The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  Staring, transfixed, Connie dropped her hands, now suddenly freed from pain as instantly as it had appeared, just as the seed puff was caught up by a passing breeze, which lifted each tender white seed-cloud up and away until they all dissolved into nothing.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered, frozen in place as the now-dead dandelion stalk abruptly withered back into the ground from whence it came.

  Part II

  THE Sieve AND Scissors

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.

  —John 1:1–2 (King James)

  And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

  —Matthew 16:18 (King James)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Marblehead, Massachusetts

  Mid-July

  1991

  THE CARDS SPREAD ON THE DINING TABLE LOOKED LIKE A GAME OF solitaire, set out in careful rows one after the other. Connie adjusted the wick of the oil lamp to brighten its orange glow, pulled out one of the shield-back chairs, and sat at the table, sliding her hands under her legs, shoulders pulled up by her ears. Most of the cards were just dull recipe cards: the boiled lobster, a few kinds of pie, casseroles, the chicken, all of them smudged with flour and thumbprints like any kitchen tool in constant use.

  But then there were the others.

  Connie pushed back from the table and stood again, pacing across the dining room. She had been shuttling like this for the past hour, first sitting at the table, then standing up again, unable to settle. Her energy was frayed, bringing her into uncomfortable awareness of the throb of blood in her veins, of the tingle of her nerves, and of the flush of adrenaline in her chest.

  Three of the cards were not recipes at all. She cast a wary eye at those three, sitting aloof on the table.

  The thing to do, of course, was to react rationally. After sprinting out of the Salem Common in a panic and roaring home in the Volvo, she had told herself in no uncertain terms that the dandelion was a coincidence; that she was tense and scared and spending too much time alone. She had spread the cards out on the dining table where they could be inspected safely, clinically.

  Connie turned back to the table, picking up the card that was labeled Works especially well for tomats. Frowning, she carried the card out of the dining room into the tiny front entryway and squatted next to the dead plant-shell in the cracked China-export pot. Keenly aware of her ridiculousness, Connie raised one hand, aimed it at the corpse of the plant, and read the words on the card aloud again.

  Nothing happened.

  “See?” she said to Arlo, who had materialized on the steps. “It’s fatigue, plain and simple.” He gazed back at her, eyes questioning, fur mottled the color of the paint in the stairwell. She watched him for a moment, then got to her feet and returned to the dining room, the animal trotting after her.

  This time Connie stood before one of the hanging planters that held the remnants of a spider plant. It had been dead for so long that a hand brushed against its leaves caused them to dissolve into dust. A few tattered spiderwebs lingered in the hollows among the leaves, their occupants long since gone. The earth inside the pot had been sucked dry of all moisture, deep crevices yawning open between the tight knot of dead roots and the bowl’s edges.

  “Okay,” said Connie, setting the card aside and turning her full attention on the dead plant. She raised her hands so that her spread fingers created a sort of spherical basket around it. She furrowed her brows, concentrating on the precise point at the center of the sphere, deep within the crumbling earth in the planter.

  “Pater in caelo,” she murmured, and a hot prickling sensation stretched across the palms of her hands. “Te oro et obsecro in benignitate tua,” she continued, as a subtle bluish glow coalesced in a swirling bubble between her outstretched fingers. Her nerves jumped and snapped in pain. “Ut sinas hanc herbam, vel lignum, vel plantam, crescere et vigere catena temporis non vinctam,” she finished. The blue orb of light grew more solid, its electrical veins snapping in jagged lines from her fingertips and palms into the center of the ceramic planter. In that instant, the dried spider plant leaves flushed with water and health, the fresh, waxy green of life crawling down each black leaf, lifting and twisting as the color returned, and sending out fragile little shoots bursting with new baby leaves up and over the edge of the planter. By the time Connie dropped her hands to her sides, the smell of moist earth filled the dining room, and the spider plant hung thick and lush, swaying a little in the close evening air.

