The Mercy Seat (60 page)

S
he was coming behind me. I turned my head a little maybe, or I he was coming behind me. I turned my head a little maybe, or I didn't turn it but only glanced over my shoulder with my eyes, or I don't know what I did but I knew she was coming along the street, trailing me. I could see her skirt stirring little dustdevils, I could see the tiny, tiny cobwebs of hairs escaped out of her braid. I didn't care. I crossed the road and went on, and I went up the little slope of bank to the tracks, the little embankment, a mild raised place of black cinders and dirt to hold the bed of rails, and the rails were shining dull in the sunlight but the crossties themselves were slag black, and I could smell the creosote and the iron leavings of trains that had passed and would pass over them, sparking steel, a splinter coming in my sole because I did not lift my foot high enough, and I didn't care. I could see him pulling up on the reins, his shoulder raised, though the roan would have stopped if he'd only just let him, because that horse was spent. He stopped in front of the mercantile store this side of Dayberry's, and I could hear the leather creak when he put the weight on his left side, put his drunken weight into the stirrup so that I hurried as fast as I might, I did not care about that splinter, though later when I took it out with Papa's hunting knife it was three inches long. I hurried to the next building, the depot, to hide, and why, I don't know, I don't know that either, because I tell you I was not afraid.

So he stood down, and I felt Thula crossing the empty road behind me, stirring dust, and I did not know her part in it, I didn't believe she had a part in it, I couldn't think that, she was not blood, not even half-blood, not any kin to me or my kin, and so she was like a spider in the road or an old terrapin, not even there for a witness because she would not see it any more than a terrapin would see it, and then I saw Papa. He was coming out the door of the stable, just walking out blinking a little in the light. I thought,
He don't know. He don't even know Fayette means to kill him.
I thought that so fast. Lightning. Faster than it could ever take now to say the words out loud. I just saw it in him, Papa, coming out of the dark square into the empty street with his hat on, and he had one of Fayette's many-mouthed guns like it was just an old ancient thing that would go on forever in us, my uncle and his guns, that I could never find them all and drop them in creekwater, I could never uncover all the pieces of death he had stole and bought and bartered and garnered unto himself, nor ever bury them deep in the earth. There could be no pit of earth deep enough to take and keep all his guns. One would poke out or stick out somewhere, like bones buried too shallow that the dogs keep digging up, so I felt defeated, though I should have been glad my Papa was armed coming out into the street with his brother ready to kill him.

The pistol was in my hand again. For a while, walking, it wasn't, but there behind the depot it was again, the grip smooth and the keen weight of it balanced, and the back of my uncle's head was only a couple of hundred feet away. And so I aimed again, pulled back the hammer, Papa walking in the still, bright daylight, and it was not to save Papa in that instant, though I have said for years that it was, because the black violence and rage in me was
at
Papa, there was no separation, Fayette's hatred was mine in the gaping maw the vast open black emptiness so that I hated him with a lust of violence to KILL him to KILL him in outrage for the effrontery of his self to conflict with Myself and my self crying out to hurt, to kill that which would hurt would take from me rob me to leave me soulless barren and without, and it was not this joined portion of self I would kill but that other in the street coming as he had always come to rob me cross me deny me so that I fired
as Fayette fired or before Fayette fired, the pistol making a fine sound an instant before the explosion from the mouth of the gun in Fayette's hand, one barrel, and immediately the second barrel, Fayette's aim going wild because he was already falling, because it was only accident or the hand of unseen forces that made the small neat twenty-two cartridge lodge in the back of my uncle's skull on its way to Papa's face.

