The Heretic's Daughter (11 page)

“Where was Father?” I asked, imagining Allen would have gotten more than a hand in his face if Father had been near.

“Hunting with Richard. Mother chased Allen out with a broom. I had gone to the yard to escape the shouting. I was holding the reins for Allen’s horse, a fine roan gelding, thinking to do him service.” The beautiful red coat of Bucephalus came to mind, and I knew that Allen could only have ridden him with Uncle’s blessing.

“When Allen came to mount his horse, he grabbed the reins and balled up his fist. He hit me hard, knocking me to the ground. He told me he would see all of us driven from the house if he had to burn it down. And, Sarah, I believe him.”

“What did Father say when he came home?” I asked.

“He said that Allen’s tinderbox was too small to start much of a blaze. And then Mother did a strange thing. . . . She laughed.”

I had begun to hate Allen all the more for thrashing down a boy half his size, but I smiled to think that my parents saw fit to ridicule his threats. I gave Tom a push to give him courage and said that such a coward would never dare do us harm when Father was about. And for a time we believed it.

J
UNE LAY FULL
and heavy on us, and the heat in the garret at night drove Richard to sleep in the barn. Andrew welcomed the heat. He seemed always to be cold, as though his illness had put out his inner furnace. Tom slept as one dead and could have drowned in his sweat before waking. Mercy became restless as well and would often slip from our bed, thinking, I suppose, I wouldn’t wake to her large feet fumbling about in the dark. She would be gone for an hour or more, and I wondered if she was stealing food from the larder as I had seen her do before.

One day found us all in the garden, bringing buckets of water from the well to the tender vines and stalks that had grown sparsely through the dry soil. Large purple clouds could be seen in the east, but the wind was moving from the southwest, blowing rain into Salem Town and then out to sea. The hot air had made us all prickly and short-tempered, and Richard, in particular, was being unpleasant. I had learned to respect his black moods, giving him wide berth whenever possible. He was sixteen, with a quick temper, as though he had been born with too much powder in his firing pan. Mercy had been teasing him that morning and I tried to warn her to leave him be, but she only smiled her crooked smile and continued to torment him. Their bantering voices continued up one row and down another, and I heard Richard say rudely that if she didn’t shut her hole, he would shut it for her. I was shocked by his language and looked around to see if Mother was close by, for she would surely bend Richard’s ear for it. Mercy did not seem threatened but rather put her bucket down and said, laughing, “Come here, then, and shut it.”

Richard threw down his bucket and walked swiftly towards her, thinking to make her cower. She stood calmly with her hands at her sides, and then a remarkable thing happened. As he approached her, she took a few steps as though to pass to the side of him. In so doing she grabbed his shirt, hooked her left foot behind his heels, and pushed him backwards with some force. He fell as hard as a locust tree under the axe and lay on the ground, staring upwards. I believe it took him the space of a few breaths to understand why the sky was in front of his eyes and not the horizon. Mercy stood above him, smiling, with her hand out to help him to his feet. At first he would not take her hand, but soon he was hoisted up on his legs, and I waited for the thunderstorm to erupt.

But instead he said to her, “How did you learn that?”

“The Indians are a small people, but they can fell a larger man in just that way and open up his ribs before his heart stops beating.”

“Teach me that,” he said, and so she did. Once our watering was done we moved behind the barn so we would not be seen. She spent most of an hour showing Richard how to sweep a man’s feet out from under him, indifferent to the direction and manner of the attack. I thought that Mercy’s hands lingered overly long on Richard’s arms and chest, and after a time they rolled around in the dust until the sweat poured in muddy rivulets down their faces and arms. I left, disgusted with their play when Richard sat upon Mercy’s chest, her legs bent upwards, her skirt up around her thighs. Tom’s eyes would have started from their sockets if I hadn’t grabbed his arm and made him leave. I could hear Mercy’s laughter even after I had returned the buckets to the well on the far side of the house.

M
OTHER HAD AN
unsettling ability to foretell the weather. It was the dregs of July and the sky had been dark for days with a blanket of low, roiling clouds. We were close to harvesting the wheat, and Father watched the sky carefully, as too much rain would ruin the crop. She assured him that the clouds would not release their water, though she believed there would be winds and lightning. We feared the summer lightning, as there had been little rain and it could bring fire enough to consume a barn, or a field of crops, within the time it took to fill six buckets of water from the well. There had been stabs of lightning in the far distance, and after supper Tom and I ran to Sunset Rock just to the north of our house to watch the march of heavenly fire crossing the Merrimack River to the west.

