The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (12 page)

Marblehead, Massachusetts
Mid-June
1991

T
HE SHOULDER BAG SLIPPED TO THE FLOOR WITH A DULL THUD AS
Connie surveyed the first floor of Granna’s house from where she stood in the doorway. Late afternoon sun crept through chinks in the dense ivy overgrowth on the windows, speckling the broad pine floorboards with flecks of light. The house had soaked up the summer heat while she was away at the archive, filtering it through the layers of wood and plaster and horsehair insulation until warmth filled each corner of every room. It seemed especially thick in the entry near the stairs, like a wall; crossing the threshold into the house always gave Connie a measure of pause. But now her hypothesis buzzed in her head, and the tingling heat of the house on her skin melded with the energy in her nerves until her whole being felt alert, watchful. The natural place to begin was with the books in the sitting room. As Connie passed the ladderlike staircase she kicked over the mushroom, enjoying the wet thump of its flesh falling onto the rotted patch on the floor.

According to Grace’s sporadic accounts, Lemuel Goodwin had been a plain man, unschooled past high school, not given to books. He spent his entire life in Marblehead, the son of shoe factory workers, and his chief pleasure had been lobstering on the weekend in the pots he kept off Cat Island, near the mouth of the harbor. A picture rested on the mantel over the sitting room fireplace, bleached almost white by the passage of time: Lemuel, squinting into the camera, his arm wrapped proudly around Grace’s shoulders under an ornate archway leading into Radcliffe. The white gloves and tidy little hat that Grace wore dated the picture to 1962, the year that she left home. Connie rubbed her thumb against the photograph frame, wondering why Grace had always said so little about her father. Connie did not even know exactly how he had died, beyond that it had been sudden, accidental. She often wondered if the ignominious end of Grace’s college career was related to Lemuel’s abrupt disappearance from her and Granna’s life. The buffer between them had been drawn away.

If her understanding of Lemuel was correct, then most of the books on the shelves would have belonged to Granna. Up until this point Connie had given scant consideration to why Deliverance Dane’s name would have appeared in this house; Yankee thrift demands that nothing still remotely usable be discarded, and so detritus accumulates from families of surprising distance and remove. But now Connie entertained the thought—the hope—that if Deliverance’s name could have lodged deep in Granna’s old family Bible, then perhaps some other residue of Deliverance’s life might persist here as well. Perhaps Granna’s Bible was the very one mentioned in Deliverance’s probate record! Connie stood, hands on hips, dragging her gaze over the spines of the books. Arlo appeared at her feet, pawing her leg. She reached down to rub one of his mud-colored ears.

“Did you ever catch that garden snake like we talked about?” she asked the animal. “It’s disgusting, having reptiles running around all over the house. You really need to start pulling your weight.” He did not respond, instead leaping onto one of the needlepoint armchairs. Connie sighed, exasperated, and decided to begin with the largest books first.

If the receipt book had been listed together with a Bible, possibly even the very Bible she had already happened upon, then she might conclude that it was roughly the same dimensions as a Bible. The books on the bottom shelf were each tall, dense slabs of text, substantial in their heft, and Connie pulled them out one at a time. The first was the Bible in which she had found the key; it seemed to have been printed in England in 1619, and the edges of some of its pages had been glued together by water damage. In addition, the shelf held two other Bibles, one from 1752 and one from 1866. The inside cover of the nineteenth-century one held a fragmentary map of Lemuel’s ancestors—Marbleheaders all of them. A needlepoint bookmark in a church steeple pattern was wedged into the book of Matthew, its threads eaten away by silverfish.

Two Psalters followed, and then what looked like a ship’s log, a cursory glance at which suggested that it had been kept by the captain of a clipper trading guano fertilizer and molasses out of the Salem port. Connie next pulled down a hymnal from the First Church by the Sea, Congregational—had Granna just walked off with it?—published in the 1940s. Connie blew an exasperated breath through her nose and slid the hymnal back into the shelf, where it met with some resistance and a gentle crunching sound. Gingerly Connie threaded a finger behind the book, bracing herself for something unsavory—a mouse skeleton, a beetle shell. Instead she pulled forth a tiny corn husk doll, dressed in a scrap of dimity with a faded yarn bow around its neck. On the husk knot that was its head, someone had crayoned a wide orange smile.

