Finding Mercy Read online

  Mrs. Kline sat on the edge of the bed, Mercy’s journal pressed into her middle. “The last page of this book sounds quite damning,” she said. “Are you guilty of their accusations?”

  “No. The truth is, I was tried and convicted for a crime I didn’t commit. A judge overturned the ruling and I was set free. Those men … didn’t agree with the judge.”

  “They aren’t lawmen, then.”

  Mercy shook her head. “Bounty hunters.” She dipped the rag into the murky water and gingerly washed the soot from her arm. She winced when she passed the rag over the places skinned by the brick.

  “What were the charges against you?”

  Mercy hesitated. “Treason.”

  Mrs. Kline frowned. “Those men broke into my home in the dead of night, then ruined a bedroom door by kicking it in.”

  “I’m sorry about the damage,” Mercy said.

  “You knew they were chasing you?”

  “I knew it was a possibility.”

  “You wrote of being a soldier in the war,” Mrs. Kline said. “I’ve heard of that. Women who dressed themselves as men so they could fight.”

  Even though the black was mostly gone from Mercy’s face and arms, her skin still had a gray pallor. “You probably also read that I have amnesia. No memory of my motives for doing that.”

  “My husband, Wendell, fought for the cause.” Mrs. Kline shook her head. “Shocked me to the core when he told me he’d enlisted. He wasn’t a young man, but he wouldn’t listen to my arguments. He left the summer of ’62. I was glad we’d never had children. I couldn’t have stood watching a son go off to fight too.

  “He came back to me twice. The first time I could see the war was taking its toll, but he was still my Wendell. The second time he came back I barely recognized him. He was bitter, angry, resentful—spoke of nothing but his hatred of the enemy. I pleaded with him not to go back, but he didn’t hear me. I don’t think he even saw me. He left and I didn’t see him again until July of 1864.”

  Mercy felt a rush of relief. “So he lived? He wasn’t killed in the war?”

  “He was captured. He was allowed to send me a single letter telling me where he was. It was short and emotionless. And it made my heart stop. I knew of the prison and the high mortality rate of its inmates.”

  “Prison is a horrible place,” Mercy said quietly.

  “I went there and bribed the guards to let me see him. It was a nightmare. There were men—walking skeletons covered in filth—and vermin inhabiting nearly every inch of space. I would not have known my husband if not for the cocky soldier who led me to him. Wendell was in a corner on the hard ground. A pile of bones, really. Cheeks so sunken he looked as if he’d been long dead, but yet he was breathing. It was scurvy, they said. Nothing to be done by that point. I sat and put my husband’s head in my lap. He woke for a minute or two, whispered he regretted his decision to fight and was sorry to leave me. He died a few hours later.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Mercy said.

  Mrs. Kline’s eyes hardened. “Please spare me your pity. I know you were a Confederate soldier. My Wendell fought for the Union—the side of the just and the right. He was condemned to die by Southern soldiers at Andersonville Prison who treated him worse than an animal. I’d like you to get out of my house now.”

  Mercy stood. “Wait, Mrs. Kline, please …”

  “I’m sorry they didn’t catch you. Sorry they didn’t make you pay for whatever it is that you’ve done—yet. They will find you again because now they have a new reason to hate you. The father of the young man who died was right here to see it.”

  “I’m sorry he died. That wasn’t my intention. And I will leave—but not without my things.” She held out her hand. “Can I have my journal back, please?”

  “Can I have my life back before my husband died fighting against a cause you defended?”

  “I’m just asking for my property and then I’ll go,” Mercy said.

  Mrs. Kline sneered at her. “You don’t get to ask for anything. I look at you and see all the evil of the South. My husband’s death is on your head.”

  “I didn’t kill your husband,” Mercy said. “And I want my book.” She drew the pistol from deep in the bodice of her dress and leveled it at her landlady. “Now.”

  “Once a low-life dirty rebel, always a dirty rebel,” Mrs. Kline said, not without some satisfaction.

