The Mercy Seat (49 page)

Otis saw me at last, had reached the end of the row and turned the plow, and he'd stopped plowing and was still trying to loosen the checkline from around his waist and get free to come to me when I hollered—well, screamed nearly; I could hear it screeching up through the peachleaf willows on the creekbank—“Quit that plowing this minute and come quick! John Lodi's shot Mr. Lodi and killed him! Brother Peevyhouse's sitting in the front yard in the buckboard, wants you to come go with him!” Otis was still struggling to untangle the line, frowning—I don't know if he couldn't hear me yet or couldn't believe what he was hearing—but I didn't think he took my meaning or I didn't think he was moving fast enough, or I don't know what I thought, but I shouted, “Don't stand there gawking like a calf at a new gate! Lodi's killed Lodi! Preacher wants you to come go with him! Hurry up!”

I was nearly sick with fear and anger and that terrible rant in the core of my chest, going,
unto one of these the least my brethren, unto one of these the least,
and why, oh, why would I take it out on my poor husband? I don't know, but I did, God forgive me, more times than I want to remember, because while the Lord allowed me to keep my tongue from being quick in public, He sure never bound it from letting loose on the one I loved most. I'd nearly want to bite it off sometimes, and that was one of those times, because what I ached to do was throw my arms around him and hold him safe forever, and what I did was yell at him to come quick, hurry up. My husband was a slow man—I don't mean slow in his wits, for he had a keen, deep intelligence—but slow in his movement. He could plow all day and coonhunt all night and walk these mountains from Bald Knob to Big Ridge without tiring, but he went slow. He wasn't a man who knew how to hurry, it just wasn't in him, and in those days I went like a house afire all the time, hollering at him to keep up. He paid me not the least mind—he never fought with me—but went on how he went, slow and methodical, lifting one foot and setting it down in front of the other, and there aren't a half-dozen times I ever remember him getting in a hurry. But that day of the Lodi killing was surely one. He was trying to hurry even then, struggling to get the checkline off as soon as he saw me, and of course I could see that, but it didn't keep me from yelling. But when he came out from behind the plow, he started running toward me, his big boots clopping on that dry dirt, and I swear I thought my heart would burst right through my bodice, I was so torn up.

So I yelled again, “John Lodi's shot Mr. Lodi and killed him! Hurry up! Pastor's waiting!”

And he got close enough that I could see it rise up over his face—his understanding of what I was saying. He got within about three feet of me and just stopped. I could see it, the first thing: relief that it was not us, not me or one of his brothers I'd come running and shouting to tell him about. The second wave was the pure comprehension of what it was. I held the dipper out to him and he took it, his brows still furled in a question as if they hadn't yet caught up to what he knew, and whatever five drops of well-water had managed to cling to the bottom of that dipper he drained off and then slung the empty bowl sideways the way you would fling out dregs, and there wasn't a drop in it. I don't remember that he said anything then, I don't believe he did, but just stood directly in front of me and looked at me very still for a minute, and then he handed me that empty dipper, turned around, and went back to unhitch the mule from the plow. I didn't say anything. I was finished hollering. My husband wasn't going to leave his mule standing hitched to the plow in the field all day while he went off to tend to a murder; he got him unhitched pretty quickly, left the plow buried to the shaft in the dry earth and came on with the mule, slapping the reins on his black rump and the two of them highstepping crossways over the furrows, raising dust, moving faster than I believe I ever witnessed either one of them before or after, and I turned and started back to the house.

When I got there I saw the pastor standing in the yard with the drink bucket in both hands and that poor old dray's nasty muzzle buried right in it, but I didn't say anything, I just went on up on the porch and laid the dipper on the shelf. I could see men gathering in front of Lodi's store in town, and I thought, Well, word sure spread fast for the pastor to not even have stopped or said hidey. Pretty soon Otis came around the side of the house, because he'd moved that fast to unharness and turn the mule out in the lot, and he went and stood by the pastor and said, “Did anybody go in yet to set with Miz Lodi?”

