The Mercy Seat (24 page)

Fayette hollered down the hillside, “I'll have to put on a little banquet for you folks up here next Tuesday! Aim to welcome you real good when you get here next week! Mitchelltree, put some damn backbone in it, my God.”

The big man grunted softly, the weight of his shoulder against the wagon. Still he did not look up, only listened to Fayette's voice rising above the dry creak of the burdened wheels. “I seen you before, mister,” he said, his voice low, coming from his throat, through his teeth. “You'll not be in no hurry one a these days.”

Fayette called, “Somebody's going to be shouting Glory Hallelujah time y'all get here! Somebody bound to be praising the Lord! Suggs, you better lay down and take a rest now—I hate to see you break a sweat!” In a little while he hollered, “I seen a old terr'pin get to Texas and back quicker'n y'all are climbing this little old bitty ridge!”

The brown man, shoving, his head down, huffed to the hillside, “I been to Texas, mister. Them terrapins can have it.” He spat once off to the side through his gritted teeth. His voice was low still, beneath his breath, but even so, it rolled as he cursed Texas. “Damn rattle-snakes can have Texas. Let the Comanches have her,” he said. “They'd know what to do.” And then
hunh,
he let go a deep grunt as he heaved the wagon harder. The yellow-complected man beside him glanced over, but the brown man, his eyes on the brown earth, didn't see.

As the afternoon wore, Fayette paced faster and faster, his eyes darting down the ridge to the wagon, closer now but still well below the rim's edge; now out along the boggy ribbon of road, which stubbornly would not yield what he looked for; now up to the heavens, where the weak sun slid westerly far too quickly in the southern sky. He shouted, “Got you fellas a little liquid freshment waiting! Looks like y'all can't get a better move on, I'm liable to have to drink it up myself !” And he pulled a whiskey flask from his coat pocket, uncapped it, and took a long pull. The cajoling was entirely gone from his voice now; the words sounded just as he intended them: a threat. He paced, nipping from the tin flask, his eyes more and more to the empty roadway, less upon the struggling wagon, and so he was not looking when the wagon creaked to a complete halt with the front wheels wedged against a rough stone outcropping a hundred yards from the top of the ridge. When he did look, drawn by the silence, it seemed to his incensed mind they'd been sitting there an hour, the smaller mule nodding half asleep in the traces and the big one standing hipshod on the ledge above. Fayette began to shout. “Don't make me hafta come down there, Moss! What the hell's the matter with you? Lay the stick on 'em! Mitchelltree, put some gumption in it! Suggs! You two shove up there! I can't wait till next Christmas—you lazy so-and-sos mean to get paid, you better get them damn animals moving!”

Moss flicked the whip, slapped the reins, said, “Giddap, now, hyah, mule!” and the high-yellow man cursed beneath his breath and pushed a little harder, and the brown man breathed deep, the old irony twisting, turning sour, rising, without humor, to a dull, familiar rancor. He shoved harder on the wagon's gate, turned his face to the side, and put the full strength of his anger in it.

“Y'all swing her around left yonder!” Fayette called. “She won't make it over that jut there, take her around!”

Moss flicked the whip hard at the rump of the dark mule, sawed left, and the big charcoal jerked his head and released his locked legs, turned hard, forcing the little gray, and the gray stumbled as, with a groan and an aching creak like the cranking of a colossal windlass, the right front wheel began to rise over the rock ledge, and the front of the wagon began to swing left. The two men at the rear, surprised, feeling the shift and splinter of wood vibrate clear through their jaws, leapt backwards, the brown man, slick as a snake strike, whisking his white Stetson off the top of the load as he jumped.

“Whoa! Jeeminy, Jeeminy, look out now,” Fayette bellowed. “You're gonna tip her!”

“Gee, mule! Gee! Gee! Gee!” Moss yanked the reins right, trying to compensate for the hard left and sudden lift, and then he tried to pull up altogether. “Whoa, mule, whoa, mule, whoa!”

But it was entirely too late. The weight of stone shifting in infinitesimal increments, hardly a fraction in time or distance but multiplied by gravity, magnified by the weight of itself measured in tons of earth-core, could not be held back. The rear axle snapped near where it speared the left wheel, and the wagonwheel collapsed sideways; the right forward wheel raised up, hung spinning. The tailgate split wide at the seam. The tongue splintered and turned loose from its bonding, broke free of the hounds, and the shattered wagon began to collapse downward. Moss threw the reins at the scrambling mulerumps and jumped off the seat above the wagon, as, with a quaking, locomotive rumble like that of an earthquake and a shriek of tortured wood and the hysterical, bawling bray of terrified muleflesh, two tons of orange-colored sandstone avalanched in a cloud of sanddust to the muddy flank of the mountain.

