Chapter 4
Martin
Martin had known Sara all his life. Her people came from the farm on the outskirts of town, out by the ridge.
The Devil’s Hand, people called it, the ledge of rock that stuck up out of the ground like a giant hand, fingers rising from the earth.
Haunted land, people said. A place where monsters dwelled.
The soil was no good, all clay and rocks, but the Harrisons eked out a living, trading the few things they could coax out of the ground—potatoes, turnips—for flour and sugar in town.
The Harrisons were thin, almost skeletal, with dark eyes and hair, but Sara was different somehow—her hair auburn when the sun hit it; her coppery eyes danced with light rather than shadow.
She seemed otherworldly to Martin, a siren or a selkie—a creature he’d read about in storybooks but never imagined might be real.
Sara’s mother had died when she was born.
It was just old Joseph Harrison caring for Sara and her older brother and sister, alone.
But folks said he once had a woman who came around.
She’d done the laundry, cooked the meals, nursed the children.
People even said she’d bedded down with Joseph Harrison, lived with him for a time like a wife.
She was an Indian woman who rarely spoke and wore clothes made from animal skins—that’s what people said.
Some said that she was half animal herself: that she had the power to transform into a bear or a deer.
Martin remembered hearing about her from his own father; he said she used to live in a cabin up beyond the Devil’s Hand, and people from town would go to see her when someone took sick.
“When the doctor couldn’t help, you went to her. ”
Something had happened to her—an accident? a drowning? Something had happened around the time Sara’s brother died. Martin couldn’t recall the details, and when he asked Sara about it after they were married, she shook her head, told him he must be mistaken.
“The stories you heard, they’re just stories. People in town love their stories, you know that as well as I do. It was just Father, Constance, Jacob, and I. There was no woman in the woods.”
Back in grammar school, Martin had been shooting marbles with a group of boys in the schoolyard.
His older brother, Lucius, was there, furious because Martin had just won his favorite marble after knocking it out of the ring: a beautiful orange aggie that Lucius had named Jupiter.
Martin was holding up his prize, thinking about the orbits of planets, when Sara Harrison came sauntering over, her bright eyes glittering and catching the light much like his new marble.
She looked so startlingly beautiful to him then that he did the only thing he could think of—he handed her the marble.
“No!” Lucius shrieked, but it was too late. Sara tightened her fingers around it and smiled.
“Martin Shea, you are the one I shall marry,” she said.
Lucius snorted with laughter. “You’re mad, Sara Harrison.”
But Sara had said the words with such sureness, such conviction, that Martin never doubted the truth of them, even though he’d laughed at the time, surrounded by his friends and his brother, as if she’d told a joke. And it did feel like a joke, that a girl as pretty as she would choose Martin.
He’d been an odd boy—arms too long for his sleeves, face always stuck in a book like The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
He longed for adventure and believed he had the heart of a hero.
Unfortunately, there were no pirates to battle in West Hall, no shipwrecks to survive.
Only the endless monotony of chores on the family farm: cows that needed milking, hay that needed to be cut.
One day, he promised himself, he’d leave it all behind—he was destined for bigger things than being a farmer.
Until then, he was just biding his time.
He did poorly in school, daydreaming when he should have been studying, while his brother, Lucius, got top marks in the class.
Lucius was stronger, faster, braver, even better-looking.
Lucius was the one all the girls dreamed of marrying one day.
So what, then, did Sara Harrison see in Martin?
He didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of Sara’s great gifts—the ability to see the future in these tiny pieces, like she had a special telescope.
“You won’t leave West Hall, Martin,” she announced at the Fourth of July picnic when Martin was twelve.
Most of the town was gathered on the green, around the newly built bandstand.
Some were dancing, others spread out on picnic blankets.
Lucius was in the gazebo, playing the trumpet with a few men from town who made up the West Hall town band.
Lucius, who would be going off to Burlington in the fall—his high marks had earned him a full scholarship at the University of Vermont.
