Hour of the Witch(19)

    “Didst thou plant these in the yard?” he asked, pointing at the items on the pumpkin pine.

“I did not.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Well, then, let us see if thou art a witch. Shall we?”

Mary couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. All that was clear was this: he was angry and tired and he was feeling particularly nasty. With his left hand he grabbed her left wrist and placed her hand flat on the table, palm down. He spread wide her fingers and lifted the fork. And instantly she understood his intentions and struggled to pull free, terrified, but it was too late.

“No, Thomas, no!” she begged, but he ignored her.

He slammed the fork, tines down, into the bones in the back of her hand. She shrieked in pain, her eyes shut and the backs of her lids awash in dancing light, and then she was sobbing and dizzy as the agony rippled up her arm and throughout her body. She felt the pain everywhere. Everywhere. When she opened her eyes, she opened her mouth, and she understood on some level that her face must have been a skeletal rictus, all aperture and torment.

He released her and clinically surveyed what he had done. The handle of the fork had bent before the tines had augered holes through or between the small bones there; she hadn’t been pinned to the table. But when she lifted her hand, the blood ran down her arm like spilled wine, and she feared from the excruciating pain that the bones there were broken. She collapsed into the chair, utterly stunned both by her husband and by a throbbing pain more incapacitating than anything she had ever experienced.

“Well, thou dost seem to bleed, Mary. Thou dost seem to bleed plenty,” Thomas said. “Thou bleedest monthly. So, I think we can conclude that my servant girl is mistaken and my wife with white meat for a brain is no witch. She may disregard her place in our Lord God’s plan. She may have whorish thoughts. Oh, I see thee, Mary. I know thee. I see, too, that the fire needs raking. Once thou hast tended to that, clean thyself up. I hope this lesson is a seed that takes root. Because it is discipline applied as a lesson. It is pain applied with reason. Now, I am going back to bed.”

    Then he shook his head, proud of himself, and shambled up their stairs.

Gently she pressed the sleeve of her shift against the back of her hand, and then she pressed harder. It was a balancing act: she needed to stop the bleeding, but pressure exacerbated the pain. Little by little her mind cleared, and she resolved that when she could, she would indeed try and sleep. She would go upstairs and climb back into bed beside the beast. But in the morning, as soon as she and Catherine had made him his breakfast—assuming the girl returned—and he had left for the mill, she was going to pack a satchel and go live with her mother and father. Her father would know whether she should see a constable first or meet directly with a magistrate. But she had heard a word and she had heard stories. The word was divorce. Her husband was no saint, and as Mary watched the sleeve of her shift grow the color of cherries and felt the wetness against her skin, as she shivered against the pain, she resolved that she was going to divorce Thomas Deerfield.





I saw my mistress placing the Devil’s tines into the earth, burying them, but for what purpose I cannot say.

    —The Testimony of Catherine Stileman, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1662, Volume III





Seven



They had, she understood, crossed a river, and there was no going back. This attack was too brutal, too violent. Moreover, Thomas had been sober when he had smashed the fork tines first into her hand. It suggested a calculation that unnerved Mary. And his contention that it was educational? That he was saving her soul? This was frightening because it meant there was no longer safety even when he was not drink-drunk.

In the morning, he insisted on unwrapping the cloth and looking at the wound. It was starting to scab over and the three points from the fork were lost in the gelatinous, fragile poultice her body was forming atop the wound. A purple bruise spread out from the spot like a fan, a shape that was eerily reminiscent of the asters in the garden that only recently had been killed by the frost. It reached all the way from her knuckles to her wrist. She was aware of the way her heart was thumping in the wound. In the bones there that were broken.

“Thou wilt heal,” he said to her. He didn’t apologize. Perhaps he, too, understood that the ground beneath them had been shaken. She said nothing in response. The throbbing pain had conspired with her anger to keep her awake most of the night, and the combination of her exhaustion and her discomfort left her weak.

He noticed that no one had started a fire and breakfast wasn’t cooking. “I see Catherine hasn’t returned yet,” he observed.

“No.”

“I suppose she has gone to the Howlands’. I rather doubt she has ventured out to join the savages or the praying Indians in the woods. She will be back. She owes me five years yet. She won’t want to see that time extended. The law…well, she knows the law.”

    Mary did not view Goody Howland as especially generous of spirit, but she agreed it was likely that she had allowed Catherine to spend the night in what had been her late brother’s bed. She was less sure how the woman or her husband, Peter, would respond to the girl’s crazed accusations that her mistress was a witch. Beth didn’t like her, this Mary knew; the goodwife had judged her harshly just the other day by the docks. The woman envied her because of her parents. And while envy was a mortal sin, it grew rampant in everyone’s soul; it was but a dandelion, a weed that was unstoppable here and one learned to live with. It was a character flaw far less dire than the sort of mean streak that led a man to stab a fork into his wife’s hand.