The Ransom of Mercy Carter (2 page)

Benny and John were already asleep. Sam, the oldest, was curled against Tommy, who was still trying to find a breathing space. Tommy poked his head out from under the covers. “Mercy, do you think they’ll come tonight?” he whispered. Tommy was only five. He didn’t really know who “they” were.

“No,” said Mercy comfortingly. “Remember, Indians
have to come all the way from French Canada. Nobody would travel three hundred miles in a blizzard.”

But she knew this to be untrue.

White settlers based their lives on outwitting weather. While the men were building thicker walls, the women were knitting thicker stockings. Indians, however, did not hide indoors. Their lives were based on entering the weather.

“How far is three hundred miles?” asked Tommy. He had rarely been beyond the stockade. Built of great slabs of tree trunks, sharpened to points at the top, the huge fence was fastened on the inside by horizontal beams. Along these, the night watch would walk uneasily in the brutal wind.

“Three hundred miles is too far for anybody, Tommy. Sleep tight.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Trusting his big sister, Tommy tucked himself into the elbows and knees of his brothers and slept.

But Mercy was not sure. She didn’t trust the soldiers. What did they care about Deerfield? Every week they wrote to their commander, saying, “Nothing is happening here, let us come home.” She knew how cold the nights were; how easy to drift toward a door in the dark, slip inside to find a fire and a hot drink.

From the fields came a vicious ripping sound, like a huge sheet being torn into rags. Mercy jerked upright,
straining to comprehend the night sounds. Voices? The sharpening of knives? The priming of guns?

“Just ice snapping on the river, Mercy,” said Sam softly.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Tried,” said Sam. “Failed.”

Sam was a year older than Mercy and hated imprisonment even more. He was so bored. No horse to ride, no hills to climb, no fields to run across. Mercy knew her brother prayed the Lord would end this captivity even if it meant the attack actually coming.

She heard a crunching sound, and then another. I will not get up, she told herself. I will not check the horizon again. I will rest in the Lord.

T
HE
C
ARTER
children slept.

Families who dared not stay on their own farms slept on other people’s floors.

Animals slept in barns.

Soldiers slept in rotation.

F
INGERS GRABBED
Mercy’s hair, twisting the thick yellow braid and yanking it tight. Her neck stretched and she could get no air. The scalping knife would—

All too familiar with this nightmare, Mercy suffocated her scream and hugged herself hard to keep from making a noise. The worst thing was to wake anybody up. They had had enough false alarms.

Lord, let me be braver than this
, she prayed.

Downstairs, one of the soldiers was doing something with the fire. She heard the friendly clink of iron tools against brick, the whooshing collapse of embers and the rasp of a heavy log shifting.

Did she also hear movement beyond the shutter, or was that just the soft breathing of her brothers?

She slid out of bed and felt her way to the window. Her fingers found the familiar bar and as silently as possible she slid it back. When the shutter opened, the blast of air sucked the warmth out of her. Her nightcap had come off in bed, and cold rushed into her head, chilling all thought.

Mercy didn’t like to think about heads because that made her think of scalping.

People could live through it. Mary Wells had. She still had her face, but there was no back to it. The edges of her face had tightened around the bone. Nobody had married Mary Wells and nobody would. Who wanted to wake up in bed with a skull on the pillow next to him?

A shawl hung on a peg by the window. Mercy held the fringed edge of wool over her mouth to warm the air.

The snow writhed with movement. It looked like the river in spring, schools of fish leaping in the lap of the water. Mercy could not imagine what she was seeing. There wasn’t enough light to make out the shapes—and
then suddenly there was an immense amount of light and everything was clear.

The Indians had come.

Hundreds of them
.

But Indians did not mass armies, like whites. They traveled in small bands. How could there be so many? They were leaping over the stockade! Impossible. It was twelve feet high.

Mercy saw what she should have seen yesterday, and the day before. Snow had drifted up and frozen solid. The huge fence was no longer a blockade, but a bridge.

She heard the long slow familiar creak of the stockade gate. No Englishman would open the gate. The Indians who had climbed over the stockade must have run through the village and opened the gates from the inside.

She realized why she could see. The Indians had fired the barns.

