The Mercy Seat (5 page)

I don't know when we stopped, but when I woke the first time it was deep night and we were not moving. I raised up and eased the flap aside and looked out. Papa was nodding in the yellow circle of coal oil light. The mules were asleep in the traces. There was no moon or stars for light, and that wind was still blowing, though soft.

My heart jerked tight, and I said, “Papa?”

His head snapped up and he slapped the reins on Delia's back. Never said a word nor looked me back, and we began to move again. I could not hear the other wagon, but I laid that off to the soft drone of wind, and I snuggled back down. I was glad for us driving on in the night. It was warm under the covers with the children, the wind was the sound of forever and sky and distance and dark, and Papa and old Sarn and Delia could carry us, the wagon rocking, the wind humming, on through the night.

 

 

When I woke at first light, the wind had died completely. As soon as my eyes opened I knew Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins were not close, not just because I couldn't hear them but because I felt it, and I did not know how they could have got far ahead in such cold and wind, but I didn't care. I was glad the wind had died. The cold now was wet cold, and stronger, seeping in through the wagonsheet. I believed we would stop then and camp, for the sake of the animals if not for Papa, but we just went on. In late morning the ice came. I understood then the meaning of the blue wind, but by then it was too late to stop and camp in a place of protection, too late to turn back.

It started first as cold rain. Wet crept up from the south, light at first, just misting so I barely could hear it, and then it became rain and began to spit at the side of the tarp. I remember that, how it came at the wagon's left side where my feet were crammed and curled tight beneath me. I could hear it spitting and then spatting and finally drumming steady on the tarp. Lyda was hiccuping at the back of the wagon. I couldn't see Mama. The children were still asleep, all of them, even Thomas when I slipped my arm from underneath him and pushed back the flap to see out. No wind then, just the slant of rain from the south, the wind's absence as strong as its presence, but I did not think. I looked around, as far as I could see, and the land was as flat as a door. I cannot describe to you how that was to me. I had never imagined the earth could be so lifeless, no more rise or fall to it than a coffin lid, and no trees that I could see anywhere around. The sight of it made me breathless and dizzy and a little bit frightened because I did not know what could have flattened the earth so. The air was a strange color, too bright for the overcast, almost greenish, even in that gray spitting rain. The water muddied the frozen ruts and drenched around the side of the tarp and poured against Papa, but his hat was pulled low and he acted like he was not even wet. I could hear Dan panting along by the right front wheel of the wagon. I couldn't hear Ringo, but I knew him, how he tried to run underneath. Bertha and her calf both were bawling. Delia kicked her head back and down again, trying to shake loose the bit, the mules' hooves sucked down in the muck and the wheels clogged and spinning, and Papa slapped the reins, hard, harder, silent, never once hyahing them. Papa did not treat his animals so. Never had I seen it. He'd been running them all night in that wind, and now here he was, going on and on and on in cold rain and mud. I could not fathom it, any more than I could fathom how or why he yelled at Little Jim Dee, but I would not ask. My papa was changed so.

The wind, dead once, I thought, suddenly, even as I watched, got resurrected, and it blew up stronger than an old sinner just born again. Sound came first, the rustling shift and change, and I did not know how the sound sent itself when there were no trees to tell of its coming, but I heard it like water rising in the north, and then came the blue wind swooping down from the north and across us like an army of angels, and it met that southern rain, or else brought its own, I don't know how it happened, but what happened was this: the cold rain slanting from the left suddenly shifted and slanted the other way, straight out, and became in that moment freezing rain, and we kept going on. There was thunder rolling above us and lightning flickering in the greenish sky and jagged hail falling in pieces big as horseshoe nails and small as the tiny tips of Lyda's fingers, and the hail thumped the tarp and cracked on the wagonseat and bounced and jumped off, and Papa did not stop. The hail transformed itself round and smooth as musket balls, grew small, became freezing rain again, became sleet, became tiny frozen pellets in gravelly masses covering the earth, and us going on, going on, and air and earth and sky turning sleet again, turning freezing rain, becoming at last all together, all iceform at once pelting down together, jagged and frozen like shattered hell falling, and it went on forever, for hours or days or forever it seemed like, the whole world turning ice and white, the sky white, the earth white, and flat, and there was nowhere to turn for protection. I knew then that this—
this
—was the place of no turning back forever. This was God's glory and punishment, and I thought Brother Hoyle lied when he preached it, because this old world is not burning. The end of the world is not fire, it is rain into sleet into hail into heavenly assault of white ice like the veil between heaven and earth rent, the whole world torn asunder. I thought we would die there, all of us together. Papa did not stop.

