The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (26 page)

The girl lowered herself onto the hard bench drawn up to the table and watched the two older women. “Good noon, Goody Bartlett,” she said, and folded her hands in her lap.

“And to you, Mahcy,” said Sarah Bartlett, her usually ruddy face turned gray by cold or worry, Mercy could not tell which.

“Go on, Sarah,” Deliverance said. “Mercy ought to hear as well.”

Sarah Bartlett looked from Deliverance to the girl and back again. “I suppose,” she said, unsure. She heaved a heavy sigh, shaking her head, wrapping her hands around the mug of hot cider that Deliverance had set before her. Mercy reflected that she had never known Sarah to cast a pall over any events. She was unaccustomed to seeing their neighbor so grave. “Things grow ugly, Livvy. I can make no sense of it. Of the morn I war tarryin’ in the Village,” she began. “They are altogethah distracted, the lot of ’em. Some gahls just younger than Mahcy heah, ’tis on a month they are in their fits, and the reverend’s daughter among ’em. Reverend Pahris, he is shah there be some diabolical mischief done in the Village. He ha’ spake
against it in the pulpit, and urged the entire congregation to fast, and pray for God’s forgiveness. Then it passed that that Mary Sibley bade Tituba, she being the Indian woman in Pahris’s house, to make her a witch cake.”

Deliverance groaned a little and shook her head. “And what receipt did she use, I wonder?” she asked dryly.

Sarah smiled. “She took water of the afflicted gahls and mixed it with some rye meal and fed it to a dog, thinking the bewitchment should pass into the beast and the gahls would be delivered of their torments. Dogs being the known familiars of witches, she ha’ saith.”

Deliverance sniffed with disapproval and took a swallow of her own cider mug. Mercy stifled a giggle, and her mother shot her an icy glare. Mercy pressed her lips together and arranged her face into a semblance of seriousness.
Dull as a box of rocks
, she thought to herself.

“Reverend Lawson being called in to assist some days hence, he denounced this witch cake as diabolical means. No amount of theah sufferings must allow us to use the Devil’s tools, he saith, and from the pulpit, too!” Sarah exclaimed. “In that same meeting that Abby Williams bade him to name his text, and the Reverend Lawson doing so, she saith ‘It is a long text.’ Never in my life ha’ I heard such utterances, and to a dignified personage at that.”

“Indeed,” said Deliverance, taking another sip of her cider. “Not the physick I would choose,” she remarked aside to Mercy, who nodded.

“Why, Livvy, theh be more,” Sarah said. “They bade the gahls name theah tormentors, declare whose forms the Devil did take. This very week they called out against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and that Tituba herself!”

Deliverance and Mercy exchanged glances. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were two notorious beggars in the Village, forever roving from house to house demanding food or lodging. Grasping, suffering women, they both struck fear into the hearts of the sturdy Villagers; they were avoided, as if their crushing misfortune might be catching. Tituba was an Indian servant in the Parris house, brought up with them from the Barbadoes
islands. “Mary Sibley must walk with God, then,” Deliverance murmured. “How fortunate for her.” She rose, moving back to stare out the window.

“Livvy, attend to me! Just today them three was brought to be examined in the meetinghouse!” Sarah cried.

“What?” Deliverance asked, turning to face Sarah, who was still seated at the table.

“Today, Livvy! And that Tituba, she ha’ confessed!” On the last word Sarah brought the flat of her hand down in a smack on the tabletop. Mercy’s eyes widened.

“Merciful Jesus,” Deliverance whispered, bringing a hand to her temple. “But surely ’tis a lie. There be no diabolical workers here.”

“Reverend Pahris saith she must come to Jesus and confess, and name what others walk with her.” Sarah swallowed, eyes burning with urgency. “Livvy, I come direct to tell you. That Peter Petfehd war at the meeting. He asked if Tituba evah walked with
you
.”

Silence descended on the hall, and the blood drained out of Deliverance’s face until she began to sway, gently, where she stood. Mercy leapt to her feet and wrapped an arm around Deliverance’s waist.

“Let us sit, Mama,” she said, easing her mother into the three-legged chair at the head of the table.

“I…,” Deliverance said. “Mercy, I…” She gasped, appearing unable to draw her breath. Mercy fumbled at the laces that bound up the front of Deliverance’s dress, pulling at them with her fingers until she felt the stays loosen and her mother inhale deeply.

