The Mercy Seat (32 page)

Lodi went on rasping the hoof wall; the stranger watched him with the close eye of an apprentice learning a trade, and the owner watched the stranger just as closely.

“Got a little something for you,” Tanner said at last, low, as if continuing a conversation. He was still hunkered over at the waist, watching, not moving an eyelash or a muscle.

Lodi took from his apron a U-shaped iron level and placed it against the bottom of the hoof wall to check it, picked up the file and began to rasp again. The stranger was growing agitated, Dayberry could feel it, though the man still stood as before, unmoving, the rank smell of him swelling to overwhelm the odor coming from the far side of the unmucked stable where a half-dozen horses were stalled.

“Your brother's one told me to come by and leave it. Up to me, I'd leave it right in front of that fancy new barn. I got to go up yonder anyhow.”

Lodi lowered the horse's hoof to the floor, turned, took a side step, lifted the hoof front-first, rested it upright on his aproned knee, and began to rasp smooth the rough edges around the old nail holes on the outer edge. The maneuver put the horse's behind between his face and that of the stranger, and Tanner straightened then and spat on the dirt floor.

“You finish up this mighty important business you're at, come on out front. I got to get on.”

He turned and sauntered out into the bright noonlight, and Lodi lowered the hoof gently, turned and backed his rear to the horse's rear, crooked the leg backward at the joint again, and cradled the hoof sole-up between his knees to fit the new shoe.

Ten minutes and more passed, and Lodi made no move to lead the shod horse out to the corral in back of the livery, as he ordinarily would, but left the old dobbin haltered and messing where it stood while he turned to the forge to work up a new set of shoes. Dayberry, keenly curious now, returned to the manger and slowly, a quarter forkful at a time, filled it, sensing Lodi's every move, though he never turned his bright, alert eyes toward him. From where he stood near the open archway, Dayberry could see the stranger leaning on the rail beside his spent sorrel, rolling a cigarette. He could see the lead mule, a big blue-nosed sumpter with haunches like a bull, and behind it the head and forelegs of the next one, though he could not see or imagine the train of thirty lined up through the town, until Field Tatum came scuttling in—Dayberry saw him in the street, scooping a wide berth around the muttonchopped stranger—and spoke excitedly in his ear.

“Blocking entrance to my store!” Tatum whispered. “A damn forty-mule train lined up single file from here to the depot! Folks are gathering, but can't any of them get to my door!”

Dayberry had no doubt that it was not to enter the spanking new doors of Tatum's Mercantile that the people were gathered but to gawk at the string of mules, though he knew there was no point in trying to convince the mercantiler of that fact. He eyed John Lodi, who never looked up from the clanging he was doing at the anvil, and suddenly the little hawk-faced man's curiosity to know what that muletrader out yonder—if indeed he was that—had to do with his employee rose up so fiercely that abruptly he shooed Field Tatum out the door and, eyes bright, tone light, he called out in a singsong, “John, would you quit that a minute and come take this manger out back? I got a bunch of animals to feed this afternoon—I can't get to all of them!”

This in itself was entirely unusual, for Dayberry had hired the man strictly as blacksmith; he'd never called on him to do one thing about the livery that did not have to do with iron. He watched Lodi's thick forearm pause an instant on the upswing, then continue down, up again, and down, rapidly, drawing out the heated bar. Dayberry stabbed the fork in the pile and crossed the floor, coming easily, gently, as one approaches a fractious horse, and when he was near Lodi's elbow, he spoke again.

“I'm asking you,” he said. “I need a hand.”

Lodi finished turning back the heel calk on the new shoe before he set it to the side, placed the sledge neatly on the floor, leaning against the anvil brace, and moved, without a glance at Dayberry, to the filled manger. He hoisted the heavy cradle to his shoulder, though Dayberry's flat cart stood ready nearby, and started out the door to the temporary corral around back. The owner followed, not merely from curiosity now but because of the strange sense of protectiveness that had passed over him as Lodi bent his head and shoulder to lift the manger. A foreboding was on him, on Dayberry, a sense that trouble was coming and he'd got his fingers into it and messed with it when circumstances would have been better left alone. He followed and stood in the doorway and watched Lodi in the bright sunlight move to the inside of the hitching rail, close to the stable wall, with the manger hoisted on his shoulder between himself and the string of thirty mules. The stranger ducked beneath the rail, limber as a garter snake, and planted himself in front of him. Dayberry moved quickly, but when he reached the two the trouble was already seething, for he could hear the contempt in the one and the anger in the other, and he could not get between them in the crowded space behind the rail.