When the last of the slabs had groaned to a halt and settled, it was quiet along the ridge but for the scrabbling of the little gray mule trying to rise. Her front legs were broken. She struggled in silence, and there was no sound for a long while but the scuttering of pebbles, the hard rustling of the tall, dry yellow weeds. Stone slabs, some nearly as large as the face of a coffin, spilled from the broken bed, scattered like a great child's tumbled blocks along the slope.

Then Fayette began to shout. “Jesus God!” He danced along the hilltop jerkily, his arms loose and floundering, his head bobbing, a half-strung marionette. “You fools, you damned dunces, Jesus holy Christ!” He saw the yellow-complected man in the distance, walking fast at a steep angle down the side of the ridge eastward. “Suggs!” Fayette screamed. “Get back here! You damn Suggs! Su-u-uggs!” But the yellow man was disappearing already around the far side of Fayette's log house. “Damn you, Suggs!” Fayette shouted.

The leg-broke little gray mule had ceased to struggle. She lay on her side, heaving, still caught in the traces, the broken oak tongue jammed beneath her broken legs. The big charcoal stood beside her, head down, in silence, and the little gray made a sound now, seeming to call to the other, her little bleats alternating with, sometimes punctuating, Fayette's curses. It was as if the mare portion of the mule's nature claimed her in dying, because the sound, coming contrapuntal with the man's, was not a jack's bray nor a mule's bawl but something stranger, breathed into the cold air on heaving shudders: a high, breathy whinny, begging. Fayette's voice was hoarse now, stripped with yelling, but in his rant he could not stop. “Moss! Damn you, Moss, you damn stupid Indi'n, never get a damn Indi'n to handle a damn mule! Mitchelltree, shoot that damn mule for God's sake!” And he went on, pacing, jerking, cursing.

The big brown man, hatted now, standing erect, enormous beside the hunched and miserable Moss, climbed the rise to a level spot above the broken wagon, spread the front of his coat, and, wordless, took a large, flat-sided, thick-barreled pistol from a left-handed holster beneath the denim. Immediately Fayette stopped his cursing rant. He froze, staring, as if at a ghost or a living memory. Mitchelltree raised the great slope-gripped gun so that Fayette could see clearly the four barrels stacked two and two, distinct and yet inseparable, joined together as one. Mitchelltree sighted briefly and pulled the trigger. The big charcoal mule jumped and brayed once, stood trembling, as the echo of a single powerful shot ricocheted across the valley. The ridge then was completely silent. Mitchelltree took a step down the slope, looked at the dead little gray. The union of barrels was pointed at the large hole oozing red above the open yellow eye, but another shot was not necessary. In a deep, resonant voice, he said, “Moss, help me get that big'n loose—he going to break a leg too 'fore it's all over.”

The driver, moving slow, came the long way around above the spilled wagon. Fayette called from the hilltop, “You! Mitchelltree!” but the big man did not answer. He stood at the big mule's head, stroking the long, elegant muzzle, talking softly, looking calmly into the epicanthic eye, while Moss began to untangle the twisted traces.

“Mitchelltree!” Fayette called, the rage gone from his voice now, a sound in it uncannily close to the pleading in the little mule's final whimper. “Hey, Mitch!”

Mitchelltree did not look up but went on talking softly, speaking secret words, low and deep and mournful, in the long silken charcoal ear.

His name was Burd Mitchelltree. The few white men who knew his Christian name thought and heard “Bird” when he told it, and figured him for part Indian because of that name and the sharpness of his features, because of the hint of terra rosa in the brown of his skin. A willing eye could've told them those planed features were not Choctaw or Cherokee but Anglo; that high, sleek forehead, rarely revealed, hinting already at future baldness, had not come down to him through any Indian blood. He was, notwithstanding white men's poor vision or hearing, within himself and to himself
Burd
Mitchelltree, short for Burden, as his mama, without irony, had named him, and by so doing naming not what he was to her but what others would demand him to carry, when he was born slave to her as slave in Texas twenty-nine years before. He'd been four years old when Lincoln proclaimed emancipation; five by the time Texas got around to letting her own slaves hear such news the following June; six when his mother died in her slave cabin, ignorant of the war's end or outcome, ignorant of the fact that her son's Christian name was a sly parody of white man's ideas. The name could as well have stood (though his mama was never to know this either) for the sonorous sound of Burden's voice as it would become in his young manhood: mellifluous, minor-keyed, like the sorrowing lower tones of a bagpipe or the deep dulcet moan of a bass organ. It was this resonating drone he used now to calm the big, dark male mule.

