The Mercy Seat (15 page)

I said, “How you been witching my sister? Tell me how you witch her! How?”

She said, “You talking 'bout something you got no knowledge nor notion,” and it was like a sigh when she said it, a sough of wind, an exhalation. No eyeblink, no rise or fall in her voice sound, she did not look at me, I was not even sure for a moment if I heard it, and she went on like she was talking to the air or rush of water. “I don't 'spire to come up here,” she said. “It ain't me or my mind. You tell him. Somebody have to tell him—he ain't going to allow me to just quit.”

“Who? Who ain't going to allow you?”

But I already knew who it was, and I knew why too, because I saw him, what he did, his yellow mustache flecked wet and moving like a hump of yellow caterpillar and her skin beneath like the black breathing mound beneath the lips of my sister, and I could see it but I didn't have words for it because it was too dark and too secret, what I could not know and should not, but I asked anyhow, and it may be I whispered, I believe I did whisper, there in the washing creek sound, because you cannot speak such secrets in daylight, but I asked it to the smoked and speaking air because the words had already been thought, I said, “How come he won't let you?”

She looked straight at me. Her face muscles shook again, or had never quit maybe, I wasn't watching, but when she looked at me I could see the skin spasm and tremble the way mule flesh ripples to twitch off biting flies.

“Hunh,”
she said. “What you think? Fool don't want my milk to dry up.”

She looked back out at the water and went on in the same monotony as if she'd never stopped. “Somebody have to tell him,” she said, and this time she shrugged her shoulders. “Tha's all, I told you, I done did all
I
could, suit me plenty fine never have to come climb this damn mountain one single more morning, child like to bite me to pieces anyhow, she plenty big,” and she went on sort of muttering so, her voice mostly even but every now and then lilting a bit in the air, and then she'd give that little shrug, and it was just how it was on the morning in the lean-to, like she was not aware in her full self that I was there. She'd tricked me with her blood and gouged flesh, I thought, because she could not feel anything and talk lightly so, and I thought it was because she was a witch woman that she did not cry or rail or scream with her flesh bit and bleeding, and her acting like she didn't much know it or care, and then I thought of the white man with the yellow mustache and my stomach pitched up sick, and the urge was coming on me again to choke her and
make
her, and also the fear. The woman's eyes lit like she'd just thought of something, but she went on looking at the water and her voice went on in the same even sound. “Your daddy got booklearning. He know how to write.”

“Papa don't know,” I said, my fists and mouth clenching. It was rising bad in me.
“I
know.”

She nodded. “That be all right then. You write it,” she said. “Have your daddy to sign.” She nodded and nodded, like she was agreeing with her own self. “Tell him to give it to Miz Misely out his own hand. Make sure she say that, she have to see to it the doctor know that, it come right out of y'all's hand,” and the woman carried on nodding to herself, looking out over the water. It was that word again,
doctor,
and it jumped stinging at me across the sparkling air, because the doctor was the white man and he was not dead, and I knew it and had known it and only just then remembered. “No sense to come down and talk direct to him,” she was saying. “I seen him, he'd talk the skin off a lizard, he might talk y'all back.”

“Who is he?” and this I know I whispered, because I heard my own
s
sound like her
s
sound sighing in the air, and the woman did not answer, and I said it louder, and it was a threat then, my fists balled so tight the nail stubs stabbed my palm. “Who is he? What kind of doctor?”

Never looked at me, her eyes only to the water, but I could feel it, I knew it, she knew I was there. It was to me she told it, not the water, not the damp air. She said, “Hunh. No kind of doctor. He ain't no kind of doctor, he lie on that how he lie on everything, but they all call him that.” She went on talking, and all she told me I remembered from the witchery inside the lean-to, I saw the pictures unfolding, and I could not stop them coming. She said, “He tell my mama he a doctor when she leaved me on the back porch after Ivy got drownded, after they chased and drownded my sister for sport pleasure down home.” And I saw the girl, her skin red as copper, jump from a yellow clay bank into brown water, saw her reach for the knotted rope thick as a fist, saw the water carry her down, shining, like a scuffed penny. “My mama could not survive it, she just want to die, she give me to him to keep me, carry me up on the back porch, we bofe of us crying, and then she quit when he come out the back door with the missus behind him—” And I saw the white man pull the watch fob from his pocket and look at it and click it shut, slide it into the slit of pocket at the side of his suspender clasp. “He say he a doctor, he going to pay me, and oh yes, he do. Pay me with coat hangers and tin scrap, I been saving 'em and selling 'em going on 'leven years, ain't never going to pay back what they feed me, what they say my children eat.”

