The Ransom of Mercy Carter (7 page)

“I will be your mother,” said Mercy, who was exactly the same age as Jemima. She had, however, been mother to her brothers for three years. “Now hush, Jem. We must not fall behind.”

And then a creek, so fast-flowing that even in this wicked cold it had not frozen. The Indians stood in ice water up to their thighs, handing the small children across, but the adults had to wade. Wet clothing froze
to the body. In this wind, at this temperature, that could spell death. Should you fall in and get entirely wet, could you even get back on your feet in the force of that current? Would not your heart stop and your lungs fill?

The adults dithered fearfully along the ice-rimmed rocks.

Lord, thought Mercy, wishing for solid English shoes instead of Indian slippers, I have to get myself over, I can’t let Daniel fall in; Ruth needs help, she hasn’t thrown anything today because she’s so tired she can hardly put one foot in front of another. Joanna can’t see and Eliza is still only half here.

When her turn came, however, the Indians lifted Daniel from her arms and passed him safely to the other side. Mercy took a deep breath, steeling herself to enter the frigid water, but Tannhahorens lifted her as if she weighed nothing and set her ashore, dry and safe. “Thank you, Tannhahorens,” she said.

They handed Ruth over as well, but Ruth did not thank them. “How could you?” she said to Mercy as the march went on. “How could you thank that man for anything?
He killed your family.
”

As
THE DAY WORE ON
, Mercy ceased to worry about Eliza, who seemed able to walk steadily even if she had lost speech and hearing. She ceased to worry about Jemima, who was just going to cry forever. Instead she
began to worry about Eben. It was not the pack on his back that was hurting Eben.

Sarah Hoyt, who was Eben’s age, tried to comfort him. “Eben, do not despair.” She talked softly, to avoid Ruth’s notice. Ruth was not a comforting person.

Eben shrugged.

“We will get there,” said Sarah. “Wherever it is, whatever it is, we will stay together and we will get there in the Lord.”

“No,” said Eben. “I have sinned.”

They had all sinned and they were all paying for it. A mile later, Sarah said, “Tell me the sin.”

“Pride. I was so proud of myself for saving my little sisters.”

Eben’s little sisters were beautiful. Mercy adored them.

Molly and Mary and Hittie hadn’t left their house in months. Englishmen were not hunters. If they accidentally found deer or turkey, of course they shot it for dinner—or tried—but they were farmers, not sharpshooters. Indians, however, could hit anything, far away or close up. Mistress Nims was not about to let them pick off her daughters.

Mercy’s restrictions had never been that harsh. Inside the stockade, at least she had been able to go from house to house, from barn to woodpile, and to meeting on Sunday.

Patiently, obediently, the little Nims girls stayed in,
week after week. Too little to weave, because they couldn’t manage the loom, they could knit and they could sew. They were the only girls in Deerfield ever to stitch samplers. Nobody else had the time to do it or the mother to insist.

“What happened, Eben?” said Sarah.

“When I woke up, the attack had begun. My mother was downstairs screaming that the Indians were at the window. I put the girls in the cellar to keep them safe,” he said to Sarah and Mercy. “But the Indians fired our house. My sisters burned alive.”

“Oh, Eben,” whispered Sarah. She took his hand and they walked on together. “You did not set the fire. Do not hold yourself guilty.”

Poor Eben! thought Mercy. No wonder he believed the Indians when they threatened burning us alive. It happened to his sisters.

Mercy prayed that smoke had taken Molly and Mary and Hittie; that they never felt fire. The story affected her feet; she could not seem to walk as fast, nor find the energy to care.

“I want to go home,” said Jemima. “How many days of this? I can’t do it.”

Mercy drew a deep breath. “Jemima, stop crying. They hate it when you cry. And we don’t know how long it will take. But Sarah’s right. We can do it.”

Jemima stood staring blankly at a horizon endlessly replacing itself with more hills and more wilderness.
She had been crying for hours now and had given up wiping her nose. Her hair had gathered in filthy hanks and she stumbled blindly like Joanna.

They came to a snowy hillside as steep as a tilted plate, down which a hundred people had already slid or fallen. Older children slid down on their stomachs or backs. Eben wriggled out of his pack and gave it a shove downhill. It made a channel in the snow. Joseph’s three toddlers let go of the rope and whooshed down, giggling.