  She staggered backward, groping for the support of the dining table, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Hot tears sprang into the rims of her eyes, and she realized that with each breath she was also letting out a high, panicked whimper. Her hand found the back of one of the shield-back chairs, pulling it toward her just in time to catch her falling weight. Horrified, Connie wrapped her arms around her middle and bent over, resting her forehead on her knees, her breath breaking into hiccuping sobs.

  Within her mind great puzzle pieces shifted, each with a different woman’s face, rotating and nudging together until a complete picture began to emerge. Across her mind’s eye drifted an image of Granna’s face, dark gray hair pulled tight, pale eyes shining as she held aloft a fat, glistening tomato from the plant outside. This image dissolved into a young, pink-cheeked woman, face framed with a perfect white linen coif, plain Puritan collar spread over her shoulders—Deliverance, or what Connie imagined Deliverance to have looked like, her mouth moving inaudibly as she read from a great open book. Then a careworn woman, tanned and mobcapped, tired—Prudence, sliding a package across a table into the hands of some unseen person. Last Connie saw Grace, straight hair falling over her shoulders, in the raftered kitchen of her Santa Fe house, her hands moving a few inches above a weeping woman’s head.

  All of them with pale, ice blue eyes.

  Connie sat up, rubbing her palms over her flushed forehead. When she dropped her hands she saw first Arlo, his chin in her lap, worrying, and behind him, on the wall, the woman in the portrait, which Connie had never noticed bore a tiny engraved plaque that read TEMPERANCE HOBBS—with her sloping nineteenth-century shoulders and wasp waist—watching her over a tiny, knowing smile.

  “It can’t be true!” she whispered, clutching at herself and rocking to and fro in the dining chair. She thought first of Grace, that she must talk to her immediately. But Granna! Connie’s eyes darted crazily around the house, taking in the few blackened jars in the dining room, the little corn husk doll with its dimity dress and yarn bow resting on the mantelpiece, Deliverance’s name tucked deep into a family Bible.

  The circle burned into her door.

  Connie leapt to her feet, rushing to pick up the telephone.

  At the instant that she arrived in the front hall, the telephone receiver clutched in her hand, the front door opened a crack. She froze.

  “Connie?” asked Sam, peering into the entry hall. When she heard his voice, she dropped the receiver with a cry of relief, winding her arms around his neck and breathing in the salty smell of his skin, freshened by the chemical gloss of paint spatters still clinging to his ponytail. “Hey,” he said, uneasy, holding his arms in a tentative shell around her trembling back before lowering them onto her waist. She tightened her grip around his shoulders, trying to wring the resistance out of his muscles, digging her chin into the spot where his shoulder met his neck until she felt him overcome his surprise and relax. They stood like that, him holding her, for a moment, the front door still open. Arlo wandered from the dining room, around their four feet grouped together, and out into the yard.

  “Sam,” she said, voice muffled. She had called him, she remembered now, as soon as she arrived back at the house, leaving a breathless, anxious message on his machine describing what had happened in the Salem Common and asking if she could see him later. Until his arrival, she
had forgotten completely.

  “Let’s sit down,” Sam suggested, leading her into the shadowed sitting room. He settled her into the armchair, hands balanced on her knees, and pulled up a low needlepoint footstool to seat himself at her feet. He propped his brown forearms on his knees and looked up at her, waiting.

  “So,” he began. “You were reading a note card out loud, and a dandelion blew away?” She read the concern in his face, but it was a concern that masked an underlying worry. Deep inside his eyes, behind the little glimmer in the retinas, she saw that Sam did not believe her. And why would he?

  “It didn’t just blow away, Sam,” she said, impatient, unsure if she wanted him to be convinced of the truth of what had happened, or if she wanted him to convince her of the folly of what she now knew to be true. “I made it blow away. Just by reading some Latin from my grandmother’s recipe card, I made it appear out of nowhere, bloom, and die! All at once!”

