The Mercy Seat (23 page)

The sun slid above the world's rim then, just east, so that the land at once bronzed and turned golden, the brittle ribs turning amber; so that even the gnarled blackjacks, toed down on the mountain, began to take on color, their shriveled brown leaves and black bark glowing orange in the sun's light. The girl stood in the light a moment, expressionless, blinking a little in the brightness, and then she turned and went back to the house.

I would come upon Jonaphrene sometimes, sitting alone beside the well or along the path to the privy, with her bonnet off, touching her hand to the back of her head. She'd rub her palm down it, down it, with that terrible expression, and I would go to her and say, “Quit that!” and slap Lottie's old bonnet back around her and tie it. I wouldn't look at that face on her, because I did not want to see it. I didn't want to know why we still wore the cousins' hats and blouses too big for us, Lottie's bonnet like an upside-down feedsack on Jonaphrene and Sarah's swallowing me, and Jim Dee chasing after Fayette's sons in one of Fowler's old slouch hats tied down over his ears. When Jessie put Thomas out on the back porch, she wrapped his head in a diaper square and pinned it and covered it with one of Fayette's old stretched-out wool socks, but I would not look at him. I wouldn't look at Jonaphrene. She'd gaze up at me while I griped at her for sitting in the sun and wind with her head bare; she'd let me tie Lottie's bonnet on her, never blinking, the look gone now—but quick as my back was turned she'd have that bonnet off again, rubbing her hand down the back of her head. So I laid it off onto grief for her hair. I thought,
She will have to get used to it,
and so I quit tying Lottie's bonnet back on her. I told myself it was like a tooth gone, how you can't keep your tongue out of the hole until the new tooth comes, and I said to myself,
When her hair comes again, it will stop.
But of course it did not.

L
afayette Lodi stood upon the crest of the ridge watching a pair of mules struggle up the slope against the weight of a flatbed wagon piled deep with slabs of sandstone. “You fellas yonder shove up from back!” he hollered at the two Negro men climbing slowly beside the wagon. The men stopped, each on either side, and waited for the mules to slog the wagon past, and then the two turned silently, simultaneously, and laid their palms to the tailgate. Fayette cupped his hands around his mouth. “For God's sake, Moss, lay the stick to 'em!” he yelled. “They're 'bout to set down and have a picnic!”

The driver, a big khaki-colored man in overalls and a felt hat, snapped the tip of the whip at the larger mule's withers, and the wagon lurched precariously. The animals were not matched, one several hundred pounds heavier and a dozen years younger than the other, and the unevenness of weight and pull made a hard climb harder, and dangerous. They mounted nearly straight up the hillside, for Fayette, in his impatience, had not taken the time to cut a switchback but had only had his sons widen the worn footpath with a scythe, and the steepness of slope, the clots of winter-bare scrub, the loose rock and thick mud and rough ledges jutting here and there from the side of the ridge, all added to the troubled ascent.

Fayette paced back and forth on the ridge, watching the mules' plodding progress, and now and again glancing below at the boggy road curving south around Waddy Mountain. His bright blue eyes were narrowed, squinting beneath his hat brim, and when he paused to stare in the distance at the nearly impassable road, he seemed to be smiling—an illusion created by the tic that tugged habitually at his jaw muscles, thinning his lips and nipping them in at the corners to reveal the startling white of his teeth through the mat of his beard.

Those who did not know him well—that is, those who did not happen to work for him or be related to him in the tight circle of family—thought Lafayette Lodi an agreeable fellow. His voice was warm, his broad, sunburned face open and lively. He shook hands easily and often, and the restless urgency that was the wellspring of his being seemed, to a stranger, no more than a lusty, unharnessed energy, so that Fayette—or Fate, as the local tongue spoke it—appeared to have a terrific passion for life, unmarred by fatigue or tranquillity. White women considered him handsome. His features were a trifle blunt maybe—the nose more rounded than would ordinarily be admired in profile, his complexion a bit ruddy—but that was offset by the striking animation that livened his burnt face, by the nearly sapphire color of his eyes and the rich walnut color of his hair, which curled to his shoulders, sparking the red highlights in his beard. Men found him a good drinking partner and jokester, and Fayette had the habit of asking them about themselves in a manner that seemed not intrusive or prying but as if he understood that the men, their former lives and present opinions, had undoubted significance in the affairs of the world.

