Read Online The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew - Free Book Online

all left Kentucky. I didn’t think anything about that then, but later I did.

T he first thing Papa made—-he began it the next day, I remember, because his lip was swelled up like a hog bladder, his eye shut nearly, and he would grunt every time he bent over—but first thing there in those mountains, Papa smoothed down a tree stump and set a back to it and rolled it to the place at the side of the wagon where the sun touched first and stayed longest. All day Mama would sit there, her eyes following Papa back and forth while he cleared and broke ground. There was more color in her face then, her fist was loose then, though she still seldom said anything but just held Lyda and nursed her and was quiet on the tree stump and watched.
    It was only a truck patch, no more than a quarter acre, but it took him a long time because that ground was so rocky, the tree stumps were many, and he broke the plow point and had to borrow Misely’s anvil to make a new one, and we had only the singletree and so he could only plow one of his mules at a time. Papa put in squash and beans and sweet potatoes—he said it was too late for corn, which it wasn’t, or at least not any too much later than for the rest of what we planted, and that’s something else I didn’t think about then—and I helped when I could. I’d go bent behind him with our seeds and potato starts, Thomas crawling in the furrows behind me, trying to pull himself up on my skirt, and Mama watching Papa with that fierce look on her. Intent. Hopeful. Like she expected any minute for him to do something other than what he was doing.
    The tallow-faced man, Misely, came around every day or so and talked to Papa. It was his land we were camped on, but he let us plant there, only too glad, I guess, for the work of clearing Papa was doing, and to my knowledge he never asked so much as a half bushel of nothing for pay. He had a wife and a passel of children who were white-blond and palely freckled just like him, and shy and silent, the children more than anything. I don’t recollect hearing hardly one of those children say a word. The old man’s bright chest hair and his faded red beard danced and sparred with each other when he talked, and it reminded me of Grandpa Lodi’s white eyebrows, how they would jump up and fidget on his forehead when he got going good talking, and in this way I liked and feared the old man Misely, and he seemed to belong to us somehow, though his tongue was so strange.
    When he came in the evenings to talk to Papa, his passel of children—boys mostly, but there were three or four girls too—would trail a little ragtag tail behind him. Sometimes there’d be ten of them, sometimes eleven or thirteen, I quit even counting, and the old man would leave them to stand around outside the split-rail fence Papa was putting up. He’d step over the rails and go off with Papa, the two of them together, to squat in the dirt behind the wagon and talk. His children would stand outside the fence and look. I’d linger on the near side of the wagon, acting to be busy sorting beans or something, and I’d listen to Papa and Mr. Misely. I never found out any secrets that way, because their talk was just crops and hunting and farm stock, how a man in the mountains needed a good brace of oxen—but it was Mr. Misely’s voice I listened for anyway. Just the sound of it, thick and burred and accented from somewhere which even now I can’t place. So I’d act busy and listen and keep an eye on the Misely children, because I did not in any way trust them. There was something big-eyed and hungry in them, the way they stood there, their fingers holding to the rails, looking at all of us, silent, like we were the strange ones. I was sneaky, how I watched them, and I told Jonaphrene to ignore them, but she would stand in the yard with her hands cocked on her hips and stare right back at them, because