“If Glenn Socoby comes back to Watsonville, he’ll be good and dead.”
“Even if Marjorie is carrying his child?”
“If Marjorie is carrying his child, I’ll kill him. And that goes for his—” Mr. Carmichael snorted—“offspring as well.”
Molly’s head shot up from the grate, her hand covered her mouth. I thought maybe she’d need to run to the bathroom after all. But she eased her head down at the sound of her mother’s voice.
“Franklin Carmichael!” Mrs. Carmichael yelled. Two chairs scraped and scooted across the floor, followed by two sets of heels running into the kitchen.
Molly’s eyes glazed over and sniffles began. I reached my hand toward her and set my hand on her back.
“I don’t mean that,” Mr. Carmichael said. Mr. Pop stayed silent. “Not about killing the baby. Though I’ve thought about, about sending her to one of those doctors in Nova Scotia. Montreal, maybe? Children are a gift from God, but not Indian children. They’re straight from the devil.”
Still Mr. Pop said nothing.
“But even still. There’s probably some ignorant couple out there—a Negro couple maybe—longing for a child, so desperate that they won’t care what sort of mother and heathen father that baby has. Someone out there won’t care about the alcohol running through its veins. The Catholics have places to send those kind of mothers. I’m going to find out about it.”
I waited for Mr. Pop to say something, to defend Glenn or the baby or Marjorie, to tell Mr. Carmichael that everything would be fine. But he said none of that.
Instead, we heard Mr. Pop say: “God in heaven already knows the right couple for that baby … if there is one. We don’t rightly know yet.”
I turned to Molly. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. I tried again, still nothing. I couldn’t imagine Mr. Pop giving in like that, especially if there was a child concerned. Two children: Marjorie and her baby. But they didn’t even know for sure if there was a baby. I knew my creased eyebrows and shifting eyes betrayed the number of questions that filled me. But I hoped my sigh and smile and my outreached hand would conceal what I worried about for what felt like the first time in my young life. I hoped that Molly couldn’t see that for the first time I didn’t know if everything would really be all right.
Once we were sure the talking below had stopped, or at least moved out of range of our ears, Molly and I lifted ourselves up from the floor. Molly was the first to speak, not in the careful whisper I imagined would come out but in full voice.
“Dad’s been like that since yesterday. He hasn’t calmed down at all. Mom’s tried to get him to ease up. But he won’t.”
“So there was a note? From Marjorie, I mean.”
Molly nodded. “But it just said she was leaving and that she’d write later and explain. She said she loved me and to tell Mom and Dad she loved them.”
“She left the note for you?”
“On our dresser. I found it when I woke up yesterday morning. I can’t believe it’s only been since yesterday.”
Molly walked toward the window and pulled back the poof of curtain to look out. “Marjorie could be anywhere, with anyone,” she said.
“But if with anyone, what’s all this talk about being with Glenn and about babies?” I asked.
“Because Old Man Stringer saw Glenn Socoby in town two nights ago. At the Old Pine Inn,” Molly said. “And because—” her sobs choked off her words.
I walked up behind her and put my hand on her back, rested my chin on her shoulder. Two heads looking out my perfectly paned window to the world.
“And because I told Mom about her and Glenn. About how they were in love. And about how Marjorie was worried about what Dad might do to him if he knew. But they don’t believe me that Marjorie loved him. They don’t believe me that she was desperate to marry him and start a new life as his wife. Dad says she’d only run off if she was scared about a baby. I’ve told them they’re wrong, but I’ve made a mess of everything.”
Molly turned to me and grabbed my hands. “What if I’m wrong?” she asked, her eyes now more crazed than crying. “I mean, Marjorie didn’t tell me for sure that they were going to run off. And she made me swear not to tell. I was just so scared. I thought it’d help them find her if they knew. But now Dad’s—”
Molly’s panic settled back into sobs. I let her cry it out until she calmed down. I was hugging her so close neither of us heard the knock at the door.
“Girls,” Mother was saying. “The Carmichaels are leaving now. Molly, dear. It’s time to go.”
