The Mercy Seat (19 page)

T
he father carried the girl on his back down the steep stairs, her thin legs dangling, her bare heels thumping the shaved wood. He set her on a milkstool by the hearth and went back for the others. She watched him carry her brother Jim Dee, and then her sister, and set them down on the pallet, each of them looking strange, unfamiliar, their heads peaked and bare. Her brother's scalp showed in two or three places. Bits of her sister's hair stuck out from behind her ears, brown and ragged, chopped short as a man's. Mattie touched her hand to her own head, felt it, light and numb and stubby, like a nail clipped too short. She had not known when they cut it, had merely drifted up once in the darkness and felt her head slick, without weight, hard and tight and feverish on the floor. It was only when she'd awakened entirely that she knew what had been done to them. She did not care. Her fingertips caressed the short, coarse hairs along her scalp line as she watched the movement in the room.

She saw her father's legs coming down the ladder, and she knew it was Thomas he carried. She wanted to stand up and go to him, but there was a stillness on her that kept her. Her mind told her to go get her brother, but she was too light in her body, her arms and legs hollow. She could see the toddler's small hands locked around their father's neck, and his skull like an egg shining in the lamplight, but she made no move to get up. The father brought the boy and put him on the pallet where the other two children were curled together, lying quiet, blinking their eyes. Mattie could feel the blank space on the pallet that should have been her baby sister, an empty scalded place where no one would look. She knew the truth as she waited with the others by the hearth for their supper, watching the empty space like boiled pigskin in the center of the quilt, but she would not let herself think about it. She turned sideways on the three-legged milkstool, away from her living brothers and sister, away from the barren place on the pallet, and looked at the high dark arc of the room.

It was a rough log room the same size and shape as the one above, where they had lain sick with the fever. The walls were not whitewashed or plastered. She could smell pine sap, see it oozing from the peeled pine flesh in the warmth behind the cookstove. The ceiling seemed far away to her; it vaulted high and distant in the dark, but the room close by was crowded and full of smells. Sap glittered on the log walls in the firelight; the humps and backs and faces of people were lit ragged, winking and dancing in shadow, and the room was jammed with supply boxes, furniture, the plenitude of her aunt and uncle's worldly goods. The whole of the house consisted only of the one room and the upper room above, dark and crowded, the walls chinked with mud.
It's only just us,
she told herself.
Just our family, that's all.
The room seemed crushed with too many people, and she didn't know why.

Her eyes scanned the room, settling at last on her aunt's profile where she stood punching out biscuits at the flour board laid over the washstand on the far side of the room. Jessie's mouth and the side of her face were lined and drawn; she punched the flour dough as if she would kill it. The female cousins were at the cookstove in a jostle, the backs of their skirts to the room, their shoulders in navy calico, the bodices all cut and sewed the same. Mattie could see them shoving each other's aprons with their elbows in secret, even the youngest one, Pearline, whose job it was to mind the flies off the table while the men ate. But there were no flies, it was winter, and the youngest one tried to belly in with the others, whining for them to quit. Papa sat at the rough-pine table with Fayette and his boys, their sleeves rolled back on their arms from washing.

The girl looked at her father's back, his thick shoulders hunched beneath suspenders. The shirt he was wearing was not his own but one stitched together of brown homespun that she'd never seen before. Her uncle was on the far side with his elbows cocked on the pine slats, his hands tipping a saucer of coffee, his mouth hidden in the clot of hair curled round it and the saucer lip buried in his mustache and beard. His sons slouched at the sides of the table, the younger one, Fowler, on a flour keg and Caleb, the eldest, across from him in the canebottom chair. Fowler's dark face was turned on his brother, the scowl like a storm boiling, and Caleb, in a half turn, was looking at his father, trying to shape his lips like him while he sipped his own saucer of coffee. She knew it was real coffee they drank, not burnt-corn coffee like she and her father had been drinking for months in the mountains. She could smell the dark, rich odor, and her stomach cramped around it. What she did not know, couldn't see then nor understand what it indicated, was that her uncle and cousin drank their coffee from saucers that had belonged to her own mother's set of white china dishes with the rose print on the edge.

