The Mercy Seat (50 page)

I could see Jessie at the far end behind that old roughhewn oak counter they had, standing there with her arms crossed over her belly—it was swelled a little even then, now that I look back and remember, but of course that was not what I noticed. Any woman who's borne ten or eleven children is welcome to a big belly, I guess, though her arms and legs were no bigger around than my little finger, and the skin on her neck was drawn tight and ropy as a terrapin's. She didn't have a tooth left in her mouth, and I'll bet she wasn't a lot past forty years old. They say before she died her belly swelled up as big as a watermelon. They said it looked like she was going to drop a litter, she was swelled up so big—I know that sounds terrible; that's just how the people around here talked about it. We didn't have experience of such things. I wasn't there to witness it—I never could get myself to go in that place after Fate's funeral, I just never could, though I sent food in every day, right up to the end—but they say she died a horrible death, screaming and crying for her dead worthless husband and her mother.

Oh, well. I don't want to speak of all that.

So Jessie stood at the counter with her arms folded. Watching us. It was nearly as if she'd been waiting for us, and I believe perhaps she was. She didn't say a word. Her littlest girl was hanging on her skirttail; I could see the top of the child's head behind the counter. It came to me then that none of their other girls were around. There were usually three or four grown girls behind the counter to flop a bolt of cloth up on it and measure your drygoods or to scoop your coffee from the grinder into a sack, and they had a middling girl, seven or eight years old; even she was nowhere around. I thought then that that was what was strange in the room. I tried to think it—I wanted to let that be it so I could think it and get it over with—and yes, that was part of it, as the absence of men on turned-backward slatback chairs and nail kegs around the stove was also part of it. But neither was all.

We stopped a little way back from the counter, the pastor bumped up behind me, and Otis hitched in his voice a little, all of us waiting. I thought it was taking forever. My husband said finally, “Afternoon, Miz Lodi,” and then hesitated again, standing there awkwardly with his hat in his hand. I wanted to just kick him. He'd never called her Missus, any more than anybody in Big Waddy ever did—he called her Jessie if he had reason to call her anything—and it seemed to me just wrong for him to do it then. Can you imagine? As if there were protocol to the delivery of a death notice which I knew better than my husband who'd been called on in the community to perform that service a dozen times.

Really, I can't tell you how a person gets to be called Missus or any other particular designation in this community. It's a mystery to me. You've got Mrs. Yanush called Granny Merl by the whole community and old Mrs. Withers called Franny by even the little Indian children, yet they called me Miz Skeen from the day Otis carried me in here from Saint Louis perched high on my Aunt Elgis's featherbed in the spring wagon—I was twenty-three, which is old to marry, perhaps, but not
old,
and as childless on that day as I'll go to my grave —so it's not solely a matter of age, though getting old helps if you care to become a Mister or a Missus. It's not entirely tied to respect either, because, as I told you, most folks called Fate Lodi Mister, and I don't think you would say he had this community's respect. He had this community's something-or-another—fear a little, certainly, but not just that. He had our . . . minds . . . our imaginations, is the best way I know how to put it. People talked about Fate Lodi more than any other living individual in this country. Thought about him, complained and griped about him, and maybe, for some of the men, bragged about him as well. Some people—men, I should say; I never heard any woman but Jessie say one word in Fate Lodi's favor—but some of the men around here admired him, and I guess that's a kind of respect. He did always seem to get hold of just about whatever it was that he wanted. Seemed able to get anybody to do what he wanted, either through bullying or pigheadedness or charm—at least that was true up till the last couple of years, when he turned so cowardly and full of threats—and some men are prone to admire that kind of lording it over everybody, if they haven't got the gumption to do otherwise.

But in any case, such was the condition in our community that Fate Lodi was Mister, and Jessie was Jessie, and I wanted Otis to tell it right, do it right. I could hear the pastor breathing hard and mumbling behind me, and the cobbler pan was shaking in my fists, and I took the edge of it and poked Otis in the back, Lord in heaven forgive me. He was the best mortal man, I promise you, that the Creator ever allowed to draw breath, and I couldn't leave him alone for a minute. I had to try to make him do as I wanted, act and move and speak as I wanted, hold his head over the bucket when he took a drink of water. I stayed on him all the time, and he just took it and went on. Never one time argued against me. I was high-strung, he called it, and he laid it off onto us never having children, but the truth is, I had the devil in me and I didn't know how to quit.

