The Mercy Seat (55 page)

At once I knew what I would do, but not in the dug well, because I didn't know what seven guns would do to well water but I didn't intend to find out because I could never keep Jonaphrene from using that well—she was too lazy to tote water up the rise from the creekbank—and anyhow, come August, we would all have to drink from it. Come dog days, Bull Creek would lie stagnant with fever and none of us dare drink from it, and I had lived long enough to know that dog days would come. I laughed again, out loud, my arms full of weapons, because I knew where I would go.

I made my way through the stubbly yellow grass down the slope. The cartridge belts and holsters were draped around my neck, and I carried both Winchesters in the crook of my right arm, the barrels weighing on my forearm, the two guns together heavy and unbalanced. The shotgun was beneath my left arm. I walked with the muzzles pointed to earth as a hunter walks, as Papa had taught me, the Colts tucked in my pantwaist and my hands free to steady the barrels of the long guns. It was just over a quarter mile to the place on the creek. I walked carefully, stumbling sometimes from the weight of the guns and the size of my boots, which were not my boots but an old pair Jim Dee left behind when he went. Down along the creekbed, easy, easy, to the great crumbling sandstone slab where once I'd taught the children.

The place was unchanged, but for the soft bank and loose stones tumbling, eaten by water, but the sandstone slab was just the same, and the trees around it, echoing Mama's memory. I stood on the rock above the water, the muscles in my back and neck burning, and let the rifles down slowly, touching the muzzles to the stone and allowing the barrels to slide along my arm to the face of the rock. I knelt as I lowered them, until at last they lay blueblack and shining on the sparkling brown slab. On my knees then, I raised up, kneeling, held the shotgun over my head, hoisted it prone in both hands like an offering to heaven, and heaved it into Bull Creek running then in the weeks of springtime swift and moiling clear. Triumph was in me in that moment, and I laughed in it, out loud, to the clear sky and bare branches budding. The shotgun tumbled once, stock over barrel, and lay in the creek bottom, wavering against the stones.

So,
I thought.
There, and so much for your
power,
Uncle, which is not your power. Which exists in the strength of itself from the hands of another and only for a time, and it is not
yours.
See it lying snuffed and fouled in clear water, powerless in water, without purpose but for the stock to grow soft and green with slime to feed the nudging mouths of perch. Fool. Another man made it, Uncle. Another man pissed on the earth for his saltpeter and dug in the earth for his iron ore, another smoked wood for the charcoal to make the blackpowder which imparts it its strength, which gives the mouth its fire and its mystery, and it is not
yours.
Another man forged those barrels, as my papa could have forged it, as my papa would fire it and beat it into life with the strength of his hands if he chose to, and he does not choose to, and you cannot force him, Uncle, and you have no power but what explodes from the mouth of that which another created, which you can hold only for a time in your hands. It is not
yours!
You bought it to pretend to own it, but it is not your strength, it is not your might, and it can never be. See it cold and useless, stiff on the bottom, gelded. Let it release its power there. And this also.
I pulled one of the pistols free of my belt and dropped it in the water. It rolled a little with the current and sank to the bottom. I plunked the others singly, pulled them from the holsters, my pantwaist, held each above the roiling water by the triggerguard and released it, and one fell straight away and one tumbled and wedged against a branch and one rolled downstream a yard or more and settled in a shaded spot.

I stood up then, and I felt the power in me as if it were righteousness. I lifted one of the Winchesters, raised it high, and heaved it as far out as I could. It hit butt-first against a log on the far bank and went off. The report sounded in the creekbed and repeated itself once against the mountain, but I didn't care. By the time I looked, the rifle had already disappeared beneath the rushing water. I lifted the last gun, and in that gesture, in the cold sunlight with the creek singing to the fingering branches above it, the emptiness swept over me. That quickly, with that little warning. The air and joy and power were sucked from me in a twinkling, because it was ever that way, the emptiness; from the first day of its coming it could suck me hollow in a breath, like bones sucked clean of marrow: dried out, scooped out, brittle and useless as a brown locust shell. I flung the last rifle without looking. I heard the splash above the creek's sounding, but I had turned away already and started back up toward town along the near bank.

