The Mercy Seat (56 page)

My voice was stopped. I couldn't answer him. I was looking at the red webs of veins across his cheeks, at his eyes filmed like uncooked eggs. I was looking at the way the yellow scarfskin drawn across his bones quivered, how his pores leaked sweat and whiskey. We were caught in a tunnel, which was the dark length of barn open at both ends, dotted here and there with those still, white spots of daylight. I could see even in that darkness. And yet the fear never left me. It is hard to explain, because I saw all this, and felt it, and I could feel the smooth handle of the gun in his hand, sleek, balanced, I could feel the power in that hand. At the same time I understood for the first time what it was that made him crave guns with many barrels—and it was because of what I felt not in him but inside myself, because the death in the four barrels was plainly visible in the four muzzles yawning black and plumbless toward me, perfect circles for killing, made powerful, made perfect and complete, by the hand of my father.

“Kill you with your own damn gun,” he said. “Call it suicide.” He laughed once, a terrible sound, and then he threw back his head, stretched his neck, gobbled deep and wet in his throat.

Still I didn't understand that in his twisted, besotted brain he thought I was Papa. There were other things I didn't understand because I could not think, because just then, standing with my uncle facing me in the shabby shed barn, mad-dog drunk and drawed down on me, I felt and knew only one thing: that he would kill me. If you have stood unarmed with the open muzzle of a gun aimed hard on you, then you know what it is, and if you have not, no amount of telling is going to proclaim it, but I will say it anyway, tell you how black terror swells on you beyond the blood drop of the first moment because you comprehend helplessness, because you know in the fullness of yourself the truth of your complete and abject powerlessness, which if you had a gun you could at least be calculating to shoot first, you could just shoot. You could shoot. So it is powerlessness swelling on you, and terror, and disbelief, because you cannot fathom you are going to die, and yet it is complete belief that you will die, in the next second, in the next instantaneous union with all men who have died thus, all men and women who have died thus, in terror, disbelieving, believing, facing the mouth of a gun. I did not think about God. I didn't think about Mama, Thomas, my sister, anything of my life, but only the dead mule—not Delia, the other one—because I saw my father turning in washed amber air, the gun lifted, the flat side of it strange because it was like the flat tang of a Winchester because there was no cylinder to bulge out, the four barrels welded as one when Papa raised them, turning them in the sunset air, and the big mule's forehead exploding red.

I waited, my body numb, and when the gun fired I waited still, to learn where he had shot me, because I could feel nothing. I waited to feel the warmth of blood oozing, so that I might know where the wound was. I waited to fall down. The gun fired again, the sound thundering, and the shriek of wood splintering, exploding behind me and a little above my head, coming more sudden than the thunder ceased. I could smell the salt smell of gunpowder so I knew I wasn't dreaming, but I was not joined with my body then but floating a little above it, and so I thought I might be dead. Still, my body remained upright, and the gun fired again, and the loamy barn floor exploded to the side of where Jim Dee's boots stood.

“You goin' to show me just right precisely where you put 'em.” His tongue was thick, but the words came clear enough. “You goin' to walk out in front of me, in case your pardner gets any fancy ideas, and we'll just go fetch my own legal property before you make me go ahead and shoot you. I didn't mean for it to have to happen but you been at it for years and years. I told Daddy I might have to kill you. I told him ever since you started setting yourself up so high and mighty, but you and him won't neither one listen.” His eyes narrowed. “Y'all think you can rob me blind, you think I'm too dumb to see it. Been robbing me for years, haven't you? Taking what's rightful mine. Make a jackass outa me right out in the damn street. Hush! Hush now. It's a damn rat snake, that's all, shut up. Quit your sniveling before I whup you. Shut up now, Daddy'll hear. You want me to lick you?” And then he stopped abruptly, blinking slowly in the barn darkness. His tongue snaked, liver-colored, out between his cracked lips, from beneath the coarse hairs curling, swiped sideways across the lips' creviced surface, and he narrowed his eyes. “Stand right where you are.” He was quiet a moment. “Th'ow me that belt.” He waved the gun at the cartridge belts around my neck.