“What you do with it after that's your business,” the stranger was saying. “Up to me, I'd give you a good horsewhipping, 'stead of buying you a new mule.”

“Out of my way, Tanner.” John Lodi's voice was low-keyed, quiet, tight as a coilspring. Dayberry couldn't see his face or the other behind him, the two men were so close to the same height, and in any case the triangular bulk of the manger blocked his view, but he heard the deadliness in Lodi's voice. “I got work to do.”

“Work.” The stranger's voice was greasy with contempt. “You call it that, maybe.” He spat lightly and flicked the flattened end of his cigarette into the road, where it smoldered briefly and was soon snuffed in the thick dust. “Aim to muck out the stalls when you're through?”

“I said it once, I'm not saying it again.”

“A man could be sitting as pretty as any man in this country, he wants to set around and shoe a damned old plowhorse for a nickel, I don't know. I'd have to say he's a fool or a coward, one.”

“Go on.”

“Or else crazy, might be. I don't know. Strange-eyed to me.”

“Go on.”

“Ain't nothing to go on about.” Tanner spat again, not a deep spit but a little picking one, as if to get tobacco flakes off his tongue. “Fay and me already got our deal settled, he's the one so hot to have you in on it. I don't give a damn, myself. You're both weirder than Lucius.” Rapid-fire staccato as he spat several times again. “I can't fathom either one of you, him or you neither. But that's not my business anyhow. My business is to complete my little proposition here, which I just done.”

Still, the stranger did not move to allow Lodi to pass. Dayberry could see the townspeople, male and female, white and Indian, gathering on the far side of the street at the edge of the wagonyard. The line of mules was clearly visible to him now, as fine a looking conglomerate of young healthy muleflesh as he'd ever witnessed, strung from south to north along the dusty main street of the little town, the new and old town: old with the Choctaw council house and the whipping tree and the Butterfield Overland Stage stop which had marked Cedar on maps of Indian Territory for years; new with the recently laid train tracks, the weeks-old redbrick depot and the mercantile, and Dayberry's own livery, which had stood its place for nearly two decades, a long time—an eon in the quick life of the Territory—but changing itself now, growing: the new blacksmith shop already framed out on the north side of the stable where the old corral had been. The town, like the Territory, was transforming. White faces outnumbered brown in the wagonyard across the street. Dayberry's sense in that moment was that, really, he'd already messed in it, he might as well go ahead and try to fix what he'd messed with, and as the other two continued to stand stock-still, the edge in the air rising, the livery owner called out to a young man he spied in the small crowd on the other side of the street. Even as he did so, the old curiosity welled in him: What business proposition? What kind of a deal? What did these many mules have to do with it, and what did that pearls-before-swine remark seem to mean? Dayberry was hankering for answers, but he tamped down his curiosity, swallowed it like cud to be chewed over later, as he called out across the street.

“C.H.! Come over here and give us a hand!”

The young man, a lanky sandy-haired fellow of about sixteen, stood in the crowd, gawking.

“Come on now!” Dayberry called. “There's two bits in it for you! I got nineteen head of stock to feed, and John here's got to get back to work!” Then he spied another man. “Mounce! Where the devil you been? That nag of yours's been finished an hour ago! Come get him or I'm going to charge you a stabling fee!” And Dayberry withdrew from behind the rail and circled out to the street, where he pushed his keen-eyed face in between the two men, saying, “John, just set it down around back anywhere; I got to figure out some type of a system a little better than what I got. Mister”—he turned his bright eyes and regal nose to the newcomer—“if you aim to board them mules you'll have to talk to Culpepper yonder at the wagonyard; I'm afraid I am completely full up.” And he clapped a hand on Lodi's shoulder, swelling with the strain of hoisting the manger, said, “Tell you what, John, set her down right here. I don't aim to have my prime blacksmith toting hay if I can help it. Carston here can tote that manger around back. Here, son.” He turned to the young man who was then crossing the road in a low rising of yellow dust. “Go in yonder and get that little cart of mine I got rigged and drag it out here. A man don't need to break his back toting hay to a handful of horses. Mounce!” he called back over his shoulder. “Come get that critter of yours out of my barn!”

