The Shape of Mercy

by Susan Meissner

  I could sense that my job hung in the balance. She was ready to pull the diary out of my hands and send me away if I refused. It mattered that much to her.

  But that’s not what bothered me most, that it mattered. I was thinking about what my father would say if I got fired from a job he thought was silly to begin with. I had no desire to find out.

  “If you think it’s necessary,” I said.

  “It is. Not for the diary, but for you.”

  She looked back down at her book, the conversation over.

  I had no idea what she meant.

  Seven

  I kind of broke my promise to Abigail the moment I got back to my dorm room. “Kind of,” because I didn’t promise I wouldn’t look at any plays about the Salem witch trials. I promised not to read historical accounts or Web sites.

  I couldn’t go back to my empty room—Clarissa would be working or studying somewhere else—with The Crucible sitting on my bookshelf and not look at it.

  I had no trouble rationalizing it. I’d already read the play, and it wasn’t a historical account. It was based on fact, but that was all.

  I’d brought quite a few books with me to Santa Barbara my freshman year. Far more than I needed, more than the average dorm room could hold. Half of the boxes of books I brought went back with my parents that same night. As my father replaced the extra books in his company car, he reminded me that if I had gotten the condo like he suggested, I could’ve brought as many books as I wanted.

  He hadn’t thought much of my idea to live in a dorm. Not enough security (he still worries I will be abducted and held for ransom), too much partying (even though I am not much of a party girl and he knows it), and not enough attention paid to studies. He had yet to meet Clarissa, the woman who could do it all—stay safe, work, party, and study, all at the same time.

  I’m sure he also felt that if I had at my disposal the means to live on my own, in the manner to which I am accustomed, why settle for anything less?

  Historically, Duroughs don’t settle.

  Clarissa was gone, and the room was quiet except for heavy bass booming from a stereo next door. I was caught up with assignments for my classes the next day, so I made a cup of green tea and eased The Crucible out from its thin space on my bookshelf.

  I opened it and fanned through the pages, noting my high school scribbling from my junior English class. I’d highlighted snatches of dialogue, penciled in a few insights from my seventeen-year-old mind, and drawn little daisies in the margins.

  The moment I held the pages still and my eyes swept the script, the details of the story came back to me. The names, the places, the remembered fear that someone can say something untrue about you and as long as there is someone else to believe it, you are whatever they say you are.

  The remembered names filled my head: John Proctor. Betty Parris. Abigail Williams. Martha Corey. Tituba. Rebecca Nurse.

  And I was suddenly aware that these people weren’t merely characters in a play. They had been real. Arthur Miller had fiddled with the details—like creating an affair between John Proctor the accused and Abigail Williams the afflicted, which would have been unlikely, as the real Abigail Williams was only eleven years old—but the people had actually existed. Mercy probably had known them all by name.

  And they knew her.

  Inside the book, just before the first scene, I found a folded piece of paper. Study notes from my American lit teacher. I read them and remembered.

  In 1692, several young girls in Salem, Massachusetts, began having hallucinations and seizures. Unable to account for their afflictions, and believing as most Puritans did that anything unexplainable and terrible was of the devil, the local physician declared that they were bewitched. Fear quickly took hold, and the girls were pressed to name their tormentors. They began to name names, perhaps arbitrarily and perhaps at the coaching of their parents. First to be accused were those considered socially deviant, but soon anyone who challenged the girls or the ruling authorities, or who defended the accused, became accused themselves. Seemingly devout people were suddenly charged with witchcraft, and as panic spread throughout the colony, others began to claim they were also bewitched. Old grievances were aired, grudges were unearthed, and ordinary people were charged, arrested, and many convicted based on little more than the claims of young girls writhing on courtroom floors. In all, more than one hundred forty people were accused of witchcraft, though not all were imprisoned or tried. Nineteen people were hanged in Salem alone.

  Your first discussion question is due Friday. Be prepared to discuss one of the following:

  How does hysteria defy logic?

  What are the ramifications of moral law equaling state law?

  How were the afflicted girls empowered, and what was the direct result of that empowerment?

  What is the basis for social intolerance?

  What is the opposite of deviance?

  My cell phone trilled, and I jumped in my chair as if Abigail had walked in the room and found me cheating. I grabbed my phone and saw the word Dad on the screen. I knew why he’d called before he even asked.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Lauren. So. How goes the job?”

  Dad’s not much for small talk. Big talk gets more done.

  “Um. I like it. It’s really interesting.” Interesting probably wasn’t the most accurate word, but it fell off my lips first.

  “Tell me.”

  Those are Dads favorite two words as a parent. Maybe they’re his favorite two words as a CEO too. They sound like an invitation to be heard, and they are. But they are also the means to enlighten. Dad has a fondness for information. He wants to know all that can be known. “Tell me” is the same as saying, “Increase my knowledge,” which is the same as “Empower me.” Dad has always understood that knowledge is power.

