The room flickered with light; the beam of a flashlight dancing through the window.
“Helen?” Nate called, coming through the door, shining his light on her. “Helen, my god! What are you doing out here?”
“I . . .” She glanced to the center of the living room. Hattie and Jane were gone.
I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe I’m going crazy.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So I came up here. Thinking about the kitchen. What kind of countertops do you think would work with a slate floor?”
“Well, come back to bed, okay? It’s, like, three in the morning. I was worried sick when I woke up and couldn’t find you.”
“Sure,” Helen said, “of course. I’m sorry, I’m just . . . excited I guess.” She smiled what she hoped was a reassuring everything’s fine smile.
As they walked out the front door, she looked back over her shoulder and thought she just caught the outline of a simple stool sitting in the darkness. She closed the door.
CHAPTER 20
Jane
S SEPTEMBER 3, 1943
When Jane woke up, she didn’t know it was to be her last day on earth. She roused her children and husband, made coffee and oatmeal just like every other morning. Her husband, Silas, read the paper.
“More news about the war, Daddy?” her son asked.
“We sunk a Japanese submarine,” her husband said.
“Boom!” shouted the boy.
“No shouting or explosives allowed at the table, please,” Jane pleaded.
Her daughter scowled into her oatmeal, whispered to her doll.
Jane looked at the photographs of the people in the newspaper and thought she herself was not unlike them: a paper woman, one-dimensional. That’s what her family saw. But really, she was more like the chains of paper dolls her daughter would cut from leftover newspaper: folded together, she looked like one, but once you opened her up, you saw she contained multitudes.
There were stories, she knew, about people who led double lives. Spies. People who had affairs.
Everyone had secrets.
Everyone told lies.
She comforted herself with these facts. She told herself she was not alone.
Her husband, he knew nothing about her. Not really. He called her a good girl. She had told him she was an orphan and he took pity on her, said, “How terrible to have no one in the world.” And she cried. It wasn’t just for show. She cried because she knew he was right.
She missed Mama.
She missed her with the dull ache of a phantom limb, like some basic part of her had been ripped away.
And almost every night, in the darkest hours, she was back in that old root cellar in Hartsboro.
She would remember, with chilling detail, how she’d hid in the root cellar for what felt like days, though surely it was only hours. Time moved slowly in the dark, when you were alone with just your own grim thoughts and spiders to keep you company.
Crouched down in the bare dirt of the root cellar floor, listening carefully for the scuttle of a rat, she went over everything that had led her there to that moment. The root cellar was the only thing left from her mother’s family home, which had burned to the ground, killing Jane’s grandmother years before Jane was even born.
“Someone from town started that fire,” Mama told her once, when Jane had asked about the fire that had killed her grandmother, destroyed everything her mama knew and loved, leaving nothing behind but a cellar hole lined with rocks, some charred wood, lilac trees in the dooryard. And the old root cellar off behind the house. The fire didn’t damage that all. Over the years when she was growing up, Jane would go there and just sit, look at the jars of canned goods her grandma put up long ago. It was like going to a museum. The museum of What Came Before. Of the Breckenridge family house. Of glass jars full of applesauce and string beans labeled with her grandmother’s careful hand. She never stayed long and never closed the door, because there were spiders and rats living down there.
“Why did they start the fire, Mama?” Jane had asked.
“It was me they were trying to kill.”
“But why?” she asked. “Why would they want to burn you up?”
“Fear is a funny thing,” her mother said.
“Why are they afraid of you?”
“People fear anything different, anything they don’t understand.”
Jane knew this to be true, even at a young age.
Her mama had a gift, but not everyone saw it that way. It was funny, though—even the people who spoke ill of her, called her a witch and the devil’s bride, they’d come sneaking out to the bog, asking Mama for love charms, healing spells, asking her to tell them their future or looking for a message from a spirit who had passed. People were afraid of her mother, but they also depended on her, sought her out in times of need (though they would never admit this out loud).
Jane herself had been ridiculed, called the devil’s daughter. She’d been held down in the schoolyard, stuck with pins to see if she would bleed. Jane had none of her mother’s powers. The spirits did not speak to her. She did not see signs of what was to come in tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. She longed for the voices, the signs, but they did not come. What she did have, what she held on to fiercely, was fury. Fury that she had not been born special like her mama. Fury at the way she and her mother were treated. Fury at what the people in town had done to her grandmother.
All her life, she carried a box of matches in her pocket, waiting.
Earlier that morning, when the children had circled her in the yard outside the school, Lucy Bishkoff had pulled up her dress and pulled down her underthings to see if she bore the mark of the devil on her skin. Jane felt something breaking inside. A dam letting go, her fury pouring through, overtaking her. And then, for the first time in her life, she heard a voice, loud and clear: not the voice of a spirit, but the voice of her own rage. Punish them, it said. Punish them all.
When everyone was still outside, she went into the schoolhouse, snuck back to the supply cupboard, made a nest of crumpled paper, lit the edges with a match. Then she went back out and waited. Once everyone was inside, sitting down for lessons, she used the strongest branch she could find to bar the door.
