The Mercy Seat Read Online Free PDF Page A

wait for tomorrow, to do some thing or any thing other than go into the river. I did not shriek. I carried Thomas over the slatted ramp onto the raft.
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    The men worked in silence, their poles in the water now sliding, now lifted and rested in the iron locks, and the raftsmen not talking even in idleness, doing nothing except to watch through slitted eyes and spit. Bertha wouldn’t quit bawling. The water swept us down and fast, so much faster than it looked from the bank. Out in it, where the men poled us, the river took us up like drift and swept us down, and I looked to the opposite bank where I could see tree bones outlined in the purpling twilight, but we were not going there, not going across but down the river and Uncle Fay and the others rushing on ahead, always ahead of us even in the rhythm of the water not our water, and I did not know why. I had a hidden smolder against them, even then, in the fear and thrill of not going across the water as I’d expected but down, because it should have been Papa. I believed always it should have been Papa and not Uncle Fayette in front.
    I could not get my balance. Thomas was on the wet raft floor, clinging to my skirt bottom and wailing to be picked up. I couldn’t hold him and hold to the iron front of the cookstove. Mama was sitting upon her trunk near the back where the raftsmen stood swaying, and Jonaphrene was beside her with her face pinched but not crying, but the new baby surely was. I couldn’t go back there and sit among their spread knees and Lyda crying. There was nowhere to sit but the raft floor, which I would not, and anyhow I could not, because I had to stand ready, there, near the front of the raft where I could see. I had to be ready in case the whole thing tipped and rolled skyward and was sucked down to the river’s muddy gut. Papa walked back and forth in the narrow space in front of the wagon, and he looked from the corner of his eye sometimes back at the raftsmen, and sometimes to the opposite shore where the tree bones were darkening, and sometimes downriver to where Uncle Fayette and the others were getting on ahead. I tried to ease toward Papa to see what his face said, but the raft seemed to roll more if my feet moved, and Thomas wailed louder, and so I had to stand and hold tight to the cookstove, and I could tell nothing except frown and concentration in the way Papa held his head.
    Bertha stood on the strapped logs, bawling, her nose tied to the near side of the wagon, her bony legs spraddled, and each time the raft dipped, she did a little jerking kind of dance. Her calf bawled as badly as she did but was better in balance, and old Sarn and Delia, too, stood on the raft better, their knees braced and hooved flat, and not braying either, Papa’s mules, but messing bad on the raftwood, their eyes wild and rolling, and you knew you had better not be anywhere close around them if you didn’t want to get kicked or bit. Because it was wrong for those animals. I could see it. They thought they were falling through heaven. And I too, that is how I felt in the rolling unsurety of the raft in the water, like dreaming of falling, like the sure clamp of earth beneath us had been ripped away and replaced with floating chaos and dread. In the other crossings, even in the swift push and rush of water, our wheels and our mules’ feet had still touched the earth.
    So that’s how we went down the river, with Thomas and the new baby and Bertha and her calf bawling, and Papa pacing, and the air growing colder and the men silent and spitting and the evening darkening down. But there were three who loved that raft ride, and those three were Little Jim Dee and Papa’s hunting dogs, Ringo and Dan. Dan wouldn’t move from up front where he stood tall with his nose lifted and his tongue lolling and the tan underside of his ears showing light in the backsweep of river wind. Ringo trotted everywhere on his dumpy legs, with