Chapter 6
Chapter
I found myself unable to sleep well for days after the visit, and in the depths of the night I would creep downstairs and curl into the armchair by the fawn’s pen, some nameless apprehension buzzing beneath my skin.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Norman, or Zeke, or David, but to me, they were all Norman.
His face, so perfectly replicated in his grandson and great-grandson, sent long-buried memories skittering through my mind like spiders startled from their corners.
I didn’t know how long it really took to seal the devil’s bargain all those years ago, but it was long enough that Norman believed he had killed me, and he fled.
He disappeared so quickly and quietly that Burrsville feared the worst on his behalf, and men went tramping through the woods to look for him.
A logger’s life was a dangerous one, and often ended crushed between rolling trunks or felled by dropping limbs or bled out on a saw.
Then the postman, who was from the next town over, said he’d seen Norman headed south with nothing but a rucksack. When he’d pulled over to offer help, the young man dove into the woods and was lost to his sight.
All eyes immediately turned to Laura Macoun.
He’s left her in the family way, people whispered, but there was no sign of that being true.
Mr. Macoun was enraged, demanding that “something be done,” and for a short time a small group of men took to walking around town with crowbars and hammers, claiming loudly that they were going to find him but never making it beyond the village limits.
There were a few scuffles with the other loggers, but nothing ever came of it beyond a few black eyes and bruised egos.
The turbulence died down after a month or two. As far as anyone knew, the only wrong Norman committed was abandoning his fiancée without a word of explanation. When it became clear he didn’t leave her with child or abscond with money, the heat in the furor dissipated.
But I still had the memory of his hands around my neck, and the devil’s stamp on the inside of my mouth.
My mother watched me closely, always with a look like she was about to ask a question, but she never did.
She took fewer shifts at the laundry and stayed home, and where once I had been lonely I now longed for solitude again.
When I stood up from weeding the garden, arching my back to relieve the ache in it, I’d glimpse her watching me through the kitchen window.
When I returned from gathering berries in the woods, I’d find her hovering on the porch.
I waited for her to accuse me; the possibility hung like an anvil around my neck.
Surely, after warning me my entire life about taking the devil’s bargain, she would have some way to recognize that I had.
“You look well,” she told me, suspicion glinting in her eyes.
“I feel well,” I lied. I did not feel well; I felt sick every waking moment, terrified that my secret would be discovered, and yet I had never looked more beautiful. My skin was radiant, my eyes dark and shining as blackberries, my hair so pale a gold it was nearly silver.
My most potent fear was that Norman would feel Laura deserved an explanation, that he’d write to her and confess what he’d done and why he’d done it.
He would tell her I had driven him to his infidelity and he had murdered me to avenge his own honor, and she would look at me, not drowned and without even the barest bruise on my white neck, and begin to wonder.
The time of witch burnings and strip searches for odd moles was long gone, but in little towns like ours, where the ancient woods crept up to the doorstep and the wild things were not so far removed, the old ways died hard.
For two weeks straight, I crept down the hill in the dead of night to hang a charm of ginseng, mint, and vervain over Laura’s bedroom window, only to go back and retrieve it at dawn before anyone could find it.
When I finally sidled up to her at the midsummer picnic, I could smell the mint she had braided into her own flower crown.
She smiled at me uncertainly, the effect of the friendship spell warring with her knowledge that we were not and never had been friends.
For all my sleepless nights, it was not a strong spell, but she tolerated me longer than she might have otherwise. When I asked if Norman ever wrote to her, she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, as if he’d been taken by the pox.
“No, I haven’t had a single letter. I can’t help but think he must’ve gotten mixed up in something terrible.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The loggers are a rough crowd; perhaps it was a gambling debt, or some kind of labor scheme.
You hear about such things, bosses charging them for their saws and boots, taking it out of their pay at such exorbitant prices that they can’t afford to live.
I just wish he would’ve told me. My father could’ve helped him. ”
“Men are proud,” I said, injecting a note of sympathy in my voice. “Perhaps it’s not as bad as all that, though. He could’ve just gone back to Kansas to help his family.”
She squinted at me suspiciously. “How did you know his family was from Kansas?”
“His accent, of course. It’s very distinct.”
“Oh, of course. Right. I thought so too.”
I patted her hand awkwardly. “Well, I hope he writes you. You’ll have to let me know if he does.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I will.”
I never spoke to Laura Macoun again, although I watched from afar as she married the boy who’d lived two doors down from her all his life, then moved away from Burrsville the moment her father passed and she received her inheritance.
My own mother died two years after that picnic, her womb riddled with cancer.
She refused to see a doctor; her fear of men had become the driving force of her decision-making.
I nursed her as best as I could, although toward the end she lived almost entirely on wine I’d spiked with laudanum to dull her agony.
When I learned what had killed her, I tongued the stamp on the inside of my mouth and wondered if this was the memory of God working, punishing her for birthing me.
But the terror of the real world quickly overrode my terror of the metaphysical one. The offers for the land had come trickling in as soon as word got around that she was sick, and now I was alone, unmarried in any traditional sense. I needed help and protection.
These were the things that drove me, through my tears, to snip off locks of my dead mother’s hair, to pluck out her eyelashes, to dig out six of her teeth, to cut open her fingers and tear out their bones.
The second time the devil came to me, I was sobbing and hysterical, braced over my mother’s body with pliers in her mouth.
He was the one who pinned down her wrists, who told me the twitching was nothing more than a response from the nerves.
I took her spells of distraction and forgetfulness, spells designed to make us invisible, and made them stronger.
She had used only the mildest plants, but I sought out my darkest sisters, henbane and hemlock and datura.
It was long, slow work, and for three years I did nothing but make everyone in Burrsville forget me, forget the land, until I was only a familiar stranger.
It was just after this that I planted my roses, weaving my magic into their young, tender roots and passing some of my burden to them. With my safeguards in place, I took myself through the woods and across the pond to where Norman’s half-built cabin waited, and I laid claim to everything.