The Shape of Mercy

by Susan Meissner

This wrinkled dismissal annoyed me. I may not have the Durough drive, but I don’t lack the household dignity. We’ve always been quick to defend our intellect. A second or two ticked by as I debated how to answer her. How does the brand-new employee answer the employer’s arguably inappropriate question? I’d never been an employee before. I do talk to God, but I didn’t see how or why that should matter to her.

  And what did that have to do with transcribing a three-hundred-year-old diary? Mild irritation gave way to momentary boldness. I looked her straight in the eye.

  “Yes. I talk to God.” I said it with such self-assurance. There is a jolt of satisfaction people my age get from answering an elderly know-it-all with confidence.

  The corners of Abigail’s mouth rose in slow symmetry. My answer amused her.

  Irritation swelled within me. “I don’t see how—”

  “And do you believe God talks back to you?” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Do you know what happened to Joan of Arc?” Abigail posed the question as easily as if I had just said, Sure, I believe God talks to me.

  “Joan of Arc?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was executed. Burned at the stake, I think.” That was all I could remember from high school social studies. I was only a month into my college Western Civ class. We were a ways off from Joan of Arc.

  “Yes, she was. Do you know why she was executed?”

  I scratched my neck. It didn’t itch. “Well, if I remember right, France was at war with England and she led the French troops. English troops captured her. The charge against her was treason?”

  Abigail inclined her head, entertained by my recap, I think. “You don’t remember right.”

  “She led troops. She was captured. I’m sure that part is right,” I said, mentally massaging my wounded ego.

  “Yes, all that’s true. But she wasn’t executed under a charge of treason.”

  I was about to ask what the charge had been when I suddenly remembered why Joan of Arc was executed. “She believed God talked to her.”

  Abigail’s eyes seemed to brighten. I had surprised her.

  “She was about your age when she died, did you know that? You are nineteen?”

  “Twenty.”

  “They called her a heretic. A witch. They lit her on fire.”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “But she wasn’t a witch, of course,” Abigail continued. “Everyone knows that now. She’s a saint. St. Joan.”

  “Yes, I remember that,” I muttered.

  “Of course, that doesn’t change how she died, how the flames ate her body while she stood tied to a pole.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said.

  Abigail said nothing for a moment, just looked at me. Then she leaned forward. “Do you see all these books?” she asked in a low voice, as if passing on a secret I should keep close to me. Abigail’s books were everywhere, stuffed into shelves, lying in piles, peeking out from under tables. I’d have to have been blind not to see them. I was in awe and afraid for the same reason—there were so many.

  And I didn’t care that she had again made a hairpin turn in the conversation. We were leaving behind the burning body of an innocent woman.

  “Yes,” I said, looking about me.

  “You love books the way I do. You love to write. I know this. That’s one of the reasons I hired you.”

  I nodded and waited.

  “Mercy Hayworth loved to write too,” Abigail said, tipping her head. “Stories. The once-upon-a-time kind. The men who demanded her execution said she wrote the devil’s words, that her stories were tales from hell, that she was the devil’s scribe. Her writings were proof she was a witch. They were just stories, Lauren. The kind of stories you and I like to read. The kind you like to write.”

  She sat back in her chair. “This is why I want you to tell Mercy’s story,” she said. “Mercy was a beautiful young girl who loved many good things. She was wrongfully accused, convicted, and hanged, and no one remembers her.”

  “I see.” I swallowed, keenly aware of the muscles in my neck.

  “I wanted you to know why you’re doing this.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Across from me, Abigail inhaled and exhaled heavily. A cleansing breath. She was ready to move on.

  I barely felt my lungs moving, the ghosts of Joan of Arc and Mercy Hayworth hovering at my shoulders, lamenting their ruin.

  “Now, then,” Abigail said. “Perhaps you’d care for a cup of tea before we get started?”

