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

doing—but it changed, sure enough, how she watched him; it was not less fierce, but there was no expecting in it now, no waiting for something, and she no longer sat on her hollowed-out tree stump when she watched him, and it was not Papa only she watched.
    It was that that first made me wake to the change in her—how Mama watched me. How she watched all of us children, like we were strangers, like every word out of our mouths, every gesture—the way Jonaphrene cocked her forehead and made faces, the way Thomas sucked his two fingers or Little Jim Dee tried to back up and lean against her—like all of these were ways belonging to children from some other country. I did not know what it was she marveled at in me, but she stared at me not only when I was with Papa but any moment I came in front of her eyes, and it was the same with me as with all of us—as if she had not ever seen a one of us move or speak in this way before.
    And in a short time, not long after I first saw her so watching us, Mama got up from her tree stump one morning and put the baby on the pallet in the shade, and from that minute on, she followed Papa. Whatever he was doing, Mama went right behind him, her eyes fierce on him, and I thought she was helping, or trying to, but I believed she was just unabled from being sick and still and out of practice for so long. She was furious, though, you could tell that. I thought it was us she was mad at, me and the children, and I tried to do right, but I did not know what would make her not mad. I thought, too, that my mama had forgot how to work. The day Papa strung the rope for the washline, Mama did a load of washing with cold creekwater right there beside him while he was hanging the pulley. She never put the tub on the fire but just rubbed cold lye soap on the cold clothes—and her arms so thin it did not even seem she could hold a rub board, but she would not let me help her but looked me back hard—and then slap! flap! she flung the wet clothes, not even wrung out, just sopping in fury over Papa’s newly strung washline till it sagged deep from the weight. Then she stared at us—me and Thomas and the children—dazed and furious, while she pressed her hand to her chest and caught up to her breathing, and then she turned and went after Papa to whatever he was doing next.
    Every day she did like that. The evening Papa planted violets by the fence row, Mama poured the dirty dishwater on them till they drownded. When he weeded the truck patch, she went behind him with the broken pieced-together hoe and chopped the squash vines so close we lost nearly all of them. When he split shingles with the froe for the lean-to because the pine bough roof was leaking water, Mama climbed up on the bows of the overjet above the wagon—and they were not iron but just bent sapling wood, how Papa had fixed them, and I didn’t know how they would hold a child’s weight, but I believe my mama did not weigh much more than a child anyhow—she climbed up and balanced there, Papa frowning so with worry, but he did not stop her, and Lyda shrieking in the lean-to, hungry, and my mama perched like a bird atop the tarp-covered bones of the wagon, laying those rough shingles before Papa could hardly finish splitting them and hand them up to her, and oh, I was afraid for her then, so thin and breathing hard, balanced on the high, dirty puff of the wagon, reaching, pounding nails with the claw hammer like she would pound that fragile lean-to into the earth.
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    I heard them one night. We still slept in the wagon, me and Thomas and the children, but Mama and Papa slept with Lyda in the lean-to. The dogs were restless, not baying steady but howling every now and then, long and lonesome, and then they’d settle down awhile, snapping and ornery, only to raise up and howl again because of something they smelled outside in the dark. I believed it was Indians they were smelling. The