“He was working on the scaffolding this morning. Painting.” Linda took a breath. “And for whatever reason, he didn’t have the safety harness on.”
“He fell,” Mike interjected. “Two stories at least. They’re in there now, pinning his leg.”
Connie felt her stomach lurch, her mind traveling back to the morning, seeing Sam, his mouth frothed with toothpaste, grinning at her over the kitchen sink. She wanted to reach forward, to grasp his arm, and a dark curtain of self-recrimination dropped over her, cursing her own inability to perceive that he would walk into danger when he left the house.
Don’t be ridiculous
, she told herself.
How could you possibly know that he would forget to put the safety harness on?
“No damn reason for him to have that job,” Sam’s father glowered, jaw muscles bunching.
“Michael,” Linda quelled him, placing her hand over his.
The three of them sat, Connie’s legs crossed at the knee and one foot hooked around her ankle, waiting in the hospital hallway. Time proceeded around them in bright, empty snapshots: two nurses, carrying lunch trays,
talking; a stooped janitor in coveralls, catching a mop bucket before it tipped; a tiny, withered man with a liver-spotted scalp, in striped pajamas, his wheelchair being pushed by a bitter-looking middle-aged woman. The lack of windows and constant blare of the fluorescent lights locked the hallway in a void where time felt difficult to gauge. Connie was not completely sure how long they sat waiting, but finally an earnest young doctor approached and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Hartley? Would you come with me, please?” Sam’s parents rose, Connie trailing after them as they followed the doctor into a room a few doors away.
She waited outside while his parents entered, knitting and unknitting her fingers. Now that she had had time to think about it, Connie could be pleasantly surprised that Sam had asked his parents to call her. Usually her reserve kept people—men especially—at a distance, but Sam was different. She felt at ease with him, comfortable. More herself. How was it possible to be more yourself when you were with another person? Connie always assumed that she was most purely herself when she was alone. She thought of Sam, grinning at her surprise when he dropped down from the roof of the church, thrusting a box of doughnuts into her hands. Her throat tightened. The door opened a crack, and half of Linda’s face appeared.
“Connie?” she asked. “You can come in, you know.”
Connie swallowed and pushed open the door.
Inside Mike and Linda stood grouped around a hospital bed, with the young doctor standing at the foot, examining a clipboard. In the bed, propped on several pillows, Sam lay, face wan, leg hoisted up by pulleys and straps. Several bars or pins extended from his shin, which was a mottled black and purple. Connie moved to the opposite side of the bed and smiled down at him. “Hello,” she whispered.
“Hey, Cornell,” he said, voice hoarse from fatigue. He attempted a smile, but it was unconvincing, and halfway through turned into a grimace. She reached down and took his hand between both of hers. To her surprise, she felt the disorder and confusion in his cells that is the result of extreme
and sudden pain. It was as if his body were still undergoing shocks that continued to ricochet through its closed system, unable to escape or quiet. Like ocean waves in a swimming pool.
She pressed his hand, weaving her fingers together around his palm, her awareness groping forward under his skin. She was stunned to find that her hands were gathering information about Sam, information that she did not know fully how to process. Since her experiment with the plants, Connie had found that she was more attuned, as if a heavy filter between herself and the world had been suddenly lifted away. The shift was daunting, incomprehensible. But now she received the incontrovertible impression that the disorder that was gripping his body extended somewhere beyond the catastrophe of the broken bones in his leg. Connie frowned, and she glanced over at the doctor.
“Well,” the doctor began, flipping through what must be Sam’s intake forms. “The good news is that the leg should heal nicely. He’s strong, and soon enough we’ll be able to have him in a cast and back home. There is one major caveat, however.” The doctor tucked the clipboard under one arm and clasped his hands together before his mouth, looking at Sam and at his parents in turn. They waited for him to continue, Sam’s grip tightening around Connie’s hand.
“I’m afraid that we also have to consider what may have caused the fall in the first place,” the doctor said.
“Should have been wearing his goddamn safety harness, is what,” Mike Hartley growled as Linda murmured, “Michael, please.”
“That’s not it at all, Mr. Hartley,” the doctor replied, unflappable. “Sam, how much do you remember from immediately before the accident?”
Sam licked his lips, and Connie watched him frown as he tried to push through the haze of receding anesthesia that was clogging his thoughts.