  “Well,” I began, “the diary is in really good shape. Abigail has a special box she keeps it in that has an airlock. I wear gloves when I handle it. Some of the pages are missing or torn, and sometimes the writing is hard to decipher. And of course, the language is a bit of a challenge. Abigail wants the transcription to be easy to read, so I’m rearranging some of the sentences and replacing the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ with ‘yous’ and ‘yours.’”

  Dad was quiet for a moment. Processing.

  “Why does this Abigail want to change the language? It seems to me a transcription should be an exact representation of the original.”

  “Well, she’d like it to be readable for today.”

  “Readable for who?”

  My eyes widened as I held the phone to my ear. I hadn’t a clue who’d be reading it when I was done. Abigail had said nothing about what she planned to do with the transcription. She’d only said she didn’t want Mercy to be forgotten.

  “Readable for who, Lauren?”

  “Um, well, anyone, I guess.”

  “But who’s going to read it?”

  Dad was not being belligerent or excessively nosey or even accusatory. He was gathering information. Increasing his understanding.

  I quickly decided it didn’t matter to me what Abigail planned to do. I was hired simply to transcribe.

  So instead of saying, “I don’t know,” I said, “Well, it makes no difference to me.”

  Even though, right then, I knew it did.

  “She must have a plan of some sort,” Dad said. “I mean, by the time you’re finished with this project, she’ll have spent several hundred dollars. And for what? If she’s planning on publishing, you should get it in writing that you’re the coeditor. Editor, actually. You might want to ask what her plans are.”

  “I don’t think she has any plans.”

  “It’s not too late to tell her you want credit on the byline.”

  “Well, it’s really Mercy’s story, not mine.”

  “Is it worth publishing?” Dad the entrepreneur, always thinking big.

  “Possibly. Probably. Mercy was hanged as a witch in Salem. But she was i
nnocent, like most of the people executed for witchcraft back then were.”

  “Hanged? As a witch?” He sounded appalled.

  “She was innocent, Dad. That’s the point. She was innocent.”

  “Not very pleasant subject matter.”

  “No. Not pleasant. But historical. It really happened.”

  “Kind of a sad way to spend your afternoons.” He said this in a fatherly way. I don’t know how else to describe it.

  “Sometimes history is sad.”

  “Hmm.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “Do you know much about the Salem witch trials, Dad?”

  “No more than the average person, I guess.”

  “A bunch of teenage girls started acting strange and accusing people of bewitching them. And everyone believed them even though there was no proof. How does a person convince people to believe things they can’t prove?”

  My father was quick to answer. “That’s easy. People always believe what they want to believe. Hitler didn’t force anybody to jump on his bandwagon. All those men who jumped on it used their own legs to do it.”

  “But how did he convince them to jump?”

  “How does anybody convince anybody else of anything? You catch them at a weak moment, when they’re feeling alone or afraid, and you offer them the security of solidarity. Advertising execs use this tactic all the time: Buy this and be like everyone else. Don’t buy it and be the loser no one respects.”

  “So I guess the key is to never let yourself feel alone or afraid.”

  “No,” he responded. “The key is to never let someone else tell you what to think.”

  Eight

  8 January 1692

  Spent the day in the cottage. Papa coughed most of the morning I made him a hot drink of dried herbs to settle his lungs. He told me it tasted like summer.

  I spun thread all afternoon and my fingers are sore. This is one chore I would gladly give up. I would wear fig leaves like Eve rather than spin thread. Papa reminded me that fig trees do not grow in the colony and even fig leaves must be sewn together.

  It seems the world will not function without thread. And even though my fingers are red and angry, supper must be made.

  Papa wants rabbit stew. I do not, but I will make it because I know he will eat it.

  And because I must go to John Peter’s house to get the rabbit. I will trade thread for it.

  ’Tis not a long walk.

  Evening

  The rabbit tasted a bit different tonight.

  John Peter insisted on bringing me home on his horse after I went for it. So I sat on a horse with a dead rabbit in my lap and my arms around John Peter’s waist.

  I may yet develop an appetite for rabbit.

  11 January 1692

  Tonight I miss Mama. ’Tis her birthday today. Papa said this would be her thirty-seventh winter if she had lived. ’Tis strange to think that when she was my age, she was already a mother.

  I am eighteen. Most of my friends are wedded already. Papa worries that his illness prevents him from finding a suitable man for me to marry. He does not get out very often.

  I want to be married, but I do not want to marry just any man.

  And I am fearful of what happened two years ago.

  I have been betrothed before.

  When I was sixteen, I was to marry a man from Marblehead named James Luddy. He was two years older than I, and his father owned a ship like Uncle’s. That is how my father knew him. James was tall and red-headed, and he scarce spoke a word to me the day I met him. His eyes were as gray as a stormy night and very large. They looked like they wished to pop from his head altogether. I think he was as afraid of me as I was of him.

  When James and his father left our cottage, I told Papa I did not think I should marry James Luddy. He said, “Why ever not?” And I said because within me there was not a hint of affection, or even its opposite. I felt nothing Papa said marriage is not kept by affection but by a pledge. Affection does not beget the pledge; the pledge begets affection. When you share a life and a home and a bed with someone, you become soul mates as surely as cream and effort produce butter. Papa told me James Luddy was a good man, a Gospel man, who would be a good husband.

