The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  Two Psalters followed, and then what looked like a ship’s log, a cursory glance at which suggested that it had been kept by the captain of a clipper trading guano fertilizer and molasses out of the Salem port. Connie next pulled down a hymnal from the First Church by the Sea, Congregational—had Granna just walked off with it?—published in the 1940s. Connie blew an exasperated breath through her nose and slid the hymnal back into the shelf, where it met with some resistance and a gentle crunching sound. Gingerly Connie threaded a finger behind the book, bracing herself for something unsavory—a mouse skeleton, a beetle shell. Instead she pulled forth a tiny corn husk doll, dressed in a scrap of dimity with a faded yarn bow around its neck. On the husk knot that was its head, someone had crayoned a wide orange smile.

  “Weird,” Connie murmured, turning the little effigy over in her hands. As she did so she felt a sharp nip, and pulled her thumb away to observe a round, crimson bubble of blood rising from the grooves of her thumbprint.

  “Ow!” she said aloud. Looking closer, Connie withdrew a slender needle, still entangled with thread, from where it had been stored in the folds of the doll’s dress. She stood, settling the little doll next to the picture of Grace and Lemuel on the mantel as she soothed her injured thumb with her lips. She gazed at the doll, frowning. Its orange grin smiled back at her. The little doll seemed too old to have been a toy of Grace’s, and yet it was hidden behind a book of relatively recent vintage. She supposed it could have been Granna’s when she was a girl. Grace could have played with it, hidden it away, and forgotten. Connie would ask her when she called tonight. Assuming Grace was there to answer the telephone.

  A further hour spent perusing the books on Granna’s shelf revealed only the standard tomes of the New England middle class: hardbound selections from the Book-of-the-Month Club, worn from rereading and without dust jackets. Several nineteenth-century books of history, three or four volumes of math puzzles, a guide to strategies in duplicate bridge. The Yachtsman’s Omni bus. A handful of texts on horticulture and garden cultivation. And, yes, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing that spoke to her hypothesis, and nothing—other than the first Bible—from the seventeenth century.

  Connie shifted her eyes around the sitting room, alighting first on the desiccated plants dangling in the windows, then roving over to the Chippendale desk. Her eyes lit up. Connie hurried to the desk, running her hands over its dense, polished cherrywood, feeling for she knew not what. Perhaps a drawer that the antique key would unlock? She had tried it in the front door and a few of the chests in the dining room, to no avail. Oftentimes these desks included a removable panel in the center front between the cubbyholes, masking a secret repository for important papers. Her fingers lit upon a little ledge underneath the writing surface, and her pulse quickened. A concealed drawer? She got to her hands and knees to look under the desk. No drawer—just a strut, awkwardly nailed in place by someone who did not know how to repair colonial furniture. Connie laughed at herself. Ridiculous. There would be no hidden book in this desk. It held only old receipts from the greengrocer, crumbling pencil erasers, a few jotted reminders that Granna had left behind when she died.

  The sunlight was beginning to drain away from the windows, retreating behind the advancing dusk. In the half-light of early evening, Connie always thought she detected movement in the corners of the house, just beyond the reach of her peripheral vision. Whenever she turned to face the flickering, it disappeared. Mice, she suspected, through she had not caught any in the traps she had scattered along the yawning seams between the walls and the floorboards. Soon it would be too dark for her to look. She almost felt as if the house were hastening the coming dark, to push her away from prodding through its secrets.

  Connie struck a match from the box on the old kitchen mantel in the dining room and lit the oil lamp, rolling down the wick until the tongue of flame settled into a round glow. The dining room held several closed sea chests and a built-in wall of dishes and crockery, which Connie had not yet been able to bring herself to clean. She carried the lamp over to the mantel, gazing down at the assortment of iron bars and hooks that bristled from the wide, empty hearth. When the house had first been built, this hearth had been its epicenter. A few ashes still sat collected at the bottom of it, cold and abandoned. She placed the lamp on the mantelpiece, resting her elbow next to it and gnawing on a knuckle.

