The Mercy Seat (41 page)

If the girl had been Indian, Thula would have sent for a certain
hilishaya
of her father's people, who would risk his own soul to follow her into that world and bring her back. But it was a white girl curled on the blanket; no medicine of that power was going to work on a white girl. If she could have, Thula Henry would have arisen from her place beside the hearth, gathered all her things into the leather satchel, and gone home. But she felt herself tethered to the form on the pallet by a strand invisible and profound, shining, unseverable but by God's hand. All she knew to do, all she could do, was pray. And she did pray, watching through the day as the pale squares of sunlight crept west to east across the floor; she prayed on into the night, pausing and rising only to feed the fire, into the coming of light through the oilpaper-covered windows the next morning; she prayed on, and on, but she questioned within herself the quality of her prayers, the strength of them, even as she moved her lips silently. Again the words came to her from the Scripture as she had taken them the first night:
Chitokaka ma! sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik
a
sai yimmo y
a
is svm apelvchaske.

Toward dawn of the third day that she'd been alone with the girl's form inside the log house, Thula took out once again from the leather satchel her Choctaw Testament and read by firelight the passage in Mark. Her eyes skimmed the first part of the story where one of the multitude came to
Chisvs
and said, Master, I've brought you my son who is possessed by a spirit, and wherever it takes him it tears him and he foams and gnashes his teeth and your disciples cannot cast it out, and the Master answered back, O you people of such little faith, how long am I going to suffer you? Bring him here. And when the child was brought to Him, the spirit saw the Master and knew Him and threw the boy down and tore him and made him wallow on the ground, as the girl Matt had wallowed on the sawdust floor of the brush arbor, and when
Chisv
s
said, How long has he been like this? the father answered, Since he was a little child, and many times it's thrown him into the fire and into the water to kill him, but if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

Here it was, here, that Thula's eyes paused, and she strained in the flickering light to read the words in Choctaw again and again:
Mihma Chisv
s ash osh chi yimma hinla hok ma, na-yimmi hokv
no nana akl
u
ha k
vt ai
i
yumohma hinla hoke, im achi tok. Mihma
vlla y
a
iki yash ot mih makinli n
o
nishkin okchi mihinti hosh chitolit, Chotokaka ma! sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik
a
sai yimmo y
a
is s
vm apelv
chaske, achi tok
(“Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And straightway the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”)

Chotokaka ma! sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik
a
sai yimmo y
a
is sv
m apelv
chaske.

“Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

Thula's eyes moved from the Scripture to the drawn form on the pallet, where the girl's eyelids were fully open, the sightless pupils now darting minnow-like from side to side, now roving aimlessly about the log room, tracking what was not visible. Thula looked to the Scripture again. The words told her that when the Master cast out the spirit, it cried and rent the child and tore him and left him as one who was dead, and the people all said, The child is dead—just as Jessie, the man Fayette, even the children's father, once, on the first night, said of the girl—but
Chisv
s
took the boy by the hand and lifted him up and he arose.
Chisv
s
took him by the hand and he arose. That clean. That sudden, from the hand of the Savior; one had only to touch the hem of His garment to be healed. He had given power to His disciples to cast out spirits, but they could not cast out the spirit that had hold of that child, and when they asked why they could not,
Chisv
s
answered, This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting.

Thula read the words again. By nothing but by prayer and fasting. If thou canst believe, all things are possible. She had prayed. She had fasted. She had believed.

But she had not believed enough.

She had not believed.