He was a big, handsome man, you know, my husband—over six feet tall and broad in the chest, with slender legs about as big around as turkey sticks and the prettiest head of black hair. When he took his hat off, his hair sprang up wild and ragged; he couldn't keep it tamed with a quart of hair oil. He had the deepest-set eyes I ever saw on a man outside of pictures of Abe Lincoln, and Otis's were nearly that brown and sad. Picture him standing before that poor widow woman who was so newly widowed her husband's blood was yet pooling on the dirt street in Cedar, who did not yet know she was widowed but only that trouble had come calling with his hat in his hand and sweat-stains blackening his shirt back. See him standing awkward in the middle of that cramped whitewashed store, saying, “Miz Lodi,” while he holds in his mind and his misery this terrible information, trying to think how to deliver a message of horror and sorrow which he no more wanted to be responsible for than he'd care to jump off a barn roof—trying to come up with the right words how to tell it, his pastor no help at all but grunting and heaving behind him, and his good little wife right at his side, using a tin cobbler pan to poke him in the back.

They say He's a merciful God, some say it, and I surely hope it. Every day I draw breath I pray God's mercy, pray Otis knows what was in my heart, because I surely never got the chance to tell him.

Oh, that's not true.

There was a chance every minute for seventeen years, until the day he died walking out of the cornfield. I was standing right here on the porch. I saw him, he was walking this way toward the house. The crops were laid by, I don't know what he was doing—checking to see if they'd tassled yet maybe—but he was just right there coming out from between the green rows, and I heard him say, “Oh, no,” and then he fell. After that, no word out of my mouth or frown or hissed whisper was ever going to be taken back.

But you didn't come to hear all that.

Jessie stood real still with her arms folded, and when Otis said Miz Lodi the next time, she turned an arm loose and reached down and placed her hand on top of the child's head. I could hear the pastor huffing, trying to say something behind me, going, “Luft, luft, luft,” and I could feel Otis's misery, his tongue like a knot in the back of his mouth, and oh, I wanted to help him and I wanted to run out of there, and I wanted him for pity's sake to hurry up and quit calling her Miz Lodi and say it right.

In a little bit, Jessie said, “Well?”

I believe she knew. I really believe she did. Or she knew something anyway, because that little girl started whimpering, and when I looked I could see the child wiggling and clutching with both hands at her mother's palm pressing down on her, squirming and crying, trying to get out from under the weight of her mother's hand.

Otis said, “I'm afraid I've got some pretty bad news.”

Jessie didn't say anything. Her mouth was collapsed together like an old woman's; it gave her the strangest look, because she didn't have a gray hair on her head.

The preacher went, “Luft, luft, luft, luft.”

It was then I felt the men's eyes behind us in the store doorway. I didn't have to turn around to see them. I could feel they were there.

“There's been a shooting in Cedar,” Otis said finally.

She stood quiet the longest time, no sound but the little girl crying, the pastor huffing, the men holding their breaths in the doorway. Then she said, very soft and slow and steady, the way you'd talk low so as not to wake a sleeping child, “Which one is it?”

“Well, Miz Lodi,” Otis said, “it's your husband.”

Jessie didn't bat an eyelash. She didn't ask if he was dead or living, who'd done it, nothing about it, which is another reason makes me believe she already knew. The little girl kept crying—not at the news, I'm sure; she probably was not yet even talking, and there hadn't been enough words passed for her to understand if she was—but because the bulk of her mama's hardtack weight was pressing down on her head. The men began to murmur behind us. The pastor, too, finally got his tongue loose, and I heard him say, “Lift 'em up to the Lord in prayer,” which is I suppose what he'd been trying to get out for ten minutes.

“Did anybody yet send for my boys?” Still soft as a whisper.

