Shades of Mercy

by Anita B. Lustrea

  “Mr. Pop said I could. I always jump at the chance.”

  “Your pop said you could or should?”

  “Should, I guess.”

  “’Cause everybody knows now?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Right. So your pop thought it’d be better for you to be killed by a moose or a tramp than to be seen coming to get us.”

  I pulled back and looked straight at him. I had been prepared to set him straight, but the glistening in his brown eyes and the terrified boy shining through the man he was trying to be dissipated any anger.

  “I just wish you’d have told me something yesterday,” I told him.

  “I told you: no time. I couldn’t. When’d you find out?”

  “Mr. Pop told us over breakfast. I knew something was up, seeing Bud and Ellery at the table.”

  “At the table!” Mick laughed. “Must’ve been some sight. Those hillbillies eating off your grandmother’s breakfast china.”

  I smiled. It had been a sight. Though it hadn’t occured to me until now.

  “You know, even Bud and Ellery told Mr. Pop I shouldn’t come today. But Mr. Pop thought different. This hasn’t changed his feelings about Maliseet.”

  Mick shook his head.

  “It might not change his feelings about having us work still, Mercy. But it sure as—it sure changes his feelings about his daughter marrying one.”

  I smiled at his determination to keep his language clean as I ran a finger through the dirt.

  “Marrying one?”

  Mick laughed. “Mercy, what’d you think all our ‘someday’ talk meant? I had it all planned out.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Stay secret through harvest. But your pop would be so impressed with my work and the seventy-five barrels a day picked this fall, he was going to write me into the will. I would be the true son he’d never had.”

  I laughed.

  “But then he’d feel bad that he cut you out, so he’d suggest you and I start—you know—seeing a bit more of each other. Then we’d officially and publicly fall in love. And folks would ooh and aah and we’d get married once you turned sixteen. Your pop would walk you right down the aisle at First Baptist. I’d kiss the bride right in front of the altar and the whole town would give us their blessing.”

  I laughed again and leaned in to kiss him right there.

  “This is how you imagined it?” I asked. “You think I want to get married at sixteen—like Mother?”

  “My ma was married at fifteen.”

  I made a face at Mick. He leaned in for a kiss.

  “This is 1954, Mick, not 1934. I’m not getting married at sixteen. Besides, one of the benefits of being the son he never had is that Mr. Pop has promised he’ll send me to college. What about college? What about you going to college?”

  “I’d’ve waited. Or gone when you went. We’d go together. Or you’d’ve gone and I’d’ve worked. But we can do it all together. Or we could’ve. Maybe.”

  “And you really think people would’ve ever blessed the marriage of Mr. Paul Millar’s only daughter to a Maliseet?”

  “Well,” he said. “I was hoping. But now, no more. Because of Glenn. I could kill him.”

  “Don’t say that. He’s your friend.”

  “He’s ruined our lives. That’s what he’s done. He’s made it so we can’t be together, even like this.”

  “Please,” I said. “Stop. Things are changing. Mr. Pop says black and white kids will have to go to school together because of the Supreme Court. My cousins live in Alabama. My aunt’s not happy about the integration. She says there’ll be trouble for all the kids. But Mr. Pop says that this is God ’s way and that we can’t act out of fear of ‘trouble.’ Maybe it’s like that for us too. Maybe there is some trouble for Glenn and Marjorie. But maybe they’ll make it easier for us to be together. Maybe Mr. Pop will see this as God’s way too.”

  Mick shook his head.

  “For a smart girl, you don’t understand much about the world, do you?” Mick asked. “There’s a world of difference between thinking it’s okay for Blacks and Whites to share a classroom and thinking Maliseet and girls like you should be holding hands on Main Street. Centuries’ worth of fear over ‘the Indians coming for our women!’ will boil up faster than your mother’s teakettle. That’s what Glenn and Marjorie have roiled up. That’s what we’re up against.”

  I stared at Mick, fearing the words that might come next. Mick grabbed a stick and drew lines in the dirt and bramble.

