The Mercy Seat (38 page)

The girl stood at the edge of the yard, looking down at the four in the roadbed. She had just come from Toms Mountain, and she was dirty-faced, in a pair of trousers and a felt hat, holding a leather thong twisted around the tail of a dead coon. She stared at her siblings, especially her sister, saying nothing, but in Matt's eyes was accusation. She answered nothing, and Thula, looking hard at her hard eyes, shrugged her shoulders and turned to walk east along the road, walking before the mounted children in the cold early morning with her hand on the halter, the braided circlet on the top of her head hardly reaching the mare's nose.

They walked nearly eighteen miles on deeply rutted roads, and in some places no roads at all, through the valleys of the Sans Bois to the appointed place below Latham's Store. Sometimes Thula rode, but she feared for the old pony's endurance, and so, riding, they did not go much faster than the woman—or the girl coming behind them—could walk. They stopped twice to eat from the leather satchel Thula carried, and so it was well dark by the time they arrived in the place of the brush arbor, and she could hear already the singing, see the lantern light from a great distance. Coming nearer, she saw the many glass bottles tied to the trunks of trees around the cleared space of the brush arbor, the bottles filled with kerosene, rags stuffed in them, burning, and she smelled the cut wood. Thula tied the mare to a tree at the rear of the conglomeration of buggies and wagons, lifted the children down one by one from the mare's back, drew a feedbag from her satchel-of-many-things and hung it around the mare's muzzle, and walked forward toward the light, holding the little boy Thomas tightly by the hand.

The brush arbor of the Wilderness Preacher was made in just the same way as the brush arbors on the stomp grounds at Kialigee town, though here the arbor was not four separate ones laid out around the square in the Four Directions, but one, and the covered space was much larger: a great open tabernacle of post oaks hewed into forked poles and placed equal distance apart, smaller poles laid across at two-foot intervals, and brushy limbs and bushes laid over all. Thula thought it was through the smiling grace of God that the night was dry, frostbitten, the stars twinkling in the black sky above the leafless branches, for if it had been a night of sleet or cold rain, that discomfort surely would have fallen through the barely clothed sticks onto the worshipers gathered to hear the Lord's Word. But the making of the brush arbor, though it was winter, was the same, and the purpose was the same, even if the white preacher knew nothing of purifying the body, preparing the body to heal it so that it might receive the spirit, but that was all right, because
Chisvs,
the Great Physician, had known that part, and Thula knew it, and all was well, as it should be, in the woman's eyes.

Thula Henry lived in two worlds simultaneously—not just Creek and Choctaw, Christian and medicine, church and stomp grounds—but in the presence of the Unseen in every moment, more real, as her heart knew, than the Seen. She understood that all had been formed balanced by the Creator from the beginning, that it was only humans who tipped and unsettled the balance, that
Chihowa's
gift of grace allowed for even that. She walked toward the square of the brush arbor as reverently as she had stood outside the sacred circle of swept leaves and dirt at Green Corn forty-three years before; this was not duality in her but union, because she believed it had been given to her to see all things not as separate, but as one. Taking the white children with her, she walked forward without acknowledging the several white men, including the children's uncle, scattered here and there among the shadows outside the square of light, surreptitiously sipping from jugs drawn quietly from beneath blankets in the backs of their wagonbeds. Nodding only once or twice, she walked past the Indian people sitting in their wagons or on homemade stools or standing around outside the rim of the tabernacle. She didn't acknowledge the woman Jessie, seated halfway down the aisle, when she turned her drawn face and looked up, shocked, her mouth open with singing, stopped open, as if she would say something. Thula ignored the little boy dragging on her hand, pulling, his head turning this way and that as he tried to shrink away from the numbers of people, the light from the kerosene lanterns hanging on poles inside the arbor, the smells. On in between the rows of hewn, backless pews filled with white people the woman walked, her eyes forward, leading the ragtag row of children to the very front of the tabernacle, where sawdust was spread on the cold earth beneath the empty log pews directly in front of the pulpit.