  Five

  The diary’s pages were the color of toast in some places and in others, the color of wet ashes. The ink, made long ago from ground walnut shells mixed with vinegar and salt, was so faint it looked as if I could blow it away if I leaned over it and merely exhaled. The frail letters on the first page were barely legible; they looked like whispers, if whispers had form. I’d never seen a book that old that wasn’t in a museum. I could tell without touching it that Mercy’s diary was too fragile to be held in my hands, too delicate to bear the weight of my fingers. The thought made me sad.

  As I stared at the diary’s pages, I felt I was just inches from this woman, a breath away. Three hundred years of time and space seemed to vanish. This was Mercy’s very touch, the last vestige of her existence.

  Abigail told me Mercy had penned her stories in a separate volume, a business ledger her father bought at Ingersoll’s Ordinary—the colonists’ version of a public house—which she kept a secret as her father had asked. But Mercy’s accusers found her hiding place when they turned her cottage upside down looking for proof of her alliance with the devil. They found the ledger of stories, and after her trial, they burned it.

  They didn’t find the diary.

  The only words of Mercy left on this earth lay on paper too fragile to be touched. And I so wanted to touch it.

  Abigail showed it to me that first afternoon, after she had finally handed me a cup of tea. She brought it from another room, inside a box that made a snorting sound when she opened it. An airlock.

  “I don’t get it out very often,” she said, as she slipped a pair of thin white gloves on her hands and gingerly lifted the wrapped book out of a foam-covered slot. “I’m afraid it will disintegrate in my hands.”

  “I’m surprised you keep it here,” I said. “If there was a fire …” I stopped. It wasn’t any of my business.

  “I keep it in a fireproof safe,” Abigail said, apparently unruffled by my comment. She laid the book down in front of me and gently removed its plastic covering. The leather cover looked like a layer of thin chocolate. A musky odor met my nostrils.

  “The cover is in remarkable shape,” Abigail said, as she nimbly opened the diary. “The pages, though, are as fragile as a house of cards.”

  The first page lay open before me, dated the fourth of January, 1692.

  I could see the first few lines. The script was both foreign and familiar. Mercy’s letters bore strokes I didn’t recognize easily. Reading her words would be like deciphering a code, like uncovering buried treasure or peeling back a veil. They beckoned.

  I am hiding high up in my elm tree as I write in this little book.

  ’Tis true I have been told not to climb any more trees. Papa said if the Village leaders see me they will think me mad. What Gospel woman in her right mind climbs a tree? An elm tree? A tree that bears no fruit to be plucked? But I cannot stay on the ground. I yearn to be up. I yearn for …

  The ink grew faint. I couldn’t read the rest of the first page. “Are all the pages like this?” I lifted my head to look at Abigail.

  “Many are that way. But not all. Some are better. Some are worse.”

  I sat with the diary inches from me, surrounded on all sides by Abigail’s horde of books. I couldn’t help but ask the obvious. “You’re a lover of stories. Why don’t you just transcribe this yourself?”

  Abigail didn’t look at me. “I cannot write what needs to be written. One can appr
eciate art and yet not have the talent to paint a picture. Besides, I am too old.”

  She wasn’t being truthful. I was sure of it. A retired librarian obsessed with books surely had the talent to transcribe a diary. And Abigail’s age didn’t appear to limit her in any other way. She was keeping something from me.

  She reached into her pocket and silently handed me a pair of white gloves just like the ones she wore.

  I slipped the gloves on my hands and placed my thumb and forefinger on the edge of the first page. My pulse quickened as nervousness swept over me. I had an immediate vision of the page crumbling to dust at my touch. I eased my finger under the page’s lower corner and slowly moved my hand upward, holding my breath as the page rose vertical. The binding made a yawning sound; I had awakened it. I clamped my mouth shut and pursed my lips together—as if this would keep the treasure in one piece—and let gravity ease the page down on the other side. The page creaked to its resting place and lay still. I exhaled.

