The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,32

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.

That Sunday morning, Mercy had crawled into the cart with me until she saw that Richard would be walking behind us. She gave up her place to Andrew and walked next to Richard the whole way into town. I thought, uncharitably, that even with a fresh cap and apron she looked unkempt and not too very clean. Richard might as well have been walking alone, though, for all the attention he gave to her chattering mouth. After a few miles her breath gave out and they continued their walk in silence. Mother glanced over her shoulder a few times and, had her looks been barbed arrows, Mercy would have been dropped to the dust like a Norman at the hands of a Welsh bowman. I wondered what sparks would fly if Iron Bessie were applied to Mercy’s backside, as she was every bit as large as my mother. She told me once she would knock senseless anyone who mishandled her.

Walking into the meetinghouse was a cold and cheerless affair. The insistent buzzing and clacking about of our neighbors ceased the instant we passed from the sunlight of the yard