Chapter 2
Chapter
That night, I dreamed of the autumn I sold my soul to the devil.
While my mother worked, I spent my days alone, coaxing hardy vegetables from our tilled plot so we wouldn’t go hungry even when the shelves of the general store were bare.
When she was home, I took long walks through the sea of waving grass that surrounded our house and disappeared into the woods, shedding my boots to feel the loam between my toes.
I walked quietly and I waited in stillness, and the wild things began to know me.
But it could not be all walking and waiting.
I practiced things my mother forbade me to practice, curiosity and defiance driving me: the long, slow blink, dropping my eyelashes like fans; the laugh of an older woman, pitching my voice until my throat strained; the love chain, braiding daffodils and cornflowers into little twists with my own hair.
When Norman rolled into town with a logging team, I was vulnerable to his charm.
He was not particularly handsome, but he was tall and broad-shouldered with curling dark hair.
His eyes were an unremarkable stony blue—light where mine were dark as pitch—but they looked at me with an intensity I mistook for attraction.
He had a kind of masculine gravity, a force that drew me into his orbit.
His deep laugh settled like burning coals in the pit of my stomach; his strong hands and their scarred knuckles sent my mind spinning on their possible uses.
Unlike most of his logging team, Norman quickly decided to put down roots in Burrsville.
He bought the land that backed up to ours, and when he wasn’t sawing with the rest of the crew on the other hill, I saw the shape of him across the pond, cutting logs for his own cabin.
I found myself walking the bank more and more often, looking for cattail rhizomes or elderberries.
Sometimes, I saw the dark silhouette pause from its work, and I could imagine him watching me.
A forbidden thrill would work its way down my spine, and time and time again I was caught between fear and desire, thrumming like a bowstring.
One day, I was standing guard over two orphan raccoon kits still learning to wash their food, keeping a sharp eye out for the telltale shadow of the resident snapping turtle.
I splashed in the shallows along with them, miming the motion their mother would’ve shown them, when suddenly they bolted into the rushes with a squeak.
I stood up and found him there, his skin glistening with sweat and sawdust caught in the hair on his arms. My own hands were black with mud, and I lifted my shoulder to swipe awkwardly at a strand of hair that was stuck to my bottom lip; we were both aware of when my sleeve slipped from that shoulder.
“Hello,” I said.
He motioned toward the rushes where the kits had disappeared, but his eyes were locked on me. “They let you touch them? Are they pets?”
“No, just orphans. Maybe too young to know better.”
“They knew enough to run when they saw me.”
You’re a man, I almost said. Instead, I only smiled and shrugged.
“Miss Wynne, is it?”
“Tess.”
“Tess,” he repeated, although his accent made it sound different, the vowel rounder and longer. “That’s pretty.”
We made small talk for a while, shyly and with too many long pauses.
He told me he came from Kansas, where rain was as precious as diamonds and the wind blew the dust into great black walls of cloud.
He told me he only had enough money to take the train to Indiana, and he had to ride as a stowaway with the hobos until they reached New York.
He told me he went three days without eating before he fell in with the logging crew, and the first time he went out on a job, he was so weak he missed the tree entirely and the axe went flying off into the undergrowth.
I told him nothing.
“You don’t go to church?” he asked eventually.
“Sometimes,” I said evasively. Even my mother, whose first priority was always to appear as harmless as possible, couldn’t stomach the falseness required to go to church every week.
We made our appearances on holidays, which was enough to quell the rumors.
But it was a dangerous question, dangerous for other people to notice, and I gave the answer she always did.
“We worship at home most days.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” he said, and a grin curled the corner of his mouth. “I wouldn’t have minded a reason to see you every week.”
I laughed, absurdly pleased with his casual impiety.
As it turned out, we ended up seeing each other nearly every week anyway. Sometimes I found him waiting for me by the pond, cooling his feet in the shallows. Sometimes I lingered at the edges, waiting for him to materialize from the darkness of the woods.
But I was not a girl with a lot of time to socialize with the other young people in town, and the occasional meeting by the pond was not a courtship, so I could hardly be surprised when the Macouns announced that Norman was engaged to their daughter, Laura.
