Finding Mercy

by Cindy Kelley

  “Yes, though we never really made that distinction,” Suzanne said. “I’ve always just been mother to you.”

  Suzanne paused and shook her head. “I’m so … so … I don’t understand. What happened to make you lose your memory? People don’t just go to sleep and wake up without a fundamental sense of who they are.”

  “That’s what it felt like,” Mercy said. “I was brought to a doctor’s clinic with a head injury. I’m told I was unconscious for a few days. And when I woke up, I had no memories of anything personal. I couldn’t say where I was from or what I was doing. I couldn’t even tell the doctor my own name.”

  “Oh, my darling girl, how awful. How long ago was this?” Suzanne fiddled with the handkerchief in her lap.

  “A little over a year ago,” Mercy said. “My memories begin with the day I woke up.”

  “But you’ve been gone for three years. Are you saying you don’t know where you were all that time?”

  Mercy nodded. “That is exactly what I’m saying.”

  “So when you left here? No idea where you went? Or why you left?” Beau asked.

  “Believe me, I have more questions than you could possibly think of,” Mercy said. “I feel as if my life is a puzzle missing over half the pieces.”

  “Maybe it would help if you answered some of Mercy’s questions,” Elijah said.

  “Who is Mercy?” Victoria asked.

  “I am,” Mercy said. “I didn’t know my real name. Some nuns I stayed with began calling me Mercy—and it’s what I’ve used ever since.”

  “This is all so—upsetting,” Suzanne said. “You’re gone and we don’t know if you’re dead or alive. Then by God’s grace you come back to us, but you can’t tell us where you’ve been.”

  “I know it’s a lot to digest,” Mercy said.

  Suzanne took a deep, steadying breath, then smiled. “What can we do to help? What would you like to know?”

  “When was the last time you saw me?” Mercy asked.

  “It was about a week after your father’s funeral.”

  “And that was?” Mercy asked.

  “August eleventh, ’63,” Suzanne said. “We had supper together as a family—albeit a fractured family. You had been so sullen and morose, not that I’m criticizing, considering the circumstances, but that night it seemed as if you might get your grief under control. You talked about the thresher on the lower field and how we could improve it once the South won the war and our lives went on.”

  “I thought the South would win?” Mercy asked.

  “Of course, dear. We all believed it to be a foregone conclusion,” Suzanne said. “Anyway, my point in bringing that up is you seemed more like yourself that night. But by the end of the meal, you said you had a headache and were going to turn in early. I believe Chessie brought fresh water to your room.”

  “How long has Chessie been with the family?” Mercy asked.

  “Your grandfather owned Chessie and gave her to your father when you were born.”

  “But now she’s free …”

  Suzanne waved a hand in the air. “Yes, yes, free. She may leave if she wants to, but in all actuality, Charlotte, where would an uneducated seventy-year-old colored woman go? Mr. Lincoln didn’t think about that when he opened the floodgates with the blood of thousands of men, and then pushed illiterate coloreds into a world they can’t possibly understand.”

  Now Mercy was sorry she asked. Of all the things she didn’t want to get into at the moment, it was the moral issue of slavery.

  “So … I went to my room with a headache that evening, and then?” Mercy asked.

  “Chessie went to check on you the next morning, and you were gone,” Beau said.

  “At first we weren’t worried,” Suzanne said. “You had a habit of disappearing for hours at a time and not telling me your whereabouts. So the first few hours you were out of the house I assumed you needed time alone. But as the day wore on and you didn’t return, Beau and a few of the house servants went out looking for you.”

  “And obviously didn’t find me. I was actually … gone.”

  “From then, until now,” Suzanne said. “We had no idea what had happened to you. As far as we could tell, you didn’t take anything with you. There was some talk that you’d taken the gun your father gave you, but in all honesty, I don’t know one weapon from the next and we had several. We asked everyone we could think to ask: friends, neighbors, anyone who you might have confided in about plans you may have had. But we could never uncover a trace of you. As the years went on, we just assumed … well, we assumed you would never leave us and not send word. It would be so rude, so mean. So … unlike you. We assumed the worst, I’m afraid.”

  “How old are you, Beau?” Mercy asked.

  Surprised at the question, Beau raised his eyebrows. “Victoria and I are seventeen.”

  “That makes me twenty-one?”

  “Twenty-two next month,” Suzanne said.

  Doc Abe was close when he said he thought I’d barely seen twenty summers. She felt a small thrill of satisfaction to know this fact. In the space of a couple of hours, she had a name, an age, a brother, a sister, and a stepmother. She had done it—she had found her home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mercy looked up at the portrait of her father. She thought she saw bits and pieces of herself in his features. The dark hair and eyes. She even recognized the line of her own nose on his face. How strange to see she resembled someone.

  “He was a very handsome man,” Mercy said.

  Suzanne glanced up at the portrait of her late husband. “Yes. Very handsome.” She turned and looked at Beau. “I always thought Beauregard favored him.”

  Mercy looked at her half brother and didn’t see an ounce of resemblance to their father. Beau was fair skinned, blond, and blue- eyed, just like his mother and sister. But she smiled and said what she thought was expected of her.

