BLOOD BROTHERS

FRAUGHT WITH THE PRIMAL AND BIBLICAL, RILLA ASKEW'S EXODUS ON THE PLAINS

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 10, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

Rilla Askew's first novel is earth and fire in equal measure, with the first element holding those secrets of the plains and the second the scourges visited on the land by man. It is an extraordinary story that owes its literary debt to Faulkner and its heart to Scripture, for Askew has taken the age-old tragedy of two warring brothers and set it inside the nebulous boundaries of Indian Territory -- in what is now Oklahoma -- in the late 19th century. If the novel sometimes reaches a little too far for those grand cadences and biblical twists that Faulkner's genius gave us, it is nonetheless ambitious in the best sense: driven by a narrative intensity that is humbling in its passion, consumed with the old-fashioned mysteries too large and too dark for most contemporary writers to go near.

The title for ``The Mercy Seat'' comes from Leviticus, wherein God asks for atonement after the deaths of the two sons of Aaron; in this regard, the story the novel tells -- of two brothers, Fayette and John Lodi, and their families -- is as old as history. But it also casts its epic within the huge westward migration during and after the Civil War, when black freedmen found a home on the frontier, white men found an escape route from old crimes and regrets, Choctaw and Creek and Cherokee tribes tried to create a viable life in the wake of the white encroachment. Into this mythic promised land of guns and God and frontier justice came all the remnants of a new world, carrying alongside their mules and feather mattresses the hope and strength and unfinished sins of where they'd already been. And riding this wave of the best and worst of humanity were two men fleeing Kentucky in the middle of the night, bound by blood and cursed by envy, trying to rid themselves of both.

The sympathetic wisdom and partial narration of ``The Mercy Seat'' belongs to Mattie Lodi, the oldest daughter of the younger brother, John: She is 10 when the two families head west in 1887, chased out of Kentucky after Fayette's shady maneuvers over a gun patent nearly got both brothers killed. The power balance between the Lodi boys, always held by the older Fayette (or ``Fate,'' to his friends), shifted when John proved the wiser and more talented: He is a rock of a man and a legendary blacksmith, while his brother is shiftless, felonious, and just downright mean. Torn from her childhood home with her four brothers and sisters, forced to care for them while she watches her mother, Demaris, fail, then die, of a displaced spirit, Mattie has a bulletproof heart before adolescence gets anywhere near her. A wrong turn and an inevitable argument between Fayette and John has landed Mattie's family in the Ozarks for a few months; by the time they've found the others, near the Sans Bois Mountains of Indian Territory, she has become the young matriarch of the clan. She has also buried her mother, given up on finding the precious tin box holding Demaris's life story, and been possessed by the first of several mystical visions that will mark her for life.

``The Mercy Seat'' is sometimes as wide and scary as the Mississippi on a bad night, and the Lodi family's journey is marked by the signposts of its time: scarlet fever, infant deaths, spit-and-gravel survival on unyielding soil. Mattie becomes both a fierce loner and the steadfast center of the family; beholden to her silent father, she takes to wearing britches and walking the land barefoot, a rifle on her shoulder. While her inner being is focused upon the loss of her mother, her voice delivers a harsh poetic story of black and Indian women healers, magnificent dream states, ``a silver road in moonlight, snaking west.'' In the same way that Faulkner blew open the world of the novel with the alternate storytellers of ``The Sound and the Fury,'' Askew has also wisely split the task of the subjective reality of ``The Mercy Seat'' among several narrators: Mattie, who dominates the first third of the book, an omniscient voice, which is seamlessly wise and appears intermittently throughout, and, near the end, a variety of witnesses to the Lodi brothers' final conflict. These narrative shifts are difficult to accomplish in the simplest of circumstances; here, they have the additional burden of relating myriad truths and levels of consciousness through a prism of perspectives.

This abundance also allows the introduction of several subplots and characters in ``The Mercy Seat'' that are showcases for Askew's novelistic skills: the fabulous (and fabulously named) Burden Mitchelltree, a black man whose polite contempt for his white townfolk is overshadowed only by the magnificent timbres of his voice; the enigmatic Choctaw woman, Thula, who begrudgingly serves as Mattie's spirit guide when she recognizes the girl's visionary gift. John Lodi's skill as a blacksmith is rendered with such passionate detail that the very bellows burn with life; this familiarity is equally applied to Choctaw language and culture, to a Baptist revival, to the scrub oak and cedar -- grown blood red in Mattie's visions -- of the rock hills and valleys of southeastern Oklahoma.

Mostly, though, Askew's interior knowledge finds its home in the doom-ridden ties of Fayette and John Lodi. The last third of the novel is given over entirely to this biblical denouement, and it is here that one feels the strain of Askew's ambition; big as her story is, it begins to stumble under its weight and its endless points of view. We know John and Fayette are headed for a showdown dictated by memory and written in history; know, too, the possibly severe consequences of Mattie having eschewed her visions, assuming instead a near Job-like despair. But sometimes the prose in ``The Mercy Seat'' is so fecund, so fueled by a sense of profundity, that it eventually threatens to undo the very effect it strives so hard to achieve.

Rilla Askew is in love with this story, though -- you can feel it in the mountains she describes, in the cold cornbread and traveling preachers and the shocking, flat-out violence -- and her deep love is contagious. Even when I grew weary of a slowed pace or lugubrious prose, which wasn't very often, I was captivated by the daring depth and fire-and-ice momentum of this novel. In creating young Mattie Lodi as God's innocent, in finding within her that dark nexus with vengeance that belongs to us all, Askew has gone after the mystery of mercy itself.

Fayette hollered down the hillside, ``I'll have to put on a little banquet for your folks up here next Tuesday! Aim to welcome you real good when you get here next week! Mitchelltree, put some damn backbone it it, my God.''

The big man grunted softly, the weight of his shoulder against the wagon. Still he did not look up, only listened to Fayette's voice rising above the dry creak of the burdened wheels. ``I seen you before, mister,'' he said, his voice low, coming from his throat, through his teeth. ``You'll not be in no hurry one a these days.''

RILLA ASKEW, from ``The Mercy Seat''