by Lara Parker
This had been her sorry life since the Reverend had brought her home from the Indian camp. The townspeople bore her ill. If a sow took sick in the hog pen, she was blamed, since she had slopped the pigs that morning; and if it recovered, she was suspected of black arts. If a cow’s udders grew thick with blockage, she was the cause; and if they mysteriously drained, it was not natural. In her heart she knew it was her silent ways, her quiet defiance, that antagonized them.
School was no kinder. Friendless, she kept to herself. The other girls avoided her, and the boys feared her with some intuition they failed to understand. Only Andrew, who was a fine lad, though a bit slow, seemed not to notice what the others said about her. As grateful as she was to him for his attentions, she did not love him, and rejected his offer of marriage, until she began to see how much she needed him.
JUDAH ZACHERY STOOD at the front of the classroom with the cherrywood switch in his hand. He tapped the lectern as the children recited their sums. When they finished the twelves, he laid down the rod and nodded his head. “Quietly, ye go.” The children bounded for the door, but he called after them, “Remember, ye hath been made in God’s image. Conduct yourselves with decorum and humility.”
As she passed him by, Miranda felt the heat of his gaze. “Stay Miranda,” he said. Silently she watched the other children run over the meadow towards the river. “I have my eye on you,” he said, his voice a low rasp in her ear. His hand on her arm was the claw of a vulture and when she looked up at him, she saw his vulture’s eyes, red ringed, and his mouth a raptor’s beak.
“Can you tell me you are pure and without taint?”
“I know not what taint you mean, sir.”
“Why, stealing off with Andrew Merriweather.”
“I have not, sir.”
“Mind yourself, Miranda. I see you.” And she knew he did. For he was closer to her kind than she dared to admit. She knew of his coven in Bedford.
They stood at the door of the schoolroom and the children’s laughter floated over the field. Close by, birds twittered and mewed in the bush. One, a swallow, had a song so piercing she imagined it was meant for her, and she let it flow into her heart. Once more she looked up at Judah Zachery. The beak was more pronounced, and his neck was red and mottled where it rose out of his untidy white ruff, which sat like a feathered collar around the naked skin. His face was ruddy and round, with hollow eyes and haggard cheeks, and although the top of his head was bald, his hair hung in filthy locks to his shoulders and his ears protruded from the greasy strands. His nose was a fleshy hook and his beak of a mouth showed yellowed teeth. Slowly he drew the cherry wood wand between his fingers, caressing its narrow flute, the long finger bones ending in nails unclipped and sharp. A moldy odor hung about him as though he often soiled himself. Back and forth he drew the rod between his fingers and it quivered, still green beneath the bark.
“Choose,” he said. “A whipping, or the closet.”
She sucked in her breath. “The closet.”
“Impudence!” He seized her by the arm, shoved her into the darkness, and locked the door. Now she was alone. Sometimes he left her there for hours, until the children had departed for home, their bright voices silenced, and only the sound of his breathing on the other side of the panel. How long would today’s punishment be? If he kept her through the night, she would miss the meeting in the forest, and the girls had asked her to come with them.
As she sat curled on the floor, she sighed to think that for a little while longer he controlled her, and she knew she had no recourse but to obey him. But she did not fear him, for she knew him. She knew he whipped her to see her bared thighs. His hand shook so violently, the blows were more glancing then painful; and when he forced her over his knee, she could always feel the bulge in his trousers. What’s more, she had seen his Devil’s ways. One night she had flown to the clearing in the field behind Bedford and, from her branch, looked down on his imbecillc rituals. The widows and spinsters of his coven, dim-witted women driven mad by lust, cavorted in the moonlight. They drank blood and screeched, and some opened their thighs and rubbed themselves against him while he stood like a great vulture, holding his book. How willingly they signed, scrambled over one another to sign. Did any of them care what they had done?
