The Mercy Seat (18 page)

And the daughter obeyed, seeing the ferocity of expression on her mother's face. She likewise hissed at her sisters, and the three half-grown girls untied and laid aside their bleached flour-sack aprons, collected their little sister Pearline from where she stood staring at the new-come cousins by the fireplace, and took her, whispering, in a rush of swirled skirts, up the steep pine stairs to the attic room where they slept.

Fayette, roused a moment from his peroration by the hushed activity, said, “Here, now, what's going on?” Jessie turned defiant eyes on him, her chin raised. Her husband sat astride a ladderback chair pulled away from the table, his arms folded across the top rung, and he had to turn and crane his neck to look up at her. She saw the flush on his ruddy cheeks, the sparkle of blue eyes in the lamplight, and knew he had not given his brother's dead wife more than a moment's thought, had not given even that much to the boy on the counterpane. Still she said nothing but went quickly to the stove and knocked the lid off the bean kettle with the big two-pronged fork, and it rang iron to iron on the hot stovetop; she slapped field peas on a plate for her husband, and began to spoon up the half-raw fried potatoes. With the bunched hem of her apron she carried the coffeepot to the table and poured boiling black liquid into tin cups. She plunked the laden plates on the pine slats and set a skillet of cornbread between them, and now her silence was not paralysis but the intentional silence of rage and punishment, intended for the ears of the one to be punished, and audible in the room, ringing in the thump and clatter of tin and cast iron—but only to the girl standing at her father's elbow. Fayette had turned back again, returned to his cascade of talk, and John sat with half-closed eyes, his chair tipped against the wall. The woman and the child looked at one another, and then the woman, frightened by the recognition she saw in the girl's strange dun-colored eyes, rushed to break her own silence.

“You men get up to the table and eat,” she said, and thunked the platter of fried meat on the table. She went to the front door and stepped out onto the log porch to retrieve the buttermilk and cake of butter from the cold box. The sky was streaked with slashes of orange and the deep mauves of winter. Her husband's hounds stood up from the log porch and slapped their long ears awake. Down on the road, beneath the wagon, John's dogs also stood and stretched, and began to trot hopefully toward her, their ribs distinct and countable as fence slats through the coarse, mud-spattered hair. Jessie looked at the remains of the wagon, where the gaunt mules were still harnessed in the traces, their heads bowed. The wheels and sideboards were mud-caked, the whole of it filthy, bedraggled; the wagonsheet was ripped in several places, so that the family's pitiful belongings were revealed to the mauve sky. It seemed to her an obscene thing, a corpse picked at by crows, and Jessie turned quickly, the fear rising, and went back in the house.

The men sat as they had sat before, Fayette in the back-turned ladderback, talking, the other tipped against the wall, eyes closed, silent, and the anger and fear multiplied in the woman so that she nearly spat as she said, “Y'all come on and eat now!” She hoisted the crock of buttermilk to pour it.

“Wash up, Matt,” John said, and grunted a little as he stood his chair down on four legs, unfolded himself slowly, seeming to fill the vaulted room, though he was not a tall man, the force and size of him contained entirely in the bulk of his shoulders as he moved across the room toward the door.

“Where do you think you're going?” Jessie blurted. Buttermilk sopped over the snuff glass onto the pine.

“I've got to unhitch the team.” He did not seem to be answering her but speaking to the girl crossing the room alongside him, the top of her head at his elbow. “See to it the children wash up good, and y'all go on and eat. I'll be in directly.” He paused a moment in the doorway, the girl never yet peeled from his side, the baby big-eyed on her hip, gazing around the room. “Say it's back up yonder that way?” John asked, and nodded his head in the direction of Fayette's barn on the little rise behind the house, and his brother proceeded to give him elaborate directions for the simple distance to the barn.

Jessie thumped the buttermilk crock on the table, dread and anger passing over her in waves laced with loathing for the man who would see to his mules before he would look after the fevered boy on the counterpane. And what could she do? She could not put the sick child out in the cold wagon; she could not make her husband deny his brother—not that she would not, but that she could not, for she had not that strength of will within her, nor that power with him, and so she did what women without power do. “Your food's getting cold,” she snapped at her husband, the words spliced and drawn as if spat through a sieve; she turned back to the cookstove, hoisted the kettle of water to heat for the dishes, said harshly over her shoulder, “You young'uns sit right where you are. I'll bring you a plate in a minute,” and proceeded to the remains of her own work and that of her daughters. She heard the log door open, felt the cold enter.

“No, now, Mattie, I'll take care of it.”

