The Mercy Seat (65 page)

“Oh, for the love of—” Mitchelltree started, and then broke off. He turned his eyes to the north side of town, the far side of the railroad tracks, where the eyes of the townspeople were turned, focused on the new-looking flatbed wagon with two erect figures in it approaching in the distance.

“Jiminy Christmas. Here he comes again,” a voice said behind him. “Going to be fireworks this time, you hide and watch.”

“That ain't him, that's the other'n,” a second voice answered. “And one of them grown girls.”

There was silence in the street a moment as the people watched north along the road.

“No, sir. That's that wild one, sure as I'm standing. Marshal, you better get your prisoner back in the stable if you want him strung together in one piece when he goes before Parker. That boy's liable to tear him to pigfeed.”

“That ain't him, I tell you, it's the other one.”

“Which other one?”

“One got him calmed down.”

“Hunh. You want to call that calm. You hide and watch.”

“Y'all hush. Who's that coming behind 'em?”

And the eyes of the townspeople and the liveryman and the sheriff and the U.S. deputy marshal all squinted through the coming dusk and rising dust at the buckboard clattering along behind the wagon.

“That's that Waddy preacher driving. Man alive, he made good time.”

“What I tell you?” a voice whispered. “That's the oldest boy in that wagon. Look there, he's dressed common.”

“Tell you one thing, I never seen the like of that other'n, swooping around here like a old tom turkey in hat and spurs. I thought they never were going to get him calmed down enough to get him back in that wagon. I thought we were just bound to have another killing before evening.”

“Hnnnh. Ain't evening yet.”

“What I want to know, did that gun of Fate's disappear before that wild boy left or after?”

Silence a moment as the wagon neared the crossroad in front of the bank.

“Oooh, Lord,” someone breathed.

“That's not no grown girl, now. Is it?”

The three offspring of John Lodi did not look at the approaching vehicles but at their father, who stood with his head bowed, almost as if in prayer, so that he might not have to look at his dead brother; they did not see when the flatbed wagon, springs squeaking, box swaying, crossed the train tracks and came on, rolling to an easing stop a hundred feet above where the many denimed legs had shuffled and drawn closed in front of the body when the crowd saw, as one witness, that it was not one of the daughters in the wagon but the dead man's wife seated on the spring seat beside her red-eyed son.

“Somebody going to answer me that?” a voice hissed, insistent. “Anybody seen that four-barrel pistol since that wild one left?”

“Hush. Hush, now. That's his wife.”

The Reverend Harland Peevyhouse drew up his sagging dray behind the wagon, holding one hand toward the crowd, palm out, straight in front of him, in a sign either of halt or of benediction, and a tall shaggy-headed big-shouldered man with deepset brown eyes and a face lined with a great sadness and compassion climbed down from the buckboard and walked front to where the widow had one foot already on the hub, and reached a steadying hand up to help her climb down.

Caleb sat in the wagon, staring straight ahead, his mouth working. The preacher struggled to ease his considerable weight over the side of the buckboard as Jessie came wordlessly forward. She carried a shiny black patent-leather handbag snapped together in her two hands in front of her. She wore a new navy calico bonnet and a freshly starched white linen apron over her gray skirt. Her mouth was collapsed flat. The man with the sorrowful eyes followed a few steps behind her, his hat in his hands, his eyes averted from the place where the curtain of men's legs had drawn together. With the continuing approach of the widow, the curtain parted again, and Fayette's body was revealed in its grotesque distortion, for, despite the gentleness with which Mitchelltree had laid it back down, the examination had left the broken body more damaged. The head lay at a loose, impossible angle from the torso, the jelled blood welling from the neck and the sharded gash on the forehead; the right arm was twisted beneath, the left cocked peculiarly across the chest, and the half-opened eyes stared blindly at heaven, the mouth dumb and open, spilling blackness, like a ripped-open scarecrow, unstuffed and unstrung. The woman walked toward it as if it were no more than that: a lifeless replica of humanness, come undone.

