Interlude 1750 #2
She gasped against my shoulder. “I cannot. It is the only life I’ve known. All that I have.”
I gripped her, pulled her backward so she could look nowhere but my eyes.
“You have no choice. There is nothing left for you here. I would not speak ill of the man you love, but he has cast you aside for a reason. Even if he did not speak it, you must see it for what it is. They have spoken an accusation. Such a thing will not keep quiet. It will spread. It already has.”
Her face was swollen with crying, but she was still lovely.
My daughter. This woman who stood in the place a girl once did.
I saw all versions of her in that moment; remembered how she saved me after her father died.
Her very presence a tether to the earth I wanted to leave so I might follow after my husband.
The only man who’d not seen me as wicked and worthy of crushing beneath his boot. The only man I would ever love.
All those years ago, I whispered to her that I would stay alive.
For her. I would keep that promise no matter how it filled me with a hurt I knew would never fully abandon me.
No matter the lies I told, the life she longed for lost because I willed it so in the name of saving her life. I would see us out.
“I have only ever wanted happiness for you. To see you live fully. But it cannot be here.” I took her hand and squeezed it. “We will find a place where that can happen. I swear it. By any god that will hear, I swear it.”
Florence looked back at me, her eyes gone dull. “It is a ghost that leaves this place. Not myself.”
Once more, I hugged her to me. “We will wait for dark and go. We cannot take much, and even then, I fear taking the wagon. The noise of it. But we will need food. The chickens will do for now. And I have packed enough seeds and roots to see us through. The earth will provide.”
As the night came on, the dark of it reaching for us, looking for something to place between its teeth, Florence aided me in packing the wagon.
It was she who remembered the ax. The rifle her father left behind.
She who settled the chickens in their baskets, their clucking finally quieting when she covered them.
She who hitched the horse to the wagon, staying her with a soft hand and softer words.
I added a single heavy-lidded cast-iron pot.
The roots and seeds. What clothing we would need, and my sewing kit. Bottles and mortar and pestle.
I would have preferred to go on foot, but we would not have been able to carry what was necessary on our own.
I could only hope we’d gotten ahead of the risk.
Already gone by the time Reverend Brenton and his men came looking for us.
It was a blessing we were already so isolated.
There was smaller opportunity for any enterprising neighbor to spy our escape and send up the alert.
Above us, the sky was dark. A new moon. Auspicious. A time for new beginnings. For cutting away the dead and rotted and looking toward the blank face of what may come.
Together, we went through the house in that dark.
Room by room. Touched what remained and then moved on.
Those rooms and what lay within those walls no longer belonged to us, but it felt right to try to memorize their shapes.
To take even the smallest memory with us.
A remembrance of the women we once were.
We came back into the front room. The hearth had burned down to embers, but we would not be there to stoke them back into life. “It is time,” I said.
Florence did not speak but nodded. When she went through the door, she did not look back.
There was no manner of fully disguising our path, but we did what little we could.
We entered the woods in several places only to trace our path out and then reenter at a separate point.
It would grant us some time should anyone attempt to follow us, and with any luck, they would tire quickly of looking and assume we would meet our own deaths regardless.
Starvation. Wolves. The natives they feared because they did not understand them.
The devil himself with his book of names stamped in blood.
So many ways a woman could die that did not involve the rope or the flame.
Finally, we set off in earnest, the forest closing over our heads as we pushed into the trees.
It would be a slow, arduous journey, for there were no roads or paths.
What our horse could not push through would have to be circumnavigated, and it was always possible we would have to go on foot in the end should the terrain become too steep or impassable.
But I could not think of that. There was only room for moving forward, and the quiet hush of the nocturnal creatures moving about us.
“Where will we go? We have no map. No shelter,” Florence said.
“The earth will provide. It always does.”
She looked askance at me; her face hardened. “It is God who will grant whatever blessing He sees fit.”
