AT SCHOOL WE’RE learning about the Salem Witch Trials. Between 1692 and 1693, Mrs. Crowley tells us, 250 women were accused of witchcraft, 150 imprisoned, and 19 hanged. They could be convicted by “spectral evidence,” an accuser’s assertion that they appeared in ghostly form, and “witches’ marks,” moles or warts. Gossip, hearsay, and rumors were admitted as evidence. The chief magistrate, John Hathorne, was notoriously ruthless. He acted more like a prosecutor than an impartial judge.
“He’s related to us, you know,” Mamey tells me when I relay this lesson after school. The two of us are sitting by the Glenwood range in the kitchen, darning socks. “Remember those three Hathorn men who left Salem in the middle of winter? It was fifty years after the trials. They were running from the shame.”
Pulling another sock out of the pile, Mamey tells me about Bridget Bishop, an innkeeper accused of stealing eggs and transforming herself into a cat. Bridget was an eccentric whose colorful clothing—a red bodice covered with lacework, in particular—was believed to be a sign of the devil. After two confessed witches testified that she was part of their coven, she was arrested, thrown into a dank cell, and fed rotten tubers and broth. It took only a few days in those conditions, Mamey says, for a respectable woman to resemble a trapped and desperate animal.
In the courtroom, in front of a jeering crowd, John Hathorne asked her, “How do you know that you are not a witch?”
She answered: “I know nothing of it.”
Justice Hathorne narrowed his eyes. Lifted his index finger. When he jabbed it at her, she stepped back as if struck. “Why look you,” he said. “You are taken now in a flat lie.” He slammed the flat of his hand on the table in front of him—Mamey slams her hand down, demonstrating—and the accusers and spectators erupted in a frenzy.
Bridget Bishop knew it was over, Mamey says. She’d be condemned to death like the others, left to swing on Gallows Hill until someone took pity and cut down her corpse, probably in the middle of the night. Like many of the condemned she was a middle-aged loner, with a house and property that had already been confiscated. Who was there to show support for her? Who would speak to her character? No one.
Eventually the governor of Massachusetts put a stop to the proceedings. One by one the magistrates of the Superior Court recanted, expressing remorse and sorrow about their rush to judgment. John Hathorne alone was silent. He never expressed the slightest regret. Even after his death twenty-five years later—peacefully, in prosperous comfort—his reputation for cold-blooded cruelty lingered.
Mamey tells me about the curse that Bridget Bishop placed on Hathorne’s descendants. Well, not a curse, exactly, but a warning, a reckoning. “You have to admire that woman,” she says. “Using the only power she possessed to instill the fear of God into him! Or the fear of something. But I believe it. I think your ancestors brought the witches with them from Salem. Their spirits haunt this place.”
“For goodness’ sake.” My mother sighs loudly in the next room. She thinks her mother fills my head with outlandish ideas. She thinks I should pay less attention to Mamey’s stories and more attention to my stitches.
WHEN I ASK Papa about the curse, he says he doesn’t know about that, but he does know the Hathorns were a notoriously unruly bunch. A fierce, rugged Scots-Irish clan who emigrated to New England from Northern Ireland in the 1600s, they quickly developed a reputation for sadism against their perceived enemies. “Beating Quakers, double-crossing Indians and selling them into slavery—things like that,” he says.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“I drank some whiskey with your grandfather once, a long time ago,” he says.
THE SPRING OF my tenth year, Mother is heavy with child. Mamey and I are doing most of the cooking, which at the tail end of a long winter consists mostly of old root vegetables from the cellar, dried fish and meat from the smoker, stews and chowders. It’s so cold and choppy on the water that Papa and Al can’t go out in the dory. Sam has a hacking cough and a runny nose. The earth is soggy; if I fall on my way to school, I end up mud soiled and damp skirted all day. None of us have much to be cheerful about.