She was quiet then, looking at the water, looking, her foot bleeding, whispering, and what she told me next I remembered, backwards, unrolling, though I didn't know I remembered until the telling, she said, “Step out the back door first morning like God, and her behind him, and I knowed it right then—”

The mystery came hard on me, too hard, so that I smelled the terrible smell, like old fish and rank tobacco, I saw the white man step onto the porch with his yellow mustache, his pale eyes, and I knew it was
going to be him that hurt me, the missus no worse than any, I seen her before, she nervous and watchful, mouth drawed down tight like green 'simmons sometime, but it going to be him with his mustache like a yella caterpillar and ice eyes, how he crackin his knuckles, watching with ice eyes, and hungry, so the missus watch too, but her watching just same old like any old white kind of watching, it going to be him and them long big-knuckle fingers of his the way they feel around in that pipe bowl, pokin and proddin, his eyes like his fingers—

“Stop,” I said. “Stop it,” because I did not know what it was, I didn't want to remember, but she wouldn't quit it, until I cried out in a loud voice, “Stop!”

The woman turned her head slow in the smoked air. She looked up at me. I don't believe she was dying, to this day I do not, but she stared at me in the way the dying stare at the living, looked at me and through me, both at the same time, like I was a ghost child, a spirit, a wisp of nothing in the air. She shut her mouth and looked back out over the water, completely silent, her foot bleeding like a pig's throat all over the track. In a little bit she looked down and it was like she just then noticed it, like the foot didn't belong to her but was just some strange something she spied on the track. She reached a hand down along her leg and wrapped her fingers around the ankle, pulled the foot toward her, turned it heel-up and looked at it and went back to dabbing blood.

That was what I could not abide. Don't you see? She'd quit me. I felt how she quit me, and me here the one who'd hidden by a hickory to catch her, who'd laid out the trap and
had
caught her and wounded her, I don't care if her whole foot wasn't wedged in, and me here remembering,
remembering,
and she looked at me and through me and away from me in such way that I was no more than a day moth nor nothing and oh, oh, the anger swelled up bad. I had no fear then, I just yelled at her, I said, “It weren't Papa, it was me, nigger,
me! Matt!
I did that!” and I waved my hands at her foot, and I wanted to grab it and shake it but I would not touch her because I knew what a danger it was to touch that dark skin. “You quit it with witching me!” I screamed so my throat stripped. “You quit! Don't you be telling me to write nothing, nigger, I won't write nothing. I got one thing to say only: You go give suck to your own baby. You leave mine alone. Don't you come back, hear? You can't anyhow, because we're leaving tomorrow, we're going to Eye Tee and you can't stop us nor nobody and I aim to tell you to quit it with your witchery, you hear me? You quit it with my sister, she's coming with us to Eye Tee,” I said. “Give her back!”

She looked up at me and I knew I was changed then, I could see it in her, and I could feel it in my belly, this change in me, though I held nothing, my hands were empty, but I had something to hurt her with and I did not know what it was. Her eyes flicked up the mountain along the track, to the water on one side, the scrub brush on the other, just wherever she could look without turning her head. I thought she was looking for a place to jump up and run to, and I prepared myself to grab her if she tried to do so, but she did not tense up and gather herself nor let go of the awkward way she held her foot. She was hunked down in herself, holding still and tough like she meant to disappear, same as that slug thought it could hide from me by hunking itself short and fat. Her eyes were not on me but darting all around. Pretty quick she began to talk, and her voice too was shrunk down, a low shushing whisper, and I cannot explain to you what was in it except it was begging and not begging, and it meant to pull me in next to her and at the same time it wanted to melt.