And J. G. Dayberry, with his jovial voice and spry movements and intelligent face of sharp eye and deep brow, altered the moment. The stifling air shifted and changed, became of a different variety, the tension focused on the livery owner himself now as he ordered folks around in his quick, good-humored voice, until at last Tanner ducked back beneath the rail and sliced the dust a quick step or two to where the lead mule was tied. From the halter he loosened the rope that connected the rest of the train to the big blue-nosed sumpter, and leaving the mule where it stood and looping the rope around one gloved fist, he untethered his gelding, mounted, walked the weary sorrel out into the street, and turned its head north. He did not speak as he drew the ragged long-eared slant-eyed multihued train in a great turning loop across the wide street, but as he rode north out of town on the old Butterfield Stage road, he shouted back over his shoulder, “It ain't been fed in a couple of days, Son! You better give it some hay from that manger you're toting!”

When John Lodi finished work in the evening he came outside through the double doors of the livery, hatted, coatless, unarmed, an empty sorghum pail dangling loose in his fingers, and turned to his left without so much as a glance at the big black mule still tied to the hitching post. In the slanting shadows he walked north, as he did every evening, along the dusty road out of town.

 

 

The sun had lowered itself beyond the mountains by the time he neared Big Waddy Crossing, and the withdrawing light, gold-glinted, greenish, seemed to trick the eye and impart glory to the dust-dulled familiar, to the powdered ribbon of road, the iridescent pines and empty oak trees, the driblet of creek, low-muddied, glowing, crawling away east. Even before he rounded the long curve he could hear the commotion—men's voices, his brother's bright and brusque, above the others. He neither quickened nor slowed his step but continued on at the same steady plod which was his rhythm, not rapid nor staccato but iambic, monotonous, like the slow beat of a tom-tom, or the pulse of blood. He heard first, and then saw, as the trees opened, the back end of the mule train once again lined through the town, this near-town, this community of white settlers with its five slapshod buildings raised on one side of the road only, their backs against the hillside, the sawmill in the failing light silent, and a dozen men gathered at the head of the mule train in the low swirl of pale dust in front of his brother's store.

No one had lit a torch, none had brought forth from an unlit interior a kerosene lantern, so that, as dusk came on, the figures ahead of him blended with it, silhouettes blurring and fading to blue, and then dark blue, purple, indigo, navy, sparked here and there with the red ends of cigarettes and white fireflies dancing. In the black line of trees along the creekbank the whippoorwills were whillowing. The men in their nearness to one another could perhaps see and distinguish faces, but from the distance he knew only his brother. He could feel the abrupt gestures, the tilt of head and broad hat brim, the voice; he perceived without having to strain through the darkness, knew him in the bones of his being, as a lover knows the beloved in a crowd at a great distance, as one knows one's own reflection in a draped parlor mirror. Sound was muffled in the dusk, drowned in the relentless whillowing, but he knew without sound, as he knew without seeing, what his brother was doing.

On he came walking, one foot set rhythmically, unerringly, in front of the other.

From the time of his arrival in the Territory he had held to this rhythm, his mind empty of words, only marking the cadence, one foot in front of the other, eyes never looking at anything except the ground where his foot stepped. He saw almost nothing but that narrow space before him, as a man with a growth on his eyeball can see only where the growth has not spread. In this way he was able to live, this means he had discovered, not from will but from necessity, from his nature, which resisted words, resisted thought in language; which, in the twisting of grief, was unwilling to allow even that which is most human—the ability to plan and look back, project and regret—as if the meted portion had all been doled to his brother, to make his brother fired with language, paralyzed with future, locked in past, and these not genuine past or future but only that imagined in the volcanic language of Fayette's own mind. His brother's voice in the dusk was nearly a constant. A flip-lipped blur as of an auctioneer, a distant swarm of insects, and John Lodi walked on, hearing without listening, seeing without sight.