Molly nodded into my shoulder, and Mother asked if she might wrap her cobbler up for her to take home. Somehow, Molly and I both laughed. We both knew the only thing my mother approved of less than eating in my room was taking food into the car.
“No, ma’am. Thank you, though.” Molly pulled away to wipe her eyes and share a smile. “I’m sorry we didn’t eat it.”
“No one did,” Mother said. “Come on down now. Mercy, you too.”
Mother turned, her skirt swishing with a grace that betrayed her farm-wife status, that gave vision to the society girl she could’ve been. Lickers followed her out.
Molly stepped forward, but then stopped short. “I don’t know when we’re going to see each other next. So I need to tell you this now.”
Molly’s face alarmed me. But I forced a smile, hoping to capture some of our past, brief moments of laughter, hoping I could lighten her mood. I didn’t.
“Glenn isn’t the only one Dad’s been talking about killing. He says that if the rumors are true, if he sees Mick so much as look at you funny, he’s going to kill him too.”
I couldn’t breathe. I felt dizzy. I leaned against my desk to steady myself. Had Molly betrayed me?
“Molly, what did you tell them?” I whispered this, but the softness of my words only punctuated my rage.
“Nothing!” Molly said, stepping toward me. I shrugged away from her outreached arm. “I didn’t tell. But someone must’ve told.”
Molly walked out as Mother called us down again. I stood to follow her, taking steps as though in a trance. The Carmichaels waited for us at the bottom of the stairs, where Mr. Carmichael’s eyes stayed trained on mine. Behind his eyes were hate and vengeance like I’d never seen, but as soon as I met his glance, Mr. Carmichael turned to Mr. Pop.
“You be careful with that girl of yours, Paul,” he said. And the Carmichaels walked out.
Chapter Five
Time ticked by. Two weeks later Mr. Pop was still sending for the Maliseet to come work the fields—rock picking had wrapped up, and now in mid-June, planting was in full swing—but I was no longer the one who went to get them. Ellery would take the truck, sometimes traveling down the main road, sometimes the border road, depending on what sort of talk was coming from town, or specifically, what Frankie Carmichael had been stirring up at the potlucks after church or telling hardware store customers. Those who came into Fulton’s thought they would simply get the new hammer or skillet or bit of sandpaper they needed, maybe a grub hoe, new spade, or a mattock, but instead they’d hear the story of how his oldest daughter, last year’s Potato Blossom Queen, Miss Marjorie Carmichael, had been stolen by Glenn Socoby, the Maliseet, and how this was typical for that dirty and disgusting tribe.
When folks asked if the authorities had been notified, Mr. Carmichael would tell them the truth: they had. But the authorities contended that Marjorie was eighteen, so legal, and that the postcards she had sent home from New York were proof enough that she ran away of her own free will. Add to that the flood of Micmac crossing the border for planting during a time when newspapers were all too keen to let Brown vs. Board of Education highlight race issues even in the deep north of Maine, the last thing the Maine State Police needed was to deal with a pesky family dispute and rile up the Indians over on Hungry Hill.
So they did nothing. Mr. Carmichael might tell them that he had driven around the state—heading down to Millinocket, where
the paper mill was and where Glenn had most recently worked, on down to Skowhegan and over to Fredericton, New Brunswick, but didn’t make much headway. So he had come back home to pray. Specifically, to pray that God would take a mighty vengeance on the Maliseet for raising such evil beings.
I spent these weeks out planting just as I always had, although now I took my dinner inside at the table with Mr. Pop and Mother, with Bud and Ellery. Only. No longer did I linger over lunch on the porch with the Maliseet workers, as we often did during the heat of planting season. Instead, after dropping their lunch in baskets on long tables under the shade of our maples, Mother called me in.