Still I didn't understand what was in him. I was stupid with fear—and yet fear is better than emptiness. I tell you it is. I knew only that he was crazy drunk and I wasn't dead, and if I was not dead yet, maybe I would not have to be. I was at once rejoined with my body, and when my uncle motioned again, said, “Th'ow it here!” I lifted the top cartridge belt over my head and tossed it toward him. It thunked on the soft barn floor.

“Not that one!” He waved the gun again.

I lifted the next belt, and the fat cartridges lined up in their strip pouches of leather clinked a little metallically when they hit the belt on the floor.

“All right now, turn around,” he said.

There was something worse about the gun in his drunken hand trained on my back instead of my belly, and I began scheming again, trying to think. I said, looking straight at him, “They're just right out yonder,” and I nodded my head, easy, toward the daylight behind me, thinking now that it could be in my power again, the power of my mind and my words, that I could bend him to my will if only I was smart enough, quick enough, because it was my pride again coming on me, and my contempt. And then for some reason I turned my head to look out the door. My sister, barefoot on the cold stubble of grass, was climbing the path toward the barn. Before I knew I would do it or had done it, I shouted, “Jonaphrene! Get back to the house!”

She looked up at me, her eyes that slow slate gaze, stubborn, and yet uncomprehending.

I screamed, “Right now! I'll be there in a minute!”

My sister paused for just an instant, hardly even perceptible, and then she came on, picking her way barefoot up the rise along the path. In the relentlessness of that gesture I saw the whole of our lives, the threads pulling as they had been pulling from far back, as long as I could remember, and even before, back through my mother's and father's memory, and their mothers' and fathers' before them, infinitesimal threads raveling, drawing together, relentless as my sister picking her way up the path. I saw cedar trees bleeding their smoked seed into the cold dawn air as the blond specter coughed, bending over, holding a pencil in unfleshed fingers, and my cousin Fowler's eyes slitted deep in envy, deeper, disappearing, and then I saw the black woman's pink bitten flesh, which I had caused, the triangular wedge gouged from her flesh by the force of my own driven will, and behind me my uncle reeling into the abyss.

“Jonaphrene!” I screamed, helpless. “Get back to the house!”

“What—?” Fayette said.

I turned to see him, and knew that he'd been whipped suddenly to the log barn, jerked back from black time and distance by my voice or Jonaphrene's name or the cunning tricks of the whiskey, I don't know. He held the gun Papa made loose and reckless in his hand, no more controlled by him than the cold eye of the sun outside crossing heaven.

“What—” he said again.

Blinking, and the word not even a question really, not to ask anything of reason in the still, rank air of the barn, but an empty echoing word of void and despair. The word came again—“What?”—and its echo, rasped away, dying as the last voice of locust dies in the distance, fading, thinning, to become air and silence, and I wanted to move, turn and run to my sister or walk backwards away from him out of the barn, but I did not and could not move backwards, because I reeled forward, dark,
into darkness, swept in. I was sick, roiling, trembling, in my soul and my body, the taste in my mouth foul, reeking poison from my tongue inside my mouth, the backs of my nostrils, my rotted teeth and belly, blinded, my head split across the front like an axe in it, and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to lie down but I could not because of the terror because something would happen in the next breath, the next instant, irrevocable and hellish, the end of the earth forever because the gates of hell would groan and the earth beneath the rise on which the barn stood would split open to swallow my hated self in my skin hating my bones reeking with the scent of me wanting to die and not dying but only the earth opening to explode me out of my guts and the sordid sinew of my body into hell when there was only one thing to save me, and it was not God—

Fayette turned.

I fell back, stumbling, and he stumbled, but only a little, and then he went carefully, as if he were not sick, as if he were not drunk even, to the side of the blue roan and lifted the leather flap of the saddlebag with the butt of his hand, the gun loose in it pointing wildly sideways and then up toward the shed roof. I turned quickly and went out the open door to stand in the acrid dust of the old barnyard and breathe deeply the still, bright air.