 

 

I didn't know what the clamp was around me, the weight of something squeezing my arms and chest, tight, so tight to take my breath so that it was like the dream where I am locked in a corpse of body, the unwilling shell of body, paralyzed, that will not move, and I struggled to cry out because I could not breathe or move, though I saw Papa walking toward Fayette's body in the dirt street with the gun in Papa's hand hanging loose at his side, Fayette's throat bleeding, the left side of his neck vanished where the red pulsed and spurted, and above his eyes the bone still showing white, a white visible sliver an instant before the red welled and drowned it, the red spurts from his throat becoming halfhearted, slower and weaker, and all of it clear before my eyes, going on forever, because I could not move, until the sound came when I knew it was not the dream but her holding me, Thula's arms vised around my arms, pinning them, and the sound of her voice chanting, which I didn't know what she was saying but I understood she was not talking to me because it was almost like her song when she smoked me, gave me the clay cup, but it was not that either. My strength returned then because I was not caught living in the dead unmovable shell of my body but only grasped around the chest by a little Indian woman of no strength, so I burst the clamp, raised both of my arms with all my power, twisting on the wooden platform to face her, twisting, breaking free, and she never hushed up chanting or praying, whatever she was saying, and the clamp was not on me, but in the next instant she had me by the wrists of both hands, pulling me along the platform on the track-side of the depot, pulling me, hard, fast, west along the platform, away from the center of town.

B
ut the coiled hoop of time is not stopped for the dead or the act of death; it spirals relentlessly forward, and the living, willing or unwilling, must turn, move, perceive, open their mouths or shut them, locked each in the cavern of self, so that John Lodi, unaware of his daughters, walked in the still and gleaming light toward the body, aware only that his brother was dead by his hand; stood over the corpse knowing only that in the rushing eternity in which his brother fired at him, he, John, had gone cold with the familiar black and icy rage that allowed him, or forced him, in the same rushing instant, to pull up and fire the seven-barreled gun at his brother's forehead. Jonaphrene started forward, stopped abruptly, seeing a young boy dash out of the mercantile and trip over her uncle's body, seeing in the next instant the store owner come out onto the gallery wiping his hands on his bloody apron, and she whirled in the horror of her self-consciousness to run with the awkward carbine back along the ties to the place where Mewborn's mare grazed, untethered, nipping the yellow grass in the ditch beside the track.

The people of Cedar began to pour forth from the square buildings, drawn each to the place where death had been committed, the livery owner J. G. Dayberry in a sharp-faced rush of intent to protect his employee, and the others, in the excitement of news and event and the fading echoes of the sounds of violence, to gawk. Five miles to the north, the boy Thomas stood in the dirt road waving his arms and crying as his cousin Caleb, approaching with his brother Fowler and six of his sisters in the wagon, slowed the highstepping young team, while, two and three-quarters miles farther north along the old Butterfield road, Jessie, inside the store now, suddenly bent double at the waist, her gut stabbed with a searing pain. A mile east of Woolerton, Burden Mitchelltree turned his big stallion's head onto the Fort Smith road. And on the train platform, a hundred yards from the bleeding shell left by a soul's departure, two figures, facing each other, skimmed westward joined at the wrists.

 

 

The woman moved smoothly, swiftly backwards along the platform, pulling the girl who was not girl, nor woman, nor any sexed creature but an incarnation of human will in a small, nut-hard body, unfathomably strong. And yet Thula Henry was stronger. The two glided along the platform, joined at stiffened arms' length as two partners face one another over the momentarily stilled handle of a switchman's cart while it glides along the rails. The gun was between them, still clutched in Matt's hand, the muzzle pointing to the side wildly, and Thula's hands were clamped around the girl's wrists, snapped tight. When they reached the end of the platform, Thula rushed forward and grabbed the girl around the waist before she had the chance or perception to resist, and immediately half dragged, half carried her off the platform and around the side of the depot to the dirt track of alley that ran behind the buildings on the west side of the street. She didn't hesitate before the gun, or fear it, or care about it, because she was compelled to drag Matt away from the town and the intrusion of white eyes by the same force that had made her drop her bundle and clamp her arms around the girl's chest in the instant she'd known the girl would fire the gun: upon the crouched, thin figure in front of her Thula had seen a vision, an overlay of strange bone and flesh, and she had thrust forward in the very instant of expulsion of sound from the pistol, followed immediately by explosions from three directions, and Thula had found herself moving backwards along the platform without thought of what she was doing or would do, knowing nothing except to whisk the girl away from white eyes. Her fear was entirely broken, discarded, not dark and swelling but cut from her by the rush of blood and breath needed to move the girl. Awkwardly, bearlike, she trundled her as far as the back of Tatum's Mercantile along the two pale tracks of alleyway behind the store, and there the girl suddenly twisted around, jerking out of her grasp.

