Blue Mercy: A Novel. Read Free Page A

problem. It does no good for you to keep telling yourself that you don't deserve these things that life throws at you. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Deserve is an illusion. Does a father deserve to die? Does a daughter deserve to rule?
    You're always quoting writers at me, Mercy, but long ago I gave you the only words you need to hear. I wonder if you remember? It was a line from The Talmud: "If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."
    I remember how you tried to understand. You tilted your lovely chin, the way you do. Your ear went down to nearly touch your shoulder and the other ear turned to me, really trying to listen. Always trying. I love that about you. But, Mercy, why is it so hard for you to hear?
    I say it again: this is our last chance. If I leave again, this time it really will be forever.  
    So I plead, knowing your mind is already made up. So I tell you again: Star will not thank you and you won't thank yourself either, in the end.  
    Life throws pebbles at us when we get things wrong, Mercy, and if we refuse to listen, we get stones. And if we continue to insist... Well, I'll be gone when the boulder comes crashing into this house but remember what I said and save yourself then, if not now.
    So I'll go and leave behind
    All my love,
    Always.

    Zach

I'll begin with the evening Star left, the day after the funeral, with the moment my father's journals came falling from their secret compartment at the back of the bureau. The big one -- long and thick, with a red hardcover, born to be a shop ledger -- landed on the floor with an unforgiving thump. And five smaller, black-covered notebooks came tumbling after.
    Seeing them splayed across the floor prodded a memory: of my father sitting at this bureau to write, the bent back hunched over, the thick fingers clasped around a skinny pen. I reached for the big folder, opened it, flicked through. The familiar handwriting marched through the pink ledger lines, as though they weren't there. My pulse, already pounding, skidded at the sight.
    Traces of him were all over these pages. Not just his writing, but the dog-ear corners he turned down, which meant he must have read them back. And other marks. Some kind of oil all over one page, an ink spill on another. Even those pages that seemed clean would have been brushed by his hand trailing across. His DNA could be reconstructed from these, I thought, and I knew then I'd found what I'd been looking for, even though I hadn't realized, until I saw them, that I'd been engaged on a search.
    August 6th, 1914. "War has been declared," he wrote. That was his reason for beginning this book, as he immediately resigned his job as a butcher's assistant in a Paris meat market to sign up. " Ma patrie ," he wrote, though his country was Ireland and he was only sixteen years old.
    Not that it made any difference where you were from. Ireland, England, France; young, middle-aged, old; Europe, Russia, America; men, women, children: all were about to be caught up in the bloody mobilization, the mass movement towards the biggest war the world had ever known. I touched the inside cover where he'd stuck his conscription card and medical records. They slid free, the glue dry and dead. It would have been against regulations for him to keep this diary, but he was never a one for regulations, my father, not for himself. A policer only of others.
    Yes, that's where I'll begin. With me, sitting to the floor to read about my father's coming of age, butcher boy to military man.

    I could start a little earlier, with the moment when I first spied the hammer sitting under the corner table in the kitchen. It had been a long day. I'd already endured my father's funeral, Dr Keane's insinuations, Star's leaving, when my eyes snagged on the sight of that hammer, left there since I'd nailed a sprig of holly over the kitchen door a week before, my feeble effort at Christmas decoration. Its two curled fingers, the side used for prising out nails, seemed