Traces of Mercy

by Michael Landon, Jr.

  “But you must have seen evidence the colored people are happy now that they are free?”

  He frowned. “I’d say more like liberty has become anarchy. President Johnson’s administration has done little, if anything, to promote the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he’s allowed Southern states to implement their own black codes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He offered a small shrug. “In essence, it makes the Freedmen’s Bureau null and void. If the blacks can’t vote or hold any public office, then there’s no social equality.” He shook his head. “The president is in quite a pickle. Johnson and the Congress are at odds—the Republicans are furious with him, and the Radicals are ready to storm the White House because of his lenient policies toward the South.”

  “What do you think? Are his policies too lenient toward the South?”

  The Rand Prescott she had come to know would be fair, she decided. He would be open-minded and logical about his response. Still, she felt a round stone of dread form in her gut.

  “He’s a fool to think the feelings that drove the Southern states to try and secede have changed just because they lost the war,” Rand said succinctly. “Nothing has changed for them except for the level of their bitterness.”

  She hated that Rand seemed to echo Elijah Hale’s sentiments. “Don’t you believe that people can change?”

  Rand paused, swirling the brandy up the sides of the snifter. “I don’t believe they can change that much—that fast—just because one side surrendered. We’ve been looking to hire workmen for the railroad, and Father thought it prudent to show good faith and hire some rebels.”

  “So did you? Hire former Confederates?”

  “Only those who had signed the oath, seeking a presidential pardon for their support of the Confederate cause.”

  She felt some measure of relief. “That’s good, then. Everyone can forgive and forget and move forward.”

  Rand tossed down the rest of his brandy, and his features hardened. “I don’t see much forgiveness happening in our lifetime,” he said. “I don’t see how you look at people and forget they tried to tear the country apart. Lincoln claimed that the Southerners didn’t commit treason because they never actually seceded—but to me, they all committed treason in their hearts. They killed my friends, put my mother in harm’s way by marching so close to the house that we had to put up a defensive wall … other people may claim they can forgive and forget and move forward. But I’m not one of them.”

  Mercy knew that the only opening she’d ever have to tell Rand the truth about herself had just closed. She felt physically sick and took a deep breath to calm her nerves

  Rand frowned. “I’m sorry, darling. All this time apart, and now I’ve spent the last few minutes running on and on about business and politics. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Dinner is on the table, Miss Mercy, Mr. Rand,” Kizzy announced from the threshold of the dining room.

  Rand got to his feet and held out a hand to Mercy. Dazed over her own predicament, she felt her head spin as she allowed him to take her into the dining room.

  Mercy didn’t realize she wasn’t eating anything until Rand finally pointed it out. “I thought you loved Kizzy’s roast beef,” he said, more as a statement than a question. “You haven’t touched a bite.”

  She looked down at her plate. “Oh. I suppose I’ve just been too caught up in our conversation to eat.” She forced a smile.

  “Wedding plans have you excited, do they?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You still need to eat. I think you’ve gotten even thinner since I’ve been gone. I don’t want to see you get so caught up in my mother’s mania for the wedding that you neglect yourself.”

  How could she tell him it wasn’t the wedding plans that had her losing sleep and losing weight? It had been the thought of telling him the truth about her past. A truth, she now knew, that could never come out. She had seen the look on his face when he spoke of the Southern sympathizers and the Confederate soldiers. She couldn’t bear to think of him looking at her that way. She had to think of another way to stop Elijah Hale from ruining her future. How ironic that she had spared his life in an act of compassion and charity, and now it had come back to be her undoing. No good deed goes unpunished, she thought.

  “You know, darling, if you don’t eat Kizzy’s cooking, you are taking away her purpose.”

  She saw Captain Hale’s face that night of his visit. His objective, as with any soldier, was single-minded in purpose. He was there to kill his enemy. He was there to kill me.

  Mercy forked a beef into her mouth and saw Rand smile with approval. The food was tasteless to her, but she swallowed it.

  “You know, I nearly brought you a little kitten today,” Rand said. “It was loose on the edge of the property. I followed it, but it slipped away before I could catch it.”

  Mercy smiled. “It was thoughtful of you to try,” she said, but her mind was on Hale’s words. You followed us so you could do your duty and kill me—but you didn’t.

  She picked up her fork and cut her food into dainty little bites. I hung that medal on the end of your knife.

  She was that person he spoke of. That soldier who was derelict in completing her mission. That rebel who denied herself victory.

  If she was still that person—then he was still her enemy. She knew what she had to do. Victory would be hers. Captain Hale must die.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I am building a fortress of lies. The worries involved with this are so great I can’t list them all; suffice it to say I will spend the rest of my life living with guilt that can be buried only by time—and more lies.

  I wish only to fulfill my duty. Finish my task. End the battle with a different outcome. Construct a plan so carefully thought through that there is no chance of error.

  It is my only chance at happiness with Rand.

