The Mercy Seat (3 page)

Sometimes we stayed two or three days in one place because our mama was too sick to endure the bumps and jolts in the frozen ruts. In the beginning we all were sick a little, our legs wobbly at night when we climbed down, but Mama was bad sick, like poison, on account of the continual sway sway sway of the wagon, every minute, never still, never stopping, going always forward and forward, and sometimes she'd have to lean her head off the side of the wagon and throw up. And then we turned west, and Mama got sicker. We camped by a fast-running branch twisting between two low sloping hills. We stayed there a week nearly, and Uncle Fay got so restless then. He would ride out on one of the team horses in the mornings, returning at night to sit jumpy by the fire and poke it with a stick.

One night I heard him and Papa in the dark at the back of our wagon.

“Go on then!” Papa said, and his voice was hard the way it was in the dawn yard at Grandma Billie's when he would not let me get down. This was some time after the humped hills were behind us but before we crossed the big water. I might've been sleeping, because I can't remember anything before those words of Papa's. “Go on then!” Papa's voice caught me, not just the sound in it but the fact of it, the fact of the two of them in the dark at the back of the wagon when they considered we were all every one asleep. I listened with my eyes open, as I always listened to grown-up talk whenever I could get by with it, but it was that hard sound that made my chest clench with the old, tight knot. I had forgotten all about that knot, but just then in the wagon in the dark I remembered, and I knew something bad was going to come.

“No, now, John,” Uncle Fay said, “I didn't mean that.” He was squatting on the ground, I could tell by his voice rising, how it came from the low earth at the back of the wheel.

“Go,” Papa said.

“I ain't going.”

“Then shut up about it.” Papa's voice grated like he meant to whisper but the hard sound pushed through him too bad and would not let him. I could hear him breathing. And then it was Uncle Fay whispering.

“I don't mean to say nothing, Son, I don't. You're my brother, we been through all this together, I ain't about to quit you. But we ain't even half out of Tennessee—”

And that was the first I knew the name of the place where we were traveling, and I said it to myself in silence in the dark in the wagon.
Ten-uh-see.
I tried to make the sound fit the low rolling hills and flattening earth, and I could not, it slipped by so fast, and when I listened again Uncle Fay was whispering.

“—get some traveling space between us, they could cross the state line anytime, come horseback, they can catch up in no time, you want that?”

It came on me then, the fear and the knot squeezing tighter to nearly shut off my breathing, because I'd forgotten somehow all through our coming, but in that moment I remembered
They
again.
They
from my uncles' and father's and grandfather's low voices on the front porch late into the night.
They
that made my mama cry soft in the loft bed and all of us to take up our home and creep south through the gray hills and west across the creeks and rivers, and all the time west, toward the red winter sun, and I did not know who
They
were, but I hated them. There was no form or shape to them, but I saw them on horseback galloping after us and we all moving slow in our crawling wagons, and my heart was with Uncle Fayette then and not Papa, because I was scared.

“They ain't,” Papa said. “Jim Dee'll turn 'em off.”

“What if he don't?”

“He will.”

“I don't know. Could be they—”

“He
will.”

And Papa was so certain, how he said it, I believed him. I could see Uncle Big Jim Dee on the porch at Grandpa Lodi's with his shotgun, waving it back and forth in the night sky, firing, loading, and firing, and the mouth shooting red, and
They
on their horses thundering toward him and being deflected off to the side right and left. I relaxed then, my chest eased a little, and I put my hand out to feel Thomas and he felt warm enough.

“All right. All right then. Reckon he will.”

Quiet a little, and I heard an owl hooting far off above the rushing sound of the water and, close by, a soft shuffle and creak of leather from where Uncle Fayette crouched at the foot of the wagon. I heard his tobacco pouch sift open. I guess Papa never moved at all. The place where he stood was quiet, you would not guess a human was there if you didn't already know. His breath and clothes and muscles, his very eyelashes, I believe, were still.

“Might be they won't hear 'im or b'lieve 'im.” Uncle Fay's voice was mangled down and crammed with something. Papa said nothing. “Might be they'll get aholt of Tanner or somebody.”