  “Here’s you.” He pointed to one line. “Here’s me.” He pointed to another. “And this is the gulf that’s come between us.” His stick drew the lines bigger and bigger.

  I swallowed.

  “We can’t just stop this. Not how we feel. At least, I can’t. I can’t just write you off. We have too much.” I waved my arm toward our lean-to doors. “We’ve built too many forts together.”

  Mick laughed. Though this fort we sat in was our first romantic hideaway, it was far from our first fort. In our early rock-picking years, Mick and I became master crafters of stone forts. Not for us. But tiny ones for the the field mice and chipmunks and woodchucks. Back then, when we were grade-schoolers constructing rock homes for various Northwoods rodents, people found our friendship adorable. Pastor Murphy even once used us in a sermon about building your house on the rock. “Not the rock like the ones Mercy and her little Maliseet friend make,” he said to much laughter.

  “People got used to us back then,” I said. “People were okay with it. We can just keep meeting like this. Stay secret for longer. It’s bound to cool down.”

  Mick sighed.

  “It’s not going to, Mercy. It’s not. My dad and the tribal leaders have been talking. They’re ready to petition the government for land of our own. They’re tired of how we’ve been treated. It’s time for things to change. For us to have land of our own and get off this dump.”

  “Well, of course. You know Mr. Pop supports that for you.”

  “In theory, yes. But when it comes down to him giving up his land? To his friends giving up theirs? I think Old Mr. Pop may change his tune. Especially if he finds out about us.”

  “No. You’re wrong, Mick. That’ll make him understand more.”

  “It won’t, Mercy. It won’t.”

  “So what are you saying? This is all over?”

  Mick breathed deep and stared ahead into the dark forest. Then he turned back and held his hand to my face. I thought Mick would kiss me, hold me, but instead he stood—crouched, really—back bent under the limbs, hands perched on his knees, ready to go.

  “No, no. Not saying that. Just … I dunno.”

  I reached toward him, offered my hand.

  “We could lie low, just take what we’ve got a bit more underground or something. Like field mice or woodchucks.”

  “Woodchucks?” Mick asked. “Tunneling?”

  “Yes.”

  Mick smiled. “Yeah. Maybe,” he said. “C’mon. We have men to wake up. Work to do.” And he took off running, forgetting to kiss me.

  Chapter Four

  Unlike most nights when the dark of night and the light of day bow to one another and agree to a friendly swap, tonight the dark forced its way across the sky as the band of gray clouds crowded out a glistening summer evening.

  “My ma used to tell me …”

  I jumped.

  “Sorry, Miss Mercy,” Ellery said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “It’s all right, Ellery. Was lost in my thoughts.”

  “Bet you were. Was just sayin’, my ma used to tell me when I was little, on her knee and whatnot, that clouds could tell us something about God’s moods. Not sure if she was right or not.”

  I smiled. “Sounds like something Ansley’d say.”

  “My ma always liked the Maliseet. Maybe that’s where she got it. Still. I wonder if she was right. What’d’ya you think?”

  “I’m not sure. But I know that my mother s
ays you move like a cat,” I said. “And she’s right. You’re quiet.”

  “I am. But you usually notice me. Like you do everything. You’re like me. Mind if I sit and wait with you?”

  I patted the step next to me.

  “I taught you how to tie a fishing line right here. Right on these porch steps. Crazy place to teach a girl to fish.”

  “That was just after Tommy Birger almost drowned in the Meduxnekeag and Mother was too scared to let me go down there. Even with you.”

  “That Tommy. What hasn’t he almost died doin’? That’s what I want to know.”

  I laughed. Inside, some light pushed back against my own darkness.

  “Molly told me his horse threw him just last week.”

  Ellery’s laugh rang out to compete with the thunder.

  “Musta been pushing that horse something hard. Trying to outrun all Molly’s chasing.”

  “For the life of me, I don’t know why he runs from her at all. I mean, it’s Molly. What boy wouldn’t be thrilled by her attention?”

  “Miss Mercy, I’d guess the kind of boy who wished he had your attention.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Tommy Birger does not want my attention.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  I turned to Ellery with my “doubtin’ look,” which Ellery said I’d been giving him since before I could talk. “You’ve never believed me, but you’ve always adored me,” Ellery liked to tease. And he was right. Though I believed him more than I ever gave him credit for.

