The Mercy Seat (39 page)

W
hen Fayette lifted her from the sawdust floor to carry her out of the tabernacle, the girl's head fell back on her thin neck as a dead songbird's will dangle, tendonless, from its downy, unbeating chest. He stumbled, walking out into the darkness, and Jessie came behind him, her hoarse whisper chopping the air: “Careful!” She reached around his shoulder to support the girl's lolling head. Behind them on the platform the song leader led the invitational hymn, his eyes darting now to the side at the departing family, now back over his shoulder at the Wilderness Preacher, who knelt behind the podium, his crowlike body hunched in sweating prayer. The song leader's hand moved in a monotonous, ponderous triangle through the kerosene-lit air; his mouth moved, his eyes darted, as the voices of the congregation lifted mournfully inside the tabernacle, swelled out into the darkness. “Juust as I a-am, without one plea, but tha-at Thy Blood was shed for me, and that Thou bidst me come to The-ee, O Lamb of God, I come. I come.”

Thula sat beside the girl in the bed of the wagon as they drove home beneath the terrible spangle of stars in the winter-black sky. The girl was perfectly still, perfectly limp beneath a spread blanket. Jessie drove, her eldest daughter beside her on the spring seat, holding her sleeping youngest; scattered about the wagonbed, the other daughters whispered in the darkness; the half-intoxicated Fayette mumbled to himself, leaning against the tailgate in the back. The two sons had hours before disappeared from the camp meeting with a bunch of older wild boys from Bokoshe; they would not come home until well into the next night. The team picked its way along the rutted road as John Lodi's three younger children, mounted one behind the other, nodding with sleepiness, trailed behind the wagon on the back of the fat mare. Now and then Jessie would cluck softly from the spring seat, flick the reins. They stopped once to put the three children into the crowded bed of the wagon after Jim Dee, having fallen asleep, nearly tumbled off the mare, and then they drove on slowly in the stillness of the new-moon darkness, drove in silence for hours, no sound but the jangle of harness, the soft thud of hooves on the winter-hard roadbed, and once, far off in the distance, the chilling screech of an owl in the dark. They did not reach the log house until first light.

John watched from the porch. His eyes were ringed dark, his chin was covered with stubble. He wore his hat and a thick shirt beneath his suspenders, but he did not have on a coat. The air had lifted, begun to blue slightly with the coming of daylight, and John stepped off the stone slab of step as soon as he saw them cross the creek, was at the foot of the yard slope when Jessie halted the team. He saw Thula hunkered near the front of the bed and so knew the answer to his question before he spoke it, but he said the words anyway, ground them between his teeth at Jessie, a powerful accusation in his voice.

“You got my young'uns with you?”

“They're here.” She was too weary even for anger, and turning on the spring seat, she nodded at the clumps of sleeping blanket-covered bodies tumbled one upon the other—her own daughters, John's children, her husband snoring open-mouthed and rank in the cramped bed at the back. Only Thula was not sleeping. Only Thula sat up, her hand on the girl's shallow, barely moving chest beneath the blanket, her fingers touching the pulse place at the girl's throat. She looked at the father, said, “She gone some place. Gone to get her lessons, maybe.”

John carried his daughter into the house and laid her on a pallet beside the fireplace. The Indian woman followed and sat down on the puncheon floor next to where the girl lay curled around herself in a stillness that was like unto the stillness of death. The log house was like a house where death had visited, for the children moved about the room slowly, swimmingly, as if in a dream, and they talked in hushed whispers. Even Jim Dee did not forget the solemnity of the situation, excepting only when he was outside the house, when he would dart and run and play as usual. John sat on a nail keg on the log porch, staring out past the bare tree branches at the fast-running Bull Creek, and Jonaphrene cooked and ate a little and fed the boys, but John and Thula did not eat.

On the second morning, Jessie came. She dreaded that house and the goings-on inside it, but she couldn't keep away. Her brother-in-law was sitting on the nail keg on the east end of the porch when she came into the yard, but he didn't acknowledge her, didn't move his eyes from the distant water or speak to her, and so she climbed the stone slab and hurried past him, also without speaking, and, without knocking or calling out, lifted the latch on the log door and walked in. The younger girl Jonaphrene sat with the boy Thomas on her lap on a box beside the cookstove, and the older boy was not in the room, but the Indian woman sat, wordless and motionless, beside the girl. She didn't speak or acknowledge Jessie any more than the father had, and Jessie went immediately and stood over her and the thin form on the pallet.

