The Mercy Seat (40 page)

But she returned again in the evening. She could not stay away—she didn't know what it was or why—and she prayed. All through the afternoon she kept up a silent pleading with God to relieve her of the bondage of that family, even as she cooked a pot of beans and ham-hocks to carry back across the clotted field to that same maddened family locked in the taint of the log house that had been her house and was no longer, and she did not know why she must carry that burden. She struggled, she railed, she pleaded, she resisted; she hated them with a terrible hatred and thought of taking one of her husband's many guns into the log house and putting the barrel to that form's pale cold forehead, thought of shooting all of them to put them out of their mad misery as you would gladly shoot a hydrophobic dog, and then the terrible pity would rise over her and she would beg forgiveness, to be forgiven her trespasses as she forgave those who trespassed against her, which she did not, and she knew she did not. This knowledge only caused the biting fear to rise again, and all of this in silence, in the silent orison of her mind pleading with the Almighty to forgive her, to relieve her, to take this cup from her, as she unwrapped new bolts of calico and slid them onto the store shelf, directed her son Caleb to clean out the ashes from the woodstove, took money from customers and made change with her hands hidden inside the cash box, climbed the worn path from the back of the store to her own house to check the water in the beans and tell Millie to put on a pan of cornbread, descended the worn path to the store again.

It was coming on dark by the time she carried the heavy cast-iron kettle across the field, although it was only four or four-thirty, but the day was gray and short with winter. John was back in his place on the nail keg at the end of the porch, so she knew he had not been gone to work when she'd come in the morning, because he never returned from Dayberry's before eight or nine o'clock. She hoisted the heavy kettle up the step with both hands on the white dishtowel wrapped around the handle, and then waited at the door for her brother-in-law to get up off the nail keg and come open it. There was a calmness about her as she stood with her arms stretched to their full length and strength, burdened with the weight of the pot of beans, as if her silent struggle throughout that gray February afternoon had left her with a certain equanimity at least, if no understanding or peace. Her brother-in-law held the door for her, and when she entered the lamplit room she sensed the change immediately. She didn't know what it was at first, for the Indian woman still sat beside the drawn form on the pallet, and though the boy Jim Dee had come in, he was as quiet and watchful from his place on the far side of the room as the other two little ones. Jessie carried the pot to the stove, where the Dutch oven squatted with its lid propped to the side a crack, from which creviced darkness floated the whangy, aromatic wild scent of boiled game. She hoisted the bean kettle to the rear stovecap, drew from beneath her coat the crumbling, towel-wrapped square of cornbread that she had carried in the scoop of her pinned-up apron, and laid it on the cooler surface at the back of the cookstove, turned to face the room. She saw then that John stood above the pallet looking down, just as she herself had stood a few hours earlier; that the Indian woman's lips were no longer silently moving; that the girl's eyes were opened in half slits, the whites showing at the bottom. The drawn limbs were eased a little beneath the thin quilt, though they still crooked toward the center of the body, and the labored breathing was visible now in the rise and fall of her chest, audible in the lamp-hissing silence of the room.

“Well,” Jessie said, that calmness still cloaked about her which she did not understand. “She's better, looks like.”

“Yes,” John said.

“Well.” It was quiet a minute, except for the girl's breathing, the lamps hissing, a stick popping in the cookstove. “I brought something. These young'uns need to eat.”

“We thank you,” John said.

“It's just beans and cornbread.”

“We thank you,” he said again. There was no hint of sarcasm or hidden grudge in the words, but rather a kind of hazy detachment, as if he meant the thank-you but didn't quite comprehend it. “Jonaphrene.”

The little girl got up from her box near the stove and went to the pine shelf by the washstand, reached up on tiptoe to gather down the china plates.

