The Ransom of Mercy Carter (3 page)

Mercy walked in front of the Indian and said loudly, “I’ll carry my sister,” pointing to show what she meant.

His eyes rested on Mercy. Then he put his hand on her hair.

I’m dead, she thought. He’ll scalp me right here.

But the Indian handed Marah over, and with both arms free, he tied his loot into a bundle, using the four corners of Mercy’s blanket. He threw the sack over his back.

“Wait. I need a coat,” said Mercy, reaching into the bundle and yanking out a warm covering for Marah. “Come, Mama,” she said, but her stepmother did not move. “Walk on,” said Mercy, shoving her. “Don’t drop the baby.”

Perhaps being upside-down had prevented Marah from whining, because as soon as Mercy got outside and turned her upright, she started shrieking again.

The line of prisoners had changed; it was moving; people were being forced out of the stockade and into the frozen fields. Her brothers and the Hurst children and the Williams children were gone and Mercy ended up next to Jemima Richards.

“They’re going to kill us,” cried Jemima, her body convulsed by sobbing.

“They had time to do that and they didn’t,” said Mercy. “I think we’re prisoners.” She forced Marah to stick her arms into the coat she had snatched, but it was Benny’s and far too large for Marah. It would keep
Marah warm to her toes, but it meant Benny wasn’t wearing anything. Where were the boys? She must catch up to them and button Tommy into his jacket. She looked around. She had already lost Stepmama and the baby.

There were too many people. She couldn’t think straight about so many people who needed so many things. Jemima held on to Mercy so hard that Mercy could barely keep her grip on Marah. Burning barns fell in and the shrieking of penned animals filled the air. They had to get out of the stockade or burn. “Hurry, Jemmie. We have to catch up.”

“I don’t want to,” moaned Jemima. “I’m English. This isn’t fair. I don’t want some savage near me. They even gave me a pack to carry. I don’t want to carry it.”

“Go!” said Mercy, jabbing her.

The north wind flung embers into the air, tossing them down to burn on, like candles in the snow. Mercy’s family had never been able to afford candles, just pine knots.

“Where’s my mother?” moaned Jemima.

“We’ll find her,” said Mercy. “Move faster, Jemima.”

Ruth Catlin stumbled into line with them, wearing only her white nightdress. On her feet were huge heavy boots that must be her father’s or brother’s. In the reflected fire, Ruth’s dark hair seemed to turn blue.

Ruth was frail and had bad lungs. Nobody had expected her to live through the winter. No young man spent time with Ruth because if there was one thing a
young man needed, it was a strong wife. Ruth didn’t qualify.

She’ll freeze to death quicker than I will, thought Mercy. She gave her scarf and cloak to Ruth, who snapped them through the air as if whipping a bare back. “Somebody let those savages in!” yelled Ruth, stamping her foot and whirling in circles to find the evidence. “There is a
traitor
here. Who opened those gates?”

Mercy had seen the attack. There was no traitor, only the stupidity of Deerfield, convinced that snow and cold were a barrier. She put Tommy’s little jacket over her shoulders until she could find him. It was a beautiful thing, heavy boiled wool the color of charcoal, a gift from Boston relatives. It had no effect on the cold. Ruth took her time wrapping herself in Mercy’s thick cozy cloak.

“I’m finding out who it was!” said Ruth. “I’m
killing
them.”

As if there were not enough killing.

Out of the meetinghouse came a row of white men roped together, a crowd of women carrying babies, and older children carrying blankets and coats and little brothers and sisters. Dozens of prisoners. Had they fled to the safety of the meetinghouse only to find themselves trapped? Or had the Indians put their prisoners inside to keep them from being shot in the melee?

They were herded like cattle toward the gate.

Mercy made out her brothers far ahead, half hidden by smoke. She counted only three.
Oh, no! O Lord! Who’s missing?

They’re all here, she told herself, I just can’t see through the smoke.

The last pair of settlers out of the meetinghouse were Eliza Price and her Indian husband.

“I bet
he’s
responsible!” said Ruth. “He’s an Indian himself, for Lord’s sake! She married him, which is disgusting. An English girl choosing an Indian?”

It was certainly amazing. But not only had Mr. Williams agreed to the marriage, he had performed it, and Eliza’s family had taken Andrew Stevens into their home. Everybody said it was the only legal marriage in the New World between a white woman and a red man.