On the way home from school one wet afternoon I see Papa’s buggy on the road ahead of me, a familiar badger shape with a blue bonnet on the seat beside him, and I know Miss Freeley is coming to deliver Mother’s baby. When I get home, my brothers and I sit in the kitchen with Papa. Rain pummels the roof and the windows, heavy, slurry, and we can all feel the dampness in our bones. I peel off my socks and drape them over the range. Even the wood smoke from the Glenwood is damp.
The birth is uneventful. Mother is used to this by now. But after Fred is born, she is different. Slow to rise when he needs her. She hands him to Mamey and goes back to bed in the middle of the day. When Fred cries for her milk, Mother turns the other way and Mamey has to stir together cow’s milk and water with a sprinkle of sugar. She puts a soapstone in the oven and wraps it in a cloth to put in his crib when he goes down for a nap, but it’s no substitute for his mama, she says.
Al and I hurry home from school to take Fred from his crib and rock him in the chair, give him baths in the tin tub. (Before we bathe him he smells sour and damp, like he’s been pulled out of a hole in the field. Afterward he smells like a puppy.) We all try to think of ways to cheer Mother up. Mamey makes pound cake with lemon peel, her favorite kind. Papa builds a four-drawer dresser for her linens. Blue is Mother’s favorite color, so I decide I’ll surprise her by painting some objects around the house a cheerful blue.
Al shakes his head when I tell him my plan. “Painting a chair is not going to help.”
“I know,” I say, but I hope maybe it will.
I ask Mamey’s permission, knowing Papa might not approve. “Splendid,” she says and hands me money for paint.
At the A. S. Fales & Sons General Store after school I pick up a gallon of the most vibrant blue on the chart, two horsehair brushes, a tin tray, and a can of turpentine, stashing it in the woods when I’m too tired to carry it all the way home. The next day, when I check the spot where I left it, it isn’t there. I’m afraid someone has stolen it, but when I get to the house, it’s sitting in the shed. “I still think it’s a silly idea,” Al says, “but I can’t let you do all the work by yourself.”
The wet paint is the color of the bluest feather on a bluebird, as shiny as the surface of a lake. With old rags Al and I wipe down the shed doors, the wagon rims and chassis, the sled and hayrack and geranium pots. Once we start painting, it’s hard to stop. We go back to Fales for more supplies and return to paint the front and back doors, all of the wagon beds.
When we persuade Mother to come downstairs and see what we’ve done, she pulls Al and me into a hug.
Slowly, things improve. As the weather warms, Mother and I resume our walks to Little Island at low tide, but now we bring my brothers too. Al runs ahead through the grass; Sam piles starfish in a tide pool. We roam the pebbled beach, searching for shells and stopping for a picnic under the old spruce tree. Mother takes baby Fred out of his sling and lays him on his back on the beach, where he coos and gurgles. I sit on a rock, watching her. She seems better, I think. But now and then I see her staring off into the distance with a blank expression on her face, and it worries me.
WHEN MRS. CROWLEY copies a poem by Emily Dickinson on the chalkboard in her neat cursive, the muttering begins.
“Did a six-year-old write that?”
“What are those dashes? Is that proper grammar?”
“My grandpa told me she was just a strange old lady. A spinster,” says Gertrude Gibbons, the class know-it-all.
“Emily Dickinson did have a quiet life,” Mrs. Crowley says, tucking a strand of gray behind her ear. “A man broke her heart, and she became something of a recluse. She only wore white. Nobody even knew she was a poet; she was admired for her beautiful garden. She would sit for hours at a little desk, but nobody really knew what she was doing. After she died, a folder of her poems was discovered in
a drawer. Page after page in her precise script, with very odd notations, as you can see. Hundreds and hundreds of poems.”
As I copy the poem on the chalkboard into my notebook I mouth the words to myself:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
“It doesn’t even rhyme,” Leslie Brown says.
“So what do you think it means?” Mrs. Crowley asks, holding the chalk in the air.
“I dunno. She feels like her life doesn’t matter?”
“That’s one interpretation. Christina, what do you think?”
“I think she feels like she’s different from most people,” I say. “And even if they find her strange, she knows she can’t be the only one.”
