A Mercy (13 page)

The housewife told her it was monthly blood; that all females suffered it and Sorrow believed her until the next month and the next and the next when it did not return. Twin and she talked about it, about whether it was instead the result of the goings that took place behind the stack of clapboard, both brothers attending,
instead of what the housewife said. Because the pain was outside between her legs, not inside where the housewife said was natural. The hurt was still there when the sawyer asked Sir to take her away, saying his wife could not keep her.

Sir asked, “Where is she?” and Sorrow was summoned into the mill.

“How old?”

When the sawyer shook his head, Sorrow spoke up. “I believe I have eleven years now.”

Sir grunted.

“Don’t mind her name,” said the sawyer. “You can name her anything you want. My wife calls her Sorrow because she was abandoned. She is a bit mongrelized as you can see. However be that, she will work without complaint.”

As he spoke Sorrow saw the side smile on his face.

She rode behind Sir’s saddle for miles with one stop on the way. Since it was her first time astride a horse, the burning brought her to tears. Swaying, bumping, clinging to Sir’s coat, finally she threw up on it. He reined in, then, and lifted her down, letting her rest while he wiped his coat with a leaf of coltsfoot. She accepted his water pouch, but the first gulp spewed out along with whatever was left in her stomach.

“Sorrow, indeed,” mumbled Sir.

She was grateful when they got close to his farm and he took her down so she could walk the rest of the way. He looked around every few furlongs to make sure she had not fallen or sickened again.

Twin smiled and clapped her hands when they
glimpsed the farm. All along the trail riding behind Sir, Sorrow had looked around with a fright that would have been even deeper had she not been suffering nausea as well as pain. Miles of hemlock towered like black ship masts, and when they fell away cathedral pine, thick as the horse was long, threw shadows over their heads. No matter how she tried, she never saw their tops that, for all she knew, broke open the sky. Now and again a hulking pelted shape standing among the trees watched them ride by. Once when an elk crossed their path, Sir had to swerve and turn the horse around four times before it would go forward again. So when she followed Sir’s horse into a sun-drenched clearing and heard the cackle of ducks neither she nor Twin could have been more relieved. Unlike the housewife, Mistress and Lina both had small, straight noses; Mistress’ skin was like the whites of eggs, Lina’s like the brown of their shells. Before anything, food or rest, Lina insisted on washing Sorrow’s hair. Not only the twigs and bits of straw hiding under her cap bothered her; she feared lice. It was a fear that surprised Sorrow who thought lice, like ticks, fleas or any of the other occupants of the body, were more nuisance than danger. Lina thought otherwise and after the hair-washing, scrubbed the girl down twice before letting her in the house. Then, shaking her head from side to side, gave her a salted rag to clean her teeth.

Sir, holding Patrician’s hand, announced that she be confined to the house at night. When Mistress asked why, he said, “I’m told she wanders.”

In the chill of that first night, scrunched on a mat
near the fireplace, Sorrow slept and woke, slept and woke, lulled continuously by Twin’s voice describing the thousandfold men walking the waves, singing wordlessly. How their teeth glittered more than the whitecaps under their feet. How, as the sky darkened and the moon rose, the edges of their night-black skin silvered. How the smell of land, ripe and loamy, brightened the eyes of the crew but made the sea walkers cry. Soothed by Twin’s voice and the animal fat Lina had spread on her lower parts, Sorrow fell into the first sweet sleep she had had in months.

Still, that first morning, she threw up her breakfast as soon as she swallowed. Mistress gave her yarrow tea and put her to work in the vegetable garden. Prying late turnips from the ground, she could hear Sir breaking rocks in a far-off field. Patrician squatted at the edge of the garden eating a yellow apple and watching her. Sorrow waved. Patrician waved back. Lina appeared and hurried the little girl away. From then on it was clear to Twin, if not to Sorrow, that Lina ruled and decided everything Sir and Mistress did not. Her eye was everywhere even when she was nowhere. She rose before cock crow, entered the house in darkness, touched a sleeping Sorrow with the toe of her moccasin and lingered while refreshing the embers. She examined baskets, looked under the lids of jars. Checking the stores, thought Sorrow. No, said Twin, checking you for food theft.