Here was the source of the striving in her spirit. She understood it, though she couldn't say its name. It had grown from such a tiny place, like the mustard seed that can move mountains, only it was faith's opposite, and she could not even say when it had come. Not when the girl had fallen on the sawdust floor speaking the language of the Fourth Part. Not during the long ride in the wagon, or the first days and nights when the girl had lain as the dead, for at the beginning Thula had sat beside the pallet entirely balanced in her faith, as she always had been: patient, praying, believing that
Chihowa
would reveal to her what she must do. But the Creator had revealed nothing, and at some instant—she didn't know when—the uneasiness had found that small chink in her faith, and crept in. It was like
Impashilup,
she thought. The Soul Eater. The ancient one who would find a little nick in a person's soul, left there by bad thoughts or too much sadness, and
Impashilup
would creep in through that tiny hole and eat that person's soul. Thula did not feel her soul eaten, gone, destroyed, but unbalanced, struggling in this place of doubt. Not that she doubted the hand of one Creator over all, or
Chisv
s
as Son and Savior, or the Son's power to heal, cast out devils, make one who was dead to rise up and walk; she didn't doubt that
Shilombish Holitopa,
the Holy Spirit, dwelt now upon the earth as Comforter in the hearts and minds of Christians. But Thula Henry knew this was not all of the Unseen.

Through the fasting days and nights she'd sat beside the empty shell upon the pallet, and in the silence she would hear a stick crack or a rustle or a small thud on the opposite side of the room in the darkness, and she would know it was
Bohpoli,
the Thrower, one of the ancient ones who had followed the
Chahta
people from their homelands to the new Nation, and she did not know why the Thrower, who lived only in the woods and deep forests, was in this house. Another time she heard the low, scuttering sound of the little bantylike spirit, the
lokhi,
of her father's people, as it came into the house and ran past the curled figure on the pallet, calling softly, lokha, lokha, lokha, scuttering around the room beneath the cookstove and washstand in search of ways to make its little mischief, quickly past the pallets on the far side, and then, as if discovering it had no business here, on out through the back wall, calling the whole time its soft lokha, lokha, lokha. Thula had been deeply troubled by these ones coming into a white house; that would not happen. That had never happened, so far as she had ever heard. Now, sitting in the flickering darkness on the dawning of the seventh morning, as she held her Choctaw Bible open in her lap, watched the girl's eyes roam about the room, Thula understood it did not matter about those white people; white people would never know or hear them. It was her own presence inside these walls, and the unease within her, that drew them. She had been taught they were of the Devil, or the old superstitious ways of the people, and the Choctaw preachers said the people had to turn away from such things, they had to forget about all that. Thula knew she must turn her face away, she must not believe them. And yet they were here, in this house; she knew the purpose of their presence as surely as she knew the white girl on the pallet journeyed in the other world. The ancient ones had come to bear witness of the Unseen, that Thula Henry might not forget.

“Chotokaka ma!”
she cried out.
“Sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik
a
sai yimmo y
a
is sv
m apelv
chaske! ”

Through the morning and noontide and afternoon she repeated the words, knowing, even as she prayed, that it was not for the girl's lost soul wandering on the other side, or that Thula's own faith and prayer and fasting might bring that soul home, but that the surety of that faith might return to her. The peace of the Comforter had departed her, and she did not know why or when; she was left unbalanced, divided in her spirit, and the cause was the Fourth Part, the existence and truth of the Fourth Part, which had been within her always, but never had it caused her to be caught in this place of disequilibrium and doubt.
Chotokaka ma! sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik
a
sai yimmo y
a
is s
vm apel
vchaske.
Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. The words were a dry, empty pleading, and then the words of her prayer changed, became a Creek song, one she knew of her father, but it, too, was cracked and dry, and it was not for the unconscious stick form on the pallet, but for her own unity, her oneness, her balance, that it might return to her. And then the song left her, and all sound left her, but she did not stop praying; in silence she prayed. Night came, and the woman went on praying, and even as she prayed to That which she could not help but believe in, she doubted that her prayers would be heard.

