The Wishing Thread (9 page)

The fort, as everyone knew, was impregnable. To the west was a murky swamp that festered like a moat, and land that was marked by sharpened timbers, trenches, earthworks, and a squadron of cannons. Along the river were rocky cliffs, and in the waters below, the British sloop-of-war
Vulture
waited for easy pickings.

And yet, despite the probable failure of any plan of attack, General Anthony Wayne intended to attempt the impossible: to take Stony Point with 1,350 men. The strategy was deceiving: Two companies of Carolinians would stage a direct and distracting barrage, while the real attack would come in
stealthily from the sides. To ensure perfect silence, the troops would not be permitted to load their muskets—they would advance with only their empty guns and their bayonets. Some of the men, brave soldiers specially chosen for the honor, would lead the midnight advances. The vanguard would wade through the muck of swamp and scale the steep and rocky slopes; then, once they penetrated the fort, they were to begin brandishing their empty weapons above their heads, yelling like bedlam,
The fort’s our own! The fort’s our own!
whether it was their own or not. The men had a nickname: the Forlorn Hope.

Helen’s husband spoke of the advance with such pride and boyish excitement that her heart sank deeper and deeper with each glorious new description. Even before he told her, she knew: Her husband, who still had a boy’s youthful grin and leggy build, had volunteered to be among them.
He
was the Forlorn Hope.

She pulled him into the semi-privacy of a copse of paper birches that cut white slashes against the dusk. With soft green leaves shimmering around them, she gave her husband a piece of her mind. It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to him.

What were you thinking?
she told him. She did not need a husband who was a war hero. She needed a husband who was alive. Now more so than ever. Her heart felt as if a hundred little fissures were running through it, like the red clay rocks that washed up along the creek beds, and one small but precise tap would make the whole thing shatter. Why couldn’t her husband have spoken with her first? She was a good Dutch woman, groomed to be the head of her home, not some Anglican church mouse too fearful to so much as whimper should her husband raise a fist. He was not to make such decisions without consulting her.

To his credit, her husband looked contrite, like a child who had expected praise but instead found censure. And the heart in Helen’s chest that had been struggling to stay in one piece crumbled to bits. She began to cry. Her husband put his arms around her and rocked her, while a gentle breeze stirred the birch leaves to expose their undersides to the sky.

And there’s more
, Helen said, teary. She had not wanted to tell him. Not until she was sure. But her courses had not come in many weeks. And she suspected she was carrying their first child. Her husband gathered her tighter, and while on another occasion he might have whooped with joy and loaded his rifle to fire a few celebratory rounds, tonight he only whispered some prayerful words and kissed her ear beneath her cap.

So you see
, Helen said.
You must come back to me. You must return alive
.

Her husband consoled her with assurances and brushed her tears from her face. He promised he would come to no harm. But Helen knew that while a man could make such promises, he had no say over whether he could keep them. Especially not if he was under orders to storm a fort full of trained soldiers without a single bullet to his name.

The night before the raid on Stony Point, Helen and the war-battered women she had come to call friends convened. Helen was not the only one who was afraid of slaughter. Many of the women who were with her had men—husbands, brothers, fathers—marching to their deaths at Stony Point. But only Helen’s man was among the forlorn. Desperation drove her to panic. What could she do?

She told the women who were with her about an old folktale, and as she told it, she began to wonder if she might believe it. Her grandmother on her father’s side had always knit one red thread into her husband’s garments to protect him.
And she had liked to say that no one ever took her charms seriously until one day her husband went out with a June hunting party and was attacked by a band of angry Mohawks. Only he returned with his scalp affixed to his head.

Helen did not need to explain what she was proposing to the women of the camp—her own mad plan to match the general’s. The women were not entirely convinced. But they were helpless enough to try.

In the hazy dark, fat-soaked cattails were touched to the cooking coals and coaxed into sputtering, stinky light. The women sat in a circle and they knit round after round, the smell of wool and smoke and sweet summer greenness in the air. Bored watchmen appeared in the quietest hours, prodded for conversation, and—finding none—went on their way. Red threads were pulled from petticoats and passed around. A woman suggested:
Perhaps we should make an offering. Just in case
. And each wife, sister, or daughter agreed to give up something important to her—just so God knew they weren’t asking to get something for nothing. Helen wove a red thread into her husband’s stocking and bowed her head, her prayers taking shape in the low Dutch of her parents and their parents before them:
Oh God in heaven. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t take him away from me so soon
. She knew she had to offer something more than prayers.

When it came time to head out to meet their destiny, some men went to Stony Point with new stockings on their feet—red fibers woven within—and some did not. Helen made her husband promise not to take his stockings off, not for anything. Then she kissed him good-bye as if they were in private, as if she might never kiss him again. With a crooked smile and a slouch that meant she should not worry, he turned his back and was gone. All of General Wayne’s men were. The women stewed in the twilight of the valley, knitting and
darning. Helen’s worry was like the itch of the poison ivy pustules that sometimes ringed her ankles, and the more she scratched at it the worse it seemed to get. She lurked away from the fire, away from the other women, and sipped a bitter tisane of wild carrot. She worried that her sacrifice would not be accepted.

But—soon enough—promising news arrived. And then—even better—her husband returned. All the men who bore red-flecked stockings returned. Helen threw her arms around her husband and cried with relief. He smelled of river water and rifle oil and sweat, and she buried her face in the rasp of his homespun shirt. Her husband declared that the plan to take Stony Point had gone off in near perfection. Mad Anthony Wayne was a genius, the Forlorn Hope would go down in history, and best of all Helen and her husband were rich.