  “Okay,” he said. “But you can see why someone would assume that you just hadn’t noticed it before until you accidentally exhaled or something and made it blow away. You admit that it would be the logical explanation here?” he prodded her, not unkindly. His face looked tired, Connie noticed. Her inner voice proposed that he would certainly think that she had lost her mind if she pursued this subject any further. Any reasonable person would respond by distancing himself. He would pull away, inventing reasons that did not have to do with her directly, and soon enough he would disappear from her life. She swallowed, eyes wide.

  “I suppose,” she said, drawing out the words.

  Then she made a show of making up her mind. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. That would be the logical explanation.” She did not meet his eyes, instead folding her arms tightly over her chest and looking at a spot on the threadbare carpet.

  Sam leaned his head into his hands and massaged his temples with his fingertips, rubbing the skin over his forehead and jaw. It occurred to Connie that she had not even asked how his work was coming along. He had been suspended overhead in an abandoned church building all day, up by the ceiling where the heat collected, alone, daubing paint in the corners of the cupola.

  “How did the gilding go?” she asked him, reaching a hand forward to brush an escaped lock of hair away from his forehead. His brow was sheened with sweat, and as her finger met his skin, she suddenly felt the great mass of his fatigue seep from his scalp into her hand and forearm, dragging them down with an almost physical weight.

  “It was fine, just fine. Hot. But fine.” He exhaled. Connie passed her thumb gently over the skin between his eyebrows; as an experiment, without even deciding to do so, she tried telegraphing intent along her neural networks, instructing his system to relax. With deepening surprise she felt the tissue under her thumb grow a little looser and heard Sam release an almost inaudible sigh. Connie pulled her hand away, gazing down at it with unconcealed wonder. A pale blue thumbprint glowed momentarily on his forehead, then vanished. She gaped, looking to Sam, who seemed unaware that anything unusual had just happened.

  He moved from his seat on the footstool into one of the armchairs by the fireplace, pressing his palms to his eyes. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said from behind his hands. After a moment’s hesitation Connie climbed into his lap, threading her arm behind his neck. Sam wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her to him. “Your message sounded so freaked out! I was worried about you,” he mumbled into her hair.

  She smiled. “You were?”

  “Yes,” he admitted, tightening his grip. She felt the warmth of his hand pressing into the skin of her leg, secure and insistent.

  Connie settled her head against his chest, hoping that she had deflected his curiosity for the time being. For the first time that day, her sense of confusion and anxiety began to ebb, subsumed in her delicious consciousness of Sam’s proximity. They sat like that for a moment, tangled together in the armchair, not saying anything. His thumb stroked the skin of her thigh, testing its texture.

  “Sam?” she asked presently, her voice muffled by his paint-stained work shirt.

  “Yes?” he said, moving his hand down her back. His lips brushed against the spot where her neck met the back of her ear, his breath stirring the faint hairs at the nape of her neck, causing the skin there to tingle. He shifted beneath her, resettling his weight in the chair.

  She cleared her throat. “If you want to stay over tonight, you know, that would be okay.”

  The invitation sounded pathetic in her ears, and Connie’s memory spiraled backward to all the stilted conversations that she had suffered through in college, with boys who had all worn a seamless layer of arrogance that Connie never knew how to penetrate. She waited for his response, afraid that he would laugh at her.

  He did laugh, but it was kind, and as he did so he tightened his grip around her waist. Through the soft flannel of his work shirt Connie felt the radiating warmth of his skin, and the sound of his laughter echoed deep within his chest. His chin grated a little against her forehead. She exhaled softly, only now aware that she had been holding her breath. “What a relief,” he exclaimed, opening his eyes. “You just saved me from having to come up with some stupid line about protecting you from vandals.”

  She turned her face to him, and he kissed her, then again, more deeply, drawing his thumb gently along her jaw.