Brother Peevyhouse raised his eyes heavenward once more, and I thought he was going to start weeping again. “She don't even
know
it, Brother Skeen. Don't none of 'em know it. I just not more than forty minutes ago witnessed the very killing—” He broke off and turned his eyes from heaven in the direction of my husband, and though he did have I believe the tiniest eyes I ever witnessed on a preacher or on any living creature except maybe a shoat pig, in that moment, looking straight on at my husband, Brother Peevyhouse's eyes swelled up large behind his glasses and got red. He said, “His own brother shot him dead right out in the street in front of the livery stable at Cedar. I mean, shot him down like a dog, may God have mercy on both of'em. I never seen the beat of it. Shot him down like a dog.” And the pastor was wiping his eyes behind his glasses, shaking his head. “I come right back to tell it, or let me say to break the news to the poor widow, as is my duty and responsibility as shepherd to this community, but I thought I better run up here and get y'all to come go with me.” He was still so excitable he could hardly catch his breath. He looked over at me and said, “Miz Skeen, I'd be sure appreciative if you'd come go with us, a woman do need a woman at a time of grief and sorrow, it's a comfort to 'em somehow, I seen it ever time.”

I just thought to myself, Rain on you, Brother. I didn't have one intention in this world of being part of that sad little delegation. By no means. In the first place, there was no love lost in me for Lafayette Lodi—well, I don't want to go into that, but just suffice it to say I didn't want to have to pretend some kind of sorrow I didn't feel—and in the second place, my job, as far as I knew, was to go right in the house and start cooking, because a woman's responsibility when there's a death in the community—doesn't make any difference if it's tragic or common—is to see to it that the food gets carried in. I kind of shook my head no at the pastor and backed up to the porch post, but he wasn't looking at me. He had his eyes turned down the road toward town and both arms wrapped around my oak bucket, holding it up for his horse. I looked at Otis to help me. He wasn't looking at me either but standing in the dirt next to the buckboard with his hat off, his lean shaggy head bowed to his chest nearly. At first I thought he was praying—I don't believe he'd even heard Brother Peevyhouse ask me to come go with them—and then I could see that it was working on him, what it meant: to go into Lodi's dark, cramped store behind the pastor and tell Jess Lodi and all those youngsters that their husband and father was dead—not from a tree falling on him, as Otis had gone with Cebe Gardner to tell Mrs. Jenkins, nor dead from the runaway team dumping the wagon and crushing the chest of Claude Wadkins, as he'd gone by himself to give the news to Claude's mother—but murdered in cold blood by the hand of his own brother.

“Reckon we better get a move on,” Brother Peevyhouse said. “Folks is starting to gather.”

A look came over Otis's face then that said,
Dear Lord, let this cup pass from me,
but all he said out loud was, “You want to wait till I saddle my mare or you want me to ride with you?”

The pastor hemmed and hawed a bit and said at last, not looking at either one of us but turning to set the water bucket on the lip of the porch, “I thought Miz Skeen might druther ride in the buckboard.”

I knew then—I think Otis and I both knew—that he didn't intend to break the news himself but to place not just a deacon but a deacon and a deacon's wife both between himself and the telling. I would've argued or simply refused to go if it hadn't been for that look on my husband. I looked at him and then I turned and looked at the pastor. I said, “Wait till I get my apron off.”

Otis had Sally saddled and the pastor's buckboard turned around by the time I came back out with my shawl and dress bonnet and a pan of cold cobbler from the last of the blackberry juice I'd put up last summer—it had a piece cut out of it from Otis's dinner, I'm embarrassed to tell, but it was all in the world I had fixed in the house to carry down there and I just couldn't make up my mind to go emptyhanded. It's hardly better than three-quarters of a mile, you know, from here across the creek to where Lodi's store was. See that old log house there where the mountain begins to rise? That's where John and his children lived, and Lodi's store was just down and a minute west from that, but I guess we couldn't walk it on a day as solemn as that one. I guess we had to lend the dignity of Otis's old saddlehorse and the pastor's buckboard both to the occasion, and we drove down the slope and across that old rock low-water bridge that lay over Bull Creek then. Otis hitched his mare and the pastor's dray in front of Lodi's store, where the townsmen—there must have been fifteen or twenty by that time—parted like the Red Sea for us to climb the wooden steps and cross the board porch and go in.

There was something that was strange from the minute we stepped inside the door. I could feel it, but I couldn't lay my mind on it. For there to be no customers was odd, certainly. I don't believe I'd ever entered that store, which was seldom enough anyhow—I didn't care to trade with Mr. Lodi and would only do so under the worst kind of emergency—but I don't believe I ever went in there once that there weren't at least a half-dozen men sitting around the potbellied stove, summer or winter, smoking and hiding their cob-stoppered jugs under their chairs. Oh, don't tell me they weren't, I'm not naive, and anyway this entire community knew. But it was not only that. I couldn't place it at first, because the store was as dark and crowded-seeming as ever, which the whitewashed walls and ceiling helped not a bit, and it was as close as ever with that smell of old smoke and unwashed men, but there was something else peculiar I couldn't seem to grasp.