She made the children to sit down beside her, and they did so without grumbling, even the wildly restless Jim Dee, and Thula opened her mouth, singing “There is power! power! wonder-working power! in the blooood—of the Laaaamb!” along with the congregation. When the many voices swung into a chorus of “In the Sweet By and By,” Thula Henry sang the words in Choctaw. The children, having heard it for more than three months then, sang
“Kanima-a-ash inli ho-o-oh”
right along with her, and the Preacher, who had, after all, been sent to save heathen, nodded benevolently at them from where he sat on the raised platform behind the pulpit—though the song leader, a short red-faced white man from Dog Creek with hair in a fringed circlet around his bald pate, frowned horribly at them, not because they sang in Choctaw but because Thula and the children were sitting on the mourners' bench where the wicked were to kneel in repentance of sin at the end of the service, and where those baptized with the Holy Spirit were to roll in the sawdust when they began to talk in tongues.

The Preacher stood up. The congregation hushed to silence, a slow fade of coughs and rustles and closing songbooks among the few who had brought them. The song leader retreated to the back of the platform and then, under the quick glance of the Preacher, descended entirely from the pulpit area to seat himself on the far end of the same mourners' bench where Thula and the children sat. The Preacher stepped to the pulpit, which was no more than a post oak stripped and hewed square, topped with a flat piece of pine. It, like everything else at the camp meeting, had been quickly hand wrought by the deacons and devout members of various white congregations of numerous denominations—Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, Pentecostal—for several miles about. In a territory so new to white settlement, there was as yet little condescension and tension between denominations, though that time would come. The Preacher, tall, crow-thin, shaggy-headed, handsome, placed one long thin hand on the pine pulpit, raised his head, flashed his eyes, and began in a resonant, rich voice to pray.

“Our Father and our Great God, as we approach the Throne of Grace this evening, we'd just ask that You'd look down upon Your poor Servant—”

Heads quickly bowed, eyes closed, most caught unawares by the unexpected invocation, and then hardly had the congregation entered a state of prayer when the Preacher shouted, “Vanity!” and the consciousness of the crowd lurched abruptly awake.

“ ‛Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity'!” the Preacher cried. He lifted up the great black leather Bible he carried, one long-boned finger caught near the center in the Book of Ecclesiastes, though he had no need to open it and read from it, for the words of his most favorite and illustrious text were inscribed on his soul. “ ‘I have seen all the works that are done under the sun,' ” he boomed, “ ‘and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit'! And what meaneth the Preacher by that? Useless! That's what he means. Useless. Everything on this earth is useless, every small or large thing under the sun is useless, without the Lord. There's no getting around it. I don't care what you do. Oh, you can try to get around it: you can gather unto yourself the wealth of David. You can get the wisdom of Solomon, wisdom's not going to do you a bit of good. Listen!” and he opened the Book and laid it flat open in his great splayed hand, but he never looked down at the printed words. “ ‘For in much wisdom is much grief ! and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow! For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, seeing that which now is, in the days to come shall all be forgotten! And how dieth the wise man? as the fool'! You hear what the Word of the Lord is saying? Wise man dies just like a fool! Y'all might just as well be fools. The Book says that. Y'all might just as well set down and quit working. It doesn't make a bit of difference to God, because it's all vanities to the Lord of Heaven, and He says it right here!” The Preacher raised the Book over his head. “ ‘I gathered me also silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings of the provinces! and whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them! Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold! all was vanity and vexation of spirit! and there was no profit under the sun'! You hear that? ‘No . . . profit . . . under . . . the sun . . .”'

He paused long and lingeringly between the words, his great shaggy head lifted toward the arbor roof. “Vanity,” he whispered. “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. And then he thumped the Book closed and began to stride back and forth on the platform, his long shoulders humped beneath his black frock coat, his voice winding up to preach. And the Preacher did preach. He preached high and preached low, preached Sin and Salvation, slid from Hellfire Damnation to God's Forgiving Mercy, from Joel crying “Awake, ye drunkards, and weep! Howl, all ye drinkers of wine!” to Christ promising the disciples He would send the Comforter to abide with them till He should come again. If Brother Fingers knew a mighty lot of Scripture, it would have to be said that his biblical scholarship was a bit slippery, in that he freely blended the Old Testament with the New and could not seem to get settled between Judgment and Grace. It was not only Ecclesiastes he fancied himself after but John the Baptist as well, trying in all desperation to make straight the path of the Lord. He knew he was a Voice Crying in the Wilderness—it said so right on his handbills—and he wore, not camel hair, camels not being native to that country, but a leather girdle about his waist at least, and a buffalo robe in cold weather, and he ate wild honey when he could get it (though he eschewed locusts, which were more than plentiful in the Territory), and he went about baptizing many Indians and a considerable number of outlaws in the name of the Lord. On the other hand, the Preacher's primary method of baptism—especially in cold weather—was the baptism of the spirit, which he invoked and exhorted in his sermons, whereas a Bible scholar would have noticed that John the Baptist did his baptizing with water and in any case had lost his head long before the Day of Pentecost, when the true believers began to talk in tongues. Still, the order and references mattered little to his congregation, and the Preacher carried on, crying out to the Holy Spirit to come lay hands upon them, and every few moments punctuating his sermon with the phrase “Vanity of vanities!” (without an iota of irony, for he had not a clue in the world he was vain), because he understood, along with Ecclesiastes, the pure, dull emptiness of life without the Lord.

