The Mercy Seat (33 page)

He neared the weary line of mules, strangely still in the growing darkness. Holding to the right, he could feel the road surface change beneath his boots as he traversed the clay portion of curve that would turn boggy in wet weather; he could smell the mulesweat and leather, the droppings on the cracked crust. The droning voice in the darkness heightened and changed. He knew that his brother was aware now of his coming, and he intended, without word or pause, to continue past the glut of men and mules and restive horses to the log house some twenty rods distant, mount the stone step and go in at the log door. He intended, but he could not. Without a glance or an acknowledgment, his brother drew him. The droning voice ceased the selling, paused and waited, and the air shifted. The men standing about in the road parted. John Lodi walked in among them, his eyes on the square of log house nearly black in the distance, walked forward in the tricking purple of first dark, in the night sound and murmur of men and tree frogs and the snuffled stirring of horses, until he was nearly on a parallel with the crowded storefront, where, scourged and lashed on by the despairing cry from the creekbank to
whip poorwill,
he looked up at his brother. His step faltered. His eyes were turned up to Fayette on the east end of the porch above the roadbed, one arm about a cedar post, the tight-gritted grin showing white in the twilight, yet he saw his brother not present on the porch but darting behind a weathered barn playing dare goal, pulling him with him into the hayloft, the pigeon's nest falling, straw raining, the nest in his own arms, upside down, cradled, pushed from the rafter by his brother, and in the nest of straw and bird mess and feathers when it was turned over a tremendous coil of black snake, and Fayette running, running with the pitchfork to kill the rat snake. There was the sound of a baby crying.

“Son,” Fayette said from the porch darkness, “what the Sam Hill are you doing walking? I ain't expected to see you afoot.”

A light was lit then, swelling yellow inside the store, so that Jessie was made visible, backlit within the open doorway, and behind her the white-collared blur of dark bodices which defined her older girls. Her infant was crying, and she stood in the doorway, bouncing and patting it on her shoulder. Because the light was behind her, he could not see her face. He saw his daughter Jonaphrene on the porch above the top step, with Thomas hoisted at her chest. The boy's legs dangled to the porch floor. His daughter's hair had grown out so that it nearly reached her shoulders; her limbs and torso had grown long and thin. Fayette's boys were perched on the porch rail, their hats tilted forward, cocked each at the same angle over one eye, and he saw his own son Jim Dee among them, indistinguishable from them but for the restless energy that made him unable to hold his swaggering pose; his son's leg jittered up and down, jiggling against the swimming dark below his booted feet.

“Where's that blame mule I just bought you?” his brother called down.

He willed himself forward; he walked on, but his step was misweighted; he couldn't seem to find his proper rhythm. His eyes were open, but the evening had grown dark. He moved through the shifting crowd of men until he was well past them and the house was nearing in the darkness, and he left the soft roadbed, climbed the rock-stubbled incline to the sandstone slab step, crossed the house porch.

 

 

Tanner sat at the table, hat off, his taffy-colored hair mashed flat. He was eating a hunk of pie, washing it down with slugs of coffee. “Evening,” he said, his mouth full.

John went to the washstand, set his lunch pail on the floor beside the butter churn, dippered water into the basin, and rolled his sleeves back to the elbows.

“Fay get them mules sold off yet?” Tanner asked.

John hung the gourd dipper on its nail, reached for the lye soap. The water in the basin turned grayblack and murky as he scrubbed soot and forge dirt from his hands, and still the flour-sack tea towel blackened when he dried his hands on it. He had not yet removed his hat. He looked to the top of the stove; there was no tin plate of food there. The cookstove was nearly cold.

“They're not the best in the world to feed a fellow,” Tanner said. “You'll about have to make do. What I done anyhow.” He forked up another wedge of crust.

John saw the remains of apple pie in the pie-safe through the open tin door dotted like swiss eyelet with pin holes punched in the homely shape of a half-moon and stars. Punched by Jessie. He had watched her, one Sunday afternoon in the summer, on her hands and knees in the shade of the porch punching the sheet of new tin laid out flat on the porch floor. Kneeling on the porch floor punching tiny holes with a homemade pick, her mouth gritted, dotting the tin with a half-moon and stars.