  For a few days Mercy went about her business even though her nerves were stretched to the breaking point. She feigned interest when Ilene had a flower arrangement to show her or a morsel of food that needed tasting, or when she wanted to celebrate the growing list of important guests who would attend the nuptials. The daily checklist of wedding tasks had started to weigh her down so much that it began to feel like an anvil on her back. As the list grew, her weight dropped, and Ilene began to study her in a way that made her feel as if she could never let down her guard. She must smile. She must eat. She must be excited.

  The time spent with Rand was the worst. The ever-present knowledge in her head of what she intended to do made every moment between them feel like a lie; time had become her enemy. If only she could stop it from moving forward—freeze it and keep the glow of Rand’s love alive and her past at bay.

  The careful balancing act kept her on the precipice of panic during the days—and at night, either she did not sleep at all, or when she did, she had a recurring nightmare:

  Elijah Hale’s face is in shadow.

  He steps into the sunshine.

  She raises a rifle to her shoulder and catches his chest in her sight.

  Her finger trembles against the trigger as she squeezes it.

  Hale falls.

  Then Rand is behind her. He knows! He saw!

  He walks away and won’t come back no matter how loudly she screams his name.

  She woke every morning in the same drenched despair. Who would she become if she actually took the life of another human being? But just as quickly, the sobering thought would occur that nothing would change. She would not change. If Elijah Hale was to be believed about her past, then she was already a person who could kill another. She even had the proper clothes to wear for the job.

  In the beginning, she had no plan. Just scattered images of what she must do. Then she saw Ezra one day, doing nothing more than a routine task—but to Mercy it w
as filled with possibilities. Her remark to him was casual but brought about enough information to move forward with her task.

  Ezra, Letty, Kizzy, and Isaac were fairly predictable—up by dawn and back in bed by nine. Lamps were extinguished in the servants’ quarters at the same time every night. She had a few hours in the darkness in which she could disappear and not be missed.

  “Letty?” she said one afternoon. “I’m thinking of tying my hair in rags for extra curl. Do you have some put aside I might have?”

  “Shore thing, Miss Mercy,” Letty said, obliging her with a bag of torn rags that could have easily serviced ten women who wanted curls.

  There were thick matches and pieces of flint above the fireplace.

  Kerosene was plentiful and easily carried in a jar meant for preserves.

  A history of the war had been unwittingly preserved in the stacks of newspapers Kizzy had saved to “catch the guts of the fish I hafta clean.”

  There were rifles and ammunition in a cabinet in the cottage study. Rand told her that during the war it had been locked in the event rebel scum might have broken in and stolen them; but with the hostilities over, the lock had been removed. Rand didn’t know that rebel scum lived in the cottage now. She recognized the irony of the situation and, at another time, might have even smiled.

  With ammunition safely tucked in a leather pouch, she sneaked a rifle out the door during a midday meal when the servants were eating in their quarters. She stashed the Springfield muzzle-loading gun and pouch in some bushes a hundred yards or so from the cottage. As the weather had improved over the winter, she had taken to afternoon rides on Lucky, and now she felt as if fate had finally slipped her some luck. She could sashay up to Isaac and ask him to saddle the horse for her daily jaunt, and no one would think anything of it.

  She took a ride to the Hendersons’ house. It was a small country estate—small in comparison to the Prescotts’, but still stately and relatively remote. Other buildings on the property included a barn, servants’ quarters, and a shed close to the house itself. The landscaping was minimal—a few trees and shrubs. John and Mary would see anyone approaching their house from quite a distance, Mercy decided. Unless, of course, the visitor didn’t want to be seen.

  Mercy fished the rifle and the leather pouch from the bushes the next afternoon. She rode for several miles in the hopes no one would hear her practice shots, dismounted, and paced off fifty yards. She loaded the rifle with a .58 caliber minié ball; her target was a broken tree limb. The gun felt comfortable and eerily familiar. She took aim, fired, and the tree limb fell.

  She paced off a hundred yards and fired.

  Paced off three hundred yards and fired.

  She never missed.

  The rifle and pouch went back into the bushes before she handed Isaac the reins of her horse when she returned to the cottage. Mercy confessed to Letty that evening that she had a headache and asked for some tea. Letty fussed and carried on and heated a brick to tuck under the covers for her feet in case she started to feel a chill and was getting sick. Now that she thought about it, Letty said, Miss Mercy had been looking mighty peaked lately. Mercy assured her that all she needed was some uninterrupted rest. She was sure a good night’s sleep would do the trick. She asked Letty to put out all the lamps on her way to the servants’ quarters and said she’d see her in the morning.

  It had all been carefully arranged when she slipped out the door in the dead of night with a small satchel in hand—wearing her brown wool shirt and green pants. Her hair was in a single braid she had pinned up in back. She told herself she’d try to forget the moment she had looked into her mirror at the familiar stranger who stared back at her.

  Mercy fetched Lucky and wondered if the crescent moon was a curse or blessing for her mission. She led the horse away from the cottage, not wanting to rouse anyone in the servants’ quarters—worrying that a midnight ride might prove to make Lucky giddy and loud. She stopped and collected the hidden rifle and ammunition in the pouch, then mounted Lucky and spurred him into a gallop.

