A Mercy

by Toni Morrison

  Mistress makes me memorize the way to get to you. I am to board the Ney brothers’ wagon in the morning as it travels north on the post road. After one stop at a tavern, the wagon will arrive at a place she calls Hartkill just after midday where I disembark. I am to walk left, westward on the Abenaki trail which I will know by the sapling bent into the earth with one sprout growing skyward. But the Ney brothers’ wagon is too much late. By the time I climb aboard and take a place at the tail behind the others it is already late afternoon. The others do not ask me where I am heading but after a while are pleasing themselves to whisper where they once live. By the sea, the women say, they cleaning ships, the men caulking them and repairing docks. They are certain their years of debt are over but the master says no. He sends them away, north, to another place, a tannery, for more years. I don’t understand why they are sad. Everyone has to work. I ask are you leaving someone dear behind? All heads turn toward me and the wind dies. Daft, a man says. A woman across from me says, young. The man says, same. Another woman raises her voice to say leave her be. Too loud. Settle down back there, the driver is shouting. The one who says I am daft bends down to scratch his ankle, scratching for a long time while the others cough and scrape their shoes as if to defy the driver’s command. The woman next to me whispers, there are no coffins in a tannery, only fast death in acid.

  The tavern needs lamplight when we reach it. At first I don’t see it, but one of us points and then we all do. A light winking through the trees. The Neys go in. We wait. They come out to water the horses and us and go in again. After that there are scuffling sounds again. I look down and see the rope that falls from their ankles twist along the wagon bed. The snow ends and the sun is gone. Quiet, quiet six drop down, the men catching the women in their arms. The boy jumps alone. The three women motion to me. My heart turns over and I drop down too. They move off back down where we are coming from, stepping as best they can figure in tree shelter at roadside, places where the snow is small. I don’t follow. Neither can I stay in the wagon. I have a cold stone in my chest. I don’t need Lina to warn me that I must not be alone with strange men with slow hands when in liquor and anger they discover their cargo is lost. I have to choose quick. I choose you. I go west into the trees. Everything I want is west. You. Your talk. The medicine you know that will make Mistress well. You will hear what I have to say and come back with me. I have only to go west. One day? Two nights?

  I am walking among chestnut trees lining the road. Some already showing leaf hold their breath until the snow melts. The silly ones let their buds drop to the ground like dry peas. I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you. I am hurrying to gain ground before all light is over. The land slopes sharply and I have no way to go but down as well. Hard as I try I lose the road. Tree leaves are too new for shelter, so everywhere the ground is slop with snow and my footprints slide and pool. The sky is the color of currants. Can I go more, I wonder. Should I. Two hares freeze before bounding away. I don’t know how to read that. I hear water running and move in the dark toward the sound. The moonlight is young. I hold one arm out in front and go slow to not stumble and fall. But the sound is pines dripping and there is no brook or stream. I make a cup of my hand to get a little fallen snow to swallow. I do not hear the paws or see any shape. It is the smell of wet fur that stops me. If I am smelling it, it is smelling me, because there is nothing with odor left in my food cloth, only bread. I cannot tell if it is bigger than me or smaller or if it is alone. I decide for stillness. I never hear it go but the odor fades at last. I think it is better to climb a tree. The old pines are very big. Any one is good cover even though it tears and fights me. Its branches sway but do not break under me. I hide from everything of creep and slouch. I know sleep will not claim me because I have too much fear. The branches creak and bend. My plan for this night is not good. I need Lina to say how to shelter in wilderness.

  Lina was unimpressed by the festive mood, the jittery satisfaction of everyone involved, and had refused to enter or go near it. That third and presumably final house that Sir insisted on building distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees. And now having died in it he will haunt its rooms forever. The first house Sir built—dirt floor, green wood—was weaker than the bark-covered one she herself was born in. The second one was strong. He tore down the first to lay wooden floors in the second with four rooms, a decent fireplace and windows with good tight shutters. There was no need for a third. Yet at the very moment when there were no children to occupy or inherit it, he meant to build another, bigger, double-storied, fenced and gated like the one he saw on his travels. Mistress had sighed and confided to Lina that at the least the doing of it would keep him more on the land.