When she drew within a few yards of her husband, the women on the mercantile porch began to ease slowly forward, their faces shadowed in buckram, as the townsmen drifted south along the street. The men settled at a comfortable distance near the hitching rail between the mercantile and the livery barn, close enough not to miss any words spoken, far enough to get out of the way if bullets began to fly. But the woman neither spoke nor pulled a derringer pistol from that patent-leather pocketbook to turn it on John Lodi, as more than a few of the men watching thought and muttered among themselves that she would. Rather she looked calm and still at her husband for only a moment, turned her eyes then, not to the brother-in-law, who stood with his hat on, head down, eyes not meeting eyes, but to the tall pretty sister with the bruise darkening her cheek, leaking its livid color from beneath the flour coating: the one, as Burden Mitchelltree instantly noted, who would have released her voice from beneath the clamps of her sister's fingers. He saw then, watching the strange yellow eyes of the elder as she stared at the woman, that both of John Lodi's daughters knew the source of, were privy and party to, the shot that had blown out their uncle's throat.

He'd known. Of course he'd known; the fact had simply not pushed through the cacophony of thoughts crowding the deputy's mind. The younger girl did not return her aunt's stare—not, Mitchelltree saw, because she refused it, as the father with his head bowed refused all eyes, but because her slate gaze was too occupied, the graygreen lights beneath the serge fringe now flicking sideways toward the townsmen on her left, now darting up to the townswomen on the porch, back around self-consciously to the men again, to see if they were watching her. Still the deputy waited—that age-old biding of time that was both his gift and his torment, for it was in near paralysis sometimes that he waited, caught by that unrelenting need to weigh and balance and figure, as if, could he only know more facts, perceive a situation from more angles, he might in some way comprehend the incomprehensible, control what was entirely out of his hands. Just so Burd Mitchelltree tarried, watching from beneath his quiescent surface, waiting for the players to act.

A wiry auburn-headed boy in a red knit cap, with the same fierce expression and clear blue eyes as his father, sidled up and stood at John Lodi's elbow, but J. G. Dayberry did not growl at his son Grady to go home. The livery owner stood with a gnarled clutch of knuckles twined in the mare's halter, the other hand on her yellowed muzzle, his scowling gaze focused protectively on his employee, standing slump-shouldered, head bowed, off to the left and a little in front of him. The Reverend Peevyhouse, alighted from the buckboard now, came waddling toward Jessie, dabbing behind his round spectacles with a white handkerchief, but the man with the sorrowful eyes took a step backwards, reached a lanky arm out to the minister to keep him from going any farther, so that they stood then a few feet behind the widow, each on either side of her, connected by Otis Skeen's staying arm. Angus Alford, his thumbs hooked in the galluses of his overalls, detached himself from the clutch of townsmen beside the hitching rail and moved up to where he could see better, and in a bit Field Tatum stepped down off the mercantile porch, edged slowly forward, the bonneted women following, whispering, behind him, as the town, entirely unconscious of itself, moved slowly to re-form its loose circle, its great misshapen hoop, with the Lodi children, their father and dead uncle and their aunt, with her calm eyes, in the middle.

The town grew silent, listening: no longer did it murmur its soft chorus of gossip and judgment. Particulate selves melded into the whole, as individuals may lose self in a gathering of souls come together to commit violence, or to worship. The town of Cedar was joined to bear witness to that which no individual could have preserved: the whole forged as one to give testament to what none outside the closed shell of the family, facing itself within that gathered circle, understood.

In the purpling twilight, in the center of the circle, the woman looked at the brother who had killed his brother, and beyond him to the three offspring who stood linked together behind him, blood of his blood; blood of her husband's blood, and her children's. She held herself in that calm stillness as if this were no more than she expected, accepted; as if she'd known her whole life that each breath and heartbeat within the cage of her chest would lead to this moment, no more escapable than the truth that one day those very breaths and heartbeats would quit. The distant argument of jays on the creekbank was silenced by dusk's coming; the nightbirds had not yet begun to call. In the quiet of the town's watching, Jessie stood, her face shadowed by the navy bonnet so that only those nearest and in front of her saw the change coming. As those few watched, the calm stillness began to depart from her, and what settled over her expression was even then beyond the unified mind of the town to comprehend. Never did she take her eyes from the children, and now Jonaphrene's fidgety gaze held steady, looking back at her, as Matt looked at her, and the boy Thomas, watching her, and yet the woman knew they did not perceive what she remembered, unwilling, in that moment: that she had wordlessly, four hours earlier, handed the carbine rifle to her niece, knowing, even then, what would come next.

