T
HE FIRE HAD
burned the hay but left the wheat. The flames had come close to the corn, wilting some of the silk tassels and puckering the husks. The kernels from those ears at summer’s end would have a scorched taste, as if they had been dragged through the ashes in the hearth. The loss was disappointing but did not compare with the loss of some of our neighbors. The Holts suffered far worse, losing most of their yield. The fire stopped only when it came to the waters of the Skug River after sweeping across the whole of Ladle Meadow. When Robert Russell came to the house days after for the harvesting of the wheat, he said there were hardened feelings from the Holts, as our crops had been spared and theirs had not. I could see that Robert’s sandy brows had been burned quite off, and one cheek was oozing from raised, seeping blisters. His leather doublet was cracked and blackened from the heat, and I pitied him as he had no wife to bind his wounds or mend his vest. He had been widowed for many years and would have to marry again soon or be thought scandalous.
He turned to my mother and said with a smile, “Susannah Holt said she saw you dancing on the crest before the wind turned direction.” Robert could often play with her in such a way, and where the rest of us would have been singed for it, she would only dip her chin and smile. Sometimes the color in her cheeks would flare, if only for a moment. Had I been older, I might have sensed that she, though a married woman, was not above being seduced by a winning, handsome man. Rattling some pots at the hearth she said, “I cannot help that their fields were burned. I am sorry for it. They are decent enough folk. But Susannah is old and half blind, and if I was dancing about, it was to put out the fire from the hem of my skirt.” Later, when we had milled the wheat into flour at Parker’s Mill, we would send four bags of it to Susannah Holt, but the bread she made from it was not enough to soak up the bitter juices of resentment.
Mercy and I made a peace of sorts, and as we worked scything down the shafts of wheat, she taught me a little song she had learned from a French trapper who traded with the Indians. The words were foreign to my ears and, as I did not know its meaning, I decided it must be a lullaby, for the words were soft and lisping. But then she told me with a twisting of her upper lip that the song was about a butterfly that goes from flower to flower to flower before drowning blissfully in the weight of the pollen.
Once the wheat had ripened, we had at most eight days to finish harvesting before the heads shattered and released their kernels. All the stalks were bound and shocked in three days. The mounds of sheaves were plentiful, perhaps a hundred or so, and they were dry and would be easy to flail and winnow. I liked best the winnowing, and I matched the bouncing movement of my basket to Mercy’s. We made a game to see who could be the first to separate out the chaff from the kernels. It was at such a time that she first spoke of her family, which was lost to the Wabanakis. She had had a mother and a father, two older brothers, and two sisters, the youngest being but four years of age. The Indians had crept in at first light and set the roof of the house on fire. As each one of her family left the house to escape burning alive, they were knocked over the head and left for dead. She was taken captive along with an older brother who later died along the long trail to Canada. Finishing her story, she smiled her crooked smile, and snaking her fingers about my wrist said, “But I shall get a new family soon, I think.”
But that was not to be.
M
ERCY AND MY
mother stood facing each other, arms folded at their chests, both throwing knives with their eyes. It was August, and though the day had just begun, the heat from the cooking fire was near unbearable in the common room. Sweat poured from Mercy’s red face, soaking through the front of her apron and wilting the corners of her cap. Mother’s dress had large damp stains under the arms, but her face in profile was as smooth and cold as a gravestone. From the back it looked as if the laces of her bodice would burst from the arching of her rigid spine. I held my breath, making myself small, for I did not want to be remembered and sent from the room.