  “Trading and traveling fill his pockets,” she’d said, “but he had been content to be a farmer when we married. Now …” Her voice trailed off as she yanked out the swan’s feathers.

  During its construction, however, Mistress couldn’t keep a smile off her face. Like everyone else, Willard, Scully, hired help, deliverymen, she was happy, cooking as though it were harvest time. Stupid Sorrow gaping with pleasure; the smithy laughing; Florens mindless as fern in wind. And Sir—she had never seen him in better spirits. Not with the birth of his doomed sons, nor with his pleasure in his daughter, not even with an especially successful business arrangement he bragged about. It was not a sudden change, yet it was a deep one. The last few years he seemed moody, less gentle, but when he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was cheerful every waking moment.

  Killing trees in that number, without asking their permission, of course his efforts would stir up malfortune. Sure enough, when the house was close to completion he fell sick with nothing else on his mind. He mystified Lina. All Europes did. Once they terrified her, then they rescued her. Now they simply puzzled her. Why, she wondered, had Mistress sent a love-disabled girl to find the blacksmith? Why not tamp down her pride and seek out one of the Anabaptists? The deacon would be more than willing. Poor Florens, thought Lina. If she is not stolen or murdered, if she finds him safe she would not return. Why should she? Lina had watched first with mild amusement, then with increasing distress the courtship that began the morning the blacksmith came to work on Sir’s foolish house. Florens had stood still, a startled doe, when he dismounted his horse, doffed his hat and asked if this was the Vaark place. Lina had shifted the milk bucket to her left hand and pointed up the hill. Mistress, leading the heifer, had come around the corner of the shed and asked him his business, sucking her teeth when he answered.

  “Dear Lord,” she murmured and, pushing out her bottom lip, blew hair away from her forehead. Then, “Wait here a moment.”

  As Mistress led the cow to pasture the blacksmith locked eyes with Lina before returning his hat to his head. He never once looked at Florens standing nearby, not breathing, holding the milking stool with both hands as though to help gravity keep her earthbound. She should have known then what the consequences would be, but felt sure that Sorrow, always an easy harvest, would quickly draw his attention and thwart Florens’ drooling. Learning from Mistress that he was a free man doubled her anxiety. He had rights, then, and privileges, like Sir. He could marry, own things, travel, sell his own labor. She should have seen the danger immediately because his arrogance was clear. When Mistress returned, rubbing her hands on her apron, he removed his hat once more, then did something Lina had never seen an African do: he looked directly at Mistress, lowering his glance, for he was very tall, never blinking those eyes slanted and yellow as a ram’s. It was not true, then, what she had heard; that for them only children and loved ones could be looked in the eye; for all others it was disrespect or a threat. In the town Lina had been taken to, after the conflagration had wiped away her village, that kind of boldness from any African was legitimate cause for a whip. An unfathomable puzzle. Europes could calmly cut mothers down, blast old men in th
e face with muskets louder than moose calls, but were enraged if a not-Europe looked a Europe in the eye. On the one hand they would torch your home; on the other they would feed, nurse and bless you. Best to judge them one at a time, proof being that one, at least, could become your friend, which is why she slept on the floor beside Mistress’ bed and kept watch in case Sorrow came close or Mistress needed something.

  Once, long ago, had Lina been older or tutored in healing, she might have eased the pain of her family and all the others dying around her: on mats of rush, lapping at the lake’s shore, curled in paths within the village and in the forest beyond, but most tearing at blankets they could neither abide nor abandon. Infants fell silent first, and even as their mothers heaped earth over their bones, they too were pouring sweat and limp as maize hair. At first they fought off the crows, she and two young boys, but they were no match for the birds or the smell, and when the wolves arrived, all three scrambled as high into a beech tree as they could. They stayed there all night listening to gnawing, baying, growling, fighting and worst of all the quiet of animals sated at last. At dawn none of them dared to apply a name to the pieces hauled away from a body or left to insect life. By noon, just as they had decided to make a run for one of the canoes moored in the lake, men in blue uniforms came, their faces wrapped in rags. News of the deaths that had swept her village had reached out. Lina’s joy at being rescued collapsed when the soldiers, having taken one look at the crows and vultures feeding on the corpses strewn about, shot the wolves then circled the whole village with fire. As the carrion flew off she did not know whether to stay hidden or risk being shot as well. But the boys screamed from the branches until the men heard them and caught each in their arms as they jumped, saying “Calme, mes petits. Calme.” If they worried that the little survivors would infect them, they chose to ignore it, being true soldiers, unwilling to slaughter small children.

