next moments was something old, inevitable, and wearisomely familiar.

“How'd you come to own it?” Fayette asked, casually, as if he might be asking about the weather down at Hartshorne last week.

Mitchelltree was silent. He knew the prudent thing, the smart thing to do was to tell the simple truth: He'd bought it off a horsetrader in Texas a year ago, had given twelve silver dollars and a Spanish saddle for it the day before he hit a white man in the head with a shovel and lit out for the Indian Territory—but that killing had nothing to do with ownership of the pistol, which he'd acquired in a legitimate cash transaction. Nothing more.

“Say?” Fayette asked.

“I believe that'd be my own business,” Mitchelltree said slowly.

“Well,” Fayette said, “my brother and me was just wondering. Wonder if we couldn't take a look at her.”

“No, sir.” Mitchelltree's voice rolled in his minor key. “Don't believe I'd care much for that.”

“What I mean,” Fayette said, seeming to grow flustered, “I ain't asking you to hand her over. Me and John just kinda want to take a look-see. He'll know if it's his. Just pull her up easy where we can take a little look at her.” The cajoling tone had never been friendlier, more charming. His teeth flashed white in his beard.

Mitchelltree's mind raced; his eyes flicked back and forth between the two men. He had little doubt he could outdraw the half-drunk Fayette, but the brother was a less certain entity, the dark look undecipherable but, Mitchelltree thought, dangerous—and the two were separated by twenty yards. Still, with a pull of the trigger, the gun's movable striker would fire the remaining three powerful barrels in rapid succession, without need even for the slight betraying flinch of a cocked hammer. All that was required was to clear the holster, aim broadly, and fire hard and fast, as a British dragoon might fire on a pair of close-charging lions in the Sudan, for this, although Mitchelltree could hardly know it, had been the original specific purpose of the weapon's design. But experience had made of Burd Mitchelltree a relentless calculator, a cautious gambler, and compulsively, as Fayette carried on persuading and cajoling, the big man registered the distance to the two men standing wide apart in front of him, noted Fayette's free hands relaxed at his sides but inches from the Colt single-action (Mitchelltree wagered single-action) tucked in his belt; he laid mental odds on where the seemingly unarmed John Lodi might have a weapon hidden about him, and multiplied all this by the distance to the doubtlessly armed batch of white men lined up within rifle distance below. Mitchelltree cogitated, cursing in his mind the horsetrader with drooping auburn mustache who had, in a similar cajoling vein a year ago in Texas, convinced him that the power and terrifying look of the weapon would compensate in any human situation for lack of distance and accuracy, for the fact it held only four shots—and concluded that the sole reasonable recourse for a Negro man in such a situation was to give up the gun.

“. . . you wouldn't know it,” Fayette continued, “but he damn sure is.”

Mitchelltree wasn't listening. He waited for a pause in the flow of useless language.

“. . . have a little look-see, that's all,” Fayette said, and hushed, seeming to wait for an answer.

“You welcome to a good look at her,” Mitchelltree said, his voice and eyes level. “From hell.”

The mournful voice was not defiant, not prideful, not even sullenly resentful. It held only the tone that had caused the speaker such trouble in his life—the very sound the good white men of Texas had not been able to tolerate and had more than once nearly killed him for, culminating in the crushed skull of an anonymous redheaded ranchhand with a big mouth near Denton just over a year ago—for Burden Mitchelltree's marvelously soft voice vibrated, subtle and deep, with the ironic timbre of contempt. In the year 1888, on the continent of North America, within the boundaries of the country called the United States, the only place for a black man of Burd Mitchelltree's temperament, blessed or cursed with Burden Mitchelltree's voice, was the Indian Territory. And here he had fled, here he lived, and here white men flowed already and relentlessly over the border, bringing the old histories with them, and Mitchelltree was weary of them and the hatred he felt in them and for them. Fayette was silent now, staring hard. John Lodi still had not spoken. Mitchelltree expected at any moment for one or the other of them to draw, and he welcomed it; he waited. To pull his own gun was to fire it, to fire was to kill one or both of these white men, and in turn be killed by the brother or the men in the town. Not either/or, Mitchelltree could see that, but both at once, simultaneously: to meet the Creator in the act of destroying His most precious and paltry creation, and be doomed for eternity to hell. Thus, silently, waiting, Mitchelltree reckoned. Tension coiled in his wrist, neck, legs, the strong bones in the back of his hand. Tight. Anticipatory. Prepared.