There was a greenish, sickly light within the clouds and a sort of leadenness to the air that made the hairs on our arms stand on end and the backs of our necks ache. Mercy had climbed the boulder with us and stood for a short while wringing her apron like it was the head of a chicken. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and within a few moments she hurried away back in the direction of the house. I danced up and down to the music of the advancing thunder. Soon the lightning could be seen jumping over Bald Hill, making white fairy lights over Blanchard’s Pond. Then there was a pause, and the sky darkened until I could barely see Tom standing next to me. I felt his hand creep into mine, and we waited and waited, until a ragged arm of blue and yellow light jumped from the sky and spread like poured mercury over Blanchard’s Plain, only a few leagues away. My teeth were knocked together with the sound of it and my ears at first were deafened and then clicked rapidly like a stone caught in a miller’s wheel.

The air turned still of a sudden, and a much colder puff of wind at my back caused my shoulders to seek each other for comfort. I turned around to face the east and saw the front of another storm coming fast to meet its twin. There were cascading ripples of light over in the direction of Salem Town, as though a flash of arms was being presented before the battle would be joined over Blanchard’s Plain.

The coming storms had made me reckless and I felt myself being raised up on my toes as if the winds were trying to enlist me to their ranks. I said to Tom that we could better see the lightning from the hayloft in the barn, but he was shivering and pale and he answered me by pulling my arm from its roots, climbing down from the rock. I went to bed that night but could not sleep, my ears trained to the retreating sounds of thunder that rolled by diminishing fits and starts into our little room. That is how I knew that Mercy had slipped out of bed a few hours after Mother and Father had gone to sleep. She stood at the foot of the bed listening for any change in my breathing and then crept barefoot from the room. I counted to ten and then rose to follow her. Pulling my skirt quickly over my head, I carried my shoes for stealth. As I stepped from the house, I saw the white form of her shift struggling against the wind to open the door of the barn, and then she was swallowed by the black inside.

I walked the short distance to the barn, careless to the sound of my shoes, as the winds were still high and struck at the largest trees, making them creak and groan. I bounced the door until it parted enough to let me pass, then stood in the blackness, listening. I could hear the gentle milling about of the cow and the ox in their stalls and I let them settle before feeling my way forward. It came to me then. The sound of mewling and sighing, not from the stalls but higher up, in the loft. I inched my way towards the ladder and froze as a flash of light illuminated everything, enough for me to see the rolling eyes of the aged draft horse jerking against his tether. The mewling stopped for an instant and then resumed with greater force. I found my way to the ladder and climbed slowly upwards, minding the hem of my skirt, until my head cleared the last rung. At that instant, there was another flash of light, this one revealing two people wrestling and fighting together as though each would commit bloody murder on the other. When the dark returned, I could hear them rolling about in the dried billows of hay and then I heard Mercy laugh and Richard’s voice say, “Hold still, then, you bitch.” The words were coarse but there was laughter in his voice as well. And then there was silence but for the strangled sounds of their breathing. I slipped one shoe from my foot and brought it behind my head, aiming for the tangled shadows a few feet away. The lightning soon came, and I threw the shoe with all my might at Mercy’s head. Blackness fell again, but not before the gratifying sounds of Mercy yowling and cursing. I was down the ladder and out the door, running before they could think of following me.

I crawled back into bed and kept my back to her when Mercy shadowed her way in. I could feel her eyes on me and then felt a sharp weight as she dropped my shoe upon the bed. The ropes beneath us shifted as she settled her head on her arm, but I knew she would not easily fall into sleep. A strong, raw animal smell came from her body. I rolled the word around and around in my mind before parting my lips and whispering, “Whore.” The sound of it mingled with the rising storm and so I did not know whether or not she heard me say it. Margaret came to me in a dream that night. She stood on the far side of the Shawshin River and called out to me something I could not hear over the roaring of the wind. She cupped her hands around her mouth but still I could not hear her words. I ran back and forth on the embankment, looking for a way to get across, but there was no boat and no bridge. She pointed to a place beyond my shoulder, and the words floated to me. “Fire, Sarah. Fire.”

