Interlude 1750
By the next full moon, an illness I’d never before seen took hold of me.
I could feel it unfolding. It crept slowly, leaching away the soft meat it could find.
My throat. My gums. My tongue. Soft boils that burned when I spoke, their hot, foul fluid flooding my mouth if I dared to eat anything other than the softest foods.
Again and again, I tapped the tree, intent that the syrup infused with its power would heal me as it had Florence, but another fortnight passed, and I was no better.
I wet the bark with my blood, swearing fealty as I had before, but whatever slept beneath did not hear.
My teeth began to rot away, and my mouth filled constantly with a dark blood that carried the sweet odor of death.
Florence was not there to see it. After the night at the tree, she requested that Isaac build a small dwelling for her, and until it was finished, she went back to the hovel we first built.
I did not know how she spent her days but would spy her from time to time heading into town, a basket filled with butter at her side.
I doubted seeing me so reduced would have troubled her.
More likely she would have seen it as triumphant proof of God’s punishment.
Any omen can be bent in one’s favor, whether ill or good, so long as the belief is strong enough.
She would have deemed it a swift and just penance for how I had stolen away her only happiness in life and brought her to this godless country.
It was a truth she would not be denied no matter how I tried to speak reason with her and tell her I only wanted her safe no matter the cost. I had damned her almost as certainly as I had saved her life.
Joan and Hope ministered in what ways they could. They had learned a great amount in their short time with me, but the sickness far surpassed our collective efforts.
“How can we help?” Hope asked, her skirts tucked beneath her as she held a warm compress to my gums.
I shook my head. There was nothing to do but help ease the pain. White willow bark. Feverfew. Blue vervain for sleep.
“Florence goes most days now to town,” Joan said as she took down the kettle and set it over the fire. “Lewis says she sells her butter and then goes directly to the meetinghouse. She spent all of last Sabbath there.”
“I do not like it. There will be questions. An unmarried girl. Unaccompanied in a covenanted town. Mark me, there will be eyes upon us. Judgment.” Hope removed the compress and turned resolutely away to rinse the blood in the bowl of water at her feet.
Exhaustion kept me to the pallet. Another boil burst anew as I spoke, and I spat and carried on. “We are protected. We swore an oath and marked it with blood. Such things are not so easily broken.”
Joan and Hope cast doubtful glances at one another and fell back to their tasks.
Unease worked its way through my limbs, my very skin twitching with it.
There was no certainty in what I told them.
We asked for abundance and have been granted it, but there were many ways to live well.
Many ways to see our children flourish. Whether they thrived under our teachings or another’s.
I pushed the thoughts away. Such things would lead to despair, and I had no room for it. There was only this disease that pushed at the insides of my wasting throat as if it could claw its way into the world, laying waste to all it touched.
THREE DAYS LATER, Hope’s oldest girl spat out a tooth. Neither she nor Isaac thought much of it. She was of an age when children lose teeth, the larger ones pushing through and leaving their smiles crooked.
But she woke in the night crying and feverish, her gums raw as she sobbed that she could feel something sharp in her throat. Like an animal tearing at her each time she drew breath.
By morning, she would take no water, and there were boils on the insides of her cheeks.
They brought her to me, her tiny body folded inside Isaac’s cloak as he laid her gently before the fire.
“I cannot break her fever. She talks of devils. A delirium, but she tries to scream, frightened as she is.” Hope wrung her hands as Isaac paced, his brow furrowed as he took in the hanging herbs and bottles and the curved knife on the table as if truly seeing them all for the first time.
“You can cure her? As you have done before?” he asked.
My own mouth wept blood, the pain so great I thought I would faint, but I forced myself to respond. “I will do all I can.”
He bowed his head and nodded. “Then do it.”
As we worked, Isaac stood outside, his face turned toward the sun. The last good thing he could look upon. He could not turn and face the darkness at his back as it devoured his daughter bit by bit.
Hope set the water to boiling, and I bent to the mortar and pestle, the pain an almost searing point at the base of my tongue. I ground dried mullein and mixed it with the tree’s syrup and spread the paste over the child’s gums, her little heart fluttering like a bird beneath my hand.
