The Mercy Seat (6 page)

It seems strange to me now to think how foreign they looked then, the shape of them, humpbacked, blue in some lights and purple in others, and tapered low at the ends like great shell-less snails lining themselves east and west clamped to the earth. That humped shape now is burned in my heart like the lines of my own memory, but then to me they looked strange. They stayed the same distance for days, weeks even it seemed like, never coming nearer, never going back further, but riding always at the edge of forever as we went west. Sometimes they would disappear for a few hours behind trees or a turning fold of land, but then, when I wasn't looking, they would rise up watchful on the horizon again. We had long left the delta, and the land had returned itself normal, and the weather, too, was back common and normal, for spring was blowing up real by that time, and the mud sucked at the wheels something terrible, and there were days we made almost no time because Papa had to pry us from the mud with the tree limb he kept strapped to the sideboard, while I slapped the reins on the mules' straining backs.

I don't know what would have happened if Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins had not caught up to us, any more than I know what would have happened if anything ever had been different than what it was, but them coming in the night and Uncle Fay's horses snorting and Sarn answering is one event I wished forever had not happened. I regretted it later until I was eaten up with it and I could not stop. I went back over and over in my mind and told it that they did not find us, that they passed in the night and went on to Eye Tee without ever knowing we were camped by that road in the dark. I made Uncle Fay die in the ice storm, and sometimes Aunt Jessie. Sometimes I saw all eight of them frozen tipped on their sides like our chickens, or I made them turn back. I know now the truth that nothing will make you so sick as sorry, but I couldn't stop regretting any more than I could do anything to change what happened. I believed if only I'd known, if only I'd looked hard enough, understood the meaning of the blue wind, petted Sarn so he would not answer, if only
something,
I could have made everything different. Because if Uncle Fay had not caught up to us, we would have kept on straight west and never turned south into those mountains. Because it was always those mountains, I believe that, and how they affected my mama. How they rose up around us and closed when we entered, jagged and hard-edged toward heaven, tree-glutted, rock-bound, blocking the light.

Uncle Fay and Aunt Jessie had not lost any of their animals. They had lost nothing because they didn't come through the ice storm but stayed by the river until it was finished, all finished, and then they came across the flat land melted and running warm with spring behind Uncle Fay's swift horses. I understood they were force of family that could not be got away from, and it was expected in my heart that they would swoop up from behind without loss. I was only surprised that all that while without me knowing it, Papa had been the one in front. I tried not to think the next thought, which was what it had cost us.

But they came and wrapped around us, and right away it was as if we'd never been separated, except for the way Aunt Jessie shared eggs with us, so wide and smiling it made you want to be sick. They had no milk either, never had had because they never brought their cow with them, but Aunt Jessie made smiling sure to share their measly brown eggs. And right away, too, Uncle Fay started in upon Papa.

He had a plan to go south and come in to Eye Tee through the mountains. He talked it low at night, jabbing at the fire, darting his eyes around outside the light, more restless than ever. He said it was too dangerous to go in at Fort Smith, said the Law was crawling all over the place there. He said the whole country knew Hanging Judge Parker would as soon hang a thief as look at him, no telling what might happen. And for many nights when we camped, he went on like that. Papa acted like he did not hear him, except the one time he said, looking hard at Uncle Fay in the camplight, “They ain't going to hang a man for breaking a damn patent. Are they?”

Uncle Fay's eyes went sideways. “I don't know, Son. I couldn't say. Couldn't say for sure, now. You aim to find out?”

And Papa said, soft, just under his breath then, “Don't make a lick of sense to go west by heading south.”

Fayette whispered, “That's a hellhole, Son, that jail there, you ever heard about it? A man might just as druther be dead.”

Papa didn't answer. He did not say another word, either then or later, but Uncle Fay kept on and kept on, every night, about turning south to get to Eye Tee. Even I knew Eye Tee was west, because we had been traveling toward sunset for weeks then. I didn't even know he was talking about Indian Territory, for he never called it anything but Eye Tee, the way my mind saw it, and I believed Eye Tee was its name. Uncle Fay spoke the sound like the name stood for Heaven, and I guess I believed it must be so.

