The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page B

help him.
    That night Uncle Fayette picked up a stone, gnawed it like a corn ear, tossed it off into the darkness. “Corn don’t grow on rock,” he said.
    Papa said nothing.
    â€œSome folks are fools,” Uncle Fay said. He picked up his green pine stick to poke the fire with. “Some folks are fools for a woman, some are just jackasses in general, I reckon.” Poking, talking loud. “Can’t see it matters much, seeing as we’re all going to starve like dogs anyhow. Seeing as there might be enough cornmeal and grits left to get us to Eye Tee.” Jabbing like the fire itself was Eye Tee. “Ain’t enough to wait for some lily woman to get some gumption about her. Ain’t enough to wait for planting.” Gold sparks whirling, spinning skyward to disappear in the dark. “Provided it’d do any good to wait for planting to start with, seeing as what mule-killing land I seen around here ain’t going to yield a crop worth pulling nohow, which any fool ought to be able to see.” Jab the flames. Spit. “Any fool but a blind ignorant jackass fool like God seen fit to give me for a baby brother.”
    And Papa quiet such a long time, through all of it, letting Uncle Fayette go on and say it, how we’d all (jab), every last one (jab) of us Lo-dyes (jab jab), flat starve to death (jab) there in Ar-kan-saw (jab jab jab). We’d flat (jab) well (jab) never make it to Eye Tee (jab jab), where the pickins was so easy. Spit. And on and on, jabbing, bits of fire swirling, that same night, that worst night, when Mama did not go to lie down in the back of the wagon but sat with us in the circle of firelight with the baby Lyda upon her lap and Uncle Fayette raving on about Eye Tee, where there was no law but Injin law which was no law, and Eye Tee, where Papa could make his guns, wouldn’t nobody threaten to flay the hide off him and then shoot his skint corpse over a blame gun patent in Eye Tee, where it was good land, milk and honey land, you could take it slick, like plucking apples from the roadside, like picking persimmons, just over the next ridge and so-many miles west, to Eye Tee, where Uncle Fayette had it all mapped out for us to live.
    And Papa quiet for just a little while longer. Then he said, his voice level, soft nearly, looking at him, “Yes, Brother, you have a way of mapping things out for all of us pretty damn good.”
    Then they were both quiet and it was just the fire snapping and the peepers peeping on the black creekbank, for it was already that late in the season, and then the two of them at once rose up together from opposite sides of the fire and clashed together like goats butting. They fought all over the cleared space between the two wagons, with the children crying and the cousins shouting and Aunt Jessie screaming and the dogs barking and Mama saying soft, No, John, No, John, No, John, like he could even hear her over that yelling and yapping and him and Uncle Fayette grunting, and me, I’m probably the only one who heard Mama because I was standing beside her from the moment Papa and Uncle Fayette rose up in silence, butting.
    While it was going on it seemed to go on forever, and then when it was over I couldn’t believe it was over so quick. Before I could realize it, Papa was on his back in the dirt, winded, with his shirt bloody, holding a hand up, palm open, in the air.
    To this day I believe he let Uncle Fay lick him. I know he did. He had to, because Fayette was never big in his back and shoulders like Papa, he never had the same strength in his arms. He couldn’t swing a sledgehammer like Papa or carry a deer on his neck from the deer woods nor in any way hold a candle to Papa, because my papa in those days was strong.
    The next morning at first light when I got up to start breakfast, Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins were gone. They’d left in the middle of the night, the same way we’d