The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew

against her where she was sitting. I was furious. I didn’t know what to make of it. I hollered, “Jim Dee, get over here!” But Little Jim Dee didn’t move. He just looked at me, big-eyed, filthy, his bony arms and legs still for once, his rusty fingers in his mouth. The woman touched the top of his head with her free hand. A look came over her. I don’t know if I could name that look even now, but it was something like helplessness, something like sorrow, but it didn’t belong to her. It wasn’t like the grief was her own. She sighed and disentangled her skirt from Little Jim Dee. She went back to her son and bent down and talked in his ear.
    The next day—this I know, it was the next day, because I remember Lyda screaming all through that night, her mewing cries grown fierce and hysterical, like she was being stuck on the inside with common pins—the next morning a colored woman came to the gate. She stood there, thin and silent, and waited for somebody to come open it for her. She had an infant slung sideways in a blue bandanna across her chest. I knew what she was there for. I’d never been around colored people because we lived far from town and we didn’t have sharecroppers, but I knew of them in the same way you know about Indians and panthers and other things you don’t hardly ever see. I knew she was a nigger woman, and she’d come to nurse my baby sister. I went to the gate and pulled it open. She never looked at me. She came in the yard and went straight to the lean-to where Lyda was yowling, and bent her neck and went inside.
    In a short time the crying stopped. In a little while after that the woman Misely showed up and walked through the gate like it belonged to her and went to the lean-to and flipped back the doorway and disappeared in there in the dark.
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    We did not salt that bear carcass like Papa said. I don’t know what became of it, if the Miselys went and got it or if it rotted in the sun, because no one ever mentioned it again. The dogs kept dragging the mauled head back into the yard to chew on it, and Misely or one of his boys would throw it back over the fence, and the dogs would find it and drag it back in, until finally somebody took it off into the woods and buried it, I guess. We lived on cornmeal and squash and sweet potatoes once the beans were gone, because Papa did not hunt at all now, and me, I didn’t have time. The Misely woman came daily. I don’t know how she got her own work done, unless her many whiteheaded children did it, because it seemed like she was always in our yard. She was strict on me, stricter than Mama ever thought about, and she made me wash the children, made me sew up the holes in their clothes. The colored woman came once in the morning, once in the evening. Lyda thrived on her and opened her gums laughing when she saw her, and I hid every time I could somewhere and watched.
    Most usually the colored woman had her own baby with her, though sometimes she didn’t, but either way it didn’t matter. She’d take Lyda in her arms. She held her like she was nothing, like she was—I don’t know. Like she was a part of her clothing or something. Not like she was anything bad, not like she was good, but like Lyda was just something the colored woman wore. Often she’d have her own baby and my sister together, one nursing from each breast.
    I had a secret fear, and there was nobody to tell it to. I watched Lyda’s mouth, pink and eager and hungry. I watched it open for the long brown breast coming to it, the dark nipple, almost black. I watched the woman’s baby, his rounded cheeks, his lips soft and sweet like my sister’s, but brown and not pink. I remembered how I had sat and watched Mama nurse Thomas, and John Junior before him, remembered Mama turning Thomas to the cup when Lyda was born, and I saw her nursing Lyda. I remembered how even when her face and hands turned