 

 

Late in the night, at about the third hour, Thula arose to put wood on the fire. It had begun to rain, she did not know when, for she had been deep in the place of wordless prayer, unaware even of the girl's slow, steady breathing beside her, unaware of the sounds and creaks and rustles within the house or the calls of winter night creatures without—the tortured screech of an owl, the yip of coyotes. But now, as she came to wakefulness in the physical world, the drumming on the roof above the upper room entered her from a great distance; she heard, nearer, the harsh patter on the porch roof, the sound small and quick, needlelike, the rain hovering at the point of freezing. In her bones, her joints, the places her muscles wrapped around her backbone, she felt the rain's ache and knot, and it took her a long time to unfold herself, for she had been sitting crosslegged a long time. The room was cold and pitch dark, the fire down to a few embers bedded in a deep mound of chalky ash; she had not shoveled the grate since the man left. The woman could see nothing, could not even see to make her way to the woodbox. She couldn't see the girl, but now she could hear her, the slow, deep breaths that were like a sleeping child's.

Slowly Thula unfolded her legs, pushed herself up from the floor, grunting, and as she did so her blanket dropped from her shoulders. She stood at last and made her way by feel to the far side of the room, where the lantern stood on a small square shelf above the man's pallet. By feel she picked it up at the base, carried it across the room slowly, feeling with her soft leather soles before her, to the shelf above the washstand where the tin of sulfur matches stood. In the dark she set the lamp down. In the dark she struck the match, and the area around the washstand leapt quickly to detail in the small yellow flare. When she'd lit the blackened wick and placed the globe over it, the room swelled to a brightness that seemed out of proportion to the strength of the one lantern, and Thula's eyes squinted at the sudden light. It hurt to bend at the woodbox, where there were only a few sticks of stovewood left amidst the cluttered twigs and bark at the bottom. She was faint with fasting, faint with the too-quick return from the place of silent, hopeless prayer, and she lost her balance as she reached for them, had to catch hold of the cold edge of the cookstove to keep from falling. When she turned with the two sticks of stovewood cradled in one arm, the handful of twigs to feed the embers in the other, she saw the girl's eyes watching her. The fragile body still lay curled on its side, but the limbs were no longer crooked inward. One hand had slipped from beneath the quilt she lay under, rested on the edge of Thula's red blanket where it had dropped on the floor. The girl's breath sounded in the room, deeply drawn and even. The woman moved forward, slowly, watching the ocher eyes as they followed her, the slow rise as they tracked her approach, and Thula knew the girl was not looking at something in the other world but at her, Thula Henry, as she came, knelt on the puncheon floor beside the pallet, placed the dry twigs on the orange coals, and blew on them until they began to smoke.

By the time the man returned with the small children at evening, Matt was sitting up on the pallet with the red blanket wrapped around her, sipping broth from a clay bowl. Jonaphrene ran toward her the instant she came in the door, but then stopped shyly a few feet from the edge of the pallet and stood with her hands behind her back. Matt looked at her sister, said nothing. She turned her eyes up at her father, looked at him a moment, glanced then at her two brothers, and went back to sipping the brown broth.

A
nd the world returned to normal—to what was normal within the realm of that home and family: the older boy ran and played in the woods as usual, or chased after his male cousins, with the younger boy stumbling along behind until the teasing would become too unmerciful and Thomas would run back, silent and panting, not crying, to the log house. The father continued to leave the house before daylight and come home well after dark; the younger girl sat in her dreamy reverie beside the hearth or the cookstove, or followed her older sister's directions as she bossed her in how to clean a squirrel or sweep off the front porch. Matt herself seemed unchanged, but for the bone thinness and the pallor that had come to her in the winter darkness, painting her skin an ethereal bloodless yellow. But even that disappeared in a short time, and within a week and a half the deep amber color of her skin was back, and she'd returned to the restless, ceaseless roaming that marked her existence, sometimes hunting, sometimes not, occasionally taking the aged beagle with her, as if the time of her near death on the pallet had never been. Every few days she would take the younger children and disappear the whole afternoon into the brush along the creekbank, and Thula would watch them from beneath the porch overhang as they trailed singlefile across the road, and each time she watched she thought she would go back inside the house and gather her belongings in the leather satchel and go home. But each time, when the children came in at first dark, they smelled the meat roasting and the
tanfula
cooking and found Thula Henry sitting with her handwork beside the fire.