I should have run right then. As quickly as I was freed and outside of the sight of him, I should have run down the slope and swept my sister back to the log house. I should have got Papa's muzzle loader and come back to the barn lot before he'd found his flask to drink those last few drops to stave the sickness. I should have, I should have, but instead I stood listening to the whisk of the uncapped flask, the long sucking pull. I listened to the whisper of the metal cartridges slipped from their leather pouches, heard the breech snap open to receive them, the slide of cold cartridges into warm steel chambers, one and two and three, and then the click shut. There was a sudden clink of spurs, and the creak of saddle leather when his weight pressed into the stirrup. The horse stepped back once and sideways before the reins lashed its flank and the spurs stung and it leapt forward. Still I stood, unmoving, leaning back against the shaved logs in the sunlight, the last cartridge belt knuckled beneath my shoulder. I stood there still when he whipped the blue roan out the barn door. Stood calm in the harsh sunlight, watching my sister scramble off to the side of the path in her bare feet, my heart lifted in a strange unfathomable rejoicing.

H
e saw her. I know that he saw her, but he lashed the rein ends on the blue speckled haunches, drove the roan, hard, down the path directly at her so that Jonaphrene scrambled and leapt to the side with no more grace than a frog, and she wasn't trampled only because she rolled sideways, her skirt twisted around her legs like clothes wrung from a wringer, but I saw as she fell what it did to her face. My uncle pulled up at path's end and turned around in the roadbed, the horse dancing a circle like a trick horse at a fairgrounds because Fayette had the reins cinched up so tight, the horse's head lifted, ears back, eyes rolling, and my uncle turned and looked up at me, his eyes like nails, and I knew where he would go then, what he would do.

I watched his hatless head turning as the horse turned in a circle, his eyes burning on me for a long time, what seemed a long time, and he'd jerk his head around fast when the horse had wheeled too far for him to keep his eyes on me. I heard Jonaphrene's soft moaning sounds,
oh,
and then
oooh,
and I saw the cartridge belts I'd dropped on the barn floor hooked over Fayette's shoulder, the crosshatched grip of the gun Papa made protruding from its place beneath the gray swell of his belly. He didn't let go my eyes until he spurred the roan once and jerked him west on the road. They disappeared from my sight on the far side of the log house. Only then was I able to move.

I went to my sister. She lay in the bitterweed along the side of the path with her head pointed downhill, her dark hair loose and tangled, her legs wrapped around, caught cocoonlike in the web of her skirt. “Stand up,” I said.

She released the little moaning sound again, and it was not really a moan but just the word “oh” let out on a long breath.

“Get up, Jonaphrene,” I told her. Her eyes were on me and I could see the mark coming already on her cheekbone, but it hadn't broken the skin. “Hurry,” I said.

She didn't let out the sound again, but it took a while for her to begin moving. I could hear Fayette talking loud to someone on the road in front of his store, but I couldn't see him because the log house was in the way. I reached a hand down to my sister and she took it, and then she began to try to stand up, but gravity and the twisted wrap of her skirt kept her because she was slanted the wrong way downhill, and I had to bend over and try to hoist her beneath the shoulders, because I knew she was hurt.

All the things that happened next took place in probably no more than a few minutes, but it seemed such a long time because I was swimming through it because it was like one of those dreams where you try and try and try and cannot get where you are going, and it was like the whole long years in Eye Tee of waiting and trying and expecting to go home to Kentucky, which I'd been striving for years to take my family and my mama home and still we were no further east than on the morning I found the empty wagon, no closer home than on the day the man shot Delia, and so I helped up my sister, and when she stood finally, hunkering over a little to lean on me, I looked and saw Thomas where he stood on the back porch of the log house. He had his Sunday hat on and Papa's suspenders. He was standing with his arm on the corner post, looking at us. And then I heard the horse again and turned my head to see Fayette trotting along the wagon track that ran on the far side of the store past their house to the barn. The horse danced and pranced sideways because he wanted to go on up to the rock barn, but Fayette held him, and he was bellowing, Fayette was, dancing the horse into their yard, and then Lottie came out on the porch, and I heard him shout at her, “Right in yonder under the spoolbed in that front bedroom! My carbine! Fetch it out here! Right now!”