The Mercy Seat (37 page)

From her mother she had one kind of mind and thought and being, for her mother's people had received the Christian faith early, had embraced it from the first teachings brought by white missionaries to Mississippi and carried it with them into the new Nation. There was something in Christianity that spoke to the understanding in her mother's people, and now they were Baptists, for it was the Baptists who'd sought out hardest and tended fiercest their souls to keep them from hellfire damnation, and Thula was Baptist, and she brought her children and grandchildren to the all-day camp meetings at Yonubby, and they were each baptized and took the Lord's Supper when it was offered, and it was through her mother's faith that Thula understood the Holy Trinity, how the Creator and the Son and the Spirit were one—but it was from her father, or, more truly, from her father's people, that she understood the Sacred Four. Thula Henry knew that the number Three left the sacred hoop broken; it was not whole in the ways formed by the Creator: the Four Directions, the four seasons, the completeness echoed in the four brush arbors built for Green Corn ceremony on the sacred stomp grounds. Thula Henry's Creek soul recognized the Fourth Part, the portion left out by white men and Christians in their search for the spirit—and yet this knowledge did not divide her. There was no conflict between stomp dance and baptism in her spirit, but only, as she understood it, the marriage of two spirits within her, and it was right in her eyes. She worked as she waited for the return of the girl and her brothers and sister, sweeping the leaves and ashes from the corners into an open circle in the center of the room, but she knew, if the white woman did not, that her purpose concerning the girl with yellow eyes was not to clean the log house.

They came at evening. Thula had built fire in the fireplace and put meat on to roast. She cooked the
tanfula,
the hominy she'd carried with her in her satchel, in the Dutch oven on the the iron hook above the open fire and put shuck bread in the hot ashes to bake. There was time for fasting and time to feed the body, and the time for fasting was not now. Almost she could feel the girl hesitate on the roadbed when she looked up at the chimney and saw the gray smoke. Almost she could feel her move forward slowly, and then her step quicken, believing it was some other one who had built fire in the house. And so they came. Thula heard the small feet running across the porch. The latch lifted, the heavy door was shoved inward, and the children, bounding in quickly, came to a tumbling halt, stumbling one into the other behind Matt, who stopped still in the middle of the floor.

For a very long time the girl and the woman looked at each other. There was recognition in their gaze—acknowledgment from the time of the clay cup healing, from the day of the death of the mules on the mountain, yes, but it was not that. Caught in the circle of leaves and ashes on the floor of the room warm with the smell of meat and bread roasting, the girl remembered what she had pushed away for nearly a quarter of her lifetime: the brown face coming down in the red darkness,
round and flat as a skillet
—
round, and flat, and brown
—the hands lifting away the tiny body with arms and legs like sticks, dangling. It was this Indian woman who'd been with them in the fever, who had stayed with them and nursed them when Papa was gone and the others shunned them; this woman who had given them medicine, smoked them and sung over them, so that they had lived—they had all but one lived. And so it was this woman who had witnessed her secret sin.

Every nerve and fiber and instinct in the girl's being told her to run. Turn and run out the door, run out into the prairies and hills and creek bottoms, never return to the log house till the taint of the woman was gone and her smell gone, and the sight of her eyes gone, if it took forever, if Matt never came back to the log house forever. And the girl could not move. She felt herself caught in the circle as tight as a mite in an orb spider's web; she could only look at the woman whose eyes nearly met her eyes—for Mattie had grown tall in the first decade of her life, but from the time of the earth falling she had not grown, and so she and the woman were the same height nearly, hardly more than four and a half feet tall, the girl only perhaps a half-inch taller, and the two stared in recognition at one another, brown webbed eyes and ocher eyes, each in some way bearing kinship to the other. For the woman recognized the girl too. She had known it in an outside way a long time, had thought it maybe even from the time of the fever, but now she knew. The girl was charged with the gifts of the spirit. Thula had never seen this in a white child. She had never seen it in anyone but her father and her firstborn grandson, and they both were dead.

