Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

I asked, “What was it like to be captured? Was it horrible?”

The needle hidden under the doll’s skirt must have pricked her skin, for she yelped and suddenly thrust the doll back to me. “Not near so bad as being knocked over the head.” She abruptly turned from me and fell to sleep. I moved away from the unpleasant smell of her body and studied the doll to make certain she had not split the seams. I stroked the red cloth and wondered if Margaret was even then thinking of me as well.

ALTHOUGH MERCY was to my cousin as a grackle is to a dove, she did have her winning ways. At times she seemed cumbersome and plodding on her feet, but at other times she would appear behind me without having made the slightest bit of noise. I would turn to find her standing at arm’s length, studying me in a way that made me want to cover the tender part of my belly. She did her chores well enough, for she was strong and never complained, but there was an air about her as though she submitted to her labors only because it suited her to do so. She had been with us a short time when she pulled a face behind my mother’s back. Mother had given her a chore to do in her usual cast-iron manner, and when she turned around, Mercy puckered her lips up in a mocking way. I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing, feeling at last that I had an ally. She soon made a habit of being compliant to my mother’s face while making fun of her when she was out of the room.

One night after supper I told the story of Uncle’s battle with the Narragansetts. I had hoped to grease the spokes of Mercy’s memory so that she would tell me something of her captivity. When I had finished, I was startled to hear the rumbling voice of my father coming from the far corner of the room. He had been braiding rope, and while he talked he twisted the strands sharply together. “The village attacked by General Winslow’s men had women and old people in it. The braves had gone into the woods for hunting. They had never once attacked an Englisher. But their children were all butchered as fawns are butchered in a pen. Their bodies left to the crows and the wolves. The Narragansetts fought then with King Philip, and there was bloody murder on both sides before it ended.”

“But I saw the scar he got fighting a brave…,” I said, thinking him to be jealous of Uncle’s courage.

Father wound the finished rope between his elbow and hand, making neat coils, saying, “That scar he sports was made by a squaw who split him open with a troweling knife before her head was hacked from her body.”

I heard Mercy snigger as she turned away to bank the fire. I felt bruised that she should laugh at my expense, but she shrugged her shoulders when I caught her eye.

The days passed and we planted the acres of wheat and corn and hay easterly in the direction of Ladle Meadow. Even Hannah was given a small sack with seed, and she helped broadcast the kernels into the ground, her little legs tripping over dirt clods and the hem of her newly lengthened shift. We made slow progress, as the ground was heavy with rocks, but the weather was fair with a few good rains. Mercy proved to have as strong a back as any youth, and she easily pulled from the ground stones the size of a calf’s head.

I would have thought she would not be eager for such hard labor, preferring instead to cook at the hearth. But wherever the men were working, there she was content to be. At times Robert Russell would come to help us with the planting. His homestead was southeast of ours, between Ladle Meadow and Gibbet Plain. He was tall and well seasoned and had come with Father from the old England many years before. Robert was the only man that my father took hunting, and when they left for the woods together, we knew them gone for days. The first day Robert appeared in the fields, Mercy jabbed me sharply with her elbow and whispered loudly, “Has that man a wife?”

I answered, rubbing my bruised ribs, “No, but he lives with a niece named Elizabeth.”

“How old is she?”

“About fourteen or fifteen, I should think.”

She put on a knowing face but beat a ragged path to Robert, bringing him water at every opportunity. He wasn’t the only man to receive fair treatment from her hands. She had started shadowing Richard about, offering to do his chores in the barn and serving him larger portions of meat at the table, until Mother finally took Richard’s plate away and gave it to Father.

IN THE SECOND week of May, Mercy and I were doing the washing together. We had added lye to the boiling water and were placing shirts in the pot with long sticks. The cast iron smelled of bear even though we had worked for most of an hour scrubbing it with sand to clean it. She was still maddeningly thick to my questions about her life with the Wabanakis and was unimpressed with Uncle’s stories. Father and my brothers were out in the fields broadcasting seeds from their sack aprons, and Mercy would often raise her head from the steam to look at them.

“Mercy, I have heard that Indians are devils. And that Lucifer himself appears as a brown man.”

She looked at me, squinting her eyes against the slanting light. She snorted air out through her nose and said, “An Indian is a man like any man.” She raised the long stick she was holding until it jutted straight out from her loins and said crudely, “And all men are designed in like fashion.” I laughed to show I understood her meaning but inwardly felt an uneasy clenching.

“Your brother Richard is a ready man. He will need a wife soon, I think.”

I had never thought of my brother as a man and no longer a boy. I had never given him much thought at all, except for the times he was being quarrelsome. Mercy walked away from the heat of the fire and laid herself down under the shade of an elm tree that threw its branches over the roof of the house. She picked up a blade of grass and, cupping it in her hand, made a high-pitched whistling noise through it. I sat next to her and, pretending to study the laces on my shoes, looked at her face and thought that Richard would never take such an ugly girl to wife.

After a few moments she said, “You asked about devils. Do you know what the Indians do to those trying to escape?”

I shook my head and she said, “There was a man from Salmon Falls who was taken captive to Canada with the rest of us. His name was Robert Rogers. He tried to escape but he was caught.” Here she looked at me and blew through the sliver of green held between her fingers, making it sound like the scream of a woman. “He was stripped naked, tied to a stake, and scorched with burning brands. This went on for some time. Then they pulled him from the stake and danced around him and cut pieces of his flesh from his naked body and threw the bloody pieces in his face. When he finally died, they tied him back to the stake and burned him until he was charred to a lump of coal.”

I felt my breakfast rising to meet my tongue.

“After that I was content to stay in Canada awhile.” She looked at the pot and said, “It’s time to stir, I think.” But as she made no move to stand, I hurried away and finished washing the shirts alone.

ONE UNEXPECTED CHANGE in my mother was the return to the rituals of the Sabbath. Grandmother, knowing she was soon to die, had made Mother promise to attend the meetinghouse faithfully once the ban had been lifted and all of us were well and whole. So on the 24th day of May, we were dressed with all the grim haste of a garrison being fired upon by French troops. We were forced to scrub at our necks until they were scarlet and put on stiff aprons and shirts. This Sabbath exercise meant that Mercy and I were washing the whole of Saturday and our hands were chafed and raw from the lye.