Free A Mercy by Toni Morrison Page B

graveyard and heaven.”
    Immediately upon landing Rebekka’s sheer good fortune in a husband stunned her. Already sixteen, she knew her father would have shipped her off to anyone who would book her passage and relieve him of feeding her. A waterman, he was privy to all sorts of news from colleagues, and when a crewman passed along an inquiry from a first mate—a search for a healthy, chaste wife willing to travel abroad—he was quick to offer his eldest girl. The stubborn one, the one with too many questions and a rebellious mouth. Rebekka’s mother objected to the “sale”—she called it that because the prospective groom had stressed “reimbursement” for clothing, expenses and a few supplies—not for love or need of her daughter, but because the husband-to-be was a heathen living among savages. Religion, as Rebekka experienced it from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred. Her parents treated each other and their children with glazed indifference and saved their fire for religious matters. Any drop of generosity to a stranger threatened to douse the blaze. Rebekka’s understanding of God was faint, except as a larger kind of king, but she quieted the shame of insufficient devotion by assuming that He could be no grander nor better than the imagination of the believer. Shallow believers preferred a shallow god. The timid enjoyed a rampaging avenging god. In spite of her father’s eagerness, her mother warned her that savages or nonconformists would slaughter her as soon as she landed, so when Rebekka found Lina already there, waiting outside the one-room cottage her new husband had built for them, she bolted the door at night andwould not let the raven-haired girl with impossible skin sleep anywhere near. Fourteen or so, stone-faced she was, and it took a while for trust between them. Perhaps because both were alone without family, or because both had to please one man, or because both were hopelessly ignorant of how to run a farm, they became what was for each a companion. A pair, anyway, the result of the mute alliance that comes of sharing tasks. Then, when the first infant was born, Lina handled it so tenderly, with such knowing, Rebekka was ashamed of her early fears and pretended she’d never had them. Now, lying in bed, her hands wrapped and bound against self-mutilation, her lips drawn back from her teeth, she turned her fate over to others and became prey to scenes of past disorder. The first hangings she saw in the square amid a happy crowd attending. She was probably two years old, and the death faces would have frightened her if the crowd had not mocked and enjoyed them so. With the rest of her family and most of their neighbors, she was present at a drawing and quartering and, although she was too young to remember the details, her nightmares were made permanently vivid by years of retelling and redescribing by her parents. She did not know what a Fifth Monarchist was, then or now, but it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king’s parade.
    Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather. The very year she stepped off the ship a mighty settlers-versus-natives war two hundred miles away was over before sheheard of it. The intermittent skirmishes of men against men, arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that she heard of could not match the gore of what she had seen since childhood. The pile of frisky, still living entrails held before the felon’s eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames; fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame. Compared to that, death by shipwreck or tomahawk paled. She did not know what other settler families nearby once knew of routine dismemberment, but she did not share their dread when, three months after the incident, news came of a pitched