Well, to tell the truth about it, just quite frankly, I was frightened. I don't know why. I don't know how to explain it. We walked in, Otis and then myself holding that ridiculous pan of cold blackberry cobbler, with the pastor bright and brave right behind us, and Otis called out, “Hello?” My chest knotted up sick with fear till the pan in my hands shook—at what, I can't say. I wasn't afraid that something was going to be done to me. It was just knowing I was going to have to look at Jessie and those youngsters, I guess—that in a minute I would watch them receive, hear my husband speak, the very words of tragedy. It didn't matter what I thought of that family—oh, I really don't want to get started on that, I really don't. I could write a book. And I tell you the truth, it didn't matter in that moment.

Well. All right. If you must know. Lafayette Lodi was a coward and a cheat and a pure out-and-out scoundrel, that's all. He sold bootleg whiskey to the Indians as well as half the white men in this country, which was a federal offense, you know, not to mention a lowdown dirty trick—you might just as well take an Indian and cram locoweed down his throat and wash it down with poison, it makes them that crazy and kills them that awful—and then he'd sell any kind of old gun or homemade ammunition to anybody he could get to turn loose of a dollar, and cheat them in the bargain. He did my husband and just about every man in this country dirty in some fashion—white, Indian, or colored, didn't matter—and if a fellow called him on it, he'd lie and say he hadn't done it and then turn right around and do it again. If a man called him on it a second time, Fate would begin to threaten—he was going to burn your haybarn, going to horsewhip the hide off your oldest-born. He threatened half the men in this territory at one time or another, though I don't know how much he ever carried out those threats, because he was an awful coward. He was.

Oh, I don't know what-all he did, I can't begin to tell you—a thousand things. Otis got into it with him over his hogs coming over on us and eating our corn. Otis tried to get him to put a fence up, but, now, Fate Lodi wasn't going to do it. “Free-range! This is free-range country, free-range!” he hollered, prancing up and down in my yard —and of course, he was right, this was all free-range back then, but nobody else's hogs came over on us the way his did; it was almost like they had the Lodi mind, to eat where it didn't cost anything and go home to digest. Jessie calculated mistakes to their favor on our ticket more than a few times so that I had to make Otis go back and settle with her over it. Their children were every one brazen and buck-toothed as gophers, they had the idea that they about ran this town, and the other one, the brother John, was a cipher and a mystery as far as anyone around here knew anything about him, whose own children were snatched up by the hair of the head and never taught—

Oh, see, now look how I'm talking.

I tell you it didn't matter. I didn't think such things in that moment, never for a minute considered the character of that family nor what the rest of the community said then or after—because we were walking into Lodi's store in the actual face and unfolding of death. We were its harbingers, we had come to tell it, and that made me just sick.

You know, it's very peculiar. I had that sense of something odd or strange, something simply not right, as I followed Otis's big back into the store, and I couldn't begin to place what it was, though I could see every detail in that building as clearly as if it were outlined in white thread. I probably saw Lodi's store in those few minutes more clearly than I'd ever seen anything in my life up to that point—of course, I know now that you can see nearly with the eyes of the angels in a moment of extremity and still be blind as a pup. Crisis, tragedy, anything like that can bring an acuteness of vision beyond anything you'd ever care to wish for—and still you'll miss the dead body in the corner. But then I didn't understand it, and I looked around those whitewashed walls cluttered with every kind of old such-and-so, trying to place what was strange. Lodi carried every imaginable salve and cracker and tool and meat and powder and drygood, hauled them up from the station on a flatbed and jammed them in his store sideways and upside down and just anyhow—absolutely no means of logical order—and each good he carried came in the door and sat there in its most raw and primitive state. That store looked about like an old sutler's supply at an army fort, and there was something in the smell and placement that made the room seem ancient, though I'm sure it hadn't been built over nine or ten years, and all of that, let me say, contributed to my distaste for trading at Lodi's. This was Eighteen Ninety-six, mind you, almost the turn of the century. You could ride the train to Fort Smith and purchase any kind of finery, lace curtains and silk hats with ostrich plumes and mercury-filled thermometers. In Saint Louis, where I came from, people had electricity already—and here was Lodi's store, primitive as an old corncrib and just about as rough.