“What makes you so sure?” Martin asked, turning to look at Sara, who had sat down beside him.
“Did you ever think that perhaps all the adventure you could ever want is right here?”
He laughed, and she smiled indulgently at him, then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled something out. The Jupiter marble.
She tucked the marble back into her pocket, leaned over, and kissed his cheek. “Happy Independence Day, Martin Shea.”
He decided then and there that Sara had been right—she was the girl he would marry, and maybe, just maybe, she was the adventure he was meant for.
“Martin,” she’d whispered on their wedding night, fingers curled in his hair, lips tickling his left ear, “one day, we’ll have a little girl.”
And, sure enough, they did.
Seven years ago, after losing three babies still in the womb and then their son, Charles, who’d died at two months, Sara gave birth to Gertie. The girl was tiny, so small; Lucius said she wouldn’t live through the week.
He had passed his state boards and come back from Burlington to work with old Dr. Stewart, who soon retired, leaving Lucius the only M.D. in town. Lucius closed his leather medical bag and put his hand on Martin’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
But Lucius was wrong: Gertie attached herself to Sara and sucked and sucked, growing stronger each day.
Their miracle child. And Sara glowed with happiness, the tiny baby asleep on her chest, Sara looking over at Martin with an all-is-right-in-the-world-now smile.
Martin felt the same way and knew that no adventure he might ever have gone on could have had a happier outcome than this.
Though she no longer sucked at her mother’s breast, Gertie had kept herself attached to Sara.
They were inseparable, always intertwined, and they spelled secret words in each other’s palms with fingertips.
Sometimes Martin was sure they didn’t need words to communicate at all—that they could read each other’s minds.
They seemed to have whole wordless conversations with their eyes, laughing and nodding at each other across the supper table.
At times, Martin felt a little spark of envy.
He would try to be in on their secrets and little jokes, laughing in the wrong places and getting a poor-Papa look from Gertie.
He understood, and eventually came to accept that they had a closeness, a bond, that he would never be a part of.
The truth was, he believed he was the luckiest man on earth to have these two for a wife and daughter—it was like getting to live with fairies or mermaids, some breathtakingly beautiful creatures he was not meant to understand fully.
He did worry though, that the losses of their previous children had made Sara cling to Gertie in a way that seemed almost desperate. There were days when Sara would not let the girl leave for school, saying she was worried that Gertie’s nose was a little runny, or her eyes looked glassy.
In his darkest hours, Martin believed that, though she’d never say it, Sara blamed him for those dead babies that came before Gertie.
Each miscarriage had nearly destroyed Sara—she spent weeks bedridden, weeping, eating only enough to keep a sparrow alive.
And then Charles had been born healthy and strong, with a headful of dark curls and a face as wise as an old man.
They’d found him breathless and cold in his cradle one morning.
Sara wrapped her arms around him, held on to him all day and into the next.
When Martin tried to take the baby, Sara insisted he was not gone.
“He’s still breathing,” she said. “I can feel his little heart beating.”
Martin stepped away from her, frightened. “Please, Sara,” he said.
“Leave us,” she snarled, pulling the dead baby tighter, her eyes cold and frantic like those of a mad animal.
Finally, Lucius had to come and sedate her. Only when she was sleeping could they pry the child from her arms.
Martin believed the deaths were the fault of this place—the 120 acres that belonged to Sara by birthright.
Other than her older sister, Constance, who’d married and moved out to Graniteville, she was the last remaining Harrison.
He blamed the ledgy soil and barren fields, where almost nothing would grow; the water that tasted of sulfur.
It was as if the land itself dared anything to stay alive.
Now, gun in hand, Martin moved east across the field as he pursued the fox, trudging along, his feet strapped into the bentwood-and-rawhide snowshoes.
His breath came out in cloudy puffs. His feet were wet and cold, soaked through already.
The fox tracks continued in a straight line, out into the orchard Sara’s grandfather had planted.
The trees were unpruned; the few apples and pears they produced were woody, bug-filled, and spotted with blight.