The Mercy Seat Read Online Free PDF

his nails clicking the raftwood, sniffing the raftsmen and their poles and gear and the wind and the raft’s mossy cracks, getting right up near the raft edge one time to dip down and smell the water, and then backing up, trotting around again on his business to sniff our belongings, as if he thought there was danger that the raft and the river could change our family’s smell. Little Jim Dee went right behind him, trotting everywhere on his short legs, and I knew Papa must be concentrating something awful because he never even told Little Jim Dee to quit.
    It kept getting colder and darker. I could not smell the mud-and-fish smell, I think because it had swelled up to suck in the whole world and so now could not be separated out as river smell. The far bank did not get closer or farther but seemed to stay always the same distance, and the only change in it was how the dark sky behind the skeletons of trees began to glow red and the trees themselves jumped outlined into black. The river went bloody for a few minutes and then fell back brown, then dark again, purple, and the sandy-bearded riverman came front and lit the lantern and went back, and then the only change on the raft was how Thomas wore down to a whimper and then so did the baby Lyda, and Bertha’s bawling slowed some and the calf hushed up and went to suck.
    There was a time then, just a few heartbeats maybe even was all it was, but I remember it: that little blink of time when the rhythm was right. We rolled and floated in the dusk. I lost sight of Uncle Fay’s raft for a while, until there was a glint far down the river in the gloaming and I saw the lantern light on the pole on the other raft swell and grow white. My hand was not so tight to the cookstove. It was cold but not shivering, not icy, and I reached down and patted Thomas the gentle soft drumming like he liked on his back. I was thinking about him, about how he would be wet on his bottom because the damp from the raftwood would be seeping up through his diaper square and blanket and gown, and I began to worry because I did not know how long we would be on the raft. I couldn’t change him or lift him, not with how we were rolling, and the bit of peacefulness vanished and I began to be afraid for my brother. I looked back toward Mama. She had one arm around Jonaphrene and the shawl wrapped around both of them and the baby Lyda swaddled in her lap. It was then, when I raised my head and looked back at Mama, that I first marked the presence of the blue wind.
    It didn’t bother me at first—I did not understand it—but it did get my notice, how it pushed down on us from upriver, gusting off and on at the beginning, getting stronger and more insistent until it made me turn north to face it to keep the little hairs that had slipped out of my braids and bonnet from beating me in the mouth. And the more the wind rose, the more I forgot about Thomas’s wet bottom. The more the wind rose, the more the animals got excited, with Bertha dancing and bawling again, and the chickens waking up to mutter and rustle, and the mules, too, shuffling their hooves on the raft floor and twitching their tails and ears. Dan did not leave his place up front nearby Papa but he turned around in a circle a few times and sat down on his haunches, whining and facing upwind. But it was that old rabbit dog Ringo who got craziest from the wind change. He trotted around the raft faster and faster, whining and jumping, with Little Jim Dee at his tail like a trailing pup, until Ringo stopped at the raft rear and started to bay into the wind.
    The man with the black beard and slit eyes flicked his foot out and kicked Ringo. That quick. Ringo yelped like his ribs had been broken, and slunk tail-tucked toward Papa, yelping, and Little Jim Dee shrieked and yelled something which I could not make out on account of the wind and the animals and Thomas too now carrying on, but Little Jim Dee, right there underfoot,