The other children, held only a shocked moment by the silent web between the two females, quickly swarmed the room, led by the urgently hungry Jim Dee, who smelled and saw and heard the hog's leg sizzling and dripping on the spit inside the fireplace and, giving a little shout, rushed over there. The boy Thomas came behind him, big and pale and handsome, his smooth countenance bland as an angel's, and he was nearly as tall as his wiry, sandy-haired brother, heavy, dense in his bones, though he was not fat but just big, solid, like his father, and, like his father, he moved always in a slow, rolling gait. And then it was Jonaphrene, torn by her desire to join with her sister—in their profound link that whispered in each other's souls without language, she knew Mattie was caught and could not move—but at last the compelling urge of the body won out in the younger girl, and she went to the spit, where the boys were tearing at the meat with a knife and their bare fingers, burning their own flesh, and said, “Wait. Wait! Let me get a fork and plate.”

Jonaphrene started across the room toward the pine shelf where the improbable stacks of delicate white china stood amid clusters of tin utensils, candle stubs, the father's shaving mug and razor strop. Thula broke her gaze away from Mattie, came around her to the kitchen area, and took the fork and the chipped plates from the younger girl's hands. With only a word or two in Choctaw she made the children settle down and stand in line before the fireplace, and she served them, great heaping plates of pork and
tanfula,
or “tom fuller,” as white folks called hominy, big crisp hunks of shuck bread. The boys went each to his place, Jim Dee to tip back against the wall on the rope-mended ladderback, Thomas to his place behind the door, to eat wolflike, not speaking, and Jonaphrene took her plate to the cold cookstove and ate tiny delicate bites of the pale hominy, her back to the room. Thula filled a plate then for Matt and took it to her, where she stood, still unmoving, in the circle of ashes. With gesture and sound and expression, the woman made it known to the girl that she should eat; she made it known to the other children to take a second helping, to carry their empty plates to the bucket, and she calmed them, made friends with the two boys almost entirely without language, as very young children make friends with one another without need of words. She calmed all of them but Matt, who continued staring at her with wide eyes, knowing eyes, frightened, but Thula Henry went on working patiently in the room, in silence, continued even when the children's father came in after dark and began asking questions. She gestured and shrugged and filled a plate for him, and pretended to not understand, until at last the man talked himself into his own answers, said he would speak to his brother tomorrow, and did not ask again, not even when she pulled her red blanket from beneath the satchel and wrapped it around herself to sit on the floor beside the hearth when the children climbed the steep stairs to settle down on their pallets. On the morrow, and on the morrow following, Thula Henry cooked and cleaned and cared for the children; never did she cross the clotted field to the store to receive her length of cloth from Jessie. Her reason to remain was not connected to the white woman, nor to any human demand or payment. Each day Thula worked in silence, in patience, for she had a large purpose, and she knew God's time was long.

 

 

The word went out in the cold moon of January. The Wilderness Preacher was coming to hold services down below Latham's Store on the banks of the Braz-eel, as the little river was called. Among the Indians it was known as far away as Nashoba and Skullyville, and it was noised about a great deal among the white settlers as well, for the Preacher's fame was broad in the land then, and the hunger for spiritual food and for entertaining diversion in I.T. was great.

It was not the proper time of year for brush arbor meetings, not in the cold teeth of winter—the proper time was the long lingering evenings of midsummer, when the crops were laid by—but Brother Jonathan Fingers, who called himself and was known as the Wilderness Preacher after his most often quoted text from Ecclesiastes and his passions for baptizing and for eating wild honey, did not pause in his soul-winning for the seasons to pass. Satan, as the Preacher knew, did not take a vacation in winter. The Preacher himself had just come from the recently opened Oklahoma Territory, where sin and corruption flowed as freely as the whiskey in the many saloons and dance halls, where the wild tribes of the west practiced their heathen rites before God's very face upon the frozen wind-stung prairie, and so he had determined to go down into the mountains among the Choctaw, who were known to be more receptive to the Word of the Lord, and to live in well-heated and tended log cabins as well, and in any case the mountains were farther south. He sent word out before himself in the form of posted handbills in English and a Chickasaw runner among the Choctaw church communities, and by the time of the new moon in February, the people of the Sans Bois, black, white, and Indian, all knew the Wilderness Preacher was coming, and where he would set up his camp meeting, and when.

