The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Read Free Book Online

the wagon as I’d seen Papa do, except Papa had gloves and I did not, and it was only because the whacks came steady and harder that I kept my numb fingers out in the pelting ice to hold to the crusted sideboard, and went back.
    We must have been dragging it a long way because just seeing it you would not even know that it had been a calf. You would know it had been an animal because the rope was still around its neck and the four legs still stuck out, but it was so mangled and the hide broken and the blood congealed red and black in the filthy ice casing that even Bertha did not pay it any more attention than if it had been a frozen sack. She stood with her head bowed nearly to the iced ground where Papa had laid hay, her near eye unfocused, not closed or open, and she was not chewing or flicking, not moving a muscle. Papa was hacking the rope near the calf ’s neck with the axe. I could see where he’d tried to cut it with the Bowie knife, and the knife lay on the ground getting covered in sleet. Ringo was chewing at the back end of the carcass, and he would flinch and duck each time Papa swung the axe. Papa hacked one more time and the rope broke like a stick, and, turning, Papa saw me. I felt then like Ringo to duck back, but he said only, “Git the knife, would you,” and wound the frozen rope up in great stiff loops around his cocked elbow and shoulder, sliding slow on the ice toward the back of the wagon. He reached to put the rope on the hook, and it was then I saw the cover pulled off the chicken crate and the hens dead in gray masses of feathers frozen on their sides. I don’t know if the rooster was dead yet, for he was still upright, back under where the hide hung over a bit, but he was perfectly still, and the ice was all on him and the crate floor. Papa could not get the frozen rope to stay on the hook. I watched him fool with it for a time until finally he pulled it back down and let it drop hard over his head and shoulder, draped like a white thick snake around him, and with the axe in one hand he started back around the side of the wagon to the front. Dan trotted, slipping and sliding, behind him.
    Just a quick moment then I looked around, at Ringo gnawing the cut-loose mangled red thing in the shell of black ice, and Bertha with her head bowed and unmoving near the yellow hay turning white on the white earth before her, and the chickens dead on their sides, and Dan’s black tail disappearing in the white behind Papa. I raised my eyes and looked out at the great white flatness, turning my head slowly, but there was nothing to see. There was no world out there, only our world, and our world was only us inside the smell and dark of the wagon behind Papa and Delia and old Sarn going on through the white and the veil around and behind and before us only to go through, keep going through, and keep on. That was all.
    I looked down at the Bowie knife disappearing under the sleet. We would need it. Flat-footed, careful, I edged over to where it lay and dug in the ice crust with my fingers, and it was like something I remembered and did not remember, and the handle stung my hand but I wrapped it in the shawl and edged back toward the wagon to reach and hold to the side of it with my free hand.
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    The first that I saw them, they appeared dark blue and low over the lip of the horizon. They came when the sun came, and in the same place nearly, for the sun returned first in the west, not rising but sinking below the silver blanket of cloud. This would have been near the end of the second full day past the river, I remember, because the earth where the mules trod was not white. There were trees then, and the limbs were low and bare and sheathed in crystal, dripping, and the land rolled, and the sun sank below the sky, brightening it and turning the earth blue-white and glaring, and finally draining away purple. A little south of where the sun drained away is where I first saw them. I