The Mercy Seat (59 page)

The girl still bore that look of hollowness, like a cornhusk doll without features, but for the yellowbrown eyes staring ahead at her uncle. She was lean, hard-muscled, bony, and her chest was as flat as the day Thula had first seen her when she was ten. Thula realized with a start and then a slow deepening of the dread within her that the girl had never received her womanhood. Watching from her creviced place, the woman teetered between believing it was a sign of the girl's emptiness that she'd never got her womanways and, in the next instant, thinking it signified how powerful was the girl's medicine: a mark from the Creator that the girl had been charged to do powerful things. It was as if Matt exemplified and bore in her body the duality that had grown up in Thula, so that the woman could only watch in secret trembling as the girl—armed, barefoot, hardly taller than a fourteen-year-old, her face blank beneath the soft brim of the tan hat —passed in the street and continued on south midst the pawing, whickering horses.

When Matt neared the crossroad beyond the bank that ran east and west beside the train tracks, Thula Henry stepped up onto the plank sidewalk, crossed it swiftly and, holding the parcel to her chest and bending her knees deeply, and grunting once, for the distance was nearly two feet, she stepped down into the dirt street, where none but her son's long-suffering mule witnessed her movement.

There were none but that mule's eye, warm, brown, slanted, comprehending, and God's eye, perhaps, to see the short Indian woman moving along the street in a long dress of faded cotton, her hair crow-black still, and braided, looped in a black circlet crowning her head, a pale knitted shawl about her shoulders, the paper-wrapped parcel pressed to her chest, and on her small feet the soft leather shoes that were not moccasins but something more like house slippers hand-stitched of cowhide, raising a thin skein of dust behind the thin boyish figure walking steadily, neither swiftly nor slowly, behind the armed man mounted on the nervous, evenly gaited blue roan. None but God's and the mule's and the Indian woman's eyes to see when the figure lifted its trousered knees and stepped barefoot over the railroad tracks that appeared to slice through the heart of the town. But it could have been God's eye alone that saw the chert-eyed sister, her hair a dark mane flying, the bruise dimmed beneath a flour coating upon her cheekbone, as she snapped the reins above the rump of the little bay mare belonging to the Waddy postmaster Clay Mewborn, harnessed to the neat, shining buggy belonging to that same Mewborn, the yellow-painted spokes on the four wheels seeming to swirl backwards as the vehicle rolled swiftly toward Cedar on the old Butterfield road.

 

 

The
what
of what happened is so simple. The
what
takes place in the warp of time that is God's time, or perhaps it is not God's time but only the peculiar distortion of the human mind's belief in Time, forged and lived in each consciousness as it goes on forever retelling, shaping, trying to grasp and change the unchangeable. A man is killed. A man was killed. A man is being killed forever. And there is none but the eye of heaven, or the sun, or the all-seeing eye of the Creator to bear witness to the affluxion of lives and moment, drawn together in the mystery of unrelenting orchestration, for now, in the center of the khaki street forming the spine of the cross, its color paler than the transverse, bleached and aged with the numbers of coachwheels and iron shoes that have ground and parted its dust, the Indian woman hurries forward, seeing, on the far side of the tracks, the armed man halt the blue roan before the false front of the mercantile; seeing the wraithlike figure of the girl step to the side and conceal itself behind the red walls of the deserted brick depot. Now, thirteen miles away, in the swept yard of a small cabin a half mile south of Woolerton, a deputy U.S. marshal turns his smooth high-domed forehead to the eye of the sun, his burnished terra cotta skin seeming lit from within as he flips the stirrup over the fine leather seat of the saddle, the whorls and nubs at the back of his closecropped head now revealed to heaven as he bends to tighten the cinch around his stallion's inflated copper belly. On the far side of Waddy Mountain, the white woman stands on the porch of her husband's store, gazing south, her youngest child whimpering on her hip, the flattened ridge of her mouth deflated, and a dark tumescent swelling, unknown to her except in the deepest unwilling reaches of her consciousness, already rising in her belly, as the boy Thomas, in his pale dress hat and his father's suspenders, runs south along the road toward the place where he has seen his sister disappear in the postmaster's buggy, while within the dark sepulchre of the livery stable, John Lodi pauses, his arm raised, the great shaggy mallethead hammer poised, his ear cocked to the open door of the stable, where the bright still air stands yellow.