Sam cleared his throat.
“Not that much, actually,” he began, looking up at his parents. “I was finishing up the last of the gilding in the church cupola.” He paused, swallowing.
“I was kind of tired, ’cause I didn’t”—he glanced up at Connie—“didn’t sleep so well. So I climbed down to take a break. I had some water from the cooler that’s there, but it was…” He worked his mouth a little, his body recalling the taste. “It was…bad. Metallic. But I didn’t care. I sat in a pew for a minute, resting.”
He took a breath, lines of tension contracting around his eyes. “I climbed back up and went back to work.” He stopped, confusion sweeping across his face. “That’s all. That’s all I remember.” He looked up at Connie, perturbed.
“You don’t remember falling? Or the ambulance ride?” the doctor pressed.
“No,” Sam said, realizing the gravity of his situation. “I don’t even know who found me.” He looked back to his parents. “Who
did
find me?” They looked at each other but said nothing.
“Interesting,” said the doctor, making a note. He paused, looking gravely down at his patient. “Sam,” he began, “I believe that your fall was caused by a grand mal seizure.”
“What?” Sam asked as his mother said, “Oh, my God.” Mike put his hands on Linda’s shoulders, and Connie looked down at Sam. His face contorted in dismay. She swallowed and pressed his hand harder.
“In a generalized seizure of this type, occasionally a patient will experience what we call an ‘aura,’ which is often marked by drastic alterations in sensory perception or emotional state. Changes in the brain can sometimes cause the patient to experience strange tastes or smells. The metallic taste of the water and your unexplained fatigue, for example. In the second stage of a seizure like this, the limbs go stiff and the patient will fall, his limbs then launching into convulsions. The patient emerging from a seizure of this type will have no recollection of the event.”
The doctor continued to make notes, casting a critical eye on Sam. “I’m afraid that that is not all. Though we had you under sedation at the time, you underwent another seizure while we were operating on your leg, together with serious vomiting. Unfortunately you didn’t seem to respond to the an
ticonvulsant that was administered to you. Is there any family history of epilepsy or other seizure disorders?”
“No,” said Linda, appalled. She glanced over at her husband, who looked as though he had just caught a boulder hurled at his chest: crumpled over, out of breath, strained.
“Not that I know of,” Mike said, voice subdued. Sam, for his part, was growing more alert, edging up farther in his pillows and shifting his weight in the bed. Connie laid a hand on his arm.
“Does this mean that I could have another one?” Sam asked, looking levelly at the doctor.
“Unfortunately there is a strong possibility of that, yes.” As the doctor said this, Linda gasped, putting her hand to her mouth. “It’s a bit unusual,” the doctor commented. “We still have to determine if there’s a genetic component to it, or if there are any external factors in play. The vomiting, obviously, raises some serious questions, so I’d like to run some more tests. But it goes without saying that Samuel will have to stay here until we have been able to stabilize his condition. He is at risk of severely jostling the broken leg when his body is convulsing, to say nothing of the neurological implications. And there’s a risk of dehydration if the vomiting should return with the same degree of severity. I can’t let you leave until we’ve brought the situation under control.”
Sam’s parents looked from the doctor, to Sam, to each other. Connie gripped his hand tightly, one tear escaping out of the corner of her eye. She rubbed it away with her shoulder, unwilling to let Sam see that she was afraid.
“It is unusual for epilepsy to appear for the first time in adulthood,” the doctor continued. “Usually this syndrome first manifests itself late in childhood or during adolescence. Further, I do not yet have an explanation for the vomiting, which seems to occur independently of the neurological events. However”—here the doctor smiled, but Connie could read the anxiety that underpinned the doctor’s sheen of confidence—“my sincere hope is that we will have a more concrete treatment plan in place by this time tomorrow.”
The doctor shook hands with everyone in the room, brisk and businesslike. As Connie watched the doctor’s white coat disappear out the door of the room, the fear in her belly calcified into a cold, hard lump.
For she perceived, as clearly as if she were looking at a bright color photograph, that the doctor had no idea what to do.
