The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page A

brown from the sun, Mama’s breasts remained white, blue-veined, her nipples large and pink and bumpy, how the color of Mama’s nipple matched the color of Lyda’s mouth when she opened and clamped over it. I thought my sister might turn brown from drinking from that woman.
    At night I unwrapped Lyda, checked her soft folded places, looking for a change. But of course no change happened except how she got more and more attached to that colored woman and would smile with her two teeth and jerk her arms in the air when she saw her and cry whimpering when the woman handed her back to me and walked out the gate.
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    Papa was working fierce. If he worked fierce when we first got there to show Mama something, after she died he worked ten times more. He did not do smithwork, not even to shoe the mules hardly, but anything he could figure out how to carve from wood he would try. I thought he was still working to prove Mama something. It was like her presence hung over him, trying to make him show what he had done in the first place was right. The woman Misely said he was working his grief off, but I didn’t think it.
    He built furniture like he expected us to keep it, and for a time I thought maybe we’d stay in those mountains and never pack up again and head on. He built an oak bed frame that was too big for the wagon, that there was no place to put it and it stood out empty in the yard. He built little tables, some chairs, a new pie safe. He tended our puny crops, helped the man Misely harvest his own, and fished sometimes, though he never now hunted, and still came home at night and sat by the fire whittling pieces with his hands.
    Little Jim Dee was getting terrible to handle. He was wild and rough, and there was a tension, a knotted hard thing, in his bony body that never would ease up, not even when he was sleeping. He’d hit me and Jonaphrene, and if I tried to make him do something, wash up like the Misely woman wanted, he’d pitch a fit and fall down yelling. I couldn’t pick him up, he’d lay there dead weight, legs and arms kicking, hollering in the yard. I gave up on him. I wouldn’t try to do anything with him, and if that Misely woman tried to make me, I’d say, You do it, and walk off.
    Jonaphrene took up with the Misely woman’s girls, but she was mean with them and would order them around, say, Stand there, Do this, when they played, and they would do it because she’d slap them if they acted like they had a mind of their own. I tried to keep a rein on my sister. I thought if we lost her the way we lost Jim Dee we might as well quit trying to be a family. But it wasn’t easy with Jonaphrene, because she was like quicksilver, she’d run everywhere, be under your feet like a new pup one minute and completely disappear the next. She’d stay off and gone for hours. Sometimes she’d be sweet and helpful and smile to make your heart melt, and she looked so much like Mama. Other times she’d be a pure little snot. They all took it for granted that because there was no woman in the household, I was the woman, and it was up to me to do all woman things. I resented that sometimes, I hated it, really, because I would’ve rather been working with Papa, but I guess I didn’t know any other way. And so I tried to rein in Jonaphrene, but it was hard.
    Still yet—and this seems like the strange part, the way I remember it—still, I was more free than any time since we stopped there, and sometimes I’d just sit in the clearing and do nothing, just say Mama’s memories to myself. Even with both Lyda and Thomas to change and look after now and every bit of the cooking to do, plus cleaning and washing and mending and trying to stay out of the way of that Misely woman, I still had time to just sit sometimes. Because Papa let me alone. He never asked me to go off with him or help him build things, never asked me for anything or hardly