“Cain't,” she whispered. “You got to tell him, some white person have to tell him, he ain't going to believe me, I cain't suck my baby no more, doctor ain't going to let me quit with y'all's baby, he got to have that milk, he a pig for it, he ain't going to let me quit, beat me to death with them coat hangers first, I don't care, but he beat my children worse with his fists. Missy, somebody have to tell him. He kilt my baby, he going to kill—” And then she stopped. She looked up at me in the way that she saw me, changed as I was, and her voice feathered up high and light. “I ain't saying nothing against him, missy, he never meant to, just how he shook him, that's all, snap back his neck, my baby died perfect, all at once, his little soul snap out sudden, quick like you snap your fingers, that's how babies do, they souls too entirely fragile, they don't hang on to life for nothing, some of 'em, mine don't . . .” and her voice trailed off. Then a sound came, it started low and growling in her throat, like a hurt dog, and just in an instant the growl went deeper, and deeper, sank down to a low, wrenching moan somewhere deep in her gut, and then it was worse even, a deep, terrible groaning, like her breath was stopped, like the very flesh was being torn loose from inside her belly.

I knew that sound. While I watched and listened I could not recall what it was, could not place it in the belly of my father in the hot circle of sunlight, but the sound wrenched me, tore open from me like it came out my own belly, and I thought,
That sound don't belong to HER, it ain't HERS!
I raised up and hit her with both fists all around her headwrap and hunked shoulders. I flailed at her like you'd beat a rug, and I don't know what she did then, I don't, except I know she didn't fight me, and I believe she turned her back and shoulders to me, because I felt my fists pound soft on the wool shawl and it made that hollow back-beating sound, and I hit her head where her ears were to make them sting, and the bone was hard as stone beneath the knuckled bone of my fingers, and I hit her on the neck and wherever I could find. She hunked and rolled tighter, her soft belly hidden, and I just flew at her with all my rage and hit, and I hit, and I hit, and I was not afraid of her. And then all at once I quit, and my heart was beating so hard, my breath pounded and hurt, and then I was afraid again, but not of her. I was afraid Papa would come, Papa! And so I turned and ran away from her up the mountain toward our place, and I only looked back quick that one time, so fast, and saw her rolled tight in herself, not looking at me but her head turned to the side a little to wait for the next hit, not making that gut sound, her foot bleeding still.

 

 

The track had grown steeper since I'd eased down it in dawn mist, and the fog that had thinned had somehow grown back deep. Wet leaves slipped and slid backwards, branches clawed for me, roots reached out to trip me, stones rolled and skidded sideways beneath the hard edge of my shoes. I could not run fast enough from what lay behind me, and yet, and still—and I don't know how this happened, because I ran and ran as in a dream and could not get away—yet too soon I heard the children playing in the yard. I stopped. Another turn more and I would be where they could see me. A hundred yards more and I would be back in my home and my life again, and that meant my family, and I could not bear it. I could not look at Papa or hear Lyda or feel Thomas scrambling to climb up in my lap. I couldn't. I stood still a moment, just waiting a moment, bent over at the waist with my hands on my knees to catch my breath and remember the lies I'd already made up and forgotten which I must tell to Papa and Jonaphrene about where I'd been gone. I was not looking at anything or thinking of anything except trying to call back the words to tell Papa, and I was holding still so around the curve of the track when I heard.

It was clearer this time, more distinguishable and certain than on the first morning outside the lean-to, though it was not much like singing now, nor even like humming, but it was the same sound, high and thin and beautiful just outside hearing, and it was familiar, I knew it, I recognized it, and it made me sick with longing and sorrow. Hard, hard sick, and I stood crouched so with my hands upon my knees and the world rising behind my eyes, going dark, buzzing, until I heaved, sick to my stomach, and there was nothing to throw up, and I heaved again, but what it was could not be vomited out from inside me. I lay down, there, on the track that had been a road leading us into the mountains, sprawled forth bellydown in the damp dirt and small rocks and leaves.