The two stood in the dirt alley, breathing hard, looking at each another. Muted sounds came from the other side of the building behind which the two stood: men's voices, someone shouting, footfalls thudding in the dirt street on the front side of the store. The girl and the woman panted, their chests rising and falling in union. Thula said, “You come go with me.” There was a minute's silence, or silence between the two of them, for the sounds on the street were swelling, rising in staccato excitement. But the girl answered Thula nothing.

“We not finish,” the woman said.

Slowly their breaths calmed, slackened, their pounding hearts each began to settle. The girl's eyes were not hollow now but alert, alive, glowing in their strange yellowbrown color of earth. Slowly she returned the twenty-two to its casing in the leather holster. Still she did not answer.

“He aims us to do it,” Thula said.

The girl's narrowed gaze began to dart then, to the left, where there was an old corral behind the stable, to the right, in the direction she and the woman had just come, over Thula's shoulder, where there were several frame houses set flat to the earth and wide apart, and beyond that the open sweep of the little prairie where the town stood.

“The Lord knows,” Thula said. “It's only the Lord knows what it is we didn't get finish. We got to depend upon the Lord,” and she went on talking, nearly chanting, a mixture of English and native tongue. “He set it out for us to do it. You can't mess with that, same as you can't mess with medicine. You can't mess with holy,
holitopashke,
it's going to do you real bad.” Her voice was low, almost monotonous, but there was urgency in it, until she ceased all at once, staring hard at the girl's face. A mask of bones lay across Matt's features, and then, as Thula watched, the bone mask was supplanted with the softened flesh of a human infant. This was the same image she'd seen on the girl's face in the instant before the gunfire, and it was her own vision, Thula understood that, given her by
Shilombish Holitopa,
the Holy Spirit. But she did not know what it meant. As quickly as it had appeared, the vision fled.

For a time there was the ringing voice of silence, a bell of silence descended around the two figures, the Choctaw woman and the white girl in a dirt alley back of the mercantile in the new town arisen for its little time between blue humps of mountains on the face of the ancient and spirit-filled prairie. In the silence Thula Henry's ear pulsed with her blood beating. She stood on the earthen track, listening, breathing.

From a great, undeterminable distance, she heard a sound:
tock-tock tock-tock tock-tock tock-tock,
the clocking sound of striking-sticks, in rhythm, in rhythm, the old beat of blood. The sound changed then, and deepened. Thula heard a lone voice calling, the sound answered, repeated by many voices, and the rhythm and the song were the sound of her own blood. This was not a song of her father's people, not a song from the Green Corn ceremony carried on, undiminished, at Nuyaka and Okfuskee, renewed in the
saka-saka
of the shell shakers, the singing and drums; but a sound more distant, beyond her own memory, to the remembering of her mother's people, the
Chahta
people—to the sacred ceremony in the old homeland in the place the whites called Mississippi, the homeland Thula Henry had never seen.

Slowly, Thula's mind filled with a new vision, an ancient vision: an image of fire, and then daylight, and the people dancing. She heard the call of the singer's voice rising in a song already forgotten, being forgotten, because the preachers said the people must—not the white preachers only, but Choctaw preachers, speaking in native tongue the Holy Word of the Lord, saying, We got to purge out the old leaven, that we could be a new lump. Saying, This cup is the new testament in
Chisv
s'
blood. Saying, We got one ceremony here now,
Chisv
s
give us this ritual, it's
Chisv
s'
blood,
Chisv
s'
body, His blood been shed for us, His blood been spilled on the mercy seat, that's the Blood sacrifice from here on out, that's all we got to know. Saying, If it had to be white people coming to take everything to bring us the Word of the Lord, so it is. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Saying, We got to forget all that old stuff, just not think about it, we got to depend upon the Lord.