Hour of the Witch(65)
She turned the knife so the tip was against the back of her wrist and pricked the skin until it bled. It was a small cut, but deep enough that she watched the blood pool. She imagined slicing through her flesh as if butchering a hog. She had that sort of strength in her right arm. She could end this lying down and then meet her Savior or Satan. She could. She stared up at the heavy table and the window beyond it, at the afternoon light. She loved the light this time of the year. She loved it in the trees when the leaves turned their kaleidoscopic reds and yellows, she loved it when the leaves were gone and the slim black branches of the oak but black lines against a sapphire sky. At the right time of day, it was like seeing the world through gauze, and the sun gave the world a calming, tawny cast.
Two words came to her now, each syllable distinct and clear: get up. Was it her Lord? It most definitely was a command. Get up. Get up now. She looked into the hearth, which almost was out, and saw there, too, a beauty in the fire. The voice, if that’s what it was, was neither Maker nor Devil. It was…her. It was her soul reminding her that her hap in the end was in God’s hands and had been in God’s hands since the beginning of time, but her moment on this earth was hers. It. Was. Hers. The self-pity had been accreting inside her like January snow on the sill—blinding her—since the moment she had stepped back inside this house. She began to fear that if she didn’t move, she would take the knife and sculpt a cup of flesh from her wrist and never get up again. And that wasn’t really what she wanted. Not at all. She wanted more, she wanted life. Where was the woman who had stood in the Town House and vowed that she would have justice when the unjust verdict had been rendered? Where had that woman gone? She recalled her resolve there and leaned over, dropping the knife back into the bucket and using both hands—her left, too, despite the pain that shot from the back of the mending bone up her arm and caused her to wince—to push herself to her feet. She would not wallow here on the floor. She would fight. What was the naval term? Line of battle. She would turn her broadside cannons upon her husband, while standing tall against the Catherine Stilemans and the Goody Howlands and the Peregrine Cookes and perhaps even the Rebeckah Coopers of Boston. She would learn who had buried the forks and the pestle in the yard—and why. And most of all? She would be free. She could not and would not live like this: a creature contemplating its own demise at its own hands. A mistress haunted by her own servant girl and scared of her husband.
She went to the window to gaze out at the world and the light that God had made, a gift to be relished—and for a moment she did. But she was not meant to enjoy it long. She saw the physician Roger Pickering, astride his majestic gray-and-white horse, coming to a stop at the end of the dooryard. As he climbed off it, their eyes met. He tipped his cap and then hitched his horse to the post. She took the hem of her sleeve and pressed it against the back of her wrist where she had pricked the skin with the tip of the knife, wiping away the blood that was hardening there. She wondered if the doctor would even notice it.
* * *
Thomas took her over the bedstead that night, violently, and her fingers clenched at the comforter against the pain. He grabbed a rope of her hair, yanking back her head toward him, and hissed into her ear that she was a sinner and a whore and she was disobedient. Her feet were bare against the floorboards, and she tried to focus only on the patch of rough wood beneath her right heel, but her mind kept returning to the pain between her legs and the pain along her scalp where it felt like he would pull out whole clumps of her hair. He had wrenched her head back so far that when she opened her eyes, she was looking upon the peak of the house and the beams that ran like bridges between the two slants of the roof. She wondered: Was there only hatred for him in the act now? Was he even attempting to curb the loneliness or the animal lust within him or was this just another way of punishing her? He wasn’t drink-drunk, this she knew. After all the allegations and suggestions at the trial, he had been careful to take smaller sips of his beer tonight at supper.
When he was through, he let go of her hair and pushed her down onto the comforter by her shoulders. She thought he was done and started to reach for her shift. But he grabbed her right arm and whirled her around, pulling her toward him. Then, as she felt his seed dripping down her thighs, he took her left hand in his and whispered menacingly, “The physician says thy hand is healing. Thou must be more careful, Mary. I know thou believest I hurt thee for no reason, but that is not true. Thou needest breaking like a horse. Humbling like a fallen angel. Art thou merely dull or something worse? Something prideful? Something that will get thee damned?”
She wanted to remind him that whether she was damned or saved was long foreordained. But she knew it would be a mistake to utter a word.
“I know for sure only this,” he continued. “Thou canst not afford another accident like that incident with”—and here he paused briefly—“the teakettle. I feel thine agony, Mary. I do.”
Then he held her left fingers in his for a long moment, surveying in the dim light from the room’s lone candle the part of her hand that he had broken.
“Yes, it is healing,” he added, his tone pensive now, as if he honestly could tell. But she could see also that an idea was curdling inside him, and it was a dark one. “And these don’t look like the claws of a witch.”
She waited, silent and wary.