The Ransom of Mercy Carter (20 page)

Did Tannhahorens think she had gotten lost? Did he believe that she had ended up on the wharf by accident? That she was waving the cross around for protection?

Or was he, in the way of Indians, allowing that to be the circumstance because it was easier?

When he had thanked the Sauk sufficiently and they had agreed to tell Otter that Mercy had gone home with her father, Tannhahorens paddled back to Kahnawake. His long strong arms bent into the current. Her family
had not trusted her after all. Tannhahorens must have been following her.

Or, in the way of a real father, he had not trusted Montréal. Either way, she was defeated. There was no escape.

If there is no escape, and if there is also no ransom, what is there for me? thought Mercy. I don’t want to be alone. A single star in a black and terrible night? How can I endure the name Alone Star? “Why do you call me Munnonock?” she asked.

She wanted desperately to go home and end this ugly day.

Home
. It was still a word of warmth and comfort. Still a word of safety and love.

The homes she had known misted and blended and she did not really know if it was Nistenha in the longhouse or Stepmama in Deerfield or her mother in heaven whose home she wanted.

“You are brave, daughter,” said Tannhahorens without looking at her, without breaking his rhythm, “and can stand alone. You shine with courage, and so shone every night of your march. You are our hope for sons and daughters to come. On you much depends.”

I
N THE REMAINING WEEKS
of autumn, they roasted chestnuts and gathered beechnuts, walnuts and butternuts. The girls shelled corn and dried apples and cranberries. The boys shot pigeons and doves by the score,
and geese migrating, and ducks. Bonfires never went out, and meat was constantly smoking.

Nistenha wove a basket of intricate design. She chose slender branches of willow, from which she had painstakingly scraped the thin yellow bark. Some she had soaked in butternut dye, and now, alternating wide and narrow bands, gold and brown, she created a complex pattern of light and dark. Then she sat Mercy in front of her, circling Mercy with her arms, and with her fingers ordered the movement of Mercy’s.

It was exactly how her real mother had taught her to knit. Mercy closed her eyes and leaned back against Nistenha. What warmth and comfort there was within a mother’s arms. Mercy began to weep. Mother, she prayed to her mother in heaven, please forgive me.

She blinked back her tears and only one splattered on the reeds in front of her. Together but separately, she and Nistenha finished the basket. It was a work of art.

“What is the occasion?” asked Mercy shakily. This basket had taken far too much time and care to be used for corn or laundry.

“Snow Walker will soon have a husband of her own,” said Nistenha. “She must have fine gifts.”

Mercy was delighted. “Great Angry Cloud?” she guessed happily.

“Of course. The families are pleased. It is good. Father Meriel will say the vows and write the names in his book.”

Not the real names, though. Father Meriel would call Snow Walker by her French name, Jeanne. But what anybody’s real name was, Mercy no longer knew.
You, Munnonock, are our hope for sons and daughters
.

Mercy’s head spun. She made one last effort to push away the world of Kahnawake. “Nistenha. On that day when I went into Montréal …?”

“Hush,” said her mother. “We speak only of joyful things. Next I will show you how to etch a drawing on a birch-bark box you will make for Snow Walker.”

She knows, thought Mercy. But in her world, you do not confess sins. You set them down.

“W
E’RE GOING HUNTING
,” Joseph told Mercy at the end of the month. “Deer are gathering because it’s rutting season. They’ll be in the oak forests, eating acorns on the ground, so they’ll be easy to find. Our family always goes north between the Matawin River and the Black.”

“Our family?” said Ruth. But she did not say it loudly or with heat. They could see by the blackened vines how quickly winter was approaching; they could feel it in the morning, tasting sharp frost in the air. Ruth too wanted enough food to last the winter.

Some warriors would be gone for the entire winter; others would return in shifts, bringing meat. Bear, moose, deer, beaver, raccoon, fox. Some for food, all for fur.

But the party searching for bear came back more quickly than they meant to.

It was the work of a warrior to enter the cave, jab the bear awake and tempt him, grumpy and stuporous, to come out where he could be shot. No fur was so warm, no meat so good, no claws better ornaments. Of course, one swipe of that great paw could break a man’s jaw or rip off an arm, but that was why it was so admired and why the warrior who goaded the bear got the claws: such impressive risk.