“Tanner's plumb to Texas.”

“We don't know that for certain.”

“Left before Christmas, shut up about all that now.”

A stick popped in the fire between the two wagons. The branch running in the distance was a gurgling soft
husssssh.
Quiet a little while. Then: “Said he did, anyhow.” Uncle Fay's voice lifting, casual, like he was just passing the time of night, but it wouldn't have fooled a baby. “Said he was leaving for Texas. Don't reckon we got a guarantee.”

“It's a damn patent, Fayette!” It was like my papa spat it, like the words hissed and
ttttt
'd out of his mouth into the fire. “Ain't a goddamn bank robbery, they ain't going to chase Tanner to Texas. They ain't going to foller us down here. This is all your doings to start with. You want to go on, y'all go on. Leave me to it. If they come after us, then they come after us. She can't go no faster and I don't aim to. Y'all just go ahead. Git!” Papa's voice spitting the whisper, and I could hear him breathing then, how hard it was to choke the sound back, and Uncle Fayette coming back over with his own whisper: “Hsssht, now you'll wake 'em, it's all right, John, all right, you're right, leave it, you're right.”

And then it got quiet again. For a long time. I listened a long time, and I tried to stay awake because I had to find out, to listen, to hear every one of my papa's words, because I had to know if
They
were coming or if Uncle Big Jim Dee had really turned them off to the side or if Uncle Fayette would really take his family and go on and leave us. But my eyes kept closing down, the drifting in my brain dark, the pictures sifting. I don't know how long it was before he came back again, Uncle Fayette, drawing the words out like he was dreaming at the fire, his mouth full of tobacco.

“All I mean to say, Son, looks to me like . . .”

His voice trailed off, and I heard a little
p-tttt
and the faint repeat of the same sound when the tobacco juice landed off somewhere in the darkness.

“I'd just think you could do a little something with her. Had me a wife I couldn't do no more with than a blame egg sucker, reckon I'd—”

And then he went cold quiet. I don't know what happened. Papa never moved. He never said nothing. Uncle Fayette just hushed up like he'd had his mouth shut for him. Or more like his mouth was hanging open but the words weren't ever going to come.

After a while like that, with Uncle Fay and Papa stone silent and the fire now and again popping and the water far off rushing and nothing more, my mama turned and rolled over beneath the feathertick at the front of the wagon. I heard her swallow deep in her throat, like the spit had been gathering in her mouth for a long time. I don't know how long she'd been awake.

 

 

The change came in Papa on the very morrow. I heard it in him, in his voice, how he called me the next morning before first light.

“Martha Ruth! Git up from there, quick now, we got to git on!”

He poked his head in the back of the wagon and said it so loud that Thomas waked up and shuddered and Little Jim Dee whimpered in his sleep and Jonaphrene jerked awake. Papa did not try to shake me awake easy without waking the others. He didn't keep it between us, how he did always—and I cannot tell you how he did so, it was just a feeling between us when we worked silent together before the rest were even stirring—that it was we two together, me and him, who got the family fed and coffeed and the animals fed and watered and all of us loaded up and ready, like it was our good and sweet job between us that nobody else could or would do. He just spoke loud and harsh and called me Martha Ruth. I knew the hard sound in his throat, which before had been sound only, was now something solid, permanent. Permanent till what caused it came out. The way a boil will hint itself tingling and aching under the skin awhile before it bursts open angry and sets up a permanence on the skin and in the skin that won't leave till the putrid core gets squeezed out.

Mama was different too, but her difference was harder to lay my mind hold of, because between Mama and me there was not a strong feeling. Not then there wasn't, not since the instant I started to hand her the tin box in the loft bed and Papa called “Matt!” from the bottom of the ladder when neither of us had heard him come in, and Mama and me both jumped and looked at each other, and I jerked my arm back. But I knew there was change in her, and I watched her. All I could see really was how she held her chin tight beneath the tie-straps of her bonnet. How she held the baby tight till it would whimper and wriggle and finally start mewling, so that Mama would hand her back to me to hush up.