They had covered the girl with a threadbare quilt, faded, flat as a sheet with years of washing, the cotton batting leaking from the seams in several places, but even beneath the thin quilt Jessie could see the awful, twisted shape of the girl where she lay curled on her side, knees drawn toward her chest, the hands clawlike and curled inward just below her chin. The child's face was set with an immobility that was like a death mask, the eyes closed, the membranes stretched taut over the eyeballs, and there was no movement at all beneath the pale blue-veined lids. Jessie couldn't see any rise or fall of breath beneath the drawn-up arms. The figure on the pallet reminded her of the translucent discarded brown shells of locusts one finds clinging with drawn legs to elm bark, the brittle castoffs which crumble so easily at human touch, but when she reached down to lay a hand on the girl's forehead—a gesture that caused the Indian woman to suddenly make a harsh, unintelligible sound in her throat—Jessie felt the skin beneath her palm as cold and hard and dense as white marble.

“My God,” she said to Thula, “she's dead, for Lord's sake. Dead! What are you doing?”

Thula didn't answer. She didn't even look up at her but kept her eyes on the lifeless girl. Jessie stared at the woman and the empty shell on the pallet, and then she looked around at the stark, wood-littered barrenness of the room, the pine shelves, the folded pile of quilts on the floor against the back wall. The eerily beautiful little girl and the pale little boy stared back at her from their seat on the wooden box in the corner. Jessie could smell the sweaty outdoor smell of children's unwashed bodies, the tang of stale bacon grease, the musty odor of Thula's herbs, and the sweet scent of cedar smoke, but she didn't detect yet the smell of the dead. Still, she hissed at the Indian woman, “You got to get that child's body out of here! She's starting to stink.”

The woman looked at her, said calmly, “Not dead. She gone to the other world.”

Baffled, more than a little frightened, Jessie looked around the room again, and not knowing what to say, what to do, she turned and walked out the door and went hunting her husband. She couldn't find him for the longest time, but at last, climbing the worn path behind the log house toward Toms Mountain, she heard the muffled sound of his voice rising above a hollow, steady thumping inside the shed barn. Jessie hurried across the barnyard, rushed in through the open archway, and was stopped by the powerful odor before she recognized where it came from: the open trapdoor leading down to the dug room, where her husband and two of his men were at that moment making a run of whiskey in the crude copper still hidden beneath the barn floor. She turned immediately and walked back out into the sunlight and stood fifty feet outside the open archway, calling her husband's name. From the day he'd started his men digging up the old dirt barn floor two years earlier, Jessie had lived within the notion that if she didn't admit to her waking mind what her husband was doing, it would never call down trouble on her household, and so she'd never yet come within acknowledgable distance of Fayette's operation in the shed barn—but the woman was frightened by the strange unfoldings in the log house far beyond her fear of the illegal trappings of her husband's bootleg business, and she kept calling his name until he emerged from the dark square. She could see anger in his face, but even that didn't stop her, and before he'd traveled the fifty feet across the dung dust of the old barnyard, she was whispering out loud in a harsh and grating whisper: “Lord God Almighty, Fay, you got to do something. You got to
do
something—they've every one gone mad. He's gone mad, your brother, he might—oh, Lord, I don't know what any of them's liable to do. That child is
dead.
”

Fayette stopped in front of her, looking hard at her, the anger whisked off his face so completely it might never have been there.

“What?”

“They got that child on the pallet she's all crimped up dead as a cricket, that crazy Indian woman is sitting there, those kids are sitting there, your brother's out on the porch, they haven't even washed her or laid her out. They're acting crazy, just plain weird. They—that Indian woman said she's not dead. She is dead. I know a dead child when I see one. Go see for yourself. You got to do something, Fay—that corpse is going to start to rot.”

And Fayette turned, went back inside the darkness of the barn a minute. When he came back out, Jessie could smell the faint whiff of corn liquor, but he walked on past her and down the gently sloping wagon track to the back porch of the log house. He climbed the rickety steps, tried the back door, which did not open, and then continued on around the side porch to the front of the house. Jessie stood on the little rise for more than an hour, watching the back of the log house. There was no movement but for the smoke rising, drifting, curling blue from the rock chimney, now and again the fat old beagle, asleep in the sun at the side of the woodpile, scratching an ear. She could hear the muffled voices of the men inside the barn behind her, the half-breed Moss laughing, and the other one—an Indian too, from the sound of him, from the sound of how they laughed together, that Indian kind of laughing she could not abide, like everything that was funny to them was some kind of big secret Indian joke—the other one laughing too, and hushing him. She knew they'd got into her husband's whiskey, but since she could not allow the knowledge of her husband's trafficking in illegal spirits into the front of her mind, she had to block out also the sounds of his workers procuring for themselves in his absence a free drunk.

