A Mercy (6 page)

It was an unrewarding life. Unless the weather was dangerous, she nested with the chickens until, just before the wife arrived, he threw up a cowshed in one day. During all that time Lina must have said fifty words other than “Yes, Sir.” Solitude, regret and fury would have broken her had she not erased those six years preceding the death of the world. The company of other children, industrious mothers in beautiful jewelry, the majestic plan of life: when to vacate, to harvest, to burn, to hunt; ceremonies of death, birth and worship. She sorted and stored what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity which shaped her inside and out. By the time Mistress came, her self-invention was almost perfected. Soon it was irresistible.

Lina placed magic pebbles under Mistress’ pillow; kept the room fresh with mint and forced angelica root in her patient’s festering mouth to pull bad spirits from her body. She prepared the most powerful remedy she knew: devil’s bit, mugwort, Saint-John’s-wort, maidenhair and periwinkle; boiled it, strained it and spooned it between Mistress’ teeth. She considered repeating some of the prayers she learned among the Presbyterians, but since none had saved Sir, she thought not. He went quickly. Screaming at Mistress. Then whispering, begging to be taken to his third house. The big one, useless now that there were no children or children’s children to
live in it. No one to stand in awe at its size or to admire the sinister gate that the smithy took two months to make. Two copper snakes met at the top. When they parted it for Sir’s last wish, Lina felt as though she were entering the world of the damned. But if the blacksmith’s work was a frivolous waste of a grown man’s time, his presence was not. He brought one girl to womanhood and saved the life of another. Sorrow. Vixen-eyed Sorrow with black teeth and a head of never groomed woolly hair the color of a setting sun. Accepted, not bought, by Sir, she joined the household after Lina but before Florens and still had no memory of her past life except being dragged ashore by whales.

“Not whales,” Mistress had said. “Certainly not. She was treading water in the North River in Mohawk country, half drowned, when two young sawyers trawled her in. They threw a blanket over her and brought their father to the riverbank where she lay. It’s said she had been living alone on a foundered ship. They thought she was a boy.”

Not then, not ever, had she spoken of how she got there or where she had been. The sawyer’s wife named her Sorrow, for good reason, thought Lina, and following a winter of feeding the daft girl who kept wandering off getting lost, who knew nothing and worked less, a strange melancholy girl to whom her sons were paying very close attention, the sawyer’s wife asked her husband to get quit of her. He obliged and offered her to the care of a customer he trusted to do her no harm. Sir. When Sorrow arrived, trailing Sir’s horse, Mistress barely hid her annoyance but admitted the place could use the help. If Sir was bent on travel, two female farmers and a
four-year-old daughter were not enough. Lina had been a tall fourteen-year-old when Sir bought her from the Presbyterians. He had searched the advertisements posted at the printer’s in town. “A likely woman who has had small pox and measles.… A likely Negro about 9 years.… Girl or woman that is handy in the kitchen sensible, speaks good English, complexion between yellow and black.… Five years time of a white woman that understands Country work, with a child upwards of two years old.… Mulatto Fellow very much pitted with small pox, honest and sober.… White lad fit to serve.… Wanted a servant able to drive a carriage, white or black.… Sober and prudent woman who.… Likely wench, white, 29 years with child.… Healthy Deutsch woman for rent … stout healthy, healthy strong, strong healthy likely sober sober sober …” until he got to “Hardy female, Christianized and capable in all matters domestic available for exchange of goods or specie.”

A bachelor expecting the arrival of a new wife, he required precisely that kind of female on his land. By then Lina’s swollen eye had calmed and the lash cuts on her face, arms and legs had healed and were barely noticeable. The Presbyterians, recalling perhaps their own foresight in the name they had given her, never asked what had happened to her and there was no point in telling them. She had no standing in law, no surname and no one would take her word against a Europe. What they did was consult with the printer about the wording of an advertisement. “Hardy female …”

When the Europe wife stepped down from the cart, hostility between them was instant. The health and
beauty of a young female already in charge annoyed the new wife; while the assumption of authority from the awkward Europe girl infuriated Lina. Yet the animosity, utterly useless in the wild, died in the womb. Even before Lina midwifed Mistress’ first child, neither one could keep the coolness. The fraudulent competition was worth nothing on land that demanding. Besides they were company for each other and by and by discovered something much more interesting than status. Rebekka laughed out loud at her own mistakes; was unembarrassed to ask for help. Lina slapped her own forehead when she forgot the berries rotting in the straw. They became friends. Not only because somebody had to pull the wasp sting from the other’s arm. Not only because it took two to push the cow away from the fence. Not only because one had to hold the head while the other one tied the trotters. Mostly because neither knew precisely what they were doing or how. Together, by trial and error they learned: what kept the foxes away; how and when to handle and spread manure; the difference between lethal and edible and the sweet taste of timothy grass; the features of measled swine; what turned the baby’s stool liquid and what hardened it into pain. For her Mistress, farmwork was more adventure than drudgery. Then again, thought Lina, she had Sir who pleased her more and more and soon a daughter, Patrician, both of whom dulled the regret of the short-lived infants Lina delivered and buried each subsequent year. By the time Sir brought Sorrow home, the resident women were a united front in dismay. To Mistress she was useless. To Lina she was bad luck in the flesh. Red hair, black teeth, recurring
neck boils and a look in those over-lashed silver-gray eyes that raised Lina’s nape hair.

