The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (5 page)

Connie got to her feet and edged through the gate.

The garden was not nearly as dense as the hedge implied. She stood on the outline of a flagstone path leading up to the moldering front door of the house, the entire surface of which was overgrown with several different varieties of vine. Over the front door draped a blooming purple-green wisteria, its thick syrupy smell puddling in the air. Several tall, slender trees—the elder that she had seen from the street, as well as an alder and a
hawthorn—dotted the garden, forming pillars that supported the tented superstructure of vines stretching from the hedge to the house. Under the trees and vines, the garden was shady without being dark. It felt private—secret.

Connie became aware of a displaced, intrusive ache in her stomach, a creeping sorrow that she had never seen this hidden realm. Sophia, her grandmother, had made this garden. But she would never know her. The finality of this realization felt leaden and inescapable. Connie superimposed her long-stored mental image of Sophia over the garden scene before her, seeing her grandmother kneeling by the corner of the house with a trowel. Connie relaxed, allowing herself to move deeper into the fantasy, and to her surprise the stooped man from her daydream in the woods—she now recognized him from old photographs as Lemuel, her grandfather, who died while Grace was in college—appeared from around the corner of the house, still carrying his load of kindling.
That’ll do
, her imagined form of Granna said to the man.
Just put it in the hall
.

Connie pressed her fingertips to her eyelids, splotches of blue and inky black spreading behind her eyes. When she dropped her hands and opened her eyes again the scene had melted into the ground, vanished. Of course, her sleep had been erratic in the days leading up to the move—even more so than was usual for her. Last night she barely slept at all, instead lying awake with Arlo in her arms, staring into the darkness. She must be overtired.

Instead of a lawn, riots of wild herbs and plants overran one another in an incoherent mass. Connie recognized most of the herbs standard to a home kitchen garden: thyme, rosemary, sage, parsley, a few different mints, fat turnip greens, dandelion leaves, dense soft dill blossoms, short tufts of chives that had not been harvested for years. Connie’s eyes moved over the plants along the far side of the garden, alighting on some obscure flowers that she knew only from horticulture books: monkshood, henbane, fox-glove, moonwort. A thick, ropey belladonna clung to the left corner of the house, sinking its roots deep into the wooden framework. Connie frowned. Hadn’t Granna known that a lot of those flowers are poisonous? She would have to be careful with Arlo.

Beyond the herbs and flowers, the garden on the near side of the house seemed overrun with vegetables. Fuzzy green leaves as wide as dinner plates shaded the nascent blobs of summer squash, muskmelon, and pumpkin. To the right, under a wide gap in the vine growth overhead, a tangle of plants clung to the opposite corner of the house, heavy fruits as big as Connie’s fist dangling under the leaves. Connie looked closer, and to her surprise saw that they were tomatoes. But not grocery store tomatoes—these were queerly multicolored, deep purple-reds, striped green, glowing yellow, and their shapes were globular and alien. The base of the tomato plants was as dense and wide as a small tree trunk, as if this tomato plant alone in the world did not die at the end of every summer. Arlo was digging in the shade under one of its leaves.

Liz appeared next to Connie, her footsteps silent on the mossy stone pathway. “This garden is crazy. Look at those tomatoes!” she exclaimed. “They’re enormous.” Liz paused, sensing Connie’s quiet, and glanced sidelong at her, touching Connie’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Connie turned to Liz, still feeling off-kilter and fogged from her vivid daydream. Her friend’s face shone with excitement at their discovery, and Connie hesitated to share her own strangely reflective mood. “I’m fine,” she said, producing a smile for Liz’s benefit. “Just a little tired. You see that endive? We can have salad for dinner!”

Grace had mentioned that the house was old, but she had never suggested
how
old: it was practically antediluvian, handmade by a craftsman using the same techniques carried over from late medieval England. Its windows were small, with lozenge-shaped panes held together with lead. Her eyes widened in wonder as she gazed upward at the facade, never so much as glimpsed by a preservationist. The silent house stared back at her, wizened and aloof.

