The Mercy Seat (61 page)

But within Thula's bloodmemory the vision rolled forward.

Though she stood in the cold bright sunlight, her sight closed down in darkness, a flickering darkness, and she saw men and women stepping, turning in the great hoop of the circle; she heard the striking-sticks, the gourd rattles, and the voice of the singer calling, the men's voices answering, and the women's voices, while the people went on stepping, stepping in the unending circle as if they would go on forever, as if the singer must sing forever this song of purification, of acknowledgment and honor and worship, singing in the voice of the people, the song given to the people, the dance shaped by the hand of the Creator to honor all that has gone before and will come after, as the
Chahta
people had done from the beginning—

Abruptly the song stopped. The dance stopped. In the same manner that the mask on the girl's face had fled, so disappeared the dancers: snuffed as a lantern wick clamped off by damp fingers.

A welling of grief came on Thula Henry, unfathomable, a stuffed and swollen sense of loss beyond sorrow at the soul's edge of remembrance, and she didn't know what it was. She stood a moment blinking, longing, praying for return, and she didn't know what it was she would return to or have returned to her, but only felt it: the gaping, expectant sense in her of something gone. When Thula looked, there was only the girl standing before her. Just the thin, strange-eyed white girl standing barefoot with her back against the wooden building in her britches and man's hat, the gunbelt dragging down on the narrow hips, the hard, flat chest rising and falling. Within Thula the dread began to rise again, dark and fingering, licking, even as the old unwilling sense of responsibility returned to her, called forth by the rumblings of men's voices rising louder from the street. Without a word she reached a hand toward the girl.

Matt stared at her, expressionless, her eyes not empty as before but with the meaning in them unrevealed, and Thula, helpless and urgent, aware then of a gray-mustached white man in overalls standing in the crevice between the mercantile and stable, where excited voices filtered from the street, knew nothing but to say the words again.

“You come go with me.”

The girl was silent.

“It's not too late,” Thula said. “We go up yonder to Yonubby, you come stay with me.”

“No,” the answer came finally.

“We ain't done it!” Thula said. “We not fully understand.
Chihowa
not give us that understanding!” She could not say these things in the backwards language of English, the paltry language of English that did not have the meaning in any of its tongued and spitting words. “We are not finish!” she tried to tell the girl. “You going to die from it. Me too maybe. Or something worse.”

The girl, staring at her as if she did not see her, as if she looked through the woman's solid cotton-clad body to the sleeping weeds in the valley behind her, said, “You seen me.” The girl's voice dropped to a whisper, again the hoarse sound of whisper, saying, “You seen me in the red darkness.” The focus of her gaze changed, though the ocher eyes never moved direction, but seemed only to pull back, to retreat behind themselves.

Thula watched the girl in silence, in the slow opening of recognition, but what she saw was not revealed in the face of the yellow-eyed girl, not revealed in vision or memory but only in the glimmering of a soul's reckoning, to be received for an instant and later forgotten in the word-mind but remembered in the soul's hope. Thula understood in that glimmer the meaning of the bone mask and its afterpart; she remembered what her people had known from the early time: how the Creator had bid them honor the bones of the dead in the sacred baskets, had bid the people paint their living faces in honor of rising up from the dust for a little time—not separate from the bones of the ancestors or the unborn soft and new in their flesh to come, but the manifest union between each, in their unbroken place on the unbroken hoop in the eternal unfolding. For an instant her soul understood what the people, without their songs, were in danger of forgetting, and then the recognition was ripped from her as the girl suddenly turned and began to walk away.

Matt moved quickly toward the crevice between the stable and the mercantile, and then as abruptly changed course, turned on her bare heel and headed toward the corral fence at the end of the wagon tracks. She shinnied over the top rail and jumped to the trampled dirt, headed across the open space toward the other side, and Thula, compelled by the force she could not comprehend, followed after. When she reached the corral fence she did not climb over but crawled painfully between the bottom and mid rail, hurried on, skimming swiftly through the skein of powdered dust after the girl walking away from her across the empty open square. Acting, not thinking, not understanding, Thula rushed forward and caught the girl by the arm and swung her around. She clamped on, snapped tight at the wrists once again, and Matt fought her, hard, pulling back with all the wizened strength in her calf muscles, her knotted forearms, but Thula Henry would not be shaken loose. The two jerked and swirled and turned about the dirt track, Matt Lodi twisting and whirling, and Thula Henry, unshakable, hanging on.