North from the treeline along the creekbank I walked, one foot before the other, by rote motion, the way you chop cotton, do the milking, churn butter, any tedious activity you go through without thought because it's got to get done. I didn't care anymore. I came up onto the road and turned toward the path up to the old shed barn, with the intention of carrying the volleygun and the gun Papa made back down to drown them in Bull Creek with the others. I thought of the gun Papa made, the big four-barreled pistol, with its flat casing jammed beneath the round mound of Fayette's belly, and I tried to think how to retrieve it without touching him. It was my next job, I thought, to rid the world of them forever, those two that were old among us, Fayette's treasures he prized above all others. When he was not drunk he kept them mounted on the rock face of the chimney inside his house, mounted together as if they were equals, and they were not and could not be, excepting only in how he went for them first to fire them when he got drunk. That volleygun was not true, it exploded and sprayed without purpose, would hang fire and misfire; it was nothing but an old blackpowder muzzle loader with a dozen firing channels to foul and clog, a worthless gun, the first of Fayette's guns-with-many-barrels, and he kept it on iron hooks above his fireplace, where it hulked like something deformed, some distorted notion of weapon, above the gun that Papa made. The gun that Papa made. A perfect gun. A nearly perfect gun. Which caused us to leave Kentucky forever.

I looked for some kind of pleasure within me, to heave those two guns into Bull Creek, but the emptiness was on me bad, and I couldn't find any. I climbed tired toward the barn, empty, separate from caring, because the old hollowness had swept me and sucked me dry. That is how I account for it. That's why, when I looked up and saw Jonaphrene in her shirtwaist on the log porch with her hair down to wash it, saw my sister shoeless in the shade of the overhang with her dark hair spread across her shoulders, I only looked at her and through her and did not tell her to get on in the house. I didn't stand a moment outside the barn door and watch and wait and listen. I took no care when I entered the darkness from the sunlight. The hollowness had come unbidden and settled upon me on the creekbank, as it had come from the first dawn when the cedars bled, to foist its emptiness upon my life and spirit, to leave me unprotected from living, from work I had to do, and that is why I was not in any way prepared or protected when I went into the barn.

 

 

He stood against the west wall, at the head of the blue roan. He had walked the horse around to where I'd stacked the rifles, and for a minute I wasn't sure I saw what I thought I saw, because I was deadened still, and hollow, my eyes were not adjusted to the darkness, and anyhow I didn't believe it because it wasn't possible. I stopped inside the mouth of the doorway, and I looked at him. He looked back at me. He was not blind now. He didn't even appear to be drunk. The gun Papa made was in his hand, retrieved from his belt, from beneath his belly where I'd been too prissy to touch. The volleygun was strapped again to the saddle. He didn't sway on his feet, nor did the gun waver. At first my mind couldn't grasp it, I could not receive it, because I knew he couldn't have dried out in the short time I'd been gone.

“Oh,” he said, and his breath blew soursweet with old whiskey, his organs steeped in it like brine. “It's you.” I knew then how close I'd come to dying in the instant I stepped from the daylight into the darkness of the barn. The emptiness poured out of me entirely, and I was alert.

He'd expected a man when he heard my boots rustling in the dry grass, stobbing the dung dust of the barnyard. He thought it was a man who had robbed him, a man coming back now to catch him naked without his weapons, and I didn't know which man he feared, or if it was all men, but, “It's you,” he said, and breathed again. He was glad to see me. I wanted to laugh when I knew it, because if I had contempt for him, he had an equal portion for me, as female, as John's daughter, and he was glad enough to see me to smile a little, breathing whiskey through the crack of his beard. He'd swum up out of his black stupor and found his whiskey spilled, found that which was God to him, his guns and his whiskey, gone from him, and the fear had clamped around him and brought him to his feet—not the gaping black fear he'd come in with, but a honed fear, particular, focused on one certain man or men, I did not know who, and it was that fear which roused him to a steady appearance. But he was drunk still, don't mistake it—insane drunk, mad drunk—and the stink was bad in the barn.