Crouching in the root cellar hours later, her heartbeat pounding in her ears, she smelled the smoke on her clothing. Heard the screams of the children. They screamed and screamed and screamed in her mind. But she told herself they deserved what they got. The whole town deserved to be punished.
She waited in the dark root cellar, listening to the echoes of the screams, waiting. But Mama did not come for her.
Eventually, she grew tired of waiting; her legs had turned to pins and needles and she was cold all over. She cracked open the door, stepped outside, the afternoon sun blinding. She staggered, squinting like a mole-girl, and moved toward home, willing herself to be slow and cautious. Where was Mama?
When she got to the bog, she saw what was left of their little house was smoldering. Gone. All gone. There was a crowd gathered at the opposite end of the bog, by the big white pine. She moved closer, stealthily, and saw what they were all looking at.
. . .
At first, when she ran away from Hartsboro as a girl of twelve, she didn’t know who she was without Mama.
She’d spent her whole life being Jane Breckenridge—daughter of Hattie, the witch of the bog, the most powerful woman in the county.
Then she was a no one. A street urchin with no last name. Smith, she said when she had to make one up. I’m Jane Smith. I come from downstate. By the Massachusetts border. My parents, they died when I was a baby and I was raised by an aunt, then she died. Now I’ve got no one.
People take pity on you when you are young and pretty and have a sad story to tell. People are drawn to sorrow.
She was taken in by a kind
Baptist family in Lewisburg—the Millers. They had a large farm outside of town. Jane learned to rise in the dark hours before dawn to milk the cows, gather eggs from the hens, collect wood for the old cookstove in the kitchen. She went to church and prayed, read the Bible each night. Learned to fit in. To be someone else.
And now, now Jane was a married woman with children of her own. Her son, Mark, he was a good boy. At eleven, he looked more and more like his father every day. He took after him, too—did well in school, was strong and well-liked. But her girl child, Ann, Jane worried for her.
And, if the truth be told, Jane was actually frightened of her.
The girl knew things. Things no six-year-old should know. Things that she said her toys and dolls told her. She had a favorite doll that she was always whispering to. It was a doll Ann made herself from rags and scraps from her mother’s sewing basket—she loved to sew, Jane’s girl. The doll was a funny-looking thing: a patchwork of colors with a pale face, embroidered mouth like a red flower petal, and two black button eyes. Her hair was a tangle of black yarn braided together.
“What’s your dolly’s name?” she’d asked Ann, not long after she’d made her.
“She’s Hattie,” Ann said.
Jane stepped back, clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Ann giggled, thought Jane was laughing, too. “It’s a silly name, isn’t it?” she said, grinning. “It must mean she likes hats!”
Jane had never told her about her grandmother. About her real name or where she’d come from. No one living knew the truth about Jane.
“Hattie says hello,” her little girl told her. “She says she knows you.”
Jane felt as if she’d been submerged in cold water—the water back at the center of the Breckenridge Bog. She felt it pulling on her, sucking her down.
“Of course she knows me,” Jane said, forcing the words out through her too-tight throat. “She’s your doll. She lives here in our house.”
“No,” she said. “She says she knows you from before.”
Jane didn’t respond. How could she?
Before.
Before.
Before.
She tried to remember before, and what came back strongest was the smell of that damp root cellar she hid in, waiting for Mama to come. But she never did.
And what she saw when she got to the bog and peered through the circle of people gathered there:
Mama was hanging from a rope tied to a branch of that old pine, dangling, lifeless. She swung in small, slow circles like a strange pendulum.
Jane had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from screaming back then as well. She bit down, chewed at her palm until she tasted blood.
She sat there, crouched down in the bushes, and watched as the men cut her mother down, stuffed her dress full of rocks, and dragged her out into the middle of the bog, the deep place where the spring came up.
“The spirits will protect us,” Mama had always promised.
Now, years later as an adult with children of her own, her chest grew cold and tight as she remembered her mother saying those words. Of how earnestly she’d believed them.
“Hattie says she loves you,” her daughter told her, clutching the terrifying doll in her arms. “Do you love her, too?”
“Of course I do,” Jane said.
When she went in to tuck her daughter in at night, she covered the doll’s face with a blanket; sometimes, if Ann was already asleep, Jane would take the doll out and hide it under the bed or in a dark corner of her closet.
But somehow, each morning when Ann woke up, Hattie the doll was beside her once more, peering up at Jane with her shiny button eyes when she came in to draw back the curtains and say, “Good morning.”
“Hattie says you shouldn’t go to work today,” Ann announced this morning as she clutched at her gruesome little doll. Its button eyes seemed to watch Jane, to give a familiar little glint when she dared look in her direction.
“Whyever not?” Jane asked, spooning more oatmeal into Ann’s bowl. Mark and his father had gone outside to feed the dog and chickens.
“Something bad is going to happen,” Ann said, pushing the bowl away. “She says you’re going to make something bad happen.”
