The Mercy Seat (66 page)

Here, to this prairie landscape, the remains of John Lodi's family came and settled in late summer, 1896, taking up residence in a Creek freedman's abandoned cabin a half mile north of the salmon-and-buff-colored sands of the Canadian. They never returned to the log house at Big Waddy Crossing, for there was nothing to retrieve there. Together they traveled in a buckboard borrowed from J. G. Dayberry, directly from the hearing at the Central District Court at South McAlester to the town of Eufaula in Creek Nation, where John Lodi entered first the feed supply and then the local livery stable to purchase with his last earned dollars a used turning plow and a mule.

The court had ruled, based on the findings of the grand jury, which had been lullingly swayed by the testimony of Deputy U.S. Marshal Burden Mitchelltree, that the killing of Lafayette Lodi in the town of Cedar, I.T., in early March of that same year, had been a case of justifiable homicide. According to the deputy's interpretation of the evidence, the deceased had been in the process of reaching toward his saddle for a tremendous twelve-barrel volleygun he had strapped there, for the clear purpose of murdering the defendant, and although in the court's opinion there was an unsatisfactory amount of contradictory testimony, and though there was a great deal of suspicious whispering in the crowded gallery and a strange resistance on the part of the widow to testify against her brother-in-law, nevertheless the jury found that there was insufficient evidence to hang the man, and the court, unwillingly, ruled the killing self-defense. The accused himself never took the stand.

John Lodi, in fact, took no part in the proceedings whatsoever, but sat with his hands folded on the polished oak table before him, silent, throughout the hearing, and when it was finished, he gave no indication of gladness or relief. He merely stood, looked to his eldest daughter, seated with her siblings on the hardback bench in the front row, and walked out of the hearing room with his offspring trailing an odd, formal tail behind. They climbed at once into the waiting buckboard without a nod, without so much as a satisfying glance at the little ragtag crowd of citizens who had traveled by wagon and horseback fifty or sixty miles from the communities of Cedar and Big Waddy Crossing to attend and bear witness to the end of the story. The Lodis left the mountains, disappeared from the lives of those communities—but never from their minds or memory—and traveled to the prairie country east of Eufaula, where the earth speaks with different voices, planted themselves in a cabin near the Canadian's changing sands.

John Lodi turned his skilled hands to the tasks of farming, and the loamy soil in the bottomlands of the Canadian River were rich for that purpose, but whatever wisdom or grace had once been in the tough palms and blunt fingers, those gifts had entirely disappeared now, and the plow would not plow straight, the chopping axe glanced off the gnarled jackoak, and the ears of corn, when the hands reached to pluck them, shriveled brown-kerneled and hard within the green shucks. Whatever task the man turned his hands to, fruitlessness spilled from it, and yet he did not quit. All human will had departed from him with the flight of his brother's soul from the broken body in the street at Cedar, and yet John Lodi had no power but to keep on in the motions of living until his own soul should do as the will had already done. It took seven years. The body is an incorrigible creature, driven to survive, sometimes, even in the loss of all hope.

As for the girl who had never become woman, his daughter, Matt Lodi, she survived, as the father survived, and her will and power increased in direct proportion to the loss of his own. She carried the other two with her, fed them on corn pone and goat's milk, directed their every breath. As the man shrank, growing smaller and older—incredibly frail and aged for his forty-odd years—even so, the daughter grew stronger, though no less wizened, but with a gristly, gnawed strength that allowed her to gather the others to herself and make them survive. It took so little to save them: shelter in the shape of a former slave's cabin, two porched rooms with a dogtrot between; chopped wood for warmth in winter; wild turkey, quail, and rabbit, and the fruits of the earth for their bellies, preserved for the length of the short winters from her memory of her mother's ways of canning and drying. The boy Thomas grew taller, put on weight, until he grew past his father's former size and began to soften to a shapeless bulk. Jonaphrene, too, began to soften, though not in the doughy manner of her brother, but with the rounding of the angular adolescent limbs into the softer forms of womanhood.