  “Yes. I see the likeness,” Mercy said.

  “You always looked more like Father than we did,” Victoria said. “When I was little, I used some of his black boot polish on my hair to make it dark like yours, and his.”

  “That was a mess,” Suzanne said. “Took me a full week to get it all out.”

  “I would like to know what happened to him,” Mercy said. “How did he die?”

  “It really is remarkable that you don’t remember,” Suzanne said.

  “Frustrating would be the word I’d use to describe it,” Mercy said.

  Suzanne shook her head with a look of concern. “Are you sure you want to have this conversation on your first day home? It might prove to be too much for you.”

  “I assure you, I’m not all that fragile. I can certainly hear the truth about what happened.” Please, God, let me be right. She looked to Elijah for his reassurance on the subject. He kept his eyes on her but addressed the others in the room.

  “Charlotte … is stronger than you might think,” he said. “I don’t know what she was like before she left, but trust me, you can tell her the truth.”

  Mercy shot Elijah a grateful look, but thought about how strange it seemed to hear him call her Charlotte.

  Suzanne sighed. “I think it’s safe to say that Charlotte has always possessed a certain … I suppose we could call it strength.”

  Beau shook his head. “I can’t get a grip on this. And I’m sorry, Char, but it’s just too awful to think you don’t remember anything. Us. What did the doctor tell you about your condition?”

  “He made no promises to me about when or if my memory might return. Now, about my father …”

  “Unlike you, I remember all the details of your father’s death nearly every day, even when I try hard not to,” Suzanne said. “The subject is very painful for me and I try not to dwell on what happened but instead to go forward with my life. Now, the joy of having y
ou return home to us is almost more than I can comprehend. Maybe you would indulge me in hearing about the part of your life you do remember, before we discuss John.”

  Before Mercy could respond, another colored woman entered the room. She looked about the same advanced age as the maid, Chessie, but she moved with a speed that defied that age. She stopped in the middle of the parlor and pressed gnarled hands over her mouth while she shook her head and hummed a few high notes.

  Suzanne raised her brows. “I see Chessie shared the good news, Juba.”

  Juba bobbed her silver-haired head, then rushed toward Mercy. “Cain’t believe it, cain’t believe dese poor ol’ eyes.”

  Mercy stood as the old woman stretched out her arms and smiled.

  Juba, though barely five feet tall, felt like a bigger presence when she hugged Mercy. “You home, Miss Charlotte. You home! I be fixin’ yo’ favorite foods fo’ sure. Gimme time and I make ’em all.”

  Mercy gave Juba a little pat on the back, then straightened from the embrace. She smiled at her. “Thank you.”

  Juba stepped back. Her face had wrinkles so deep it looked like someone had folded her skin like paper and then unfolded it again. There were white clouds of flour that drifted across her dark blue apron. “Thought I’d hafta meet mah Maker a’for I see you again.”

  “No. I’m … here now. Safe and sound,” Mercy said. Safe and basically sound.

  Juba shot a look at the portrait of Mercy’s father. “Massah would shorely be a happy man you home. He shorely would be …”

  “Yes, he would be happy, Juba,” Suzanne said. “We’re all happy.”

  Juba didn’t acknowledge Suzanne’s statement. Instead, she dipped her head at Mercy. “Sorry to interrupt, jes had ta see fo’ myself you was here.”

  She hustled out of the room almost as quickly as she’d come into it.

  “That was Juba, our cook,” Victoria said.

  “She’s been with us since we were children,” Beau added.

  Suzanne cocked her head to the side and looked at Mercy. “You do well ‘meeting’ people without calling attention to your memory issue.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mercy said. “It’s hard to tell someone who seems to know and care about me that I don’t remember them.”

  “I suppose you’ll have to find a way, darling. You will see a lot of people who knew and cared about you,” Suzanne said. “Now … I believe you were going to tell us what you know about these past three years?”

  “I can’t talk much about the first two years I was gone, because all I do remember about my life—my entire life—is this last year. What happened before the injury that caused the amnesia is a complete blank. It’s as if my life began on an April day in 1865.”

  “So where you went and what you were doing when you left us will remain a mystery?”

  Mercy hesitated. “I can’t say for certain where I was—but I do think I know what I was doing.”

  They stared at her expectantly. “I have it on good authority that after I left here, I enlisted in the Confederate army,” Mercy said, with a quick glance at Elijah.

  They stared at her for a moment of stunned silence.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Beau said. “Women can’t be in the army.”

  “It seems I cut my hair, bound my chest, put on a wool shirt and a pair of trousers, and passed myself off as a man.”

  Suzanne looked at Elijah, who confirmed the story with a nod.

  “You marched with the other soldiers?” Suzanne asked.

  Mercy swallowed. “Not exactly. I believe I was a sharpshooter.”

  Suzanne studied her, then sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “At last, something that makes sense. Your father taught you to shoot before you could read. He told me you could shoot out the eye of a pigeon from fifty yards away.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her father had taught her to shoot a gun. So strange to use the word father in context with herself. My father taught me.

