Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  “We’ll be needing some rye meal. You know where your master keeps it?”

  John doesn’t know, as he doesn’t work much within the household, and his wife’s not there to tell him. He looks at Reverend Parris.

  “It’s all right, John,” the Reverend says.

  “That sack, there,” Mrs. Parris says, pointing.

  John goes to the sack and opens it.

  “How much?” he asks in a quiet voice of Goody Sibley.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not so much. A fistful. That should do.”

  John Indian fills his hands with rye meal and sifts it into a shallow dish that one of the other goodwives has passed along for the purpose.

  The island woman has reappeared from the attic, her apron full of bits of broken bowl. She goes to the door to the side yard and shakes her apron out into the garden, incurious about what her husband’s up to with the bothersome English woman.

  “Tituba,” Goody Sibley says, raising her voice in command.

  The slave’s name is hard to say. We all pronounce it differently. I suspect John has an Indian name, too, but none of us know what it is. At the sound of her name, or near enough, she turns and faces the crowd of onlookers in the parsonage hall.

  “Ma’am,” Tittibe says evenly.

  “I want you to take this upstairs and collect the girls’ water in it.”

  Goody Sibley thrusts the pan of rye into a surprised Tittibe’s hands.

  “Their water?” she protests. “But why?”

  “Don’t argue with me, woman,” Goody Sibley says, scowling. “Just do as you’re told.”

  Tittibe glances at Reverend Parris, whose face is white with tension. He issues a curt nod. She then looks at Mrs. Parris, who’s frozen in place, unable to make hide nor hair of what’s unfolding in her house.

  “As you like,” Tittibe says with some distaste.

  While she’s upstairs, we all wait, murmuring amongst ourselves, wondering what Mary Sibley could be up to.

  “I’ve heard tell of this before,” another goodwife whispers aside. “There used to be a woman would do it, for pay, in Lynn, the village where I was a girl. Ann Burt was her name. It’s for uncharming.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Nicholas Noyes asks. Adam’s apple like a nervous mouse.

  “Might could,” the woman from Lynn muses. “It has before.”

  Upstairs we hear muffled protests and then silence. Presently Tittibe reappears at the head of the attic stairs, making her way down with care, the shallow pan sloshing and full.

  “They didn’t like to do it,” Tittibe remarks to no one in particular. I gather she counts herself among the number of those who didn’t like to do it. “Now you, my Annie.”

  “Me?” I squeak.

  “But yes, you. You be ailing, too, it’s said. Come on, now.”

  I look around, my armpits growing damp from nerves and the heat of so many people. Of course I’m used to doing it with my brothers and sisters around, and no one paying any mind. But there must be twenty people here, many of them strangers, and all of them with their eyes on me.

  I spot Betty Hubbard still standing in our corner, her hands clapped over her mouth to force herself to keep from laughing aloud. I shoot her a vicious glare.

  “Come along, Ann,” Reverend Parris encourages me.

  Tittibe stoops with a grunt and places the pan at my feet. There’s a strong smell, and the water coils around the heap of rye, rolling its grains in little eddies. I wrinkle my nose and look around at the crowd of faces pressing in around me, waiting.

  “Best do as they say,” Tittibe whispers. Her eyes blink with knowledge that I cannot see, but knowing it’s there makes me afraid to disobey.

  Swallowing my fear, I hoist my skirts, pulling layers of linen and wool out of the way, and squat, lowering my bareness over the pan. Everyone stares. My body has shifted over the past year, changing, making my joints ache, growing heavier in the hips, and I have a tuft of fur that’s new and soft in my most secret parts. Everyone can see it. I’m worried they can smell me, this rich smell I have now. They’re all looking. They’re all waiting, and they can see my nakedness.

  The water won’t come.

  I have to close my eyes and pretend there’s no one there but my baby sister, who watches me all the time, since she’s too little to be let alone. There’s no one there but her and my mother and that lazy Marcy. Not even my brothers are there; they’re all outside. It’s all right. No one’s looking.

  The pretense works, and I empty myself into the pan. A little splashes on my boots.

  “All right,” Goody Sibley says. “Now pick it up, Tituba, and knead it into a paste.”

  I’ve covered myself quickly, and am avoiding looking at Betty Hubbard, who’s in a veritable fit of laughter behind one of the coats on a wall peg. My ears burn.

  Tittibe stares at Goody Sibley. She doesn’t speak, but the challenge is there in her eyes.

  “Do it, woman,” Reverend Parris commands.

  Tittibe levels her eyes at her master and lets him feel her objection. Slowly, no faster than dripping molasses, she moves to the table with the pan. She rolls her sleeves and lifts her hands before her face. We watch, holding our breath. I’m relieved no one’s looking at me anymore. I’ve let myself be absorbed in the crowd in the hall, watching, too. After a moment, her expression unchanging, Tittibe sinks her hands into the wet rye and starts to knead.

  Chapter 14

  DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2012

  Who watches TV at 6:00 A.M.? Nobody. Seriously.