“Weird,” Connie murmured, turning the little effigy over in her hands. As she did so she felt a sharp nip, and pulled her thumb away to observe a round, crimson bubble of blood rising from the grooves of her thumbprint.

“Ow!” she said aloud. Looking closer, Connie withdrew a slender needle, still entangled with thread, from where it had been stored in the folds of the doll’s dress. She stood, settling the little doll next to the picture of Grace and Lemuel on the mantel as she soothed her injured thumb with her lips. She gazed at the doll, frowning. Its orange grin smiled back at her. The little doll seemed too old to have been a toy of Grace’s, and yet it was hidden be
hind a book of relatively recent vintage. She supposed it could have been Granna’s when she was a girl. Grace could have played with it, hidden it away, and forgotten. Connie would ask her when she called tonight. Assuming Grace was there to answer the telephone.

A further hour spent perusing the books on Granna’s shelf revealed only the standard tomes of the New England middle class: hardbound selections from the Book-of-the-Month Club, worn from rereading and without dust jackets. Several nineteenth-century books of history, three or four volumes of math puzzles, a guide to strategies in duplicate bridge.
The Yachtsman’s Omni bus
. A handful of texts on horticulture and garden cultivation. And, yes,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Nothing that spoke to her hypothesis, and nothing—other than the first Bible—from the seventeenth century.

Connie shifted her eyes around the sitting room, alighting first on the desiccated plants dangling in the windows, then roving over to the Chippendale desk. Her eyes lit up. Connie hurried to the desk, running her hands over its dense, polished cherrywood, feeling for she knew not what. Perhaps a drawer that the antique key would unlock? She had tried it in the front door and a few of the chests in the dining room, to no avail. Oftentimes these desks included a removable panel in the center front between the cubbyholes, masking a secret repository for important papers. Her fingers lit upon a little ledge underneath the writing surface, and her pulse quickened. A concealed drawer? She got to her hands and knees to look under the desk. No drawer—just a strut, awkwardly nailed in place by someone who did not know how to repair colonial furniture. Connie laughed at herself. Ridiculous. There would be no hidden book in this desk. It held only old receipts from the greengrocer, crumbling pencil erasers, a few jotted reminders that Granna had left behind when she died.

The sunlight was beginning to drain away from the windows, retreating behind the advancing dusk. In the half-light of early evening, Connie always thought she detected movement in the corners of the house, just beyond the reach of her peripheral vision. Whenever she turned to face the flickering, it disappeared. Mice, she suspected, through she had not caught
any in the traps she had scattered along the yawning seams between the walls and the floorboards. Soon it would be too dark for her to look. She almost felt as if the house were hastening the coming dark, to push her away from prodding through its secrets.

Connie struck a match from the box on the old kitchen mantel in the dining room and lit the oil lamp, rolling down the wick until the tongue of flame settled into a round glow. The dining room held several closed sea chests and a built-in wall of dishes and crockery, which Connie had not yet been able to bring herself to clean. She carried the lamp over to the mantel, gazing down at the assortment of iron bars and hooks that bristled from the wide, empty hearth. When the house had first been built, this hearth had been its epicenter. A few ashes still sat collected at the bottom of it, cold and abandoned. She placed the lamp on the mantelpiece, resting her elbow next to it and gnawing on a knuckle.

Connie ran a finger through the layer of dirt along the crockery shelf, leaving a naked trail along the wood in its wake. She would have to wash off all of these dishes eventually. Box them up. Sell them. The enormity of the unpleasant task made Connie feel tired, overwhelmed. She pulled one of the shield-back chairs out from the table and sat, resting her chin on her hand as darkness gathered in the silent house. Across the room, between two more deceased hanging plants, a three-quarter portrait of a brunette woman with pale blue eyes smiled primly down at her, dressed in the narrow waist and sloping shoulders of the 1830s.

“What are you looking so smug about?” Connie asked her. The portrait, unsurprisingly, said nothing. Instead, two small dog feet planted themselves in her lap, and Arlo’s nose worked its way under her arm.

She looked down into the animal’s eyes and smiled. “I think that’s a great idea, Arlo,” she said, getting to her feet.