He drove those mules balking, he lashed them with the whip, their hooves caked and slipping, and you could see the ice chunking on the traces, the reins, the mules' necks and ears and withers all gray-white and spattered, the ice getting thicker and thicker, the wagonwheels slipping and catching and spinning, and Bertha carrying on something awful, I could not hear the calf at all now, and I had to at last, I had to, reaching my arm out. “Papa!” I cried. “Papa!”

He turned only a little, a little half turn, and his face was the face of an ice man, his mustache and sideburns white with ice, his brows white, his lashes, and he looked at me and did not see me, and he turned back again, slapped the whip.

T
he wagon stopped, and I don't know if it was the same day or the next one, for there was no such thing as time then, only the endless now of the crossing, but I do know it was after Little Jim Dee peed the bed because that smell was all around and part of it, and I know it was daytime, for the whole of the white blinded me when Papa called me to bring him the hatchet and I pushed back the flap to see out.

At first my eyes squinted shut nearly, and this not because of the sun, for there was no sun, no light but ice light, no horizon or source or direction but just endless white blinding me. When my eyes opened all the way I could see the wagonseat nubbed with the grit of ice pellets falling, and this seemed to me a good thing, not so slick as the frozen rain. But when I crawled out onto it I could find no firm place to put my hands but the depression where Papa had been sitting, and even that place was quickly icing in, though the veil was thinner and the pellets fell with spaces of air between them and not so very fast. I could not stand up. On my knees in the well I tried to lift the wagonseat to reach in where Papa kept his tools and get the hatchet. The lid was frozen shut. My hands already that fast were completely numb. Papa was hollering, his voice rising, not hard, not angry, just coming up to me louder from where he was at the back of the wagon, and I wanted, oh, I wanted to do it quick, what he asked me, but the ice was pelting fire needles on my face and fingers, and my eyes were stinging not with sunlight but with the force of ice, and I could not lift the lid. Then Papa was beside me, his hat brim folded down gray and solid, an inch thick with ice. He said nothing, but from where he stood on the ground reached up and with the heel of his gloved palm smashed the box lid upward, hit it again, and the ice seal broke and the lid jumped. Still kneeling, I pushed the lid up and got out the hatchet, and Papa said, “No, Mattie, reckon I'm going to need the axe.”

I lifted the axe with both hands and handed it down to him. Papa turned and, keeping his free hand to the side of the wagon, disappeared in the white. Dan turned behind Papa, his splayed feet slipping, his black back and tan nose grizzled with sleet, and then, stepping deer-careful upon the pelleted earth, he disappeared too.

I could hear muted whacks coming from the back of the wagon, and I wanted to know what Papa was doing. I went to climb down. My shoes slicked right out from under me when they touched the wheelrim, and my hands could not help me, for there was nowhere but ice to touch, and down I went, skidding, the ice slicing my cheek where I fell. I got up and fell again, got up, and fell, and finally bellied to the near wheel and grabbed hold of a wheelspoke. My skin stung like it would freeze to the wood, but I held to it long enough to get my feet underneath me. I could hear Thomas inside the wagon, calling me, mumm mumm mumm, how he did then, but I went on, keeping a hand to the side of the wagon as I'd seen Papa do, except Papa had gloves and I did not, and it was only because the whacks came steady and harder that I kept my numb fingers out in the pelting ice to hold to the crusted sideboard, and went back.

