The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “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.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Marblehead, Massachusetts

  Mid-August

  1991

  NIGHT CAME UNDER THE TIGHT CANOPY OF VINES OVER GRANNA’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.

  Another widespread vernacular divination technique, similarly crude but available to all regardless of social class, was the so-called “sieve and scissors.” This process consists of balancing a sieve atop an open set of shears and asking a yes or no question. Like the key and Bible, the toppling over of the sieve was thought to signify an answer in the affirmative to the supplicant’s question. It has been argued that the genesis of this technique can be tied to the relative expense of scissors; a common household tool, they nevertheless were comparatively costly and difficult to manufacture. They were of particular value in the New World, which only acquired the means to manufacture local scissors and shears rather late. Some evidence suggests that this method was favored to reveal the location of lost property, and in particular the identity of thieves in an age when official channels for the enforcement and redress of petty crime apart from community pressure and observation were almost nonexistent.

  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 know
ing 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.

  AFTER SOME RUMMAGING, CONNIE HAD MANAGED TO LOCATE THE 1970S 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.