  Before she knew what was happening Sam was standing up, hoisting her legs around his waist and carrying her toward the stairs. “Enough of this,” he said, voice thick. Connie threw her head back with delighted laughter, ducking her head just in time to miss the joist as he started up the narrow staircase to the attic bedroom.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Mid-July

  1991

  THE WOODEN BENCH IN THE VESTIBULE OUTSIDE OF MANNING CHILTON’S office in the Harvard history department was a hard, imitation Windsor seat, painted black, with sharp pole-shaped slats designed expressly to discourage sitting. Connie unfolded her left hand and gazed into the palm, bending her fingers one after the other and touching each to her thumb in turn. At Sam’s insistence the previous night, she had finally pulled out the Latin note card to show him, and he read it over several times. Once he tried reading it aloud while holding his own hand next to one of the dead plants in the sitting room, to no effect. See? he said. It was just a coincidence.

  I know, Connie responded. I’ve just been working too hard, I guess. Too many witches on the brain, Cornell, he teased her.

  But that raised the question of why the recipe card had not worked for Sam. Whenever she tried to grab hold of a possible explanation it pulled apart like wet paper in her hands. For Sam’s part, the confirmation that it was just a note card appeared to bring the subject to a close. As for Connie, the further away the revival of the spider plant moved from her in time, the less possible it seemed. And yet, it had happened.

  Rolling her wrist over, Connie glanced at her watch. It was uncharacteristic of Chilton to keep her waiting. Unlike Janine Silva, who was perpetually out of breath and behind schedule, Chilton maintained a rigid order to his days. His office hours remained consistent even across the blurry days of summer, when most academics fled the campus. She waved one flip-flop from the end of her outstretched foot, avoiding gazing at the disconcerting landscape painting with its matching sun and moon. Her shoulder blades shifted against the center splat of the bench back, which held a relief carving of the university seal with Veritas—truth—in deep scrollwork. The raised wood ground against her muscles, and she leaned her elbows onto her knees to escape its pressure. She wondered how much longer she should wait. It was unlike him, but perhaps Chilton had forgotten their appointment.

  As she delved into her shoulder bag for something to read, the door to Chilton’s office clicked open, and she saw two polished loafers appear side by side in the corner of her vision. She looked up and was met with the pinched face of Manning Chilton, pallid over his navy club bow tie.

&n
bsp; “Connie, my girl,” he said, voice sounding strained. “We do have an appointment, don’t we? Why don’t you come in.” Without having a chance to respond, Connie gathered her shoulder bag together and followed him into his office. The sight of Chilton’s preoccupied face pushed the strange events of the previous night into a deep corner of her mind as she concentrated on reading the situation with her advisor.

  His desk, rather than being its usual wide expanse of naked, gleaming oak, was cluttered with untidy heaps of paper, drifting into dunes at its far corners. Half a dozen books stood stacked at his elbow, bookmark slips spilling out of them in several places. A yellow legal pad sat before him, covered from margin to margin in dense scrawled notes. An ashtray festered within arm’s reach, and the mouthpiece of his pipe bore tooth marks. Chilton sat leaning back in his chair, fingers tucked into a temple before his mouth, and Connie thought she even saw the ghost of a coffee ring staining one of the papers jutting out from under the green glass desk lamp. He rocked a little in his chair, not really looking at her, seeming only half aware that she had seated herself across from him.

  “Professor Chilton?” she asked, leaning forward to meet his gaze.

  He rocked for a moment more, then blinked and focused his eyes on Connie. Her advisor appeared even older than she remembered, his hair a fraction whiter, his skin a little more sallow. His work must be troubling him even more than Janine had implied. For the first time in her years as his student, Connie caught herself feeling almost protective toward Chilton, imagining the scorn that he must have faced at the conference that Janine mentioned. Perhaps his work had grown too esoteric, too philosophical for mainstream historians. She felt a glow of approbation toward him, of pride that she should be working with a man who had the power to change the way history was understood.