The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (9 page)

“I can see that. But history’s not as different as you might think.” She brushed her fingers over Marcy Lamson’s name scrawled on the page. “Don’t you think Marcy would be surprised if she knew that some random people in 1991 were reading her name and thinking about her? She probably never even imagined 1991. In a way”—Connie hesitated—“it offers her a kind of immortality. At least this way she gets to be remembered. Or thought about. Noticed.”

As her fingertip touched the surface of the page, Connie saw with stunning clarity the image of a smiling woman’s face, freckled, shaded by a broad straw hat. She was old, her blue eyes lidded and soft, and she was laughing at something. Then just as instantly the impression vanished, and Connie felt like the breath had been squeezed out of her chest. The intensity of the effect was staggering. Connie no longer felt like she could explain it to herself as a daydream; the sensation was utterly different, like having the real world replaced with a bright cellophane film still, overlying her field of vision.

“True,” Sam was saying, closing the book on his lap and folding his hands behind his head. He leaned back in his chair, exhaling, not noticing anything amiss.

“Well,” she said, smoothing her voice and massaging her temple. She must discuss this with someone—Grace. Or maybe a doctor. “Looks like this was a waste of time. Thank you, Sam, for helping me out so much. I didn’t mean to take over your whole afternoon.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “The cupola’ll be there. I love an excuse to mess around in these archives. But,” he said, “there’s one place left for us to look. Annals of Membership.”

Connie groaned. “Come on. If she was a person, which we don’t know, then she wasn’t born here, she wasn’t married here, and she didn’t die here. What would she be doing in Annals of Membership?”

Sam made a
pshaw
ing sound. “Look at this. And I thought Harvard was supposed to be a good school.” He rose, pulled three volumes from the bottom bookshelf by the door, and dropped them unceremoniously on the card table. “Don’t they teach you how to do thorough research at your big fancy university? This is a very second-tier-school attitude I am sensing. Let’s go, Cornell. One more hour and we’ll be done.”

Connie reached for the volume nearest her, laughing in spite of herself. Liz had gone to Cornell and was forever reminding people, bristling, that it was in the Ivy League. Sam’s teasing warmth pushed aside the spreading ache in Connie’s head, bringing her back to the real pleasures of her work. She cast an appreciative glance over this strange young man, who made her feel disarrayed and yet was somehow making her better at her work. He grinned back.

They worked for a further hour in silence, paging through lists of townspeople proposed for full church membership, some names appearing repeatedly over decades before their membership was confirmed. Connie marveled at the reserve, the closed-ness implied in these pages, and felt a sour bloom of distaste for this culture that she had given her life to studying. On most days she enjoyed the opacity of this kind of archive. It was a puzzle waiting
to be solved, disparate isolated facts that, if properly assembled, could create a picture of a world that had long since ceased to exist, but that had left residues of itself almost everywhere that she looked. But sometimes the completed picture that the facts implied was startling in its cruelty. For all their idealization by the fantasists of history, the New England colonists could be as harsh and abrasive as any other real, flawed, people: petty, deceitful, manipulative. She reached for the final ledger, riffling through the blank first pages until she found the title page. Her eyebrows pulled up in surprise.
EX COMMUNICATIONS
, it read.

The book appeared still technically to be in use, as there were several unfilled pages toward the back. The last recorded excommunication dated from the mid-nineteenth century, after which the First Church of Salem must have turned its attention toward less doctrinaire problems. Many New England congregations had been intensely active in emancipation work in the years leading up to the Civil War, and Connie imagined that congregational infighting must have seemed a petty concern when compared with human slavery. Slowly she paged her way back to the beginning.

The first excommunication dated from 1627, but a portion of the page was damaged by a water stain, and Connie could not make it out. Isolated cases turned up every few years after settlement, never with any explanation attached. A small cluster of cases all within a few years of one another seemed to correspond with the Antinomian crisis, when a religious schism over whether good behavior was sufficient to attain God’s grace rocked the Puritan world. After the crisis subsided, the excommunications resumed their sporadic pattern until Connie turned one final page.

“My God!” Connie cried, unable to keep the excitement from her voice. “I know why Deliverance Dane isn’t in any of the records!”

“What?” Sam asked, looking up from his ledger.