Nor could I be surprised when he continued to meet me at the water’s edge, when he looked at me with the same intensity.
Finally, when the days had begun to shorten and the evenings were kissed by the cool breath of autumn, I went out to the pond and found a checkered blanket spread over the damp grass, a jar of apple cider and some rough sandwiches in a basket.
I was still seething from an argument with my mother hours before—“You’re going to attract the wrong kind of attention!
” she’d hissed, shattering the bottle of homemade perfume I’d attempted—and the anger made me reckless.
Maybe, as a young woman who didn’t often attend church, I had something of a reputation, and maybe I knew it.
Maybe I knew that Norman was looking for something his proper churchgoing fiancée couldn’t give him, and maybe I, not so terrified of an eternity in sulfur and brimstone, was a little too eager to give it.
He seemed nervous, pouring the cider messily and spending fifteen minutes picking at a corner of his sandwich, then wolfing the remainder in two bites.
I tried out the slow blink, allowing my lashes to dip and flutter like a butterfly’s wings, and in a heady rush of euphoria I saw his pupils blow wide like a cat in the dark.
I’d kissed a few boys before, never going any further than that, but perhaps my lack of fear solidified my reputation.
By the time he worked up the nerve to kiss me, the sky had turned a sultry violet, and when he laid me down on the blanket, I felt the tremor running through his whole body.
It was an embarrassingly short affair. I had only a vague idea of what should happen, and although he reassured me, the murmured words seemed mostly for himself.
He had barely entered before he was pulling back out again to spend himself on the ground.
He was breathing heavily while I had the barest flush in my cheeks, and the warmth of the sun was all but gone, leaving a damp chill behind.
The intense pressure created by the secrecy and urgency of our tryst dissipated, and the mood shifted abruptly.
For a moment we sat there, staring at each other coldly.
“You made me do this,” he said, and the tremor was in his voice now, fear instead of passion. Looking back, it was the fear that disgusted me, not the blame.
“Do what?” I snapped. I thought perhaps he was trying to salvage the moment with a backhanded compliment, and I was in no mood for it.
But it wasn’t that. His face was screwed up in fury, and the fading light caught tears shining in his narrowed eyes.
“Bed you. I’m engaged to be married.”
I was still brazenly naked, and I laughed, too stupid and spiteful to sense the danger. “I didn’t make you do anything. You wanted to wet your whistle.”
“No.” His voice began to shake. “You made me do it. You were jealous of Laura. You seduced me somehow.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said scornfully. I scrambled to my feet and snatched my blouse from the ground, trying to find the sleeves in the gathering dark. “I didn’t do anything except join you for a picnic.”
He stormed forward suddenly, grabbing the blouse from me and hurling it away; I heard the seams pop. “Don’t lie. What did you do to me? Some kind of drug? Or spell?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and neither do you. This was your idea as much as mine, and you came to it on your own. What, you think I slipped you some love potion, like a lonely old crone?”
He seized my arm in an iron grip, and suddenly I was aware of the size of him, the untapped reserves of strength at his disposal.
His fingers touched around my upper arm, and he loomed over me, bent like a furious sapling.
It began to dawn on me why my mother always sought to make men calm, to make them feel secure and strong; fear did not make them weak, but vicious.
“Let me go,” I said, fighting for composure.
“That’s what it is, isn’t it? It was a potion. You’re a witch.”
“I’m not a witch, you great stupid sack of—”
He hurled me into the pond.
I was a good swimmer, and if I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve struck out for the other side of the pond and left him behind. But my sense was smothered by rage, and I rose out of the shallows longing only to sink my fingernails into his eyes.
I felt powerful for an instant. My body was young and strong and charged with fury, and the will and ability to hurt him, perhaps even kill him, seemed within reach. I was young, and I didn’t know what real power felt like.
He splashed in after me and I met him halfway.
Perhaps it set him back on his heels a little, to see me charging back at him, naked and dripping.
More likely, it only reinforced his conclusion that I was something unnatural and wrong.
He caught me by the neck, and I hissed and spat like a cat and sank my nails into his wrist until blood ran.