The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Page B

talked or looked at me either, and it might’ve been partly true what Misely’s wife said, that he needed all that work to do to keep up his frenzy, but to me, what I knew was, with Mama gone, Papa had lost his need to make me his own.
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    One morning I woke up—it happened just that sudden—and the world had turned cold. Frost iced the top of the wagon where we slept, crimped the leaves brown, sparkled the sandstone. As soon as my eyes opened and I saw my breath in the dim light of the wagon, I remembered.
    I began to search for Mama’s tin box in secret. When Papa was off wherever he went to, I picked and pawed and pilfered through all Mama’s things. Papa had never unpacked Mama’s trunk or done anything with her clothes, and though the Misely woman hinted several times shouldn’t he Rid Himself of Those Painful Reminders, Papa ignored her, and Mama’s bonnet still hung by the tie straps from a nail next to the lean-to door. There came in those first cold days a driven secret thing inside me. Every time I was alone, I went in the lean-to and lifted the lid on Mama’s trunk and pulled out her dresses, her undergarments, her embroidered pillowslips and linens. I patted them, crushed them between my fingers, as if that square box could be hidden in a small secret fold somewhere. I felt the sides of the trunk with the flat of my hand. I hunted with one ear cocked for the sound of Papa’s dogs panting ahead of him into the clearing. If the Misely woman came in the yard, I hurried out in the daylight and got busy with Thomas, and when she was gone I’d duck back in the lean-to and search the same places again and again. I never doubted that box was somewhere in Mama’s possessions. I thought there was just some tiny seam or corner I’d left untouched last time that would, this time, reveal Mama’s secret to me.
    The weather turned back warm after that first frost, but warm weather did not stop me, and I did not forget again. Sometimes I would have to hunt in near darkness because a dense gray fog seeped in the wagon before first light, filtered into the lean-to through the overhang of blanket, hung close to the earth, wrapped close about us, stayed surrounding us and in us for hours because the sun on those mornings could not seem to get strength enough to climb over the southeastern rim. I hated that dank fog as I hated everything about those mountains, because they helped kill my mama. I felt it, that gray mist, like an invisible hand that would press me into the dirt at the edge of the yard where I waited for the colored woman to get finished with Lyda.
    It was one of those hollow times when I did not have to work or watch children because Thomas was still sleeping and Jonaphrene was in the wagon with him, sitting up on the feathertick, drawing pictures with charred fire sticks on beech bark—she wouldn’t come outside in the spitting mist that was falling, she was entirely too pinched up and prissy for that—and Papa was of course gone, and Little Jim Dee was out no telling where. So I was waiting, impatient, because I wanted to look in Mama’s things before the woman Misely showed up to start her bossing, and I was irritated, too, with a slow smolder that I did not then recognize, because what it felt like was that the colored woman was the dark weight pressing against me which I could not press back, and it felt like she knew it and she had no right to know it or stop me, because what I wanted, if I couldn’t search for Mama’s tin box, then I wanted to watch her nurse Lyda, and I could not think of one good excuse to go in the lean-to and stay there. She did not now nurse Lyda outside on Mama’s tree stump as she’d done in warm weather but came in the gate and went straight to the lean-to, the same way she’d done the first morning, stayed inside in the dark with my baby sister until it was finished, and then