The morning had started peaceably enough. Father had gone hunting at first light with Andrew and Tom. Richard had left with a few bags of ground wheat for barter in the town’s market. The three of us had risen early to do the baking for the week and I was shredding greens from the garden, sifting through sprigs of rosemary lying in fragrant bunches upon the table. A pot of rabbit for the day’s dinner was already beginning to bubble as it swung from the lug pole under the flue. As the men were not present, Mother and Mercy had tucked up their skirts and aprons into their waistbands, giving them easy movement about the hearth. Mother had just tested the heat of the baking niche with her arm and found it ready. The skin on her right arm was forever as smooth as an infant’s bottom, for all the hair had been burned off by the heat. Hannah sat below the table at my feet, playing happily with a wooden spoon that she spun dizzily across the wooden planks of the floor. Mother was in a brighter mood that morning, for she had nursed the milk cow back to health. The cow’s udder had become swollen and painful with the damp heat and had been giving less milk. Mother had made a poultice of some mossy herbs in warm water that she bathed over the cow’s teats every hour until the swelling had gone and the cow could once again give her full measure. Mercy said she had never seen a cow with such an illness heal so quickly.
The clouds made good on their promise of rain. The wheat had been harvested and the corn swelled and grew hearty. The yield from the corn would be plentiful, bringing greater opportunity for trade. Mother had spoken almost cheerfully about the tallow she would get for candles and the wool she would have for spinning in the autumn. She talked of getting a young heifer and a sow for more milk and meat. Mercy must also have thought that this day was a good one to do some bartering with my mother, trading the scandal of a bastard child she said was to come for the respectability of Richard’s name in marriage. But Mercy made a bad show of it and bleated out the news like a stranded goat. When she finished, there was a great crash as Mother slammed down the lid for the oven, making Hannah start and cling to my legs in fright. And there they stood, both of them working to master their emotions, my mother tempering her anger, and Mercy, I believe, stuffing down her fear. Richard had turned seventeen in July and by all accounts was a man and could take a wife, but only with the consent of his father.
Suddenly Mother pushed up her sleeves and said, “Very well, then. You say you are with child, so let me see with my own eyes if that be the case.”
Mercy was so surprised that her mouth fell open and she watched wordlessly as Mother swept every bit of greens off the table into my apron.
“Good God, girl, don’t open your mouth to me. I’ve been midwife a dozen times and have seen full well what’s under your skirt. Do you think I’ll give my son up to one such as you without proof you are in the family way?”
Mercy stood rooted to the spot and her eyes searched me out for help, but I was useless against Mother’s fury and could only watch her go to the slaughter. She started to protest by saying forcefully, “I am with child, and Richard must marry me now or I am ruined.”
Mother did not answer but waited ponderously by the table. I could see the thoughts chase themselves across Mercy’s face, some of them cunning and some of them tinged with terror. Perhaps she thought that enough play had gone on with Richard to fool her inquisitor, and so she climbed up on the boards and lay on her back. Mother briskly pulled Mercy’s skirt and shift up over her thighs and pulled her knees apart. I backed away from the table but not so far as to not see what she had between her legs. For everything that Margaret had told me, I had no picture in my mind of what a woman fully formed looked like. I watched with equal parts fascination and horror as my mother quickly examined her and then pulled her skirt back down to her ankles. Mother stood up from the table saying, “Your maidenhead is still intact. It would be a fine trick to pass a child through your birth canal without having had a man pass through it first.”
Mercy sat up, screaming loudly, “I am with child. I am with child.” The last word was said in a long protesting wail, but Mother was unmoved. Mercy sat on the table for a while, crying and whimpering until she saw that there was nothing to be gained by it. She then scrambled off the boards, smoothing out her rumpled skirt and apron. She drew herself up as best she could and said, wiping her streaming nose on her arm, “It’s because I’m indentured that you think I’m not fit for your son. But no matter what you say, he by rights should marry me and buy in earnest what he’s already used. You think I’m nothing now, but my family had better than this in Topsfield. Enough to make this farm look like a dung beetle’s pile.”
I think my mother had begun to pity her until she insulted us.
“You could not help your state. Misfortune has placed you in servitude, but that’s not the reason you’ll not get my son as a husband. It’s because you’re a sneaking thief and a liar that I’ll not have you any longer in my family. I took you in and clothed you and fed you, and you thanked me by stealing the food from my children’s mouths. Don’t think I don’t know about the food you’ve taken, and the bits of wool and the bottoms you’ve shaved off the candles. You’d have stolen the spinning wheel if you could have gotten it up under your skirt. For all that you stole, I might have forgiven you, but worst of all is your lying. I will not abide a liar.”
