Free The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page B

I just watched and tended Thomas and tried to make the children mind and be quiet and stay out of the way.
    Sometimes I helped him when Mama’s back was turned. I didn’t know then why I hid my helping from Mama, but I did and only worked with him when she was resting in the lean-to and Thomas was down on the pallet in the shade for his nap. Alone with Papa I worked hard. I pretended to believe the same as he did, that somehow we could make it right or please her or make time go backwards, though I knew in my heart we never could. Because the earth in that place was high and jagged and completely unyielding. Because it held back the sun. There was no house there, no graves there, we’d left the pie-safe and the chifforobe. It wasn’t Kentucky. But I went on and helped him, Lord help me, in secret, even though it was melting my mama. I was young then. I was ten then. I didn’t understand.
    Well, you know then my mama saw me.
    I remember it. How she stood in the arc of the lean-to, holding the ragged pink blanket to the side. I don’t know what woke her up. She stood there, one half of her, half her face, in shadow. Looking at me and Papa. No. Not Papa. Only me. There. Where I crouched with my hands on the great wedge Papa used for a chisel, keeping it steady for Papa while he carved out a new seat stump. Stood a long time, still and quiet, just looking. Then she turned slow and went back and disappeared in the dark inside the lean-to.
    So that was when the last change began.
    It wasn’t something sudden you could see in one minute—no more than there’d been an earth mark in winter that said Now You Are Gone From Kentucky; no more than there’d been one moment when she’d known, and so I’d known, that Papa was trying to shape the old homeplace out of those mountains—it was just change slow and gradual, growing in her the same as the green crops were creeping up slow out of the earth. For a time I don’t think anybody knew it but me and Mama.
    It started that she kept me with her. Where for months she had sent me off with the children to keep them quiet and away for her, now she’d call me if I was away from her doing something, no matter if it was chores or cooking that had to get done. She’d ask me to get her a cool drink of water. She’d let me brush her hair. She still couldn’t abide the children, even Thomas, but she held Lyda and nursed her and called me to come to her a dozen times a day.
    Then, not too long—it wasn’t so very long though it seemed to me then so—my mama began to talk to me. It was just a little at first, just telling me this one thing, how her mother was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking peoples lived. But then more and more Mama kept me with her—she would send Jonaphrene to fetch me if I dropped out of her sight—and Mama touched me, put her hand on my hair, on my shoulder, and she talked to me, the words falling each day freer and faster, till at last it all came like a hymn or a history, like a waterfall she couldn’t stop or hold on to, couldn’t say fast enough; she said them, she whispered them, soft and low and furious, many of them the same words, again and again.
    And so Papa saw this change within Mama, and the change between her and me. He’d come upon me sitting in the hot sun with Mama, and he’d be still a long time. Then he’d say, Matt, here, put on these britches, I seen a late patch of blackberries back in that deep holler. He’d say, Matt, come with me to fetch water. Matt, I need you to come help me chop wood. Then he changed even that, and it was, Here, Matt, skin this rabbit. Matt, jump up here and load the rifle, we’re going for squirrel.
    Thomas, he was walking pretty good then, and he’d totter after me, whining Momo, Momo, and acting like I was his mama that didn’t have time for him, when in truth it was my mama who