The Mercy Seat (36 page)

For three years Jessie had watched in silence, from a distance, as John Lodi's children grew wilder and stranger. She'd thought that when she and her family moved out of the log house and left John and his children to it, her mind would be shed of them. She'd thought that her new five-room home, framed out and finished with kilned lumber and real glass freighted from McAlester, which Fayette had hired built, grandly perched on the slope above the store, would remove thoughts of the unwanted and undisciplined children. But each day she watched from her front-room window or the steps of the store and saw the condition of the log house deteriorating, the yard unswept and growing up with brambles, trash lying about in the dirt, on the porches, and every morning her brother-in-law walking off to work at Cedar while the filth spread and the children grew more untamed. She watched the girl Martha take her sister and the younger boy down by the creekbank, where they would disappear for hours among the sycamores and peach willows, to emerge at dusk in a pitiful little procession climbing the rise to the log house. The older boy, Jim Dee, was sometimes with them, more often not, and he ran wild through the town, would bowl a grown white man off the wooden walk in front of the post office or follow her own sons when they went to Wister to the depot, running along behind the wagon until they stopped and allowed him to climb up. Jessie didn't know what the children ate or how they kept themselves. They did not attend the new subscription school and she believed they didn't wash often, though the few times John brought them to church meeting at the schoolhouse they were clean, the two boys in starched overalls and the girls in clean, plain gingham dresses with their hair braided and bowed, the boys' hair parted and slicked down. But something was very wrong at that house, the town knew it, Jessie knew, and at last, when the old beagle dragged a rotting opossum carcass into the yard and it lay stinking for two days before John found it and buried it in the field across the road, Jessie determined she would take matters in hand. She'd gone to the log house in the early morning before the children could scatter, had crossed the log porch with the strange sensation of entering her own past, and knocked at the door.

It had been the younger girl Jonaphrene who answered, and Jessie stared at her, wordless. The girl was starkly beautiful, as a colt is beautiful, but with an unnaturalness about her that made the woman exceedingly uncomfortable, because it was a long-boned and aquiline beauty, an adult beauty, not that of a nine-year-old child. The little girl stared at Jessie rudely—without even a word of greeting, because the children had no manners whatsoever—and failed to ask her in. Hemming and hawing, Jessie had finally stuttered out that it was high time for the children to go to school, that their uncle would pay the dollar subscription for each of them if their father could not manage (though she had already determined that she would save out the money and pay it herself), and it was then the girl Martha had come to the door. She'd stood behind her sister and lifted the door hanging loose on its leather hinges, scraped it open wider, silently staring, as rude and unmannered as her sister, and Jessie had stammered her message again. She could see through the open doorway that there was no furniture in the room beyond what her own family had left behind when they'd moved out: the rusted iron cookstove John had hauled down from the old barn, a busted ladderback and two wooden crates turned over to sit on, a flour keg, a pile of folded quilts on the floor by the back wall. She'd been stunned for a moment; it was one thing that had never occurred to her, though she'd known they were uncouth, but she'd never dreamed John had not brought another stick of furniture into the house. There was not even a table to eat at, though she could smell beans or peas cooking, saw a black Dutch oven steaming on the stove. She saw, too, that the house was dirty—not unsanitary, not filthy, but cobwebbed and dusty, the floor covered in soot and dirt and wood leavings, what a woman must strive against every minute because of carrying in stovewood and toting out ashes, because of yard dirt and leaves tracked in with every coming and going—but clearly no one had striven here. The girl Martha stood staring up at her from behind the door. She was small, hardly taller than her sister, though she must have been almost fourteen, and tough and yellow as a corn kernel. She'd remained silent as Jessie spoke again of school, and then she'd answered politely, “Yes'm, I'll speak to Papa.” Then, without a word of pardon, she'd lifted the log door and pushed it closed in Jessie's face.

The following Saturday afternoon—almost as if by design or purpose, Jessie thought later, for the Henrys did not often come in to Big Waddy, almost never traded at her husband's store—but the very next Saturday, the Indian woman had come into the store for flour and a tin of molasses. The idea had struck Jessie from nowhere, watching the woman ease sideways along the crowded aisles with her head tilted back, looking up at the tinned goods and plow points and bolts of cloth on the shelves. Jessie had come from behind the counter almost immediately; she gave no thought to what she was asking except to hurry up and finish with the business, for Fayette or one of the boys would be back soon, and she had negotiated quickly and efficiently, promising her five yards of quality cotton from one of the finer bolts behind the counter, and the woman had agreed. Jessie did not consider that she'd hired Thula Henry once again to heal sickness—the woman, in any case, would not take payment for that, or she hadn't three years earlier anyway—but Jessie thought she was making a simpler agreement; she believed she had hired her to come clean the log house.

