The Invited(69)

She’d spent her whole life being Jane Breckenridge—daughter of Hattie, the witch of the bog, the most powerful woman in the county.

Then she was a no one. A street urchin with no last name. Smith, she said when she had to make one up. I’m Jane Smith. I come from downstate. By the Massachusetts border. My parents, they died when I was a baby and I was raised by an aunt, then she died. Now I’ve got no one.

People take pity on you when you are young and pretty and have a sad story to tell. People are drawn to sorrow.

She was taken in by a kind Baptist family in Lewisburg—the Millers. They had a large farm outside of town. Jane learned to rise in the dark hours before dawn to milk the cows, gather eggs from the hens, collect wood for the old cookstove in the kitchen. She went to church and prayed, read the Bible each night. Learned to fit in. To be someone else.

And now, now Jane was a married woman with children of her own. Her son, Mark, he was a good boy. At eleven, he looked more and more like his father every day. He took after him, too—did well in school, was strong and well-liked. But her girl child, Ann, Jane worried for her.

And, if the truth be told, Jane was actually frightened of her.

The girl knew things. Things no six-year-old should know. Things that she said her toys and dolls told her. She had a favorite doll that she was always whispering to. It was a doll Ann had made herself from rags and scraps from her mother’s sewing basket—she loved to sew, Jane’s girl. The doll was a funny-looking thing: a patchwork of colors with a pale face, an embroidered mouth like a red flower petal, and two black button eyes. Her hair was a tangle of black yarn braided together.

“What’s your dolly’s name?” she’d asked Ann, not long after she’d made her.

“She’s Hattie,” Ann said.

Jane stepped back, clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Ann giggled, thought Jane was laughing, too. “It’s a silly name, isn’t it?” she said, grinning. “It must mean she likes hats!”

Jane had never told her about her grandmother. About her real name or where she’d come from. No one living knew the truth about Jane.

    “Hattie says hello,” her little girl told her. “She says she knows you.”

Jane felt as if she’d been submerged in cold water—the water back at the center of the Breckenridge Bog. She felt it pulling on her, sucking her down.

“Of course she knows me,” Jane said, forcing the words out through her too-tight throat. “She’s your doll. She lives here in our house.”

“No,” she said. “She says she knows you from before.”

Jane didn’t respond. How could she?

Before.

Before.

Before.

She tried to remember before, and what came back strongest was the smell of that damp root cellar she hid in, waiting for Mama to come. But she never did.

And what she saw when she got to the bog and peered through the circle of people gathered there:

Mama was hanging from a rope tied to a branch of that old pine, dangling, lifeless. She swung in small, slow circles like a strange pendulum.

Jane had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from screaming back then as well. She bit down, chewed at her palm until she tasted blood.

She sat there, crouched down in the bushes, and watched as the men cut her mother down, stuffed her dress full of rocks, and dragged her out into the middle of the bog, the deep place where the spring came up.

“The spirits will protect us,” Mama had always promised.

Now, years later as an adult with children of her own, Jane felt her chest grow cold and tight as she remembered her mother saying those words. And how earnestly she’d believed them.

“Hattie says she loves you,” her daughter told her, clutching the terrifying doll in her arms. “Do you love her, too?”

“Of course I do,” Jane said.

When she went in to tuck her daughter in at night, she covered the doll’s face with a blanket; sometimes, if Ann was already asleep, Jane would take the doll out and hide it under the bed or in a dark corner of her closet.

    But somehow, each morning when Ann woke up, Hattie the doll was beside her once more, peering up at Jane with her shiny button eyes when she came in to draw back the curtains and say “Good morning.”

“Hattie says you shouldn’t go to work today,” Ann announced this morning as she clutched at her gruesome little doll. Its button eyes seemed to watch Jane, to give a familiar little glint when she dared look in her direction.

“Whyever not?” Jane asked, spooning more oatmeal into Ann’s bowl. Mark and his father had gone outside to feed the dog and chickens.

“Something bad is going to happen,” Ann said, pushing the bowl away. “She says you’re going to make something bad happen.”

“Me? All I’m going to do is run those old looms.”

“Please, Mama,” she said, her brow furrowed like an old lady’s, not like a little girl’s.

“Don’t be silly,” Jane told her. “Eat your breakfast and get ready for school. I’m going to work, just as I do every day.”

But when she got to the mill, Jane realized she should have listened.

Tom Chancy, the foreman, told the women they were behind—they’d gotten too lazy, too slow, and if it kept up, he was going to dock their pay. “No more midmorning breaks,” he announced when he gathered them all in a circle for a meeting before the first work bell rang. There were murmurs of dissent. “And no one,” Tom said, voice rising above all the mumbled complaints, “I mean no one, is to leave their workstation until the bell rings at noon!”