The Mercy Seat (31 page)

“I can't.” Her mother's voice was fading, moving deeper into the cellar.

“I been waiting for you, Mama. Every day I been waiting.”

“I can't climb those stairs again, sweetheart.”

“Come get me, Mama!”

“I can't.”

Her mother's voice faded into silence. Mattie opened her mouth to call her and she could not; she could not follow her mother's voice into the darkness so that she might know the meaning of burnt match-sticks kept in a cheap snuffbox, a child's pair of eyeglasses, worthless treasury notes in a cracked leather purse. She could not know who the blond wraith was, blood and not-blood, half-blood—a cousin, dying on bloodless ground—because she could not know her mother's life, not lived nor told nor unfolding in the strength of imagination nor in dream or vision. Her mother's life was locked away from her, eternal, as she was locked away from all others, as we each are locked away from one another in the pores of finite mind and skin, and though she was dreaming, or trancing, her eyes closed, the ocher irises darting and twitching beneath the pale film of her eyelids, her thin shoulders slumped, her head forward, palms open at her sides and the backs of her hands on either side touching the blackened circle of goods that had been their lives, now burnt and rank with weather, and though she did not know and would never know that she did so, for the first time since her mother's dying, the child wept.

I
n early summer a white man named Tanner crossed the Red River near Tulip, Texas, and traveled north through Indian Territory leading a train of thirty mules. He skirted the active coal-mining settlements around McAlester and made his way through the dry, crackling valleys over the course of several days to the crossroads town of Cedar, where he dismounted at noon, tethered his sorrel gelding to the rail next to the wide-open doors of the livery stable, and tied the lead mule beside it so that the train of thirty mules was strung north along the street in a balky, messing, multihued line nearly to the new depot in the heart of the town. He entered the darkened door of the livery, where John Lodi was bent at the back end of a plowhorse, fitting a shoe. Tanner nodded to the livery owner pitching hay from a small stack into a manger near the archway and started across the dirt floor.

“Help you?” the owner called, but Tanner waved one gloved hand behind him as if to say, No, that's all right, I can get it myself. He paused a few feet away from where John Lodi hulked with his head down, the horse's left rear leg lifted, the hoof caught between his knees. It was some time before Lodi looked up, though the measuring ordinarily would take no more than a few seconds, but at last he raised his head as he eased the hoof to the floor. He nodded once at Tanner, without expression, and with the tongs carried the cooling horseshoe to the forge, heated it a moment and laid it on the anvil to mold it with a stroke or two. He turned to the horse and lifted the leg again and placed the shoe. The smell of burning hoof scorched the stable air. There was a faint sizzling sound, soon lost in the
cling
of the hammer, and the shoe was quickly set and nailed, the nails trimmed off, clenched, and rasped smooth, and John Lodi had already begun to loosen the clenches from the worn shoe on the horse's other rear hoof before Tanner spoke.

“I seen waste in my life,” he said, “but this beats anything.”

Lodi picked up a pair of nippers and pulled off the old shoe, dropped it on the floor so that it made a dull
pluck
in the dirt as it hit, withdrew a straight-edged bone-handled knife from his apron pocket, and began to trim the sole.

“There's pearls before swine,” Tanner said, “and gold in a tin mine, but John Lodi doing farrier work is about as useless a proposition as I've seen in a while.”

The livery owner, a small, spry man with a long mustache and a face like a Cooper's hawk, stepped from the hay pile and said, “Wha'cha need, mister?”

Tanner didn't look at him; his eyes followed the deft movement of Lodi's scarred hands as they scraped the outer edge of sole, trimmed the frog deep in the cleft, and in a twinkling, replacing the knife with the nippers, began to trim the hoof wall. The owner sauntered nearer. He leaned on the pitchfork tilted on its end, prongs bedded in the dirt, seeming casually interested in the present job, as the stranger was interested, though the owner doubtless had seen his employee shoe a hundred horses, oxen, mules. J. G. Dayberry's front-thrust face matched Tanner's in focus and direction, but his bright eyes beneath the overhanging brow were keen on the newcomer. He understood three things about him: one, that the man had traveled far, and had done so recently and in the company of considerable horseflesh (the stranger's scent alone could have told this fact); two, that he was a close acquaintance of John Lodi, had known him from his pre-Territorial past, and called on a familiarity John Lodi had no wish to renew (his words and Lodi's insistent ignoring of them, and him, told that fact); three, that the man was crooked as a dog's hind leg. This Dayberry knew without knowing precisely how he knew it, but he was more sure of this last fact than of the other two put together. J. G. Dayberry had a sixth sense as acute as a redbone's sense of smell, honed on nearly two decades' worth of experience as a liveryman in a territory peopled almost entirely by law-abiding Choctaws and outlaw white men—and women, if you counted Belle Starr, which Dayberry did, for reputation if not accuracy, for most folks knew (as Dayberry's sixth sense knew) that Belle Starr was not much of an outlaw but only a hellion who traded in borrowed horses from time to time. Dayberry knew, too, of the truth concerning honor among thieves, and who kept it, and who didn't unless it was to his own best advantage, which was hardly true honor, and he knew who had not an ounce of it in his veins, and this muttonchopped stranger here who stood in his creased hat and foul clothes watching John Lodi shoe an old plowhorse was one who bore not a driblet.

So the livery owner's interest was piqued, not least because in the ten months John Lodi had worked for him he had never witnessed a Lodi acquaintance, friend, or family member coming around. It had never occurred to Dayberry that the man's past would be of the shadier variety—though certainly it should have, he thought now, that being the condition of half the white men in this country—but John Lodi was just so plainly scrupulous, to a fault. To the point of peculiarity, really. For instance, if a customer came by to make payment on his stable fee or some kind of smithing or farrier work he'd had done and Dayberry didn't happen to be in the stable, Lodi would tell him to come back at such-and-such a time, when Dayberry would return. If the fellow tried to leave payment, Lodi would ignore him, repeating to come back such-and-such a time, and would go on with whatever he was doing. He simply would not lay a finger on a dollar that didn't belong to him. If the fellow insisted because he didn't fancy to make another trip, he had his money ready now—this happened with Angus Alford and Jim Mewborn, a few of the more stubborn ones, before word got around—Lodi would seem at first to sull up and balk, but then he'd turn his slate eyes on the fellow, and the fellow would begin crawfishing, saying, yes, I believe I'll just stop back by such-and-such a time. There were other evidences of Lodi's acute probity. He wouldn't shirk a minute's work while Dayberry was paying him, would eat standing up working the bellows or some other job, and half the time did not even take a dinner break at all. Dayberry had never given much thought to this trait in his employee, except to be a little disgusted with him for his stubbornness sometimes: Dayberry knew the man was trustworthy; John Lodi didn't have to work so hard, to the point of alienating customers, to prove it.