The Mercy Seat (48 page)

I looked back at John Lodi. He didn't appear to act like he even knew I was there, just went on about his business, and I had the strangest sensation. I felt like I was crazy. Like I hadn't seen what I'd seen. I hoped I hadn't seen it, because it was murder I'd seen in that man's eyes. I knew it. I didn't know a name for it, but I felt it in every inch of my being: that man'd as soon choke me as look at me. But yet this was John Lodi here, standing at his anvil. I'd give up being afraid of him weeks back. I guess you'd say I was a little taken with him—you know how a boy'll make a hero out of somebody. Seemed like he could do so much more than my dad. I thought we were pardners, you know, and I didn't know what to do. My heart was bleating in my throat. In a bit he glanced back over at me—I was still standing there; I was too paralyzed to move, to blink hardly—and he said, “Come back this evening, son.” He kindly rolled a look toward the other side yonder and back at me, like they was some kind of a new secret between us, picked up his hammer again.

I didn't go back that evening. I don't know how long it was before I went back. Not too long, I imagine, because that livery stable was about the center of my life, for one thing. Not to mention that empty muzzle loader carried considerable more weight than a look on a man's face I thought I'd seen but wasn't sure I'd seen and finally made up my mind I hadn't seen because nobody else acted like they knew anything about it, including Lodi himself. I guess I needed to make my mind up that way. The very idea of it disappeared until a long time later, when I got to trying to fathom what my dad meant. You know how a little fella's memory will do. I convinced myself I hadn't witnessed John Lodi's eyes blacken down cold under them eyebrows. For a little while around there, though, I was nearly sick. I remember that part. I just felt a hundred percent alone, because my mind wouldn't let me forget it. I'd go back over it and over it: had I seen him look thataway or did I just think it? There wasn't anybody I would talk to about it, not even Clyde or my mother. I don't know how to explain it to you, but I just felt like I was wrong. I wasn't supposed to know it and I didn't want to know it, and somehow knowing it made me a party to it. I was sick to my stomach that John Lodi wasn't what I'd cracked him up to be. And then I just made up my mind to forget all about it, and I did.

I
heard it like this. Heard the one brother came horseback from up around Latham or Sans Bois or somewhere, wherever they homesteaded. The two of them lived together, is how I heard it, just one right on top of the other and their children as well, and now, why, I don't know. Way too much land in this country for people to be living on top of each other, but I heard these two brothers did, and the one had a job of work at a livery over at Cedar and the other was a gunsmith deluxe or something up around where they lived, and made a pile of money off it too, from what I heard. So money was no doubt at the core of it unless it was a woman, but I never heard anything about that. There was bad blood between them anyhow, and I expect it went way back. Usually does, from all I've ever seen. So these two brothers were feuding and their youngsters as well, or this is how I heard it—it's an old story around here, folks have told it for years—and the one brother rode horseback down to Cedar one morning.

They tell me he was unarmed. Now, a man just didn't go around without a weapon hardly back then. Never mind outlaws and thievery and whatever else you might run into, there were still plenty panthers in these mountains then, and they weren't shy to tell. This is mean country, has been ever since the white man came in here, and still yet to this day these hills are crawling with snakes and ticks and chiggers, stinging scorpions, tarantulas, poison centipedes as long as your arm. They didn't have so many ticks back then, but you can't shoot a tick anyhow, but what they did have was plenty of game, plenty of God's poison scourges, plenty of outlaws and Indians. A man had to be armed. There were wolves and bears and rattlers, not to mention you had to cross these old slow muddy waters horseback without benefit of a bridge, and these creeks have always been roiling with cottonmouths. You might happen across dinner under a six-point rack standing right in your path, and if you didn't meet dinner, you might meet your Maker in the form of a horsethief or any sort of old run-of-the-mill scoundrel. So a man just did not go around without a gun then, not to travel he didn't, excepting only one reason, and that'd be to lay down on his back like a dog and give up.

