Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

“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.

JUNE 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.

MOTHER 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.