“I’m a sled, I’m a sled!” shouted Daniel, tumbling down the hill and bumping into Sarah Hoyt’s ankles. Sarah fell over and a dozen children piled on top of each other, laughing, and had to be sorted out and turned upright by Indians.

“Come, Eliza,” said Eben, reaching for her hand, but she neither heard nor saw, so he put his arm around her waist and the two of them skidded down together. At the bottom, several boys started a snowball fight. Eben made snowballs for each side, handing them out as fast as they could be thrown.

“I can’t go on,” said Jemima dully. She let go of her pack.

Mercy forced herself to take Jemima’s hand and pull her on. “You have to try, Jemmie. They will tomahawk you if you don’t.”

“I don’t care.”

“Of course you care.” Mercy picked up Jemima’s
pack. She could carry it in her arms, it wasn’t that heavy. She’d still be able to lift Daniel when she got down to him. “I’ll carry this for you, Jemmie. You carry yourself.”

But Jemima did not move.

Mercy linked her arm through Jemima’s to haul her forward, but Jemima would not or could not go.

They were the very last English at the top of the hill.

It was suddenly terrifying and eerie: children playing at the bottom as if this were recess from school; parents far off, on their leashes; and Mercy and Jemima, left behind.

Jemima’s Indian appeared at their side.

He had been one of the braves carrying a wounded warrior, but his warrior had died that morning. All day he had walked apart, paying no heed to Jemima that Mercy had seen. He continued to carry the body. Mercy did not know if he planned to take it home to Canada to bury or if he could not yet bear to part with it.

Now, quite gently, he separated the two girls, taking Jemima’s pack away from Mercy. “Carry boy,” he said to Mercy, pointing down the hill at Daniel. “Go.”

Mercy met the Indian’s eyes. They both knew Jemima had told the truth. Jemima could not go on. And if everybody walked north and left her behind, what would happen? Jemima would be meat for predators.

So when the Indian said again, “Go,” Mercy skidded down the hill, but she could not miss the cracking thud of stone against bone.

The tremor that had destroyed Jemima, partly destroyed Uncle Nathaniel and was quivering inside her brother Sam invaded Mercy’s heart.

I will be brave, she told herself. I will stay strong.

Lord, Lord, Lord
, she said to Him. She had never needed Him more, but in this cold white wilderness, she could not feel His presence.

The snowball fights ended.

The sledding stopped.

The march went on. Nobody could help Mercy. Everybody had their own trembling legs and hearts to deal with.

Tannhahorens appeared by her side. He had covered his ears and shaved head with a great scarlet muff of a hat. In his long blue coat, he was astonishing, like something out of a Bible story. With mittened hands, he lifted Daniel from Mercy’s back, giving the little boy another bite of hard bread and setting him on his shoulders to ride high and comfortable, the way Eunice Williams was riding. Then he took Mercy’s hand to keep her from falling as the march went up yet another hill.

E
ben saw his sisters’ smiles etched in the snow and their hair in the weeping branches of the willow. Yet he was not the captive possessed by rage. It was Ruth who stomped and fought and spat. When Joanna took the hand of her mother’s killer, Ruth trembled with anger. “I won’t forgive Joanna!” Ruth said in Eben’s hearing. “She suffers from blurry eyes and maybe she didn’t see it happen, but she’s been told!”

Eben said nothing.

“I can’t forgive Mercy either,” said Ruth. “How could she just walk away and let them kill Jemima?”

Jemima’s death already seemed remote. Six more captives had been killed since then. Eben hardly thought about them. To his shame, he thought about his stomach. They had had almost nothing to eat in three days.

When he was not thinking of his sisters, he was
remembering his mother’s hasty pudding, how she would add hot milk and maple sugar. Her baked beans. How she mixed in molasses and chunks of ham to make the most wonderful dinner.

“And I will not forgive Joseph Kellogg for making a game of it,” said Ruth.

Eben let Ruth yell. He didn’t mind being yelled at, but the others had lost patience with Ruth.