  And so I began to imagine my life with James Luddy. I imagined being butter.

  But before I finished sewing even one tablecloth for my future table, James Luddy came down with brain fever and died.

  I did not know how to weep for him.

  Papa has not tried to find me another match. I believe James’s death affected him greatly. Or perhaps he has tried, but no man wants to take James’s place and wind up where he is: in Abraham’s bosom.

  I wonder if I should tell Papa that I fancy John Peter. Can it not be that for some, affection begets a pledge?

  Abigail hadn’t mentioned that Mercy had been in love. And I knew the moment I finished reading the January 11 entry that she had been. The shape of the words on the paper, the underlying tone, the lift in the script.

  Mercy had been in love.

  The story was taking a painful turn already, and it was only my fifth afternoon with the diary. Here was a woman in love about to be hanged. An innocent woman.

  I turned to look at Abigail who, as usual, sat behind me, her nose in a book. It was a few minutes before six o’clock. Esperanza hadn’t called us to dinner yet.

  “She’s in love with John Peter,” I said.

  “You can tell that from four pages in, can you?” Abigail kept her eyes on the book she held in her lap. I didn’t know what she was reading.

  I turned to face Mercy’s pages. “It just surprises me.”

  Abigail raised her head. “Why is that?”

  “Because,” I began, but I had no good reasons for thinking a woman my age in colonial New England wasn’t capable of falling in love.

  “I am sure you’ve been attracted to someone before, haven’t you?” Fatigue edged Abigail’s voice. She waited for me to answer.

  Of course I’d been attracted to people. Tyler Prindell in sixth grade. Adam Bosch in tenth. Steve Lynde had escorted me to a debutante ball when I was seventeen. I liked him. We had a lot of the same friends, and we played tennis a couple times. He was attractive. He kissed me once, but I hadn’t been in love with him.

  I wouldn’t have walked to his house through the snow to trade thread for a dead rabbit.

  Attraction was one thing. Love was another.

  “Yes, I have. I just.”

  “Makes it harder, doesn’t it?” Again I caught the weight of weariness in her voice. She meant that knowing Mercy had been in love would make the transcription work more emotionally difficult simply because I knew Mercy was doomed. But there was something else there, lurking just under the surface of her words: being in love complicates things.

  I thought back to that moment two weeks earlier when I saw Abigail for the first time, when I visually took in her physical resilience. I had known somehow that she was alone. That she had always been alone.

  But that she knew what it was like to be in love.

  “Have you ever been attracted to someone?” I was only asking her the same question she asked me, but it was more than that and we both knew it. I was asking her if she had ever been in love.

  She looked at the book in her lap. “Yes. Once.”

  “Who was he?” I asked softly, hoping she liked mentioning his name from time to time. If he was dead, she might. If he’d left her for another, then maybe not.

  She ran her finger absently down the length of a bookmark resting on her open book. I expected her to say, “Oh, he was just someone I met in college,” or “He was a librarian in the next county over,” or “He never even knew I liked him.”

  But as her finger slid down the bookmark, she said, “He was the man I should have married.”

  Then she closed the book.

  “Time for dinner,” she said, looking up.

  Esperanza had not called us.

  M
ealtimes with Abigail were never predictable. Sometimes she was silent the whole time we ate. If I asked a question or attempted to begin a conversation on one of those evenings, her response was a short one-word answer that clearly meant, “I don’t want to talk.” Other times we discussed books the entire meal. She especially liked to talk about books we’d both read. Her eyes lit up if she looked up from her plate and asked, “Have you read this?” and I responded that yes, I had.

  In the beginning, I chalked up her talkative moods to being a retired librarian who missed being around people who loved books. I suppose that was a small part of it. But there were other reasons Abigail pounced on any opportunity to discuss a book we had both read. Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you’ll go nuts. That’s her way. It is also mine.

  As we walked to the dining room that evening, I could almost hear the heavy fabric of Abigail’s lifelong disappointment swishing. This was to be a silent meal. I dreaded it already.

  Esperanza, a truly wonderful cook, had made a dish she called bifana—a pork roast she slow-cooked with ginger, cloves, and garlic, and which she served with rhubarb chutney. The sweet and spicy aroma met us halfway down the hall. I said something about how wonderful it smelled, and Abigail said nothing.

  The dining room was at the far end of the long entryway, just off the kitchen. It was paneled in dark wood, and the table that ran the length of the room was dark also. Cherry, probably. The curtains and valances were a deep crimson with gold brocade. A few family portraits and one seascape hung on the walls. The Persian rug under the table, the same bottomless shade of red as the curtains, was fringed in light beige. Those threads were the only hue in the room that hinted there were other colors in the spectrum besides heavy ones.

  Abigail sat at the head of the long table, and I took a chair to her right. She prayed for our meal, a rote prayer, but one I sensed she genuinely meant. And we began to eat.