On the appointed Saturday which was to be the first night of the revival, whites and Indians (not those of the African race, for Brother Fingers did not consider he had been sent into the wilderness to teach the Sons of Ham; that was left to their own preachers, because true Christian missionaries had all the flock they could tend to between the red heathen and the white sinners, and in any case, the communities were not to mix: it said so in the Bible somewhere) began to gather from all directions. They started out in the early morning in their buckboards and farm wagons, on horseback, muleback, entire families walking, to gather throughout the day and on into the evening beneath the leafless arbor set up on the banks of the Brazil, coming to receive the Word of the Lord from the mouth of the Preacher on the first frosty night of the February new moon.

Of course, the white people of Waddy gathered with them. Fayette and his boys came for sport, his wife and daughters for loftier reasons—not excepting the notion among the four young women that the famous Wilderness Preacher's Day of Pentecost Brush Arbor Baptism Revival & Camp Meeting would surely be the most apt place in the Territory to show off their new winter muffs. Several families started out well before daylight to drive the nearly twenty-five miles from Cedar, though John Lodi was not among them. On the first day of the revival he walked south at dawn from Big Waddy Crossing to work at Dayberry's as he would on any ordinary Saturday morning; nor did he make any attempt to see to it that his children attended the camp meeting either. In fits and starts over the course of the past three years he'd made occasional stabs at civilizing his youngsters by cleaning them up for Sunday morning service at the schoolhouse at Big Waddy, but his efforts were without heart, because they were without faith, and so he did not persevere; he was not capable of sustained effort in that area, though his tenacity for all else was nearly beyond reason, and the youngsters did not fight him because they knew it would not last long.

However, conditions had changed in the log house since the coming of Thula Henry. She did not bother with Matt, did not seem to make any effort concerning the girl in any manner, for Thula knew the time was not yet. But every Saturday afternoon she cleaned up the other three children and walked with them in the waning afternoon light two and a half miles to her log home near the Indian Missionary Baptist Church at Yonubby so that they might be present and ready when the bell in the church yard began to ring Sunday morning. The huge brass bell, standing free in the yard at the top of a wooden stilt-like scaffold, would begin ringing in the early morning, and from all directions the people would come walking, the three white children lined up before Thula Henry, along with six of her grandchildren, making their way the quarter mile from her home to the one-room log church surrounded on all sides by screenless frame cookhouses. The children had to sit still for hours and listen to the Choctaw preacher preach the Gospel in Choctaw, but this was acceptable to Jonaphrene, for there was a powerful ascetic streak in her that responded to the mystery of the Word spoken in an undecipherable tongue, and it was acceptable to Thomas because everything that came before the boy's eyes in the world was received equally, and it was all right with Jim Dee because he could play games with the Choctaw boys around the cookhouses when church was over, and the food, when they finally got to it in the late afternoon, was good.

So it was Thula Henry who insisted that John Lodi's children attend the Wilderness Preacher's brush arbor revival, but when she got the children ready for the journey, she somehow did not deem it necessary to tell their father, who in any case had left the house at dawn before she began her ear scrubbing and hair plaiting, that they were traveling not to Yonubby this morning but nearly all the way to Bokoshe, on the banks of the Brazil, a day's ride away. She did, however, tell the girl Matt. In English she told her—not the broken English of Thula's Creek father, but the form as she had learned it from the Presbyterian missionaries at Wheelock Academy forty years before.

“We're going to church now,” she told the girl. “Won't be back till day after tomorrow.” Thula stood in the road in front of the house with her hand on the halter of an ancient fat white mare she had borrowed from one of her sons for the journey. The three younger children, scrubbed and red-faced, perched dangle-legged on a blanket on the mare's back. “You come go with us,” Thula said.