He held her by the shoulders, his eyes bright with reflections of fire and his own proud tears. There was a prize, he told her, for the first man to reach the fort—and he won it! He’d waded through the swamp with his rifle high and silent and empty over his head, and he’d pictured her—only her—and the life they would have if he could swallow his fear and win. He told her: Now they could buy that bit of land in Tarrytown. They could build a house on the ridge overlooking the river. He pressed his hands against the small of her back. They could raise their baby on land they themselves owned.

Helen hung her head. The sluggish dawn of guilt and dread was like a dark river swallowing its banks, a slow, thick flooding.

What is it?
her husband asked.

She pulled herself up straight and told him:
I’m so sorry
.

His grip on her shoulders slackened.

She said:
Oh my love. There never was a child
. She explained
with her palms facing the sky that she would have said anything
—anything
—to compel him to return to her safely, to fight to save his life. She hoped he could forgive her. She trembled, waiting, believing in the folklore, in her grandmother, in her prayers, in anything she could get her hands on to believe.

He blinked once, slow and dumb like an old cow, before breaking into laughter. The sound was a volley of cannon fire. So full of trickery was his little wife. They would just have to try again. He lifted her and kissed her and swung her around.

The end
, Mariah said. And the spell of the Revolution encampment cleared like the last hiss of smoke from a doused fire. Then she tucked each girl into her own bed with her own kiss and a wish to sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite. Outside, the hills of the lower valley were bright with neon and traffic and the noise of human life, and it was a great comfort to the Van Ripper girls.

For in the silence, the terrible and threatening silence, was the rest of the story—the parts that Mariah had alluded to only in passing over the years. The end of the story, the real end, was told only in little dribs and drabs, like spots of paint laid at random on a canvas until with squinting and head-angling the full picture began to come into view.

With the money Helen’s husband had won at Stony Point, the Stitchery was built on the edge of a grassy square in Tarrytown. Helen’s husband became a trusted secretary to a lawyer who treated him less like an employee than a good friend. Her sons were born and raised, sent off into the world to marry, or sent off to sea or war. Her only daughter, who had a birthmark in the exact shape of a star on her cheek, was taught how to knit. One night when her children were grown
and on their own, and Helen’s hair had grayed, and people were whispering of a war between the North and South, her husband drifted out of life quietly and with no warning, falling into sleep within sleep. Helen donned her widow’s weeds, sad but grateful for everything she’d had. She watched herself grow old in the family’s black-spotted mirror, which had come down to her from two generations past.

With no husband and no children who needed her, she threw her life’s focus into her knitting, so that eventually the people of Tarrytown began to refer to her home as the Stitchery. Women came to her door, women who had dirt under their fingernails and women who had never washed so much as a teacup in their lives. They heard rumors; they heard she could help. She asked them:
What are you willing to give up?
and she hid their treasures away. She continued to thrive—until one chilly day in October, when the winds blew down from the north so hard that the candle she had placed on the windowsill was snuffed out.

Helen’s daughter, who had been taught her mother’s secret of knitting, was in the kitchen boiling soup at their newfangled iron stove when she heard her mother shriek. The sound was unnatural. She hurried to the parlor. And she found Helen staring in mortal terror at nothing more than the wall. Her hands were motionless on her needles. Her eyes, milky with cataracts, were unseeing.

What is it?
her daughter asked. But Helen would not speak. There were devils in the wallpaper, in the bread box, under the doors. Sometimes they were soldiers; sometimes, babies. She cried out against them; she threw the furniture to keep them away. Her daughter gently coaxed her back into the world of the living with cups of strong black coffee. But day by day, Helen became increasingly confused, increasingly tormented, as if demons were reaching their claws up from hell
itself to drag her soul down through the Stitchery floorboards. People began to whisper. Her daughter fought to keep her mother out of the madhouse and in her prayers asked the Lord for the mercy of a swift and quiet death.

For the women of the Stitchery, this was the beginning of the end.

Aubrey had not been expecting Vic Oliveira at her door on the morning of Mariah’s funeral, although it was not all that unusual for him to appear there. He and Mariah had become good friends since he’d first moved to Tarrytown a few months ago, and he’d fallen into the role of being the Stitchery’s go-to handyman. He often stopped by to caulk, nail, screw, grease, lift, wedge, and jury-rig as needed. When Aubrey saw him standing on the porch, in nice pants and a black dress shirt, gripping a handful of late-blooming sunflowers, a little fissure of longing opened along a seam in her heart.

“How are you holding up?” Vic asked.

“Great!” she said, so belligerently cheerful that it took them both aback. Then, because she realized that niceties weren’t called for at a time like this, she told him the truth: “Actually, you know how a piece of celery gets when it’s been in the fridge too long?”

“Yes?”

“I feel like that.”

“I wish I could fix this for you,” Vic said. “But even duct tape has its limits.”

He held out the flowers and she took them. Sunflowers were perfect for Mariah, who had always hated “funeral flowers”
like carnations and lilies and roses that were too serious for their own good. Vic must have known.

“I’ve been thinking of you,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do to help …”

“That’s kind.” She risked a quick glance at his face; she knew her eyes were awful to look at—alien and strange. But she wanted to see him, just for a second, before she looked away.