Slowly, John Lodi raised his head. His eyes—the shape and cast of his eldest daughter's, the ungraspable color of the younger's, and none like, none like the guiltless pallor of his son's—met the woman's. They stood a long time, forever, eternity; stood no longer than the pulse of one heartbeat, one breath, recognizing each other: each knowing the other and the whole, all that had happened, not in the details of bullets and barrels and who had fired in the moment of killing, but that truth beyond particulars as it was made manifest in themselves and their children: that law which says we shall tear down in the same portion with which we forge and hone and make; and the second law, its equal: the old baffling determinant whose truth is that we have been given power to destroy life yet not to create it—but only to act as the vessel for it, a little while, sometimes. Jessie's eyes went to the children again. They stood tightly bound, the strange boy on one side, the awkwardly beautiful younger girl on the other, her lips silent now, subsumed to the will of her sister, and in the middle, her thin arms tight around each of them, the eldest: small, wizened, unmercifully strong—and yet her eyes as empty as they'd been when she lay curled, hollow, on the pallet years before. As she looked at the children, and remembered, Jessie's chapped knuckles began to whiten against the clasped pocketbook.

In the street, as the town watched, the woman began to tremble, her slatted bones heaving beneath the shirtwaist as if she could not get her breath—in wrath, the town thought; in an outraged paroxysm of grief. Only Otis Skeen, whose gift and curse had been compassion, saw, in the trembling slope of the woman's shoulders, in the knotted bones beneath the gray cotton on her back, that it was not rage, not personal loss or sorrow that made her tremble so, but a terrible, hopeless grief at humankind's ruthless paltriness on this earth—and her part in it. Her terrible part in it. Jessie turned away from the children and began to walk toward her husband's body. With each step she seemed to sink lower, as if she were melting, as if the thin legs beneath the gray skirt were dissolving into the earth. Within four steps she was on her knees; with the next gesture of propelling herself forward, she sprawled flat on the ground, the shiny patent-leather purse caught beneath the white apron as her arms stretched, her hands opened, closed again, clutching her husband's legs.

“Ma!” Caleb leapt from the wagon, covered the distance in a few bootclops to bend over his mother, saying, “Ma! Mama! Ma!” And he put his arms across his mother's arms, his hands on her hands, his head lifted, saying, “Ma! Ma! Ma!” like a distressed crow cawing, and after a breath, “Mama!” and then, again, “Ma! Ma!”

The town, its eyes on the prone woman and son sprawled over the body, was silent a moment longer—only a moment, but long enough for Burden Mitchelltree, seeing the man's shoulders heaving, to hear the working out of the sound. It came hard and deep at first, from a place unused, frozen inside him, barking into the air in short hard chops, as of an axe breaking ice. John Lodi was not bound, and yet he stood with his hands clasped at the wrists, his feet together, as though both were shackled. The great shoulders heaved with each chopping sound. And then the barks began to run together, rose from the frozen chest and spilled from the throat in harsh, dry shudders, the sobs of a drunkard on his knees in the garden, but still John Lodi stood upright in the street, hands and feet together, as if he were powerless to move. The blond boy began to sob. Beside his sisters, joined without expression in the violet dusk, in his new felt hat and ragged suspenders, the boy sobbed in the manner of the father, tearless, shoulders shaking, hands and feet together. The town began to move again, and softly murmur, the circle drawing tighter, while the son Caleb went on cawing in the twilight, “Ma!... Ma!... Ma!... Ma!”

T
he descent is quick from the bony blue ridges of the Sans Bois to The descent is quick from the bony blue ridges of the Sans Bois to the open prairies in the heart of Oklahoma—quick, and yet gentle, for the Sans Bois are the most northern of the great Ouachita Mountains, and they long earthward toward the sweep of plains from which they arose. A rider on horseback can travel north from the hidden caves and rock ledges of the Sans Bois, winding down in a slow, sloping decline, and within no more than a few hours find the surrounding land gently rolling, the horizon arcing away above a sea of goldentop grasses. It is hardly thirty miles from the deep mysteries of the Fourche Maline creek bottoms to the broad, meandering sand banks of the Canadian River crawling west to east across the prairie, where lone sandstone bluffs rise above the grasses and the few trees are of the short, clawed variety: blackjack and shinnery; where the ocher earth begins to darken, taking on the rusty hues that will deepen to blood red farther north and west along the ruddy waters of the Cimarron and the Deep Fork.