 

 

Jonaphrene drove fast around the curve through the pine woods, but she slowed, pulling up hard on the reins as soon as she saw the buildings of Cedar ahead. An overpowering shyness swept her, a self-consciousness born of vanity and confusion, and the terrible isolation in the confines of the log house on the edge of the little fading community of Big Waddy Crossing. As she passed before the remains of the old courthouse at the north edge of town, its rock chimneys standing empty at either end of the pile of rubble, the charred columns on the slab porch holding up only sky, she thought she could go no further. The long yellowbrown street before her was empty except for the few tethered horses and, far in the distance, the moving figure of the Indian woman, whom the girl did not recognize. Her experience was so barren that she did not even think it strange the town was empty, silent; she only feared someone would come out of one of the buildings on Main Street and see her with her tangled hair and marred face, and so at the cross street just past the cotton gin, Jonaphrene turned the bay's head to the left, and then, at the next corner, right again, taking the turns slowly, the mare walking, following a nameless side road parallel to Main Street through each of its small crossroads, south.

On the floorboard beneath her highbutton shoes, in the well of the buggy, lay a carbine rifle—the very one Fayette had called out to his daughter Lottie to bring him from beneath the spoolbed in the front bedroom. The one Jessie had brought out of the frame house after her husband's departure and carried, the crying toddler stumbling after her along the step-softened path, the rifle dragging muzzle-down and weighted through the bright motionless air, into the whitewashed and crowded interior of her husband's store, where she'd laid it upon the oak counter for no reason present within her own mind. A simple carbine rifle in no way tied to Lafayette Lodi's mired obsession with weapons of many chambers and barrels and complex firing mechanisms; it was merely another weapon he owned, as yet unblighted with the palm sweat and hunger of the man who owned it: a gun possessed of no more significance than the fact that it had been there, on the oak counter, when Jonaphrene went into the store because she could not find her father's muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle inside the log house.

Her sister had told her to borrow Mewborn's buggy, bring the muzzle loader, not let Mewborn see it, and Jonaphrene had followed meticulously each instruction, but for the bringing of the muzzle loader, which was not in its place on the two iron nails above the front door, and which she did not spy in a quick sweep through the downstairs, and so she'd gone to the store, where she knew—or expected —there were rifles aplenty. Jonaphrene, struggling to comprehend a world no one would explain to her, had developed into a very literal-minded young woman—more literal-minded, in fact, than even her brother Thomas, who took all the world at its word. Matt hadn't told her to bring Thomas, and so Jonaphrene had left him, running fast away from him across the field. Her sister had told her to hurry, and she had hurried, and yet when she couldn't find the muzzle loader, it had seemed to her no betrayal or peculiarity to go to her uncle's store. It had been, after all, Mewborn she'd been instructed to not let see the gun. Jonaphrene couldn't hold within herself the division and loyalty Matt carried, because she did not understand it. She'd been taught words long ago about a dead mother she could not remember, had been told she must haul water from the creek when there was a perfectly good fount of well water a hundred yards across the pasture. To her mind it wasn't betrayal to drink from her uncle's well, to wear her cousins' cast-off dresses, to go to Jessie and tell her she could not find the muzzle loader she was supposed to carry in Mewborn's buggy to Cedar. It was Jessie who had lifted the shiny carbine rifle off the counter and handed it, wordlessly, to her niece.

When Jonaphrene came to the junction of east-west crossroad hugging the train track, she halted the leather-trimmed buggy, climbed down with difficulty over the yellow wheelspokes in her ballooning volume of six overlayered skirts, and stood a moment looking west. She waited for the unfamiliar soreness to settle before she reached into the buggy and lifted out the carbine rifle and, holding it awkwardly before her in both hands, began to walk toward the depot along the bare rails. She walked slowly, stiff in the litheness of her limbs because of the violence of her fall: a girl of fifteen, beautiful, with no inkling of her own beauty but only an overweening self-consciousness that made her, even as she stepped along the crossties in a forced, uneven gait, believe there were eyes watching her from the houses on the far side of the road. She had no notion of the clownishness of her six layered skirts donned in lieu of petticoats, her face powdered with white flour, dusted on hurriedly in one quick, peering glance into the triangular piece of broken mirror wedged into a chink of log wall above her pallet in the dim upper room. She had no knowledge of the startling, nearly painful symmetry of form and bone and color beneath that flour-caked surface, the impossibly long fringe of lashes, straight, serge brown, above which the straight slash of brow seemed to give a scowl to the perfect features—a frown belied by the wide taking-in of the graygreen eyes, changing, transforming, shifting color as she walked, turning her head slowly, glancing self-consciously side to side at the invisible watchers she believed must be audience to her journey. For all the inward-turning of her awareness, she could have no idea of the strange juxtaposition on the creosote-blackened rails of girl and gun and awkward beauty, which alone would have captured all eyes to witness her part in the unfolding—had there been any human eye turned upon it.