Salem Town, Massachusetts
Late February
1692
T
he belly of the egg split open with one swift crack, spilling its slippery contents into a waiting hand. The hand’s fingers parted just a bit, allowing the viscous white to drip into a thick glass of water below, but retaining the round orb of the yolk. Mercy Dane sniffed at the yolk cupped in her hand, rolling it under her thumb. Its membranes gave a bit but held together, smooth and warm, and its color was a deep healthy orange. It smelled clean and earthy, nourished by wheat chaff and dried maize kernels. She slipped the yolk from her hand into a little earthenware bowl, where four or five others already sat, glistening in the dim light of the hall. Mercy’s mouth watered a little as she contemplated the custard that she would make later with the surplus yolks. A little milk, rye meal, some currants—she had squirreled some away a week previous—and molasses. She ran her tongue over her front teeth, behind her lips, imagining the smell of cooking pudding that was to come as she wiped the egg residue from her hands.
Meanwhile, the egg white had collected in a hazy cloud in the water glass, and her mother’s tired hand reached forward to grasp the glass, holding it aloft and turning it this way and that. She heard her mother murmur a phrase under her breath and replace the glass on the scarred board on trestles that served as the hall table.
“Well?” asked an anxious young woman’s voice. Mercy busied herself at the hearth, using a long iron hook to swivel a small, simmering cauldron a smidgen off of the hottest part of the fire. She was permitted to assist with her mother’s work, provided she keep her opinions to herself and not interrupt. The iron hook clattered against the hearth bricks as Mercy stoked the fire, sending a smattering of impatient sparks up and around the base of the cauldron. Though her back was turned to the two women seated at the table, Mercy felt her mother glower in her direction. A glance over her shoulder confirmed this guess, as her eyes met Deliverance’s silent glare. Mercy returned the look with a sulk and turned back to the greens boiling over the fire. She could not fathom that Mary Sibley.
Why would Mother attend to her? She’s just a meddling gossip, is all
, Mercy brooded. When she took up the craft herself, why, she’d sure forbear to meet with that Mary. Too right she should.
Deliverance Dane sighed, saying, “I cannot say, Mary. ’Tis a poor scrying glass withal.”
The young goodwife seated at the hall table twisted her handkerchief between grasping hands. “But, Livvy! You
must
see! ’Tis on three weeks now the girls are afflicted. Let us break another.” The matron reached for another egg from within the basket at her elbow, proffering a smooth, speckled orb. Deliverance raised one hand, fending off the egg that Mary Sibley thrust at her.
“And you are certain these hail from the Parris barn?” Deliverance asked, looking steadily at Goody Sibley.
“I was told so,” said Mary, her eyes slipping a fraction down from where Deliverance had held them.
“How came you to have them?” Deliverance asked, her voice weary.
“I cannot think the Reverend Parris would wish his eggs be used for divination.”
“You’ll ha’ not seen his Betty, then,” Mary whispered, eyes shifting left and right. “She is gripped with insensible speeches and fits most violent, and theah servant Abigail Williams, too. The reverend having no time to attend his bahn passes all his days in prayerful meditation.”
“Then with God’s blessing these girls shall recover their senses soon,” Deliverance said, rising to her feet. “How fare those greens, Mercy?” she said, moving nearer the hearth. She took up a rag and used it to lift the iron lid of the cauldron, sniffing at its bubbling contents. As she did so a cold gust of wind burst down the chimney, billowing ashes around the women’s feet. Mercy and Deliverance fell to shaking out their skirts, brushing away the grime lest a live ember should catch their clothes.
“Livvy!” Mary Sibley cried through the passing commotion, rising to her feet, her hands planted on the hall table. “He ha’ called in William Griggs!”
“Oh?” said Deliverance with indifference. “A goodly physician is Mister Griggs, I’m told.”
Mary hurried around the table, planting her hands on her hips as she came. She thrust her face near to Deliverance, so that even Mercy could feel her hot breath. “And Mister Griggs ha’ saith he sees the
evil hand
in this,” Mary said, teeth clenched. “Now cannow we look again?” She held out the egg, but Deliverance turned away. Mercy glanced from her mother to Mary and back again. It was unlike her mother to dissemble so.
“I cannot see, Goody Sibley. Perhaps the Devil clouds my sight,” Deliverance said. She looked back over at Mary, whose jaw was tight, and whose eyes were shining with anger. “We must place our trust in God,” Deliverance finished, folding her arms. “May His miraculous providences restore those girls to health. I feel sure ’twil be altogether over soon enough.”