When she sent Fowler to Yonubby to fetch Mrs. Henry, she'd made him promise to not tell anyone, meaning, as both he and she knew, to not tell his father. Jessie didn't question to herself why she did not want Fayette to know—there was so much she had to keep from her husband—but she told her son to bring the woman directly to the store, to keep hushed about it, and then he might take the buckboard on to Cedar if he wanted, and, as with so many secrets between them, the boy did just as she asked. He drove up in a cloud of khaki dust and buckboard clatter, drew the reins up sharply, and waited impatiently for the Indian woman to climb down. He was off with the team and buggy before the woman had hardly cleared the spokes, and Jessie called after him, “Mind what I said now!” She stood on the porch, her arms wrapped around herself, one eye on her youngest child toddling about the porch floor, as Thula Henry, wrapped in a red blanket and holding to her chest a leather satchel, slowly climbed the store steps. Jessie bent and grasped the toddler by the back of the collar as the little one wobbled toward the porch ledge. She said, “Come in, Miz Henry, let me just get my wrap.”

The woman waited inside the door, seeming to look at everything and nothing, as Jessie carried her toddler to the back and placed her kicking and yelping in her eldest daughter's arms. “Watch the front,” Jessie said. “I'll be back in a little bit.” It was not necessary to tell Mildred—to tell any of her daughters at any time—to not speak of things to their father. Jessie took off her apron, folded it and laid it on the counter, reached for a thick knitted gray sweater lying on a shelf, and put it on. She made her way rapidly between the crowded rows of boxes and barrels, kegs, harrows, singletrees, stacks of buckets and tins, to where the woman stood in her wool dress and blanket, peering upward, expressionless, seeming oblivious—or, in any case, without opinion—regarding all that took place in front of her, and at the same time acutely alert. Jessie started out the door without speaking and was halfway across the porch before she remembered what she was supposed to be doing. Quickly she turned and entered the store again, where the woman still stood, apparently not having moved an eyelash, just inside the door.

“Millie!” Jessie called. “Bring me the mop and that big bucket. And one of them corn brooms hanging up over there.” Surely they've got soap and water in that house, she thought, and then, on second thought: “Bring me a box of them soap flakes too!” she said, and then did not wait for her daughter to put down the little one and do as she'd directed but went on into the store and gathered the items herself. She handed the mop and box of soap to the woman and started out again with the broom in one hand and the bucket stuffed with clean rags in the other, and this time the woman followed behind her.

Jessie led the way across the sloping yard toward the log house. They left the store's little wedge of swept yard and moved east directly across the land. For some reason Jessie did not want to go along the road, and the Indian woman followed without protest, the two of them picking through the burst pods of milkweed and clutching cockleburs, their skirts filling with legions of beggar's-lice, their sticks of mop and broom pointing skyward, as they made their way slowly across the orange and umber November field.

Again Jessie experienced the peculiar sensation of entering her own past when she mounted the stone step. It was not pleasant: she had worked too hard to leave that bone-hard existence; she did not like to reenter it, and even as her shoe touched the wood of the porch, she hesitated. But there was that sense of duty in her—or this is how she thought of it—a nagging sense of Christian duty which she could not escape. And something else. Something about the girl Martha and her hard eyes and her hard little chest: the girl was coming into her time, Jessie knew it, she had raised too many daughters, and the child had no one but a father to guide her, which he would not nor could not, and in any case most of the time he was not even there. It was up to Jessie to do something, and this was more important, deeper and more urgent than the children's dirt and wildness, but she knew no other way to start than to begin by cleaning up the house—as if cleaning could wipe away the soiled years and lack of raising, she thought—but really, she knew no other way. She half hoped the children would be gone, half hoped they would be there, and knew not why she wanted either, but there was no answer when she rapped her reddened knuckles on the split-log door, and the relief swept her like a wind.