There was one change in me, one only so far as I know of. After that night I never sat in the back of the wagon and looked behind us anymore. Not because
They
might be following on horseback—or not following, I didn't know which—not because I didn't care to watch Tennessee flattening and the earth changing behind us, but because I had to sit up close to the front of the wagon, even though it was dim and choked and cramped in the center and I could not see where we were going or where we had come from beneath the sky-dimming tarp. But I had to sit up there, right behind them, with Thomas babbling in my lap and no air hardly, no light, because I had to watch the hunched backs and clenched jaws of my mama and papa.

In a few days—I cannot tell you how many, for they all ran together the same from where I sat in the gray belly of the wagon, but it was not so many days and we did not stop again except to cook and sleep in the late evenings and Papa's voice was fixed and hard, and the knot in my chest was also back again, fixed, though not so hard as it had been but more like gutted-up twisting—within a few several days from the time of the first change, we came in late afternoon to the great water. I could smell it the whole day like old fish and pond mud. I didn't know what it was until we came over a hint of rise and I, peeking between Mama's and Papa's stiff shoulders, saw it sprawled snaking brown and wide before us.

Uncle Fay said the word, how many times he said it
—MississippiMississippiMississippi —
shaking his head at the muddy river and the day getting late and the sun sliding as we stood all of us on the bank, waiting. I saw the name in my mind, the humps and curves and dots spelled out strung out long, and the sound of the word was like the longways of the water from where it came toward us on our right, north, far up, because we could see there because the earth was so dirt-brown and flat, and it came by us and went on forever down around a curve south. But the sound in the name did not carry the width of the river, I thought, not the depth, how it was, huge wide muddy flowing brown slow and fast, like the very split in the earth, like you could never get back over it once you had got across. I thought to myself,
This is the place of no turning back forever.
I was mistaken over that. I didn't know I was mistaken, because I could not then see or dream what would happen, and I dreaded that water and could not move at all even with the men and Papa working and his voice hard and the sun sliding and the day falling colder and still. My mama dreaded it. Her face was more white than a cloudbank. The baby Lyda cried and cried.

The raftsmen had made us get out of the wagons. From our wagon they took out Mama's trunk and the iron cookstove and a few wooden crates and placed them around different places on the raft, and that wooden strapped-together raft looked too flimsy for the whole family and our animals, and the four men with their beards and slouch hats and burnt faces frightened me. I did not trust them, how they could get all of us to the far side and not lose any of us, not with the memory so close of the swirling, rushing waters behind us, and them smaller, them nowhere like this water, and in the smaller waters the whirling push and chance and struggle, the dogs swimming, and the time Bertha's calf got loose and was swept downriver bawling and Uncle Fay threw the reins to Caleb and jumped off and waded to catch her by the loose rope and pulled her kicking to the far bank. This place here was so much wider, longer, more powerful than any we'd crossed over, the smell of it strong beyond all imagining, and the day was dropping down, the sky turning purple and lowering, the air growing still. There was no wind. Cold seemed to press down on us from the heavens and rise from the earth to press us squeezed together in the middle with cold.

I hoisted Thomas on my hip. He was getting too big for it, his legs dangled nearly past my knees and he was too heavy, I could hardly hold him, but I did. I'd put Jonaphrene and Little Jim Dee to stand together near the dock where they could see, and I'd wrapped a scrap quilt around them to keep them warm together, but Little Jim Dee could not ever be still. He darted in and out among the raftsmen till Papa hollered at him to Git Over Here Right Now, and Papa's voice so hard that Little Jim Dee obeyed him and came all the way back over onto the bank and even stood still for maybe two minutes before he took off again, but he never did go back onto the raft. Jonaphrene whined over the cold, but I paid her no attention, not even to tell her to shut up, because I could not take my eyes off the water. It was purpling down in the dropping cold, a sick swirling bruise color, and I wanted to say, Papa, Papa, let's don't go, let us wait until tomorrow, and I wanted to say, Oh, please, Papa, let's go now, let's cross now and get it over before night comes and all is worse.