MERCY: On those worst December nights sweat poured off my head even though I was freezing, and I coughed with lungs made of stained glass. When December became January, Mary Olive came to see me. I could see only her silhouette and she was smaller than she was in life. She had become as little and creeping as a child and her hair had grown flowing and wild as though it hadn’t been cut for all the years since she was gone. But then her child-shape changed, flowed, didn’t hold, and she was something else entirely. I was afraid and I couldn’t speak her name and I couldn’t move as she wormed up onto my bed and sat on my chest. She was as heavy as the boulders we couldn’t move from our fields. Even though I was so scared I wanted to say hi, tell her I missed her, but I couldn’t breathe. Mary leaned close so we were both lost in the forest of her hair. Then her hair moved and waved on its own, forming inky clouds that hid her face. There was a rattle in my chest, and I knew she had come back to listen to my purr and to take it away with her, and that’s when I felt oddly light, like a feather wanting or willing a breeze to lift it away. This was all right because I knew she loved me even though she wouldn’t sing for me anymore.

ART: You died in January of 1892. Edwin continued to get sicker, and then your neighbors approached your father with an outlandish idea of what was happening to Edwin.

MERCY: They said one of us three Brown women were coming back at night and eating the living tissue and blood of Edwin. Always the women’s fault.

ART: Did your father believe them?

MERCY: No, he didn’t. He wasn’t superstitious or religious, and he wanted to be left alone, but his grief and fervent neighbors wore him down. He eventually gave permission for all three of our bodies to be exhumed and examined.

ART: Right, on March 17, 1892. Why exhume the bodies? What proof of you being a vampire were they looking for?

MERCY: To be clear, no one ever uttered the word “vampire” until after the Providence Journal reported what happened.

ART: My apologies.