The Mercy Seat (42 page)

Jessie did not come again, but often Fayette would be there, following John through the door as he came in from work, or showing up a half hour later, and the children's uncle would sit on the mended ladderback tipped against the wall for only a moment before he'd get up to rove restlessly about the room, prowling and pawing at their few pitiful belongings—the shaving mug and razor propped on the top shelf, the chipped china saucers, the metal pitcher on the washstand —though he seemed not to really see the things he picked up and handled but to be touching them thoughtlessly, unconsciously, as one caresses an old scar. Always, he would be talking. Talking. The Indian woman watched him. She recognized the unnaturally bright eyes, the overloud voice, as he blustered and tried to cajole his brother; often she could detect the faint sour-sweet smell. When he was in the room the unease within her would stir up, get stronger. This was still a house of sickness, which Thula knew if none of the rest of them knew it; in her soul she knew it, and she knew it was very bad, very dangerous, to bring the destructive power of liquor into a sickhouse. She watched the children's father as well, not understanding why he would let that bad force come around his frail and vulnerable children.

But John seemed to pay his brother almost no mind, and Thula watched that too, how the more John ignored Fayette, the louder and more restless the other would become, striding aimlessly about the log room, talking, talking, and she thought, watching him as he roamed, insatiable, unable to be satisfied with whatever he picked up or looked at or ate or spoke, that this was the same in the girl, in her restless, aimless walking, the same in the father as he worked, the same in the jittery limbs of the boy Jim Dee, and Thula Henry thought maybe it was the same in all white people; maybe
Chihowa
put that hungry restlessness in all white people for a purpose, though she could not see what that purpose might be, because it seemed to make too much destruction. But the Creator's will and design had ever been unfathomable, and in her deeply troubled spirit, Thula did not try to comprehend. It would be like trying to comprehend why He sent His Son to such a little bunch of people in the desert, and then when that news went out, He let it be spread with so much killing—or why He let all these white people come swarming and devouring as locusts so that now there were three whites to every Choctaw in the Nation, taking the Nation's coal and trees and unbroken earth—or what He meant her to do with that girl.

Thula had given up trying to comprehend that portion; she was no longer patient and faithful, believing He would reveal to her His purpose, nor was she submissive, as she had been, to her part in that purpose—but still she did not seem to be able to leave. Nor did the children's father ask her. Never once had John suggested, whether by word or silence or gesture, that she was not needed in this house, that it was time for her to go home. The two continued in their unspoken collusion—the man, without argument, allowing her to take the place of mother for his children because he would not take a wife; the woman staying because, when she was alone in the log house, when she would begin to gather her herbs and her second skirt drying by the fire and her red blanket in preparation to go home, a bad feeling would come on her, a strange, indefinite foreboding, which would not depart until she settled back some way to stay. Not that she found peace in staying—her peace had entirely departed from her in the seven days and nights of the girl's sojourn—but the disturbance in her soul was easier when she did not try to fight.

She would speak to the girl sometimes, in the evenings before the father came home, when the younger ones were asleep in the upper room and it was just the two of them alone in the quiet beside the fire; she would say in a facsimile of her father's English, “You got some job to do. The Creator given you some work, you going to die you ain't done it,” and repeat the same meaning in her mother's tongue. Sometimes she would read aloud from her Choctaw Bible, or smoke the room with sage and cedar, make her offerings of tobacco, but even as she did these things she felt her own soul dry and barren; she had no faith in the words coming from her mouth, no faith even in the cedar smoke, the songs that seemed no longer to belong to her. It was as if she had been sucked dry of all forms to do the Spirit's work. Once, she asked the girl, “What you seen yonder? What is it look like?” and then was shamed at her own question and immediately held her tongue. The girl looked back at her with almond eyes, answered nothing.

One morning Thula's eldest son George came and stood in the yard and called her to come out, and when she stood on the porch and looked at him with his big hat in his two hands and his black hair streaked with gray in the wintry daylight, and his face which was her own face gazing at her with that question, the longing in her to go home was so sharp she thought it would cut her breast in two. She went back in the log house and got her satchel, leaving even the chiggerweed roots she had just dug drying beside the fireplace, and walked with her son as far as the sawmill on the east side of Big Waddy—but the pull was too strong in her, that terrible sense that there was something she must do, and she was afraid. Thula stopped her son with a hand on his arm, looked up at him, and the two faces were equal in the gray light, the same round form and blackness of eye and glabrous skin, the woman almost two feet shorter and the son's head grayer, but the expressions on the identically formed features just the same, and she said in native tongue, “It's not finished. When it's finished I'll come.” She turned, leaving her son standing in the dirt road, and went back.