“Here,” Jessie said, and she took the plates from the girl. “You two wash up,” she said, meaning the two boys, and she proceeded with what she could do, what she knew to do, filling plates, cutting bread, lifting the iron cap with a fork because she couldn't find the cap lifter, and shoving more twigs in the hole to make the fire hot for coffee, as if the three forms on the other side of the room were invisible to her. It was only after she'd got the children fed, started the dishwater heating, set the younger girl to sweeping up cornbread crumbs from around the stove, that she went over to where they held their positions, posed and motionless as a painting: the man standing with hat on, the woman crosslegged on the floor in a red blanket, the stick figure curled on its side with arms and legs drawn up. It was then that Jessie saw, beneath the taut membranes of the half-opened eyelids, the girl's sightless pupils roving about the room. A powerful physical revulsion swept over the woman, a sickness that was like the nausea she'd felt a dozen years before as she'd watched Demaris give birth to that pinheaded baby, a retching of soul and belly in the face of what was not normal. She said—croaked actually: she could hear the awful sound in it, her voice like an old woman's—“Y'all better eat something.” The strange calm that had descended on her as she'd climbed the porch step with the bean kettle was entirely gone now, fled, whisked dry away, replaced with that sickening recoil of the senses and a cringing sense of defeat: she was too weak, too weak: she could not abide it. She turned abruptly and went to the stove, began to scoop beans out of her kettle onto a couple of tin plates. She slapped stringy spoonfuls of boiled meat from the Dutch oven—rabbit she thought it was, though the dark flesh was boiled off the bone and it was hard to tell—onto the plates, broke the last piece of cornbread in half and put a piece on each of them, stood a moment at the stove, her shoulders heaving with deep, gulping breaths, her back to the room. She could feel the children off to her left, watching her, could feel John's eyes on her back, and the Indian woman's, and time swirled around her, the past as present, eternity, her self bound forever in that house before the stove in the corner with a child of death somewhere in the room.

“Y'all eat now,” she said, without turning. Her eyes were on the rusting elbow of stovepipe where it crooked to vent out the log wall in front of her face. “Girl,” she said, meaning Jonaphrene, though she did not look at her, “put the beans in the cold box when they get finished. They'll sour on you if you leave them out overnight. I'll come get my pot tomorrow evening,” and she turned slowly, carefully, moved across the open space of the room without turning her eyes, and when she reached the log door she said, “There'll be somebody come fetch it tomorrow,” referring to the kettle again, and she pushed on the door, went out, promising herself she would never darken that threshold again.

That was on the evening of the fourth day.

Before dawn on the morning of the fifth day, John arose fully dressed, as he had lain down at midnight, from his pallet on the far side of the room. He lit the lamp, looked over at the woman keeping her sleepless vigil near the fireplace, at the still form beside her, and could see the slow rise and fall of his daughter's chest. The fire was burning strongly, so he knew the woman had moved a few times in the night to feed it, but from her position and expression it appeared she had not moved or slept at all. He looked down at the near pallet where his other three children were sleeping. Jonaphrene had dragged her blankets downstairs the first night, and the boys would not sleep in the upper room alone, and so they all slept in the single room together. The three younger ones drew their slow, untroubled breaths with their mouths open, their faces placid, soft with the transfiguring perfection of sleep. Quietly John slid his suspenders up over his shoulders and went to the woodbox for kindling. He shoved a few sticks onto the cold ashes in the cookstove, twisted the bent nail in the stovepipe to open the flue, reached for the box of sulfur matches on the pine shelf.

“Papa?”

He started, glanced quickly over his shoulder. Jonaphrene was sitting up on the pallet beside her sleeping brothers. She hadn't unbraided her hair the night before—had perhaps not braided or unbraided it for days—and the two flattened plaits were cockeyed, loosely woven, with a thousand stray hairs pulled free and radiating wildly about her head. She shivered in her thin nightgown, squinted in the lamplight, rubbing her eyes. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing, honey. I got to go to work.”

“Is Mattie better?”

“She's better. Hush now. Y'all go back to sleep.”

“Is she well?”

“Not yet, honey. Soon. Go back to sleep.”