Every day we went on, but we went slower, which I marked but thought it on account of Mama, for every day she looked paler and weaker and her hand now almost never left that shut tight place at her chest, and we were gradually turning, which I did not mark somehow, watching Mama, until the dawn we were facing directly toward the mountains, close then, rising up snail-like before us, and the rising sun back over our left. Then I knew Uncle Fayette had won.

 

 

The road wound around and up, and behind us I could see the valley falling away pale green below, and it frightened me, the earth falling away and disappearing, and so I quit watching behind us and looked only at the back of the wagon—for we were walking then, all of us, even Mama, to ease the weight—or I would walk up front beside Papa and keep my eyes to the rocky earth rolling beneath the mules' feet. The sides of the hills were hardscrabble. Uncle Fay said the road had been looked out by the loggers down in Booneville, said it was a good road, said loggers always sighted the best way to go. He lashed his horses and hyahed them because they did not want to climb. Papa said nothing, not the first day or second, nor later, growing each day more silent, but he did not whip his mules. Everywhere were great stumps of trees like fire corpses, until they began to dwindle and mix in with living trees tall as God, I thought then, and then the stumps disappeared and the mountains closed thick with woods and insects.

Dark dropped quicker because of the hillsides. Morning came later. Evenings after we'd camped I would sit for hours in shadow and watch the twilight stretch blue and starless, lingering late, high above. I knew the days were getting longer, were supposed to be getting longer, because it was well into spring then, almost summer, but I couldn't feel the sun coming back to us in those mountains at all. The climb grew steeper, and each time we crested, all we could see before us were more mountains rolling dark blue into skyhaze to the south. We never came up over a hogback like Uncle Fayette said we would, to ease down again to a smooth valley and turn west. Each day we went slower. Each day my mama was paler. Each night Uncle Fayette's mouth got worse.

It started out him talking about Mama. He never said a word directly to her or to anyone, but spoke soft straight ahead while he jabbed the fire. Said he'd heard of some kind of weak-minded women scared of their own shadow, some kind of lily women—and this is how he called it, meaning only our Mama—scared of Injins in Eye Tee, scared of a little ole biddy copperhead snake. He would talk like that, poking the fire, not saying it directly to anyone but muttering in his beard for the whole world to hear, especially Papa. I'd see him cut his eyes at Papa all the time. Sometimes he'd get up and go off awhile in the dark behind the wagons, and when he came back to the fire again, his blue eyes would glitter and his voice would be loud. Yessir, these lily women, he'd say, poking the ashes, They ain't no kind of pioneer women. Ain't the same stock the Lodis come from. Scared of some pitiful old Injins getting fat in Eye Tee. Scared of a garter snake, he reckoned. Scared of a June bug squallylegged on its back. He'd heard that, Uncle Fay would mutter, and then he'd shake his head and turn his face away from the fire to spit.

When he talked about the Injins in Eye Tee, Aunt Jessie would call little Pearline to her and stroke her scrawny head and lift her own head, looking brave, I guess she thought it, like she wasn't afraid of anything on God's earth or under it, including red heathen savages. I would get so mad then, just furious, because I knew Mama
was
afraid of Indians, because
I
was, and I would call Thomas to me and rub
his
head and lift my own face brave and courageous to the dark outside the circle of light from the fire, and it was all a lie. I was a fake in my heart, both then and later, because I finally understood that Eye Tee meant Indians, and at night in the wagon I pulled my feet up and tucked my knees tight under my chin so that Thomas beside me got nothing but hard bone to rest against, because I was afraid the Injins would sneak around the wagon and chop off my feet while I slept. Injins and Eye Tee and the darkness in those mountains were all the same to me then.

The road thinned, became a hard rutted track growing thinner and thinner, until it was two faint rails fading to nothing beside a little trickling creek in the high cleft of those mountains. We stopped and camped in the early part of the afternoon, though the light was still good, but the road was fading. The two tracks went down and disappeared like a ghost road into dark pine woods below the clearing, you could not see where they went, and it was there in that clearing that Papa and Uncle Fayette had their knockdown-dragout fight.

