The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page A

it.” She touched my hair again. I knew it was coming then, and I held my breath.
    I had held it, this secret hope and fear, ever since I heard Papa say it that night from my bed in the wagon. Sometimes I dreamed it. I saw me sitting in the seat of the wagon, holding the mules tight in the traces, driving, driving forever back over that land that had unrolled behind us, back down out of the mountains and across the great flat place and the river, east toward the rising sun for a long ways and then, when it was time, and I would know when it was time, turning north again, traveling days, cooking nights, me taking Mama back home. I could feel something coming, and I believed we were leading up to it, there on that morning with the heat rising and the black flies and locusts and the quiet and the children gone. I thought, Today is the day she will tell me.
    But Mama pulled her hand away and passed it over her eyes. “He thinks—” she said, her voice strong now, and urgent, but it was not to me she was talking, I only the same to her as a black fly or locust, I not then even there for a witness. “He thinks he can appease me with fences and tree stumps and wild violets planted in a clearing. He thinks . . .” She stopped again, staring, and the necessity drained slowly out of her face. She was quiet a long time, and then she said, and this to me, this direct to me but rising weak, like a halfhearted question, “I was married . . . in a dress . . . of white linen . . . ?”
    She leaned back and closed her eyes, her one hand in the place where it lived in a fist against her chest, her other hand brown and limp in her lap. I heard the baby Lyda crying in the lean-to. I knew she had been crying a long time. Mama opened her eyes, wet and milky blue, and she looked down at me. “Honey?” she said. “You know it? I’m never going to see my mama again. I’m never going to see Kentucky. I’m never going to see my home.”
    There was a noise then. A great thrashing and yelling, like when Papa and Uncle Fayette had their knockdown-dragout, only it did not rise from the clearing around us but fumbled and smashed toward us from the deep brushy woods. Louder, and coming louder, until at last Papa crashed into the clearing, with the dogs and the man Misely holding Papa’s gun and a dozen blond Misely children and our children whirling alongside him, the dogs barking and jumping and Jonaphrene and Little Jim Dee hollering and jumping, and Thomas waking up on his pallet under the pine tree to join his wailing voice with Lyda bawling in the lean-to, and Mama’s grief drowning in it, disappearing in it like a dead leaf sucked in a whirlpool, because Papa held in his two hands, above the leaping mouths and fingers, the cut and bloodied head of a bear. My papa was grinning. Blood dripped in small plops onto the rock dirt of the clearing.
    â€œLook here, wife,” Papa said. “You nearly lost a husband on this day, did you know it?”
    And Mama, she did look, I know she did look. But she looked in that moment like Grandma Billie. Her eyes empty circles.
    I had no warning. When the memory first started, I only saw Grandma’s face toward us. Her dress thin like summer. Her eyes empty, rolled up, looking after, on the morning it would not turn morning. But there in the clearing, in the midst of the yipping and yapping and hollering and snapping, the mystery came on me for the first time, and the remembering went dark. I could not see then, only listen, because Grandma Billie couldn’t see us leaving Kentucky forever, but she could hear us: all seven of our family in the wagon, and the new baby crying, Papa’s tongue clicking, his voice —hyah!— the mad rooster crowing, wheels creaking, the mules going thud in the dirt roadbed where their feet fell and Uncle Fayette’s horses even on the hard dirt going clopclop, and Mama, my mama, making that sound like