Altogether, the hunting party lost three men in poor judgment of bears.

The paw that swiped Tannhahorens in the face was given to his widow. His funeral was in church and in Latin. How soft the Mass was. How hard and fierce Tannhahorens had been.

Mercy was not comforted. Tannhahorens was just dead and the Mass was just noise. She was relieved when the Indians left the church and walked to the Place of the Dead, where the powwow led another ceremony and they could all howl and beat their breasts.

On me much depends
. O Lord, does that mean that I take care of Nistenha now? That one day my son will be named Tannhahorens?

Nistenha and Tannhahorens’s mother and sisters blackened their faces with soot and chopped their hair off raw and ugly, to lose their looks and grace. Nistenha
would not let Mercy cut her hair, but she agreed to blacken Mercy’s face in the color of sorrow.

The mourners paraded for several hours, but when Mercy went to join them, Ruth screamed. “How can you grieve for that murderer, Mercy? Remember his barbarous cruelties!”

So had Uncle Nathaniel said—
you must remember
. So had Mr. Williams said—
you must remember
. And one of the people Mercy would always remember was Tannhahorens. “He saved me, Ruth,” she said sadly. “I owed him.”

Ruth hauled Mercy down to the river. She threw the younger girl into the water and waded right in after her. The first crust of ice had formed and it splintered around their legs. Mercy could have fought back, but fighting was unthinkable because Ruth was right. A bear had avenged the Carter family, while Mercy had not.

Ruth scrubbed Mercy with sand, as if adopting her; as if washing away bad white blood. When Mercy’s face was clean of soot and Ruth’s rage spent, the girls climbed out of the water.

In Kahnawake everything was in the open. There was no cover, no place to hide. Soaked and shivering in the wind, she walked alone to her longhouse.

Nistenha left the mourners and came after her to wrap Mercy in blankets.

“Do you truly mourn your father?” asked Nistenha. How awful Nistenha looked, her face black and dripping, her hair jagged and torn, her clothing rent, her hands grimy from touching her sooty face.

Mercy nodded. She mourned all the fathers, English and Indian. She could not count as high as the number of fathers there were.

“Then I will give you just a little paint, one stroke on each cheek, to show how your heart hurts.”

Mercy raised her face to accept the paint. “What about Ruth?”

“Do not worry,” said Nistenha.

What capacity the Indians had not to worry. In Deerfield, all had been worry. Worry about the Lord, worry about sin. Worry about today, worry about tomorrow. Worry about crops, worry about children.

But Indians set worry down.

The next day, Mercy didn’t see Ruth once, nor the day after that, nor the third day. Finally she sought out Otter. “Is Spukumenen ill?” said Mercy anxiously.

“She has been sold,” said Otter. “She is in Montréal with the French nuns.”

Mercy was astonished.

He had sold Ruth? This man who had accepted everything Ruth had ever done—from throwing packs to kicking him in the shins? From wearing French clothing to refusing to speak a syllable of Mohawk?

“When she could not let you mourn your father, it was best for her to go,” said Otter.

Mercy wanted to sob. Difficult as Ruth was, Mercy would miss her terribly. She was Mercy’s only enduring link to Deerfield. “Would you tell me why you gave her a second name, Otter? Let the Sky In?”

“She never told you? I am not surprised. She looked two ways on this. Once on the march, she and I stood at the edge of an ice cliff and it was I who lost our argument. I fell over and was much damaged. Ruth risked her life to save me,” he said, using the English name Ruth had refused to surrender. “Without her, I would not again have seen the sky. But she was not glad to have done it. It was punishment for her to give me life.”

Ruth had saved the life of her father’s killer?

Oh, poor Ruth! Carrying her good deed with her! Knowing it was equally a bad deed!

Otter rested a hand on Mercy’s shoulder. “Your Ruth is well. She will not miss us. We will miss her, for she did bring our sky in. Someday in Montréal, you will see her again. Now go with the children and play. You have mourned enough.”

T
he day of the adoption was cool and windy, with a gray sky and the ground wet from spring rains.