“A compress, Goody Bartlett, please,” Mercy said without looking around, her voice carrying a new note of authority. Sarah Bartlett bustled about behind her, finding a clean rag and dipping it in the bucket where Mercy had collected snow to melt for washing. Sarah pressed the compress into the girl’s hand, and Mercy smoothed the cold cloth across Deliverance’s brow, pushing back her coif until the first gray-brown strands of hair drifted down over her mother’s face. “Gather your breath, Mother,” she whispered, working the compress behind Deliverance’s ears and onto the base of her
neck. She felt her mother’s breathing grow more deep and steady, and she held her gaze until Deliverance’s vision grew focused once again. For the first time Mercy observed the quality of her mother’s skin—somehow it had grown more papery and thin, spreading a fine mesh of lines around her eyes and mouth. She had never considered Deliverance to be anything other than powerful, competent. She remembered, in the most hazy terms, the year in her childhood when her mother had been distant and difficult to reach, and now she read in her mother’s face the same worry and fear that she had not been fully able to understand then.

“That Peter Petford, he is sorry and distracted,” Mercy said, looking into her mother’s face. “Is he not, Goody Bartlett?”

“That he is,” Sarah affirmed, crouching next to where Deliverance was seated. “Nowt could countenance his railings. I saith so in meeting myself.” She reached a plump hand forward to pat Deliverance on the knee.

Deliverance swallowed, reaching forward to rub Mercy’s dress sleeve reassuringly. “So I well know,” she said. “But I’ll know what ha’ been said.” She looked into Sarah’s face and waited.

“That Tituba saith she knew not one way or t’other. Then the reverend asked what made Petfahd wonder so, and that Petfahd claimed that you presided o’er the death of his little Mahther, lo these years ago.”

Deliverance heard this news in silence, though her face grew stricken. She clutched at Mercy’s sleeve. In the distance Mercy thought she heard the thrum of hoofbeats approaching their lane, but she said nothing. Out of the deepening darkness in the house the form of Dog coalesced in Deliverance’s lap. Sarah gasped, rocking back on her heels.

“Oh!” she cried. Deliverance and Mercy both looked at her, saying nothing. “He be a quiet one, is that little cur.” She laughed, a weak sound in the silent room. The hoofbeats grew louder, muffled by the snow but unmistakable.

“And what did the assembly decide?” Deliverance asked quietly.

Sarah swallowed again. “Reverend Pahris saith…,” she began as the hoofbeats galloped to a halt outside the front of the Dane house. Someone
dismounted, someone large, and proceeded to wade through the snowdrift to their door. The three women heard the hushing sound of woolen trousers dragged through dense, wet snow. “That they perhaps needs ha’ words with you, Livvy.” She choked, clasping her hands together. Deliverance gazed at Sarah, her face growing calm and resolved.

“Well,” Deliverance said, rising to her feet. She smoothed her skirts with both hands, and set to tightening the laces at her breast, retying them in a tidy bow. She reached up to adjust her head covering, tucking a loose strand of hair back into place. She inhaled, and exhaled with authority. A knock sounded at the door. “They are fast withal,” she remarked. “You’ll get the door, Mercy.”

Mercy, meanwhile, had grown more panicked with each moment as her mother grew more calm. “Mother!” she whispered, voice urgent. “We could hide! I can conjure up a slowing receipt, and you can run into the cowshed, and I—” She stopped as Deliverance shot her a solemn look.

“’Tis only the mournful wailings of a bewildered man,” she said, touching Mercy’s cheek. “I’ve needs only explain so to the gentlemen of the Village, and all will be well.” The knock sounded again at the door, loud and businesslike. “Now, you’ll get the door, daughter.”

Sarah stood frozen in her place, and so the girl gathered her wits together and moved toward the door. “Mercy!” Her mother stopped her with a whisper. “While I am gone you shall say nothing of the book. To anyone.” Mercy nodded wordlessly, and when Deliverance gestured to the door she turned, opening it to find the great lurking form of Jonas Oliver, from Marblehead one town over. He wore the formal cloak of a county magistrate on an official errand. His broad-brimmed hat was thickly covered over in frost, and snow had gathered on his high shoulders. Behind him his flea-bitten horse stamped its foot, making a dull thud on the frozen ground. “Good evening, Mahcy Dane,” he said.

“Goodman Oliver,” she said, without warmth. She observed him slowly scanning the interior of the hall, taking in her mother standing, white-lipped, at the head of the table, and Sarah, hands clutched together, rooted in place off to one side. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

“S’pose you’ll know why I’m heah,” he said. Mercy reflected that this was probably the longest sentence she had ever heard Jonas Oliver utter.