For not even Matt turned her head to witness; not even Thula Henry, who could have seen Jonaphrene from the moment the buggy turned the corner, had she not been so locked onto the thin figure kneeling on the wooden platform behind the depot. The Indian woman had been flung drowning into the place of her soul's division, so that, watching in the harsh still glare of midafternoon sunlight, she saw not the bony nineteen-year-old in a man's hat and breeches hunched behind the brick wall of the depot, but the fourteen-year-old walking from the east in the wanner light of midmorning, up the slope and into the clotted yard beside the log house, where she sat down on the dun grass and put her arm across the rolling back of the fat beagle: the fourteen-year-old Matt, thin, pale, parched-corn yellow, her hair pulled back tightly from her face in a leather thong at the base of her skull, and her eyes entirely empty. Thula's fear was not dry now but a swamp like the black aimless sloughs of the Fourche Maline river bottoms, rising, changing, transforming solid earth to quagmire and bog.

“
Impashilup,
” she said, out loud.

John Lodi, emerging from the stable then, walked alone in the street toward his brother. He was not afraid, walked without anger even in that moment, but merely in weariness at the relentlessness of the trouble between them, which was not hatred, to John's mind, but only the old tie of brotherness, raveled and worn raw by the chafing of Fayette's sickness. He carried the seven-barreled pistol he'd taken off Fayette five hours earlier; he didn't believe his brother meant to kill him—had not thought it five hours before, didn't consider it now—but he carried the pepperbox anyway, as both pacifier and threat. He might hoist it and brandish it when the other began waving his guns around, or he'd offer to give it back to him as a sweetener to get his drunk brother to settle down. Even when Fayette, standing perfectly steady, apparently perfectly sober in the dirt street beside the blue roan, pulled the big four-barreled howdah from his waistband, John did not change expression or pause but came on at his steady, unchanging rhythm.

It was in the soul of Fayette Lodi himself that the turning of the moment began. The man stood in the harsh sunlight manifest in the soiled flesh of his body, but his mind was locked away from that world in a darkened place, a cavern of pictures, words, imagined slights, and the profound, spitting, unsatisfiable outrage at what others had done to him. The words wrung themselves out in his shriveled being, inescapable: a ceaseless, monotonous rant against his sons who'd betrayed him with their worthlessness, against his wife who'd betrayed him with her lack of faith, against the community of Big Waddy Crossing which had betrayed him by not becoming the big town he'd wanted, against his partner Tanner who'd betrayed him by quitting him altogether. Above all, first and last, most ancient and new and forever, the litany belonged to the brother walking toward him on the dirt street, whose very skin and eyes and hair, whose very tilt of head and living bones were an effrontery to Fayette's soul. He aimed to kill him. To kill him now in the final blasted outrage of his soul's festering, or to die trying, or to do both. Fayette was perfectly calm, perfectly placid, as he raised the heavy muzzle of the howdah in the still sunlight.

And the girl was with him. The two were joined as one—not yoked in a bonding as it existed between the two brothers, but as if their souls' impermeable borders, having touched in the dark remains of the shed barn, must now merge with one another, overlapping, united in the void of consumed self never to be filled. And yet there was a difference: in the man the soulsickness was enlarged by the alchemy of whiskey past the certain sin of envy, beyond his first belief that his brother would forever have something he did not, into the pure unsatisfiable lust of hatred that made him aim the four-barreled howdah at his brother's face and pull the trigger. But it was a separate cause whereby the girl Matt slowly squeezed the trigger of the twenty-two pistol a full heartbeat before the howdah's first explosion—a full half second before her father fired the seven-barreled weapon at his brother's forehead, just as Jonaphrene, the literal-minded and self-conscious Jonaphrene, raised the light carbine to her shoulder and, another heartbeat later, while her uncle turned in the still, cold light, falling, fired the shot that blew out his neck.