The Shape of Mercy (11 page)

The equation she was drawing between me, her, and Mercy was plain.

Three daughters. Three fathers. No sons.

I saw nothing but the vaguest of similarities. Mere mathematics.

Besides, Abigail and I didn’t grow up without our mothers like Mercy did.

I decided to remind Abigail of this. “It would’ve been terribly hard on Mercy’s mother, had she been alive, to witness what became of her daughter. I imagine it was hard enough on her father.”

Abigail gave me a strange look and then nodded.

She had forgotten there were things about Mercy I didn’t yet know.

I have been out of ink and out of walnut shells to crush to make more. Papa has been to the harbor and back several times, and he brought me ink from Boston. It is very fine ink, as black as night. Papa seems pale and weak to me, but he insists fresh air and labor are making him well. I wonder if he would rather live at the harbor and not be constrained to travel so much when his brother’s ship is in port, but he will not leave this cottage where he loved my mother
.

Something odd occurred at the meetinghouse during the sermon today. Prudence Dawes would not stop staring at me. She would look at me and then John Peter and then me again. When our eyes met, she did not look away. I smiled at her. I did not know what else to do. She did not smile back. She just slowly turned her head to face the front
.

When the meeting was over, John Peter and his mother met Papa and me at the door as we walked outside. John Peter asked if we would care to sell them eggs every week as the family that had been selling eggs to them moved away. Papa said of course we could and that he could bring some over on the morrow. But John Peter
said no, he would come get the eggs himself. Papa looked surprised. So did John Peter’s mother. So did I, I’m sure. One of John Peter’s sisters could surely come get eggs
.

But then Papa looked at me, and I think he knew why John Peter wanted to come get the eggs himself
.

As we made our way home, Papa did not say anything until we were almost at the cottage. And when he did speak, it was not to me, but to God, I think
.

“’Tis the way it should be,” he said
.

I think he will miss me when I marry someday. I think he sorrows at the thought of being alone in the cottage.

John Peter was back again to fetch eggs. I daresay he asks his mother to cook eggs every night. He asked if he could read my stories sometime
.

“Who told you I write stories?” I said. I could scarcely speak. I do not tell this to people. Papa has asked me not to, and it is not something I wish others to know
.

“You did,” was his answer, “when you were ten
.”

Eight years ago. I don’t remember telling him this, but he does
.

He held the basket and watched me gather eggs from our henhouse. I told him I could gather the eggs and hold his basket, that I do it all the time, but he said, “’Tis no trouble for me to hold the basket
.”

I brushed up against him when I stepped away from the roost. ’Twas not what I planned: I merely misjudged the distance between us. I am usually alone in the henhouse. I begged his pardon
.

He told me he is not free to pardon where no offense is taken. Then he reached out and laid a hand gently on my hair. I nearly toppled with the weight of that gentle touch. He pulled a piece of straw from my hair and tossed it to the ground
.

I looked down at his basket. It was full
.

“I shall have to get a bigger basket,” he said
.

“I shall have to get more chickens,” I said
.

We both laughed
.

My heart won’t be still
.

If I were in the meetinghouse for the sermon and the tithing man saw my pounding heart, he would whack it.

I do not know what to make of the news Papa has brought home tonight. Dr. Griggs has made a diagnosis in the case of the afflicted girls: witchcraft. The doctor can come by no other explanation for their fits. Everything he knows to do, he has tried. Nothing has healed them. He has declared they must therefore be under the spell of a witch. When Papa told me this, my mind conjured a picture of a Mary Glover, even though I know not what she looks like. I saw her standing at a barrel of soaking laundry as men accused her of strangling the children, making them fly and bark like dogs. What was she thinking when they said these things? Could she have done what they said she did? Did she in truth do the Devil’s bidding? The thought makes me shiver
.

Papa is skeptical that the girls in our Village are bewitched, but he cannot explain the fits. No one can. And now that the cause has been determined, the girls
will be pressed upon to name their afflicters. How does one know something like that?

The little bird with the broken wing is back. Winter is far from over. He must know this now.

I
dreamed again of Mercy. This time I dreamed she was at my writing desk back home, just like I pictured when I was there. She was writing in her diary—the one I spend my afternoons with—bending over it with her feather pen. I could hear the soft scratching of the quill on the parchment.

I was afraid that if I spoke to her, she would disappear, so I said nothing. I just stood and watched her. She wore the dress from my fourth-grade play. Her brown hair was swept back with the ponytail holder I had worn. I could see its hot pink hue just under her white cap. Her facial features were indistinguishable. She had eyes and a nose and a mouth, but they were out of focus. I couldn’t make them out. The room was different, the way dream rooms are. The walls were still painted yellow, but there were more of them, like the room was expanding, creating more space for itself.

My pictures of Paris were there, but they were full of people, and the images were alive. The people in the pictures moved, going about their Parisian business, oblivious to their onlookers.

The photographs made me uneasy. For some reason I didn’t want Mercy to see them. I moved away from the walls and they receded, but the photographs seem to grow larger. Mercy would surely see them.