  She was relieved that the waiting was over and it was finally time to act. She had a mission to complete, and that was the only thought she allowed herself to have as she rode across the sleeping landscape.

  The Hendersons’ place was still. No lamps shone from the windows. No noise crept from the house. She had two things to accomplish—well, three, actually, if she was going to count a murder. Lucky was tied a good distance from the house, and she looked around for a spot to place a note she pulled from her satchel. A black lawn jockey was positioned on the edge of the gravel drive that led to the house, and Mercy speared the paper over the dark hand held up in a perpetual wave of greeting for all visitors. One down. Two to go. She squatted on the ground and took out the second thing she had brought along, courtesy of Ezra.

  “What are you doing, Ezra?” Mercy had asked.

  “We’s got some fierce-looking rats in the barn, Miss Mercy, and I is flushing ’em out with the smoke,” he’d told her as he tended a small fire in front of the barn door.

  It was simple, really. Make a ball of tightly bound strips of fabric, or some curling rags, and soak the whole thing in a healthy dose of kerosene. A match to the whole lot, and you’d get yourself a dandy fire that would create as much smoke as it would flame.

  Ezra had unwittingly been the impetus of her plan. She’d flush out her target; as they’d used dogs to drive the birds into the open, she’d use smoke to drive out her prey.

  She lit the fat match in her satchel and touched it to the longest tail end of the rag ball she carried before tossing it at the ground near a shed close enough to the house to provide her smoke but far enough away to spare the home. For a heart-stopping minute, she was sure the thing was going to burn itself right out. And then a spark caught on the wood. Two down—one to go. She dashed for Lucky, and they galloped into the darkness while Mercy calculated three hundred yards. She slipped out of the saddle, pulling the rifle along with her. She found a V in the branches of a tree and used it to brace the long barrel of her gun. Flipping up the sight, she let her eyes adjust to the high-powered scope.

  In less than ten minutes, she saw John Henderson sprint outside in his bathrobe. A large black man followed right behind him, and Mercy could see John gesturing for him to go to the well in the yard. John took off his robe and tried to beat back the flames. His face glowed in the firelight, and she could see him coughing in the thick smoke.

  Mercy’s heart rate quickened when Captain Hale stepped into her sight and pulled the congressman away from the building flames.

  She tracked him with the scope.

  The noise of the fire roared in the quiet night.

  Captain Hale grabbed the bucket from the servant and pointed for him to go back for another.

  Shoot him.

  He turned and threw water on the fire.

  Shoot him.

  Back to the well with the empty bucket, John on his heels.

  Her finger hovered over the trigger; she felt it start to give.

  Orange sparks spiraled into the sky.

  Hale doused the fire again and turned as if to face her.

  Shoot him. End it.

  A cornet played in her head; the loneliness of it shattered her.

  Her knees hit the ground as she realized she was going to fail—but then the butt of the rifle jammed into the dirt behind her, and the finger still hovering on the trigger actually squeezed it. The shot rang out over the sound of the fire. She looked up to see Captain Hale look toward the darkness. Toward her. Into the worn shallows of ground where she kneeled. She saw rather than heard him yell to the others, gesturing at the distance between them.

  Scrambling onto Lucky’s back, she spurred him hard, and he broke into a full gallop. She was reeling from her failure when she misjudged a tree, and the branch not only tore into her right shoulder
but tore her from the saddle as well. She felt the searing heat of the pain from her ripped skin and the warmth of the blood that immediately ran down her side. Lucky whirled around and came back for her as she pushed herself to stand. She could hear Hale yelling in the darkness behind her—he was getting closer. He was going to catch her. She scrambled into the saddle when he was almost upon her and leaned low over Lucky’s neck. She pressed her knees tight against the horse’s side, and they galloped hard away from the fire.

  Everything was going to change now. Everything had to change. She had failed at her mission.

  He wasn’t dead.

  Fear of discovery was greater for the moment than the pain she felt from her shoulder. Mercy managed to get Lucky back into the barn at the cottage and stifled a scream of pain with a rag in her mouth as she lifted the saddle from his back. She told herself not to hurry, not to rush—not to make a mistake that would bring one of the servants running outside to check on them. She forced herself to go through the motions of Lucky’s care, then made her way to the cottage with the rifle under her good arm.

  Mercy put the Springfield back in the cabinet with all the other guns and shut the door with a firm click. Moving carefully, slowly, quietly through the dark cottage, she made her way to her room and dropped her clothes on the floor. She winced when she saw the bloody mess that was her shoulder and found some of the unused rags from Letty. She did the best she could with her wound, crawled under the quilt, and started to shake.

  Then the tears came—and along with them, a prayer that morning would never come.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In the predawn hour, Mercy wrapped herself in a quilt from the bed and dipped her quill into the inkwell. She was anxious to get the dreaded note to Rand composed before she lost her nerve or—at this point—her mind. By candlelight, she scratched the nib of the pen across the linen paper.