  Our weary laughter faded as our stares fixed on the road that stretched across the front of the farm. Before I was old enough to work the farm with Mr. Pop, I’d sit for hours on the front lawn overlooking the main road. I loved that the big road, the main way into town, was practically outside our front door. I used to count the cars. I tried to make the logging trucks honk their horns as they drove past. Because our farm was at the crest of the hill, I could see for miles. Out beyond the old outhouse, I could see Mother’s garden. Mr. Pop might be the resident farmer, but Mother had a green thumb to rival any farmer in Watsonville. Her rhubarb patch, just to the north of the flower garden, yielded some of the sweetest in the county. The fact that it was on the north side of the old outhouse might have had something to do with it. Then to the south of the flower garden, which was filled with beautiful gladiolas of all colors along with a small patch of pansies, marigolds, and snapdragons, was the truck garden. This garden filled our table and enabled generosity toward others, as the Spirit led, all summer and on into fall. Besides her famous broccoli, she grew cauliflower, peas, lettuce, kale, corn, scallions, and my favorite, beet greens. Only thing better than beet greens were fiddleheads in the spring.

  On the crest of the hill, I could see almost to the Canadian border to the north. To the east I could even see the top of the old Carmichael farm, where Mr. Carmichael grew up. He decided a long time ago that town life was more appealing than farm life. The only farming his girls ever knew was when they were visiting me. They thought picking raspberries or cutting cucumbers from the vine was fun work. But they knew nothing of doing that kind of back-bending work for ten hours straight. No, Marjorie and Molly had grown up townies.

  Truth was, I envied them. I didn’t want to be the girl that was “better than any son.” All I could think of when I heard Mr. Pop say that was the story of Hannah in the Bible when her husband Elkanah said, “Aren’t I worth more than ten sons?” I didn’t want to be as good as ten sons or one son. I wanted to be a girl, a woman. I wanted to be somebody’s girl. And I was. I was Mick’s girl, or I would be if I could hold on for “someday.”

  “You think they’re really going to come?” I asked, breaking into our thoughts.

  “If Mr. Carmichael tells your father he’ll be here, then he’ll be here. No doubtin’ looks for that, Miss Mercy.”

  I smiled and we both breathed deep when we saw the red of the Carmichaels’ sleek Buick Riviera cut across the gray, rumbly twilight. I loved that car. No new cars on the farm for the last eight years or so. Owning a store in town certainly had its perks. A new car every couple of years was one of them. That Buick was a real beauty.

  What I wouldn’t give to get behind that wheel. As we stood up to greet them as the car turned into the drive, the heavens opened and the rain began.

  “Mercy, you and Molly take your cobbler and milk upstairs,” Mother said, pushing me out of the kitchen and into the hall.

  “Upstairs?” I asked. Even when I was at my sickest, Mother resisted allowing food in my bedroom. Lickers had offered us enough gifts through the years to prove that Mother was right to worry that even bread and soup for a sick soul was only giving mice a chance to find snatches of crumbs and bring more disease and pestilence in where we slept. So Mother allowed food to be eaten in only two places: at the corner kitchen table, tucked into the bay window Mr. Pop had added as a wedding gift, or at the dining room table that had held the “fine food and fancies of generations of Millars,” as Ellery said.

  “That’s right. You girls go enjoy your dessert. Maybe you can show Molly your new book. Now scoot.”

  Mother swept her fingers at Molly and me and jerked her head toward the stairs. When Mother pushed the oak-paneled door back into the kitchen, I shrugged at Molly.

  “Guess we aren’t invited to the discussion.”

  “It’s okay,” said Molly. “I’ve had enough discussion for a lifetime.”

  As we started up the stairs, I craned to see the living room. Mrs. Carmichael still sat in there on the sofa, staring at her shoes while she fiddled with the clasp on her handbag. I’d never known her not to help Mother in the kitchen. I wondered if Mother had refused her help or if Mrs. Carmichael hadn’t offered. Neither way made any sense.