She waited until her eyes became accustomed to the dark. The crack above the door and another at the floor gave light enough for her to amuse herself with his books. And Judah Zachery had many books—books he had brought with him from England, printed on coarse paper, nearly all in Latin or French. She could not read them, but the illustrations enthralled her: the intricate drawings and foreign designs. They were books that would shock the people in the town were they to see them, they so reeked of heresy. Books of anatomy showed naked bodies stripped of their skin, the muscles pulled away from the bones, the organs hanging out of the stomach cavity, the sex exposed. There were books of astrology depicting the creatures who lived in the heavens—a goat, a bull, and a giant scorpion. She drew Hooke’s Micrographia into her lap, and marveled at etchings of insects as large as lobsters with ratcheted claws and jaws, and studied drawings of prehistoric beasts: a lion with wings and a pig with a man’s head. She shivered at sea monsters with long tentacles, unicorns, and dragons. She knew it was all blasphemy, but that did not trouble her. She only feared that Judah might catch her looking at his books and punish her for not standing silently in the dark.
But she could not resist. Some of the names she had learned from his teaching: Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler, all known heretics, for Galileo said the earth traveled around the sun, which seemed impossible, although Metacomet once told her it was probably true. But she was incapable of understanding the circles and triangles and the numbers and symbols. Hours passed as she studied a book on mechanics and pored over diagrams of an air pump and a telescope, a camera obscura, a thermometer, a crossbow and a catapult, something called a chastity belt, and the awful rack and the Halifax Gibbet, which severed heads—all scientific instruments, and the last three designed to thwart the Devil. She found a book in English and read a profane treatise on the mortal soul perishing with the body, of atoms that swerve in their path by free will, and conversations with spirits. She found a pamphlet entitled The Art of Swimming that delighted her with its drawings of naked men floating in a river. Another called A History of Ethiopia showed ferocious barbarians in horned headdresses wielding spears and clubs. Their unclad bodies excited her and she stared long and hard at the organs hanging between their legs.
Miranda reached into the back of the closet for the wooden box, opened it, and drew out the mask. She knew it for what it was, and shivered to think what power it possessed. The mask was crudely fashioned of gold and encrusted with jewels: fat rubies surrounded the eyes and sapphires studded the mouth. A crown of laurel leaves and a beard of dangling fronds were of beaten gold. Gingerly she placed the mask over her own face and felt its heat on her cheeks, but only for a moment. Then she hid it away again and settled down with her favorite book, Milton’s Paradise Lost. She loved to look at the paintings of the poor souls in hell writhing in the flames, spitted on long spears by magnificent angels. When she heard the key in the lock, she quickly replaced the book and stood, head bowed, like a contrite child waiting her release. This day he let her go without a word.
MIDNIGHT, AND MOVING through the dark of the barnyard, loath to rouse the rooster with his clamoring cry, Miranda felt a cold hand on her heart and shivered. Dread weighed on her like a stone as she hurried through the stalls, her fear so humid she could smell it with her tongue. The hogs stirred, and she dared not look at them, their grunting bodies, or the listless sheep with their vacant eyes, the placid cows swinging their udders, as all could turn into monsters, but kept her eyes on the ground and crept out into the night while the damp gathered around the edge of her petticoat and the cold seeped into her shoes.
The forest where they were to meet loomed beyond the field. Tituba had told them they would see th
eir future husbands in the swirl of egg white, and they would dance, and conjure up Goody Larson’s dead babies again, and tonight they would all fly. But Tituba was an island woman, a voodoo-practicing slave brought over from Haiti. She could not save them from their foolishness. Only Miranda could do that.
She could see three of the girls coming from the village; they clung to one another, whispering softly together, eager to be devilish. They seemed one dark body with many limbs, and she felt envy’s sting. She had no friends, and even if they let her come with them to the forest, she knew they were frightened of her.
Behind their path stood the last house in the village: a hard edge of clapboard, a dark shape, a black chimney, dead wood, dead stone, fashioned from the living trees who still cried when they were cut, and from the stone that sobbed when it was pulled from the earth. Men shouted, sawed, pounded, and another grove of rippling saplings was forced into service of these walls, so straight and plumb. Sometimes she would run her hand over the gray clapboard hoping for a splinter, a sign that life still frisked in the boards nailed to that unyielding frame.