  Connie ran a finger through the layer of dirt along the crockery shelf, leaving a naked trail along the wood in its wake. She would have to wash off all of these dishes eventually. Box them up. Sell them. The enormity of the unpleasant task made Connie feel tired, overwhelmed. She pulled one of the shield-back chairs out from the table and sat, resting her chin on her hand as darkness gathered in the silent house. Across the room, between two more deceased hanging plants, a three-quarter portrait of a brunette woman with pale blue eyes smiled primly down at her, dressed in the narrow waist and sloping shoulders of the 1830s.

  “What are you looking so smug about?” Connie asked her. The portrait, unsurprisingly, said nothing. Instead, two small dog feet planted themselves in her lap, and Arlo’s nose worked its way under her arm.

  She looked down into the animal’s eyes and smiled. “I think that’s a great idea, Arlo,” she said, getting to her feet.

  THE DAY’S HEAT HAD APPARENTLY BEEN PRESSING INTO OTHER HOUSES in Old Town, Marblehead, as well, and so the small downtown block was almost crowded by the time Connie rounded the corner on her way to the telephone booth. The windows of the ice cream shop were jammed with teenagers, all elbows and legs, reveling in the air-conditioning. Down the street, noise poured from the open front door of an Italian restaurant as the teenagers’ parents clustered at the bar. Cheers erupted in response to a baseball game on the bar television. A coterie of boys rolled by on skateboards, and Arlo took cover behind Connie’s legs as they passed.

  “Wimp,” Connie said to him. She pulled open the phone booth door, draped her towel over her shoulder, and dialed New Mexico.

  She was completely unprepared when Grace answered on the first ring. “Mom?” she said, unable to conceal her surprise.

  “Connie! I’m so glad I caught you,” said Grace Goodwin, her voice cheerful.

  “I called you,” said Connie before she could stop herself.

  “Oh, my darling. Always so literal. But how are things? How are you finding the house? Have you settled in?” Grace always sounded so positive. This trait used to irritate Connie no end when she was a teenager. Now she found herself appreciating it; she discovered that she was smiling.

  “Yes, thanks, but you were right—the house is a disaster. I’m amazed it’s still standing, quite frankly. The garden’s gone positively feral.”

  “Yes, well, your grandmother always said that the old ways of doing things were better.” Grace chuckled. “I presume she would have put house construction in that category as well. But tell me—how are you liking being there?”

  “It’s…different,” Connie admitted. “It’s not Cambridge, to say the least.”

  “Indeed not,” Grace agreed. Connie wondered what Grace had been doing, that she was so near the telephone. She closed her eyes, groping her imagination forward as she tried to picture the raftered living room of her mother’s adobe house. She pictured Grace sitting in her deep Mission armchair, jeans rolled up, feet sunk in a wide metal bowl full of something aromatic. Connie worked her own feet unconsciously, and felt her arches ache.

  “What were you doing today?” she asked, pulling on the telephone cord.

  Her mother sighed. “Oh, you know. Not much. I went on a desert hike with my women’s group. Four hours, up and down these rocks and things. And I wore espadrilles, if you can believe it,” Grace said, laughing at herself. “Talk about poor planning.”

  Connie smiled, privately amused that she had surmised correctly. “Mom,” she said, venturing a guess. “Do you know anything about someone named Deliverance Dane?”

  “Who?” Grace asked
, incurious. Connie imagined her leaning her head back against the deep armchair, eyes closed. It would just be sunset in Santa Fe. In the street outside the telephone booth where Connie stood, a boy pedaled by on a bicycle, causing a pickup truck to screech to a halt. The driver’s arm extended from the window of the truck, and he hurled epithets that Connie could not hear. Arlo scratched at the glass door, and Connie held up a finger to indicate that he should wait.

  “I found that name on a slip of paper hidden in a key inside one of Granna’s Bibles,” Connie said. “I think she might have been caught up in the Salem witch trials. I was looking through the house tonight to see if I could find anything else, but so far there’s been nothing. I wondered if you knew anything.”