Mr. Pop had me riding the back of the tractor while he or Bud drove it. I watched the potato planter making sure it ran smoothly and didn’t malfunction. The seed potatoes dropped like clockwork into the soil, then got covered over and hilled up. Watching, focusing on the planter was tedious but necessary work. My body jarred to the bone as we rode over acre upon acre across bumpy farm terrain. Mother’s garden tending was a welcome relief to riding that bucking bronco Ford tractor. I was all for walking the rows instead of riding them. The joy of drawing sketches of the garden, sitting side by side with Mother, was always a favorite time for me, dreaming of the kinds of vegetables we’d be enjoying on our table. Looking at the newest varieties Burpee had to offer in their annual seed catalogue was a highlight of the process. Planning Mother’s garden caused my imagination to go straight beyond harvesttime to sitting down to a cornucopia of flavors. I was already living in September. Fact is, I wished it were harvesttime already, so maybe all of this mess would be smoothed out by then.
I tried to catch Mick’s eye as he worked down the row from me in the fields, but I’d become a ghost to him. Some days I wandered through my life, through the fields, through my house, through church, and sometimes town, like Holden Caulfield had wandered Manhattan, wondering who were the phonies and who was real.
Mother stopped me in the kitchen.
“Mercy, before you head back out, could you help me with something?”
I nodded and followed her into the pantry. The pantry was large, even for farmhouse standards, but even then I understood what a master organizer my mother was. No one’s shelves could touch hers. The top two shelves housed rows of red raspberry and black raspberry jams. Then came the jellies: apple, boysenberry, chokecherry, and cranberry. The canned vegetables came next. Beets, corn, green and yellow string beans, as well as boxes of Cream of Wheat, oatmeal, cornstarch, baking soda, baking powder, along with salt and sugar in big tins to keep the moisture out.
It took two shelves to hold all the spices needed for everything from baking various flavored pies, cookies, cakes, and doughnuts, to the ones used for pickling. I could always count on finding pickles in the pantry. Some weeks it was dill, other times it was sweet, or bread and butter pickles. On the bottom shelf was the large crock where Mother kept the cream. She let it stay there until it soured, and once a week she’d churn it into butter. Oh, how Mr. Pop loved this weekly ritual. He had a sixth sense about when Mother was churning butter. About halfway through the process, Mr. Pop would show up. He could have been clear down on the back acreage, but he knew butter was in the making. This meant buttermilk. Mr. Pop would come into the kitchen and make a beeline for Mother. He’d uncork the churn and have a glass ready. He’d drink it down, let out a sigh, and exclaim, “That was wicked good!” and head right back to the field.
Any good pantry had noodles. Mother shelved box after box of macaroni, mostly for casseroles and macaroni ’n cheese and chili mac. Jars of honey, thanks to Mr. Pop’s bees; molasses; and Karo, were situated and mentally catalogued according to purpose and frequency of use. Her pans and plates, measuring cups and mixing bowls, the same.
But she walked me past all this toward the one snag in her system, the one fault in her genius: the corner, The place just beyond the big flour barrel filled with twenty-five pounds of Robin Hood flour, and just behind the heating vent where Mother stored her baskets. Baskets that were seldom used, but often purchased. The ash baskets she’d traded Maliseet women for more times than she could count, simply so that they could have vegetables from her garden. Mother would have gladly given them away, but the women did not want charity. So Mother gladly accepted the baskets. She had a collection of baskets, the kind used to gather potatoes in the field during fall harvest. There were small jewelry boxes woven from brown ash and dyed with indigo, a basket woven over the top of a B & M Baked Bean jar, all kinds of sewing baskets, and woven pin cushions. All of the baskets, including her favorites, sat tilted and pressed together inside a medium-sized skillfully woven but plain looking laundry basket, filling the corner in a haphazard array of color.
Her least favorites held turnips, butternut squash, parsnips, spaghetti squash, and all kinds of other root vegetables in the cellar.
Mother led me to the baskets and pointed to a new stack I hadn’t seen. “Ellery brought these back this morning. Mrs. Polchies wanted beets and onions and, of course, wouldn’t simply take them, so she had Mick get these out to give to me.”
My heart nearly stopped.
“They’re lovely, of course, but they’re going to take over the house. Can you sort through these? Figure out where to put them?” Mother lifted up the top basket and raised an eyebrow. I looked into the basket and gasped. Mother simply put the basket down and turned. As she walked out, she said, “You can see that you need to be very careful with these, my dear.”
