The Mercy Seat (11 page)

The weather turned back warm after that first frost, but warm weather did not stop me, and I did not forget again. Sometimes I would have to hunt in near darkness because a dense gray fog seeped in the wagon before first light, filtered into the lean-to through the overhang of blanket, hung close to the earth, wrapped close about us, stayed surrounding us and in us for hours because the sun on those mornings could not seem to get strength enough to climb over the southeastern rim. I hated that dank fog as I hated everything about those mountains, because they helped kill my mama. I felt it, that gray mist, like an invisible hand that would press me into the dirt at the edge of the yard where I waited for the colored woman to get finished with Lyda.

It was one of those hollow times when I did not have to work or watch children because Thomas was still sleeping and Jonaphrene was in the wagon with him, sitting up on the feathertick, drawing pictures with charred fire sticks on beech bark—she wouldn't come outside in the spitting mist that was falling, she was entirely too pinched up and prissy for that—and Papa was of course gone, and Little Jim Dee was out no telling where. So I was waiting, impatient, because I wanted to look in Mama's things before the woman Misely showed up to start her bossing, and I was irritated, too, with a slow smolder that I did not then recognize, because what it felt like was that the colored woman was the dark weight pressing against me which I could not press back, and it felt like she knew it and she had no right to know it or stop me, because what I wanted, if I couldn't search for Mama's tin box, then I wanted to watch her nurse Lyda, and I could not think of one good excuse to go in the lean-to and stay there. She did not now nurse Lyda outside on Mama's tree stump as she'd done in warm weather but came in the gate and went straight to the lean-to, the same way she'd done the first morning, stayed inside in the dark with my baby sister until it was finished, and then she'd lay Lyda back down in her wooden cradle, no matter even if Lyda was hollering, and come out and never say a word and disappear between the trees down the hill. I hadn't watched her nurse Lyda in a long time.

I had my foot on the bottom rail of the fence near the lean-to, and I hung on it, my arms hooked over the splintery top rail, and danced my foot on the cedar, shrugging my shoulders and rolling my head till I could feel the ends of my braids touch way down on my back. I dropped my head all the way forward, held to the top rail with my elbows and reared back, but no matter how I craned my neck and twisted and wallowed, I could not shrug that invisible weight off me. I got still. I was listening, as I always listened, for some intruding presence: Papa coming, the woman Misely, Thomas waking up. The woods were quiet because the air was too thick and too damp, but somehow it sounded like I heard the woman singing—or not singing, I guess, humming, because the sound had no words, and I could just barely hear it, like it came from the gray mist all around me and not through the blankets and rough-cut wooden planks. Oh, I wanted to go inside and see her. I wanted to see her singing to Lyda because she didn't have her own baby with her on that day, she didn't bring her own baby anymore, hardly ever, and so it had to be Lyda she sang to, and I thought this was how she made Lyda open her mouth and arms for her, and it got me all stirred up.

I stood there, my insides churning, my foot scraping again on the fence rail, hard—yes, hard! I could've ground that soft wood into splinters—the smell of cedar rising, my toes cramped in last winter's shoes. At once it came to me—and this without words but just the clear knowledge—that I could go in the lean-to if I wanted. I could just go in there and sit down. It seems strange to me now that I had believed a colored woman could keep me from my own family's property, but I was young then, I didn't know things then, her skin scared me and the way she never talked.

No. It wasn't that. Or it was not that only.

The lean-to was Mama's and Papa's private place, their sleeping and grown-up talking place. Their place for babies and Mama's soft crying, like the loft bed back home. It was the same as their privacies, as my own body's privacies, and it had to be kept secret, no matter from colored woman or children or neighbor or what. It was secret from me even, and I had to hide my going in there from myself. I could not show it to a stranger, not to Jonaphrene or Papa, not to no one at all.

I thought,
That woman's got no right to be singing alone with Lyda in Mama's and Papa's lean-to!
And I understood she would not stop me from coming in, nor tell anybody about it, and so it would just be between her and me. I felt a power then. I went quickly over the rough ground to the blanket hanging in front of the doorway and lifted it up.