Mrs. Crowley smiles. She seems to be about to say something, then changes her mind. “A kindred spirit,” she says.
After class I ask her if I can read more poems by this poet I’ve never heard of. Picking up a small blue hard-backed volume on her desk, she shows me that Emily Dickinson often used “common meter,” alternating lines of eight and six syllables, a form more typical of hymns. That she wrote most of her poems in slant rhyme, in which the rhyming words are similar but not exact. And she employed a figure of speech called synecdoche, wherein the part stands in for the whole—“for example, here, in this poem,” Mrs. Crowley says, tapping a page and reciting the words aloud: “‘The Eyes around—had wrung them dry.’ What do you think this refers to?”
“Um . . .” I scan the first few lines of the poem:
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—
“The people standing around the bed, mourning the one who died?”
Mrs. Crowley nods. She hands me the book. “If you’d like, you may take this home for the weekend.”
Sitting on the front stoop of my house after school I thumb through the pages, alighting here and there:
This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me—
The simple news that Nature told—
With tender majesty . . .
The poems are peculiar and inside out, and I’m not sure I know what they mean. I imagine Emily Dickinson in a white dress, sitting at her desk, head bent over her quill, scratching out these halting fragments. “It’s all right if you don’t exactly understand,” Mrs. Crowley told the class. “What matters is how a poem resonates for you.”
What must it have been like to capture these thoughts on paper? Like trapping fireflies, I think.
Mother, seeing me reading on the stoop, dumps a basket of air-dried sheets in my lap. “No time for lollygagging,” she says under her breath.
NEAR THE END of eighth grade—the final year of Wing School Number 4, and the last year of any kind of schooling for most of us—Mrs. Crowley takes me aside during a lunch period. “Christina, I can’t do this forever,” she says. “Would you be interested in staying on for another few years, to get qualified to take over the school? I think you’d make an excellent teacher.”
Her words make me glow with pride. But at supper that evening, when I report the conversation to Mother and Papa, I see a look pass between them. “We’ll talk about it,” Papa says and sends me outside to sit on the stoop.
When he calls me back in, Mother is looking at her plate. Papa says, “I’m sorry, Christina, but you’ve had more schooling than either of us ever did. Your mother has too much to do. We need your help around here.”
My stomach plummets. I try to keep the hard edge of panic out of my voice. “But, Papa, I could go to school only in the mornings. Or stay home when I’m needed.”
“Trust me, you’ll learn more on this farm than you’ll ever learn from a book.”
“But I like going to school. I like what I’m learning.”
“Book learning doesn’t get the chores done.”
The next day I plead my case to Mamey. Later I hear her talking to Papa in a low voice in the parlor. “Let her stay in school a few more years,” she says. “What can it hurt? Teaching is a fine profession. And let’s face it: There’s not much else available to her.”
“Katie isn’t well, you know that. Christina is needed here. You need her here.”
“We can manage,” Mamey says. “If she doesn’t do this now, she might end up on this farm for the rest of her life.”
“Is that so intolerable? It’s the life I chose.”
“But that’s it, John. You saw the world and then you chose it. She’s never been farther than Rockland.”
“And remember what a success that was? She couldn’t wait to get home.”
“She was young and scared.”
“The wider world is no place for her.”
“For pity’s sake, we’re not talking about the wider world. We’re talking about a small town a mile and a half from here.”
“My decision is made, Tryphena.”
Telling Mrs. Crowley at recess the next day that I can’t stay in school is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. She is silent for a moment. Then she says, “You’ll be fine, Christina. There will be other opportunities, no doubt.” She seems a little teary. I am teary too. She has never touched me before, but now she puts her delicate hand on mine. “I want to say, Christina, that you are . . . unusual. And somehow . . .” Her voice trails off. “Your mind—your curiosity—will be your comfort.”