Connie hoisted her own book up to face him on the table and drew his attention to a line on the page. There, near the bottom of a lengthy list of hastily scrawled names, was written
Delliveranse Dane
, the spelling presumably mangled by a semiliterate clerk.

“Look at the year,” said Connie.

Sam looked, and his eyes narrowed with confusion. He looked up at her, head cocked, waiting for her to elaborate.

The date read
1692
.

“Sam,” Connie said, reaching across the table to grasp his arm, “Deliverance Dane was a witch!”

“
E
XPLAIN THIS TO ME AGAIN,” SAID
S
AM, SLIDING A HEAVY PINT OF
beer toward Connie. She sat with her elbows on the bar, drumming her fingertips excitedly on the top of her head. Sam settled on the stool next to her and slurped the foam off of his own beer. At the opposite end of the bar, a small group of middle-aged men in orange foul-weather gear and Top-Siders joked and guffawed, clinking their Cape Codders together. The bar where they sat was dimly lit, hung with regatta pennants and sepia photographs of men in horn-rimmed glasses, grinning into a sun of forty years ago.

“This is one of the ten great sailing bars in the world,” said Connie, recalling one of the asides in the letter that her mother had sent her, together with the house key. In suggesting that Connie visit this bar while she was living in Granna’s house, Grace recalled her teenager-hood spent loitering in this repurposed sail loft, watching local boys get tossed out on their ears
and hustled home by the constable. Some of the raucousness seemed to have aged out of the loft since then, though the sailors at the end of the bar tried gamely to make up for it.

Connie had driven Sam with her back to Marblehead, an impulsive move. She had offered to buy him a round to thank him for helping her all afternoon, and he had come along naturally. No phone calls to make first, no clothes to change. Glancing sidelong at his profile next to her at the bar, Connie watched the texture of Sam’s skin as he licked the foam from his upper lip. It was rich and satiny, the smile brackets around his eyes burned into place by the sun.

“Uh-huh,” said Sam, scratching his stubble and eyeing the sailors more warily. “But the date,” he prompted her. “I’m rusty on the seventeenth century. Tell me again.”

“Mmmmm.” Connie sighed, sipping her own beer. “I was so hot all day today.” She draped her arms across the bar in front of her, feeling the afternoon’s exhilaration ebb as she started to relax. “I usually don’t like beer, but this is just perfect.”

“
Connie
,” he prodded, nudging her elbow with his knuckles. She paused, beer glass suspended halfway in the air, mouth still open. His eyes met hers, warm and eager.

“Right,” she said after a minute, smiling. “The date.” She swiveled on her stool to face him. “So it all started in January of 1692, when the daughter of Salem Village’s minister, Samuel Parris, fell ill. Betty was her name. Pretty young, too—she was nine, and her father couldn’t figure out what was the matter with her. He was kind of a divisive guy, this minister. Some people in the Village were totally behind him, but others thought he had demanded too much money. Over his years in the Village he made all sorts of unconventional demands, including free firewood, title to his parsonage—”

“Title to his parsonage! The nerve of him,” Sam interrupted, voice tinged with sarcasm, holding a hand to his chest in false shock.

“Yeah, right?” Connie said, laughing, placing a hand on Sam’s arm.
“Who does he think he is? So by the time Betty fell ill, Parris had already made a few firm enemies. The Villagers were pretty bristly people by all accounts, anyway.”

Connie paused to sip her beer. “Rather like today, actually,” she mused, and Sam smiled out of one side of his mouth. “Anyway,” she continued, “Reverend Parris called a doctor, but the doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong.”

“Not that a doctor would have been able to do much back then, anyway, right?” he asked.

“That’s true,” Connie agreed. “One of the weirdest things about this time period is that it’s
before
the Scientific Revolution. They didn’t have the scientific method, and so they couldn’t tell the difference between correlation and causation. The world would have seemed like a big, incomprehensible progression of random occurrences and acts of God.”

“That’s why whenever I catch myself getting nostalgic about any period of history, I just think about
antibiotics
,” Sam said, archly. “Do go on.”

Connie grinned. “Anyway. The doctor—his name was Griggs, I think—probably would have just bled her, which would have made her even worse. This is right about when doctors are starting to first appear as a respected profession, expected to have a formal education. So maybe the doctor was just passing the buck, trying to save his reputation. Who knows? At any rate, he tells Reverend Parris that Betty isn’t sick, she has been bewitched. And so the minister starts claiming in his sermons that evil has come to Salem Village. He thinks that his daughter is being punished because the town has grown sinful, and he tells everybody that the evil must be drummed out of town.