  Mercy sighed. She was so tired. “So it seems.” She kept her gun trained on the landlady until she threw the journal back onto the bed. Without taking her eyes from the older woman, Mercy grabbed her journal and stuffed it into a saddlebag. Clutching her shoes and saddlebags with one hand, she backed out of the room.

  “I hope they catch you!” Mrs. Kline’s voice followed her down the stairs. “I hope they catch you and hang you!”

  Chapter Three

  The white man and the Negro boy had a system in each town they came to. The man entered every established business he could find with a carte de visite photograph of Mercy. The boy questioned every colored person on the street. But each time, they received a shake of the head, a frown, a shrug. It seemed no one had seen the lovely young woman they sought.

  They galloped out of the latest small town on their path, taking their disappointment with them. When they rode through southern Illinois, the man finally slowed his horse to a walk. The boy did the same and for nearly an hour there was comfortable silence. But finally, the boy, being a natural-born conversationalist, broke the quiet.

  “What’choo thinkin’ on, Cap’n?”

  Captain Elijah Hale looked over at fourteen-year-old Isaac and said the first thing that came to mind. “I’m wishing I could go back six months in time.”

  Isaac frowned and shook his head. “Not me. Nassuh. I’ve had me more good months since I knowed Miss Mercy dan I did before.”

  “Isaac, you’re basically homeless because of Mercy,” Elijah said.

  The boy shook his head again, more adamantly this time. “She made me feel like a ’portant person. Treated me nice. Tol’ me I can do things with my life. She stand up to Ezra and tell him quit beatin’ on me.” Isaac flexed his jaw and sat up a little straighter in the saddle. “She didn’t ask me to come lookin’ fo’ her, Cap’n. This be my doin’. I ain’t ever gonna be sorry I met Miss Mercy. Nassuh. I ain’t.”

  Isaac was getting warmed up to the conversation. “First time I laid eyes on Miss Mercy be on my birfday. What ’bout you? When was da first time you say hello to her?”

  “That’s a little … complicated,” Elijah said.

  “What’cha mean?”

  “The first time I saw her, she was dressed as a man—as a soldier.”

  Isaac let the information sink in. “Did you know I be in the courtroom when Miss Mercy be on trial?”

  “No. You never told me that.”

  “I sit up in da top seats where da colored folks could be. And I hear da man ask Miss Mercy if she remember being a soldier—and she say no.”

  “I believe she was being truthful. She doesn’t remember it,” Elijah said.

  “But den she tells da man dat even though she don’t ’member being a rebel, she do believe she was,” Isaac said. He looked pointedly at Elijah. “Somebody must a’ told her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dat somebody be you?”

  Elijah sighed. “Yes, Isaac. It was me.”

  “Can’t even get my head to think on Miss Mercy lookin’ like a man.”

  “It sounds impossible, but she fooled everyone with her disguise … including me.”

  The face of that young Confederate sergeant came to mind as it often did when Elijah thought back to that day a year earlier. The sergeant had chased him down during the heat of battle to kill him but had instead stood quietly while Elijah prayed over his younger brother, Jed, who lay dying from a bullet wound su
stained in a Tennessee field. That had been one of two days in Elijah’s twenty-seven years when grief had driven him to his knees—the first being the day his father died. He had felt both helpless and numb when he said good-bye to the brother he’d grown up with, raced through meadows, climbed trees, and wrestled to burn off the steam that builds in boys. As an officer in the same company, Elijah felt he had failed to protect his brother, but because of the mercy of the sergeant, he’d been able to have a last few moments with him. His hand went to the mercy medallion around his neck that his own mother had given him as a reminder to pray daily for safety. Should have prayed hourly, Elijah thought. Or maybe minute by minute because that’s how quick life changed for Jed—and for me. Minute by minute …

  There had been very few words between Elijah and his rebel counterpart that April day. Elijah had met the sergeant’s brown eyes when he uttered his thanks, and then he’d hung his medallion on the end of the soldier’s knife and walked away.

  “So—den you see her again,” Isaac said. “Bet dat be a big surprise.”