“Coffee's cold, even,” Tanner said. “He's had her over yonder all evening.” He took a slurp of coffee, followed by a bite of pie. “Pie's good, though.”

John stepped over and closed the pie-safe door. He bent to the nearly empty woodbox and gathered a few splits of kindling, opened the firebox and poked around in the ashes till a glow started, then put the kindling in on the halfhearted coals. He went out, leaving the front door open behind him and Tanner visible at the table near the oil lamp, mashing the back of his fork on the pie crumbs and lifting them to his deeply mustached mouth.

Standing in the dark beside the woodpile he saw his brother, trailed by the skirted covey of females, coming along the road from the store. In the distance he saw the boys driving the mule train up the mountain toward Fayette's barn. John gathered an armload of stovewood and turned to climb the rise and go back into the house. When Fayette and Jessie and the daughters came in, John had the stove started and was stirring flour and eggs into batter. The woman did not acknowledge him but gave the infant to her oldest girl and immediately went to the washstand and lifted her apron from the nail and tied it on. She took the wooden spoon from her brother-in-law and stirred the batter, turned and spat on the stove once to see if it was hot.

“Sell them all?” Tanner said from his place at the table.

“Not hardly,” Fayette answered.

“Not hardly,” the boy Thomas said.

Fayette put his hat on a wall peg, sat down in a near chair to take his boots off. The daughters in a fluid motion moved each to a practiced task: one to grease the griddle, one to slice the bacon brought in with them from the well box; one held the baby on her shoulder as she set the table, while another went out the door with the empty bucket. Jonaphrene took the paring knife when Jessie held it out to her and sat at the table to peel potatoes. The smell of heating bacon grease slowly salted the air.

Fayette grunted, pulling a boot off with both hands, one each gripped around the heel and toe. He set the boot on the floor. “How many days we got to get word around, you reckon?”

“You reckon?” the boy Thomas said.

Silence a moment as Tanner eyed the little boy at the the end of the table, leaning across his sister's lap. “Not many,” Tanner said finally. “None, maybe.”

“None baby,” Thomas said, looking up at Tanner. The boy's head cleared the top of the table. He was big for a three-year-old, a blond, broadfaced toddler with a blandness in his features like a newborn, his forehead high and smooth, his eyes pale blue, wide open, almost devoid of expression, as if he saw everything around him new in each moment and had no experience to weigh it or judge its meaning. Tanner shook his head. The boy spooked him.

“How many you get rid of?” he asked Fayette slowly, never taking his eyes off the little boy's pale blue ones.

“Five's all.” Fayette grunted, tugging at the other boot.

“Five, Saul,” the boy said immediately, almost before the words were finished and in just the same tone and inflection, but with that minute split in the placement of vowel and consonant, the slightest increase in the sibilance of
s,
so that the meaning seemed changed, and Tanner, growing ever more uncomfortable, shoved the empty plate across the table and leaned back in his chair to tug his tobacco pouch loose from the waist of his breeches. Glancing at John Lodi, motionless, still hatted, beside the front door, Tanner took papers from his shirt pocket and began to roll a cigarette. John stepped to the side when the middle daughter came in with the water bucket and carried it, her shoulders sloped with the weight, across the room to the washstand, but he did not make a move to come on into the room himself and sit down.

“I figure we can sell a dozen or so Monday,” Fayette went on, “provided that idiot Moss'll do like he says.”

“Do like he says,” the boy said.

“Monday? That's day after tomorrow. I ain't hanging around till day after tomorrow, pardon me, I'm sure not.”

“Sure not.”

“. . . said you'd have a bunch of buyers ready. You better get them here tomorrow, you aim to sell 'em, and you better aim to sell more than a dozen if you intend me in on this type of a deal.”

“Type-a deal.”