She knew she must not think of these things tonight because if she allowed her mind to slip, she might see beyond, see the end of things, and the fear crept up from her damp boots and gathered around her calves. Her skirt was soggy from trailing through the leaves, and in the fabric she could still smell the sheep from the barn, the wool of her dress never rid of that reek, and quickly she stopped herself before she thought of the ewes dying in the blizzard and the new lambs on her bed.
Foolish Tituba, who said they would fly. She tried to imagine them, shapes against the moon, petticoats loose and lifting. Perhaps after they ate the rye bread tinged with red and drank whatever concoction Tituba stirred in the kettle, and after they danced, they could come home certain they had flown, even if they had not. But the dark wedge of a thought, empty except for the cry of surprise and the sound of branches breaking, forced its way into her brain.
When the forest closed around them, they came together and Tituba was leading them. Miranda relaxed a little. Reverend Collins said the forest was where the Old Deluder hid, but she knew it as God’s cathedral. How wrong they were about everything. Surely God was among them and would protect them, not her perhaps, with her deceitful ways, but a group of mischievous girls. Running, they were running now, and her sodden skirts were heavy with wet, her boots filled with water. There was no way they could fly, these silly girls, and yet, would Tituba make some spell? She must find a way to stop them, but they did not like her, would not listen if she tried. You fly, they would say.
How close were they now to the place Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief, had taken her to live with the tribe? Her heart winced when she thought of her father’s head shattered against the rock, her mother’s blood-soaked dress. Reverend Collins had spied her playing in the stream and returned her to Salem Village. There he had dressed her in a woolen skirt, capped her hair, and forced her bare feet into dark stockings and boots, compelled her to sit in meeting and to go to the schoolhouse where her tormentor, Judah Zachery, raised the whip against her. With the evil that coiled in his own heart the schoolteacher saw her mysterious ways as wickedness.
Then one day Abigail Soames had told her she heard her own father say that the three cleared fields and the farm at the end of Litchy Road belonged to Miranda. No one spoke to her of it. But, begrudgingly, or perhaps spitefully, the Reverend had shown her the name Edmund du Val in the book of property.
The girls reached the clearing, and Tituba already crouched at the fire ring, her heavy body splayed over her fat knees, as she blew the tinder to flame. The girls stared at her, waiting: Lucinda Whaples with her yellow curls, dull Betty Parris, and brown-eyed Abigail Putnam, all children under twelve, and Mary Walcott who already had breasts like a cow and who was old enough to know better than to cast spells. But she, more than the others, wanted to see her husband’s face in the cauldron. Into the liquid went bits of beetles and lizards. Tituba kept a sack around her neck, from out of which she drew something as red as blood, and then, as the brew began to boil, she dropped the egg white and swirled it on the surface.
“There! I see his face,” cried Lucinda, and they all shrieked, the forest echoing their cries. “It’s Samuel!”
“No, William! It’s William Basset!”
“You are the silly one for I see Samuel.”
“Miranda,” and they were sing-songing now, “I see your darling Andrew. Come and see.”
Could it be they envied her beau? Or did they only think he was simpleminded?
After they drank the potion, Tituba began beating her little drum. The girls formed a circle and, with clumsy steps, they began to dance. They grabbed their petticoats and lifted them over their heads. Stockings fell in the grass, shifts and pantaloons. Giggling as if tickled in the bed covers to frenzy, they hugged themselves, shivering, then threw out their arms to show themselves to the fire, to the somber, waiting trees. The rhythmic song of the drum taunted her, and finally Miranda joined them. She twisted her body in rakish thrusting motions until she was dizzy, then collapsed exhausted into the grass.
