Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(44)

He went to his study and latched the door, letting his wife know he was not to be disturbed. Ruth was accustomed to doing as she was told and asked no questions even though she had taken note of his dark expression. She thought that he might be writing a sermon, for he often spoke in church, or perhaps he was drafting contracts for his shipping business, when in fact, he had locked himself away so that he might burn Maria’s letter in a brass bowl. The smoke was foul and red, and yet it made him feel something, a rush of desire, what he’d experienced in the tiled courtyard in Cura?ao, the raw emotions of a reckless fool. He sat there with a throbbing headache, sprawled in a leather chair that had once belonged to his father. He knew that men must pay for their mistakes, for even men who tried to do good in the world were touched by original sin. Wicked actions sprang from a few moments of weakness in the face of the sinful ways of the world and all its indecent enchantments. Women could destroy men, he was sure of it, as Eve had tempted Adam. This was the reason women were not allowed to speak in church. To merely look upon them could cause vile thoughts, and soon enough such thoughts could become deeds. Hathorne believed that God and his angels moved through the mortal world, but the devil walked among them as well.

That night he fully admitted to himself that he had erred and veered onto a dark and unexpected path. Hathorne made no more excuses. He had sinned. He fell into a sort of madness as the two sides of him warred, the one who was the man who swam with a turtle, the other his father’s son. He stood at the window, looking into the dark. Halfway through the night, when the stars had filled the sky, Hathorne considered breaking faith with everything and everyone he had ever known and imagined taking Maria and their child back to Cura?ao. But those treacherous thoughts lasted for only an hour or two, a heedless period of sin and lust, during which time he forgot he was a man with a family and a duty to the world in which he lived. Hathorne went to the shed and beat himself until his back was bloody and he gasped with the pain he’d inflicted upon his flesh. He could not do as he pleased. This wasn’t the land of the turtles and rose-colored birds, but a world whose only palette was black and white, where it was hard to think or move or breathe, and sleep was often impossible, for with sleep came dreams, and that was something he must avoid.



* * *



People said that a black bird was circling the magistrate’s house each and every day. It dropped stones, one after the other, and there was a pelting sound that echoed down the street. By summer, crowds came to Washington Street so that they might stand on the corner and gawk. Most people believed such an event portended a curse, and neighbors began to close their shutters, as Ruth Hathorne had done on the day the witch first appeared, even though the heat had become oppressive. Bad fortune could move from house to house, it was contagious, and if there was magic it was best to lock oneself away.

The crow stole flowers from gardens, and when he spied children’s shoes left on porches so that the mud on their soles could dry, he took them, too. He pulled open shutters and flew through windows to steal silver wedding thimbles, given here in lieu of rings, for a ring was nothing more than vanity and a thimble could be put to good use. Women’s fingers bled as they did their sewing, and they found themselves weeping and wishing they’d had another life, for the crow reminded them of who they might be if they’d been allowed to make their own choices. The crow was so brazen he pulled the white caps off their heads as they walked to church on Sundays. He woke newborn babies from sleep with his clattering, and set people’s nerves on edge. John Hathorne watched the crow from his garden and decided that something must be done. Time and time again, the crow perched in the tree with the black leaves, as if announcing John’s guilt. He could not have this creature denounce him in the face of others.

Hathorne gathered the men in town to say the crow was more than a pest. He was a creature sent by evil powers, an evil they must resist. They went out with their rifles, stalking through the fields that separated Salem Town from the forests where not long ago these same men had pursued the Wampanoags, murdering and beheading as many as they could find. The settlers felt this land was theirs now. They’d taken it in battle, and a crow was not about to spook their families and get away with what was not merely mischief, but clearly something darker, something that boiled the blood. Large numbers of crows had been roosting in trees at the edge of town, and to men intent on murder, one dead crow was as good as another. It would do them well, they soon decided, to kill one and all. They walked past rye and corn, and alongside wild blackberries and saplings that would become pear trees, if they weren’t broken by these men’s boots. They walked past the wild red lilies that grew nowhere else. Across the sky there were banks of clouds. A hunt made men feel they could protect what was theirs; spirits were high, and for miles it was possible to hear the hollering and shouts that rose up.

They waited through the heat of noon and the dullness of a stifling afternoon into the falling dusk, when the air was thick with black gnats. By then an odd silence had settled, something uncomfortable. Still no crows flew overhead. A band of men was sent ahead to flush out the birds, Hathorne in the forefront, for his neighbors were fighting evil on his behalf. Privately, he wished Maria’s crow would simply disappear, and take her along, like a fever dream that vanished in a blink. But just as darkness was about to fall, a huge number of crows came flocking from the north, a thousand or more. At once, the men began to fire their rifles. They shot wildly and blindly, and several grazed their fellow bird-hunters by accident. One fellow was shot through the throat, and he lay in a pool of his own blood, and not even a kerchief tied around his neck could stop the gushing. The men went wild when they could not rouse their fellow hunter, and they set to firing off rounds as if in war. John sank back from them, for he stood out in the crowd; he was the tallest among them, and the wealthiest, and the reason why there had been a death on this day. He knew how easily people could turn on each other, how a man could be a hero one moment, and the cause of resentment the next. How he wished he had never been to that cursed island, or gone to sea, or told Maria about Essex County. And yet he imagined leaping into the blue-green water, thousands of miles from here, in a land where no one followed the rules set forth, where a sin might float like a flower in a fountain and a man was free to do as he pleased.