Thula did not know when the two white men first appeared, was unaware of them entirely until her throat was locked fiercely from behind by a flannel-covered arm, choking her wind off, so that the white man accomplished what even the ferocious whirling and jerking of the girl's strength could not do. Thula let go. There was no more than a heartbeat when she saw the bald short man bleating, as he circled the girl with a blood-spattered apron held up in front of him, “Behave now! Behave yourself, here!” and then Thula's breath was gone completely, the world darkening, and she went down.

 

 

When the light came again, she was lying on the feedlot floor. She was aware, as through a fog, a clouded mist, of the two white men. One of them—the mustached one in overalls she'd seen in the little alley—was holding the girl by the back of her trousers; the other still circled the girl helplessly, ineffectually, with his hands in the air. Coughing, gasping, the choking not from her lungs but from her throat where the man's elbow had pressed tight, Thula pulled herself up to sit in the trampled dust a few feet from the strange, excited circling of the two men around the girl who was like a she-fox caught live in the teeth of an iron trap, leaping and snapping in pain and terror and fury. Thula knew that these white men did not see her. Her presence was nonmaterial to them, dismissed, a disappearance. For a moment she felt the old welling of rage at the men's ignorance, at their mindless ruthlessness to nearly choke the life out of her and then dismiss her from their sight as if she were a whipped dog panting in the feedlot dust.

But in the next instant, watching the girl snarl and spit and spin in her pitiful shrunken fury, Thula Henry was washed entirely of her hatred. She felt it ebb from her as cleanly as a lanced wound. What it was, she did not understand in that moment; she was aware only of a terrible sorrow for the thin form whirling about and cursing and lashing. From that sorrow, deep within her, emanated a kind of letting-go, a forgiveness,
kashofi,
so that Thula could not hold in herself the bruise of hatred. The washing away came not from inside her but through her, as the working of medicine came through her, and she understood her part had not been for the sake of the white girl only, but that she, Thula Henry, might remember in the fullness of knowledge what had long been given to the people—not separate from the Fourth Part, not in fear as the fear had been taught her—but in union, in oneness, as it had been given from the beginning of the world. In that moment, the woman's peace was restored. Thula's mind did not comprehend it, her tongue did not know how to tell it, yet her
shilup,
her immortal spirit, was one with it, so that she knew that whatever the joining-together had been, it was finished now.

From a great, peaceful distance she watched them, heard the men's curses rise above the girl's curses from the little whirlwind of dust stirred by their turning feet. While the white men rattled their awkward tooth-filled tongue in loud voices and danced fearfully around the girl, trying to hold on to her without coming inside the range of her flailing arms, Thula Henry drew her weary legs beneath her. She lifted her sore and weighted body from the dust and limped slowly to the corral gate left standing open. She walked out of the feedlot, across the faint dun-colored wagon tracks behind the town buildings. The profane voices faded behind her as she started out north and west across the prairie to begin the long walk home.

S
he'd seen me in the red darkness, her brown face coming down, She'd seen me in the red darkness, her brown face coming down, round and flat, soft as doeskin, while I lay fevered on the hard pallet. She witnessed me, saw me pray one into death, one into life. She knew it was Mama's baby suckled by a black woman I turned back. To keep Thomas. It was only to keep Thomas, my brother, whom I loved. I have tried to say it, tried to make justice of it, but God turned back the bitter joke on me, made him an idiot, to stay a knee-baby forever, and not that only, not only that. Because I was charged with the gifts of the spirit, and it was not in the manner of the tongues of men and of angels nor the gift of prophecy, but to enter the soul of another, for the sake of union. For the sake of mercy. And I turned my face away. I chose first my family, and then my own will. And so it was stripped from me, scooped out of my soul when I shook my fist at heaven the dawn the cedars bled. Given against my will, taken from me against my will, returned to me in the barn darkness with my uncle, and you have seen what I did with it. Even as Thula had seen.

