The Mercy Seat (28 page)

“I don't know what to do with her,” Jessie said, still sewing. She looked at Matt, seeming unsurprised to see her awake and listening, sitting up on the pallet with her gown tucked over her knees. The woman went on talking, as if the girl were invisible. “From the minute she quit having fits, or pretending to have fits—”

“Fits. She hadn't had no fits.”

“Well, whatever it was, whatever that bouncing around and falling down was about—”

“She quit that.”

“No, I know. That's what I mean.” The needle paused, and then the woman clasped the sheet around and dropped it to her lap. “She's fine now, she could help now, but she won't stay put. She won't work. She runs off the minute you leave in the morning, don't come back till nearly dark, and I know good and well you know it. Lord only dreams what she's up to, because when she comes trailing in here for supper she don't have a thing to show but scratches and stick-tights in her skirt tails and, day before yesterday, a bleeding foot. Look there, the child's face is getting dark as a you-know-what, I can't keep a hat on her. I can't do a thing in the world with her. You're going to have to do something because I can't and I don't aim to, I've got all I can say grace over now.”

“Nobody's asking,” the man said. He didn't take his eyes off his daughter. In a bit, he said, “Mattie, y'all been running off every day like your aunt tells me?”

The girl looked at her aunt, at her aunt's mouth, not pinched but tucked in at the corners as though she might any minute break into a smile. She waited for her father to speak again, but he said nothing, and at last she said, “I been out.”

“Out where?”

“Outside.”

“Doing what?”

“Walking.”

“Walking where?”

“All over.”

Her father looked at her. He was turned halfway around at the table, his hat pushed to the back of his head. The girl could see his eyes clearly. “What is it you been doing while you been out walking?”

“Hunting,” she said.

Jessie snorted. The girl continued to look at her father, unblinking.

“How come I don't ever see any game?” he said.

The girl didn't answer.

Jessie said, “You don't see no game because she's lying through her little yellow teeth.”

“Jessie!” Fayette hollered from upstairs.

The room was still, just the soft mothwing thump and flutter. The girl knew then there'd been no snoring for a long time. Her brother Jim Dee was awake, lying very still on the far side of the pallet. Her sister was breathing quickly beside her, her face covered with the blanket. The girl felt the cousins rustling awake above.

“Get up here and get to bed.” Fayette's voice from the upper room was not a shout this time but cold, uninflected. The wood overhead creaked.

The woman looked at her brother-in-law, but he didn't look back at her. She folded the muslin sheet and bent to put it in the sewing basket on the floor. She stood then. Before she turned to climb the stairs, John said softly, but still loud enough for the woman, for even the ones upstairs to hear, “If you aim to hunt, Matt, I believe you better take my muzzle loader. Y'might have better luck.”

The girl heard her aunt grunt, the wind bursting from her gut as if she'd been kicked.

“Another thing,” the man said, looking at the girl, his voice stern, his eyes bright in the firelight. “From here on out, wear a hat.”

 

 

So the girl began to carry her father's rifle. From the hand-hewn nail beside the fireplace in the mornings she would take whichever slouch hat came beneath her fingers and slap it on her head; she'd sling the powderhorn by its leather thong across her thin chest, hoist the long-barreled gun to her shoulder, and walk out the door in the dawn light just before or after her father, turning her face up to him sometimes, her mouth slightly open, as if she would speak but could not. Once, she put her hand on his arm and he paused, one foot upon the stone step, and looked at her. Matt turned her face away quickly, whistled for the old beagle hound Ringo, jumped off the log porch, and walked off with the dog west. It was as if her mouth was stopped when she was alone with her father, stripped of voice and will to ask him what had happened to their belongings. It became the same within her as the memory of the baby sister, lifted away in the red darkness, taken away, disappeared, unspoken of, as if the child had never lived. To ask was to remember, to learn, to hear what she didn't want to know, and so she would not ask.