She entered the room that had been her home for the first terrible year and a half after they'd arrived in the Territory—the rough log room wherein she had scrimped and saved and struggled to put enough food on the table for her children, where she'd worked day and night, trying endlessly, futilely, to keep them and the crude, sap-glittered, mud-chinked, bark-littered house clean—and went straight to work sweeping almost as soon as she came in. She started at the cold, cinder-strewn hearth, moving the corn broom roughly over the sandstone, the scarred puncheon in front of it, because she did not want to look at the room—dark, as it had always been, and hollow now, empty, the unfinished ceiling arching away. The Choctaw woman came in behind her and stood in the center of the room, watching. Jessie could feel her there, not moving, not working, just watching, and at last she stopped, exasperated, and said, “Well, what are you looking at? What are you waiting for?”

The woman said, “Me think you hire me him for to clean 'im up.”

Jessie nearly exploded in disgust. “Oh, for Pete's sake. Yes. Me hire you to clean him up. Talk English. Here!” And she thrust the broom at her.

It wasn't just that the woman's English was abominable—or seemed to be anyway, although Jessie had always had, even in that first year, the sense that Thula Henry could speak the King's English as well as any white person if she wanted to—and it wasn't just that she didn't care to be paying an Indian five yards of good cotton to stand around and stare at her in disapproval. It was . . . it was the taut strings twisting her spine into knots; the shudders running rivers beneath her skin; her teeth—the twelve that remained to her—gum-gritted and aching. It was . . . she didn't know what it was, but when the Indian woman laid her satchel aside, dropped the mop to the floor with a clatter that echoed in the bare, high-ceilinged room, and took the broom from her and began sweeping in just such a way as to nearly literally sweep her out the door, Jess Lodi was grateful.

She stood on the log porch a moment, a little confused, but relieved, as if a dreadful burden had been removed, and recognizing suddenly that she had done all she could do, she stepped down off the porch and picked her way back across the land, home.

 

 

The white woman was right about Thula Henry's ability to speak English. She could speak it precisely as well as she chose to—had learned not only to speak it but to read it and write it at the Wheelock Academy down by Broken Bow—but she preferred her father's brand of English, and she used that when she had to speak the distasteful language at all. Thula Henry was Choctaw, yes, for her mother was Choctaw, and she spoke Choctaw predominantly, lived with her mother's people near the Indian Church at Yonubby—but it was her father's English she spoke when she had to; it was from her father's people that she had received certain gifts of knowledge.

Her father had been a Creek man, a Muscogee man, who'd come down into the Choctaw Nation soon after the Removals and settled there, taking a Choctaw woman, Thula's mother, to wife. He had fathered Thula, whom he called Tooske, in the winter of 1837 and lived with them nine years, taking up Choctaw ways, farming—but each summer he'd returned north to his native grounds at Kialigee town for Green Corn ceremony. And each year, going, he stayed longer, coming back to Choctaw Nation later and later each autumn, until the year Thula was nine, when he did not return at all. For two years her mother waited, and in that time she did not hold the Big Indian Cry, would not take up mourning or receive another man. Then, the summer Thula was to become eleven, her mother put her on a fine horse, gave her a pistol and a leather satchel of food—this selfsame satchel she'd laid aside on a flour keg to take up Jessie's broom—and sent her to Creek Nation to bring back her father. She had not brought him back, for he was dead, shot on the sandy banks of Skunk Creek by a Cherokee man he was drinking with, and Thula did not grieve him, for she understood it was because he was supposed to be, in his language,
hilishaya,
or medicine man, that he had to die like that. Long before that time, he had taught her. It was from him she had learned the everyday forms of healing—not spirit healing, not the songs and powerful medicine, but how to use the slippery-elm bark for cleansing, the uses of blackroot and chiggerweed, how to smoke the sick person or make a sweat. But her father had told her early on, from the time she was little, that he was a bad man who did not do as he was supposed to do. He had never worked bad medicine, did not use the gift that way, but he'd let the white man's fire demon take him when he was a young man, and it had thiefed his soul; he had no defense against it, though he would become sober a good long time before Green Corn, had to be clean to take ceremony, to purify himself, to receive the black drink and dance—but always afterwards, the thirst would come on him bad again, and he would go down in the Deep Fork River bottoms alone, or with another one also caught by that demon, and so he betrayed the gift. It was because she understood this that Thula did not grieve her father, but she stayed four months with her father's people, and it was during those four months that she had listened to the drum, the singing, the
saka-saka
of the turtle shells strapped to the shell-shakers' legs as they danced in a circle around the sacred fire; only one summer did she drink
osofki,
dance the ribbon dance at Green Corn, take medicine—but she'd held the truth of it inside her spirit all her life.