She brushed aside the curtain of wisteria flowers and traced her fingertips over the door. The wood had probably once been painted white, but now it carried a dark greenish tint from mildew and time. Connie tried to imagine her mother as a small child living here, and the image jarred,
incongruous. Grace and Sophia and Lemuel, her grandfather, a taciturn Marbleheader whom Grace never mentioned, all of them moving around one another in little bubbles of subjectivity, intersecting in this house. Grace was too lively, too active, to belong here.

Perhaps that was why she had left.

The garden and the house seemed to belong to their own abandoned world so completely that the presence of any person, lively or otherwise, felt like a grave mistake. Connie dug in her blue jean pocket for the key that her mother had mailed and brushed aside the crust of dirt in the keyhole with one thumb. The key slid in, and after some resistance turned, emitting the grinding squeak of long-locked metal. With one gentle press of her shoulder, Connie nudged the door open.

The jamb reluctantly released its hold, billowing forth a cloud of dust. Connie coughed and gagged, waving the dingy haze away from her face. As the door wrenched open, she heard a metallic
ker-chunk
from just overhead, and something small and fragile clattered to the stones at her feet.

Nailed to the threshold overhead, almost completely obscured by the wisteria, Connie discovered a dented horseshoe rusted almost to a shadow. One of the square nails holding it to the suppurating wood had come loose, leaving the shoe dangling at a dangerous angle. Connie pocketed the tiny handmade nail and stepped into the waiting house.

T
HE HOUSE CONTAINED EXACTLY THE KIND OF AIR THAT
C
ONNIE WOULD
have expected to find in a sealed sea chest retrieved from the bottom of the ocean: woody, salty, and stale. Most of the afternoon light was screened out by the dense layers of leaves twined across the windows. Connie paused, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The interior assembled around her out of the gloom, a perfect simulacrum of a first-period, pre-1700 house, with furnishings of subsequent generations added gradually over the centuries. Except that the house was not a simulacrum.

“My God,” she breathed, disbelieving. “How long has this been here?”
The silent interior felt so timeless, so untouched by the outside world as to seem unreal.

The front door opened into a tiny entrance hall across from a spiral wooden staircase so narrow and steep as almost to qualify as a ladder. In its original orientation, in the seventeenth century, the household would have done most of its living—eating, cooking, sleeping, sewing, praying—on the first floor, using the attic loft overhead for extra sleeping space and storage. Each slat in the stair was of polished Ipswich pine, with deep depressions worn away by generations of passing feet. The remainder of the entryway consisted of a rickety Queen Anne table weighted down with several months’ worth of unopened mail, yellowed and brittle. Over the table hung a simple Greek Revival mirror, its glass misted with clinging dust and cobwebs, the gilding peeling and faded. A gnarled, long-dead plant sat in the corner under the stair, in a China-export porcelain pot split down the middle by a dry brown crack. The floor of the hallway bore a rotted soft spot, and Connie cringed to see a thick mushroom pushing up from between the boards. Her eye detected a flash of movement on the periphery of her vision, and she jumped, glimpsing the vanishing tail of a garden snake slipping into the shadows behind the potted plant.

To the left of the front hallway was what looked like a little sitting room; Connie could just make out shelves stuffed with leather-bound books and a couple of mismatched armchairs grouped around a shallow fireplace. The threadbare needlepoint upholstery promised dampness, mildew, and mice, filling the air with a faint, humid miasma. The obstinate bulk of a Chippendale writing desk crouched in the corner, its carved paw-feet gripping the floor. More skeletal plant remnants hung motionless in the windows. The floorboards were of the same heavy yellow pine as the staircase, some of the boards almost two feet wide, stretching along the entire length of the house and studded with square-headed nails.

To the right of the entryway Connie found an austere dining room, furnished with another Queen Anne table surrounded by shield-back side chairs—mid-eighteenth century, she marveled, and judging from their sil
houettes, carved in Salem. The room had clearly not been used for dining, even when Granna was alive; in every available corner stood stacks of newspapers, a chest or two, some blackened sealed jars. The dining room also held a fireplace, but this one was older; it was wide and deep, bristling with iron hooks and pots of varying size, and had a beehive-shaped brick cavern for baking bread. Connie suspected that the dining room had originally been the hall, which was the early term for the main living room and work-room, the functional heart of the house. To the left of the fireplace stood built-in shelves crowded with plates, mugs, and bottles so encased with filth that she could not tell what color they were. A few framed paintings dotted the walls, but the shadows kept their images veiled. To the right of the fireplace, a narrow door leaned, closed with an iron latch.

