The Mercy Seat (17 page)

I didn't know. There were no soldiers. There were no Indians standing guard at the border. There was nothing but a silver road in moonlight, snaking west.

T
ake your eye up into the heavens and place it like God's there. Look down. You will see the Appalachians slanting north to south down the eastern edge of the continent; and the Rockies, the great Sierras, crumbling south to north in the west; and all across the North American landmass the force of mountains lining themselves pole to pole in opposition to the sun. Now look to the lower midbelly of the nation, where the Ouachitas slice small, east to west, like an anomalous slit of extruding navel, binding the lands called Arkansas and Oklahoma: jagged earth rising, joining in harmony the proper path of the sun. It was here, along the southeastern blade of Oklahoma's blunt hatchet, that the Choctaw people built anew their Nation. Here, bandits hid out in the sandstone caves—Belle Starr, the James Boys, the Youngers: white outlaws in Indian Territory to escape white man's law. Deep in these mountains the shriek of a panther, like Lucifer cast down from Heaven, still cuts the night air. Along the murky sloughs of the waterways you may stumble over earthen mounds shaped by the hands of the First People who lived here, and know in your bones their bones are here.

The dirt is not the famous rich red of the Cimarron country, nor the blended sienna and verdigris and salmon of the haunted Deep Fork river bottoms in the central heart of Oklahoma, but a faded yellow brown, dun-colored, dusty in summer, clayey in spring, rock-ridden in all seasons. The names of the waters are lyrical—Fourche Maline, Poteau, Brazil—and they tumble clear and singing from the rock hills into the long valleys, where they gather the yellowbrown dust to themselves, merge with it, drink it, until they lie low within their banks in late August, sluggish, lazy, the slow murky color of the water moccasins that lurk, secretive and mean, underneath. Summers here are long; winters short; spring is roaring and changeable, for this mountainous southeastern corner is not exempt from the unstable temperatures and capricious winds that sweep, constant and permutable, over the whole of Oklahoma. In winter, the hills are blue with pine and cedar, brown with clinging oak leaves, the unclothed bark of hickory. In spring, redbuds daub the hillsides purple; dogwoods flutter white within the tangle of stark branches like distant snowbanks, until the earth wakens, quick, frenetic with a wild scramble of growing, the fields and ditches clotted with sumac and pokeweed and blackberry briars, every living inch of these hills writhing with insects and green ivy, before the dry winds arrive in midsummer, and the high, dank heat; and the land shrinks, exhausted, sere, choking. It is a long time before autumn comes to these mountains. Before cold sends the scorpions and rattle-snakes into their rocky dens and the hickories dormant, before the seed ticks stop crawling and the skins of the prickly pear cacti on the ridges shrivel in upon themselves.

In a certain cleft near the northern limits of these mountains, in the long east-west valleys between the Sans Bois and the Winding Stair, and well north of Kiamichi's jeweled range, there grew up, in the time of this story, a little sawmilling community of white people called Big Waddy Crossing. The time was near the end of the last century. The earth remains the same—a little prairie surrounded by humped hills, the ragged ridge behind, and, directly south of the townsite, the great oval lump of ground called Waddy Mountain—but the man marks are gone now, swept away by tornado and change. It was to this place that Lafayette Lodi brought his family in the spring of 1887. He came, driving his horses hard in the swelter of a May heat wave, almost directly to this narrow cleft in the mountains, chosen for no better reason than that he'd paused at a farmhouse near Heavener to beg well-water for his team in the searing heat, and the farmer had been a white man with a Choctaw wife who said he had a brother who lived at a sawmilling town called Big Waddy Crossing, a few miles north of the stage stop at Cedar, and he meant to go visit him sometime soon. Within weeks after coming to Big Waddy, Lafayette had obtained a permit to rent and do business within the Choctaw Nation, had built a log house and a shack barn, and had set his sons to work clearing land and breaking it. Then he proceeded to set himself up as a buyer and seller of goods in a goods-starved territory, and waited.

 

 

The brother came in the time of the earth's turning after autumn: the skies gray with smoke, the fields umber, branches unsheathed. He came in the same manner that the Territory changed: urgent, quick, driven. The man drove his mules mercilessly, and his face was grim, floating in the smoked dusk of late November; his mules were gaunt, his two dogs like wraiths running beside the wagon. Next to him, sitting straight on the spring seat, her neck craned, her head bare, the girl turned her face side to side, watching; the grim, pliant face with ocher eyes, molded in the image of her father. She looked just like him, though her face was still soft with the soft bones of childhood, her features muted, a little too big. It was not so much in the bones, anyway, that she resembled him—though there was that too: her nose squarish, overlarge; the dome of her forehead high-rounded and smooth—but in the set of her mouth as she frowned at the winter fields on either side as they passed. It was in her eyebrows, fiercely feathered, like the father's, though upon the child the look was black and startling, the dark hairs above light eyes meeting in the heart of her face. The likeness was most acute in the way the top of the girl's head met the air first, bouncing along on the seat of the wagon: the crown of fine straight hair pulled tight into two dun-colored braids, elongating and thinning her narrow eyes the same color as the dust-bitten earth. On her lap the baby cried. Behind her, three tiny faces peeked from the open maw of the canvas. The wagon rolled in the bruised twilight, the gray dawns; and the blue hills humped on either side, sentinels lining the path, or guarding it, as the wagon wound along the twisting, muddy tracks of the Territory, west and a little north, west and a little north, heading always toward the inaudible pulse pounding, drawing blood to blood.