  Page two of Mercy’s diary was legible almost in its entirety. I leaned over the ancient words and a strange love affair began. There is no other way to describe it. I devoured those first few words like I was ravenous.

  I am so pleased Papa gave me this little book to record my thoughts. On occasion my thoughts find their way into the stories in mine other little book. But these pages will be filled with all that stirs me, all that I wonder about. And it won’t be a story. Unless I call it my story.

  Papa is feeling better today, though he still looks pale to me. Oh, that the sun would come out blazing and warm him. But there is not much sun today. The little of it we saw shone through the window of the Meeting House this morning when the Reverend brought us the lesson. I tried with all my strength to listen to him speak from the Book of Isaiah, but mine eyes kept traveling to the shaft of light falling on the floor. Dust motes were at play in the beam, and I could nigh hear the music they danced to. Goody Collier’s son, John Peter, witnessed me smiling at the sun’s little ballet. He was looking at me from the men’s side. I feared he might be of a mind to tell my father, but he smiled as if pleased I had seen the dance within the sunbeam because he had seen it too.

  It near transfixed me, his gaze. I had to look away.

  It is nigh unto nightfall. I hear Lily, our milk cow, teasing me to go to her. On the morrow I shall write a story of a fairy maiden who dances for the queen of the sky and of the fairy prince who secretly loves her. He will …

  The ink faded away with the fairy prince on the cusp of discovery. I wanted to read more but I didn’t know if I could handle the stress of turning another page. Abigail spoke, and the sound of her voice startled me.

  “I don’t want you merely to copy the diary, Lauren. I want Mercy’s life to be remembered in language that is understandable. I want it to be a story. There’s more to Mercy than this diary.”

  “More?”

  “Of course there’s more.” Abigail frowned, as if wondering how I could not know a woman is more than what she says about herself. “There’s everything I know in my head about her; what has been told about her down through the decades, what has been passed from generation to generation—all of which I will tell you, Lauren, because I have no daughter.”

  At that moment, I understood Abigail had arrived at a place of decision and the lore that surrounded her beloved cousin was with her at that meeting place. Abigail stood at a crossroads, burdened by her status as sole heir, to decide if Mercy Hayworth would slip away into anonymity when Abigail died, or if she would unseal the vault that kept Mercy’s memory alive and command us to weep for her.

  She wanted what Joan of Arc finally got five hundred years too late—a crown of sainthood on a tragically bowed head.

  I should have realized then that this wasn’t about Mercy alone.

  Six

  5 January 1692

  A bird the color of sky flew into our barn today. It has an injured wing. He must have been hurt before the autumn snows and so could not fly south with his brothers. Papa thinks he must be roaming from barn to barn in the settlement, looking for a warm place to spend the winter. Poor thing. He’ll not find a warm place this winter, I dare say. I cannot remember a January as cold as this one. Clouds are collecting, and I fear we are in for a terrible blizzard. I can hear it in the wind. Lily senses it too. When I milked her she kept her nose in the air, sniffing like a dog.

  Goody Dawes made a strange face at the Ordinary today when I told her the wind whispers of heavy snow for tonight. I don’t think she cares to listen to anything save gossip. Gossip is seldom about the weather.

  I heard her tell Goody Wyndham that ’Tis a disgrace John Peter Collier isn’t in the militia with the other young men of the Village. They meant with their own sons, of course. I was of a mind to remind them that since the passing of John Collier Senior, John Peter’s mother has relied solely on him to tend to the mill. If he left, there would be none but his young sisters to help. There’s not a one of John Peter’s sisters who could manage the grindstone.

  But I minded my tongue. Not because I wanted to, but because Papa would have wanted me to.

  Ah, I see the first flakes of snow as I write. A wall of whiteness descending.

  I do hope the little bird stays in the barn tonight.

  ’Twill not be safe to be out and about.