What fools we are, thought Mercy. We store our hay and kindling leaning against the barns. One flick of the torch and the deed is done. If we are not shot or scalped, we will be burned.

Mercy came to her senses. She slammed the thick wooden shutter, throwing the bar just as a bullet flew through the air. It thudded into the shutter, splintering the wood below her hand and half emerging into the room.

All Deerfield had awakened at the same moment and to the same horror. Three hundred people screamed together.

Mercy had listened to single shots all her life: killing a crow here, slaughtering a cow there. But a battle she had never heard. Now hundreds of guns were going off.

Beneath her came the splintering smash of doors and window frames being burst through.

The Indians were inside the house.

Indians in the field, Indians in the woods—yes. Indians with arrows, with bullets—yes. But the attack was supposed to stay outside. She stood rooted to the floor.

Furniture was being upturned. Plates smashed. There were thuds, one solid thump after another.

Over the cries of the English came wolf howls so alien, so gruesome, Mercy felt them through her spine instead of her ears.

Sam was out of bed, yanking Benny and John and Tommy with him. “Put on shoes,” said Sam roughly, shoving pairs toward the little ones. “Maybe they’ll take us captive. We’ll need our shoes on.”

Mercy had been waiting for death, in which shoes were of little consequence. She was astonished that Sam could think of shoes. Well, if they needed shoes, they needed coats. She got her cloak and Tommy’s jacket, but fear made her stupid and slow.

Their stepmother tottered in, moaning deep in her
chest. She was holding the baby, but just barely. Marah, pulling her comfort blanket along the floor, clung to Stepmama’s nightdress. Stepmama’s eyes were open so wide they seemed ready to come loose and fall out. “Sam! Mercy! We have to barricade ourselves up here.”

There was no way to do that. The only furniture upstairs was her parents’ bed. The children slept on rough wool bags stuffed with pine needles. They had neither chairs nor chests. There were no bedroom doors, only thick hanging curtains. Mercy slid past her brothers to take the baby before Stepmama dropped it headfirst onto the floor.

The shooting downstairs stopped.

It was not silent, because the fighting went on outside, but there was a pause within.

The children were gasping for breath from the smoky air. Mercy assumed the house was on fire. Which would be worse? To go downstairs and be tomahawked or stay up here and be burned?

Stepmama’s face turned inside out with terror, and she backed up, screaming and sobbing and tripping on Marah.

Standing on the stairs was an Indian.

M
ERCY HAD ALWAYS
wanted to see war paint. Now she had her wish.

Black zigzags crossed his bare chest. Black stripes encircled
his eyes and snaked over his shaved head to the single lock of hair braided in back. The braid had been tossed over his shoulder to hang in front, and the braid itself was hung with scalps. They were quite lovely, as if he collected horses’ tails in many colors.

In his hand was a tomahawk, which turned out to be a smooth rock on a wooden handle. The stone was speckled with blood.

Mercy stood between her brothers and death. She had no idea what to do. Beg? Pray? Kick?

Stepmama backed into her own bedroom, pulling the curtain shut, as if cloth might save her and the baby from the Indians. Marah, abandoned, began crying in her most annoying whine.

The Indian’s eyes traveled slowly, examining each of the four boys before he focused on the sobbing three-year-old. Mercy had time to walk between the tomahawk and her little sister. Kneeling beside Marah, she said, “Hush now. It’s all right.”

Marah didn’t hush.

The Indian’s hand, large and dark and covered with drawings, landed on Mercy’s shoulder. His fingers closed tightly, and she obeyed the pressure and returned to her brothers. Tucking Marah under his arm like a sack of grain, the Indian pointed a finger at each child. “Go,” he said in English, nodding at the stairs. “Go down.”

Albany Indians who came from New York to trade in
Deerfield spoke a little English, and Andrew, the new husband of Eliza, spoke the same English as the rest of them, but English from a Canada Indian in war paint?

Mercy swept the boys ahead of her. John and Benny and Tommy were too little to wake up fast and so they were too confused and sleepy to cry or fight. Sam was organized and calm, checking stockings and shoes. The boys stumbled down the narrow steps while the Indian entered the bedroom. He wore heavy leggings, but the rest of his body, split in half by white and black paint, was bare. In this terrible cold, he had come without even a shirt?