She sat on piled quilts on the far side away from the doorway, over by Lyda's cradle. There was no sound in the lean-to but the little sounds Lyda made sucking, and I crouched still for just a heartbeat because I'd meant to say, You quit lullabying my sister! but there was nothing to say quit it about, and then I gathered myself, saying,
She's got no right to be alone with Lyda in Mama's and Papa's lean-to, I don't care if she's singing or not,
and so I ducked beneath the pink blanket and went in.

When the blanket fell, the room was dark like a cavern, and it was warm in there with the warmth of her body, but the quilt on the featherbed where my hands fell was damp. It was all damp, the whole ragged rectangular space, dank with the clouds living low on the mountain. I could smell mildew and wet earth. I could smell Lyda's baby smell a little but mostly Papa, his hatband sweat and suspenders, and under it the sharp scent of stranger which was the colored woman's smell. Mama's smell had shrunk since her death until it lived only in the folds of her linens and dresses. I knew that already. It was one thing I searched for when I went through her trunk.

I waited with my hands and knees on the featherbed till the darkness would lighten and reveal shapes to me, and soon I could see well enough to pick out Mama's trunk, and I crawled over to where it sat upon the bare ground by the west wall and climbed on it and sat. I looked at the woman, and her outline got clearer and clearer, a vertical dark shape faded at the top, the light shape of the baby crossways in the middle, until finally I could see the woman's eyes big in the darkness. I got scared then. She was looking right at me, and she didn't speak and she didn't blink hardly but just stared at me like I was a demon, an intruder, a night thief, I thought. It was quiet and too close, the two of us together in that lean-to, and I couldn't think what to say or what I'd come in for, couldn't think any clear thing at all. My old childish ways came on me, ways from when I was very little, and I trembled before that colored woman. I could not move, could not speak or think, and I could not go back out, and so I just sat trembling upon Mama's hard black wood trunk. It was a long time before she started to talk.

“She big enough now.”

The words came soft, almost whispered, in the closed space between us, but still they made me jump.

“Y'all could turn her out if you wanted.”

I was too trembling scared to understand what she was talking about.

“She big enough. Hear me?”

I nodded my head. Lyda's sucking noises got louder—long, smacking sounds, empty. The woman lifted my sister then, I could see it, and broke her suck with a finger and pulled her away from the breast. Lyda whimpered, ready to start bawling, but the woman turned her around in her lap, all at the same time tucking her one breast in the front of her shirtwaist and pulling out the other, and she let Lyda have the other and Lyda settled down again, sucking. But it was strange to me, I got a strange start, because I could see she had Lyda swaddled, wrapped tight in the light blanket. My sister was too big for swaddling.

“She plenty big,” the woman said again, and at first I thought she was answering me, but then I saw she was saying it to herself.

“Why don't you quit coming?” I said, and my heart stopped and started and fluttered, because I said it the same way I'd talk to Jonaphrene, the same voice I'd tell her to set her flighty self down and hush up. That colored woman was a grown-up, a grown-up, you did not talk to grown-ups in such a way, even niggers, I was taught that, or I believed I was taught that then.

The woman let out a dry little snort like
hunh
through her nose. She was not now looking at me; the white circles of her eyes held on the empty space in the center of the lean-to.

“Tell that to the doctor,” she said. “Tell
him
how come I don't quit coming.”

She lifted Lyda again and shifted her on her lap. Lyda made not a sound this time, was stiff and still as a cornshuck-wrapped baby doll, and it frightened me. I thought she was dead. The woman kept on. “Doctor have his own idea how come I don't quit,” she muttered, and then she said other words I could not hear, and then I did hear: “He a flat fool and lying to his own self but I will not disapprise him of that.” She went on in her low voice like it was not even to me she was talking but some other person she'd been talking to for hours, like me there, I was hidden from her sight only to overhear.

