The Mercy Seat (35 page)

He did not see his brother stiffen, grow yet more coldly breathless and still.

“No more borrying somebody else's design unless we know a hundred percent sure it's run out. You can't make no money that way anyhow, fending off lawsuits and what-have-you, but I'll tell you something—manufacturing is the way to go. I have sure figured that out. You were making, what, seven, eight guns a month there at the last? That's nothing, that's not a drop in the bucket compared to what we can do. We're going to be rich, Son, and we don't need no howdahs to do it.” His voice grew wistful with regret. “Too bad, though, if you think about it. That is a fine weapon.” He shook his head. “There's some power in that gun, now. You can blow the top off a bear's skull with one of them barrels and have three left for target practice. That one I got off that ni—” He stopped abruptly, slapped an imaginary mosquito on the back of his neck. “Lord,” he said. “You might reckon this dry heat'd kill a few of these critters.”

He paused a moment, gazing out into the moonlit yard, his mind on the big four-barreled pistol he'd bought off Mitchelltree on the ridge and now kept hidden from his brother's sight beneath the horsehair mattress in the crowded room upstairs. The fact that he could not brag and show it about to the townsmen of Big Waddy galled him. “Should've kept them.” Without even a glance at Tanner, whom he'd long suspected of selling that very howdah to Mitchelltree—of taking, in fact, more than a dozen of the weapons when he lit out for Texas, and selling them, and sharing not a penny of the profit—Fayette turned to his brother. John's face was shadowed beneath the porch overhang, for the moon had now risen above the roof rim. “We should've kept one or two of them. I shouldn't never have listened to you on that business. We could have hid them—just for our own pleasure, I'm talking about. I don't mean to sell.”

The fading smolder of an old resentment licked up, breathed upon by memory; the image quickened in his mind of the charcoal mule, dead on the ridge, its forehead exploded by the .54-caliber shell. “You got some mighty strange notions, Son,” Fayette said, his voice balanced between ire and wonder. “Mighty strange.” Then, as if to extinguish the image with heartiness and false camaraderie, and unwilling to perceive the icy stillness in his brother beside him, Fayette slapped his hands together, saying, “Well, well. Enough about all that now—we got other things to look upon.” He spied the three boys climbing the incline of the rocky yard. “Caleb!” he shouted, trying to force into his voice the familiar joviality. “You get them mules took care of good like I said?”

“Yes, sir,” the tallest boy answered. The three trooped up the steps, nearly identical in their swagger, and spread out to take their young men's positions about the porch, moving confidently, the eldest with an inflated sense of his own manliness, his brother Fowler in perfect imitation of that self-importance, and their young cousin in wiry, awkward imitation of each. Caleb crossed the porch, his boots making an exaggerated sound on the rough wood, and squatted on his haunches beside the door. He tipped his hat to the back of his head. His brother eyed him briefly and then moved to the porch rail, climbed up to perch there casually as on a yard fence, and Jim Dee, for an instant torn between them, at last took his own position against a cedar post, arms folded in complete and unconscious imitation of the muttonchopped stranger leaning against the post by the porch steps.

“Water 'em good?” Fayette asked, and the eldest nodded, and the younger two nodded. “Put out some shorts like I said? I ain't going to stingy 'em on feed, never mind if they are going to belong to somebody else come Monday. I mean to see sleek livestock, I want to see me some fine muleflesh fat as fall taters when I put 'em up for sale—” He suddenly remembered the big black mule—not the dead one but the new one he'd gone to such worry and expense, as he just then recollected, to present to his brother. Despite his earlier intentions, Fayette turned impulsively in John's direction, said, “I hope you fed him up good, that black mule I bought you, before you come off—”

Abruptly he halted, confused. He could not comprehend why he suddenly felt as if he'd stepped out onto the porch naked. John's face was turned away, looking east, hidden in shadow. Fayette felt it then, an absolute coldness there, a blackness beyond telling. He floundered a moment, felt he needed to get back in the house and put his boots on, though it was late, way past time for supper, time for sleep really, and he remembered the unfed females upstairs and his own unfed belly and the bacon growing limp in its own grease on the back of the stove. He had to get back into the log house, sit at the table, see his wife at the stove cooking, his daughters in an impatient row beside the washstand, his sons with their sleeves rolled back looking up at him over their saucers of coffee. He had to put his boots back on.

“Lord have mercy!” he cried. “Don't tell me I'm about to plumb forget to feed myself !”

Only his brother heard the fear in the forced heartiness of the explosion.