“He’s a Praying Indian,” Mercy reminded Ruth. It was as odd to have this conversation as it had been for Sam to think of shoes. Scraps of normality were flying around like burning embers.

“So Andrew claims to be Christian,” snapped Ruth. “So he doesn’t use the name Strong Arrow anymore. What makes everybody think the man suddenly became Weak Thread? I would never take a red Indian into my house. Andrew Stevens opened our gates. I know he did.”

But if anyone had betrayed Deerfield, it could not have been Andrew.

Eliza was moved aside to make room. Then Andrew was hacked to death by his own people. Andrew did not fight. He stood still and erect while they chopped him to pieces and did not fall until he was dead. He seemed to have known it was coming. When it was finished, the Indians put Eliza in line next to Ruth, where she stood numbly, staring at her husband’s body.

With the sharp edge of hatchets, the Indians prodded the line forward.

Nobody argued.

The huge gate had been half torn from its hinges. Captives were trying to fit through, trying to lead children, trying to count their families.

Mercy tripped on a little boy sucking his thumb and tugging sadly at his earlobe. He wore a frown and not much else. Mercy set Marah down and knelt in the shadow of the fallen gate to see who the naked child was. Little Daniel, his mother dead and his father away, left for the winter with his Warner cousins. His father had gone to Boston in the hope of finding a bride who would come to Deerfield and take care of Daniel for him. Boston women were too sensible to consider moving to Deerfield. In fact, there was not one Deerfield woman who would not have been joyful to move to Boston, but Boston had passed a law saying that to abandon a frontier town was the act of a traitor. If you lived in Deerfield, you could not leave.

Except now. They were leaving now.

Mercy hugged Daniel, who smiled around his thumb sucking and said without moving the thumb, “Hi, Merfy.” Mercy wiped away Daniel’s tears so they would not freeze to his skin.

“Where are the Warners?” said Jemima irritably.

Mercy did not want to know the answer to that. She had enough answers. “Daniel is our responsibility now, Jemima. Tuck him in your cloak while I carry Marah. And stop him from crying, Jemmie. They are killing the babies who cry.”

Jemima would not pick Daniel up. He was too heavy, she said. Anyway, if she set her pack down, she would get scalped. “He’s three,” said Jemima, “he can walk.”

Mercy took Tommy’s jacket off her shoulders and bundled Daniel into it. She lifted the little boy on one hip and hoisted Marah on the other. Daniel settled in, putting one arm around Mercy’s neck and still sucking his thumb. Even now, Marah did not want to share and tried to kick Daniel.

The sun was rising. It jumped out from behind the eastern ridge, throwing pink shadows over the snow and golden rays into Mercy’s eyes. In minutes, the world went from dark to dawn to daylight.

There seemed no point in trying to catch up to her brothers, even if Mercy could have walked quickly with a child in each arm. Sam will take care of the boys, she told herself.

The snow had been so trampled inside Deerfield that
she had half forgotten it, but beyond the gate, the snow became a living creature: deep and solid, crusted and pathless. Leaders somewhere out of Mercy’s sight were taking the line of prisoners northeast, and into the hills.

Only fifty yards beyond the gate, the weight of two toddlers already seemed impossible. Mercy was used to babies; most women in Deerfield had a baby every year. Not all of them lived, of course, but it took a lot of big sisters and cousins and neighbors to hold so many babies. Rocking them by the fireside was easier than carrying them uphill.

Mercy’s breathing came hard. Jemima kept muttering and looking back while Ruth made threats from the safe warmth of Mercy’s cloak and poor sad widowed Eliza stumbled.

Mercy paused to catch her breath and shift the children. She squinted into the rising sun, trying to make an accurate count of the prisoners, strung out now across a mile of snow. Smaller children were hard to see, hidden by snowdrifts or the long swinging cloaks of adults or being carried. When Mercy rubbed her eyes she realized it was not the glare of sun on snow that made it hard to see. It was tears.

She thought there might actually be a hundred captives. She had never heard of Indians taking more than one or two. There was no way to march a hundred prisoners, mostly little ones with short legs and hungry tummies, all
the way to Canada in the middle of winter. No way to keep these children warm and their feet from freezing.

