Mercy Me

I STOLE MY brother’s pellet rifle when I was 6 because it was an upgrade from our old lever-action BB gun. I just wanted to hold it, to feel its heft.

I put a single pellet from a plastic tray in the chamber, the same way I had seen him do it, set the tray on the ground and cocked the gun with a click and a click. I pumped the forestock until the gun felt air-filled and lethal.

I wondered if it would hurt my shoulder. The kickback.

I leaned my head toward the barrel and closed one eye and leveled the gun at the thick canopy of a crab apple tree growing too close to the barn. The gun gave a swift exhale, and the pellet thwacked into the branches.

A second later, a red-breasted robin tumbled from the tree.

I could say I heard it thump to the ground, but that would be stretching my memory to the point of fictionalizing. I can’t remember if it made an audible sound when it hit. But I remember vividly, as clear as the buzz of this morning’s traffic, the sound of its wings swishing against the grass and forget-me-nots, and its desperate squawking, as if asking itself why its body was no longer listening to the commands of its mind, and why this sudden sharp pain in its center.

I was outside on a farm in upstate New York with a pellet gun I wasn’t supposed to touch. I had felled a bird without intention or purpose, without wanting to hurt anything. So I went to it, stood over its little fluttering body, and fumbled another pellet into the chamber, pressed the barrel to the bird, clamped my tear-filled eyes tightly closed, and pulled the trigger again.

Still, the scream, like the frantic ringing of some serrated bell. The wild flapping. The attempt to fly away from whatever invisible horror had pinned its body to the ground.

Another pellet, another pull of the trigger. And then another. And then another.

It was a mercy killing, said Mom when I was curled in her arms, sobbing, later that day. That’s what it was asking for. It was a mercy.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Lord, in your mercy, please disregard the unending lapses in our own, the botched attempts, the birds we didn’t aim for with lead-heavy breasts.
Lord, in your mercy, please short-circuit the mechanism of reciprocity in your beatitude. We will never get it right. We will never summon enough to unlock the requisite deluge.

WHEN MOM WAS a toddler, my grandmother put her in a leather harness and tethered her to the clothesline so she wouldn’t waddle away after my grandfather, who was off with the cows in the fields. The dog, Pluto, whose territory had been invaded, sat in a pile nearby, panting. My mother worked up and down the line, picking every forget-me-not she could reach, placing them gently in the dog’s fur until the animal was covered.

From a distance, the dog looked as if it were smoldering in a bright blue fire, shot through with yellow sparks.

Certain legends say the precise blue of the forget-me-not was the last remnant in the palette when God named and colored all of earth’s flowers, gave each pistil and petal its own hue. As God was closing shop, the work for the day finished, God heard the tiny whisper of a star-lobed blossom, as colorless as the vacuum of space. Completely unnamed.

Forget me not, O Lord!

And the God of the cosmos, whose hearing stretches to the scorched edges of an expanding, roaring, honeycombed universe, heard the whisper of one of the smallest earth-anchored flowers, and God’s face bent to the ground.

This shall be your name, bellowed God, brushing the last shard of blue over the petals. This shall be your color.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer, as our species is bankrupt and reeling.
Lord, in your mercy, see that those lacking it are going for everyone’s throats, and with the constriction and cutting all your creation can manage is a whisper and we are whispering through compromised airways for more mercy.

SOMETIMES AT NIGHT I try to align the beating of my heart with the ancient prayers of those desperate to catch the attention of the carpenter king: the 10 lepers huddled together on the border between Samaria and Galilee, the Canaanite mother whose daughter housed demons, the pilgrim pressing east wanting nothing more than to pray without ceasing: Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy.

And how cavernous the pulsing of our own hearts in silence.

And how fast mine beats through the insomnia these days, through those moments, minutes, hours when the universe expands in my mind to unbearable lengths and heft.

And how I fail to fit the whole Eastern prayer within each beat—Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me—because the heart-pound is a fast staccato, and I mostly just say mercy, mercy, mercy until the sun starts to peer around the corners of the earth, the window shades. A brand-new day.

IN THE LAST 365 days, 35 men and women in the U.S. were executed (eventually) by lethal injection. The oldest, John Henry, was 63. The youngest, Anthony Doyle, was 29. The request for mercy from a prisoner facing imminent death is sometimes desperate, sometimes composed, followed by the legalese of professionals whose job it is to seek clemency or defend against it, then the hushed decision of a governor behind closed doors, and finally the cacophony of a mostly derelict media hissing and buzzing and rattling off the verdict and final hours.

In the last 365 days, a dozen mothers and fathers have looked through television cameras into the eyes of men hell-bent on heaven, men with knives poised at the throats of their children, and begged for mercy. Language hiccups to describe the request of a mother for the life of her child.

In the last 365 days, one man with an officer’s arm wrapped tightly around his neck wheezed 11 pleas for mercy as the asphyxia set in. They were quiet requests, desperate, ultimately dishonored.

I cannot speak of school children in Pakistan, or the teachers who tried to shield them.

At night I imagine each petition drifting to the ears of God who, in the gospels, at least, never once denied a request for mercy. In the gospels, at least, not a sparrow falls to the ground without God’s attune.

I RECENTLY CALLED Mom to make sure I had my facts right. Leather harness, right? Some kind of leash? Indeed. They used to make and market them for the restriction of children prone to wander. My mom was prone to wander.

Pluto the pup, right? Yes, Grandpa named all the German short-haired pointers Pluto to simplify the sending out and rounding up on a 700-acre dairy farm. Pluto slept right through the flowering, she said. He had no sense of his new blanket until he awoke, shaking off the color like flung sparks.

But the blossoms, so vividly forget-me-nots in my imagined version of her story, as well as my own: Violets, she said. They were violets. And by the barn where the bird fell, probably Queen Anne’s lace. Forget-me-nots tend to grow closer to water, she said. Rivers and creeks and ditches.

“The mouse-ear forget-me-not, Myosotis laxa, has now extended its racemes very much, and hangs over the edge of the brook,” wrote Thoreau from his forested perch. “It is the more beautiful for being small and unpretending; even flowers must be modest.”

Lord, in your mercy, hear our modest prayer, and hear it, even, from a man who has shown mercy in fragments, sometimes none, sometime more.
I killed the bird, Lord. Forget me not. Remember your promises.