  But Muriel Carmichael wasn’t the one I really wondered about. It was her husband. We all knew Muriel would fret and fidget over her lost daughter. But Mr. Carmichael? None of us knew. This was what Ellery and I had sat on the porch wondering. Why we stayed in the rain as they stepped out onto the gravel. Would he collapse into despair? Lash out in fury? Both were equally likely from this man Mr. Pop considered as close as his own brother, from this man I should have loved like an uncle but who remained distant and remote.

  “Girls, I said scoot!” Mother sat another full pan of cobbler on the table and turned toward the stairs. “If I don’t hear the click of your door on the count of seven, Miss Lickers will be getting that cobbler and milk you’re holding.” I took one more look at the living room and then we double-timed it up the stairs.

  The door clicked closed at the count of six.

  We set our desserts and milk on the desk and smiled briefly at each other. It was good to see Molly’s face lighten, even if for a moment. We hadn’t gotten time to talk, and I didn’t know when we would. Because now we would discuss neither the secret life of Holden Caufield nor the secret life of Marjorie Carmichael, who maybe now was Mrs. Glenn Socoby. We were here to do one thing—what we’d do ever since we were old enough to get shooed upstairs. With the synchronization that only a lifetime of friendship and practice can bring about, Molly and I knelt on the floor, rolled back the rug to reveal the register. Whether it was the stress, desperate for release, or our conspiracy, our teamwork, or just doing the thing we’d always done, our stone-cold serious eyes met and brought laughs from somewhere deep in each of us.

  “Ssssh,” I warned, but my shushing only made us giggle more. It felt too good. But I managed to add: “If we can hear them, then they can hear us.” This shut us both up as we lowered our ears to the heating grate on the floor. This was better than any gossip section of the Watsonville Chronicle. This grate was how Molly and I learned of the big news, the difficult marriages, the troubled children, the struggling farms, the heretical deacons, and now … the truth about runaway sisters and distraught parents.

  But it stayed quiet in the living room below us. We heard only mumbles and murmurs and clanki
ng of forks and clinking of coffee cups from the more distant dining room. “Maybe we should head to the bathroom?” Molly suggested. That register, as we both knew, fed into the dining room.

  “Too risky. Mother is on to us, you know. She’s got one ear in the dining room and another to the stairs, just waiting for the door to creak and Lickers to escape.”

  We both looked back at the cat who sat hunched at the door, alternately mewing to be released from this room and tending to something on her paw. If we opened that door even a crack, Lickers would make a run for it. She’d head downstairs and be the tattletale we didn’t need.

  “Maybe she’d stay for some cobbler and milk,” was Molly’s idea.

  I smiled. “Maybe she would.” But as I contemplated setting our dishes down for the cat, a chair scraped across the floor below. Our ears moved back to the grate as though pulled.

  “I’m sorry, Geneva. I just can’t eat.”

  It was Mr. Carmichael. And it was his feet that stomped back into the living room, followed by a plea from Molly’s mother.

  “Frankie, please.”

  Then Mr. Pop said something, presumably to Mother and Mrs. Carmichael. I imagined words of comfort, of assuring Mrs. Carmichael that he would take care of it, that everything would be fine. Those were the words Mr. Pop always gave, and he was always right. He always took care of everything and everything was always fine. Then his chair eased back, gently, not wanting to scrape the wood floors he’d so carefully sanded and stained not two winters ago and took his usual steady and sturdy steps toward his friend.

  Molly and I looked at each other. Lickers wouldn’t get her cobbler-bribe after all. We both gulped. I brought a finger to my lips. Things were about to get interesting right below us.

  “Frankie,” Mr. Pop said.

  “What’d that general used to say? ‘Only good Indian is a dead Indian’? That man knew what he was talking about.”

  “Frankie,” Mr. Pop said again. Slower and softer this time. The sofa squeaked. Mr. Pop must’ve moved to sit beside his friend. I never knew Mr. Pop to sit anywhere but in his chair, but I also never knew Mr. Pop to move away from a person in need.