It was true then, what Mr. Williams said. Indians were not human. No real person could endure such a thing.

Onto the bed quilt, he tossed their nighttime drinking cups, Benny’s fishhooks and Mercy’s sewing needles. He found Sam’s knives and John’s book of ABCs.

Mercy could not collect herself. She could not even form a prayer.

“Go,” said the Indian. “Leave house.” Eyes that did not seem like eyes stared at her from a face that did not look like a face. Mercy backed away from him and tried to go down the stairs, but the boys had come to a halt at the bottom.

Mercy looked over their heads. Hanging from the ceiling were hats, bullet pouches, strings of dried red peppers and apples, yarn in skeins and powder horns. Indian hands were plucking them down.

Mercy forced herself between her brothers and on
down the narrow steps until she could see what blocked the way.

Bodies.

Only last night, Mercy had cleaned that floor with sand, scrubbing on her knees, sweeping it down the cracks, until the floor was white. Now it was red.

In this warm familiar room where Father read every night from the Bible while Mercy knit, here the soldiers had bunked, and here they had died.

They looked as if they had been talking or smoking their pipes and been slaughtered where they stood. It did not look as if they had fought back. Perhaps they had never even bolted the door, expecting to come and go when it was their turn to walk the stockade.

She looked for Aunt Mary, Uncle Nathaniel and her two cousins, but they were not there dead or alive. Fire spread gaily from one soldier’s pile of blankets to the next. The painted Indian bumped Mercy in the middle of her back.

“Step over the bodies,” said Mercy to her brothers. “We must go outside. Here, Tommy, I’ll help you.” She sounded as if she were lifting him over mud on the way to church. Perhaps the Lord had answered her prayer and made her brave. He had certainly answered another prayer: they were going to leave the stockade.

Sam gave Benny a push and John a hand and then the Carter children were outside.

The burning village was spectacular. Flames lit the sky. Snow gleamed gold and orange. From one house came deafening gunfire, Deerfield men shooting out the upstairs windows and Indians shooting back.

The chaos was unimaginable. Painted and fearsome in the firelight, the attackers were red and white, black and white, black and red and white, slashed and zigzagged like lightning.

The fire spread, with its own horrific sound, sparkling as it devoured.

Hell will be like this, thought Mercy. All I love turned to ash.

And then a unit of French soldiers in scarlet jackets with gold braid appeared. They even wore their swords.

The presence of Canada French stunned her. For three hundred miles there were no roads; there were hardly even paths. They would have walked on frozen rivers; slept without shelter; eaten with their fingers. Just to get to Deerfield, this little button of a town in the middle of nowhere? How could Deerfield matter so much?

A bullet took a Frenchman in the chest and knocked him down at Mercy’s feet. His companions surrounded him, exposing their backs to the Deerfield guns. Lifting the wounded man, they rushed him inside the Catlin house.

The Indians paid no attention to the wounding of a Frenchman. In fact, they paid no attention to anything.
As if nothing at all were happening, they lined their prisoners up. Mercy and Sam, Tommy and John and Benny stumbled into place, and now Mercy saw that the line was long. Dozens of children had been thrust out into the cold, where they stood stunned and silent. There were some parents.

She counted the entire Kellogg family. All six Hurst children. Some of the Williams children. Mercy found herself next to the oldest Williams girl, who tried twice to speak and twice could not; who pawed at Mercy’s shawl and scrabbled at the fringe. What bodies had
she
had to step over to get out of her house?

Her father was the minister. Mercy loved Mr. Williams. He was the voice of God. Deerfield could not survive without him. Surely
he
could not be dead. “Your father and mother?” Mercy said finally.

“John and Jerusha,” came the whisper.

John was six years old; Jerusha a newborn. If the Indians would kill John and Jerusha, they would kill Marah.

Mercy left her brothers, running back into her house, slipping in blood and ignoring flames. Her Indian was at the hearth, adding pots and spoons to his bundle. Stepmama was standing next to him, staring blankly, the baby asleep on her shoulder. The savage still held Marah upside-down under his arm and Marah was still holding her beloved blanket. Mercy remembered that she too was carrying things: Tommy’s jacket, her own cloak.