The Mercy Seat (7 page)

And Papa quiet such a long time, through all of it, letting Uncle Fayette go on and say it, how we'd
all
(jab), every last
one
(jab) of us
Lo-dyes
(jab jab), flat starve to
death
(jab) there in
Ar-kan-saw
(jab jab jab). We'd
flat
(jab)
well
(jab) never make it to
Eye Tee
(jab jab), where the pickins was so easy. Spit. And on and on, jabbing, bits of fire swirling, that same night, that worst night, when Mama did not go to lie down in the back of the wagon but sat with us in the circle of firelight with the baby Lyda upon her lap and Uncle Fayette raving on about Eye Tee, where there was no law but Injin law which was no law, and Eye Tee, where Papa could make his guns, wouldn't nobody threaten to flay the hide off him and then shoot his skint corpse over a blame gun patent in Eye Tee, where it was good land, milk and honey land, you could take it slick, like plucking apples from the roadside, like picking persimmons, just over the next ridge and so-many miles west, to Eye Tee, where Uncle Fayette had it all mapped out for us to live.

And Papa quiet for just a little while longer. Then he said, his voice level, soft nearly, looking at him, “Yes, Brother, you have a way of mapping things out for all of us pretty damn good.”

Then they were both quiet and it was just the fire snapping and the peepers peeping on the black creekbank, for it was already that late in the season, and then the two of them at once rose up together from opposite sides of the fire and clashed together like goats butting. They fought all over the cleared space between the two wagons, with the children crying and the cousins shouting and Aunt Jessie screaming and the dogs barking and Mama saying soft, No, John, No, John, No, John, like he could even hear her over that yelling and yapping and him and Uncle Fayette grunting, and me, I'm probably the only one who heard Mama because I was standing beside her from the moment Papa and Uncle Fayette rose up in silence, butting.

While it was going on it seemed to go on forever, and then when it was over I couldn't believe it was over so quick. Before I could realize it, Papa was on his back in the dirt, winded, with his shirt bloody, holding a hand up, palm open, in the air.

To this day I believe he let Uncle Fay lick him. I know he did. He had to, because Fayette was never big in his back and shoulders like Papa, he never had the same strength in his arms. He couldn't swing a sledgehammer like Papa or carry a deer on his neck from the deer woods nor in any way hold a candle to Papa, because my papa in those days was strong.

The next morning at first light when I got up to start breakfast, Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins were gone. They'd left in the middle of the night, the same way we'd all left Kentucky. I didn't think anything about that then, but later I did.

T
he first thing Papa made—-he began it the next day, I remember, because his lip was swelled up like a hog bladder, his eye shut nearly, and he would grunt every time he bent over—but first thing there in those mountains, Papa smoothed down a tree stump and set a back to it and rolled it to the place at the side of the wagon where the sun touched first and stayed longest. All day Mama would sit there, her eyes following Papa back and forth while he cleared and broke ground. There was more color in her face then, her fist was loose then, though she still seldom said anything but just held Lyda and nursed her and was quiet on the tree stump and watched.

It was only a truck patch, no more than a quarter acre, but it took him a long time because that ground was so rocky, the tree stumps were many, and he broke the plow point and had to borrow Misely's anvil to make a new one, and we had only the singletree and so he could only plow one of his mules at a time. Papa put in squash and beans and sweet potatoes—he said it was too late for corn, which it wasn't, or at least not any too much later than for the rest of what we planted, and that's something else I didn't think about then—and I helped when I could. I'd go bent behind him with our seeds and potato starts, Thomas crawling in the furrows behind me, trying to pull himself up on my skirt, and Mama watching Papa with that fierce look on her. Intent. Hopeful. Like she expected any minute for him to do something other than what he was doing.

The tallow-faced man, Misely, came around every day or so and talked to Papa. It was his land we were camped on, but he let us plant there, only too glad, I guess, for the work of clearing Papa was doing, and to my knowledge he never asked so much as a half bushel of nothing for pay. He had a wife and a passel of children who were white-blond and palely freckled just like him, and shy and silent, the children more than anything. I don't recollect hearing hardly one of those children say a word. The old man's bright chest hair and his faded red beard danced and sparred with each other when he talked, and it reminded me of Grandpa Lodi's white eyebrows, how they would jump up and fidget on his forehead when he got going good talking, and in this way I liked and feared the old man Misely, and he seemed to belong to us somehow, though his tongue was so strange.