I woke to Tom shaking me frantically by the foot. He was shouting, “Fire, Sarah! The fields are on fire!”

Hannah opened her eyes then and, seeing the terror in Tom’s face, screamed like something dying. She clutched tightly to my legs, threatening to trip me as I struggled to pull a skirt over my head. I picked her up and ran with Tom to the edge of the fields. Mercy was running with Father towards a wall of smoke, and the world to the east of the barn was made of yellow, low-surging light. I could see Andrew running as fast as he could, bringing buckets of well water to Richard, who had climbed to the top of the barn to dampen the roof. There was a slight rise behind the barn and as I crested it I could see where the fire had started. A lone elm that had stood for generations had channeled the lightning as easily as a gutter channels rainwater. The split trunk lay blackened and dead and the fire was consuming the outer fields of hay on the far side of the path running along the crest from north to south. The wind buffeted first to the west and then to the east as the twin storms combined. I saw a man working next to Father, both desperately trying to make a space between the fields of hay and the tender shafts of wheat, their hoes rising and falling in rapid succession.

Mother grabbed at my shoulder and thrust me back in the direction of the barn, shouting, “Bring the scythes, Sarah, and there is another hoe just within the door. Hurry, for God’s sake, or we will be burned to the ground.”

I ran until my lungs ached, wondering what I was to do with Hannah. I could not bring her into the burning fields, and my brothers would be needed to keep the flames at bay. Her nails drew blood when I pulled her from my neck, and as I tied her to a post with a leather strap, she kicked and cried piteously. Her fear of being abandoned made her feral, and the whites of her eyes showed as she bit at the strap. I shouted to Andrew to remember to rescue Hannah if the barn should catch fire and prayed he would remember her in the confusion. I gathered up the needed tools and raced back to the fields, hoping I wouldn’t trip and cut off my legs, falling on the newly sharpened scythes. Mother and I worked next to the men as they dug their shallow trench, scything away the stalks to make a path the fire could not jump. But the fire raged on towards us and into the wheat, and I could feel the heat of it on my cheeks, curling my hair. I stopped for a moment to rest, but Mother pushed me and said hoarsely, “Don’t stop. Keep working.” I could hear Tom somewhere behind me as he lay down buckets of sand over the fallen shafts of grain.

The heat was terrible, but worse was the billowing smoke that found its way into every opening, until our eyes and ears and throats blistered and watered. I pulled my skirt up around my face to breathe, and suddenly I was standing alone in the tortured field, lost in a wall of smoke. I felt panic rising in my throat and turned to see a tongue of flame flowing like a runnel of silk towards the sole of my shoe. I cried out but could see nothing beyond the gray mass and would have run but did not know north from south, east from west. I sank to my knees and felt a creeping blankness in my head, like a drawstring tightening within a gray felt bag. There was a pain at my shoulders as fingers clamped around my arms. Strong hands lifted me up, and we ran through the fire clouds until I could see the sky and the fields again. Mercy clapped me harshly on the back as we coughed and spit foaming ash from our lungs. I looked up and saw the bruised knot my shoe had left on her brow, large enough to show through the blackened soot covering her face.

She said to me, without malice, “It seems we may both be homeless soon.”

My family and some of our close neighbors gathered on the crest, expecting to watch the burning of the remainder of the wheat. Robert Russell stood next to Father, as well as Samuel Holt and his brother Henry Holt from the farms near Ladle Meadow. A growing light came from the eastern horizon and the wind changed course and blew suddenly from the west, rushing to meet the dawn. The fire stalled for a moment, the heads of the flames licking at the air like tracking hounds. And then the fire turned and flowed east, churning and fast, as though it would throw itself into the sea. The Holts raced back to their farms, and with them ran my Father, his long hoe braced over one shoulder, its heated metal head sending up wisps of steam. A cold splinter of thought shifted in my head as I remembered Allen’s threat to burn us out. But our fields and house remained. It would be many more hours of work with a bucket and hoe before I could fall into bed, my skin and hair bathed and perfumed in acrid smoke. When I finally remembered Hannah, left tethered in the barn, it was in the full light of morning. She had fallen asleep, her first and last fingers pressed wetly into her mouth, but woke as soon as I lifted her to take her to the house. She would demand to be carried for days afterwards, eating and sleeping only in the circling embrace of my arms.