Well, the pastor's voice was unstoppered pretty well I guess at that point, because he proceeded to declare that the two oldest were down yonder already—never did he explain where “down yonder” was or how they'd got there, but perhaps she knew more about it than I did, because she didn't appear the least surprised, whereas I kind of blinked when he said that. The girls were yonder too, the pastor said, or most of them, near as he could count. He'd stayed a minute to pray with them, knelt right down in the street to pray with them to give God the victory, and then he'd come right on back to lift her up to the Lord in prayer, she needn't worry, if the family needed anything, anything at all, just call on him as shepherd and friend, our church community would be there to provide for her and the children in this time of grief and sorrow—

Oh, I don't know, he went on for the better part of twenty minutes, but I was just glad. I didn't want Otis to have to utter another word. The men had started nudging inside the store by then. I stepped forward and set the cobbler on the counter, and then went back as quickly as I could and stood beside Otis. I just don't have the tongue for it. I don't know what to say, even at a regular time of bereavement. Death embarrasses me. Still yet it does to this day. I didn't know what to say to anybody when they came out to the house after Otis died. My husband was lying dead on the cooling board in the parlor, what was I going to say to some woman who says the Lord moves in mysterious ways or she's praying for me or she knows just how I feel?

Anyway, I was glad Brother Peevyhouse took over. He wasn't weeping, or saying anything about anybody getting shot down like a dog, but just answering a few questions from the men who'd come on in by then and were milling around. I never heard Jessie ask him anything, but the others did, and I have to say the pastor handled it very well. Otis made his way over and stood by a big pickle barrel against the wall, and I followed him. He was just waiting, I think, for what the pastor wanted him to do next.

In a little bit he said, “Agnes, if Brother Peevyhouse needs me to go back down yonder with him to fetch Mr. Lodi in the buckboard, you reckon you could ride Sally home on that old saddle?”

I'd never taken much to riding since I came into this country, though I could drive a team from here to Houston if I had to, but I just never did care much to sit a horse. But any time I did ride, it was in the pretty little sidesaddle he'd sent to Fort Smith and bought me, it most certainly was not in an old cow-pony man's saddle like Otis used for his old mare. But I said, “Yes, Otis, I believe I could.” I thought to myself, Well, I can walk that mare up that hill.

Then he said, “I don't know, what do
you
think he did with them?”

He turned his eyes expectantly on me, as if we'd talked about this already, as if this was the middle of a conversation we'd been having silently all afternoon and just now got around to speaking out loud. I didn't have an idea in the world what he was talking about.

“What did he do with who?” I said, because I knew the “he” was Fate Lodi—not because he was the man who'd just got murdered but because he had that kind of effect on people: lots of times you'd hear people talk about
he-
this and
he-
that and never once pass his name, but you knew who they meant. But I didn't know who the “them” was that Otis was talking about, and I looked at him and asked that, and now it was his turn to look at me as if he didn't have an idea in the world what
I
meant.

“Why,” he said at last, and swept his big deep-set eyes around the cluttered whitewashed boardslats, pausing at last on the lone empty west wall, barren and pale as a burn scar, which was of course the source of that strangeness I'd witnessed and not witnessed because I had not been willing to see it. “Why,” he said, “what'd Fate do with all them dozens of guns used to hang on the wall over there?”

N
ow, you need to understand something here. Killings was not all that unusual in this part of the country at that time. I don't mean you'd see one every day, but you'd hear about one onced a week nearly, but usually it'd be connected to a bank robbery or a shootout between a posse and some little gang of outlaws or somebody got shot down delivering the mail. It's hard to imagine how much outlawry and killing it took to settle this country, but, now, it sure did. The majority of the time there'd be some famous person at the heart of it, or if he wasn't famous to start with, he'd get famous on account of it. Those were the kind of killings that traveled. What I mean, if Cherokee Bill shoots some stranger at a bank holdup and it was a fellow just happened to be standing around, curious, watching the robbery, how any fellow might do, why that's the kind of killing you'd hear about. That happened up at Lenapah in the fall of Ninety-four, I think it was, and we all heard about it in a week or two. Heard they made a law afterwards that Cherokee Bill was to pass unmolested in Lenapah from then on. That's one outlaw was allowed by law to come and go in a town any how he pleased, on account of the people were so scared of the man. Now, that wasn't the killing made Cherokee Bill famous, but it was one that sure traveled, and you know a bunch of them did. I could tell you a hunnerd stories, but they'd near ever one show off Henry Starr or Belle Starr or the Cook Gang or the Daltons or somebody. If you heard about a killing way off up at Chandler, it had to have a outlaw in it, and if you heard about it for years and years after, it generally had a outlaw and a posse and like as not some kind of famous marshal.