Mary stamped her foot in frustration, and Mercy edged away from her, pressing her back to the wall as the young matron shouldered her way past her to the door. Deliverance watched her go, impassive. When she reached
the door Mary Sibley turned, fumbling with her heavy woolen cloak as she spoke.
“Them gahls are bewitched shah as I’m standing heah,” she said. “If you cannow see fit to help them, why, I’ll make a cake myself. Theh’s no talent to this!”
With a significant sniff she tied the cloak under her chin, flung open the front door, and stepped into the wall of cold out of doors, shutting the door with a slam behind her. A small flurry of snowflakes blew in after her, collecting in a drift over the floorboards of the entryway. When she was gone, Deliverance moved to the three-legged chair at the end of the table and settled herself in it, resting her head in her hands. Her fingertips drummed on the back of her coif.
Mercy pretended to tend the greens on the fire, and to check the progress of the bread loaf baking in the brick hollow oven in the hearth, but her attention was on her mother. She waited.
Deliverance sighed, bringing her fingertips to her temples, elbows resting on the tabletop. Mercy stole a glance at her and observed that Deliverance’s eyes were closed. “As if her cake will do a lick of good,” Deliverance said, mostly to herself, eyes still closed. Mercy took this comment as an opening, hanging the iron hook back amongst the other cooking implements near the fire and sitting at the table. She pulled over the bowl of yolks to start mixing the custard. As she sat, her feet under the table met a warm lump, which murmured at the touch of her toe. Most winters found Dog sleeping under the hall table, almost invisible in the darkness.
They sat for a few moments in silence, Mercy breaking the yolks with a wooden spoon and stirring in a spoonful of molasses. Presently she ventured to speak. “Why should you tell Goody Sibley you couldn’t see, Mother?” she asked. “You always see in the egg-in-water.”
Deliverance opened her eyes and looked at her daughter. When she gazed on her thus Mercy always felt like Deliverance could see directly through her, as if she herself were just an egg white suspended in a water glass. She averted her gaze, but her mother’s eyes lingered.
“How long since that shift was washed?” Deliverance asked, reaching out to finger the linen shirt at Mercy’s throat. “I’ve an old one in the trunk. We’ll air it out on the morrow.”
Mercy laid aside her wooden spoon and turned to face Deliverance. In the past year she had grown taller than her mother, and a little thicker, too. But still she was given no authority in this house, though she nearly ran it now. “
Why
, Mother?” Mercy demanded, growing impatient. “I’ll have you answer me!”
“Oh, you shall?” Deliverance said, with a mirthless laugh. “And what, pray tell, would you have me say, Mercy Dane?” She rose and moved to the window, rubbing aside some of the frost. The air by the window was colder, and Deliverance’s breath escaped in a visible film of vapor, collecting anew on the glass. “Shall I say the girls are dissembling?” she asked, coldly. “That they invoke diabolical influence to bring mere sport and variation to their sorry days? Then I shall be impugning the pastor’s daughter. I shall be calling her a liar, and so be open to the charge of slander, too, if I be proven wrong.
“Or”—she turned to face Mercy again, her arms folded over her chest—“shall I say that Mary Sibley be in the right, the girls are sure bewitched? What then?” She moved across the room, nearer to where Mercy sat by the fire. Deliverance reached forward and took a lock of Mercy’s hair where it hung folded over her shoulder, and rubbed the flaxen strands between her fingers.
“Whom do you think the townsfolk will look to?” she asked, voice soft. “How soon before all their healed calves and found pewter and well-timed plantings and soothed ailings vanish in their haste to find someone to blame?”
“But, Mother,” Mercy whispered, blue eyes wide and catching the flicker from the fire. “Lying is a mortal sin.”
Deliverance smiled down at the youthful girl seated at her hall table, long of leg and spotty-faced. “My immortal soul belongs to Jesus Christ,” she said, smoothing the lock of Mercy’s hair back into place. “To do with as
He will. If I am saved, it is by the mercy of His grace alone. And if I am damned”—she paused, still smiling, and Mercy felt a blackness gather in her chest—“then I shall spare my daughter in this life the torments that I must suffer in the next.”