I couldn't bear to breathe a moment longer the air of her presence. She had witnessed me in the black shade behind the depot, even as she'd seen me in the red darkness, the same: her eyes open, her arms clamped round me the very instant my finger began pressing lightly, squeezing gently, so easy, the smooth plate of the trigger easing back —and then it was her two hands pulling me away from the place of killing, the dirt street of Cedar, where the voice of my uncle's blood cried out from the ground. Her two hands holding me in the dirt tracks behind the town, her mouth in the other tongue saying, Come go with me. I would not go with her. I would never go with her. I would have to kill her if I did.

I turned to run. I thought if I could get to the creek bottom on the far side of the fence rails, she couldn't keep up with me. I knew the creek bottoms of Eye Tee, the tangled depths and mudwater sloughs; I could weave among the grapevines and swamp willows as clean as a river snake. If I could make it to the water, she couldn't grab me again.

It was them, whoever they were. In the dirt square Thula held me, her strong hands clasped round me, but I would have broken free. I could have. I would. But the men came, and it was not what they did to me but to her when the one locked his arm on her throat, took her life's breath and Thula fell back into darkness, so that for a dying instant I fell with her. Unwilling. As I had ever been.

 

 

For this there is no translation.

I fought then, cursing, railing, crying out against it. It was not men I struck against. My uncle's blood cried out from the ground. I fought the unspeakable mercy.

B
urden Mitchelltree sensed a killing before he'd even ridden close enough to the town to see the crowd. A half mile ahead, at the crossroads, he saw a lone figure dash across the road from the north side to the south side; behind that figure, a few moments later, another one darted. Above the drumming of his horse's hooves he heard a rising thrum of voices, off to the south a little, out of sight behind the buildings on that side of town. Killing or bank robbery, he thought. Or both. Those were the two events that could put that rise in the air, that particular high-pitched murmur of turmoil and excitement. He pressed his heels tighter against the stallion's belly, though he was already pushing the sorrel at a steady lope, much harder than he ordinarily would just heading out for Fort Smith. But he'd got a late start—a peculiarly late start to be setting out on that sixty-mile journey—and he meant to stay over at a boardinghouse on the far side of Wister operated by a certain light-skinned, sweet-faced daughter of a Choctaw freedwoman. Already he was going to be hard-pressed to get much past Fanshawe before dark; this little sidetrack would set him back further, and cursing silently, glancing a hundred yards ahead at the blank bank building where no crowd stood about, and so satisfying himself that it was indeed a killing he was looking at, not a bank robbery—which was something at least, he thought—he chucked softly at the sorrel as he dug in his spurless heels.

Thus it happened that the nearest deputy U.S. marshal, unsent for, galloped into Cedar from the west in a swirl of dun dust within an hour and a half of the Lodi killing. The deputy wheeled his tremendous copper-flanked stallion around the turn by the brick depot, rode into and scattered the clutch of gawkers gathered around the corpse sprawled faceup on the street. Mitchelltree ignored the scowls and glares of resentment from the scattered onlookers as he gazed at the dead man from his great height astride the quivering, sidestepping stallion. He could see that the man had been dead for a while. A blood-soaked handkerchief had been spread over the face, and it was black and fidgety with flies even this early in the year. The pooled blood in the dirt road had already sunk into the dust, jelled mulberry. The handkerchief didn't cover the ragged neck, flagged with scraps of torn flesh, or conceal the blood-matted brown hair spreading flowerlike from the blasted scalp. Mitchelltree dismounted, handed the reins to a boy standing by the hitching rail, and made his way through the knot of onlookers who had regathered around the dead man as turkey buzzards, scattered but unmolested, will return quickly to the scavenged kill. The deputy's resonant voice rumbled over the rising buzz from the townsmen.