The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew

was his mama and didn’t have the will to be with him, and Jonaphrene and Little Jim Dee were turning wild as red Comanches with nobody to look after them, and that’s how it was then, and I didn’t even know it or see it or think a thing about it.
    I look back now, I see how that time set everything in me. Set me and determined me the way next year’s peaches get set in the silent buds over winter. Oh, it’d been coming a long time, I know that, but it was those days that settled everything—only then I didn’t know. I was just thrilled my mama talked to me, she’d never talked to me in all my life. I was glad Papa called me Matt and cut his brown trousers off at the legs for me to wear to go blackberry picking and taught me to hunt. I was glad even, though I swatted his little hands and walked off from him, that my brother Thomas thought I was his mother in this world.
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    It was the last part of July—July the twenty-second—but it wasn’t so very hot yet on that morning because the sun had just climbed over the eastern rim. The dirt and leaves where I sat on the ground beside Mama were still damp. That’s how it was in those mountains. No matter how hot and dry in the daytime, at night the dew fell and the whole world got damp. Mama was stroking my hair with her left hand because her right hand now did not ever, not even when she nursed Lyda, my mother’s hand never left that squeezed-shut tight place between her breasts. Thomas and Lyda were sleeping. I didn’t know or even think about where Little Jim Dee and Jonaphrene were.
    â€œThe Billies,” Mama said, “came west into Kentucky from Virginia. There were seven brothers: James and Thomas and Oliver, William, Alexander, Obediah, called Bede, and your grandfather Cornelius, who died at Vicksburg in the War. That was Eighteen Sixty-three, which seems a long time ago to your young mind, but it is not long at all. I was fourteen when my father died, and he was thirty-nine. Now . . .” Mama’s skirt shifted, and her voice faltered, then she pulled her hand away from my hair. “Now,” she said, and her voice waxed strong again, “the Billies came to Kentucky in the year Eighteen Hundred and Forty, and that is where Cornelius Billie met your grandmother Mary Whitsun, who was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking peoples lives . . . Where . . . my mama was born . . .” Fading again. Faltering. Passing her hand down her face. Rising. “Born in London, England, in the year Eighteen Twenty-seven, and traveled with her parents and two sisters to the United States of America in . . . in Eighteen Thirty, settling first in Ohio and then in Logan County, Kentucky, where Mary Elizabeth Whitsun and Cornelius Billie were joined in holy matrimony in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Forty-eight. They had six progeny, and those were . . . those children were . . .” Mama’s voice trailed off into the sunlight and died there.
    â€œUncle Thomas,” I whispered. I could feel the heat coming. “Uncle Neeley, Aunt Lizbeth, Aunt Minnie . . .”
    But Mama wasn’t listening. She was staring across the yard clearing to the pine brush on the other side. “When I was your age—” she started. She stopped again. Black flies whipped the air around us. Locusts whined in the hot trees. Mama stared at the brush, where there was nothing, her breath quick and urgent, as if she chased it, chased it, and could not catch and hold it.
    I watched Mama’s face. Her skin was brown and freckled now, like the tan spotted eggs Papa found in a ground nest one time and brought in for me to cook. Back home, in Logan County, my mama’s skin had been pale as milk. “I don’t aim,” Mama said, squinting, “to raise my daughters in a place full of nothing but men and red heathen savages. I don’t by any means intend to do