T
HE FOLLOWING FEW DAYS PASSED AS MOST WINTER DAYS DID IN THE
Dane household. The two women lingered within a few feet of the hearth fire, baking bread, boiling cornmeal, squinting to mend clothes by candlelight, Dog snoring under the table. In the afternoons, Deliverance would pull out her book for Mercy to study by, draping first one dried herb, then another before the girl at the table, asking her to recite its name, properties, and uses in the same precise tone as she recited her catechism. Outside, the snow heaped up against their two-room house in a sloping white drift, pressing in against the hall windows, blowing down the chimney, and creeping in at the gap under the front door. They had few visitors, only neighbors running short of supplies and looking to make a bargain. Mercy bridled at the monotony, her fingers growing itchier with each passing day, yearning for some gossip from the village.
“I’ll go down to the wharves,” she announced the afternoon that March began, the cold still unabated. The world outside was one undifferentiated cloud of white. Mercy started pulling on her heavy cloak and rooting for one of Nathaniel’s old felt hats in the trunk at the foot of the bedstead in the keeping room. She had preserved most of Nathaniel’s clothes when he died the previous year—all but those he had been wearing in the accident. Sometimes in her mind’s eye she still saw the bright splash of red in the road, still heard the crunch of the splitting wagon wheel. She rubbed her eyes, pushing the unwelcome memory away. Mercy found herself resurrecting his old hats and blouses to wear when she was feeling most disagreeable and low. She felt that way more and more, it seemed.
“Whatever for?” Deliverance demanded from the doorway.
Mercy drew herself up to her full height, hoping to attain some semblance
of nobility in spite of the blue tinge of her lips. “I wish for news from the Farms,” she said, using the old-fashioned name for Salem Village.
The town of Salem, where they lived in their little house, a close walk to the waterfront, had grown at a steady pace over the past decades, and sometime previously had established an outlying region called Salem Farms to funnel food into the swelling city. By and by the Farms region obtained a degree of autonomy, changing its name to Salem Village. Even the area’s culture was different: the Villagers were country people, clannish and suspicious. Not ship people. Despite her growing stature, Mercy still felt rather small on the inside, overwhelmed by the pressing in of new faces around her. They streamed into town from “out the eastward,” the Maine frontier, where settlement had been pushed back by Indian attacks, and poured off of ships arriving from England. Each day fresh waves of strangers spilled over the streets of Salem Town, washing up into every corner of Mercy’s experience: at the market, at Sunday meeting, sometimes even into their shabby hall, seeking Deliverance’s various services. In a feeble effort to lay claim to her presence, Mercy had lately fallen into the habit of clinging to dated terms for the areas and squares around her. It peeved her whenever she caught herself doing it. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“You’ve no reason to wish for news from the Farms,” Deliverance said. “But as you’ve donned your cloak already, the cow could stand a feeding.” Deliverance turned back to the warmth of the hall as Mercy’s face contorted with anger at her thwarted plans.
“I’ve a mind to know what’s happened!” she cried, face red.
Deliverance turned back to face her, eyes cold. “We’ll be needing more wood for the kitchen fire as well,” she said, in the tone of voice that always signaled ultimate finality to Mercy, and which had begun to fray at Mercy’s nerves. Scolding and muttering, she gathered her cloak around her and groused out into the frigid afternoon.
The New England winter pressed against her as she stepped into the yard, chapping her cheeks and blowing her skirts out at an angle against her legs. As she plodded toward the cowshed behind the house, feet sinking
several inches through the crust of fallen snow, she felt with irritation a creeping sense of relief that her mother had forbade her to travel down to the wharves. Had Deliverance not forbidden her, she must needs have gone, for pride’s sake. And already her toes were fallen numb in her boots.
Within an hour or two, her chores were done, and she drew the rear door open with one mittened thumb, wrestling the split logs into a less cumbersome attitude in her arms as she edged her way through the doorway. She stamped her feet to loosen the worst of the ice and entered the hall, grunting with effort. Mercy dumped the logs in a heap near the fire and turned her face to the hearth, beating her mittens together to bring the blood and feeling back into her hands. As she turned back to the table and pulled off Nathaniel’s tattered hat, she started to find Sarah Bartlett’s great bulk seated at the table with her mother. Goody Bartlett’s face was grave, and her hands were clasped over Deliverance’s own as they whispered together. Deliverance looked up quickly, swallowed, and then said, “Here is Goody Bartlett with your news, Mercy.”