The little girl said nothing more while her father got the stove started, ladled fresh water into the granite coffeepot, spooned grounds from the grinder into it, and set the pot on the stove. When he started out the door into the predawn darkness with the empty drink bucket, she called out again, “Papa?”

“
Hssht,
honey!” He stood with his hat on, his hand on the latch. “What?”

“How come you're going if Mattie ain't well?”

He was silent for a moment. “I got to,” was all he said before he opened the door.

“Papa?”

He stood with the sky blooming gentian behind him, the cold air welling into the room. The crow of a rooster off east somewhere rode in on the cold air. A black look was on him, an icy, merciless expression that seemed to have nothing to do with the little girl sitting up on the pallet. “What.”

“Is she going to die?”

Her father didn't answer. He turned and went out, drew the door closed behind him. When he came back with the full bucket, the black icy look was gone from him, and he set the bucket on the washstand, ladled water into the tin basin, proceeded to strop the straightrazor he drew down from the shelf. He took his hat off and laid it on the countertop beside the bucket, lathered quickly, and began to shave off the five days' growth of facial hair that had gone beyond stubble to the scratchy beginnings of beard; he scraped his chin, forelip, upper neck entirely by feel, as he always did, for there was no mirror—or none but the small triangular wedge Jessie had dropped earlier that morning, which Jonaphrene had picked up from the quilt and hidden away in the folds of her own pallet. It was while he was shaving that the Choctaw woman spoke aloud for the first time since she'd followed him into the house as he carried the girl.

“Take them little ones with you,” she said.

John paused, the razor in one hand, the fingers of the other hand feeling gingerly the edge of the hairline in front of his ear. He looked at the woman. Her head was uptilted, the thick coil of braid like an ebony crown on top, and her eyes, black and small and depthless, stared evenly at him.

“I got to work,” he said.

“Take the little ones with you,” she said.

They looked at each other a long time. It was a strange union, almost collusion, between the two of them, and yet there was antipathy as well. He did not like the Indian woman's ways, her smell and smoke and songs she'd sung to heal his daughter when the girl could not walk straight, to heal all his offspring, but one, in the time of the red fever. And yet she had healed them; she could heal Matt, if she would, he believed that, and never moving his eyes from the woman's eyes, he said at last, “Jonaphrene, wake up your brothers. Y'all get dressed.” He took his hat from the washstand, put it on, and went out the door to bring in wood for the woodbox.

A half hour later, as the man and the three bundled, sleepy children started out into the pale light of first dawn, the woman spoke again. She didn't lift her eyes from the figure on the pallet this time, didn't bother to look up and hold the man's eyes.

“Keep away four days,” she said.

So then it was the girl and Thula alone in the shell of the log house. The girl and Thula alone, as it had been in spirit, as it should now be also in the body, and Thula understood that there was something she must do, but she did not know what it was. She didn't know a song for this sickness. She knew no herbs or healing but had prayed in silence, without medicine, for four days. She had fasted. She went again and again in her mind to the passage of Scripture she'd found on the first night, and then she would turn from the Word to her understanding of where the girl's soul roamed, and Thula's own soul was troubled. As Jessie strove in spirit with her God, so Thula Henry struggled, but her striving was of a different nature than the white woman's, for within the Choctaw woman a trembling had begun, marked by that duality which had never been a division within her but which now cut her thoughts, separating her from her own understanding. For Thula knew of this kind of travel in the other world. In Indian way, she understood fully where the girl's soul was. In Christian way, this could not be so. It was the inescapable force of this duality—not of more than one God, but of more than one world—that conflicted Thula's spirit and threatened to destroy her peace. She knew that Matt's soul had been captured and carried to the world of the dead, but the world where the girl now dwelt was not like what the preachers preached of heaven and hell, as God had ordained them, those two only, with no other place for the departed to dwell. The girl was not in heaven or hell, no more than she was present inside her body. She was in the other world.