  “Why teach a daughter to shoot?” Mercy asked, then immediately regretted the question when she saw the irritated look on Beau’s face. “I’m sure he taught us all?”

  “Absolutely not,” Victoria said. “I wanted nothing to do with his horrible guns.” Mercy looked at Beau, hoping to find some sibling link between them. “Did we practice together?”

  She thought she saw a quick flash of annoyance cross Beau’s face, but he covered it with a smile. “Once in a while we did. But honestly, Char, you were Father’s star pupil.”

  “He was a marksman, then?” Elijah asked.

  “Among other things,” Suzanne said. “John was a career military man.”

  “He didn’t run the plantation?” Mercy asked.

  Suzanne raised her eyes to the portrait of her deceased husband. “Between wars he did. He was educated in the art of warfare. His degree in engineering was almost an afterthought for him.”

  “A West Point man?” Elijah asked.

  Suzanne arched a brow. “Yes. You’ve heard of it, then.”

  Elijah nodded. “Some of the highest-ranking commanders came from the Point. Good men, all of them.”

  Suzanne’s face clouded. “Yes, good men. But so many dead men. Former classmates pitted against one another in a war that never should have happened.”

  Elijah didn’t comment, and it seemed to Mercy it was the lack of comment that caused Suzanne to study him a little more.

  “You have the presence of a military man, Mr. Hale,” she said. “Did you fight?”

  “Yes. It’s how I met Mer … Charlotte,” he said.

  She smiled. “A fellow patriot.”

  Elijah smiled but said nothing.

  “Seems everybody got to fight the despicable Yankees but me,” Beau said. The bitter tone of his voice spoke of a wound that had never healed.

  “You were only a child, darling,” Suzanne said. “You know your father wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “And if you’d been away fighting in that nasty war, you wouldn’t have been here to protect us from those vile Yankees that came into our home and acted like the barbarians we know them to be,” Victoria said.

  “The Northern army was here? In the house?” Mercy asked.

  “Evidence of their unwelcomed presence is all around you.” The icy tone of Suzanne’s voice gave away her deep feelings. “The broken floorboards and torn wallpaper. The gouges in the wood and the splintered furniture. Yankees used our home for a staging place, if you will. Complete disregard for us, our property. Rode their horses through the foyer just for the fun and spectacle of it! Victoria calling them barbarians is accurate. It is precisely the way they acted and why I wish they all would burn in hell.”

  Mercy didn’t dare look at Elijah for fear she’d give him away. He had been right. The wounds were still too fresh to sit in a parlor and have a conversation with someone who was still their sworn enemy.

  “Maybe in time the country will look back on the war and see the passion people had for their own ways of life and not focus on all the lives that were lost,” Mercy said. “The bitterness will eventually fade—won’t it?”

  Suzanne shook her head. “The bitterness will never fade for me. Your father is dead because of that war.”

  “Was he shot in battle?”

  Suzanne shook her head and tried to clear her throat. Mercy could see how difficult the conversation was for her newfound family. “Really, darling, I beg of you to leave this dreariness until another day.”

  “Of course,” Mercy said.

  “I think you should count yourself lucky you don’t remember what happened, Char,” Beau said. “I wish I could forget it.”

  “In any event, it’s in John’s memory that we strive so hard to bring this plantation back to the level of success we enjoyed before th
e war. Back to the glory days of when your father was alive and well and impressing us all with his newfangled methods for growing and harvesting rice.”

  “That must be quite difficult without your former labor,” Elijah said.

  Suzanne nodded. “At one time we had nearly three hundred slaves working the property, but now, to say there are fifty families working as sharecroppers is probably generous. Each and every day is a struggle, but we’re doing fine.”

  “Life goes on,” Victoria said. “Even when your father dies and your sister flees.”

  “Again, please accept my apologies for leaving the way I did,” Mercy said.

  Suzanne smiled. “We are just so happy to have you home, darling. Now, I’m sure you’re exhausted and would like to freshen up before supper?”

  “Yes, thank you, Mother,” Mercy said.

  Suzanne turned to Elijah. “Mr. Hale? I don’t know what your plans are, but surely it’s too late in the day to leave us now. You’ll spend the night?”

  Elijah glanced at Mercy, who nodded. “I appreciate your kind invitation.”

  “Nonsense. It’s the least we can do for the man who provided a safe journey home for our Charlotte. Now, if y’all will excuse me, I’ll see about supper preparations.”

  “What about Isaac?” Mercy asked before Suzanne could leave the room.

  “Who is Isaac?” Victoria asked.

  “The young man we arrived with,” Mercy said. “He was sent to take care of the horses.”

  “The colored boy you arrived with,” Beau corrected.

  For a moment, Suzanne looked confused. “Beau will make arrangements for him in the colored camp.”

  “I am indebted to Isaac as well as to Elijah,” Mercy said. “Is there a room in the house for—”

  Elijah stopped her short with a meaningful look and a barely perceptible shake of his head. She turned to Beau. “I’m sure Isaac will appreciate whatever accommodations you make for him.”

  “Splendid. All settled, then.” Suzanne made her way to a velvet rope hanging from the ceiling and pulled it. Rose appeared moments later.