Speed of Mercy

Mal was covered sweat, bits of twigs and bark sticking to her skin, bits of lichen caught in her curly black hair. She stood at the edge of the woods looking out at Mercy Lake, listening to a loon call from the water, and then the honks of the Canada geese floating on the lake. Mal felt primeval, not just-turned-thirty.

The burned-out remains of the lodge were barely visible from where she stood. Nature was slowly purging and reclaiming the site, absorbing and concealing what had happened here in 1980. Fireweed in the meadow in front of the burn-out ended at a crescent-shaped white sandy beach. At the other end, ten miles across, the lake broke into estuaries and streams, which led to a bog, from which flowed the Mercy River. It cut through the Acadian forest for miles, then snaked across meadows and fields, bending by the tiny town of Seabury, emptying into a bay before flowing into the Bay of Fundy and, finally, the vast Atlantic Ocean beyond. It was very different from the coastal forests at home in Northern California. A seagull cried overhead and Mal looked up at the white bird floating through the blue of the late afternoon sky, a sky that seemed closer over the short trees than above the sequoia, the soaring redwoods, in California.

She had never been to this far-western part of the Annapolis Valley. Her grandmother had lived two hundred miles away, outside of Bigelow Bay, on land given to Black Loyalists coming up from the American South