They would pause at a houseplace, a farm or lone Choctaw cabin, and the man would climb down and speak a few moments to the occupants, gesturing, cupping his hand at his chin to shape his brother's beard. The girl would watch intently, suspicious, for she knew the people were Indians and she distrusted them for their gardens and square houses, their homespun trousers and cotton dresses, more so than if they'd worn war bonnets and beads. They did not match what she expected of them, and her slanted eyes would narrow more deeply as she watched a dark man with a mustache and felt hat step out onto his log porch, or pause in his cornfield, scythe in hand, the dried cornstalks quivering and rattling behind him, to shake his head or nod it, point with his eyes or stare silently, for often they did not speak English. The girl would stare at the man's wife in an everyday gingham dress beside him, the man's children gazing back at her with deep eyes, and she would hold the crying baby on her lap tighter. She would speak harshly over her shoulder to the silent children behind her, tell them to hush up. Her eyes would never leave the faces of the people until her father had turned and come back to the wagon, climbed up onto the seat beside her, and then she would turn her eyes front, never glancing back or sideways, as they hurried on.

Within a few days they came to Big Waddy Crossing. A small town, a community of no consequence, but for the fact that the brother, having set and prepared everything, awaited them there.

J
essie watched her brother-in-law carry the youngest boy into the room, and her fearful heart knew. She watched him lay his dying boy on her own bed, heard him direct his other children to sit down yonder by the fireplace, heard his weary grunt and the creak of cane as he sat in the chair on the far side of the room, and she said nothing. Her husband called out, “Wife, you got our coffee boiling yet?” She did not move but kept her eyes on the blond toddler on the bed. The child was not sleeping but unconscious, his face pale, his forehead high and rounded, his tongue protruding between petaled, cracked lips. A red flush lay across the bridge of his nose, spreading mask-like to his pale cheeks; he lay motionless upon the counterpane, his legs bowed and thin, the tiny body stiff and formal as if laid out on a cooling board in a parlor, and the woman knew, she knew, and was powerless to cry out: Where is their mother? Where is she? Do not bring these children of death into my home!

The voices of the men filled the log room, her husband's urgent, excited, the words following rapidly upon themselves, tumbling with his cascade of Territory news; the other's slower, the words fewer, heavy with weariness, and Jessie felt the return of the bond between them that filled her with a cold, unspoken hatred for the one who held her husband's attention. Beneath the rumble of male voices she heard her daughters in a hushed argument at the stove, the two middle ones vying to stir the fried potatoes so that they might each claim to have cooked supper and so be exempt from doing dishes, and her heart was cold with fear. She laid a thin hand protectively across her quickened belly, thanked Providence that her sons were gone with the wagon to meet the supply train at Wister. Thank God for that, thank God. And still, for a moment, silent, powerless, she could not move to protect her daughters, but only turned her eyes from the boy on the bed to John Lodi sitting oblivious, exhausted, in filthy clothes and mud-caked boots, with his hat on, in a canebottom chair against the log wall.

His eldest child Martha Ruth came to him and said, “Papa?” Her tone was impatient, her small face eerily adult as she stood with the ten-month-old baby perched on her hip and shook her father's sleeve as if to wake him, though he was not sleeping, any more than the boy on the bed was sleeping, but sitting heavily in a kind of entranced stupor, gazing at his brother's spirited, talking face.

“Papa?” the girl said, and Jessie shrank in herself at the sight of the offspring wearing the stamp of the father in her expression and stance, in the scowling dark brows feathered across the pale forehead; she shrank at the casual way the child held the baby, nearly as if she herself had borne it, and again Jessie thought of the mother, weak, sickly, without gumption, as Fayette had always said of her, and she knew then that Demaris was dead. Dead! she thought. And no word spoken to mourn her or tell of her passing, and here come her half-starved children swirling into my home in the shank of winter to spread their fever among my own. The woman looked at the father and the little girl in his image tugging at him, and the enmity she bore John Lodi leapt to the child who looked just like him, and was like him.

“Papa!” the girl said, her voice nearly scolding. “You want to unload, or you want me to? It's going on dark now.”

It was this, the thought of them bringing into her house the family's contaminated belongings, that unstopped the woman's voice at last, though still she had none to defy her husband or his brother. She heard John say, “We'll unload in the morning,” and thought to herself, Over my dead body! Abruptly she turned to those over whom she had direction, stepped quickly to the iron stove, where her daughter Mildred was turning the popping meat, and whispered fiercely, “Take your sisters and get on upstairs.” The daughter opened her mouth, a protest rising, and Jessie hissed, “This instant!”