“Got me a half-dozen reasons,” she said. “Name Dulsey and Amsar and Ivy and Nole Jean and Harold and Evangeline.” Paused. Still yet did not look at me. I could hear Lyda making little pleasure sounds, nursing.
“Hunh,”
the woman said again, louder. Her head raised up, tilted back some, so that I could see her nostrils get big in the gray light. “They ain't all mine, if you want to know it.” I thought then maybe it was to me after all she was talking. I thought then so, but I know better now. “Doctor have his own idea about that too.” She laughed, not a real laugh but another snorting sound, a different sound, but no less a blowing out like horse breath into the dank grayness her contempt and disgust.

“What doctor?” I said.

She let out the
hunh
sound again and said nothing.

I might have screamed it, I believe I screamed it, in the dark in the lean-to. I did not think nigger grown-up, Misely woman coming, did not think anything of fear, because I just heard the word
doctor,
and if there was a doctor in those mountains my mama did not have to die. If there was a doctor we could have brought him before the last change and it could all have been different. The remembering came back on me then, the hot circle of sun and whip of flies buzzing and the smell of bear and blood and dog and Papa groaning, how he did across her, sprawled groaning across Mama like the sound tore out his throat from the wet depths of his belly, like it came from the bear's belly, like it tore out his gut, and I did think, alive in the lean-to in that moment, I thought,
Did not have to be, did not have to,
and it was all I could think. I said it again. “What doctor?” Choking, barely whispered, because I could not breathe, wrapped in her smell, and Papa's.

“Doctor,” she said. She turned her eyes on me. Oh, she looked at me then. She saw me. She said, “What you talking about, doctor?”

“What are
you
talking about? What kind of doctor's around here?”

“Hunh.
I ain't talking about no kind of doctor. I don't know no doctor.”

Long pause and quiet but for the rain on the roof of the lean-to, the day mist now shaped like water, spatting on the wood roof of the lean-to, making sound.

“ 'Cept one.”

I held my breath then. Mama's trunk was hard under my legs and bottom, hard so I felt the bones like two hard knots under each side of my hips.

“I knowed one doctor one time,” she said. Still she looked at me. “Name Williams. Doctored all around down by Booneville. Use to.” Her eyes were pale circles like moon rings. “Don't doctor no more though,” she said. “He dead.” Then she looked back to the empty gray air.

I flew mad. I don't know why, because I was glad there was no doctor, because I did not want to carry
Did not have to be
in my soul all my life. But the anger flew up inside me anyhow, all caught up with her dark weight pressing out at me, pushing back at me, to keep me from watching her nurse Lyda, keep me from hunting in pure secret in my own mama's trunk.

“Unwrap my sister!” I ground it out like I would spit at her. Oh, yes, and I glared at her, but she did not have her eyes on me then and I believe did not see. “She's too big, you're going to stunt her.”

“She too big, unh-huh, what you think I been saying?”

“Unwrap her!” I said.

“That baby pinch a plug out of my flesh if I unwrap her.” She said it simply, unswervingly, like the truth that sun rises at morning.

“You hush!”

And she was hushed already, she stayed hushed a long time, staring at me in the dark, big-eyed, and I did not care or notice.

“Hush up this minute, I said!” like she was going on talking. “Quit singing too, nigger.” I was rolling, my heart thumping. “You got no right here, to be singing here, in my mama's place. I heard it and I aim you to quit it. And unwrap my sister. Right now!”

The woman did what I said. Oh, that shifted something in me. She did just like I told her, and her a grown-up, and me just past ten. I watched her, her head wrapped in a light rag, tucked forward as she bent her neck to me, like she would kneel even to have it chopped off. Her long fingers plucked at the pink scrap of blanket. It was completely unwilling, she did not want to do it, I could see that, but she unwrapped my sister. Lyda clung on the skinny breast like a naked possum in its mama's pocket, and she whimpered, protesting, but her mouth never once let go. When the woman had the blanket pulled back, Lyda waved her arms free and gurgled. I saw her reach up a tiny white hand and lay it palm open on the side of the woman's face. She sucked, she made a little sweet sound, she patted the woman's face a few times, patted and got still, settled quiet, nursing, her hand soft and open on that black woman's skin.