“I’ll just ready myself,” Deliverance said, pulling on her heavy cloak and taking up the mittens that Mercy had left to dry by the fire. Sarah had roused herself from her reverie long enough to pack some hard corn bread into a parcel together with a small bladder of cider. All the while Jonas Oliver waited at the doorway, unmoving, face impassive, a gale blowing into the house around him, bringing wafts of dirty snow and ice into the hallway. Mercy watched these preparations, feeling the frigid night air washing over her and pulling out with it any semblance of safety or security that she might feel in that house. Panic rose in her chest, coursing through her body like a great red and black wave, and she ransacked her brain for an idea, for something that she could do to keep this horrid man from taking her mother away with him. She tried to recall a receipt for time reversal that she had been practicing, something that shrank fruits back into seeds, that might work on a situation or on a man, and as she shuffled through the drawers in her mind looking for the words that she needed, her mother took up the parcel that Sarah had assembled and made her way to the door.

Deliverance laid a hand on Mercy’s shoulder and looked into her eyes. “Remember what I told you,” she whispered. Mercy nodded, feeling as if she were on the brink of explosion.

“While I’m away, I leave the house to you. Do not shirk your labors.” Mercy nodded again, and as she saw Jonas Oliver step out of the doorway with a gesture for Deliverance to come with him, Mercy’s control dissolved completely, and she cried out, “Mama!” She flung herself around her mother’s neck, a rush of tears and mucus flowing forth from her face into her mother’s cloak and hair.

“Shhh, shhhh,” Deliverance soothed, stroking her back just the way her father used to, and Mercy shuddered, sobbing harder at the thought of him. “This’ll be settled soon enow. We must pray for God to give us strength.”

Gently she disengaged Mercy’s clinging arms, breaking their embrace by degrees until Mercy stood, head down, roiling in fury and sadness.
“You’ve been a good friend to us, Sarah,” Deliverance said to her friend, who responded, “Go with God, Livvy Dane.”

With that Deliverance placed a kiss on Mercy’s forehead, looked around the house one last time, and followed Jonas Oliver out into the night.

Mercy watched her go, hating the man, the Village, Reverend Parris, the ridiculous squealing girls, her dead father, Sarah Bartlett, even—she hated to admit it—God Himself for letting this happen. As the horse galloped off with its heavy burden and a mist of snow closed behind their retreating form, Mercy watched them go, waiting in the doorway until the hoofbeats drained away to nothingness and there was only the dead sound of the snowbound night, encased in silence, even down to the small dog who had appeared at her feet.

Marblehead, Massachusetts
Mid-August
1991

N
IGHT CAME UNDER THE TIGHT CANOPY OF VINES OVER
G
RANNA’S
yard before it arrived outside, but Connie had no trouble making out the burned circle that still sat on her front door. She dropped her shoulder bag at her feet where she stood, placed her hands on her hips, and felt fatigue seep into her limbs. The afternoon at the hospital had left her feeling empty and unmoored. Sam’s leg was improving, slowly, but his seizures were growing worse. They ripped through his body with a frenzy that clearly frightened even the jaded nurses on his ward. The muscular convulsions gripped his arms, legs, back, and neck, stiffening and bending him into terrifying shapes, robbing him of consciousness, lolling his tongue, and were often followed by vomiting that was wrenching and extreme.

Exhaustion was beginning to show in his face: deep purple circles spread under his eyes like a growing stain, and he could sleep only in abbreviated snatches. The doctors had given him three or four different anticonvulsants,
all with no effect. She had overheard them bandy about a number of different theories, none of which seemed to account for all of his symptoms. Not cholera. Not epilepsy. Not a tumor. They had even ordered something called a Reinsch test, which Connie had had to look up—it was designed to test for poisoning, possibly from chemicals in the paint. But the results were inconclusive. Though the doctors affected an attitude of confidence in front of Sam and his parents, Connie could see the crawling doubt under the surface of their taut faces. When she arrived that afternoon, she had interrupted a group of seven or eight medical students watching Sam’s body convulse, pens poised over note pads but not moving. They all looked up when she entered, not yet trained enough to hide their gaping.

Now she stood, casting her eyes over the burn mark on the front door, turning over Liz’s hypothesis in her mind. Liz claimed that the circle might have been meant to protect, rather than frighten. Her theory still did nothing to explain where the circle had come from—or more importantly, who had caused it. Connie pressed her fingertips over her eyebrows in frustration, and a white flash of hate for her own powerlessness burst behind her eyes.