“It will help if there is any infection and to open her lungs so she might breathe easier,” I said. In truth, I did not know what to do. I’d not been able to heal myself. I did not think I would be able to heal their daughter.
Sobbing, Hope sank to the floor beside her daughter and gripped her hand. Such despair only a parent can understand. I knew it well.
Blinking away tears, I readied the kettle. If nothing else, I could help the girl sleep.
Hours passed, each of us locked in stasis as we waited and watched. Isaac seated near the hearth, his gaze far away. Hope beside her daughter. I on my own pallet, a small bowl filled with blood at my feet.
I did not know when we fell into sleep, only that for me, it was deep. Dreamless. An endless, dark sea of pain that followed me without regard for my unconsciousness.
It was Hope’s scream that woke me.
“Where is she?”
I startled awake, blood pooling in my mouth as I choked and then spat. Whatever had come loose in my mouth fell with a thick plop, and I looked down in horror at the rotted portion of my tongue lying beneath me.
“Where is she?” Hope shrieked again.
I blinked at the gloom; the fire had died down to nothing but coals that left the room in shadow. Hope clawed at Isaac’s cloak, desperation sending her into a frenzy, but the girl who was supposed to be wrapped within was gone.
“She can’t have gone far,” Isaac said, and pushed past his wife and out into the gathering night as he called his daughter’s name, his voice raw-edged and pleading.
“She’ll be cold,” Hope said, her hands still locked on the fabric of Isaac’s cloak.
“Come. Sit here,” I told her as I stoked the coals, urging them back toward flame and warmth. “He will find her.”
It was a necessary dishonesty. With all my knowledge of the earth and its magic, I had never been one granted the ability to see the future. But I spoke to her then as if I could.
A chill wind settled over us as we waited for Isaac’s voice. His relief as he stumbled back inside, his arms around their little girl.
But there was only silence, and in it I felt the beginning swell of dread.
IT WAS ISAAC who found her. Exhausted and shivering from the long hours spent searching in the cold, he finally went to the tree, remembering how his daughter loved it. How beautiful she found it. Perhaps she’d gone there, seeking some kind of comfort or had stumbled there in her fevered delirium.
He did not speak when he returned but trembled like a man haunted.
Hope leapt from her place by the fire. “You found her?”
“I cannot reach her. My girl. I cannot reach—” He brought his hands to his face and covered his eyes. “She is on the tree. Run through on the branches. Hanging there like … my God.”
His wail was that of a wounded animal. Grief and rage and horror given voice and let loose upon the world because he could not raise the dead.
Not even I, with the tree’s magic coursing through my blood, had that power.
In my diminished state, I assumed I would soon join her.
I was of no use to them other than to bear witness to their grief.
They held each other, salting the earth with their tears. I held quiet vigil, unable to speak any words of comfort as I swallowed the blood in my mouth, so they would not be forced to see such horrors. They had already seen enough.
When the morning came, they went, and with Lewis’s help, took their daughter from the branch wrapped round her heart.
That evening, we met under the tree. All but Florence.
I waited for the sadness at her absence.
She might disagree with our way of life, but this was a child.
An innocent taken from the world too soon.
Instead, I felt the dark edges of my anger rising.
It was not right she chose not to join us.
She abandoned us to our grief and confusion in favor of her pious judgment.
If she had appeared before me, I would have slapped her for such lack of compassion.
The sun warmed our backs even as the wind chilled us, and with gentle hands, the men buried Isaac and Hope’s daughter beneath the black walnut’s branches.
Isaac had not wanted to bury her there, but Hope insisted. “She loved it so. I would have her go into the next life surrounded by the things she cherished. The things she found beautiful.”
After we finished, Joan came to stand beside me and offered her arm as support. I had lost no more of my tongue, but it took all my strength to stand, and the handkerchief in my pocket was dark with blood.
“We have found abundance here,” she said, her gaze focused on the small mound of earth that should not exist. “But I worry at what cost.”