Already her feet, uncomfortably jammed into Mother’s old leather shoes, were chafed and cold.

Cold replaced fear. She was not going to last long without a coat.
Lord, care for me. I have Marah and Daniel. I need to be strong
.

An Indian appeared next to her. He wore a deerskin cape and fat fur mittens. His black and white paint stared at her. It was not until he took off the cape and his chest was bare again that Mercy recognized him as the Indian on her stairs.

He put his cape over Mercy, tucking it around her and both the babies. It was lined with rabbit fur and had a hood, which he tied beneath her chin.

The Indian pointed Mercy forward and gave her a gentle push.

On this terrible morning, forward could have only one meaning: Canada.

Three hundred miles.

On foot.

In this weather.

Carrying two toddlers.

E
ben Nims was last in the line of captives that straggled across the fields and up into the hills. The Indians had strapped a heavy pack to his back, its weight supported by a belt across his forehead. Wrapped in the quilt his grandmother had made in England were his mother’s stew pot and china bowls, his sisters’ dolls, his father’s gun and his brother-in-law’s Bible. There were boots and a whole ham, powder and shot and yesterday’s bread.

Eben would not have to part with his family’s possessions. He himself would carry them to Canada.

Next to him, Mercy Carter’s stepmother could not even carry her own baby. Terrified beyond thought or action, she skittered aimlessly in the snow, mewling like the infant she held. Eben tried to take the baby for her, but so quickly that she could not have known what was happening, she and her baby were disposed of. Eben
even understood why it was done. She would not have made it over the first mountain.

So these were the border wars, where the French sent their tame Indians to slaughter English settlers. The taking of so many children would strike horror into the heart of every frontier mother and father. Farms and villages would be abandoned. The settlements would return to wilderness. The New World would be French, and not English.

But in spite of shock and fear, Eben Nims rejoiced. He had saved his three little sisters: twins Molly and Mary, age five, hair of gold and eyes of blue, and Hittie, the picky, feisty seven-year-old Eben loved best.

By the time Eben had been awakened by gunfire, already the sleepers downstairs were trying to find and load weapons and trying to hold the heavy front door against the Indians, who were smashing the lock with their hatchets and throwing their weight against the hinges. Eben tore his little sisters from their bed, carrying all three in his arms and leaping down the steep stairs. He yanked up the trapdoor to the shallow cellar where food was stored and lowered the girls into the dark. “Are you coming too, Eben?” begged Molly, who was afraid of spiders.

“I’ll be up here fighting. Stay quiet. Soon the attack will be over and I’ll get you out.” Eben slammed the trapdoor down and their terrified eyes vanished from his sight. He kicked bedrolls over the telltale cracks in the
floorboards and the Indians smashed through the front door and were inside the house.

Eben prepared to fight to the death. Help would come too late for him, but his little sisters would be found. The settlers had experience; they knew to check cellars.

Eben had no weapon but a frying pan, which he used as violently as the Indians used their tomahawks.

Frenchmen poured into the house. Eben was so astonished to see the French that the pan slipped from his grasp. The French did not do their own fighting. The whole point of Indian allies was to be sure that the Indians took all the risk.

Before he could launch his fists, an Indian thrust a knife into his chest. Eben gave his soul to the Lord, but when the blade had penetrated half an inch, the Indian used it to prod Eben out of the house. Eben willed Molly and Mary and Hittie to stay silent until the men of neighboring towns spotted fire in the northern sky and came to the rescue.

Running two fingers through his own dark red greasepaint, the Indian marked Eben’s forehead.

Why was Eben alive?

Had it been so crowded in the house that they did not know Eben had killed one of them? Or did they know well, and did this mark him out for torture later?

M
ERCY PULLED HER SISTER
along while she carried Daniel, and then she carried Marah and hauled Daniel.
Jemima did not help. Ruth, whose lungs got worse in cold weather, was wheezing.

Mercy knew the hill they were climbing; it was the view from her bedroom window. Long since stripped of trees, because the settlers needed so much wood for building and for fires, the hills around Deerfield had no covering now but grass. To get trees big enough to repair the stockade, the men had to venture three or four miles from the village. In wartime, it was too dangerous. The very trees they needed to cut down in order to build safety were the trees behind which the Indians lurked.