Connie detested feeling out of control of her own life, hated that she could do nothing to help Sam, and her ire extended outward to encompass the unseen hands who had marked her house, and to the doctors with their incompetence and their useless white coats. That very afternoon, she had overheard Linda whispering into the pay phone in the hallway, “He’s dying, Michael. My only boy…If they don’t find out what’s wrong soon…” Linda had spotted Connie listening and abruptly changed the subject, but the pallor of her face revealed the depth of her despair. Connie grabbed up her bag, wiping an arm across her face, and pushed through the door into the waiting house.

Night awaited her in the sitting room, so Connie groped her way past the two armchairs by the fireplace until her hands found Granna’s Chippendale desk. “Arlo?” she called, but the house was silent. She listened, straining her ears for the sound of paws or snoring, but heard nothing. From
within her cutoff pocket she produced a cheap cardboard matchbook, striking fire into her cupped hands. She lit the small oil lamp that rested on the desk, adjusting the flame inside the glass chimney until the sitting room filled with a warm, round orange glow.

Granna’s desk was covered with thick layers of Connie’s research notes, and the books that she had brought up from Cambridge sat heaped in disordered piles on the floor. Connie knelt, running her hands over the spines of the books until she found Lionel Chandler’s
The Material Culture of Supersti tion.
Connie could barely remember the book’s central argument from studying for her oral exams in the spring. Settling into the desk chair, bare feet folded under her, Connie cracked open the book and cast her eyes down the contents, looking for a chapter that might talk about crosses, or circles together with crosses. She paged past the frontispiece, past the publication details, past the acknowledgments. After all the front matter of the book, but before the first chapter, “Superstition and the Vernacular Tradition,” her gaze fell upon a rough woodcut illustration showing a young woman in simple peasant garb holding out a thick book on one outstretched hand. Connie’s eyebrows knit together. The caption read:
Young woman practicing the key and Bible, Anonymous woodcarver, East Anglia, 1587. Reproduced in
Maleficia Totalis,
British Museum Special Collections. See p. 43. “What?”
Connie said aloud, and as she did she felt a soft dog tongue lick her knee. “Oh, hi, Arlo,” she said to the animal, who appeared sitting at the feet of the heavy desk. He whimpered. She flipped to page 43, dragging her fingertip down the page.

“…often had to resort to artifacts commonly found around the house,” she read, starting at the top of the page. “A widespread vernacular divination technique mentioned in several sources, and found to occur as late as the first decade of the nineteenth century, was the so-called ‘key and Bible.’ In this simple process a key would be placed inside a large, heavy book, usually a Bible, and the supplicant would ask a question aloud while holding the book. If the book turned over and spilled out the key, then the supplicant could assume the answer to the question was ‘yes.’”

As Connie read, she felt the house closing in around her shoulders, squeezing her into a tiny little box. She read further: “A variation on this technique allowed the supplicant to write a name or a question on a slip of paper, which would then be slid back inside the key and direct the nature of the inquiry more precisely.”

Connie snapped her head up, pulled the book off the desk and into her lap, and rooted through the papers until her fingers found the key that she had carried in her pocket for most of the summer. Slowly she withdrew it from beneath her notes, raising it before her eyes and turning it in the warm glow of the oil lamp. A shine glinted down its long shank. She used a thumbnail to catch the protruding end of the minuscule scroll that had first brought Deliverance Dane’s name to her, withdrawing it from its hiding place and rolling it between her finger and thumb.

Connie’s mind traveled back to the first night that she had spent in Granna’s house, fearful, unable to sleep, Liz sacked out in a sleeping bag on the damp quilts upstairs, oil lamp burning. What had she been doing that night? She had been anxious, looking for something to read. Connie rose, taking the lamp with her over to the bookcase, retracing her steps.
I found the crumbling copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she remembered, placing her hand atop the small novel. She walked her fingertips along the brown spines of the books.
Then I looked down at the big books on the bottom shelf
, she thought, getting to her knees and holding the lamp near to their spines.
And I pulled out the Bible
. She rested her hand on the dense book. Connie frowned.

“But I don’t remember saying anything out loud, much less asking a question,” Connie said to Arlo, who had followed her to the bookcase. He looked up at her, impassive. She brought her thumbnail to her teeth and nibbled at it for a moment. “But I was
thinking
,” she continued. “I’m always thinking.” Connie paused. “What was I thinking about?”

She conjured the image of herself in her pajamas that first night, looking down at the specter of herself paging through the first chapters of the Bible. She saw herself reading, and then she narrowed her eyes, trying to peer into the remembered version of herself who was kneeling on the floor. Connie
stared at the imaginary scene, watching until she saw herself recoil from the sizzling pain that had shot into her hand, this time observing a bluish puff or haze drifting out from her fingertips, which she did not remember noticing that night. The specter of herself dropped the antique book, rubbing her hand and flexing the fingers to free them from the pain. “What are you thinking about?” she asked the image. The image turned its face to Connie, smiled, slid the key out of the Bible where it had fallen on the floor, held it aloft for the real-world Connie to see, and then faded into the dark.