  Connie heard her mother laugh softly. The sound went on for a while. “Oh, my darling,” she said. “You and your history. Now, don’t get angry,” Grace began, and as she said it Connie steeled herself to do exactly that. “But have you ever considered that you might prefer to spend time thinking about people who are long gone because you are a tad overwhelmed by knowing people fully in the present? Let’s focus on the now. Tell me about how you are doing.”

  A red burst of anger exploded across Connie’s eyes, and she fought the urge to hang up. “Mom, it’s my work. My research is how I’m doing.”

  “Nonsense,” Grace said smoothly. “I can tell by your color that there’s something else going on.” This was Grace’s way of saying that Connie’s aura had changed, and Connie had to struggle to contain her irritation. She pinched the bridge of her nose, squinted her eyes closed and counted silently to ten. “Is it a boy?” Grace asked coyly before Connie could speak again.

  “Actually, I have been having much more vivid daydreams since moving up here,” Connie said, divulging this detail as a sort of peace offering. “They appear, and then my head hurts afterward. I’ve been thinking maybe I should see a doctor.”

  “Oh, you don’t need a doctor,” Grace said, sounding unsurprised. “What are the dreams about?”

  “Granna mostly,” Connie said. “And of Lemuel, which is weird, since I never met him.”

  Grace was silent for a moment, and Connie felt remorse. She worried that the mention of Lemuel would sadden her mother. Grace sighed again.

  “Ah, you would have loved Dad,” her mother said, her voice a little wistful. “He wouldn’t have understood you, any more than he understood me, but he would’ve been crazy about you. I’m glad you’ve been thinking about him.”

  Connie swallowed, suddenly sorry for her irritation. Grace just had an idiosyncratic way of expressing things. Connie reminded herself that she had pledged to try to listen to the substance of what Grace had to say, rather than her language or her idiom. “That’s not all, Mom—” she started to say.

  “The thing about auras, Connie,” Grace said, interrupting her, “is that they have a way of lingering on things. Perceptive people can often pick up on these little remnants that get left behind. They can be surprisingly specific, you know. And I’ve always thought you were a very perceptive girl.”

  Connie felt an odd mixture of pleasure at her mother’s praise and aggravation at the subject matter. Auras, indeed. Connie was willing to believe that she had an active imagination, and willing to believe that she was lonely, and so inclined to look for things that might not be there. But that was as far as she was willing to go.

  “Mom, I’ve got to go,” she said. “There’s a heat wave over here, and this phone booth is killing me.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t a boy?” Grace asked, voice wary. “If there is, you should really tell me, my darling.”

  “Mom,” Connie said, exasperated. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you again soon, I promise. And you had better pick up.”

  Grace began to laugh, and Connie smiled. She started to hang up the phone, thought better of it, said, “I love you, Mom,” and waited.

  “I love you, too, my darling. Call me on Sunday if you like,” said Grace.

  “I will,” said Connie, cheeks flushed as she hung up the phone.

  WITH ARLO SNUFFLING IN HER WAKE, CONNIE TIPTOED DOWN THE wooden gangplank that led from the public park on the western shore of Marblehead harbor to the swimming raft that was anchored off the granite cliff face. The humid evening air had grown thicker and heavier since she left the house, and where it met the cool harbor water it congealed into a fog so dense that Connie could almost mold it into shapes, like clay. When she reached the raft, the fog closed off the gangplank behind her, and she found herself alone. She dropped the towel that she was carrying, and Arlo settled on it, stretching out his legs with a sigh. In the diffuse moonlight his fur looked mottled gray-black, almost invisible against the wood of the raft. Connie paused, inhaling the briny smell of the sea, and listened.

  Only the muffled clanking of sailboat rigging through the mist told her that boats were moored sixty feet away from where she stood. The water slopped against the side of the raft, calm and waveless. She sighed with relief, pulling off her sweat-stained T-shirt and stepping out of her cutoffs until she stood in her underwear, invisible in the dark. The fog felt cool and comfortable against her skin, and she slid noiselessly into the harbor, feeling the heat from her suffering body pulled away by the delightful embrace of the salt water. Connie dropped beneath the surface, swimming sightless through the black night water, the silence closing in around her, conjuring nights stealing naked into Walden Pond when she was a child.