When he came in the evenings to talk to Papa, his passel of children—boys mostly, but there were three or four girls too—would trail a little ragtag tail behind him. Sometimes there'd be ten of them, sometimes eleven or thirteen, I quit even counting, and the old man would leave them to stand around outside the split-rail fence Papa was putting up. He'd step over the rails and go off with Papa, the two of them together, to squat in the dirt behind the wagon and talk. His children would stand outside the fence and look. I'd linger on the near side of the wagon, acting to be busy sorting beans or something, and I'd listen to Papa and Mr. Misely. I never found out any secrets that way, because their talk was just crops and hunting and farm stock, how a man in the mountains needed a good brace of oxen—but it was Mr. Misely's voice I listened for anyway. Just the sound of it, thick and burred and accented from somewhere which even now I can't place. So I'd act busy and listen and keep an eye on the Misely children, because I did not in any way trust them. There was something big-eyed and hungry in them, the way they stood there, their fingers holding to the rails, looking at all of us, silent, like we were the strange ones. I was sneaky, how I watched them, and I told Jonaphrene to ignore them, but she would stand in the yard with her hands cocked on her hips and stare right back at them, because Jonaphrene knew who was strange.

So the days just went on. The weather got hotter. Our provisions got leaner. Our new shoots came up slow. I knew it was on account of the poor ground and so little sunlight, though our clearing was broad and getting broader all the time with Papa cutting. I would take Thomas sometimes and go walking back along the road the way we'd come, or if he wasn't with me, so I didn't have his weight to carry, I'd climb the craggy sun-tipped ridge on the far side of the water, trying to see, trying to see, but all I could see was trees and mountains marching off in any direction. Once or twice I followed the two fading tracks along the creek to the place far below our clearing where they turned away from the water and disappeared into deep woods. I never went in there, because those were the woods that swallowed Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins, and it was the place the man Misely and his blond children walked in from, and those dark piney woods were a boundary to me. The mountains were strange, I could not fathom them, how they could be so scraggly and mean and hot in the daytime, the rocks keen with scorpions and lizards, the trees whining with locusts, little stubs of prickly pear and stunted cedar on the high ridges, and yet the water sang clear and cool on the rocks trickling by our clearing, the slopes around us hidden tall and dark and wet with sweet-gum and pine. At night it got cold. I would tell myself sometimes, looking up at the black wedge of sky or along the ridge eastward,
This is not the same world as back home in Kentucky. That is not the same moonlight. Those are not the same stars.

Jonaphrene whined at night with the bellyache, and me, my stomach cramped too, though I wouldn't tell it. I'd give my portion to Thomas a lot of times to make him hush up, I had to, because we'd left Bertha dying on the ice sheet and even though Thomas was the knee-baby and needed milk, Mama said she could not nurse him, and he would cry and cry. Some mornings we'd find a sack of snap peas or early okra by the rail fence, sometimes a full milk bucket, once a big round cake of butter, and I knew one of the Misely children had been sent by the father and had come and left it in the dark. Papa hardly ever hunted, though there was good game in those mountains and we were all hungry, but I did not ask why. Never in our lives did we ask questions of our parents, you just did not do so, ever, nobody did. But I wondered sometimes. Like why, if we meant to go on as soon as we'd brought in our little crop, why was it Papa worked so hard, all day, every day, to make that camp look like the old place back home in Logan County?