Tituba’s drum pulsed in the dark, and she sang in a slow voice odd consonants of an island dialect, a haunting chant. The girls were naked now, and Miranda caught a sweating arm, brushed against a cool, round bottom, or turned and turned like a wound up top. They were graceless dancers, but they savored the metallic taste of freedom, like blood from a bitten tongue. They touched one another, then licked, then prodded in shameful places, and shrieked with glee.
“Stop,” she cried out. “We must stop. Someone might come.”
“Who?” cried Lucinda. “The Black Man? Let him come. I dare him to show his face to me.” The other younger girls shrank back at this blasphemy, but Lucinda glared into the trees. “Come for me!” she cried. The girl they drowned in Whethersfield with their dunking had pleaded for her life; the only evidence had been a pudding that broke in the pan and a cow that died in the coldest week of winter. But she was a wanton girl who had spoken once with Miranda. Perhaps it was better she was gone. Tituba’s drum grew louder. What madness this was, dancing in the forest, risking at the very least a whipping in the square. The girl had been called Constance, and she was uncommonly pretty. Perhaps the burghers wanted more than anything to strip her of her clothes and search for a devil’s teat. Constance was willful, but innocent. Even if no teat was found, they still gazed on her helpless nakedness and carried their visions to their beds.
Panting, Miranda leaned her bare back against the trunk of a hickory, and ran her hands over the rough bark. She could ease into this tree, become one with it, and disappear into its leaves. She looked up at the faint shapes of the gray beeches and ghostly birches glimmering among the older, darker trees, and she longed to rise, to float upward. Had the girls seen Andrew’s face in the cauldron? Would she have seen him? He was dazzled by her, she knew that. A strapping lad with muscular arms. He would make a good husband, a good father to her children.
She must make them stop.
“Tituba!”
Miranda was holding Betty’s hand, and for a moment the girl anchored her to the earth. When they saw she had jumped but not landed, they stared at her feet six inches above the ground. She could not control herself and slowly she tipped horizontal, hovered a moment and then, like an expelled breath, flew into the trees. While she looked down at them from her branch, the girls leapt and cavorted, giddy as idiots, and flapped their arms. “Whist! Whist!” they cried.
Lucinda called them towards the cliff and Miranda left. Miranda felt fear clutch her heart. They looked to her. “This way! Come, it’s time!” No, no. She flew down to stop them and she turned to see them coming, their eyes rimmed with red. They ran, flinging out their frail arms, twittering bird sounds and, at the edge she grabbed for them, caught them, all but Lucinda, who hung a moment at the lip of the rock then flung herself out over the gorge. There was a cry, as a wild thing taken
by the throat, and the sound of snapping branches. The other girls gaped stupidly down into the dark.
SIX
Collinwood—1971
THE MORNING WAS CRISP and the air so cool and clear, Barnabas decided, in spite of Julia’s fretting, to walk the half mile to the Old House. David, who had begged to accompany him, strolled by his side for a few hundred yards, then in a burst of youthful exuberance, jogged ahead down the path. The trees were resplendent with hues Barnabas found astonishing, and he amused himself by imagining that they were girls at a ball, each clothed in a different gown: amber, magenta, and aubergine. Each flirted for attention, each demanded admiration, each claimed the crown of beauty as her own. Fallen leaves lay in scarlet pools beneath the gray maples, or in yellow ponds beneath the elms with their black trunks, and Barnabas laughed at himself for thinking such beauty could ever harbor evil intent.
Ashamed of his actions the night before and the tangle of emotions that had ensued after his hotheaded pursuit of Antoinette in the dark, he had resolved to have nothing more to do with her other than treat her as a neighbor with a problem in her woods. Likewise he had made up his mind to respect Julia’s wishes and not search for the vampire. As she had said, those days were over. Instead he had decided to be of service to Roger. Undoubtedly Roger’s tarnished opinion of him needed some polishing. He knew that the older man saw him as lazy and unproductive, living off the family’s good will and making no contribution to the coffers. His intention this morning was to follow Roger’s instructions and find some way of ridding the estate of the hippies.