William Moss moved slowly, meticulously, trying to untangle the snarled reins entangled in the traces, until at last, glancing up the hill once quickly, he slipped his buck knife from beneath his pantsleg and used it to cut the leather in two places. When the animal was nearly freed, Mitchelltree put a twistlock on the mule's muzzle to keep him from running mad and wild the instant the collar eased off, never ceasing to croon the dirgelike chant in the mule's ear all the while, and within a few minutes the mule was calm enough that he could release the twistlock and walk him on up the slope to where Fayette stood, still staring, not at the brown man himself, not at the lone living mule or the worthless dead one, nor at the jumble of orange rock slabs spilling crookedly from the broken wagon, but intently and longingly at the gracefully curved stock of the pistol, returned to its holster now, made visible to the thinning afternoon light from beneath the denim coattail by the lift and roll of Burd Mitchelltree's massive shoulders.

If there was but one person on earth whose actions and intentions drew Fayette's full concentration, there was, as well, one object only that could snap his head around like an iron filing whisked to a magnet, pause him in his relentless pursuit of whatever notion or item he currently raced after—and that was a firing weapon of any kind. Just now, as he stood on the ridge watching Mitchelltree climb the remaining yards with a soothing hand to the mule's quivering neck, there was a miraculous confluence of the two driving forces in Fayette Lodi's existence, as two underground rivers might converge in the hidden depths of a cavern to rage and rise to the earth's crust. A great stillness settled upon him—or rather an eerie calm appeared to descend on the surface: his cerulean eyes hardly blinked; the restless pacing and hand-flinging, the cursing, were now completely stopped—but beneath the sanguine surface, Fayette's pulse thudded in his owns ears, his chest cinched tight as a tourniquet, his nerves were honed and focused, keen as a cat's. The whole of his being was riveted to the curve of the gunhandle—for he was certain, or very nearly certain, that the thick-barreled pistol the man carried was one of three or four dozen powerful weapons called howdahs that had been skillfully, cunningly, illegally wrought by the hand of his brother. Guns, their power and mystery, affect different men differently; for some, a gun is but a tool, as necessary as the plow, for the gathering of food; others are drawn to a weapon's mechanical nature, its cleverness and precision; and still others cherish a firearm's ability to enhance not only a man's actual power but his appearance of strength as well, so that men will fear him. Though Fayette Lodi's fascination—one may say obsession—with firearms held a bit of all these, it was more singularly derived from the history he shared with his brother: it had been guns that unbalanced their bonded relationship; guns that had, as he thought, given his brother dominance over him in the eyes of the world. But it had been specifically the making of the big four-barreled howdahs, copied from a model filched by Tanner and carried into John Lodi's barn by Fayette himself, with a promise of fame and mutual profit if John would but turn his skilled hands to their making, that had caused the Lodis to flee Kentucky. It was the weapon the big man carried—if indeed it was one of John's—that had wrenched away the remnants of Fayette's control over his brother, and that same weapon, he suddenly thought, watching the crosshatched grip rise and fall with the man's movement, that could return him his power.

“Good job! Fine job! Get on up here, fella, my Lord,” he shouted heartily at Mitchelltree as the man and the mule crested the rim. The threat in Fayette's voice was completely gone now; he might have been welcoming a beloved, long-absent friend. “That goddamn Indi'n—” he said, and moved quickly toward Mitchelltree and the still-skittery mule, with his right hand thrust forward as if to shake the man's hand. Not for a moment did his eyes sway from their hungry watch on the leather holster, and in the thoroughness of his self-absorption, in his complete lack of self-consciousness and the prodigious paucity of any ability within him to witness another human, he was ignorant of the directness of his gaze. Mitchelltree, on the other hand, had been alert to Fayette's lean-eyed scrutiny almost from the instant he himself had pulled the pistol, though he had no notion of its source or meaning. What he did know, from long, violent experience, was the fact that a white man's hungry eye on a black man's weapon was nothing but a killing of some sort getting ready to unfold. He ignored Fayette's out-thrust hand and eased the mule warily, quickly past him, keeping the dark flank between himself and the white man, making the move seem necessary, unintentional, until at last he stood a little above Fayette on the slant, his weight balanced, his hands free, the mule off to the side now and easy. Below the rim, a thick scuttling sound rustled in the winter weeds.