Free The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page A

“Don’t start on Fay.”
    â€œStart,” Mama said. “Start?” And I heard her move in the bedclothes and a little harsh breath sound from her, though I did not know if it was a half-laugh or half-cry, and then her voice came back with the same wiredrawn fury. “They’re hungry, John! Your children are hungry and you don’t see it, they’re turning wild, and you don’t see that either. Look at Jonaphrene! Look at her hair snarled a rat’s nest full of cockleburs! Your son spins around like a tongue-talker, you can’t make him sit still one minute or do a lick of work, Mattie’s turning into some kind of pinched-up little hull of I-don’t-know-what. Look at her! Look at your daughter. She hasn’t got an ounce of meat on her, she runs around here on spit and spite, lugging that baby and worrying the rest of them to death trying to boss them, the baby can’t walk nor talk right, he’s going on two years old, John, his legs bowed out like elb—”
    â€œWhose fault is that?”
    â€œWhose fault what? Tommy’s bones too soft to carry him because you let our cow die?”
    â€œThat your firstborn has to be mother to your children.”
    â€œWhose—?” Mama’s voice so high and frail it could be a wisp rising through the shingles. “Whose fault but yours— to carry us—carry us off from our home— to live like the very heathen of the earth—”
    â€œYou’re my wife. I didn’t put you in no tow sack.”
    â€œYours and your foul-mouthed brother with his big ideas, his big talk—”
    And then I did hear it. The muffled sound again. Like Sudie’s pups. I lay stiff and quiet, not breathing for sure now, waiting. Trying to hear. Blood beat in my chest, my ear on the pillow. Jonaphrene coughed, and I reached over and pinched her. She said No!, still asleep, and kicked me. I put my hand on her back, firm, and in a bit she got quiet. But still I couldn’t hear them. I stayed awake long after my parents’ voices went silent, long after I heard Papa snoring. Stayed awake listening, for what could never be heard or said anyhow, holding my legs safe from the Indians, quiet, hardly breathing.
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    From that night there grew to be an edge in Papa, a jagged rough thing like the ridges all around us, and it was worse in him, and different, from his hard voice on the porch steps with Grandpa Lodi and Uncle Big Jim Dee, worse even than his face coming through the ice. He was short with me and the children—especially Little Jim Dee, it got to where he stayed on Little Jim Dee all the time—and then he’d jump all over any of us for being too loud around Mama. He worked fiercer and harder than ever I saw him, long before daylight, long, long after dark. He would grunt and move and sweat and not talk, but you could hear it in him, like breathing, like the sweat dripping from him: More work could work off the trouble. More work could wear away that look upon Mama.
    But more work could not do it. Our mama got worse.
    It wasn’t that she got weak again, exactly, but more like she fell back and began to disappear inside her own mind. She sat all day in the sun, like before, alone with the baby on her tree stump. She quit pretending to work, quit watching Papa, quit the rest of us. Her eyes turned more and more inward, to herself—and down, in her lap, to Lyda, the last baby. Her fist went back tight to her chest.
    And Papa just kept working. He couldn’t see that each touch he tried only made Mama fall back farther. It was such a ferocious thing in him. He wouldn’t get finished with one idea for that camp before he’d start in on another, and all of it to make it look like the homeplace, and none of it, none of it could do what he wanted. I could see it, but I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop her disappearing and I couldn’t stop Papa, and so