When she turned, she saw John in the doorway with the sky washed lavender and indigo behind him, and the girl, unbonneted, uncloaked, trying to walk beneath his outstretched arm wedged against the door-post. The baby sat glassy-eyed and silent on the bare puncheon floor by the door.

“You stay here with the children. Wake Tommy up, he needs to eat something.”

The woman knew then for the first time that her brother-in-law did not know that his son was dying.

“Matt! I said no, now.”

For an instant there was the terrible tension of the child in rebellion, and then it was gone as the baby fell over sideways and cracked her head on the wood floor; the sound popped in the vaulted room, there was complete silence, and then a high thin wail rose. Jessie, impelled by a force separate from her fear, and stronger, stepped across the room and picked up the baby, and the wails crescendoed in hysterical shrieks. The child stank of urine and mildew and sour baby-smell, and the jerking, flailing flesh beneath the soiled gown was burning hot. The woman cradled the baby in her arms, unwilling, unable not to, and paced the floor, patting the foul bottom gently, saying, “There's some sweetmilk left out yonder in the cold box. You better fetch it in before you go off tending to your mules.” She didn't look at her brother-in-law as she said it, but at the children themselves, her eyes sliding around the dark high-ceilinged room as she paced with the infant, to the back wall, where the unconscious boy lay on the bed, perhaps dead or dying this moment; to the west wall, where the little girl and fidgety boy crouched on wooden crates near the fireplace, the little girl's eyes glittering bright already with fever; and near her, just before her in the doorway, the eldest girl with her stubborn face standing at her father's elbow: motherless, Jessie did not have to be told. Laid upon her by God's will, perhaps to spread their sickness to her own, and nothing in the world for her to do but accept.

“Martharuth,” she said, “cut that nonsense and get in here and take this baby. I've got to see to that boy.”

She went to the foot of the pine stairs, still cradling the shrieking infant, and yelled, “Millie! Get your sisters ready!” then called back over her shoulder, “Shut that door! You're letting cold air in!” She turned again to the narrow flank of stairs. “Put your coats on! Wrap Pearly up good!” There was a chorus of blurred voices from overhead, drowned in the sound of the crying baby, and Jessie hollered, “I don't care if you got your nightgowns on already, I'm telling you to get dressed!” She turned to find the girl Mattie directly behind her, and paused not a breath but shoved the baby in the girl's arms and said, “Take her and sit down on that chair yonder. I'll tend to her in a minute. Hitch up the wagon,” she said to her husband, though she never looked at him; one would hardly know she did not offer this direction as well to the child. “You got to take the girls over to Mewborns',” and her husband, confused, entirely oblivious to all that the sudden rush and noise meant, sat in his same position in the ladderback, tamping tobacco into the bowl of a cob pipe.

Jessie went for the first time to the bed and stood over the boy. He was still breathing; she could see the shallow rise and fall beneath his filthy woolen shirt. His pale lids stretched like egg membrane over the eyeballs, and when she touched him he was fiery hot, but he was not sweating; his veined skin was dry as corn husk. The scarlet mask on his face had spread to his throat. She felt someone behind her, and she did not have to turn to know it was the father, standing back a little, reluctant, looking at the child with open eyes now. She heard wood scrape wood, her husband's chair shoved back on the puncheon, and then Fayette, too, was standing there. “Oh my Lord,” she heard him say, and she turned on him in fury: “Get the girls out of here!”

John gazed at his son in the same kind of stupor with which he had watched his brother's face before; he said dreamily, “My team is still hitched, Fay. I reckon they won't drop dead to go another mile or two, if you want to take the wagon.”

Jessie whirled on him now, the one, as she felt it, who had brought God's curse upon her household. “No! My daughters are not touching a thing in that wagon!” She lifted her head, craned her neck toward the stairs, nearly shrieking. “You girls get a move on! Quick! Fayette, go catch up the horse, now! Martha, run out—no, you do it,” she said, meaning John, though she did not again look at him, never taking her eyes from the toddler boy on the counterpane. “Go fetch some cool well-water, we got to get this boy's fever down.” The baby still wailed on the girl's lap in the corner.

Fayette said, “Jess, don't you know the boys are gone in the wagon?”

Jessie turned slowly, her arm draped across her belly; she looked at her husband as if she could hardly place him. “Well,” she said at last, “borrow Witlow's buckboard. Or saddle that mule you're so high and mighty proud of and ride them over one at a time. They're not touching that wagon. They're not staying in this house.” Without turning, she again screamed toward the attic: “Millie! Get your sisters dressed!”