“Me? All I’m going to do is run those old looms.”
“Please, Mama,” she said, her brow furrowed like an old lady’s, not like a little girl’s.
“Don’t be silly,” she told her. “Eat your breakfast and get ready for school. I’m going to work, just as I do every day.”
But when she got to the mill, Jane realized she should have listened.
Tom Chancy, the foreman, told the women they were behind—they’d gotten too lazy, too slow, and if it kept up, he was going to dock their pay. “No more midmorning breaks,” he announced when he gathered them all in a circle for a meeting before the first work bell rang. There were murmurs of dissent. “And no one,” Tom said, voice rising above all the mumbled complaints, “I mean no one, is to leave their workstation until the bell rings at noon!”
“What about cigarettes?” Maggie Bianco asked.
“You’ll wait till noon. If any one of you is foolish enough to try to sneak a smoke in here, you’ll be fired instantly.”
The women wouldn’t dare. They all knew how flammable the very air was, full of cotton dust that could ignite, send the whole mill up in a great ball of flames.
“Well, what if we’ve got to use the john?” Mildred Cox wanted to know.
“Then you’ll hold it.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then you’ll piss down your leg, I imagine,” Tom said.
The bell rang and the women went to work, annoyed, sure—but there was no point in grumbling. They quickly settled at their stations, running the looms. The sound was deafening but comforting to Jane. The whole room vibrated, smelled of hot grease and warm cotton. Their fingers moved quickly, deftly, over the machines. About ten o’clock, Tom came by Jane’s loom, stood behind her, said he needed to speak with her a moment. In the office. He took her into his office, a tiny box of a room with shelves and a desk stuffed full of piles of paper. Tom shut the door and Jane’s heart grew cold.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“The other girls look up to you,” he said.
She nodded. It was true. She was older than most of them, had been here longer. That counted for something. She’d learned to get by. To keep walking when Tom gave her bottom a pinch or when he stood so close behind her that she could feel his privates pressed against her. She recalled her first day on the job over ten years ago now, how Tom had seemed so kind, had said he knew her husband’s family and was happy to hire her despite the terrible state of the economy. “We’re in a depression, you know,” he reminded her. She told him she understood and would work hard, that he wouldn’t be sorry he’d hired her. And she had kept up her end. She didn’t smoke or gossip. She did good work and showed the new girls how to do good work, too. She didn’t reckon she’d been late to work one day in ten years.
“I’m going to be making cuts,” he said this morning, “letting some of the girls go.”
Jane stiffened.
“Do you want to keep your job, Mrs. Whitcomb?”
“Yes, of course.”
She needed the job. Silas was not bringing in much pay. He’d lost his job at the bank and was logging now—work that didn’t suit him and didn’t pay nearly as much. Everyone in town knew this, Tom included.
Tom came toward Jane, put his big, dirty hand on her hip, pulled her to him.
Jane pushed away.
“I thought you wanted to keep your job?” he asked, coming closer. He smelled like sausages and tobacco. His teeth were brown.
He put one hand at her waist and began tugging at her dress with the other, and just l
ike that, she was back down on the ground of the schoolyard in Hartsboro, a circle of children around her, taunting, tugging at her clothes, exposing her, looking for the devil’s mark.
What they didn’t know, what she herself didn’t fully understand until that day, was that mark was not out on her skin, but somewhere deep inside her.
She felt it surface once more as she gathered all her strength, planted her hands on his chest, and shoved. He stumbled a step backward, his rump hitting his desk. Jane lunged for the door but stopped when he spoke.
“You’ll finish up your day today,” he snarled, eyes furious. “And then you’re fired.”
“You can’t do that!” she said.
He smiled a sickening smile. “Are you sure about that, Mrs. Whitcomb?”
“I’ll tell my husband,” she said.
He laughed. “Tell him that you made improper advances toward me in a pathetic attempt to keep your job after I told you cuts would have to be made? Do you really want to go stirring up that kind of trouble, letting the whole town hear about the sort of woman you really are?”
Tears blurred her vision. She hurried back to her looms, blood pounding in her ears. She began to work, walking around the looms, checking the warps, watching the thread unspool, feeling the quality of the cloth as she always did. But a rage boiled inside. She pictured Tom Chancy’s face, his filthy hands, and imagined terrible things. She imagined him suffering. Screaming.
Jane remembered her daughter’s words: Something bad is going to happen. You’re going to make something bad happen.
And she felt for the matches in her pocket. They were always there, waiting, making her feel safe, powerful. A talisman.
Punish him, the voice inside told her. Make him pay.
She went over to the corner, to one of the bins of cotton just outside the door of Tom’s office. She glanced around—none of the other workers were watching, all focused on their looms, perhaps hoping to avoid getting involved in whatever trouble Jane Whitcomb may be in. They certainly wouldn’t hear the quiet scritch of the match striking over the din. She lit the match, held it to the cotton, watched it catch. Just like that, she was a little girl again, hearing her mother’s voice: The spirits will protect us.
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