The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew Read Free Book Online Page A

thought they were thunderheads maybe, rolling above the earth in the southwest, but when they did not change or draw nearer, I did not dread them, and anyhow we stopped then in a little copse and made camp.
    Papa shook when he got down from the wagon. He stood on the ground and his legs trembled and his hand holding to the wheel quivered like he was shaking with fever. I thought at first he was sick. I said, “Papa?” He turned away and walked two steps over to a little rise and sat down upon it. Then he lay back flat on his back. His hat fell off and gaped openmouthed and stiff on the dark earth. I could see his legs jerking beneath his britches. He said to me, his voice calm, like it was in no way unusual to lie upon the frozen earth twitching on your back, he said, “Start supper, Matt.”
    We stayed there one night, our first camp since we left the river, our first time to eat proper and empty the pots and rub diapers and air out the smell. It was there in that bare tree copse we left the chickens dead in their crates, thawed enough by daylight to stink and so we ate only the rooster, and it was there we left Bertha, not dead yet but dying, and I don’t know why Papa didn’t shoot her unless maybe he did not want to waste the powder and lead. It was there, too, as I was helping Papa load the wagon at dawn and looked up to see the indigo shapes still in the distance, that I understood they were not cloudbanks or some purple drift skyward but a part of the earth itself, humped low on the southwestern horizon, pushing up from the ground. I knew, the way you will sometimes know a thing, one swift thought that speaks the word, that these shapes were mountains. I did not have to ask.
    It seems strange to me now to think how foreign they looked then, the shape of them, humpbacked, blue in some lights and purple in others, and tapered low at the ends like great shell-less snails lining themselves east and west clamped to the earth. That humped shape now is burned in my heart like the lines of my own memory, but then to me they looked strange. They stayed the same distance for days, weeks even it seemed like, never coming nearer, never going back further, but riding always at the edge of forever as we went west. Sometimes they would disappear for a few hours behind trees or a turning fold of land, but then, when I wasn’t looking, they would rise up watchful on the horizon again. We had long left the delta, and the land had returned itself normal, and the weather, too, was back common and normal, for spring was blowing up real by that time, and the mud sucked at the wheels something terrible, and there were days we made almost no time because Papa had to pry us from the mud with the tree limb he kept strapped to the sideboard, while I slapped the reins on the mules’ straining backs.
    I don’t know what would have happened if Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie and the six cousins had not caught up to us, any more than I know what would have happened if anything ever had been different than what it was, but them coming in the night and Uncle Fay’s horses snorting and Sarn answering is one event I wished forever had not happened. I regretted it later until I was eaten up with it and I could not stop. I went back over and over in my mind and told it that they did not find us, that they passed in the night and went on to Eye Tee without ever knowing we were camped by that road in the dark. I made Uncle Fay die in the ice storm, and sometimes Aunt Jessie. Sometimes I saw all eight of them frozen tipped on their sides like our chickens, or I made them turn back. I know now the truth that nothing will make you so sick as sorry, but I couldn’t stop regretting any more than I could do anything to change what happened. I believed if only I’d known, if only I’d looked hard enough, understood the meaning of the blue wind, petted Sarn so he would not answer, if only something, I could have made