She looked away from the crowded swirl of the room to her brother and sister and Thomas snuggled together on the pallet on the puncheon floor. For the first time she saw that it was Pearline's old summer gown her sister was wearing, a light gown of thin muslin, though the floor beneath the pallet was cold as stone. She saw that her brother Jim Dee had on a nightshirt a dozen sizes too big for him, and Thomas wore only a diaper square and a piece of blanket pinned together. Jonaphrene looked up then, her dark eyes enormous as she scrambled and twisted around to sit up. Jim Dee began to fidget and twitch, picking at loose threads in the quilt top, and Thomas lay on his side, curled around himself.
Too still,
Mattie thought,
too still again.
She saw her brothers and sister changed: thin, liver-colored and hairless as newborn possums—and still she did not see all that the red darkness had done.

“Martharuth!” her aunt called. “Jump up here now and help Sarey set the table.” And Jessie went on punching the powder biscuits, laying them rapidly in the pan.

The hollowness was yet in the girl's bones, but the place behind her eyes was not filled with the black swimming; the fever was gone now, she was not even cold, and so she didn't know it would happen. When she stood up, the rock hearth and the fireplace beside it fell away. There was no pain, only that lightness upon her and a little stuffed feeling deep in her ears. But the room fell away, and she didn't know what to think. She sat back down.

Her aunt called again, her voice sharp. “Martharuth!”

“Mattie,” her father said, “git up and help now. You're all right.”

Again the girl stood. Again it happened. The floor fell away. She held herself very still; she didn't know what it was.

Jessie said, “Supper's near about ready, child. Hurry up!”

Mattie tried to walk toward her cousin, but the log walls swooped and fell away from her. She hit the pine table where the men sat, walked sideways into it, and shook the coffee saucers splashing, the coal oil trembling in the lamp.

Her father grabbed for her, said, “Whoa, now!”

Jessie hollered, “Look out, child! What in the name of Pete is the matter with you?”

Papa had her by the back of the nightgown, and she put her hand on the table, not because she knew to do so, but because she had walked directly into it, crashed into the pine ledge without bracing or flinching because she'd had no idea it would happen, and it was the weight of the table that stopped her. She touched the top of it, the flat plane of pine with the flat of her hand, held to it with her palm spread, Papa clutching up the neck of the nightgown—her cousin Lottie's nightgown she had on—and in a minute the room settled. Her father's eyes were on her, stern and nearly black in the darkness. Mattie looked up, and then quickly away, but she felt his eyes on her, and so she tried to take her hand off the table.

Fayette said, “Ah, leave her rest, John, them kids have been mighty sick,” and he slurped a sip of coffee. The wood between his elbows was wet with slopped coffee. The lip of the saucer was sunk in the mat of his beard. The girl looked at the saucer, unseeing, without recognition, but feeling it as something familiar from long ago that erupted her soul. She heard a sharp tongue-to-teeth sound beside the stove, though she didn't know if it was her aunt or one of the cousins. She did not turn to look; her father's hand was still tight on the nightgown. The room was not rolling then because she was standing still, her hand on the tabletop, her head forward a little and tilted to the side, but she knew something was terribly wrong. Her father's hand eased on her. He said, so softly she barely could hear him, “Go set down, Matt.”

She turned her head, saw her brother and sister and Thomas on the pallet beside the hearthstones. She saw the milkstool and the fire burning bright, and she tried to walk toward it.

The fire sank. The log room like a cave turned and tilted away from her, and she stepped where there was no floor.

Her chin hit the wood, and her teeth jarred and stung to her eyeballs. She heard yelling, her father's voice in a shout, “Mattie!” She couldn't answer. She could not stand up. Her uncle said, “Y'all better let them young'uns rest,” and the girl hated him as she crawled to the fireplace and put her open palm on the flat stones. She pulled herself onto the hearth and lay across it, warm and smooth: the warm, smooth breast of hard stone. The room ceased to turn; the world settled. She heard the wooden legs of the milkstool clatter and roll on the puncheon, felt her sister's hand, or someone's hand, warm on her back. Someone was hollering, or talking, but the sound came from far away. The hand was calm on her back, and it calmed her.