He'd built a lean-to out of rough-cut and blankets under a big oak tree beside the wagon and hauled the featherbed out of the wagon and crammed it inside. Then he went on and split rails for the fence, like the old one, to keep the mules out of the yard. He dug violets from the deep woods and planted them in a little half-moon in front of the wagon, dug an outhouse like our old one, strung a pulley rope for the washing at the exact same angle as our old clothesline had run, south and east from the house. Papa cut and sawed and toted and carried and hauled rocks and rocks and more rocks out of that clearing, and sometimes he'd call me to help him because Little Jim Dee was just too little and wild and distracted, he couldn't stay put on any task Papa set for him but would chase off after a lizard or something until Papa would get mad and holler at him and tell him to go on then, get out from under foot. Then Papa would call me to come on and hold the pry bar for him or something, and I'd put Thomas down and go help him, feeling Mama's eyes, watching.

I could not tell you the precise moment when it happened. It was just a slow waking—me waking to the change within Mama, her waking to what Papa was doing—but it changed, sure enough, how she watched him; it was not less fierce, but there was no expecting in it now, no waiting for something, and she no longer sat on her hollowed-out tree stump when she watched him, and it was not Papa only she watched.

It was that that first made me wake to the change in her—how Mama watched me. How she watched all of us children, like we were strangers, like every word out of our mouths, every gesture—the way Jonaphrene cocked her forehead and made faces, the way Thomas sucked his two fingers or Little Jim Dee tried to back up and lean against her—like all of these were ways belonging to children from some other country. I did not know what it was she marveled at in me, but she stared at me not only when I was with Papa but any moment I came in front of her eyes, and it was the same with me as with all of us—as if she had not ever seen a one of us move or speak in this way before.

And in a short time, not long after I first saw her so watching us, Mama got up from her tree stump one morning and put the baby on the pallet in the shade, and from that minute on, she followed Papa. Whatever he was doing, Mama went right behind him, her eyes fierce on him, and I thought she was helping, or trying to, but I believed she was just unabled from being sick and still and out of practice for so long. She was furious, though, you could tell that. I thought it was us she was mad at, me and the children, and I tried to do right, but I did not know what would make her not mad. I thought, too, that my mama had forgot how to work. The day Papa strung the rope for the washline, Mama did a load of washing with cold creekwater right there beside him while he was hanging the pulley. She never put the tub on the fire but just rubbed cold lye soap on the cold clothes—and her arms so thin it did not even seem she could hold a rub board, but she would not let me help her but looked me back hard—and then
slap! flap!
she flung the wet clothes, not even wrung out, just sopping in fury over Papa's newly strung washline till it sagged deep from the weight. Then she stared at us—me and Thomas and the children—dazed and furious, while she pressed her hand to her chest and caught up to her breathing, and then she turned and went after Papa to whatever he was doing next.

Every day she did like that. The evening Papa planted violets by the fence row, Mama poured the dirty dishwater on them till they drownded. When he weeded the truck patch, she went behind him with the broken pieced-together hoe and chopped the squash vines so close we lost nearly all of them. When he split shingles with the froe for the lean-to because the pine bough roof was leaking water, Mama climbed up on the bows of the overjet above the wagon—and they were not iron but just bent sapling wood, how Papa had fixed them, and I didn't know how they would hold a child's weight, but I believe my mama did not weigh much more than a child anyhow—she climbed up and balanced there, Papa frowning so with worry, but he did not stop her, and Lyda shrieking in the lean-to, hungry, and my mama perched like a bird atop the tarp-covered bones of the wagon, laying those rough shingles before Papa could hardly finish splitting them and hand them up to her, and oh, I was afraid for her then, so thin and breathing hard, balanced on the high, dirty puff of the wagon, reaching, pounding nails with the claw hammer like she would pound that fragile lean-to into the earth.

 

 

I heard them one night. We still slept in the wagon, me and Thomas and the children, but Mama and Papa slept with Lyda in the lean-to. The dogs were restless, not baying steady but howling every now and then, long and lonesome, and then they'd settle down awhile, snapping and ornery, only to raise up and howl again because of something they smelled outside in the dark. I believed it was Indians they were smelling. The children were hard asleep, Thomas snoring his tiny soft snores beside me, and I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe nearly, and I didn't know why. I had my legs pulled up and folded in front of me like always, because I was ever more afraid of losing my legs from the knees down than of losing my hair. So I was awake, hugging my knees and breathing lightly, and afterwhile the dogs settled down completely, and it was quiet. I heard my name. Papa spoke it.