“You’re the liar,” Mercy screamed, her white skin turning blotchy and liverish. “You and your useless son. He promised to marry me and I gave him a roll to bind the deal, but your son and his puny wick couldn’t find his way into a woman even when it was thrust in his face. If you turn me out without a promise of marriage, I swear I’ll tell the whole village your family is filled with whoresons.” The rising sound of her voice was cut short by Mother slapping her hard across the face. A thin sliver of spit ran down the corner of her mouth while she cradled the reddening cheek with her hand.
“I turned a blind eye while you made moon eyes at Richard and shamelessly chased him about the place. But had I known you were putting yourself out with him under our roof, I would have dragged the rest of your hair out by its roots. At least Richard had enough sense to keep his rod in his pants with a girl so homely and rummy that even the Indians wouldn’t have her.”
I have never since seen the enormity of hate on a woman as that which filled the face of Mercy Williams in that moment. She looked at the both of us, and I was soon clinging to Hannah for comfort. She gathered her few things and walked out the front door, and it was days before we heard that she had been taken in by the Chandlers. They lived close by, across Boston Way Road, and had a travelers inn and were happy to buy from Father the remainder of her indenture. What story she must have told them I do not know, but Father was honest with William Chandler and said that Mercy had been a good worker. After Mother spoke to Father that evening, he beckoned ominously to Richard and they were out in the barn together a good while. When Richard came back into the house, he could barely walk from the welts the strap had left on his legs, but he seemed much lighter in spirit.
Lying in bed alone that night, I hummed the French trapper’s song but soon gave it up as I had already begun to forget the words. I held Margaret’s poppet close to my lips, but, not feeling the needle within, I lifted the skirt and found it to be gone. I sincerely hoped that it would soon break in Mercy’s thieving fingers, giving her lockjaw and a slow, painful death. Sometime during the night, Hannah crawled into my bed, and, as I pulled her round little body to me, I whispered, “Mercy is gone now. And as you are two years old, and a big grown girl, you shall sleep with me in my bed from now on.” I could smell the rosemary still clinging to my fingers and was grateful for its fragrance covering over Mercy’s musky odor, which had sweated into the sheets: an odor of hidden thoughts and furtive womanly desires. I fell asleep thinking of swift-burning fires and forested paths that traveled nowhere but north.
September 1691–December 1691
O
FTEN DURING THOSE
first days of September I would hide myself away in the cool and rustling stalks of corn growing in the house garden. The beans and squash had begun to ripen and I took time filling my apron, knowing that other less pleasant tasks waited for me in the torpid heat of the house and barn. We had nearly eighty bushels of corn from the harvesting of the outer field, and there was hardly a meal that didn’t have the hard little kernels ground or mashed or soaked into the game Father had shot. We had them as roasting ears pulled from the embers, as hominy soaked to mash in wood-ash lye and baked with beans and squash. Later, in the new year, when the sap rose in the maples, we would have cornmeal mixed with syrup and flour to make Indian pudding. It would take a goodly amount of the syrup to disguise the gritty taste of corn that had been stored in bushel baskets for many months.
I moved deeper into the shade and came upon the scarecrow, his head and shoulders peeking above the corn’s silken tassels waving in the wind like citizens hailing their protecting king. He was in fact a lengthy baking paddle with a hickory branch lashed to the pole to make two arms. We clothed him with a pair of Father’s aging breeches and coat, so ancient they had been worn on the crossing from old England. The jacket was a faded red woolen with turned-back cuffs of blue and a mended tear across the sleeve. Weeks before, I had come upon Father staring at the stick man as though at one long thought dead. The day had entered the long-shadow time that Father loved best, and, as he was at his ease, I braved asking him what he was thinking. Unmoving, he had answered, “I am remembering what I would forget. But a man’s past is like his own shadow.” After a time he felt my wondering gaze on him and nodded. “Go on, Sarah, ask your question.”