So I heard this one rode up in public, right out in broad daylight on Main Street, is how they tell it, and they say he called his brother out. This fellow wasn't armed, but he called his brother out the same as if he meant to fight him. Clearly he didn't expect his own brother to kill him, but now he sure did. Whatever bad blood it was between them must've been something awful, because, how I heard it, the one brother came out of the livery carrying an old pepperbox or some such contraption, and the other put his hands up in the air, put them up just like this. Said, I don't aim to do anything but just talk, Brother, I only come here to talk.

Well, the one put his gun down loose like he didn't intend to do anything but just hold it, and they stood awhile and talked. Then the one that had ridden down from Latham or Bokoshe or wherever it was, turned around and started to mount, had his foot in the stirrup and his back to his brother, and now I heard the brother raised that old eight-barreled pistol without a hi or a word of warning and shot the man in the back. Shot him down like a dog, he didn't have one chance in the world, that just how folks tell it. And now would you believe it? That man never spent a night in jail. They tell me Cedar's one town in Oklahoma you can shoot a man down in broad daylight on Main Street and never see the inside of a cell.

I know there's some folks need killing—some men are so sorry you can't do a thing with them but just put them out of their misery—but I don't care how sorry a fellow is, you don't shoot an unarmed man in the back. I don't care what. This wasn't any little pallid shootout; I guess that's why folks are still so apt to tell it. They tell me the one brother that did the killing was so eaten up with hatred he walked up to where that fellow was squirming dying on the ground and rolled him over with his boot toe, put them eight barrels right up against his brother's forehead and blew the top of his head off. Gunned him down unarmed like a dog and sauntered up to finish his work, and I guess the folks at Cedar just swarmed around and slapped him on the back.

I
t was Brother Harland Peevyhouse who brought the word back to Big Waddy. I don't know what he was doing in Cedar in the buckboard that morning, waiting on the train from Wister maybe, but he must have been johnny-on-the-spot, because Otis said Mr. Lodi was not even good and stiff yet when he and the pastor raced back down there. He'd come directly to our house, Brother Peevyhouse had—didn't even pause in town, though there were men lolling at the hitching post in front of Lodi's store and I'm sure Jessie was there in the back—but he raced right on out here to our house, and you know, at the time I never questioned why. People just depended on Otis that way.

I stood on the side porch and watched the pastor's buckboard clatter around the curve and on through town in a cloud of dust like a storm coming, and I thought to myself, Well, my stars. Brother Peevyhouse was always what you might call on the excitable side, but I had never seen him in such a state. He lashed that poor old dray up the incline and into my cleanswept yard, which I hadn't ten minutes before finished sweeping, jerked him up tight with the reins just shy of the porch ledge there, and then sat leaning over the dashboard with his hand to his chest, trying to catch his breath as if it'd been him running and not that poor soapy creature he was driving. Otis was in the field, naturally—it was, I don't remember, maybe two or three o'clock in the afternoon; pretty well after dinner anyway—and I knew something big had happened, though I wouldn't have dreamed it was a tragedy. I thought maybe they'd finally pushed through statehood or something. I couldn't tell. But then the pastor caught his breath at last, and he practically shouted at me, “Where's Brother Skeen!”

I believe I was so taken aback I didn't even answer but just nodded my head toward the south field where Otis was plowing, and the pastor said, “Run out chonder and tell him to come quick. You come on too, Mizrus Lodi's going to be in need of female company.”

I said, “Mrs. Lodi?” because it took me a minute to think who he was talking about. I'd never heard her called anything but Jessie, though we all called her husband Mr. Lodi, or anyhow I did.

He said, “Oh, Lord yes, Lord have mercy, John Lodi has just kilt her husband, shotgunned him to death on the streets of Cedar, Lord have mercy on this godless territory and the poor souls wretched enough to live in it.”

I said, “John Lodi shot Mr. Lodi? Fate Lodi?”

And the pastor took off his little rimless glasses and wiped tears from his little eyes and raised them to heaven, or his hat brim anyway, and said prayerfully, “Kilt him dead as a lick log.”

