Hour of the Witch(64)

THE BOOK of the WITCH





Mary Deerfield, thou hast been accused of witchcraft. There is much evidence to corroborate such a charge. Tell us plainly so we know where we stand: Dost thou wish to confess to falling prey to the Devil’s enticements and signing a covenant with the Dark One?

—The Charges, as read by Governor John Endicott, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1663, Volume I





Twenty



Catherine prepared a dinner for the three of them of well-seasoned squash and mussels that Thomas had instructed her to buy that morning at the market. There was also cornbread and cheese.

At one point, Thomas rested his fist on the table beside Catherine’s trencher and said to the girl, “Dost thou still believe thy mistress is possessed?” Mary tried to decipher the tone: on the surface it was paternal, but there was something about the way he stressed the inherent sibilance of the last word that gave it a more threatening cast.

Catherine shook her head grimly, and then brought one of the mussels to her mouth, sucking the cooked animal from the shell. The girl was cornered. What could she say? They agreed that she would retrieve her clothes that afternoon from Goody Howland’s and then resume her life with the Deerfields. That night she would sleep once again in the kitchen, as she had every night she had lived in Boston, with the exception of her time at the Howlands’. Mary had a feeling that the servant would not sleep deeply but felt no sorrow at her plight. If she lusted after Thomas, it seemed he did not return her ardor; if she truly believed that Mary was a witch, now she was trapped with her inside this house. Yes, Mary had lost; but so, it seemed, had Catherine.

“Good,” Thomas said. “Thou wilt be happy here again.” He took a swallow of beer and smiled benignly. He reported that he had asked the physician to visit that afternoon and examine Mary’s hand to see how it was healing.

“That’s not necessary,” she told him.

“Certainly, it is,” he said, and then parodied what she’d said at the Town House. “After all, Mary, a teakettle can be a weapon most terrible.”

    Mary did not reply. She turned to Catherine and told her, “I still miss thy brother. I am sorry that he passed so young.”

“He is with the Lord. He is well now,” she murmured.

“Yes,” Mary agreed. “He is.”

When they had finished dinner, Thomas returned to his mill. She and Catherine cleaned up the remnants of the meal. Then Catherine left for the Howlands’, and Mary sat alone at the kitchen table. The room was utterly silent. She thought back on their meal. Thomas’s prayer had been short, but he had thanked the Lord for returning to him his wife. It was altogether nonjudgmental and suggested no atonement was necessary on his part: it was as if she had been thought lost at sea and suddenly, much to everyone’s surprise, been found. His conversation had vacillated between ominous and ordinary. At one point, he had tried to be pleasant and told a story of the farmer from Salem he had dealt with that morning. Another time, he had glowered at the squash and ruminated aloud, “What do the two of thee think? Do I need a cupbearer? Shall I search out and retain my own personal Nehemiah to be sure that my food has not been poisoned?” Mary recalled the man’s daughter’s apples, but neither she nor Catherine had responded.

Now, Mary realized as she sat in solitude, she was stunned. Once, early that summer when she had been walking at the edge of the city, she had seen a hawk plunge into a farmer’s field and then arise with a chipmunk in its talons. The chipmunk was alive, but it wasn’t struggling. It was dazed. Stupefied. Mary understood that her situation was not that dire: her death was not imminent. She wasn’t about to be eaten. But she found it almost unfathomable that but two hours ago she was standing in the Town House hoping to hear that her petition had been granted and she’d been set free. Instead she was a—and the word came to her and she thought it not melodramatic—prisoner.

She was a prisoner of a man who had within him a monster. It lived among his four humours, and he was pliant to its whims. When he was drink-drunk he was especially susceptible to its brutality and fancies, but it would be a mistake to attribute his violence to his penchant for too much cider or beer. She knew what he was capable of even when he was sober. Moreover, there was a deliberation to his evil: he attacked her only (and always) when there were no witnesses present.

    Finally, she stirred. She went to the bucket where Catherine was soaking their knives and spoons, and pulled from the water a knife. She held it in her right hand and thought again of that chipmunk in the hawk’s claws. She felt gutted, the emotions spontaneous and almost overwhelming, the sorrow deep inside her, and she started to cry. She collapsed onto the floor, her back against the wall, and stared through her tears at the blade. She pressed it against her left wrist, curious if she could or should slice through the skin and watch her blood puddle onto the wooden boards.

She turned her left hand over and looked at the mark where he had stabbed her and recalled the pain. She thought of Corinthians:

O death, where is thy sting?

The answer? The sting of death is sin.

But she knew the sting of the Devil’s tines.

No, she knew the sting of a fork.

It was cutlery, no more devilish than this knife in her hand or the ones soaking with the spoons in the bucket, and henceforth she would call it that and only that. It was a…fork. And would the sting of the knife be an agony any worse than what Thomas had accomplished with a fork? Someday she would know God’s eternal plan for her, whether she was among the damned or the elect. Did it really matter if she discovered that in ten years or ten minutes? It did not. God was inscrutable. She could die here and be but sweat and tears and the macerating remains of her fiery humours when Catherine or Thomas returned, her soul already gone to Heaven or Hell.