When the door clicked closed, I knelt beside the stack of baskets, running my hand along the edges before reaching in to pull out the piece of paper. On it, an image I’d know anywhere: a stone fort with a field mouse tucked inside and a woodchuck tunneling toward it.
I smiled for a moment before dissolving into tears.
Mother was sitting at the kitchen table as I walked out of the pantry, a stack of baskets in my left arm, the note from Mick folded and tucked in my pocket. I stopped as soon as I saw her. Mother never just sat. But there she was, with a cup of tea in front of her but nothing else. No needlework, no paperwork, no labels.
Mother took a sip of her tea and said, “Could you join me a minute?”
Just moments before, as I had sat on the floor, weeping with Mick’s note pressed to my face, hoping to catch his scent or a sense of his presence, I thought I’d found an ally in Mother. She would be someone who would keep my secret, not just about books I read but about loves I held secret. I thought she’d be the one to stand up for me and for Mick in a way I now doubted Mr. Pop would, at least since that night with the Carmichaels. I had swelled with love for Mother just moments ago. Now worry swelled instead, sinking my stomach as I stepped toward the table.
“You can set the baskets on the floor,” Mother said. So I did before sliding up next to her on the bench she had patted for me.
I wanted to thank her for letting me see the note, but instead I just swallowed hard.
“I want you to know that you never need to run away from us,” she said.
“Run away?”
“You know that your father and I have money aside for you to go to college. And that’s only a few years away. You can stay here, do your work, and then fly off.”
“Fly off?”
“To go see the world, meet new people, study grand ideas, become the woman you’re meant to be.”
At this, tears filled her eyes. I wrapped an arm around her and rested my head on her shoulder.
“Mother, I’m not going to run off.”
Mother dabbed her handkerchief to her eyes, sniffed, and straightened her back. She smoothed her skirt before wriggling beneath my arm and turning to me.
“I can see the way you look at each other. I’ve seen it for months. The change, I mean. I’m not blind. And I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve known this would happen, for years. You and Mick have always been two peas. But …”
The screen squealed open, and Mother and I looked up to see Mr. Pop in the kitchen.
>
“Well, this is a sight for weary eyes,” Mr. Pop said. “Don’t usually catch you two just chatting.”
“No, I suppose you don’t,” Mother said. “But sometimes ladies just need a minute to catch up. To talk about women things.”
At this, Mr. Pop blushed. “In that case, I’ll fill my water from the faucet out back.”
Mother winked at me as he walked right back out the door.
“Does Mr. Pop know?”
“Heavens, no! You think he’d be this calm if he did? He thinks I’m giving you the ‘talk.’ I’ve never had the heart to tell him you and I had that conversation years ago.”
We both laughed. Years ago, when I was maybe eight, I had caught Lickers in a “romantic mood” with Saucy, one of Ellery’s barn cats. I was in the potato house breathing in the scent of the dirt mixed with the seed potatoes, a smell that always made me smile and think of planting again. But then I saw Lickers and Saucy. I had run in terror to Mother and Ellery. Ellery, fixing a loose floorboard on the porch, immediately said, “Well butter my bottom and call me a biscuit! Mercy, what are you goin’ on about?” I was screaming that Saucy was trying to kill Lickers, that he had grabbed her from behind and was shaking the life right out of her. Mother, in the middle of doing the wash on the front porch, stopped everything to listen to me. She never believed in obscuring the truth, so she had told it straight to a slack-jawed me that day. Of course, when I was eight she only told it true about farm animals. It took till I was eleven and learning a little more about life from Marjorie and Molly that I gathered up the nerve to ask Mother if farm animals and farm people were made the same way. Once again, Mother didn’t hide the truth. Well, maybe she hid a bit of the truth. At least, that’s what I was figuring out from those stolen kisses with Mick.
“Although,” Mother continued, “with all that’s gone on, I think Mr. Pop would be relieved knowing that you’re not naive about these matters. And that you’ve always known you could come to me with anything. That you don’t need to hide things.”
Shades of Mercy Page 5