  I would rather be asleep any day. But that Monday, I was up at 5:30, blanket wrapped around my shoulders, slumped on the floor of the living room, my mother on the couch behind me in flannel pajamas, her hair a gray-brown thicket of sleep, her glasses making her look like a tired mole. Though dawn was thinking about getting started outside, inside our house it still felt like night. My father had snapped on a light in the kitchen, the one over the sink, so that he could start the coffee. Even Michael was up, in one of my old band T-shirts. I wasn’t sure where Wheez was—still in bed, maybe.

  I hadn’t been able to get Anjali on the phone since seeing her yearbook smile splashed across the news. I’d tried texting her, I’d tried calling, and it went straight to voice mail. I’d checked her Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, but they hadn’t been touched since Saturday. I’d called the Guptas’ home phone a half dozen times, and nobody answered. Her dad could still have been out of town, and I felt sure that whatever was happening with Anjali, Dr. Gupta was all over it, so I told myself there was no reason to be worried. But I wanted to hear her voice.

  “Here,” my father said, thrusting a mug into my mother’s inert hand. He settled next to her on the couch with a habitual grunt of relief.

  “I don’t get any?” I complained from inside my blanket.

  “Your legs are broken? I’m so sorry, I didn’t know,” he replied, eyes wide with innocence.

  I stuck out my lower lip at him.

  Without saying anything to anyone, Michael unfolded himself from the recliner and shuffled into the kitchen.

  “I don’t know, Mike,” Mom said, rubbing under an eye with her fingertips. “Maybe we should keep her home today.”

  “Maybe,” my father said.

  He looked at me.

  “What do you think, Colleen?”

  It was tempting, from a laziness standpoint. The thought of just turning around and shuffling back to bed was seductive. But it also felt stupid. Immature. Plus, I had that awful tenth of a percent, always floating at the edge of my consciousness. Of course, if I stayed home, I could get started on the extra credit for Ms. Slater, which I totally hadn’t started working on yet. But then I’d fall behind in everything else. Too far behind to catch Fabiana.

&nbs
p; “Don’t be crazy,” I said. “It’s not even a big deal. If it were a big deal, they’d suspend classes.”

  “Sixteen, you said?”

  “That’s what they said on the news.”

  Michael shuffled back in, bearing two coffee mugs. To my surprise he handed one to me and climbed back into the recliner, cradling the other in his lap. I didn’t know he drank coffee. But I slurped mine gratefully anyway. I guessed he could keep my shirt if he really wanted it.

  “Look, it’s starting. Turn it up.”

  Someone did, and the chipper opening theme to This Is Danvers blared through our living room. The blue glow from the set bathed our tired faces in a flat, cold light.

  “Good morning, everyone, and welcome to This Is Danvers. I’m TJ Wadsworth, and we’re just so happy to see you all today!”

  That was her catchphrase. Pretty catchy, right? As if.

  “Nice suit,” Michael said from behind his coffee mug.

  I smirked as my mother shushed him.

  “We have a very special edition of our show for you today. The Mystery Illness at St. Joan’s Academy. What’s really causing it? Is the school doing enough? And what do you need to know to keep your children safe? An investigation by this station has revealed that all is not as it seems at the august private school, and we have some exclusive guests here in the studio today who are going to tell us more. Then later, a visit from Cupid as our correspondent Sasha Dobson tells us some surprising ideas for new places to take your valentine this Valentine’s Day. Stick around.”

  Chipper morning show transitional music, and the screen cut to an ad for floor wax. The woman in the ad looked way too happy about her floor wax.

  “Mute it, would you, Mikey? My head’s killing me,” my mother said softly.

  My brother rooted in the cushions of the recliner for the remote and obeyed.

  “Maybe you should stay home,” my father said, scratching at his stubble. “Just ’til we get a handle on what’s going on.”

  “Dad,” I started to object.

  “God, all that money. You’d think they could keep something like this from happening,” my mother said.

  “Linda, come on.”

  “Seriously. I would’ve been fine, sending her to the public school. Mikey, too. What’s wrong with public school? I went to public school. You went to public school. We’re doing fine. And so far I don’t see that guidance counselor making such a big difference in her college options. Nothing like they promised.”

  “We talked about this.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re going to talk about it again when it’s Louisa’s turn.”

  “But I want to go to St. Joan’s,” my sister whined from next to my father on the couch. No one had seen her come in. Maybe she’d been there the whole time. “Besides, Colleen got to go all twelve years, and I’m only going to get to go for six. It’s not fair.”

  Still without saying anything, Michael unmuted the television. TJ Wadsworth was now sitting, knees crossed, in a dun-colored overstuffed armchair next to a coffee table scattered with mugs. It could have been any morning show at any station anywhere in America. But it wasn’t.

  It was Danvers.

  My home.

  “. . . joined in the studio today by Dr. Sharon Strayed, professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts, by Laurel Hocking, nurse at St. Joan’s Academy and first responder to the Mystery Illness, and by Kathy Carruthers, mother of one of the afflicted girls, who’ll be talking exclusively with us today. Ladies, welcome, and thanks for joining us on This Is Danvers this morning.”

  “Well, of course Kathy Carruthers is on,” my mother muttered.