  Her face broke through the membrane of the harbor surface some distance away, and she found that the fog curtain had obscured the image of the raft. Stretching out on her back, she floated, a pale island in the night. She was glad that she had reached Grace. Though their conversation had been vexing at times, she nevertheless felt reassured. And she hadn’t even told Grace that she had been to the sail loft! Connie grinned, a little salt water leaking into the corners of her mouth. She would tell her on Sunday. She reached one hand up to touch the fog, trailing her fingers in the mist.

  A bark rang out, dampered by the moisture in the air, and Connie raised her head, treading water. “Arlo?” she called out. Happy whimpering answered her call, and then she heard a splash. She started to swim back in the direction of the raft.

  The fog trailed apart as she advanced, and she could tell by the shift in vibration that there was something in the water with her. “Arlo?” she called again, casting her arms before her for the paddling shape of her dog. Her hand struck something, and a voice said, “Watch it!”

  Connie cried out in surprise, and the voice said, “Connie?”

  She looked closer, and saw that the lumpen shape emerging through the mist in front of her belonged to a young man, who seemed to be hanging on to the raft with one arm. Above him the silhouette of her dog stood, tail vibrating. “Sam?” she asked, unbelieving.

  “Hi!” he said, letting go of the raft and sidestroking over to her.

  She laughed once, utterly surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  “Swimming,” he said, with authority. “Ask me another one.”

  She batted some water at him impatiently. “I mean, what are you doing swimming here? You live one town over!”

  “And have you ever seen Salem harbor? It could spontaneously ignite, it’s so polluted. I swim here all the time.” He ducked his head under the water, rising again with his head tipped back to smooth the hair out of his eyes. The moonlight shone on his skin as the water ran down his face in rivulets, glinting on the small ring under his nose. Connie wondered how long he had had that. She usually detested jewelry on men, but Sam’s nose ring looked unconventional. Dangerous.

  “So, I met Arlo,” Sam remarked, breaking into her thoughts. “He’s pretty cool. Didn’t bite me, anyway. Though I don’t think he’d let me steal your towel without a fight.”

  “He wouldn’t,” she said, mouth twisting into a wicked smile. She paddled leisurely away from the raft, and he followed behind her.

  “So,” he ventured as
they swam, “any developments on your favorite witch?”

  Connie rolled her eyes and kicked out with one foot, directing a focused splash squarely into his face.

  “Hey!” he sputtered, flailing. “What was that for?”

  “For talking about work when it’s too hot,” she said. “And I’m not afraid to do it again.”

  “Fair enough,” Sam said, chastened. “We will not discuss work.” He paused, creeping closer in the water and shifting his eyes left and right. Connie watched him, treading water. Her pale shoulders just emerged from the black harbor surface, and her unbraided hair swirled around her in the water, dark brown brows swept together over her eyes. “You know, it might be dangerous for us to be out swimming here this late at night,” he said, voice low.

  “Why is that?” she said, dropping her voice as well.

  “Well,” he said, assuming a mock-serious tone, “because of the squid.”

  “The squid,” she repeated, arching one eyebrow.

  “Oh, yes. The rare North American poison-spitting squid. They only come out to hunt in the fog. If you feel something brush against your leg”—he moved still closer, dropping his voice to a whisper—“it’s probably already too late.”

  Connie felt a set of toes grope across her knee under water, and she reached one hand down, grasping the ankle that belonged to the foot and hoisting it up out of the water. “Hey! I got one!” she exclaimed in triumph as Sam pitched backward, ducking his head below the surface in a froth of laughter. “Oh, wait—this one is covered in tattoos,” she remarked, inspecting the leg as Sam’s arms waved and splashed for the surface. He wrenched the leg away and, gasping, splashed after her as she paddled away, laughing.