  Elijah nodded. “But when I saw her again, I didn’t know we’d met before.”

  It was several months later, when he attended an engagement party with some friends in St. Louis, that he’d been introduced to the bride-to-be and looked into those same brown eyes he’d seen on that battlefield.

  “She was all dressed up at a party with Mr. Rand,” Elijah said. “There was just something familiar about her. Her eyes … I don’t know. But I spoke without thinking and asked her if we’d met.”

  “But she don’t remember you.”

  “No. I was quickly reminded she had lost her memory. And by then I had told myself I was being foolish,” Elijah said. “I tried to let it go … but I couldn’t. I had to find out the truth.”

  Elijah had asked around about the mysterious woman and learned she’d been found wounded and alone with a head injury that had caused her amnesia. She’d taken her name from a mercy medallion she wore around her neck and could shoot a rifle with stunning accuracy. He knew. He knew Mercy, now engaged to be married to a proud and vocal supporter of the Union cause, had been that sergeant who had fought for the Confederacy—the one to whom he’d given his mercy medallion. He believed her amnesia to be real—that she really couldn’t remember her time in the war. But he also believed she needed to know about it—and needed to tell her intended before their wedding day. She had argued at first and saw no point in dredging up a past she couldn’t even remember. But Elijah had been adamant. “What happens someday when your memory returns—and along with it, all the hatred that you felt for the North? It’s possible if your memory returns you will be in the thick of the emotions that propelled you to fight for the South. You could wake up one morning and literally be sleeping with your enemy. He has to be told before you marry him.”

  He remembered the look on her face and knew he was asking her to do something that seemed impossible. But it was the truth and he couldn’t let it go. Elijah gave her a few weeks to tell her fiancé, Rand Prescott, what she’d learned about her past, and promised her if she didn’t tell him, then he would.

  It had seemed so simple. Mercy just needed to tell Rand the truth about her past. But the cascade of events that transpired while Mercy tried to come to terms with telling the man she loved about her Southern affinities had taken Elijah by surprise. When the story finally came out, it was a version of the truth manipulated by lies, anger, and hurt. Mercy was caught in a rolling tide that couldn’t be stopped and by the time Elijah learned she was found guilty of a crime he knew she didn’t commit, he barely made it in time to stop her hanging. She was released into his custody on a technicality of law others didn’t agree with. Others that included a group of bounty hunters who still hated anyone or anything that had to do with the Confederacy. Mercy had every reason to hate Elijah, but he remembered the look of gratitude on her face when he told her he’d escort her safely out of Missouri. Gratitude, wonder, fear. He wondered how one woman could look so innocent and beguiling one moment, then steadfast and convicted the next.

  “Miss Mercy be a lady full of surprises,” Isaac observed.

  Mercy was an enigma, but he’d had no reason to believe she’d run when they stopped to rest a few hours from Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis. She took the first watch, and he gave her a pistol for her own protection. But it turned out she’d had one more surprise for him. He’d memorized the note she’d left for them while he and Isaac foolishly slept; it was folded neatly in his pocket along with a photograph of the woman herself the night of her engagement party—the night Elijah had seen her again. “Elijah and Isaac—I’m sorry, but I’m going on alone. I have done enough damage, disrupted enough lives—and I won’t have the two of you endangered because of me. You have a post to get back to, Elijah, and Isaac, it’s time you thought about your own life for a change. Go north and find those opportunities you spoke of. You have a big heart and a great capacity for compassion. I know you will find the happiness you deserve. I left you the medallion, Elijah. It seems only fitting that you have it—especially considering it is your family heirloom, not mine. I need to find my family. My name. I know that I can’t go forward with my life until I go back. After all, what are we if not the sum of our memories? Thank you for saving me. Mercy.”