“Of course, it could be that Parris is passing the buck, too. Some historians think that the minister fueled the accusations to hide how unpopular he had become. Regardless, soon everybody is talking witchcraft, and other young girls in town start falling into fits just like Betty. Abigail Williams, Parris’s niece, who lived as a servant in the minister’s house, is one of the most famous ones. Arthur Miller used her as the protagonist of
The Crucible
.”

“And so began the Salem witch panic,” finished Sam. “Damn!” He wove his fingers together and cracked his knuckles.

“Right,” said Connie. “And we all know what happened next. Reverend Parris’s slave, Tituba, is accused of bewitching the girls. Historians argue about Tituba; no one has ever been able to decide for sure if she was black, or if she was Native American. Anyway, the important thing is that Tituba
confesses
! She says that the Devil came to her, wearing a long black coat, and promised her she could fly home to Barbados if she agreed to work for him.” Connie sipped her beer again and smiled. “A few historians have pointed out how closely Tituba’s description of the Devil resembles Reverend Parris himself. No small wonder. There was no other way for her to say what she really thought about the man.”

Sam smiled.

“Anyway,” Connie continued, “the minister tells her that she can have forgiveness from Jesus if she will only tell him who else in the town has pledged to work for the Devil. She names a couple of women, local beggars, who of course say that they are innocent. But the afflicted girls all support Tituba’s accusations. Soon enough things spiral completely out of control. Over the next several months, hundreds of people from all over Essex County are accused, and almost twenty are hanged. One man, Giles Corey, was even pressed to death between stones as the court tried to force him to enter a plea.” Connie shuddered.

“That,” said Sam, “would be a hideous way to die.”

“The story goes that his last words were
More weight
,” Connie remarked contemplatively. She took another sip from her beer, gazing into the middle distance for a moment before continuing. “Which is pretty hard-core, if you ask me. And that as he died someone used the tip of a cane to stuff his protruding tongue back into his mouth.”

She paused, then seemed to shake off the unpleasant image. “But apart from that,” Connie continued, “there have been a lot of competing explanations for why the panic spread the way that it did. Isolated cases of witchcraft popped up all over New England in the seventeenth century, but this
was by far the most lethal. No one fully understands why it got so out of hand—whether the girls were just enjoying wielding power over mostly middle-aged women and educated men, which totally flipped the Puritan hierarchy, or whether there were other factors in play. But here’s the thing. Before any of the accused witches were put to death, they were
excommunicated from the church
.”

She sipped at her beer again. “So anyone listed in that church record book as being excommunicated in 1692 was almost definitely caught up in the trials in some way. Probably because they were going to be hanged within the week.”

“But why would they be kicked out of the church first?” Sam asked.

“Because witchcraft was a kind of heresy.” Connie shrugged.

“Really?” asked Sam. “I thought it was more of an alternative religion. Like its own separate thing.” One of the sailors at the end of the bar loudly recited an off-color joke that involved a blonde, a fish, and a bartender. His compatriots’ shoulders rocked with laughter, and the bartender—herself a blonde—rolled her eyes and reached for another pint glass to polish.

“Actually, no,” said Connie. “I mean, everything I have read implies that first of all, witchcraft was more of an imaginary threat than a real activity in the seventeenth century, and second of all, the ministers made a big deal of it because it was a profanation of Christian practice, borrowing all these prayers and devotional systems from pre-Reformation Catholicism. More than anything it represented people, and especially women, trying to take too much power into their own hands; power that Puritan theologians thought should belong only to God.”

“So you’re saying that witchcraft was just a projection of social anxieties, and nothing more,” said Sam, folding his arms.

“Yeah.” Connie sipped her beer again. “Pretty tough, being put to death because of a social anxiety.”

“You almost finished with that beer?” Sam asked, watching her.

“Pretty much. Why?”

“Because I have something to show you. Come on.”