“Tomorrow's Sunday,” Fayette said. “Folks don't buy on Sunday. You the one come lollygagging in here on a Saturday—”

“Saturday's the day folks come to town buying. They ain't bought on a Saturday, they ain't going to do it on a Monday!”

“On a Monday, yeah,” the boy said.

“Goddamnit, get that kid out of here!” Tanner exploded. “I'm going to wring his weird little fool neck!”

“Fool neck.”

The room was silent for a moment but for the hiss of flapjacks just poured on the griddle. Slowly, quietly, but with great menace in his voice, Fayette said, “Jess, take the girls and go upstairs. I'll be there directly.”

“Dreckly,” Thomas said, never taking his unblinking eyes off Tanner.

Jessie opened her mouth but said nothing. She set the hot griddle to the cool side of the stove, the flapjacks still smoking, bubbles popping; she looked once at her daughter Mildred and stepped across the room to the table, where she took the boy by the hand. “Leave it,” she said to Jonaphrene, and without a word the girl left the milky potatoes to rust on the tabletop, the peelings curled in a pile beside them, and followed Jessie's skirt and her brother's toddling legs to the far side of the room, where the hems of the girl cousins' dresses were already disappearing up the stairs.

Tanner said, “Well.” He pulled a wooden match from his shirt pocket, struck it on the tabletop. He spoke from the side of mouth, around the cigarette. “I can't talk business with some fool kid mocking my every word.”

John made an aborted move, quickly strangled, seeming to half come at Tanner, half turn to go out the door, and then he stood motionless again.

“We got to get some things straight around here,” Fayette said. The menace drained from his voice, slowly. “First place, that's John's boy, and he ain't mocking you. He can't help that, and I'll thank you to keep your trap shut about it, or about anybody else in my family. You ain't doing business with my family, you're doing it with me, and maybe John here if we can persuade him, which you taking in after his boy ain't going to help. Second place, there's no call to start in on such stuff before we even eat supper.” The threat was entirely gone from Fayette's voice now, or covered over, ladled with the familiar cajoling tone. “These kids are hungry.
I'm
hungry. I don't like to talk business on a empty stomach.” He surveyed the room from his chair in the corner, his gaze coming to rest finally on his brother beside the door. He was sober, completely, Fayette was, and he seemed ready to say or ask something, his brilliant blue eyes questioning, but John's eyes held steadily to a section of rag carpet about three feet in front of him. Fayette at last returned his scrutiny to Tanner.

“All right,” he said. “We got started, let's finish her up. Say what's on your mind.”

The man at the table drew hard on the cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger, said, “All I mean to say, you aim me to be the one risks his neck bringing a string of animals through the Territory, you better have some buyers waiting at the end of it or we got no deal.”

“You'll get your buyers,” Fayette said.

“That's what I know.” Tanner dropped the cigarette to the floor beneath the table, ground it with his boot. “Question is, when. Might leave the both of us wishing different if a U.S. marshal happens along about day after tomorrow wanting to know where you come by such a pretty mess of mules for sale marked by that peculiar-looking brand.”

“Ain't no U.S. marshal going to happen along day after tomorrow, or no time.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know it, that's all. Listen here, you keep to your end of it, I'll keep to mine. I said I'd take care of the selling, I'll take care of it. Selling's my middle name, and you know it. I just need a little time. Not every Tom around here's got sixty or a hunnerd dollars to plunk down on a good mule. We got to get the word around.”

“You're supposed to get the damn word around before I got my neck on the line holding 'em.”

“You get a little more specific about when you'll be pleased to show up, I might do so, yessir, I just might.”

“Hell, I can't get any more specific. What you want me to do, send up smoke signals? Took me a damn week just to find a opportunity to wade those animals across the river. Thirty mules is not exactly invisible.”

“Well.”

“Well.” Tanner began spitting the little front-of-tongue sputters that were his habit when irritated. “All I know is, it's a good way for the law to get wind of what become of thirty missing army mules.”

“Law ain't going to get wind of it.”