Before the two-hour sermon was finished, Brother Fingers had reduced himself to sackcloth and ashes, quite literally, through a bag of props he kept at the rear of the platform, and if he'd had a coat of camel hair he surely would have put it on. By that time, too, the front of the open-air temple was crowded with believers raising their palms to God, faces thrown back in ecstasy and the reception of the Holy Spirit, many speaking the jaw-tight, back-teeth-gritted glory of God in the language of the Spirit, and even on that frostbitten February night there was a considerable amount of sweat balling up the sawdust at the front of the tabernacle, and there was much shouting and singing and praising the Lord, and the Holy Spirit was so manifestly present at the camp meeting that many wished in their deepest hearts for summer so that they might find a good long serpent to handle, as had been promised to the true believers in the Book of Mark, though of course the local reptile population was all well denned and asleep. The Preacher had not yet even begun to give the invitation. There might be many more dozens of poor sinners, he knew, still nailed by sin and hardheartedness to their log pews, resisting the call, and the Preacher, sensing the hardheartedness and corruption still out there in the audience, began to try to make a sign to the song leader to come up to the platform and lead the remnants of still-seated congregation in the powerful invitational hymn “Just As I Am,” which never failed to pull a few nails from the recalcitrant rear ends of unbelievers still tacked to their seats by sin and self-will, and the Preacher did look yonder to the song leader, who was somehow not intent on the pulpit as he should have been but peering off at something to the side beyond the square of light. It was not only the song leader from Dog Creek who felt the presence outside the brush arbor in the darkness. Thula knew her. Jessie, seated far back behind the raised hands and lifted voices, knew her. And the girl Jonaphrene.

The Preacher paused, sweating, trying to carry the whole of the tabernacle into silence, but those filled with the Holy Ghost down front could not feel the Preacher's direction, drenched as they were in the filling of the Spirit apart from the vain world, so that the speaking in tongues and the shouting Glory! Praise Jesus! went on and on while the girl came from the dark outside the lanterns, came toward Thula walking slowly, directly, without coat or sweater, her hat gone, her face more soiled than it had been in the morning, and she walked directly to the mourners' bench unobserved by any but the song leader and Jessie, her own siblings, and the Choctaw woman whose story and responsibility were bound up with hers.

Jessie stood up and came down front as a sinner comes to the altar to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb, but she did not bend her head and kneel in grief and repentance. She stood, staring, as the girl walked forward and stood directly in front of Thula Henry, talking, speaking a language that was not the sound of tongues spoken by those baptized by the Holy Ghost all around them, and Jessie thought it was Choctaw maybe, or French, but it was not Choctaw, she knew the chopped sound of Choctaw, and the fear was rising in the woman Jessie and the powerful wrenching of compassion that she dreaded and would have none of and that made her want to cry out. Thula Henry knew that the tongue the girl spoke was not Choctaw, nor any language formed of the intelligence of humans, and it was not the language of the Pentecost either, but it was nevertheless a part of the Great Mystery—the language of the Fourth Part—and this, too, was the language of God. As her tongue moved, rapid, guttural, the girl suddenly grew rigid, as if every muscle and tendon in her small skinny body at once tensed and became frozen; she did not lift her palm or face to God but fell straight down solid as a ninepin, straight down to the sawdust, and her entire body began to twitch and tremble and shake on the earth.