I know how they tell it now, Mildred and Pearline and them. I know they say Uncle Fay went on to prepare a place for Papa like Jesus going on to Heaven. I know they say the two of them made it up together, and it was all to protect Mama, but I was there, mind you. This is me here. Matt Lodi. I remember all of it. Every bit of it. Just this way.

We were camped on someone else's land, though we didn't yet know it, and at first it was three days, and then four days, and soon it was a week, and then longer. Mama did not come out of the wagon except to eat a little bite in the evening, and then she'd go back with the baby and lie down. Uncle Fay didn't even talk under his breath now but straight out, loud enough for Mama to hear from where she lay in the wagon. Loud enough for all of us. He'd put it like a question, like he was asking the ashes, and then he'd spit, the tobacco juice sizzling in the red underpart, Uncle Fay's answer. What were we going to do for food when the supplies run out, did anybody reckon? Put in a crop on the rock side of a mountain with no sun? What were we going to live on till that lily woman got well, rocks and water? Spit then, and sizzle. Wasn't but so-many miles fu'ther, just over the hogback and down again west, but no-sir, we got to sit and starve for a woman, he reckoned. Spit.

Every night he said it, sitting on a tree stump, poke, poke, poking at the fire. I'll never forget that, the image burned harder and brighter in my mind's eye than those mountains: Uncle Fayette in his big hat with his pine stick jabbing every word from his brown mouth into the fire's spark and ashes. His boys then, Caleb and Fowler, they'd act just like him, poking and spitting, though they knew better than to speak it, but Uncle Fay just kept on and on in a singsong about food and Mama, food and Mama, like it was food and Mama that landed us up there in those mountains with the road fading before us and nowhere to go but back down like we'd come, and my papa saying nothing, saying nothing, like he never heard him, till I thought I would scream or puke from rage, and I could not understand why Papa would not
do
something. But all he did was ignore Uncle Fay like he was deaf to him, or else Papa would just go off to hunt. Every dawn and dusk he went out, and when he'd get back and had finished cleaning whatever he'd shot—mostly squirrel, sometimes rabbit, one time a slick, stringy old coon—he'd put it down by the fire for me to cook and go over to the wagon to check the supplies bin. He'd look in the box at so-much cornmeal left, so-much beans, so-much molasses, and none of it enough, and he wouldn't say a word about it but just turn away then to do some little piece of work. In the high part of day, Papa tended the animals or went off by himself and stayed gone for hours. At night he sat off away from the fire by the lantern and mended harness, sharpened tools, such niggling jobs as that.

When we'd been camped for ten or twelve nights maybe, a man showed up one morning. He wasn't an old man, I think now, but he looked old to me then, his skin washed out and wanly freckled and his hair where it curled out beneath his hat so pale it looked silver. He had great tufts of bright yellow hair growing out of his chest that stood up startled and met his reddish beard, and that was the only color upon him—that and his blue eyes—for even his clothes were washed out and pale. His voice was burred and lilting, and he scared me a little, but Papa was not scared. He went out behind the wagon with the man to the place where the woods were thinnest and squatted on the ground with him and talked for a long time. The next morning I woke up when I heard the sound of wood chopping. Papa never said a word to any of us but went to cutting trees, and in the afternoon he took Little Jim Dee to help him.

That night Uncle Fayette picked up a stone, gnawed it like a corn ear, tossed it off into the darkness. “Corn don't grow on rock,” he said.

Papa said nothing.

“Some folks are fools,” Uncle Fay said. He picked up his green pine stick to poke the fire with. “Some folks are fools for a woman, some are just jackasses in general, I reckon.” Poking, talking loud. “Can't see it matters much, seeing as we're all going to starve like dogs anyhow. Seeing as there might be enough cornmeal and grits left to get us to Eye Tee.” Jabbing like the fire itself was Eye Tee. “Ain't enough to wait for some lily woman to get some gumption about her. Ain't enough to wait for planting.” Gold sparks whirling, spinning skyward to disappear in the dark. “Provided it'd do any good to wait for planting to start with, seeing as what mule-killing land I seen around here ain't going to yield a crop worth pulling nohow, which any fool ought to be able to see.” Jab the flames. Spit. “Any fool but a blind ignorant jackass fool like God seen fit to give me for a baby brother.”