Then I heard a noise, something beating against the window. I turned. Mercy had heard it too. A bird flew into the window above the desk, over and over.

Mercy stood and leaned over the desk. She grabbed the window latch and struggled to release it, calling to the bird to wait and she would
help it. But the bird kept flinging its body against the glass. And Mercy couldn’t open the window.

I knew I should help her. I knew that window stuck sometimes and you had to push down on it before lifting up.

But I just stood there.

Mercy continued to struggle with the window, calling out to the bird in a frantic voice to wait. To stop. To give her a moment.

And the little bird hit the window over and over with its body.

When blood appeared on the glass, Mercy screamed, and I awoke.

It was a few minutes before dawn.

I got out of bed to the aroma of strong coffee. A light was on and Clarissa’s bed was empty. She sat at our cramped desk area, tapping madly away on her laptop.

She had pulled an all-nighter. She looked up at me.

“Can you proof this when I’m done? It’s due today.”

“Sure.” I grabbed a clean mug from the microwave cart that housed our coffee maker and poured a cup from the pot. It was as black as tar.

“Will this kill me?” I asked.

“Hardly. It will keep you awake, sister.”

I took a sip. It tasted medicinal, earthy and wild. I forced myself to take another drink.

“Yeah, you look like you could use it,” Clarissa said, smiling as she typed.

“What do you mean?”

“You were having a nightmare or something just now.”

“I was?”

“Weren’t you? You were thrashing around and whimpering.”

My mind conjured the bloody window, the dead bird, and the pitch of Mercy’s scream. I wrapped my hands around the mug, eager for its warmth.

“I guess it was a nightmare,” I said.

“Chased by a madman with a knife?”

“No.”

“I don’t have that dream either,” Clarissa said. “I always dream I’m on fire. Like I’m in a burning house or something. I hate that dream.”

I pulled my fingers away from the hot mug.

“So were you falling off a cliff?” she continued, still drumming away at the little keys on her laptop.

“No, nothing like that.”

Clarissa whirled. The tiny diamond stud on her left nostril caught the light from her desk lamp and winked at me. “Oh no, you didn’t dream you were, like, walking down Rodeo Drive in your underwear?”

Ah, a rich-girl joke.

“It was nothing like that, Clarissa.” I sank into her canvas beach chair and took another sip of the industrial-strength coffee.

“Well?”

I toyed with a string on the chair’s cushion with my free hand. “I dreamed I was in my parents’ house with this girl who’s been dead for three hundred years, and a bird was flinging itself against the window. I woke up when it started to bleed.”

“A dead girl? You dreamed up a dead girl?” Clarissa couldn’t care less about the bird.

“She wasn’t dead in the dream,” I said. “She was alive in my dream. But she’s been dead for three hundred years. It was that girl whose diary I’m transcribing.”

“The witch?”

“She wasn’t a witch.”

“But I thought you told me she was hung as a witch in Salem.”

“But she wasn’t a witch. That’s the whole point. Hardly any of those people were.”

Clarissa was quiet for a moment. “How do you know she wasn’t?” She turned around and began to type again.

“She wasn’t.”

“So why did people think she was?”
Tap, tap, tap.

“I don’t know yet. I’m only two months into the diary.”

Tap, tap, tap.

“Don’t you wonder why, though?” Clarissa said. “I mean, she must have done something weird or quirky or strange.”

I looked at Clarissa’s purple-streaked hair, her glistening nose stud, and the tattooed cherub on her forearm and said nothing.

“There. Done!” Clarissa pressed a couple of keys on her laptop, and her printer began to hum.

I sat there, waiting to see if Clarissa really wanted to know how I thought Mercy ended up at the end of a noose. But she just gathered up the pages from her printer and handed them to me.

“Do you know how many of my friends are totally jealous that I have an English major for a roommate?” she said.

She grabbed her bathroom bag and headed for the door, apparently uninterested in an answer to that question also. But she turned back toward me before leaving the room. “Anytime you want to go strolling down Rodeo Drive in your underwear, just holler. I’d do it in a heartbeat. That would be a total blast! Can you imagine?”

Clarissa laughed and disappeared.

Betty Parris has named Tituba, their servant from the islands, as the one who bewitched her. No one is much surprised. Tituba is not English. She comes from a different world called Barbados, where it is summer all year and where magic is not feared. But why would Tituba cause Betty to suffer so? She is the Parrises’ slave, and she cares for the Parris children when Rev. Parris is away and Goody Parris is unwell. What end would Tituba desire?

The afflicted girls now say Goody Goode and Goody Osborne also torture them! Sarah Goode is indeed a strange woman, but she is not evil. She carries many burdens. Perhaps I would mumble and make strange faces if I had to beg for food and clothing in the dead of winter for myself and my child. And Sarah Osborne is ill
.

My cider is cloudy and sour. It is not setting well.

Papa came home from the Village fearful and angry. Men in the Village have made formal complaints against the
women accused. The town magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin have issued warrants to arrest Tituba, Sarah Goode, and Sarah Osborne. They will be taken to Ingersoll’s on the morrow and publicly examined
.