The hair rope hoop coiled, and coiled again, the seasons spiraling into years, into the unfolding of a new century, and little changed. Their lives were only lives now, hardly lived. In some way, for each of them, everything had ended on the dirt streets of Cedar. As John Lodi's gifts had disappeared from his able hands, so had Matt's gifts departed; no longer did she search in the darkened spaces behind her eyes but kept every particle of her being focused in the arid, sun-spun world, to the gathering of food, the filling of bellies, the making of crude wooden furniture: to the keeping of her family together in a hard-gritted penance, as if once, long ago, she had made a grievous mistake.

Twice a year she hitched the plow mule to a neighbor's borrowed wagon and drove the seventeen miles to Eufaula to trade for supplies. There were few goods that the family needed which could not be taken from the earth, but for those items—plow points, kerosene, turpentine, coffee—Matt grew a small patch of cotton; she carried two bales to the gin in autumn, saved back two bales to buy supplies in the spring. After the first season, Matt traveled alone to Eufaula, or accompanied only by her father, for she had seen how the bustling streets worked on her sister, how Jonaphrene would be stirred by the sight of white women in plumed hats and fine dresses, by the many rich odors, the sounds of jangling harnesses and the rumbling of the board sidewalks beneath the boots of men in broad-brimmed hats. Remembering the lost Jim Dee, Matt forbade her sister to go with them; she made Thomas, too, stay behind. The younger girl protested, but only faintly, and only for a short time. There was only one will in that household, Matt's will, and it determined all of the comings and goings, the days of planting and harvest and which day should be wash day and which hog-killing or canning, which morning the cotton-filled wagon should set out for Eufaula. This is why there were only the two of them, the father and the daughter, in the borrowed wagon traveling west on the old Briartown road toward Eufaula on the cold spring afternoon in 1902 when someone shot John Lodi in the back.

 

 

 

 

No one tells the story.

The daughter drove home with her father's body resting beside the bales of unginned cotton in the bed of the wagon, throughout the cold day and on into the evening. The sun sank winter-red and purple behind her, behind the bare reaching fingers of blackjacks low on the horizon, but Matt did not see it as she drove east, back over the wagonroad to the two-room cabin near the sandbed river, where her brother and sister waited. It was cold dark when she and her father arrived there. No official was notified, no death certificate issued. John Lodi's death was never listed as a murder in the annals of Indian Territory, never recorded in any way at all.

My first thanks go to my family for their abiding faith and support, in particular my parents, Paul and Carmelita Askew, who willingly answered at all hours all manner of questions about guns, cookstoves, ways of living and doing and talking; my husband, Paul Austin, who from the beginning has given me faith, freedom, keen-eyed criticism, and love; and, especially, my sister, Ruth Brelsford, who received these pages in daily missiles sent south and west from the mountains of New York to her home near Tulsa. She read with commitment, openheartedness, and tremendous forbearance, for she'd agreed to make no comment but only receive the story as it spun forward, and to her great credit, she asked no questions, made no judgments during the years of messy and tortuous creation. Her silent partnership is all through this work.

I'm deeply grateful to my agent, Jane Gelfman, whose enthusiasm and tenacious commitment are unparalleled, and whose gratifying first phone call will forever be the high point for me in this book's journey, and to my editor, Courtney Hodell, who read with probing intelligence and a deep comprehension of the work's intention; her contributions have without doubt helped to make a better book. Thanks, as well, to Jessica Treat for her skillful feedback and enduring friendship, to W. Roger Webb at Northeastern in Tahlequah for giving me the opportunity to come home and stay a while, and a special thank you to Ida Stallaby of Red Oak, Oklahoma, for sharing with me her language and her good company as she struggled, with great humor, across the gulf of two worlds and two tongues to help me understand The Word in Choctaw. Above all, my thanks to the Creator, for giving me this job.

 

—Rilla Askew