In the dark of night she stole a pair of trousers from one of the boy cousins and hid them beneath the pallet. Afterwards, in the mornings, she'd take them with her, wedged tightly like a narrow bedroll beneath her arm. When she was out of sight of the house she'd unroll the homespun trousers and put them on under her skirt—to save her legs from the briarbushes, she told herself, but in the depths of woods far from white eyes, the girl would gather the ragged expanse of calico skirt in her arms and tie a knot with it around her waist so that she could stride fast on her skinny, hickory-hard legs, unimpeded by anything more than the stone cut and scrabble of rocky earth; she used the pants pockets to hold wadding and lead. If the old hound dog scared up a rabbit and ran it around by, the girl would shoot it, but that seldom happened, because she didn't go quietly through the woods; she would not wait for Ringo to head a rangy swamp rabbit in a great loop back to where she stood, but walked in her relentless and driven manner, snapping sticks, the swiftest and broadest way to cover the earth. One time she shot a cottonmouth swimming toward her on Bull Creek. Another time she took the head off a gray squirrel flattened tight to a tree trunk, its tail twitching. She did not bother to go over and pick the squirrel up. It was not game to her then, not food or pelt, but a gray tail on a mockernut hickory, twitching.

 

 

The land turned over hot and dry. Before green had settled on the earth that first spring, the long grasses began to wither. Dust coated the blackjacks and cedars. Elm leaves shriveled and crimped brown on the edges before they'd hardly unfurled. Everywhere dusty land terrapins crawled on the dusty roadbeds, scritched slowly through the dry grass in the ditches, moving each with webbed neck stretched out and head lifted, following its own imponderable purpose. Some whites who'd lived awhile in the Territory talked about the great number of crawling terrapins, the fact it was more than a month too soon to see them crawling. It was common to see hundreds in the high heat of late June, fumbling their lone journeys along the choking roadbeds: crawling for water, some said; hunting a partner, said others—though the Muscogee people knew the land turtles were only returning home to their stomp grounds for Green Corn ceremony in the time of the full summer moon. But never had folks seen so many crawling so early, and they spoke of it, some of them, a little in fear, shaking their heads. The year was too new for that migration. The weather was too hot for early May.

Thus, in the aptness of Providence and the story's unfolding, it was cold when the girl found the cold, empty wagon, but hot on the afternoon she found the charred remains. She came upon them near the place called the Narrows, the narrow cleft south of town where the hills lap together and form the pass to Cedar. The blackened circle lay sheltered low on the east side of the mountain—this was Bull Mountain, not Waddy: the western twin shaped like a kneeling buffalo slumped toward the earth. At first the girl could just make out a dark patch on the ground through the grid of pine trunks and pin oaks; she and the dog were coming down through a part of the mountain that hadn't been logged yet. The old hound labored down the slope in front of her, panting and wheezing and trotting his fat and aged self, and Matt in her man's hat and boy's trousers, with the blue bunch of skirt tied in a knot at her belly, followed at a slow pace, her face red and sweaty, and the long barrel of the muzzle loader too loose in the crook of her arm, dipping nearly to the ground with the force of its own weight. She could see the black place on the earth, she could smell it, charred and bitterly rank from old rains, but she couldn't see the size of it or the size of the clearing. She thought it must be an old Choctaw cabin burnt to the ground. Then she came down between the trees and saw it, too small to have been a cabin, and the shape wrong: a very nearly perfect circle, laid out on a bald rock face, open to the sun.

She stood a moment. The dog went snuffling and sniffling around, but soon lost interest and trotted over to the shade beneath a pine tree and lay down with his tongue out, panting. The girl looked at the charred circle impassively, blinking slowly in the hot sunlight, hardly curious: in the great self-absorption that closed her eyes to all but that which served her secret purpose, she nearly missed the very thing she'd walked the hills and valleys endlessly seeking. She did not know it or recognize it but merely gazed at it a moment and turned away, turned to walk on down the slope toward the road curving at the base of the mountain, thinking nothing, thinking only that she might go back along the road, no matter about the dust and the terrapins and perhaps people passing, because it was just too hot. She stopped, caught by the smallest bit of sunglint off metal. It did not show perfectly, blackened as it was with soot and ashes and dulled in the tan dust, but some part of it, the edge maybe, caught the bright sunlight in one narrow streak, and Matt saw it even as she was turning, like quartz in a roadbed far off. She was caught and held by it, nearly as if the glint on the earth were singing, and she knew in the same breath and heartbeat what it was.