At that moment a curtain was pulled aside in Connie’s mind. “I was wondering whose story I would find here,” she said to the void where her imaginary self had been. “The key and Bible answered my question, even though I didn’t know I was asking it!” Connie wrapped her arms around herself, quelling the leaps and jumps that were gripping her heart. “It’s something in the words,” she whispered to herself.

She hurried with the oil lamp back to Granna’s desk, Arlo galloping behind, as if equally engrossed. “But it’s not just in the words. Sam tried out the Latin note card, and it didn’t work.” She sat, turning over these details in her mind. She took up the book on superstitious practices again, scanning the page where she had left off to see if it could tell her more. Her eyes skimmed over the various examples of the key and Bible in the late medieval and early modern period, coming to a stop three pages deeper into the chapter.

Connie sat back in her chair, pulling her knees up to her chest. She let out a slow breath. Her mind traveled to Sam, vulnerable and alone. A freakish accident, and now he was trapped in a hospital bed. She wondered how Grace had managed, pressing on with her life after Leo disappeared. How could she have faced her days without knowing what had happened? Of course, there had been a war. People disappeared. A tide of grief rose in Connie’s chest as she thought about her mother, twenty-one, at the end of college, waiting. Connie wondered how long Grace had spent waiting, clinging to hope, before she understood that she should stop.

All at once, Connie came to a decision.

“C’mon,” she said to the dog, who trotted after her as she strode with the oil lamp toward the kitchen.

A
FTER SOME RUMMAGING
, C
ONNIE HAD MANAGED TO LOCATE THE
1970
S
vintage colander, covered with chipped lime green ceramic plating, and a rusted pair of pruning shears, which a few drops of cooking oil rendered loose and functional once again. “Do you think a colander counts as a sieve?” she asked the empty kitchen. Arlo loitered at her feet, watching her, but she had not really addressed her inquiry to him. Perhaps she was hoping to perceive some sense of what Granna would have thought. Granna had clearly not been much for cooking. Other than the bottles and jars ranged across the shelving, the kitchen was surprisingly spare. Two cooking spoons. One chopping knife, dull. One iron skillet. Connie smiled to herself. Grace once complained that Granna gave her nothing to eat growing up but Velveeta, crackers, canned beets, and deviled ham. One does not especially
need cooking implements for that. She worked the two blades of the shears back and forth, feeling the rough grind of the joint begin to give.

“Okay,” she said aloud. She looked around, thinking vaguely that this experiment might require a more dramatic backdrop than the narrow kitchen, with its leaning broom clotted with wax and its cheap screen door. But she felt more at ease in the kitchen, more in command of things. The glow from the oil lamp filled the little room completely, throwing the thin space behind the remaining jars into dark shadow, but leaving Connie with the reassuring feeling that her world was bounded, controllable.

“All right,” she said. She opened the scissors at a right angle and balanced the colander, round side down, between the outstretched blades. Slowly she removed her hand from the colander, grasping only one of the scissors handles and letting the other wobble free. Now, she had only to ask. Yes or no questions only, the book said. Connie set her jaw, straightening her spine a fraction. She thought about what she had overheard Linda fearfully whispering into the pay phone.

“If he doesn’t get help soon,” Connie began, “will Sam die?”

A now-familiar tingling, stinging sensation collected in the palm of the hand that was holding the scissors handle, shooting vibrating, nearly painful energy through her fingers, up her forearm, and down the blades of the scissors. A bluish glow crackled in the empty center of the colander, shooting forth miniature jolts of electricity, one or two of which spewed outward, touching first the counter by the sink, then the antique icebox, then the ceiling, then the floor. Suddenly the free blade of the scissors shot outward, and the colander fell with such force that it seemed to have been slapped away by an unseen hand. The instant that the colander smacked and bounced against the floor, the bluish energy vanished.

Connie stood rooted in place, gripped with astonishment.
It had worked
. It had worked! How was such a thing possible? Maybe she could rationalize away the appearance of the dandelion in the Common or the spider plant in the living room as a coincidence, an accident. But here and now, in this kitchen, the pain still rocketing through her nerves insisted that what she
was experiencing was true, it had just happened.
Just because you don’t believe it,
the earringed Wiccan’s voice echoed in her mind,
doesn’t mean that it’s not true.