On the last day of school, I am so full of self-pity that I can hardly speak. On my way out the door I linger in front of Mrs. Crowley’s globe, ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalog, and turn it with a finger. The ocean is robin’s egg blue, with bumpy raised green and tan parts representing continents. I run my fingers over Taiwan, Tasmania, Texas. These faraway places are as real to me as the treasure buried in Mystery Tunnel. Which is to say: It’s hard for me to believe they actually exist.
AFTER I LEAVE school, time stretches ahead like a long, flat road visible for miles. My routine becomes as regular as the tide. I rise before dawn to collect an armload of firewood from the shed, dump it into the bin beside the Glenwood range in the kitchen, and go back for another. Open the heavy black door of the oven, use the poker to stir the ashes, find the faint embers. Add several logs, coax the fire along with kindling, shut the door and press my cold stiff hands against it to warm them. Then I rouse my brothers from bed to feed the chickens and pigs, the horses and the mule. They grumble all the way down the stairs about who scatters the feed, mucks the stalls, collects the eggs. While the boys are in the barn I fix a pot of boiled oats with currants and raisins for their breakfast and make sandwiches of butter and molasses on thick sourdough bread, wrapped in wax paper, for their lunches; gather vegetables and apples from the cellar, a basket looped over my arm as I make my way down the rickety wooden ladder.
Al forgets a book, Sam his pail, Fred his hat. When they’re finally out the door, I wash their dishes in the long cast-iron sink in the pantry. Then I start the process of baking bread, pinching off the sourdough starter I keep in the pantry, sprinkling flour over the wooden board. I make beds, empty night jars, limp to the garden to pick squash for a pie. After school, Sam and Fred help Papa in the barn and the fields and Al goes out in his boat. In the late afternoon, when the boys’ other chores are done, they work on the fish weir that stretches between Little Island and Pleasant Point. Before supper they have to be reminded to wash, to take their boots off, to come to the table.
I have plenty to think about, I suppose. Will the bread rise properly if I use a different kind of flour? How many servings will one anemic chicken provide? How much money will the wool of eight sheep bring in, after adjusting for expenses? I know how to get the hens to lay more: give them extra salt, keep the henhouse windows clean to let in light, grind lobster shells into their feed. Our healthy hens produce more than ou
r family can consume, so Al and I start selling the eggs. I spend several hours each month sewing bags out of cheesecloth to store them.
Despite my crooked hands, I am becoming a reasonable seamstress. In the afternoons I darn and patch the boys’ hard-worn trousers and shirts and socks and spruce up old dresses with new collars and cuffs. Before long I am sewing all my own skirts and blouses and dresses on Mother’s treadle Singer in the dining room, with its pretty red, green, and gold fleur-de-lis pattern, its rounded form like an arm bent at the elbow. From her book of patterns I learn to sew a three-panel skirt, and then one with five panels. Buttonholes are hardest; it takes my clumsy fingers ages to get them right.
Mother believes pockets on skirts are inelegant. She shows me how to sew a secret pouch into the lining so no one can see. “A lady doesn’t reach into her pocket in view of others,” she says.
I find her formality a little silly. It’s only us here, and the boys neither notice nor care.
With no running water, we collect rain and melted snow from gutters and downspouts in the large cistern in the cellar and dredge it up using the hand pump in the pantry. Al figures out how to attach a funnel from the downspout to a hose to collect water for the cistern, making the process more efficient. When we run out of water in the cellar, I harness our mule, Dandy, to a wooden drag loaded with two empty barrels, corral one of the boys to help, and lead her to the pasture spring half a mile away to fill them. Laundry, once a week, takes at least one full day, and sometimes two. I boil water on the range and pour it from the large black pot into a wide steel tub, then scrub the laundry on a ribbed washboard and run it through a handwringer before hanging the dripping sheets and shirts and undergarments to dry. It’s not easy, with my uneven balance, to pin clothes on the line outside, but I discover that I can detach the rope from the two poles on either end and pin the laundry on it while it’s on the ground, then raise the line, with damp clothes hanging from it like a charm bracelet. When it’s too snowy to go outside, I hang clothes in the shed. They stay damp for days; the smell of mildew lingers until spring.