Lina spoke very little to her, not even “good morning,” and only when the content of what she had to say was urgent. Therefore it was she who told Sorrow she was pregnant. Lina had removed a basket of millet from
Sorrow’s hands. Looked her dead in the eye and said, “Do you know you are with child, child?”

Sorrow’s jaw dropped. Then she flushed with pleasure at the thought of a real person, a person of her own, growing inside her.

“What should I do?” she asked.

Lina simply stared at her and, hoisting the basket on her hip, walked away. If Mistress knew, she never said, perhaps because she was pregnant herself. Sorrow’s birthing came too soon, Lina told her, for the infant to survive, but Mistress delivered a fat boy who cheered everybody up—for six months anyway. They put him with his brother at the bottom of the rise behind the house and said prayers. Although Sorrow thought she saw her own newborn yawn, Lina wrapped it in a piece of sacking and set it a-sail in the widest part of the stream and far below the beavers’ dam. It had no name. Sorrow wept, but Twin told her not to. “I am always with you,” she said. That was some consolation, but it took years for Sorrow’s steady thoughts of her baby breathing water under Lina’s palm to recede. With no one to talk to, she relied on Twin more and more. With her, Sorrow never wanted for friendship or conversation. Even if they made her sleep inside, there were stories to listen to and they could steal away together during the day for strolls and larks in the forest. There were cherries, too, and walnuts from the deacon. But she had to be quiet. Once he brought her a neckerchief which she filled with stones and threw in the stream, knowing such finery would raise Lina’s anger as well as alert Mistress. And although another of Mistress’ baby
boys perished, Patrician stayed healthy. For a little while Lina seemed to be persuaded that the boys’ deaths were not Sorrow’s fault, but when a horse broke Patrician’s crown, she changed her mind.

Then came Florens.

Then came the blacksmith. Twice.

When Florens arrived that bitter winter, Sorrow, curious and happy to see someone new, smiled and was about to step forward just to touch one of the little girl’s fat braids. But Twin stopped her, leaning close to Sorrow’s face, crying, “Don’t! Don’t!” Sorrow recognized Twin’s jealousy and waved her face away, but not quickly enough. Lina, having taken off her shawl and wrapped it around the child’s shoulders, picked her up and carried her into the cowshed. Thereafter, the girl belonged to Lina. They slept together, bathed together, ate together. Lina made clothes for her and tiny shoes from rabbit skin. Whenever Sorrow came near, Lina said “Scat,” or sent her on some task that needed doing immediately, all the while making certain everyone else shared the distrust that sparkled in her own eyes. Sorrow remembered how they narrowed, gleamed, when Sir made her sleep inside. And although Lina helped her through childbirth, Sorrow never forgot the baby breathing water every day, every night, down all the streams of the world. Kept as distant from the new girl as she had been from Patrician, Sorrow behaved thereafter the way she always had—with placid indifference to anyone, except Twin.

Years later, when the blacksmith came, the weather of the place changed. Forever. Twin noticed it first, saying
Lina was afraid of the smithy and tried to warn Mistress about him, but the warning was fruitless. Mistress paid it no attention. She was too happy for guardedness because Sir was not traveling anymore. He was always there working on the new house, managing deliveries, laying string from angle to angle and in close conversation with the smithy about the gate’s design. Lina dreading; Mistress humming with contentment; Sir in high spirits. Florens, of course, was the most distracted.

Neither Sorrow nor Twin had settled on exactly what to think of the blacksmith. He seemed complete, unaware of his effect. Was he the danger Lina saw in him or was her fear mere jealousy? Was he Sir’s perfect building partner or a curse on Florens, altering her behavior from open to furtive? They had yet to make up their minds when Sorrow, returning from the stream with a bucket of water, collapsed, burning and shaking, near the building site. It was pure luck that the smithy was right there and saw her fall. He picked her up and laid her down on the pallet where he slept. Sorrow’s face and arms were welting. The smithy touched her neck boils, then shouted. Sir poked his head out of the door frame and Florens came running. Mistress arrived and the smithy called for vinegar. Lina went to fetch it, and when it came, he doused Sorrow’s boils and the skin of her face and arms, sending her into spasms of pain. While the women sucked air and Sir frowned, the blacksmith heated a knife and slit open one of the swellings. They watched in silence as he tipped Sorrow’s own blood drops between her lips. All of them thought it better not to have her in the house, so Sorrow lay
sweltering in a hammock all day, all night—permitted no food or water—as the women took turns fanning her. The constant breeze of their fans summoned sail wind and Captain, the tiller in his hand. She heard him before she saw him. Laughing. Loud, raucous. No. Not laughing. Screaming. Along with the others. High-pitched and low, the screams were far away, on the other side of the white clouds surrounding her. Horses, too. Pounding hooves. Freed from below. Leaping over sacks of grain and kicking barrels until the staves broke and a thick sweet blackness poured out. Still, she could not move or tear through the clouds. Pushing, pushing, she fell to the floor while the clouds covered and smothered her whole self, convincing her the screams belonged to gulls. When she came to, eyes, the shape and color of her own, greeted her. The puffy clouds, mere threads now, drifted away.