  It was the last line of the note that haunted Elijah. “Thank you for saving me.” He may have saved her from a hangman’s noose, but without his insistence on the truth, the events that transpired would have never happened. He saved her from one fate, only to catapult her into running from another. If the men who hunted people for money found her, then it seemed to Elijah that hanging would have been kinder for her. At least it would have been quick. He didn’t believe the same would be true if bounty hunters found Mercy before he did. She had been released into his custody and he’d failed in his commitment to keep her safe. Elijah needed to find her, see her home, and only then could he get on with his own life. Each day on her trail felt as if she were slipping farther and farther away. Elijah pressed his heels into the horse, and they picked up speed.

  “My belly is rumbling,” Isaac said.

  “Your belly is always rumbling,” Elijah said. “We’re running low on food. There’s a fort south of here—two or three days’ ride. We’ll get more provisions there, and I need to send a telegram back to Fort Wallace to ask permission to extend my leave.”

  “What if you ain’t able to stay gone?”

  “I’ll be able,” Elijah said. “I’ve got more time coming.”

  “Seems kinda peculiar to hafta send a wire tellin’ folks who know you ain’t there, that you ain’t there,” Isaac reasoned.

  “Not so peculiar,” Elijah said. “The army is supposed to know where I am. I took an oath and it’s part of that oath.”

  “Oath?”

  “It’s like a promise.”

  “Like your promise to da court to help Miss Mercy get to the state line?”

  “Something like that.”

  He looked over at the boy, who’d already taught him more about what it meant to be a Negro in post–Civil War America than he would ever learn from books or newsprint. He knew finding Mercy was the thing in Isaac’s mind that would set everything right—but the longer they went without a trace of her, the more pessimistic Elijah became. He could only hope that the bounty hunters on her trail had come up as short at finding her as he had.

  “Guess we better stop and fill that empty belly of yours,” Elijah said.

  “I think you is a born problem solver,” Isaac said. “An’ I kin think of one more problem you can take care of.”

  “What’s that?” Elijah asked.

  “Learnin’ me to shoot that pistol o’ yours,” Isaac said. “What if someone overtakes you and I be the only one around? If I don’t know how to shoot, how am I gonna save you?”

  “Isaac, even though I believe they are wron
g, there are still laws on the books in some states that make it illegal for a Negro to fire a gun. I don’t want there to be any reason at all for someone to lock you up.”

  Isaac looked resigned. “Yassuh, Cap’n. I guess I’ll just hafta save you by my own wits if you get in some kinda trouble.”

  “All right. I’ll take that help because I believe your ‘wits’ are nearly as lethal as any weapon,” Elijah said.

  Chapter Four

  Bess and the town of Salem were twenty-four hours behind her. Mercy had gone straight to the livery from the boardinghouse and, when she was sure no one was waiting for her, had collected her horse, Lucky. He was the only living thing in the world that she could say with any certainty loved her. Lucky meant the world to her. She knew he would run forever if she asked it of him. So when he stumbled over a large tree root on the outskirts of Cairo, Illinois, she knew they had to stop.

  The town was situated between two large rivers that were busy ports for traffic moving along the water. She gravitated west where she followed the banks of the Mississippi. She’d been vaguely aware of people in the area, some sitting on the river’s edge, some lounging under trees. But it wasn’t until she actually stopped and dismounted that she realized every face around her was black. Lucky immediately began munching on clumps of tall, reedy grass. Nervous, she tried to pretend there weren’t hundreds of eyes upon her, and opened her saddlebags while her stomach growled in protest. But there was nothing, not even a morsel of food. She would let Lucky get his fill of grass, get some water from the river, and move on. She thought about the pistol she had tucked under the saddle blanket and wondered how quickly she’d be able to grab it if one of the Negroes surrounding her got aggressive. Not quickly enough, she decided. One of her and probably two hundred of them. She needed to go. Just get back in the saddle and find Lucky another patch of delicious grass.

  “I kin see it on yo’ face, missus.”

  Mercy looked around for the source of the voice and saw an old woman sitting under a tree a few feet away. She had a red kerchief tied around her head, and a dark, serviceable dress was stretched out like a blanket over her legs, and on top of that, a colorful apron. Her bare feet poked out past the hem of the skirt.