In fact, Fayette Lodi had never been calculating or scheming in the manner of some white men who would seduce a man into telling his business and then find means to use that information against him. In fact, he didn't attend to the answers men gave once he'd elicited them, so absorbed in self was he that he could not, had he cared to, hear. He was driven on to the next thought, the next question, consumed by a ruthless urgency that precluded his ability to witness any other human in the world—but one. And in his haste he pushed and cajoled and hollered at those around him as a man herds dawdling cattle before a storm. There were those who grew to hate this drive in him, but Fayette's wife, at least, understood that it was not a will to power that made her husband dominate others, but the sense of being himself lashed by the unmerciful whip of time and competition and profound necessity. Fayette drove others—his wife and sons, the men who had the misfortune to hire on to him—only as he himself was driven: relentlessly, without focus or respite, and it was solely in the dregs of sleep, where he sank at night, undreaming, as a bullfrog in pond mud in winter, that he found peace.

He paused now on the bald sweep of ridge. Glancing at the road again and not seeing what he looked for, he turned his eyes down the widened footpath, cupped his hands to his beard once more. “Hell, man,” he hollered, seeming to grin, his voice light, teeth showing. “I seen quicker slugs crawling! Whup up on that off mule, fella, she's near about walking backwards!”

Moss flicked at the smaller gray and checked the nigh dark one, and the wagon swayed and rolled like a drunkard, and Fayette hollered, “Reckon y'all think I oughta build her where she sets?” The snort that came from between his white teeth then sounded much like a laugh. He went back to pacing, his hand soothing the holster of the Colt he wore tucked at his belly. In his mind he could see the great rectangle of the barn outlined on the hilltop, solid, immutable, rising above the town for the world below to see. Never mind the impracticality of the steep rise, the great distance from the log house in winter. He meant to build a new house there as well, one day, not long, on the crest of the bald ridge, and the house, too, raised from native orange sandstone laid out in puzzled complexity, and permanent. His eyes darted sideways and southward, where the road curved a tan muddy ribbon toward Cedar, and on he went, continuing his restless, purposeless walk.

There was one among the three hired men slogging up the hill with the overloaded wagon who understood Fate Lodi, or understood anyway the profound nature of his hurry. It wasn't the thick-chested mixed-blood driver, who accepted Lodi's perpetual harangue as he accepted the unreasonable behavior of other white men, without opinion or rancor, because to William Moss (although he was three-eighths white himself), all white people were crazy. Certainly it wasn't the jaundiced, wiry fellow pushing lightly at the right rear of the wagon, who received Fayette's urgings with bitterness in his heart and the small, hard swellings of hatred; but it was rather the taller and browner-skinned of the two Negroes, who, under the rain of Fayette's cajoling curses, now shoved at the tailgate with the full strength of his shoulders. He never looked up but held his shoulder to the wood and his eyes to the muddy rock-clotted slope of earth, his lips pressed tight around clamped teeth.

Even hunched as he was at the rear of the wagon, he was clearly a big man—over six feet tall standing straight up hatless and bootless—and heavy through the shoulders, broad across the chest. He was hatless now, having tossed his broad-brimmed Stetson on top of the load when he first bent his shoulder to the wagon, revealing to the watery, early-spring light the high dome of his forehead, the kinked hair shaved tight to the skull. His skin was a deep berry brown that seemed to hold within its integument a burnished light, separate from external source, so that even in thin overcast, as on this day, his face appeared to be lit from within by a luminous sheen. His face now was turned sideways as he strained at the rear of the wagon, the tip of an ear skyward, the clenched plane of his cheekbone raised to the sun. His mustache—coke black and bristling, the hair of it straighter than the hair on his head—twitched like a squirrel's tail as he gritted, un-gritted his teeth. The expression, but for that grim clamping, was one of irony as he listened to Fayette's rant: he knew the man, or he knew white men like him, and it made him want to laugh. He could hear, in the back-and-forth roving, the reckless spouting, that Fayette already had the barn built and the hay in it, the cows bought, the pigs slaughtered come first frost next autumn, before he'd got the stones he must have to build it up the hill. Beneath his breath, softly, so that even the fellow beside him did not hear, the big man said, “Better get your stones set first, white man.”