Thus the end of winter passed. The hoop was arcing toward the earth's renewal when the man Fayette followed his brother in the door one night with a large powderhorn hanging from his neck and a grotesquely fat rifle of many barrels in his hands. Thula was sitting alone in the silence. Her Bible was open on her lap, but she was not reading the words. The younger children had been put to bed upstairs; the girl was not in the house, had not yet returned from her day's roaming, and Thula felt herself waiting, as she was ever waiting. Sometimes she thought that this was all that was asked of her, to wait, in bewilderment and turmoil, because the Creator was testing her as He tested His children in the Old Testament; other times she thought the soulsickness in that log house had crept inside her skin.

She paid little attention to the gun the man carried—though it was a tremendous weapon that held the force of great destruction within its iron pores—because it was sometimes Fayette's habit to bring a gun into the house and show it about, demonstrating its mechanisms to his brother, who hardly watched, and as Fayette snapped open the breech or spun the smoothly revolving cylinder, he would keep a constant hungry eye on his brother, who seemed to take notice of that least of all. But Thula was alert to the man himself from the moment he stumbled in the door, exhaling the sour smell before him, because she saw that the liquor was on him bad this night. It was the same as she'd seen it in her grandson Moss, as she'd seen it in her father, in old Cinnamon John who lived at Yonubby and sat in the yard of the church with his eyes blurred, looking to heaven, weeping, and trying to sing the old songs: as if the liquor itself were a spirit that got into the drinker and walked in his form, though crooked, and spoke through his mouth, though slurred, but a bad spirit itself whose only purpose was to destroy the carcass it inhabited and any human souls around that the spirit could find a way to touch. She closed her Testament and set it to the side, but she did not stand when the men came in. This was part of the silent agreement she held with the father: she cooked for and tended only the children, and the father might eat the leftovers in the food warmer above the stovetop, but he would serve himself—which he did now, first washing up at the washstand—but Thula's eyes were not on the father but on his brother as he roiled and raged about the room.

“When you going to get some damn furniture?” Fayette said, and he lurched in a looping half circle toward the crate box in the corner. “Man cain't even find a damn place to seddown!” But Fayette didn't attempt to sit on the crate but rather upended the multibarreled weapon on it so that the stock rested on the pine. “You gonna like this one, I reckon. It's a damn blackpowder muzzle loader, like that blame ole contraption you got yonder,” and he waved a flapping hand at the longrifle resting on two big iron nails above the front door. “Fellow could make pert near any kinda gun on the face of the earth and still yet uses a old muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle, I reckon he just likes to mess with it, reckon maybe twelve times that many barrels to pack and load oughta satisfy him in a weap'n. Eh?”

He winked broadly, held it like a squint as he turned a glinting sapphire-and-ruby eye on the woman near the fireplace and, seeing the impassivity of expression there, allowed that same lit eye to travel around the room, roving, unfocused, as if it were the eye that were drunk and the man chasing after it, until at last it found his brother standing in front of the cookstove with a tin plate in his hand. Fayette blinked an instant, and then he said, almost with surprise, “Looka here now, Son. Look!” Swaying a little, he lifted the powderhorn that hung from the thong around his neck. The large end of the horn, where it had once met the bull's skull, was sealed with a leather skin stretched tight as a drumhead; the sharp point had been snipped from the tapered end, and that end was capped with a snug hand-carved horn cap. Fayette pulled the cap off with his teeth and spat it onto the floor, where it plinked against the wood and rolled, and he began to pour blackpowder from the horn into the many barrels, loosely, messily, the powder sifting in a fine black rain over the fist that held the muzzle end of the big gun. He kept up his rain of words as he poured, sometimes slurring, sometimes pronouncing them cleanly and carefully. “Got this off a ole boy 'tween here'n Fort Smith, old trader I don't know what, some kind of prospector or something, said he was. Said he was. Volleygun. That's what he called it. English volleygun. From England. I bet you this thing's a hunnerd years old, y'reckon?” He righted the powderhorn a moment, squinted at the barrels, upended the horn again, and continued to pour. “Give 'im two dollars, 's all he said he wanted. I th'ew in a quart of whiskey for good luck. You could scare the bejeezus outa somebody with this thing, couldn'cha? Man alive. Open up twelve barrels at once on their gizzard, just blow'em to holy hell.”