  She never learned where they took the boys, but she was taken to live among kindly Presbyterians. They were pleased to have her, they said, because they admired native women who, they said, worked as hard as they themselves did, but scorned native men who simply fished and hunted like gentry all day. Impoverished gentry, that is, since they owned nothing, certainly not the land they slept on, preferring to live as entitled paupers. And since some of the church elders had heard horrible tales of, or witnessed themselves, God’s wrath toward the idle and profane—flinging black death followed by raging fire on the proud and blasphemous city of their birth—they could only pray that Lina’s people understood before they died that what had befallen them was merely the first sign of His displeasure: a pouring out of one of the seven vials, the final one of which would announce His arrival and the birth of young Jerusalem. They named her Messalina, just in case, but shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope. Afraid of once more losing shelter, terrified of being alone in the world without family, Lina acknowledged her status as heathen and let herself be purified by these worthies. She learned that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn mush with one’s fingers was perverse. That God hated idleness most of all, so staring off into space to weep for a mother or a playmate was to court damnation. Covering oneself in the skin of beasts offended God, so they burned her deerskin dress and gave her a good duffel cloth one. They clipped the beads from her arms and scissored inches from her hair. Although they would not permit her to accompany them to either of the Sunday services they attended, she was included in the daily prayers before breakfast, midmorning and evening. But none of the surrender, begging, imploring or praising on her knees took hold because, hard as she fought, the Messalina part erupted anyway and the Presbyterians abandoned her without so much as a murmur of fare well.

  It was some time afterward while branch-sweeping Sir’s dirt floor, being careful to avoid the hen nesting in the corner, lonely, angry and hurting, that she decided to fortify herself by piecing together scraps of what her mother had taught her before dying in agony. Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world. There was no comfort or place for her in the village; Sir was there and not there. Solitude would have crushed her had she not fallen into hermit skills and become one more thing that moved in the natural world. She cawed with birds, chatted with plants, spoke to squirrels, sang to the cow and opened her mouth to rain. The shame of having survived the destruction of her families shrank with her vow never to betray or abandon anyone she cherished. Memories of her village peopled by the dead turned slowly to ash and in their place a single image arose. Fire. How quick. How purposefully it ate what had been built, what had been life. Cleansing somehow and scandalous in beauty. Even before a simple hearth or encouraging a flame to boil water she felt a sweet twinge of agitation.

  Waiting for the arrival of a wife, Sir was a hurricane of activity laboring to bring nature under his control. More than once when Lina brought his dinner to whatever field or woodlot he was working in, she found him, head thrown back, staring at the sky as if in wondering despair at the land’s refusal to obey his will. Together they minded the fowl and starter stock; planted corn and vegetables. But it was she who taught him how to dry the fish they caught; to anticipate spawning and how to protect a crop from night creatures. Yet neither of them knew what to do about fourteen days of rain or fifty-five of none. They were helpless when black flies descended in scarves, disabling cattle, the horse, and forcing them to take refuge indoors. Lina didn’t know too much herself, but she did know what a poor farmer he was. At least she was able to distinguish weed from seedling. Without patience, the lifeblood of farming, and reluctant to seek advice from villagers nearby, he was forever unprepared for violent, mocking changes in weather and for the fact that common predators neither knew nor cared to whom their prey belonged. He ignored her warning of using alewives as fertilizer only to see his plots of tender vegetables torn up by foragers attracted by the smell. Nor would he plant squash among the corn. Though he allowed that the vines kept weeds away, he did not like the look of disorder. Yet he was good with animals and building things.

  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.”