A Mercy by Toni Morrison Page B

cooking. The blacksmith, who worried everybody except herself and Jacob, was like an anchor holding the couple in place in untrustworthy waters. Lina was afraid of him. Sorrow grateful as a hound to him. And Florens, poor Florens, she was completely smitten. Of the three, only she could be counted on to get to him. Lina would have begged off, unwilling to leave her patient, of course, but, more than that, despising him. Pregnant stupid Sorrow could not have. Rebekka had confidence in Florens because she was clever and because she had a strong reason to succeed. And she felt a lot of affection for her, although it took some time to develop. Jacob probably believed giving her a girl close to Patrician’s age would please her. In fact, it insulted her. Nothing could replace the original and nothing should. So she barely glanced at her when she came and had no need to later because Lina took the child so completely under her wing. In time, Rebekka thawed, relaxed, was even amused by Florens’ eagerness for approval. “Well done.” “It’s fine.” However slight, any kindness shown her she munched like a rabbit. Jacob said the mother had no use for her which, Rebekka decided, explained her need to please. Explainedalso her attachment to the blacksmith, trotting up to him for any reason, panicked to get his food to him on time. Jacob dismissed Lina’s glower and Florens’ shine: the blacksmith would soon be gone, he said. No need to worry, besides the man was too skilled and valuable to let go, certainly not because a girl was mooning over him. Jacob was right, of course. The smithy’s value was without price when he cured Sorrow of whatever had struck her down. Pray to God he could repeat that miracle. Pray also Florens could persuade him. They’d stuffed her feet in good strong boots. Jacob’s. And folded a clarifying letter of authority inside. And her traveling instructions were clear.
    It would all be all right. Just as the pall of childlessness coupled with bouts of loneliness had disappeared, melted like the snow showers that signaled it. Just as Jacob’s determination to rise up in the world had ceased to trouble her. She decided that the satisfaction of having more and more was not greed, was not in the things themselves, but in the pleasure of the process. Whatever the truth, however driven he seemed, Jacob was there. With her. Breathing next to her in bed. Reaching for her even as he slept. Then suddenly, he was not.
    Were the Anabaptists right? Was happiness Satan’s allure, his tantalizing deceit? Was her devotion so frail it was merely bait? Her stubborn self-sufficiency outright blasphemy? Is that why at the height of her contentedness, once again death turned to look her way? And smile? Well, her shipmates, it seemed, had got on with it. As she knew from their visits, whatever life threw up, whatever obstacles they faced, they manipulated the circumstancesto their advantage and trusted their own imagination. The Baptist women trusted elsewhere. Unlike her shipmates, they neither dared nor stood up to the fickleness of life. On the contrary, they dared death. Dared it to erase them, to pretend this earthly life was all; that beyond it was nothing; that there was no acknowledgment of suffering and certainly no reward; they refused meaninglessness and the random. What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms. Some, like Lina, who had experienced both deliverance and destruction at their hands, withdrew. Some, like Sorrow, who apparently was never coached by other females, became their play. Some like her shipmates fought them. Others, the pious, obeyed them. And a few, like herself, after a mutually