We must have been dragging it a long way because just seeing it you would not even know that it had been a calf. You would know it had been an animal because the rope was still around its neck and the four legs still stuck out, but it was so mangled and the hide broken and the blood congealed red and black in the filthy ice casing that even Bertha did not pay it any more attention than if it had been a frozen sack. She stood with her head bowed nearly to the iced ground where Papa had laid hay, her near eye unfocused, not closed or open, and she was not chewing or flicking, not moving a muscle. Papa was hacking the rope near the calf 's neck with the axe. I could see where he'd tried to cut it with the Bowie knife, and the knife lay on the ground getting covered in sleet. Ringo was chewing at the back end of the carcass, and he would flinch and duck each time Papa swung the axe. Papa hacked one more time and the rope broke like a stick, and, turning, Papa saw me. I felt then like Ringo to duck back, but he said only, “Git the knife, would you,” and wound the frozen rope up in great stiff loops around his cocked elbow and shoulder, sliding slow on the ice toward the back of the wagon. He reached to put the rope on the hook, and it was then I saw the cover pulled off the chicken crate and the hens dead in gray masses of feathers frozen on their sides. I don't know if the rooster was dead yet, for he was still upright, back under where the hide hung over a bit, but he was perfectly still, and the ice was all on him and the crate floor. Papa could not get the frozen rope to stay on the hook. I watched him fool with it for a time until finally he pulled it back down and let it drop hard over his head and shoulder, draped like a white thick snake around him, and with the axe in one hand he started back around the side of the wagon to the front. Dan trotted, slipping and sliding, behind him.

Just a quick moment then I looked around, at Ringo gnawing the cut-loose mangled red thing in the shell of black ice, and Bertha with her head bowed and unmoving near the yellow hay turning white on the white earth before her, and the chickens dead on their sides, and Dan's black tail disappearing in the white behind Papa. I raised my eyes and looked out at the great white flatness, turning my head slowly, but there was nothing to see. There was no world out there, only our world, and our world was only us inside the smell and dark of the wagon behind Papa and Delia and old Sarn going on through the white and the veil around and behind and before us only to go through, keep going through, and keep on. That was all.

I looked down at the Bowie knife disappearing under the sleet. We would need it. Flat-footed, careful, I edged over to where it lay and dug in the ice crust with my fingers, and it was like something I remembered and did not remember, and the handle stung my hand but I wrapped it in the shawl and edged back toward the wagon to reach and hold to the side of it with my free hand.

 

 

The first that I saw them, they appeared dark blue and low over the lip of the horizon. They came when the sun came, and in the same place nearly, for the sun returned first in the west, not rising but sinking below the silver blanket of cloud. This would have been near the end of the second full day past the river, I remember, because the earth where the mules trod was not white. There were trees then, and the limbs were low and bare and sheathed in crystal, dripping, and the land rolled, and the sun sank below the sky, brightening it and turning the earth blue-white and glaring, and finally draining away purple. A little south of where the sun drained away is where I first saw them. I thought they were thunderheads maybe, rolling above the earth in the southwest, but when they did not change or draw nearer, I did not dread them, and anyhow we stopped then in a little copse and made camp.

Papa shook when he got down from the wagon. He stood on the ground and his legs trembled and his hand holding to the wheel quivered like he was shaking with fever. I thought at first he was sick. I said, “Papa?” He turned away and walked two steps over to a little rise and sat down upon it. Then he lay back flat on his back. His hat fell off and gaped openmouthed and stiff on the dark earth. I could see his legs jerking beneath his britches. He said to me, his voice calm, like it was in no way unusual to lie upon the frozen earth twitching on your back, he said, “Start supper, Matt.”

We stayed there one night, our first camp since we left the river, our first time to eat proper and empty the pots and rub diapers and air out the smell. It was there in that bare tree copse we left the chickens dead in their crates, thawed enough by daylight to stink and so we ate only the rooster, and it was there we left Bertha, not dead yet but dying, and I don't know why Papa didn't shoot her unless maybe he did not want to waste the powder and lead. It was there, too, as I was helping Papa load the wagon at dawn and looked up to see the indigo shapes still in the distance, that I understood they were not cloudbanks or some purple drift skyward but a part of the earth itself, humped low on the southwestern horizon, pushing up from the ground. I knew, the way you will sometimes know a thing, one swift thought that speaks the word, that these shapes were mountains. I did not have to ask.