The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew

by the loggers down in Booneville, said it was a good road, said loggers always sighted the best way to go. He lashed his horses and hyahed them because they did not want to climb. Papa said nothing, not the first day or second, nor later, growing each day more silent, but he did not whip his mules. Everywhere were great stumps of trees like fire corpses, until they began to dwindle and mix in with living trees tall as God, I thought then, and then the stumps disappeared and the mountains closed thick with woods and insects.
    Dark dropped quicker because of the hillsides. Morning came later. Evenings after we’d camped I would sit for hours in shadow and watch the twilight stretch blue and starless, lingering late, high above. I knew the days were getting longer, were supposed to be getting longer, because it was well into spring then, almost summer, but I couldn’t feel the sun coming back to us in those mountains at all. The climb grew steeper, and each time we crested, all we could see before us were more mountains rolling dark blue into skyhaze to the south. We never came up over a hogback like Uncle Fayette said we would, to ease down again to a smooth valley and turn west. Each day we went slower. Each day my mama was paler. Each night Uncle Fayette’s mouth got worse.
    It started out him talking about Mama. He never said a word directly to her or to anyone, but spoke soft straight ahead while he jabbed the fire. Said he’d heard of some kind of weak-minded women scared of their own shadow, some kind of lily women—and this is how he called it, meaning only our Mama—scared of Injins in Eye Tee, scared of a little ole biddy copperhead snake. He would talk like that, poking the fire, not saying it directly to anyone but muttering in his beard for the whole world to hear, especially Papa. I’d see him cut his eyes at Papa all the time. Sometimes he’d get up and go off awhile in the dark behind the wagons, and when he came back to the fire again, his blue eyes would glitter and his voice would be loud. Yessir, these lily women, he’d say, poking the ashes, They ain’t no kind of pioneer women. Ain’t the same stock the Lodis come from. Scared of some pitiful old Injins getting fat in Eye Tee. Scared of a garter snake, he reckoned. Scared of a June bug squallylegged on its back. He’d heard that, Uncle Fay would mutter, and then he’d shake his head and turn his face away from the fire to spit.
    When he talked about the Injins in Eye Tee, Aunt Jessie would call little Pearline to her and stroke her scrawny head and lift her own head, looking brave, I guess she thought it, like she wasn’t afraid of anything on God’s earth or under it, including red heathen savages. I would get so mad then, just furious, because I knew Mama was afraid of Indians, because I was, and I would call Thomas to me and rub his head and lift my own face brave and courageous to the dark outside the circle of light from the fire, and it was all a lie. I was a fake in my heart, both then and later, because I finally understood that Eye Tee meant Indians, and at night in the wagon I pulled my feet up and tucked my knees tight under my chin so that Thomas beside me got nothing but hard bone to rest against, because I was afraid the Injins would sneak around the wagon and chop off my feet while I slept. Injins and Eye Tee and the darkness in those mountains were all the same to me then.
    The road thinned, became a hard rutted track growing thinner and thinner, until it was two faint rails fading to nothing beside a little trickling creek in the high cleft of those mountains. We stopped and camped in the early part of the afternoon, though the light was still good, but the road was fading. The two tracks went down and disappeared like a ghost road into dark pine woods below the clearing, you could not see where they went, and it was there in that clearing that Papa and Uncle Fayette had their