It could have been no more than Fate Lodi's unconscious fingers returning to probe his back pocket for the absent bottle; it could've been a flicked mule ear, the sound of a cabin door being shut in the distance, could have been any such innocuous twitch or flicker that allowed Mitchelltree's tense gunhand to fly free and begin firing. There are such seeming accidents that change engagements between humans and thus the unfolding of individual stories, and so the very spin of the world; it could have been, for all the elements were here: fear and obsession and men locked each in the cave of his own history and will, and so easily it
could
have been—but it was not. The small turning, the seeming small accident that changed and directed the lives of the three men triangulated on the ridge, was only the high, thin sound of a child's voice calling from below the hill's rim.

“Papa.”

The three men in unison—even the bleary-eyed Lafayette—obeying an ancient edict stamped on men's souls to protect the seed of the species, paused and turned as one to the sound of the child's voice.

“Papa.”

The sound was not plaintive, not tremulous or frightened, but calm, unshrill, and yet somehow demanding in its calmness, mounting slowly toward them up the hill. John Lodi's profile was toward Mitchelltree now as he turned from the mule and stepped to the edge of the ridge. “You kids git on home now.” The voice croaked a rough monotone as if the cords were knotted with disuse. “I mean it now!” He took off his hat, peering down, and Mitchelltree saw the thinning hair, the soft line of forehead revealed belly-white at the hatline above the sallow face. “Matt.” The tone was the same as the child's: not hollered or requested, but a statement. “Hear me. Y'all git on back to the house.”

The child's voice came again, a bit closer, a bit louder, almost husky, but no less calm, answering in the same flat tone. “Papa.” And then the two small faces appeared above the rim, the two ratlike heads—girls, Mitchelltree could see, little girls with boys' heads in overlarge gingham dresses—and they walked singlefile, the younger before the elder, and the elder with her hand clamped to the smaller one's shoulder. Neither of them could be over eight or nine, Mitchelltree thought, little pale skinny white children, half scalped.

They came on, mounted the rise, and stood yoked together, looking up at their father as he stepped back from the edge; they appeared very small, very grave, in the sun's dying flare. Their father, hatted again, did not look down at them but looked off over the valley, blue now with shadows, as the sun's retreating rays fingered only the high peaks of the hills. There was something wrong about the children, Mitchelltree thought, something beyond the peculiarity of closecropped, naked heads emerging from gaping neckholes of gingham—something even beyond the way they stood so unchildlike and still on the great expanse of cleared ground, arms linked, touching each other as if to do so kept either of them from skimming away on the air like a puff of milkweed seed. Mitchelltree watched them, repulsed and troubled, and then the older—or anyway the taller, the one who had walked behind as they came—spoke again.

“He killed Delia,” she said. Clearly the words were spoken to her father, but she did not cast her eyes up at him. A sickly child, hatless and coatless and thin as a stick, she clung to her sister, but she stared directly at Burd Mitchelltree with unblinking eyes the color of yellow clay.

“You young'uns get on back to the house,” Fayette said. His hands began to twitch toward his empty back pocket, but Mitchelltree, intent on the girl, was not looking at him now.

“You killed our mule,” the child said, not an accusation but a statement, flat and familiar, as if she'd given her name.

“Matt,” the father said.

Still not looking at him, she said, “Papa, he shot Delia.”

“I know it,” the father said. “Y'all go on back now. I'll be there directly.”

“He shot Delia in the head,” the child said. She continued to stare at Mitchelltree, unblinking, without accusation or anger but placidly, in the stillness of that unchildlike calm—and yet beneath the stillness, as in the slagheap at the back of her father's eyes, there was a fierceness beyond the power of her thin bones and few years.

Mitchelltree had no means to perceive the true nature of the child's reaction; all he could dream of as cause for such ferocity was the idea that the gray mule had been her particular pet. Immediately a warmth flared in him, part pity, part anger, sparked not by the child herself—for she was too strange, too alien, a white rat-child in any case—but by his own memory of the bloodied remains of a red pup he'd had once in boyhood, shot by a Texas rancher for no better reason than that the pup chased his calves. In this way individual past overwhelms history, collective memory, and Mitchelltree, in pity, had turned to her before he hardly knew he would speak.