T
HE DAY’S HEAT HAD APPARENTLY BEEN PRESSING INTO OTHER HOUSES
in Old Town, Marblehead, as well, and so the small downtown block was al
most crowded by the time Connie rounded the corner on her way to the telephone booth. The windows of the ice cream shop were jammed with teenagers, all elbows and legs, reveling in the air-conditioning. Down the street, noise poured from the open front door of an Italian restaurant as the teenagers’ parents clustered at the bar. Cheers erupted in response to a baseball game on the bar television. A coterie of boys rolled by on skateboards, and Arlo took cover behind Connie’s legs as they passed.

“Wimp,” Connie said to him. She pulled open the phone booth door, draped her towel over her shoulder, and dialed New Mexico.

She was completely unprepared when Grace answered on the first ring. “Mom?” she said, unable to conceal her surprise.

“Connie! I’m so glad I caught you,” said Grace Goodwin, her voice cheerful.

“I called
you
,” said Connie before she could stop herself.

“Oh, my darling. Always so literal. But how are things? How are you finding the house? Have you settled in?” Grace always sounded so positive. This trait used to irritate Connie no end when she was a teenager. Now she found herself appreciating it; she discovered that she was smiling.

“Yes, thanks, but you were right—the house is a disaster. I’m amazed it’s still standing, quite frankly. The garden’s gone positively feral.”

“Yes, well, your grandmother always said that the old ways of doing things were better.” Grace chuckled. “I presume she would have put house construction in that category as well. But tell me—how are
you
liking being there?”

“It’s…different,” Connie admitted. “It’s not Cambridge, to say the least.”

“Indeed not,” Grace agreed. Connie wondered what Grace had been doing, that she was so near the telephone. She closed her eyes, groping her imagination forward as she tried to picture the raftered living room of her mother’s adobe house. She pictured Grace sitting in her deep Mission armchair, jeans rolled up, feet sunk in a wide metal bowl full of something aromatic. Connie worked her own feet unconsciously, and felt her arches ache.

“What were you doing today?” she asked, pulling on the telephone cord.

Her mother sighed. “Oh, you know. Not much. I went on a desert hike with my women’s group. Four hours, up and down these rocks and things. And I wore espadrilles, if you can believe it,” Grace said, laughing at herself. “Talk about poor planning.”

Connie smiled, privately amused that she had surmised correctly. “Mom,” she said, venturing a guess. “Do you know anything about someone named Deliverance Dane?”

“Who?” Grace asked, incurious. Connie imagined her leaning her head back against the deep armchair, eyes closed. It would just be sunset in Santa Fe. In the street outside the telephone booth where Connie stood, a boy pedaled by on a bicycle, causing a pickup truck to screech to a halt. The driver’s arm extended from the window of the truck, and he hurled epithets that Connie could not hear. Arlo scratched at the glass door, and Connie held up a finger to indicate that he should wait.

“I found that name on a slip of paper hidden in a key inside one of Granna’s Bibles,” Connie said. “I think she might have been caught up in the Salem witch trials. I was looking through the house tonight to see if I could find anything else, but so far there’s been nothing. I wondered if you knew anything.”

Connie heard her mother laugh softly. The sound went on for a while. “Oh, my darling,” she said. “You and your history. Now, don’t get angry,” Grace began, and as she said it Connie steeled herself to do exactly that. “But have you ever considered that you might prefer to spend time thinking about people who are long gone because you are a tad overwhelmed by knowing people fully in the present? Let’s focus on the now. Tell me about how
you
are doing.”

A red burst of anger exploded across Connie’s eyes, and she fought the urge to hang up. “Mom, it’s my work. My research
is
how I’m doing.”

“Nonsense,” Grace said smoothly. “I can tell by your color that there’s something else going on.” This was Grace’s way of saying that Connie’s
aura had changed, and Connie had to struggle to contain her irritation. She pinched the bridge of her nose, squinted her eyes closed and counted silently to ten. “Is it a boy?” Grace asked coyly before Connie could speak again.

“Actually, I have been having much more vivid daydreams since moving up here,” Connie said, divulging this detail as a sort of peace offering. “They appear, and then my head hurts afterward. I’ve been thinking maybe I should see a doctor.”