Those were very few words, coming from that preacher, and then he was quiet a minute, which was even odder, because he was one minister I certainly never saw at a loss for words. He sat in the buckboard looking skyward, weeping and shaking his head. Brother Peevyhouse hadn't been among us much more than a year at that time, and I suppose a killing on Main Street was something of a wonder to him, same as the Indians were marvels to him still. He'd come from Little Rock to save Indians, and I think he just never could get over there being so many Indian Baptists already, couldn't get over them having their own church with their own preacher preaching the gospel in Choctaw, and he would just shake his head over it while he skulked around the churchhouse at Yonubby when the Indians piled in for their all-day camp meeting and dinner on the ground. I believe he mistrusted the gospel in Choctaw. I think he had the idea that Brother Coley was preaching some hidden heathen doctrine from that Choctaw Bible. Brother Peevyhouse had had to settle for our little white congregation here at Big Waddy when he'd come to Indian Territory to save savages, and I think that might have troubled his mind some. I always laid much of Brother Peevyhouse's emotional nature off onto his disappointment over that.

So I can't say I was surprised to see him weeping in the buckboard over a murder, but I do remember being surprised that it was John Lodi who'd shot Lafayette, because if anybody had ever told me it was going to come to a killing between those two, I'd have surely said it would be the other way around. All at once the urgency came on Brother Peevyhouse again, and he put his glasses back on and twined them behind his ears, shouting, “Run fetch your husband, Miz Skeen, y'all come on quick!”

I thought to myself, Now, Pastor, where's your hurry? There's plenty time to lay the man out; nobody's going to try to raise Fate Lodi from the dead. If anybody needed killing in these parts, it was that one. And then I got ahold of myself. Sometimes my mind is just so wicked. I said a quick prayer for forgiveness and to please, Lord, bind my wicked tongue, which He's seen fit for the most part to allow me to hold silent in public in the years since I married Otis, but these bad thoughts He has never removed from my thinking to this day. So I didn't say anything, thank goodness, but just reached in the house for my bonnet and strapped it on, told Brother Peevyhouse to help himself to the water bucket if he cared to. I'd just drawn it fresh and set it on the porch, ready to take a drink to Otis. I scooped a dipperful and came down off the porch and walked out toward the field.

It was so strange how that killing worked on me, stepping with the filled dipper up and down over the furrows toward my husband. It was a drouthy spring that year, and the earth was hard as drypan and rocky as seven evils—this was just never easy farming country, never will be if a man carried a thousand rocks an acre out of these fields—and Otis had already busted two plowpoints trying to break it open. He was plowing along the creekline, making that swoop of
S
yonder —well, you can't see it now, the brush has grown up, but that's where he was, way off there. And I went, hollering. Well, just a little at first, calling him, hallooing him, but then the farther I went, the more that news worked on me, and the more it worked, the faster I stumbled, sloshing that little bit of well-water on the cracked rows—it would just turn black and sink in a second; by the time I reached Otis there wasn't a thimbleful of water in the bottom of that dipper—and I just went faster and faster until I was nearly running, holding my dress in one hand and the tin stem of the dipper high out in front of me, hollering, “O-oh-t-i-is! O-oh-t-i-is!”

Well, he never heard me, not for the longest. I could see him behind that old coal-colored mule we had then, which as a matter of fact we'd bought off Mr. Lodi, and that worked on me too. I could see the back of my husband's shoulders bowed to the harness and the sweat in big stains turning black, and somehow I felt my heart was just going to crack. There was a terrible feeling in me that if it could happen to Fate Lodi, it could happen to Otis. Could happen to every one of us, and I don't mean simply death but violence—a killing death. Murder. Not sickness or accident or the hand of the Lord working His mysterious ways on us, but the intentional striking away of a man's life by the hand of another, and these words came to me:
unto one of these the least my brethren,
and of course that Scripture is not about the least worthy brethren getting shotgunned on Main Street but Christ saying,
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these the least my brethren, ye have done it unto me,
meaning charity, not murder. It made no more sense than a nursery rhyme for me to be thinking it, stumbling over that dunbrown field, but it sang in my head with no more control than I had over my wicked thoughts, and by the time I reached my husband, I was nearly hysterical.