“Tanner, I told you I don't like to talk business on an empty stomach. Man alive, we got to feed these boys. Got to feed ourselves. Son—”

It was to his son Caleb he spoke, not his brother, and he saw no confusion or inconsistency in it, nor did any of them, even the two he called by the same appellation; Caleb knew his father meant him. In fact, there was only one among those on the porch who noted—was burningly aware at every moment—that Fayette called both his eldest offspring and his brother Son, and that one was Fowler, the younger, who longed to be called by that name and never in his life had been.

“Get up from yonder,” Fayette said, “and y'all go on in the house.”

Slowly Caleb stood, and as he did so the other two slid from their positions.

“Tell your ma to get them flapjacks cooking,” Fayette continued, the heartiness gone from his voice now, the sound only gruff, domineering. “Folks are famished. We're going to starve to death if she don't put some food on the table. Tell her to get a move on. We got one or two things to clear up here, and then we'll be on in.” He felt his woolen socks rooted to the porch floor, feared he could not move them upon his will to do so. Feared what would happen if he tried. “Git now!” he said, though the boys were already moving. “Tell her to hurry up with that grub!” Fayette felt the last remnants of his will surviving only in his ability to give orders, and he continued mouthing at the boys until they'd gone in the house and shut the door behind them. He could hear voices inside, the baby crying, his wife hollering down from upstairs, but the sound was too far distant. There was that coldness, that blackness swirling about him, and he was confused, terrified by his own inability to move. He heard a new sound, below him in the yard, a labored panting, and looking down, he saw his brother's fat, aged beagle trotting heavily around from behind the house. Something in that sight inched his rising terror higher; his throat was dry, he could not make spit, could hardly speak, and he feared even his voice would be stopped in a moment so that he'd have nothing of self left, nothing left of will.

“Son!” he croaked. “C'mon back out here!”

In a few seconds the porch was sliced open with a square of yellow lamplight, widening, widening, and Fowler poked his head around the log door. He did not come out but stood craning his neck around the doorway, looking up at his father.

“Bring me that jug yonder behind the safe,” Fayette said.

 

 

The girl was out there somewhere in the darkness. Her presence was as distinct as the sound of the dog wheezing in the yard, though John Lodi could not see her, did not know where she was hidden; he knew she would not come in until the porch was cleared. He looked at the moonlit sideyard, east along the strip of road to the low, rocky ford where the trickling remains of creek crossed it, twisting away into shadows. The trees were bare, not with the coming winter but with the drought that had stripped them before August was well ended, and their limbs cast a grotesque web over the exposed stones of the creekbed, the sunken trickle glinting in moonlight. He heard the log door open again behind him, the pock of the boy's boots on the porch floor, the unstoppering of the jug close by, nearly at his elbow, and then his brother's throat moving, a choked, chugging gurgle. In his nostrils the smell of liquor burned, and above it the sweet, pungent drift of tobacco, the rank odor of old dog, the dust-dry crumble of oak leaves. His senses were grown suddenly acute, so that he tasted even his own spit. He heard lungs breathing, the swallowed phlegm in his brother's throat; felt the crack and pop of cartilage in his own knuckles as his hands curled and uncurled at his sides. It was as if he'd awakened from a long sleep—not as one wakes luxuriously at morning, drawn unwilling from the familiar country to that other landscape beyond dream, but as one jerks awake in the night, snapped alert by the sound of something crashing, glass breaking on the far side of the room in the dark. His heart beat in staccato rhythm. In the yard below him he saw the marked hairs, coarse and distinct, on the dog's back. His tongue was bitter with the taste of iron, metallic and foul, from ingested ore, smoke, solder; from not having eaten for many hours. Always, in and around the other sensations, was the sound of the ceaseless whillowing:
whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill whi-ip poorwill

He could feel her out there somewhere in the darkness: hidden behind a tree's silhouette; crouched in the black shade of the rain barrel. Without turning his head from the clear wash of moonlight, he said, “I have sworn once to make no more guns. I'll make no more.” He turned, moved past his brother, with the jug upturned on his shoulder, past the boy with scowling face in porch shadow, past the man with arms folded beside him, and stepped down off the sandstone slab of step.

T
he hair-rope hoop coils around and down, as it must, each season dropping looped upon self: the curve of hoop spiraling toward winter, cresting pale, coiling downward toward spring, the long green arc of summer, and each year, irrevocable, rising toward winter again. It was late fall—metal skies, dark brown tree limbs: November—three loops from the time of their coming, almost four from the night the Lodis left Kentucky, when the woman Thula Henry came again. She came this time not across the land, walking, but in a buckboard carriage driven by Jessie's son Fowler in yellow spats and a new bowler hat. It was Jessie who'd sent for her, as it had been Jessie who'd brought her to the log house the first winter, but for a different reason—and yet in its essence nearly the same. She meant the Choctaw woman to do what she herself could not, to heal a mystery she could not understand.