Connie reached one arm into the dining room, groping for a light switch near the doorjamb, but finding nothing. The air was silent and still, implicitly unwelcoming, as if the house had settled into its own decay and did not wish to be disturbed. She started to tiptoe across the dining room, each footfall leaving a dark circle in the coating of dust on the floor.

“I don’t know why I should be tiptoeing,” she said aloud, irritated at her own trepidation. For the rest of the summer, this was
her
house. She lowered her heel onto the floor, striding with purpose over to the latched doorway. It yielded to her touch after slight persuasion, and opened with a creak.

Behind the door, instead of the closet that she was expecting, Connie found a cramped kitchen, unceremoniously tacked onto the house sometime within the last hundred years. On the right side of the kitchen stood a deep porcelain sink watched over by another window, clogged with leaves and overgrowth. The room featured an iron woodstove, a low icebox, a floor covered in curling linoleum, and a cheap wooden door leading into the garden behind the house.

What Connie noticed in the room, however, were not these archaic appliances, but the shelves upon shelves of glass bottles and jars ranging over the walls, all of them containing unidentifiable powders, leaves, and syrups. Some of the jars bore illegible labels stained with dried paste. In the corner
stood propped an old-fashioned broom made of bunches of dried twigs fastened with twine to a long ash branch. The broom seemed roped in place by skeins of spiderweb.

Connie stood in the kitchen gaping at the bizarre assortment lining the shelves. Grace had always insisted that Granna was not one for cooking, and so Connie could not account for the bottles and jars. Maybe she had a canning phase at the end of her life, and they were all dried out and blackened because they were not sealed properly. Like Grace, Granna had been prone to phases, in her own way. The only Christmas with Granna that Connie could remember, Granna had appeared, just before she died, at the Concord farmhouse with hand-knitted sweaters for her and Grace, the same fisherman’s pattern in three different colors. Unfortunately Sophia’s command of shoulder-to-arm proportion had been idiosyncratic, the sleeves stopping halfway down the arm on the left and well over the knuckles on the right. Connie chuckled with affection at the memory.

The air in the kitchen was close and dry, with a palpable scent of decay, and the jars were all coated in a thick drapery of grime. As Connie stood, hands on her hips, her excitement at the undiscovered house tempered by vague disquiet, soft footsteps approached behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder, startled. She was met with the beaming face of Liz carrying a sweatshirt fashioned into a makeshift sack bulging with tomatoes and endives. At her feet sat Arlo, smug, a root protruding from his mouth. His tail brushed aside thick layers of dust on the floor behind him.

“We’ve been scavenging for dinner,” Liz announced. “Is this the kitchen?” She pushed around Connie, dumping the vegetables in the sink. She twisted the brass faucet handle, and the pipes released an echoing groan, shuddering and coughing dryly before spewing forth a brownish trickle of water. “I’m glad you packed Palmolive. Grace was right—this house is a pit.”

Liz rinsed the dust out of the kitchen sink and scrubbed the vegetables she had taken from the garden. “So I was thinking we start the cleaning in
the kitchen, since that’s where you’ll have to eat, and then we do the bedrooms after dinner, so we have a clean place to sleep. Also, how long do you think it’ll take us to reach the train station tomorrow? Twenty minutes? I just want to know when we need to get up in the morning. I think we can make some real headway tonight so you’re at least kind of sane for the coming week.”

Liz’s bright, efficient chatter shook Connie out of her reverie, reminding her that Granna’s house might feel like a gap, a stitch dropped in the fabric of time, but it was really just a house like any other—older, perhaps, in much worse shape, but still just a house. Connie rubbed her hands along her upper arms, turning over in her mind the embodiments of normalcy that she had brought with her, like talismans: Liz, her plants, her books, her dog. This would be an unusual summer, to be sure, but really not that different from any other. A lot more cleaning than she was used to, that’s all. Reassured by these thoughts, Connie squatted down next to Arlo to disengage the root from his mouth.