She watched while Mistress trained Sorrow to sewing, the one task she liked and was good at, and said nothing when, to stop her roaming, he said, Sir made the girl sleep by the fireplace all seasons. A comfort Lina was suspicious of but did not envy even in bad weather. Her people had built sheltering cities for a thousand years and, except for the deathfeet of the Europes, might have built them for a thousand more. As it turned out the sachem had been dead wrong. The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. Lina was not so sure. Based on the way Sir and Mistress tried to run their farm, she knew there were exceptions to the sachem’s revised prophecy. They seemed mindful of a distinction between earth and property, fenced their cattle though their neighbors did
not, and although legal to do so, they were hesitant to kill foraging swine. They hoped to live by tillage rather than eat up the land with herds, measures that kept their profit low. So while Lina trusted more or less Sir’s and Mistress’ judgment, she did not trust their instincts. Had they true insight they would never have kept Sorrow so close.

Hard company she was, needing constant attention, as at this very daybreak when, out of necessity, she had been trusted with the milking. Since being pregnant hampered her on the stool, she mis-handled the udder, and the cow, Sorrow reported, had kicked. Lina left the sickroom to mind the heifer—talk to her first, hum a little, then slowly cradle the tender teats with a palm of cream. The spurts were sporadic, worthless, except for the cow’s relief, and after she had oiled her into comfort, Lina rushed back into the house. No good could come of leaving Mistress alone with Sorrow, and now that her stomach was low with child, she was even less reliable. In the best of times the girl dragged misery like a tail. There was a man in Lina’s village like that. His name she had forgotten along with the rest of her language, but it meant “trees fall behind him,” suggesting his influence on the surroundings. In Sorrow’s presence eggs would not allow themselves to be beaten into foam, nor did butter lighten cake batter. Lina was sure the early deaths of Mistress’ sons could be placed at the feet of the natural curse that was Sorrow. After the death of the second infant Lina felt obliged to inform her mistress of the danger. They were making mincemeat to be ready for Sir’s return. The neats’ feet which had been simmering
since morning were cool now. Their severed bones lay on the table, waiting for the addition of fat and gristle for boiling.

“Some people do evil purposefully,” said Lina. “Others can’t help the evil they make.”

Mistress looked up. “What are you saying?”

“Your son, John Jacob. He died after Sorrow came.”

“Stay, Lina. Don’t feed old misery. My baby died of fever.”

“But Patrician sickened too and did not—”

“I said stay. That he died in my arms is enough without adding savage nonsense.” She went on describing all infants’ frailty during teething, her voice stern as she chopped the meat then stirred in raisins, apple slices, ginger, sugar and salt. Lina pushed a large jar closer and the two of them spooned the mixture into it. Then Lina filled the jar to the top with brandy and sealed it. Four weeks or more outside and it would be ready for a crust at Christmas. Meantime, Mistress dropped the brain and heart of a calf into a pot of boiling seasoned water. Such a supper, fried in butter and garnished with egg slices, would be a treat.

Now, more than unreliable, more than wandering off to talk to grass and grapevines, Sorrow was pregnant and soon there would be another virgin birth and, perhaps, unfortunately, this one would not die. But if Mistress died, what then? To whom could they turn? Although the Baptists once freely helped Sir build the second house, the outhouses, and happily joined him in felling white pine for the post fence, a cooling had risen between them and his family. Partly because Mistress hated them for shutting her children out of heaven, but
also, thought Lina, because Sorrow’s lurking frightened them. Years past, the Baptists might bring a brace of salmon or offer a no-longer-needed cradle for Mistress’ baby. And the deacon could be counted on for baskets of strawberries and blue, all manner of nuts and once a whole haunch of venison. Now, of course, nobody, Baptist or any other, would come to a poxed house. Neither Willard nor Scully came, which should not have disappointed her, but did. Both were Europes, after all. Willard was getting on in years and was still working off his passage. The original seven years stretched to twenty-some, he said, and he had long ago forgotten most of the mischief that kept extending his bondage. The ones he remembered with a smile involved rum; the others were attempts to run away. Scully, young, fine-boned, with light scars tracing his back, had plans. He was finishing his mother’s contract. True, he didn’t know how long it would take but, he boasted, unlike Willard’s or Lina’s, his enslavement would end before death. He was the son of a woman sent off to the colonies for “lewdness and disobedience,” neither of which according to him was quelled. Her death transferred her contract to her son. Then a man claiming to be Scully’s father settled the balance owed and recuperated certain expenses by leasing the boy to his current master for a span of time soon to end, although Scully was not privy to exactly when. There was a legal paper, he had told Lina, that said it. Lina guessed he had not seen it and could not cipher it if he had. All he knew for certain was that the freedom fee would be generous enough to purchase a horse or set him up in a trade. What trade, wondered Lina. If that glorious day of freedom fees did not arrive
soon, he too, she thought, will run away, and maybe have the good fortune denied Willard. Cleverer than the older man, and sober, he might succeed. Still, she doubted it; thought his dreams of selling his labor were only that. She knew he did not object to lying with Willard when sleep was not the point. No wonder Sir, without kin or sons to count on, had no males on his property. It made good sense, except when it didn’t. As now with two lamenting women, one confined to bed, the other heavily pregnant; a love-broken girl on the loose and herself unsure of everything including moonrise.

Don’t die, Miss. Don’t. Herself, Sorrow, a newborn and maybe Florens—three unmastered women and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone. None of them could inherit; none was attached to a church or recorded in its books. Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters, if they stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile. The farm could be claimed by or auctioned off to the Baptists. Lina had relished her place in this small, tight family, but now saw its folly. Sir and Mistress believed they could have honest free-thinking lives, yet without heirs, all their work meant less than a swallow’s nest. Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from
nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family—not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.