“I’m here,” said the girl with a face matching her own exactly. “I’m always here.”

With Twin she was less afraid and the two began to search the silent, listing ship. Slowly, slowly. Peeking here, listening there, finding nothing except a bonnet and seagulls pecking the remains of a colt.

Under the waving fan, drenched in sweat, Sorrow remembered freezing day after day on the ship. Other than icy wind, nothing stirred. Aft was the sea, fore a rocky beach below a cliff of stone and brush. Sorrow had never set foot on land and was terrified of leaving ship for shore. It was as foreign to her as ocean was to sheep. Twin made it possible. When they descended, the earth—mean, hard, thick, hateful—shocked her. That’s
when she understood Captain’s choice to keep her aboard. He reared her not as a daughter but as a sort of crewman-to-be. Dirty, trousered, both wild and obedient with one important skill, patching and sewing sailcloth.

Mistress and Lina quarreled with the blacksmith about whether she should be forced to eat or drink, but he ruled, insisting she have nothing. Riveted by that hot knife and blood medicine, they deferred. Fanning and vinegar-soaked boils only. At the close of the third day, Sorrow’s fever broke and she begged for water. The smithy held her head as she sipped from a dried squash gourd. Raising her eyes, she saw Twin seated in the branches above the hammock, smiling. Soon Sorrow said she was hungry. Bit by bit, under the smithy’s care and Florens’ nursing, the boils shriveled, the welts disappeared and her strength returned. Now their judgment was clear: the blacksmith was a savior. Lina, however, became truly ugly in her efforts to keep Florens away from the patient and the healer, muttering that she had seen this sickness before when she was a child, and that it would spread like mold to them all. But she lost the battle with Florens. By the time Sorrow recovered, Florens was struck down with another sickness much longer lasting and far more lethal.

It was while lying in the meadow at the forest’s edge, listening to Twin tell a favorite story, the one about a school of fish girls with pearls for eyes and green-black locks of seaweed hair racing one another, riding the backs of a fleet of whales, that Sorrow first saw the smithy and Florens coiled around each other. Twin had
just gotten to the part where seabirds, excited by the foam trailing the fleet like shooting stars, were joining the race, when Sorrow put a finger to her lips and pointed with another. Twin stopped speaking and looked. The blacksmith and Florens were rocking and, unlike female farm animals in heat, she was not standing quietly under the weight and thrust of the male. What Sorrow saw yonder in the grass under a hickory tree was not the silent submission to the slow goings behind a pile of wood or a hurried one in a church pew that Sorrow knew. This here female stretched, kicked her heels and whipped her head left, right, to, fro. It was a dancing. Florens rolled and twisted from her back to his. He hoisted her up against the hickory; she bent her head into his shoulder. A dancing. Horizontal one minute, another minute vertical.

Sorrow watched until it was over; until, stumbling like tired old people, they dressed themselves. It all ended when the blacksmith grabbed Florens’ hair, yanked her head back to put his mouth on hers. Then they went off in different directions. It amazed her to see that. In all of the goings she knew, no one had ever kissed her mouth. Ever.

It was natural, once Sir was buried and Mistress fell ill, to send for the blacksmith. And he came. Alone. He gazed for a while at the great, new house before dismounting. Then he glanced at Sorrow’s belly, then her eyes before handing her the reins. He turned to Lina.

“Lead me to her,” he said.

Sorrow rushed back from tying the horse as fast as her weight let her and the three of them entered the
house. He paused and, noticing the smell, looked into the pot of stewed mugwort and other bits of Lina’s brew.