I kept silent, unwilling to introduce an argument into the start of this new life.
I would not begrudge Florence the god she had chosen.
I had not before. Even as I tried to teach her the old ways.
It only pushed her further from me. But perhaps we could find a new path together.
A common ground built from a necessary intimacy with the natural cycle of things.
The earth and its growing. The wind and water and sun and all that was nourished by those things.
The power that slept there. Perhaps, without the influence of Reverend Brenton, my daughter and I could live as I’d always wanted.
Simply, in accordance with the natural order.
My heart glowed with the possibility of it.
Exhausted as we were, the gentle rock of the wagon finally pulled us into slumber.
Somehow, the horse carried on, Florence and I drifting somewhere in the twilight world between sleeping and waking.
It was a stupid thing to let myself sleep when there was so much danger still around us, but I had grown tired of fighting, and so I slept, comforted by the warmth of Florence’s body beside mine.
I was not sure how long we wandered or how far we’d gone into the heart of the forest. If it had been days or only hours, and if the morning stole upon us, I could not remember its light.
I only remembered when we stopped, and the sudden, insistent pull that seemed to travel to the very center of my being.
I’d spent my entire life with my hands in the dirt.
Learning from what grew there and the creatures that drew life from it.
The chorus of my girlhood was learning the steady hum that lay at the core of the world.
A power so many people could not sense because they would not take the time to do so or feared it meant there was no use for their god.
Those who would shy away from blood or death because they saw it as evil rather than the natural order of things.
They labeled me “witch” because of it. I could not wear such a name there.
But perhaps, with such a power perfuming the very air, I could wear it here.
There was a power in naming, and I’d been running from my own name for too long.
The horse came to rest, dropping his head to crop at the grass, and I felt as if I could do nothing other than stare.
A black walnut tree in full flower sat in the center of an impossibly open space.
Its branches twisted into the sky, and leaves of full, verdant green buzzed with the drunk stumble of bees.
Around it, the air seemed to expand and contract like some great, living creature drawing breath.
It was as if some transparent eye had turned itself upon me, left me exposed and trembling and aware of how in the face of something so infinite, I was immaterial.
It struck me that the tree had always been there, biding its time, casting deep roots that drank from pools that were older than any man could comprehend.
There were spaces in this world that held an ancient power, and this was one.
I stumbled out of the wagon, not minding when my legs buckled from lack of use.
I needed to touch it, run my hands over its bark and breathe in the magic it held.
I wanted to hold that power inside me and feel it blossom into something that would let Florence and me flourish.
I expected something to stop me, to keep me away from the tree and what it contained, but I approached without opposition.
As in all things, the tree held a beauty that served as a thin veil for grotesqueries the common eye would not see.
I held my breath as I ran my hands over the rough bark.
It traced outward in a series of bulbous growths that bent and shifted in the light so they resembled screaming mouths and bloated heads lopped off at the neck.
My skin prickled, each part of me suddenly longing to feel the velvet touch of leaves, to sprout roots and drink deep from the hidden darkness that fed the tree and take into myself that same power.
“I do not like the look of it.” Florence appeared at my shoulder, and I startled and dropped my hands.
Florence pointed at the tree. The bark with its strange markings. “It is the mark of the devil.”
I shook my head. “No. The natural world could not be so befouled. The devil resides only in the hearts of men.”
“It frightens me.”
I clasped Florence’s hand, pressed it to the tree, and smiled. This was only the beginning of a reintroduction to what I had always hoped she would understand. “There is nothing to fear in power. Can you not feel it?”
She withdrew her hand and let it drop to her side where it twitched spiderlike over her skirts. She’d smoothed the lines of her face, but her gaze was still fearful, her eyes damp as she looked up at the tree.
“Here. On this ground. In this place. We will live well. I feel it in my very bones,” I said.
Florence said nothing and turned away.
I ignored the sinking in my heart and looked at the tree. Only at the tree.