The Mercy Seat

After he has closed up the store for the night, Dale takes a long, cold shower. He tilts his face toward the shower-head, lets the water batter his cheeks, his forehead, feels it bead on the webbing of his lashes. He imagines that he can feel each individual drop, a million needles of cold tattooing his face numb. As he stands there, a memory surfaces: dazzled sunlight, the ceaseless fall of water from a rock face, glassy sheets breaking into shards that shattered further as they fell cold against his body. He’d been maybe seven, eight years old. Where? He can’t remember, but he can hear his father’s voice through the plash of water, can hear his father singing: The cleansing spring, I see, I see; I plunge, and oh it cleanses me!

Dale wipes the water from his eyes, blinks them open. Mildewed tiles, fluorescent light. He turns the faucet off, steps out of the shower, and dries his face with a towel that he then wraps around his waist. He thinks it might have been Tennessee, that waterfall, but it is one of those memories that are similar to dreams: there, yet just beyond reach.

He gathers the day’s clothing from where he left it on the floor and tosses it all into the hamper, and he’s about to switch the bathroom light off when he remembers the letter in the pocket of his shirt. For a moment he considers leaving it there, for Ora to find and read when she does the laundry, but it isn’t a real thought. He finds his shirt in the hamper and retrieves the envelope from the breast pocket. Once crisp, it is now soft and worn, slightly curved according to the contours of his chest. He has read the letter only once since it arrived in the mail, but he finds himself now opening the envelope again, as if in a week’s time the words inside might have somehow changed.

Your son, Tobias, was killed in action on September 18, 1943, on Attu Island.

The Japanese made a counterattack through our right lines. Tobias was on duty as a member of a 37-mm gun crew when the position was rushed by a large group of Japanese.

I know that nothing can make amends for the great loss you have sustained. But I wish to convey to you the deepest sympathy of the officers and men of this organization in your bereavement. Tobias was held in high regard by all members of the command and was a splendid soldier.

His loss is felt deeply by the company.

Dale stares down at the words, thinking of the moment by the mailbox when he’d first read them, entirely unprepared. He’d just put a piece of chocolate into his mouth. Chocolate. He can’t remember now if he swallowed it, or spat it out.

He folds the letter up and puts it back into the envelope, but instead of bringing it with him to the bedroom, he opens the medicine cabinet and slips it beneath the paper lining of the shelf where he keeps his things: shaving cream, soap, razor. He doesn’t want to carry it around with him anymore, as if the truth could be so easily put down.

Dale turns off the bathroom light and walks down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Tobe’s bedroom door is ajar, and when he peers inside he sees Ora, curled on their son’s bed. Dale watches her, the gentle rise and fall of her rib cage, the strands of hair wavering with each passing revolution of the fan. He feels his pulse tick with some odd mixture of longing, love, and pain. What he’d like would be to go and lie beside her, take her body in his arms, but he knows she wouldn’t have him.

He goes into their own bedroom instead, pulls on a T-shirt and boxer shorts without turning on the light. The room is airless. Before lying down he lifts the shade and opens wide the single window, which had been shut against the day’s heat. Suddenly the room is flooded with the ruckus of cicadas screeching in the field beyond. Not with cooler air, though; not with any breeze. Dale puts his palm against the screen; the wires are still hot.

He has just turned from the window when he hears another sound from outside, the growling of a dog, a throaty noise, which soon transforms into a steady and insistent bark. Dale frowns and peers outside. He can see little in the shadows behind the station, but someone’s out there, he’s sure; the dog’s bark is now verging on frantic. Suddenly galvanized, his gloom forgotten, Dale pulls on a pair of pants, grabs the .22 he keeps loaded on the topmost closet shelf, and walks swiftly out the bedroom door.

The kitchen is dark. Dale curses when he stubs his toe on the leg of a chair as he hurries across the room; he hasn’t bothered to find shoes. He turns on the kitchen light and shoves open the door to outside with such force that it swings crashing into the building’s outer wall as he stumbles onto the dirt. He strides past the dog toward the chicken coop, where the hens are in noisy outrage. Rifle raised, he scans the moon-cast shadows for whatever person might be out there, and then he sees a disturbance in the cotton, a rustling of leaves.

“Hey!” Dale shouts, as a head rises from the rows and starts to run away. He squints down the barrel of the rifle, righteous, overcome by anger that startles even himself. “Take another goddamn step and I’ll blow your nigger head off!”

It’s a kid; Dale realizes this as two scrawny arms lift in surrender. The kid turns around, eyes wide and white.

The kid obeys. The chickens are hysterical; their noise makes Dale want to shoot each one.

“So you’re the one gone and thieved that hen,” he growls, gun aimed at the boy as he steps into the dirt yard. The dog has ceased his barking; he approaches the kid with his tail wagging. “Git!” Dale shouts at the dog, lunging toward him and gesturing briefly away with the tip of the rifle; the dog cowers and skitters off toward the shed. He points the rifle toward the kid again. “That right, boy? You thieved that hen and now you’re back for another.”

“Oh, no? What, skulking round here by night for what then? Huh?” In a single, quick motion Dale lowers the rifle and takes it by the barrel with one hand, while with the other hand he grabs the kid by the collar, drags him toward the light coming from the kitchen.

“Look at me, boy,” Dale says, and he squints harshly into the boy’s eyes. His breaths are shallow in his anger, and his heartbeat is loud in his ear. “You gonna have to make even with me, you hear that?”

“Dale.” Ora’s voice is cold, steely, hateful; she herself is an angry silhouette in the kitchen doorway. “You let that boy alone.” She steps down into the dirt, and her features are suddenly illuminated by the light. Her eyes are blazing.

“Dale. I said you let that boy alone.” Ora spits the words. She glares at Dale. Her eyelids seem to twitch.

Dale drops the kid’s collar, roughly, and glares at Ora. “They’re your damn chickens, anyway,” he says. The boy stands there, looking from Dale to Ora, taking small steps backward toward the cotton.

“No, he’s not. He’s here for candy. He’s here for candy, and there you go off with your gun—”

Ora puts a hand on her hip. “And why shouldn’t a boy have some candy?” she demands. “Why shouldn’t we be neighborly with our neighbors?”

“They ain’t neighbors, Ora,” he says, gesturing to the spot where the boy used to be, though he has disappeared. “You go round handing out food like that they just gonna come round.” he says. “God damn it, you can’t go filling your empty nest with niggers and canines.”

The moment the words leave his mouth Dale regrets them. He stands there, waiting, wary, looking guardedly at his wife. But she does not yell. She just stares, her eyes hard, resolute. She takes a long breath, then strides off barefoot into the cotton. Dale doesn’t call after her. He doesn’t dare, even though he thinks he’d give anything for her to stay.