  7 January 1692

  Snow covers all. I shoveled a path to the barn, and the traces of my steps disappeared even as I stepped away. Lily was fretting to go out. She does not care for being wedged in the barn all day long She gave me little milk for wanting to be out in the sun. I told her there was no sun today. She tossed her head at me as if to say, if there is daylight, there is sun. I told her the light she senses is but the wide whiteness of last night’s blizzard. Snow has a light of its own when it is angry. A cold light. Menacing.

  The little bird sat watching me as I milked Lily. He chirped. I threw him some crusts of bread that I carried in my apron.

  I have named him Wanderer.

  John Peter likes the name.

  Mama would have liked it too.

  The first afternoon I spent with Mercy began with these two January days, one promising a storm that would leave its cold mark on everything in its path and the other promising that there would be no escaping it, not even for the smallest and delicate of creatures.

  When I finished transcribing Mercy’s first entries, I felt as though I had been sucked into a portal of shifting moments and then spit out. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my right shoulder. Handling the pages of Mercy’s diary kept the muscles in my neck and arms tense with worry. It had taken me an hour to transcribe the first entry into language that made sense and yet didn’t alter what Mercy had written. Then another hour for the second.

  I wanted it to be perfect.

  I wanted to let my mind conjure the scene as Mercy wrote. The cold whiteness of winter. The fluttering of tiny wings. Bittersweet memories of a deceased mother. The hard life of a young woman in colonial times who had already lost much. And over all these images was my knowledge that something was about to descend upon Mercy, far worse than a snowstorm. I wanted to shout across the centuries and warn her even though I knew full well, as Abigail had told me, that Mercy’s destiny was sealed.

  I had read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in high school. I remembered enough of the play to know that the coming days in Mercy’s snowy white world would usher in a nightmare, a truly dark moment in our nation’s history. As I rubbed an ache in my neck, I had a sudden desire to research the Salem witch trials, to read up on what I would soon see through Mercy Hayworth’s eyes. Surely in a library as overweight as Abigail’s there would be books on the Salem trials, especially since Abigail’s long-ago cousin had been a victim of them.

  I looked up from my work to face Abigail, who sat behind me as I read and typed. Abigail didn’t stand over me as I plucked away at the laptop. In fact, she never seemed to let her eyes glance over the text of Mercy’s diary. When sh
e was in the room with me, helping to fill gaps where pages were missing or not legible, or where Mercy’s ancient words needed clarification, she always stood off to the side. She never looked over my shoulder at the faded pages.

  She sensed me looking at her and raised her head. “Do you need something, Lauren?”

  “I was just wondering if you had books on the Salem witch trials I could take home and read on my own time.”

  She blinked at me. “What for?”

  “I’d like do some research. I think it would help me understand the times Mercy was living in and what she went through.”

  Abigail licked her bottom lip. “Honestly, Lauren, the diary is all you need to understand Mercy and what she went through.” She looked down for a moment, as if concentrating on choosing just the right words. “In fact, that kind of research would interfere with the work you’re doing. Many have hypothesized on how the hysteria began and why. No one is really sure. It can get a little muddy, even political.”

  Abigail paused for a second, then continued. “I am asking you, Lauren, to read nothing written about the trials. Nothing. Not until you are done with the diary. When you’re done, you may borrow any book I have on the subject. And I have many. But I ask that you wait until you’re finished. And don’t meddle with those Web sites on the Internet. Not yet. Just concentrate on the diary.”

  Abigail locked her eyes on mine, pleading with me. A strange sensation fell over me as I realized I was in a position of power over her. There were not to be many moments like that one.

  “May we agree on that? Just until you are finished with the diary?” she asked.

  It occurred to me then that the diary might be a forgery. It didn’t look like one, but her anxiety made me question it.

  “Is this diary genuine?” I asked.

  “I assure you it is genuine. God is my witness.”

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  “So may we agree on this? It is essential that we agree.” Her eyes were hard on mine.