Finally she saw Fayette in the near sideyard, coming around from the front of the house. He climbed toward her without looking up at her, and she had the sudden cold thought he might be as loco as the rest of them. She met him halfway down the path, and when he stood in front of her, he ran his eyes along the path, up to the shed barn, past that to the foot of Toms Mountain, back down to the fading wagon track.

“Well?” she said.

He wouldn't look at her; his brilliant sapphire eyes darted up the yellow slope again to the barn's mouth.

“He . . . he says she ain't dead.”

“She's
dead,
Fay. Good Lord, go in and look at her.”

“I did,” he said.

“Well, is she or ain't she?”

“I don't know. Looks dead to me. They say not. That Indi'n woman says not. I don't know. I didn't smell nothing.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake!” Jessie said, the plosive exploding into the now fading daylight.

“Well.” Fayette turned his head, let his eyes wander back down toward the log house. “I don't reckon it's going to hurt to wait till she starts to stink.” There was a burst of low chuckling laughter from the depths of the barn then, and his head snapped back around, his eyes to the barn door. “Let's give it a day or two,” he said as he began to stride swiftly away from her up the track. Jessie could hear him cussing the men as she made her way down the path a few yards, and then she cut west straight across the land above the log house.

She stayed away for a day and a half. She went about her work in her own house, bossed her daughters, and her sons when she could find them, minded the store, but her thoughts every minute were on the dead girl and the Indian woman inside the log house. There was no one to turn to in this lawless country, she thought, no white sheriff within a hundred miles to come haul that corpse out of that house and make those people bury it, and plainly she was not going to get any help from her husband; she'd have to take matters into her own hands, of course. But how? She awoke the following morning with a plan. Within a half hour she was climbing the slab step with a wedge of mirror from her daughter Lottie's broken vanity set tucked into the pocket of her apron. She'd marched across the field between the two houses with a gritted determination to make that father see the truth for himself, but John wasn't sitting on the nail keg on the end of the porch as she'd expected; neither was he inside the house, and even this mild discrepancy between her mind's rehearsal and the unruliness of reality was enough to make her hesitate as she crossed the doorsill. Jonaphrene and Thomas were in their same places beside the cookstove, Thula Henry was hunched in the same crouch beside the body on the pallet, as if no one had moved, no life or time had proceeded in the two days since Jessie had been there. She went immediately, even with that horrid hesitation about her, and stood over the woman and girl again.

“Mrs. Henry,” she said, “this is . . . this is . . . We can't have this, you got to let that child go. I don't know what . . .” Her determination slipped further in the face of the woman's fierce concentration. “You been mighty good to come take care of these young'uns, but . . . Mrs. Henry? You can go on back home now. Right this evening, if you want to.” Jessie lifted her eyes, swept the room with them, lowered them to the Indian woman again. She saw for the first time that the woman's lips were moving, hardly perceptible, the lips shaping inaudible language, her face very still. “Mrs. Henry!” Jessie cried. “She's dead. You ain't going to bring her back from the dead! Look here!” From her apron pocket she drew the irregular palm-sized triangle of mirror and, bending down, held it in front of the girl's colorless lips. The mirror's foiled surface remained clear. “Look!” she cried. “No breath. See? No breath!” But even as she cupped the trembling wedge of mirror, she saw the cloud come, a tiny spot no larger than a dime, blurring the looking-glass surface, and a sickening sensation drained her, a sinking heartsickness and fear. It was worse than death, she thought, a thousand times worse than a dead child, and her mind reeled with condemnation, with judgment, with comprehension of the sins of the fathers—the sins of the fathers and the mothers, she thought—visited on the children. The fear was dark in her, a rising, clutching thing in the pit of her belly, for she knew she herself was alive with her secret iniquities, the fear biting, clawing, because of her own sons, what could become of her own sons, and her daughters, in the face of God's judgment, if such a thing could happen to this girl. She dropped the mirror on the pallet, straightened, and walked quickly out the log door.