The dog stood up and stretched, shook his ears flapping, ready to trot off in whatever direction he sensed in her, and then he too stopped. He stood quite still, looking at the charred circle, whining. Matt lowered the rifle to the ground barrel-first, the stock sliding heavily in the crook of her arm; she placed it flat in the dry weeds before she turned to walk barefoot over the crunch and shift of ashes to where the box lay, tilted sideways, in the center of the sooted pile. Still she did not understand what she was standing on, but she knew what that black square was, shaped square still, holding the boxed shape of its integrity, not melted but only blackened like a sooty lamp chimney, and warped a little along the bottom edge. Somebody had laid it there—or thrown it—after the fire was nearly dying.

The girl knelt in the filth and the crumbling cinders rank with the smell of charcoal. Her hand trembled when she reached for it. She dug quickly in the ashes, her fingers turning black, to free it, and picked it up, cradled the box to her belly, where it blackened the knot of calico and the flat pane of shirtfront. The tin was warm from the sun's heat in the cold ashes, like living flesh. The girl understood then what she was kneeling on. She turned her head slowly, looking at all of it, the whole blackened circle: her mother's embroidered pillowslips and linens, the cedar wood from the trunk, their crockery and wool blankets and the seven quilts pieced by Grandma Billie, all the objects of her family's lives brought with them from Kentucky, burnt in a circle of fire while she had slept in the red darkness. And she knew it was the same as the circle of white ice, coming through it with Papa, the same and its opposite, for both were the point of no turning back forever, but the first had been ice and white and eternal, and the last black and fire and small. The first of God's making, and this—she knew it, she had no hint of doubt about it—from the hand of her family.

It was not Papa only,
the girl thought.

She could see then the aunt's raw, red knuckles folded over, the hands lifting a straw-filled crate away from the pile of goods on the ground, setting it to the side before the coal oil rained down, shaken like rain onto the pile by her uncle's hands, and her father's. She saw the fire lick up quick and yellow, burning nearly smokeless in the cold November light.

The girl held the tin box tightly in the wedge of her left arm, and with the other hand she dug in the ashes, past the crumbling, hot, dry surface, deep into the black muck where even the hot May sun could not reach. Her fingers scraped past the shards and shreds of what would not burn, past melted shoe eyelets and her father's chisel and the iron clasps of her mother's trunk, past the formless chunks of charcoal, into the dank mass, cool and black and stinking, in the depths of the black circle. For a long time she knelt so, with the tin box warm against her left side and her right hand buried, trying to feel what these lumps were, trying to read with her fingers, as the blind would, with the sweat running in her eyes and the hot May sun burning the back of her head through the slouch hat. She stirred the damp remains, the sift and silt of what they'd made their lives from, charred and melted past all knowing, each lump with no more form to it than a clump of river-rock or stinking clay.

Not one thing to keep here,
she thought.
Nothing to save.
She knew the completeness with which those hands had piled every item, soaked each piece with kerosene, how thorough and deft they had been. There was no grief in her, only the beginnings of anger, rising in small, hot waves from her stomach through her chest and face. She turned over a clumped mass that crumbled black between her fingers and fell open, smoke white, where the feathers sifted out: a lump of Mama's featherbed, too thick and damp with down to burn properly, too dense. Matt touched the singed feathers with her finger. She smelled the burnt animal smell. At once she knew where the tin box had been hidden all those months, riding soft and discreet, like the unborn, from Kentucky into the mountains where her mother died, and then on along the pig trails, in secret, unknown, into Eye Tee, sewn tight in the ticking seams.