  “Did they say they’re going to talk to the Carruthers girl?” my father asked the room at large.

  Leigh! My first thought was That wannabe.

  Seriously. TJ Wadsworth couldn’t even get an A-list afflicted girl? Where was Clara? Maybe the network had called the Rutherfords and their publicist had told them not to go on for some reason. Maybe the Other Jennifer didn’t want to go on TV with no hair. But surely they could have gotten Elizabeth.

  I didn’t even know Leigh had gotten sick. She’d been fine when I saw her in class last week. I wondered how many other members of the senior class had sickened, just in the span of a single weekend.

  The phone in my sweatshirt front pocket vibrated softly with an incoming text. I pulled it out to peek, my heart doing a few quick hard thuds at the thought that it might be Anjali finally texting me back.

  No Anjali.

  Spence.

  He’d been really cool about yesterday, which made me feel even more guilty about how annoyed I’d been about the interview. Of course after he’d said legacy all casual like that, I’d wanted to break my coffee mug in half, which is even worse. But when I couldn’t get ahold of Anjali, he saw right away that I was too shaken to hang out. He’d actually ridden with me on the T to the train station. And then he’d waited with me for forty minutes before the next commuter rail like it was no big deal. And before he’d put me on the train, he’d wrapped his arms around me without even asking and whispered into my hair that I shouldn’t worry, that he was sure there was some mix-up and that Anjali was just fine.

  U watching?

  I eyed my mother from my perch on the floor, not wanting to send her over the edge about my texting before we’d even had breakfast. But she was absorbed in the program.

  Yeah . . . you?

  And back into my sweatshirt pocket.

  “. . . Hocking, it’s such a pleasure having you here. You’ve become something of a household name these last couple of weeks, with everything that you’ve done for these girls. That must be such a good feeling, knowing that you’re helping them like that.”

  “Oh, definitely, it is. I’m just glad they’re doing okay.”

  “Can you tell us when you first realized that the symptoms weren’t being caused by what the school initially claimed?”

  “Definitely, TJ,” the school nurse began. She didn’t look nursey at all for this interview, but like an impeccably styled talk show host herself. Made up, really nice suit, no nurse jacket or anything. Hair sprayed into place. Deena had told me someone started a Facebook fan page for her, and it had 127 likes already.

  “The school claimed?” I said, incredulous. “I don’t remember the school making the diagnosis. I thought she did.”

  “Did she?” my mother asked. “I don’t remember.”

  “She did,” my brother said quietly.

  “I started to have my suspicions right away, to be honest. The initial expression of the symptoms didn’t seem to fit with what you’d normally expect to see in an allergic reaction to a vaccine, even a relatively new one like the one for HPV. Of course, many parents had concerns about the HPV vaccine, for a lot of reasons. The initial cluster of patients were known to have all gotten the third shot around the same time, from the same pediatrician, and there was a lot of play about it in the media—”

  “And what’re you calling this?” my mother said, flinging her hand into the air.

  She was a big TV talker. She talked back to movies, too.

  “—but I was still skeptical. Then my suspicions were confirmed when we had an unfortunate incident of some students falling ill during a school assembly. I’ve gotten permission from those families to share that the second wave of students had no direct connection with the first, including their pediatricians. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to suggest that a vaccine could be responsible for the cluster of symptoms that we were seeing. Unfortunately it was very difficult getting the school to acknowledge that there might be another underlying problem.”

  Weird. Laurel Hocking was really laying into the St. Joan’s administration. I wondered what the upper school dean was thinking, watching this. And then I wondered how much longer Laurel Hocking
was going to be the nurse at St. Joan’s.

  “Fascinating. So what did you decide to do next?”

  “She called me,” said Dr. Sharon Strayed, whom I immediately recognized as the mystery suit woman from my interview with the nurse.

  “Now, Dr. Strayed, you’re a professor of epidemiology at UMass.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that means you study how diseases spread through populations, is that right?”

  “That’s right, TJ. Nurse Hocking and I had a long phone conversation, in which she described the symptoms that she was seeing in the students. I knew right away that it wasn’t caused by the HPV vaccine. We asked the parents’ permission to interview all the members of the class in which the first afflicted girls were enrolled about their health history, so that we could start looking for patterns.”

  “Asked?” my mother said. “I don’t remember being asked. Do you?”

  “Not as such,” my father said. He’d folded his arms over his chest and was glaring at the television.

  “She was at my interview, Mom. With the nurse.”

  “Well, she never asked me a goddamn thing.” My mother scowled, and my father wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

  “And when you started looking for these patterns, as you call it, what did you find?”

  “Well,” Dr. Strayed said, “I’ll tell you, what we found was pretty surprising.”

  “I’m afraid we have to take a break, but when we come back, more from the school nurse at the exclusive Danvers private school St. Joan’s Academy, site of a mysterious illness that has sickened sixteen teenage girls in less than a month. What’s really behind their strange symptoms? And what do you need to know to keep your family safe? Stay with us.”

  Chipper morning show transitional music again, and then a commercial for Jenny Craig.

  “Mikey—” my mother began, but my brother had muted the television before she could finish her thought.