Inside, Mattie felt a slow warmth spreading, easing through her veins, along the trembling flesh of her back, into the well of her stomach. She turned her head and saw Jonaphrene crouched on the pallet with her knees tucked to her chin beneath the thin summer gown, her luminous eyes burning dark as a nightjar's, the brown hair sticking up like scruff from the top of her head. Both of Jonaphrene's arms were wrapped around her gowned legs, hugging them. Mattie slid her eyes round the room, and she saw them watching her, all of them: her sister and brothers watching her, and Papa half turned at the table with his eyes on her, Fayette's eyes upon her, and his sons' eyes, Caleb and Fowler, watching not out of interest but because the others were looking at her. In front of the cookstove, the girl cousins had turned and stood perfectly still in a blue-dark calico row, the eldest one's hand in the air with the meat fork pointed up. Jessie stood perfectly still, half turned from the flour board, one hand on her hip and the tin biscuit cutter in the other, cocked in the same manner, caught up in midair.

Mattie knew then whose hand was upon her.

She felt it as surely as she had felt it warm on her shoulder to claim her that hot afternoon in the clearing. She was not afraid.

The room was still, the only movement the flicker of firelight and shadows dancing, the coal oil burning steadily in the lamp on the table, the rock hearth swelling, receding, warm and smooth beneath her. She could see her own blood joined up with her, watching, not afraid yet: Thomas drowsy, wanting to sleep again; Jim Dee restless in his muscles; Jonaphrene shivering, her eyes big, trying to know if it was all right. She could see the six cousins, half-blood and curious, and her aunt, who had no blood in her, fearful and furious, and it was Jessie at first Mattie knew best because her aunt's energy was strongest and thrown at them, because she did not want them; she had no say-so but to take them, but she didn't choose them, and Mattie saw that. She looked at her aunt, caught in the half turn: a gaunt woman with bad teeth and a rising belly in a sack apron and patched dress, glaring in the lamplight with her hand up, the tin loop of biscuit cutter like a weapon in her fingers cocked in the air. Mattie saw the two swellings inside her: fear for her own children—especially her sons; the girl could see the fierce mother-love of sons for the two who sat impatient and hungry at the pine-slat table, and of those two it was Fowler she feared most for, her fear like a claw thrown round him—and the other swelling an aimless, useless, empty anger which had no place to land but upon the unwanted children against the log wall by the hearth. The girl did not see the unborn child her aunt carried.

Stranger,
Mattie thought.
Not blood kin.
She shut her eyes from the woman, turned her head.

Her legs were long on the hearthstones, long and bony, extending off the hearth to the cold dark past the fire. She felt herself awkward, her feet big, her legs too long for her body, and she thought she had grown in the red darkness, grown long while she slept in the fever. The others were talking. She heard Lottie say, “Mama, what's she doing?” and Sarah in a loud whisper, “Mama! They're still sick!” Jessie said, “You girls hush up and tend to your business.” Fayette said, “Somebody pour her a cup of coffee, when's them biscuits ready? A man's liable to starve to death before somebody puts supper on the table around here.”

Mattie opened her eyes again, turned toward the sound. She could see the men's legs, their boot tops beneath the table. She didn't look up for a bit, and when she did, it was to the boys Caleb and Fowler her eyes drifted. She understood then, gazing at the two brothers, what it was that made the younger one turn his scudding scowl on the elder: the dark envy that forced him to watch his brother every instant, to crave his every joy and gesture; she saw how Fowler hungered after even the cold coffee Caleb slurped from a saucer, believing in his secret heart that it was better than any coffee given into his own hand by their father, and she saw him in that moment thirsting after it, with Jessie's fear and fierce love dug in his heart like a claw.

They are half-blood,
she thought.
The blood of their father and our father is the same from Grandpa Lodi, the same from Grandma
(a wisp of sticks dying with black sunken mouth on the bed back home in Kentucky),
but their mother is not blood to us. None of hers is ours. They are half-blood, that's all.