Mercy was trembling.
O Lord
, she prayed, and as in every prayer for a year and a month, she stopped there. She did not know what she was praying for, only that the presence of God was necessary. She prayed that He would know where to be and what to do.

It began to rain softly and lightly. Like a baptism, thought Mercy. The Lord himself supplies the water.

In the canoe, she was surrounded by Nistenha’s family, but she hardly saw them and did not think of them. What would it be like to see an English child adopted? How would she feel, in her heart and in her soul, as the white blood was scrubbed out so that Indian blood ran true and forever?

She wondered if the boy wanted to be adopted. Not
that it mattered. There was no choice involved. The boy would make no promises and supply no answers. It was a magical cleansing, followed by a magical welcome. And she, and all other white captives, would be part of it: witnesses to the surrender of English blood.

The captives did not know the boy’s name, because on such a day, the English name would not be spoken. They did not know if they would be allowed to talk to him or whether he came from Deerfield or from another of the many towns on the Maine or Massachusetts or New York frontiers. They did not know if he was three years old, like Daniel; almost a man, like Eben; or fourteen, like Joseph. Joseph and Mercy had both had birthdays since their capture.

I am twelve now, thought Mercy. Close to being a woman. I am treated as Nistenha’s daughter. But she has never spoken of adopting me. I am still the child of Samuel Carter and his wife Mercy Brooks, sister of Nathaniel. I am still a child of Deerfield, Massachusetts.

She ordered herself to show courage during this adoption. Courage for the boy’s sake, she wondered, or for mine? Carefully Mercy said, “Does the boy have a name given by his priest?” Sometimes the English name could be guessed from the French.

“Jean,” said her uncle.

Heartbreak hit Mercy.
Jean
was the French way of saying John.

It could not be her brother John, for he lived in
Montréal and everyone said he was happy becoming French. O John! thought Mercy.
Please, God, let it be so, that he is happy
.

John was a popular name among Deerfield boys. This could be John Catlin, Ruth’s brother, who would be seventeen now. John Burt, Sally Burt’s brother-in-law, who was about twenty. It could be Jonathan Hoyt, Sarah’s older brother, or John Stebbins, Thankful’s older brother. Or, far more likely, John Field, age four.

Little John Field’s sister Mary sat in a canoe a hundred yards downriver from Mercy. Mercy was almost never permitted to speak to Mary Field. What if it was Mary’s very own baby brother being adopted, whom none of them had seen in a whole year?

It’s nobody we know, Mercy told herself. It’s a stranger, entering a strange life for good.

Mercy wanted to pray that the boy John was ready, that it would be easy for him, that he would be calm. But Ruth and Mr. Williams would expect Mercy to pray for the opposite: that he would refuse the adoption; that he might even fight to escape it.

Perhaps it was only Mercy whose heart was flung about like a leaf in a storm, for the others were thinking mostly of the feast. Joanna said, “I hope their corn lasted longer than ours. I hope we have something to eat at the feast besides meat and fish.”

Kahnawake had used up its corn supply weeks ago.
No one had gone hungry because game remained plentiful. But a diet of nothing but meat was exhausting.

It was a long journey to the Abenaki fort of St. Francis.

When they finally clambered onto the shore, Mercy didn’t like St. Francis half so much as Kahnawake. It wasn’t clean or well planned. Its buildings were not attractive. The fields were not orderly and had not been made ready last fall. Nor was she impressed by the housing given to the guests. In fact, she found the entire village slovenly and dirty.

Mercy heard these thoughts as if someone else had uttered them. Of all the amazing things she had said to herself in the last year and month, this was the most amazing. She had become loyal to Kahnawake.

During the march, when Mercy was finding the Mohawk language such a challenge and a pleasure to learn, Ruth had said to Eben, “I know why the powwow’s magic is successful. The children arrive ready.”

The ceremony took place at the edge of the St. Francis River, smaller than the St. Lawrence but still impressive. The spray of river against rock, of ice melt smashing into shore, leaped up to meet the rain. Sacraments must occur in the presence of water, under the sky and in the arms of the wind.

There was no Catholic priest. There were no French. Only the language of the people was spoken, and the
powwow and the chief preceded each
prayer
and cry with the rocking refrain
Listen, listen, listen
.