The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “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.”

  THE 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 a
way. 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.”

  The girl lowered herself onto the hard bench drawn up to the table and watched the two older women. “Good noon, Goody Bartlett,” she said, and folded her hands in her lap.

  “And to you, Mahcy,” said Sarah Bartlett, her usually ruddy face turned gray by cold or worry, Mercy could not tell which.

  “Go on, Sarah,” Deliverance said. “Mercy ought to hear as well.”

  Sarah Bartlett looked from Deliverance to the girl and back again. “I suppose,” she said, unsure. She heaved a heavy sigh, shaking her head, wrapping her hands around the mug of hot cider that Deliverance had set before her. Mercy reflected that she had never known Sarah to cast a pall over any events. She was unaccustomed to seeing their neighbor so grave. “Things grow ugly, Livvy. I can make no sense of it. Of the morn I war tarryin’ in the Village,” she began. “They are altogethah distracted, the lot of ’em. Some gahls just younger than Mahcy heah, ’tis on a month they are in their fits, and the reverend’s daughter among ’em. Reverend Pahris, he is shah there be some diabolical mischief done in the Village. He ha’ spake against it in the pulpit, and urged the entire congregation to fast, and pray for God’s forgiveness. Then it passed that that Mary Sibley bade Tituba, she being the Indian woman in Pahris’s house, to make her a witch cake.”

  Deliverance groaned a little and shook her head. “And what receipt did she use, I wonder?” she asked dryly.

  Sarah smiled. “She took water of the afflicted gahls and mixed it with some rye meal and fed it to a dog, thinking the bewitchment should pass into the beast and the gahls would be delivered of their torments. Dogs being the known familiars of witches, she ha’ saith.”

  Deliverance sniffed with disapproval and took a swallow of her own cider mug. Mercy stifled a giggle, and her mother shot her an icy glare. Mercy pressed her lips together and arranged her face into a semblance of seriousness. Dull as a box of rocks, she thought to herself.

  “Reverend Lawson being called in to assist some days hence, he denounced this witch cake as diabolical means. No amount of theah sufferings must allow us to use the Devil’s tools, he saith, and from the pulpit, too!” Sarah exclaimed. “In that same meeting that Abby Williams bade him to name his text, and the Reverend Lawson doing so, she saith ‘It is a long text.’ Never in my life ha’ I heard such utterances, and to a dignified personage at that.”

  “Indeed,” said Deliverance, taking another sip of her cider. “Not the physick I would choose,” she remarked aside to Mercy, who nodded.

  “Why, Livvy, theh be more,” Sarah said. “They bade the gahls name theah tormentors, declare whose forms the Devil did take. This very week they called out against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and that Tituba herself!”

  Deliverance and Mercy exchanged glances. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were two notorious beggars in the Village, forever roving from house to house demanding food or lodging. Grasping, suffering women, they both struck fear into the hearts of the sturdy Villagers; they were avoided, as if their crushing misfortune might be catching. Tituba was an Indian servant in the Parris house, brought up with them from the Barbadoes islands. “Mary Sibley must walk with God, then,” Deliverance murmured. “How fortunate for her.” She rose, moving back to stare out the window.

  “Livvy, attend to me! Just today them three was brought to be examined in the meetinghouse!” Sarah cried.

  “What?” Deliverance asked, turning to face Sarah, who was still seated at the table.

  “Today, Livvy! And that Tituba, she ha’ confessed!” On the last word Sarah brought the flat of her hand down in a smack on the tabletop. Mercy’s eyes widened.

  “Merciful Jesus,” Deliverance whispered, bringing a hand to her temple. “But surely ’tis a lie. There be no diabolical workers here.”

  “Reverend Pahris saith she must come to Jesus and confess, and name what others walk with her.” Sarah swallowed, eyes burning with urgency. “Livvy, I come direct to tell you. That Peter Petfehd war at the meeting. He asked if Tituba evah walked with you.”

  Silence descended on the hall, and the blood drained out of Deliverance’s face until she began to sway, gently, where she stood. Mercy leapt to her feet and wrapped an arm around Deliverance’s waist.

  “Let us sit, Mama,” she said, easing her mother into the three-legged chair at the head of the table.

  “I…,” Deliverance said. “Mercy, I…” She gasped, appearing unable to draw her breath. Mercy fumbled at the laces that bound up the front of Deliverance’s dress, pulling at them with her fingers until s
he felt the stays loosen and her mother inhale deeply.

  “A compress, Goody Bartlett, please,” Mercy said without looking around, her voice carrying a new note of authority. Sarah Bartlett bustled about behind her, finding a clean rag and dipping it in the bucket where Mercy had collected snow to melt for washing. Sarah pressed the compress into the girl’s hand, and Mercy smoothed the cold cloth across Deliverance’s brow, pushing back her coif until the first gray-brown strands of hair drifted down over her mother’s face. “Gather your breath, Mother,” she whispered, working the compress behind Deliverance’s ears and onto the base of her neck. She felt her mother’s breathing grow more deep and steady, and she held her gaze until Deliverance’s vision grew focused once again. For the first time Mercy observed the quality of her mother’s skin—somehow it had grown more papery and thin, spreading a fine mesh of lines around her eyes and mouth. She had never considered Deliverance to be anything other than powerful, competent. She remembered, in the most hazy terms, the year in her childhood when her mother had been distant and difficult to reach, and now she read in her mother’s face the same worry and fear that she had not been fully able to understand then.

  “That Peter Petford, he is sorry and distracted,” Mercy said, looking into her mother’s face. “Is he not, Goody Bartlett?”

  “That he is,” Sarah affirmed, crouching next to where Deliverance was seated. “Nowt could countenance his railings. I saith so in meeting myself.” She reached a plump hand forward to pat Deliverance on the knee.

  Deliverance swallowed, reaching forward to rub Mercy’s dress sleeve reassuringly. “So I well know,” she said. “But I’ll know what ha’ been said.” She looked into Sarah’s face and waited.