“You better watch sneaking up on a fellow like that,” he said. He swayed a little, standing in one place, the top of his body dipping a half circle.

“Jessie sent me,” I said. It was all I could think of. “She wants you to come down to the store.”

“What for?” His eyes showed blue and red even in the barn darkness, eyeballs soaked red and the blue parts dull within the red swimming. His nose was swelled to a ruddy blob between his cheeks. “Wha's she want?”

“I don't know. She just said for me to come tell you.”

He squinted, lifted the hand with Papa's gun in it, and pressed the heel of it against his forehead, the four heavy barrels aiming skyward. I could see them wavering. He lowered his hand, coughed once, and cleared the phlegm from his throat. “Tell 'er—” Smacking his cracked lips. Trying to act normal, trying to say it normal, when his mouth was warped with slurs and sickness. “Tell her I'll be down directly.” And of course he was lying, because he had no intention of going down there, because his store and wife and business were beyond him, even whiskey making was beyond him, even selling his guns, because my uncle was half the time too drunk to work.

“All right,” I said, nodding, beginning to back toward the front of the barn, thinking,
I'll get my rifle and wait for him.
Thinking,
He'll wander out in a little bit to hunt a bottle, I'll wait for him out there.
I turned to walk out in the daylight, and it was then, in the turning, that I saw the union of barrels rising.

“Wait—” he said.

My blood dropped. The dark barn went darker. Every thread of blood in my body sank to my feet, so that it felt my insides would fall through the barn floor. A sound hummed in my ears, a high skirring like gourd shells shaking, unceasing. I stood very, very still, my back half to him. I couldn't turn, and yet I saw the angled black shape outlined in the barn darkness, lifted toward me. From the side of my mind I saw it, not with my eyes. I didn't breathe, though even with my nostrils stayed and my chest unmoving, the rank smell seeped in me, bringing in me barnscent, horse lather, the odor of old haydust and manure; bringing in me, so I could not hold my breath against it, the sour taint of his smell. Slow, and slow, I turned my face to look at him, easing my eyes around. He blinked at me, the gun Papa made steady now, not trembling, drawed down on me. He was maybe fifteen feet away.

“What're you doing with them belts?” he said.

It was only then I realized I still wore them, the empty holsters stiff against my ribs, because the hollowness had come on me unbidden so that I didn't finish my work. I cursed myself—even in that moment, yes; even with the blood draining and the sound buzzing and the fire twisting in my chest—for being so stupid as to walk into the barn darkness unprotected. To stand now, unarmed and dumb, outlined against the bright day in the doorway with the cartridge belts and empty holsters draped around my neck. I had nothing to answer.

“You been scheming on this for years. Ain't you?” His blue eyes narrowed in the poor light. “Answer me!”

“Found them,” I said.

“You been planning it.”

The muzzles were not quite leveled at me but aimed just a fraction above my head. I gazed at the four barrels as my uncle lowered his hand and lined them up with the place where the fire was burning in the center of my chest.

“Where is he?” Fayette said.

“Who?” My voice came from a great distance.

“Your pardner,” he said, slurring the word out a little.

“Partner?”

I thought for an instant he meant Papa, or Jim Dee maybe, though Jim Dee had been gone for two years. But his eyes squinted down tighter. “Where's Tanner?” he said.

That, too, came from a great distance. “Tanner?” I felt like my brother Thomas, to echo his words so, but I couldn't find any core within myself to think. It had been years since I'd heard the word Tanner. I saw the outline of the skink stranger on the porch in the blue moonlight, but the memory was from so long ago, floating.

“Y'all been hatching this up a long time, ain'cha?”

I was silent, staring. The memory was flickering in me, but I couldn't grasp it.

“Ain'cha!”

I shook my head.

“Y'all think you can catch this old boy napping”—and now his torso swayed a little, but the gun did not waver—“you got another think coming. Blow your damn head off.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed again, filmed over, shining. He wagged his head and the gun side to side, shook his head and the four barrels in unison. His voice was slurred and gleeful when he said, “Tell you what. Blow your head off with your own damn gun. How you like that?”