The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page A

knockdown-dragout fight.
    I know how they tell it now, Mildred and Pearline and them. I know they say Uncle Fay went on to prepare a place for Papa like Jesus going on to Heaven. I know they say the two of them made it up together, and it was all to protect Mama, but I was there, mind you. This is me here. Matt Lodi. I remember all of it. Every bit of it. Just this way.
    We were camped on someone else’s land, though we didn’t yet know it, and at first it was three days, and then four days, and soon it was a week, and then longer. Mama did not come out of the wagon except to eat a little bite in the evening, and then she’d go back with the baby and lie down. Uncle Fay didn’t even talk under his breath now but straight out, loud enough for Mama to hear from where she lay in the wagon. Loud enough for all of us. He’d put it like a question, like he was asking the ashes, and then he’d spit, the tobacco juice sizzling in the red underpart, Uncle Fay’s answer. What were we going to do for food when the supplies run out, did anybody reckon? Put in a crop on the rock side of a mountain with no sun? What were we going to live on till that lily woman got well, rocks and water? Spit then, and sizzle. Wasn’t but so-many miles fu’ther, just over the hogback and down again west, but no-sir, we got to sit and starve for a woman, he reckoned. Spit.
    Every night he said it, sitting on a tree stump, poke, poke, poking at the fire. I’ll never forget that, the image burned harder and brighter in my mind’s eye than those mountains: Uncle Fayette in his big hat with his pine stick jabbing every word from his brown mouth into the fire’s spark and ashes. His boys then, Caleb and Fowler, they’d act just like him, poking and spitting, though they knew better than to speak it, but Uncle Fay just kept on and on in a singsong about food and Mama, food and Mama, like it was food and Mama that landed us up there in those mountains with the road fading before us and nowhere to go but back down like we’d come, and my papa saying nothing, saying nothing, like he never heard him, till I thought I would scream or puke from rage, and I could not understand why Papa would not do something. But all he did was ignore Uncle Fay like he was deaf to him, or else Papa would just go off to hunt. Every dawn and dusk he went out, and when he’d get back and had finished cleaning whatever he’d shot—mostly squirrel, sometimes rabbit, one time a slick, stringy old coon—he’d put it down by the fire for me to cook and go over to the wagon to check the supplies bin. He’d look in the box at so-much cornmeal left, so-much beans, so-much molasses, and none of it enough, and he wouldn’t say a word about it but just turn away then to do some little piece of work. In the high part of day, Papa tended the animals or went off by himself and stayed gone for hours. At night he sat off away from the fire by the lantern and mended harness, sharpened tools, such niggling jobs as that.
    When we’d been camped for ten or twelve nights maybe, a man showed up one morning. He wasn’t an old man, I think now, but he looked old to me then, his skin washed out and wanly freckled and his hair where it curled out beneath his hat so pale it looked silver. He had great tufts of bright yellow hair growing out of his chest that stood up startled and met his reddish beard, and that was the only color upon him—that and his blue eyes—for even his clothes were washed out and pale. His voice was burred and lilting, and he scared me a little, but Papa was not scared. He went out behind the wagon with the man to the place where the woods were thinnest and squatted on the ground with him and talked for a long time. The next morning I woke up when I heard the sound of wood chopping. Papa never said a word to any of us but went to cutting trees, and in the afternoon he took Little Jim Dee to