He reached with clumsy fingers into the leather pouch at his waist and drew out a lead ball, dull and pewter gray in the lamplight, and with several tries managed to align it with the round rim of one of the barrels, pushed it in, reached for another from the pouch. He'd poured a tremendous load of powder in each, and Thula saw him put two balls in some of the barrels, none in others. Several times he fumbled the one he was trying to place, and the ball would drop from his fingers, thunk, and roll cleanly on the wood floor. He withdrew the rod from the pipes beneath the nether barrel and rammed it down the twelve, sloppily, missing some of them, doing others two and three times, as the tone of his words changed from boyish thrill to the bitter whine of accusation.

“Could jus' lay this in a man's face, I reckon a man might do about whatever you ast him politely to do then. What kinda hole you believe twelve barrels at onced is gonna make in a man's belly? 'M'ona show ya right here in a little bit. I come to give you a little demonstration.” And he continued jamming the ramrod hard, haphazardly, hit or miss, into the barrels. “Blasts 'em all ever' one at once, this thing does. Course, somebody knew what he was doing, he could figure out how to make him a twelve-barrel shotgun could just fire however many barrels a fellow wanted, nine or seven or the whole blame bunch if a fellow wanted to blow somebody to holy hell and be done with it. Couldn't he?” Fayette turned the glistening moistness of his eyes to his brother again. “Somebody been given a talent he don't even want to use it for the betterment of himself or his children who been living in a pigsty without even no decent furniture, won't use it even when his own blood and kin asks him, asks him polite as a gingerlady, that's the kind of fella's about as stubborn and stupid as a pig himself. Y'reckon? Son?”

John spooned a pale clump of hominy into his mouth. His eyes were on his brother, his features without expression.

“Man with that kind of talent, he wouldn't even have to use his brains that hard.” Fayette paused in his ramrodding, gazed steadily, evenly, across the room, his bloodshot eyes still glistening but the sway of trunk and slur of tongue, for the moment, calmed. “He could just forge a good simple type of a weapon people could use in this country, let the other fellow distribute it like he wants to, make 'em all a living. Make everybody a decent way to live. But no-sir. No-sir. Man like that, he don't care a damn what's to become of his family. Man like that, he's got to run off at the first sign of some little old patent trouble, some stupid little no 'count thing.” Thus had Fayette twisted in his mind the old trouble that had caused them to leave Kentucky. The sway was back in his torso, and he spat once on the floor, returned to jamming the rod again and again, remembering, in the blaming necessity of his besotted mind, that it had been John who'd fled fearfully across the land, driven by phantasms, he himself who'd been dragged along in his brother's wake.

Thula Henry, watching, understood that the man Fayette had been naming something in his mind's language for a long time; she did not need to listen to the words in their harsh tongue to hear. This one had nurtured and built and nourished something until it swelled up big, fully grown, but it had become something different from the seed that had begun it. Watching the two men, she saw the children's father standing before the cookstove with the hominy plate in one hand, eating steadily in a slow, unvaried rhythm, lifting the spoon without pause from plate to mouth, back to plate, the sound of tin scraping tin making a ticking, monotonous rhythm in the room. On his face was a shadow of the black, cold look she had seen as he started out into the predawn darkness on the morning before the girl had awakened from the other world. Thula turned her eyes to the face of the drunk man again; she watched him draw the ramrod from the last barrel, fumble to replace it in the pipes, give up finally and, with an oath, drop it clattering on the floor, among the loose musket balls, the powderhorn cap, and spilled powder, all the while watching from slit bloodshot eyes as his brother ate in that slow, undeviating rhythm. Thula saw that the man Fayette was nursing a very old wound. She saw that he'd been feeling and re-feeling that same grievous wound for many years. It wasn't formed from outside himself, hadn't been given to him that way, but was a remembered stab-hurt entirely of his own making, and Thula saw this in the same way she saw that the liquor was not, as she'd thought (as she wanted to think, because of her grandson, her father), a separate bad spirit come into the man's soul to make him act so, but a sly force that knew how to trick the bad thing that dwelt there already to come out.