The Mercy Seat (30 page)

In the heat and sound of a thousand rasping cicadas, the girl was transported to the hot clearing in the mountains of Arkansas, to the repetition and voice of her mother, and the girl heard what she had been lessoned by rote so that the rhythms and words were an eternal present, her mother's voice chanting, rising, falling like the asking voices of locusts:
James and Thomas and Oliver, William, Alexander, Obediah, called Bede, and your grandfather Cornelius who died at Vicksburg in the War. That was Eighteen Sixty-three, which seems a long time ago to your young mind, but it is not long at all, I was fourteen when my father died, and he was thirty-nine, I was fourteen which seems a long time ago to your young mind but it is not long at all.
Matt stared at the Confederate note. Richmond, Feb 17th, 1864.
your grandfather cornelius who died at vicksburg in the war that was eighteen sixty-three which seems a long time ago.

From the cluster of letters amidst the treasury notes she plucked a thick piece of paper folded in thirds, and opened it to discover that it was not a letter at all but a child's penmanship practice, the scrolled alphabet repeated in upper case and lower case between stiff lines ruled with charcoal. She folded the thick paper and placed it in the box lid, reached for a folded semitransparent sheet, brown and thin as the skin of an onion, through which she could see dark blue scratches. Her breath held as she unfolded the friable page. The hand was beautifully penned in slanted
o's
and sweeping tails and elaborate curlicues, the indigo ink faded in places and smudged illegibly in the creases, but yes, it was a letter, dated in the upper corner Oct 21st, 1861.

Matt folded the thin sheet along the creases and placed it beside the other items in the box lid. She unfolded another, thick-coated and stiff. In a different hand, one blocked and bluntly square, someone had written on a torn piece of wallpaper:

No signature. No date. She folded it and placed it next to the others in the silver square, reached for another paper, where a childish scrawl declared Roses are Red Violets are Blue Honey is Sweet And You are To. Another contained a recipe for chess pie. When she unfolded another, a lock of very blond, curly hair tied with a pale ribbon fell to her lap from a charred printed leaf. To the girl's eyes it seemed that the burnt edges of the page were blacker, more distinctly charred, than the browned tinge at the edge of the others, and there were blurred blue marks on one side where a hand had underlined words and phrases. Matt looked to the top of the page, where the name EZEKIEL, the numbers <32 27> were inscribed. Quickly, uncomprehendingly, she scanned the passages marred with smearing blurred lines:

The girl's eyes darted back and forth and down, finding the same words underlined again and again:

Folding the Old Testament page along the creased squares, she slipped the lock of blond hair within and put it away. On another partially burned Bible page separated from its binding were the listings of family births and deaths and marriage dates, printed in a strong sweeping hand, the words and order just as her mother had taught her. Inside the last delicate and half-singed page the girl opened, in a hand unlike the others, another letter began
My beloved
—

Without judgment, she read.

Without wisdom, without comprehension, her earth-yellow eyes skimming back and forth, the girl read . . .

. . . until she began to know without language or comprehension, to hear with her soul what she saw in the place behind her eyes: a pale skeleton of a man seated upon the fetid earth in tattered trousers faded to no-color, shredded high above his ankles, flapping in a high breeze like the unsolid limbs of a scarecrow, and in his cracked fingers a stubbed pencil pressed to page, and in his shallow breath the urgency of the dying; she knew that he suffered the mystery, as she herself suffered it; that he carried unto madness the same gift and curse to breathe the soul of another; that he held, as she did, the rolling vision in the dark place behind his pale eyes.

Abruptly the child stopped reading. The paper fell, crushed between the small, blackened fingers, unattended in her lap. She sank, spiraling, into knowledge that was beyond her understanding, truth that was beyond her wisdom, seeing that the writer was a man kin to her—kin to her mother—a blond specter with yellow eyes, and yet his was not the hand that had penned the indigo script chastising the faithless woman, though the kinship was there too, so that the words were a distortion of the same cadences and rhythms from the same pulse of blood, and she saw within the spiral Grandma Billie, blind and heavy in her shapeless dress in the dawn fog; it was her grandmother who had been the faithless woman, the contentious woman who set her face against her husband, and he died at Vicksburg, died at Vicksburg in the war. The blond specter swam forward but he did not see Grandma Billie, and the girl knew the blood kinship was not there. She struggled, trying to twist free of the spiral, and could not, any more than she could walk naked on the earth freed of the very blood and breath within her, mingled within her in the burden and protection of blood, calcified in the carapace of family.

The girl sat on the blackened earth without presence in her body, without power over the images rolling behind her eyes, listening without judgment as a child listens to a tale that is told. The blond wraith had loved her mother, these scratched words had been written for her mother and to her mother in her mother's girlhood from the long travail of a madness unto death, and the girl felt his hand shake with fever, not from a soldier's wound, though he was a soldier, but fevered with madness and hunger; she saw the ghosts of men groaning nearby on the fetid ground, sprawled in acres in a great space around him, and he was blood-kin through her mother's father, and the searing sight in him was the same behind her own eyes—the same and yet different; for in the blond wraith the vision was madness, and in the girl it was only like remembering: a deep and unfathomable memory in the blood. She remembered that the blond soldier had loved her mother, she remembered he was dying; she remembered the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth upon prison ground deep with the stench of dying, far away to the east, and the memory rolled back, and back, the numbers increasing, the voices crying, and the girl knew she could not know these thousand lives from before her borning, how they had spoken in the world or walked, not gestures, not scent or warm breath, but only that they were hers and she theirs, and kin.

The vision rolled deeper; she was not she but one hiding, in fear, hiding; it was a cottage with whitewashed walls and a hewn oaken table, and one hid beneath the oaken wood of the table, for the enemy roamed without, and the one hiding, coward and afraid in war, crouched beneath the oaken table, trembling, heard voices, the voices of women; and one hid, afraid, shrinking in terror, the women's voices coming to the door, entering, three peasant women in scarves and woolen dresses, moving about the cottage to prepare food, a mess of pottage, a mess of pottage for the one hiding, the coward, the soldier, until they became and had always been Holy Women, to protect and guide the one, to save the one hiding from the enemy on the fields, the green fields, the fetid fields all around, and as one watched, the faces of the Holy Women changed, darkened, became all the face of the Choctaw woman, and they held each of them out to the one hiding the clay cup.

The girl's eyes rolled back in her head, her head slumped forward, and she fell into darkness.

 

 

Mattie stood at the top of dark stairs in a house that had belonged to her long ago, so long ago, and her mother's voice called her from the root cellar.

“Mattie? Mattie. Come here a minute. Mama needs you.”

“Mama?”

She stood at the top, staring down into the darkness where the wooden steps descended lower and lower and disappeared in blueblack velvet.

“Come down here, honey.”

She was afraid. It was too dark, the stairs too steep. She could not remember what the cellar looked like at the bottom. “Come get me, Mama!”

“I can't come there, Mattie.”

“Come get me.”

“I can't. I need you. Come down here where I am.”

“Who is he, Mama? That man?”

“Nobody. A cousin. Come down, honey. Mama needs you.”

“I can't, I can't, I'm too afraid, come get me. You come get me.”