They stepped out into the night, shadows falling between the saltbox houses forming navy blue pools on the gravel. Connie tucked her sweater more tightly around her shoulders and wished that she had thought to change into jeans. In Cambridge the night sky in summer was obscured by a hazy chemical orange glow, and the asphalt radiated heat that it absorbed during the day. Marblehead at night entered a cool, dark plane: the houses encased in shadow, the chill of the sea washing over the land, the stars like little points of ice. As Connie walked alongside Sam, matching his stride, she found that she could sense him there, in the dark next to her, unseen but present. The tips of her fingers and thumb on her right hand brushed themselves together, yearning to reach out for Sam’s hand. Instead Connie thrust her fists deep into the pockets of her cutoffs, keeping her eyes on her feet.

“Before I was hired to do the cupola job, I had a few restoration projects going in Old Town,” whispered Sam. Connie appreciated his whisper—it showed that he, too, was touched by the quiet of the town.

“What sort of restoration jobs?” she asked.

“Strip-outs, mostly,” he said. “A lot of Boston people are buying up the old fishermen’s houses and redoing them. A couple of times I’ve been brought in to rip out all the modifications that have built up in the houses over the years. Especially the houses that were divided into apartments in the fifties and sixties. New buyers come in and want to get rid of the acoustical tile ceilings, expose the original beams, add fancy new kitchens. I’ve been asked to consult on a few of these when the buyers actually care about preserving the historical character of the house.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” asked Connie.

“Good for me, ’cause I need the work, and good for them, ’cause they get a well-done house. Not so good if you are a fisherman, or if it’s your apartment being bought out from under you for some banker’s weekend retreat.” He glowered. Connie smiled at him. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s one of my rants.”

“Don’t worry,” Connie said. “I’m full of rants.”

“But that’s not why I brought it up. On one of those Old Town redos I found something pretty interesting. I want to show it to you.”

“You mean we’re going to someone’s house?” Connie asked, alarmed.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured her.

He turned abruptly down a nameless side street, so narrow that a car could only just pass without taking a few front doors along with it. The houses along this street were short and packed tightly together, leading Connie to suspect that this had at one time been a mews, or a row of carriage houses and little barns to serve the grander houses one block away. Some of them were painted in cheerful, ridiculous colors—ochre, vermillion, puce. Tiny windows held planters overflowing with pansies and wilted tulips. “It’s not far from here,” said Sam, urging her to hurry.

They rounded another corner, to the street of houses that would have been served by the mews. These houses had twin chimney stacks and tidy wooden shingles, and a few of them were surrounded by modest but luscious green lawns dotted with dandelions. The houses were separated here and there by wooden fencing, or by a crumbling stone wall layered with moss, screened from one another by whispering oak trees. Connie estimated the houses’ ages as ranging from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries—ship captains’ houses, if not quite merchantmen’s houses. The moonlight cast a gray-white sheen across the surface of the leaves and the grass, making the shadows blacker. Connie could smell burning apple wood from an unseen fireplace; the sensation reminded her of sitting in the kitchen of the Concord commune with Grace. Her heart swelled a little at the memory, and Connie resolved to reach Grace by telephone tomorrow. She could tell her that she had finally visited the sail loft; Grace would probably enjoy that. And she could tell her about the daydreams. Maybe.

Sam caught up Connie’s hand to pull her after him as he moved toward the stone wall, but Connie balked. “Sam!” she whispered. “What are you doing? We can’t just go sneaking into someone’s yard!”

“Shhhhhhhh!” Sam shushed her, smiling. “There’s no way they’re home. And just in case, we’ll tiptoe.”

“Sam!” she hissed, her fear heightened by excitement and pleasure.

“C’mon!” He tightened his grip on her hand, and Connie thrilled at the warm feel of his skin, smooth but callused, allowing herself to be pulled along the stone wall deep into a little copse of woods between two of the houses. Sam touched his way along the wall, finally stopping by a block of granite, about two feet high, standing out at an angle from the stone wall. The wall and surrounding trees cast the block in thick shadow, and Connie looked nervously back at the nearer of the two houses, certain that she would catch a face behind a curtain, or the sudden snapping on of a porch light to show that they were about to be caught. “Hold on a sec,” Sam muttered, rummaging in a pocket of his coveralls. Connie heard a snap and a hiss, and the whiff of phosphorous reached her just as the match flamed to life. “Okay,” he said, crouching down to hold the flame near the granite block. “Now look at this.”