The French had used Ruth’s house to shelter their wounded during the battle. Ruth’s mother had stepped across the bodies of her son and husband to nurse the bleeding French soldiers. Eben found this an act of Christian service beyond anything; maybe even beyond Christianity. Who could understand Mistress Catlin, saving the lives of those who had just killed her children? Minutes later, when Ruth was shoved out the front door and into the line of captives, her mother actually waved good-bye in the doorway, the only English settler left behind on purpose.

“Listen to Sarah Hoyt!” cried Ruth. Her long bony face was twisted with anger and hunger. “She’s actually laughing. I despise her! It dishonors the dead to make friends with their murderers.”

Eben’s heart broke for Ruth. Was that how she believed her mother had behaved? Dishonoring her dead?

Ruth stormed over the snow to holler at Sarah, and Eben hoped Sarah would answer gently. But Ruth was caught by her Indian, who did not want the children’s
play interrupted. Ruth attempted suicide. She lunged at the Indian, grabbing his knife from his belt.

Eben ran forward, crying, “No! Ruth! No, she doesn’t mean it!” he shouted to the Indians. “Don’t—”

But her Indian simply caught Ruth’s wrist in what must have been a painful grip and retrieved his knife.

Ruth was willing to hate her own as much as she hated the Indians. But the Indians did not accept her hate. They respected her. No matter what Ruth did, they thought more of her. They had even named Ruth, using a special word to call her. (She didn’t come.) “Mahakemo,” they called her, and they enjoyed saying the word. It just made Ruth madder.

It was amazing that Ruth would survive to kick and scream, she whose lungs had seemingly destined her for an early grave, while many who would be useful to the Indians, who would lift and carry and obey, were killed.

It came to Eben that the Indians were not deciding who deserved life. They were deciding who deserved captivity. Being the property of an Indian was an honor.

He just wished they were worthy of being fed.

T
HEY MARCHED
.

“Ask your Indian his name,” Mercy said softly to Eben. “They like that.”

So Eben patted his chest and said, “Eben.” Then he touched his Indian’s arm and said, “Who are you?”

“Thorakwaneken.”

Eben said it over and over until Thorakwaneken nodded and Eben supposed he had the pronunciation right.

Mercy pointed to a squirrel sitting on a branch. “Thorakwaneken,” she said, “what is that?”

“Arosen.”

“Arosen,”
repeated Mercy, and Eben echoed her.
Arosen
. Squirrel.

Eben would rather have had that knife pierce his chest and kill him than live to acquire an Indian vocabulary, but it was something to do and it kept Mercy cheerful. Eben did not much care if he lived, but he could not bear the thought of one more girl dying.

By nightfall, Eben and Mercy possessed a vocabulary of twenty-one words. They knew
redbird, sky, rock, spruce, knife
and the difference between
wood
and
woods
. They knew
fire
and
foot
and
hand
. So when Thorakwaneken took Eben’s pack, gave him a light shove toward the forest and said in Mohawk, “Firewood,” Eben realized he was being sent to gather kindling.

For the first time on the march, the Indians were going to permit a fire. The prisoners would be warm and have hot food.

“Go,” said Thorakwaneken in English, and then in his own tongue.

Never had Eben been given an order he was so glad to obey. Moments later Joseph Kellogg was thrashing through the snow after him, breaking up fallen limbs and snapping off dead branches.

Eben envied Joseph, whose older brother, father and two sisters were on this march. How lucky Joseph was that his family had been largely spared. Of course, Joseph had not been allowed near his father or brother, his sister Rebecca was kept entirely separate by her Indian, and Joanna, whose eyesight was so bad, he was not allowed to help either. Still. Joseph did not have to imagine their final hour.

“Fire!” sang Joseph. “We’re going to get warm!”

“We’ll dry out our moccasins,” agreed Eben, “and our pants and our blankets. We can warm our feet by the fire all night long.”

“Do you think there will be food?” asked Joseph.

“No,” said Eben. The French soldiers were gone, having moved ahead, fallen behind or taken another route. That still left three hundred to feed, and no Indian had gone hunting; they were too busy pushing their captives and carrying their wounded.

Eben chose a long heavy forked branch on which to stack his firewood and dragged the burden back to the camp, where he found much rejoicing. The Indians, it seemed, had paused here on their journey south from Canada to go hunting before the battle. Under the snow were stored the carcasses of twenty moose.

Twenty!
Eben had to count them himself before he could believe it, and even then, he could not believe it.