Amherst Reads Excerpt

Prologue

It was always possible that the Devil was present.

Certainly, God was watching. And their Savior.

And so they were never completely alone. Not even when they might wander out toward the mudflats or the salt marshes which, because they all but disappeared at high tide, they called the Back Bay, or they happened to scale the Trimountain—three separate hills, really, Cotton and Sentry and Beacon—they had virtually flattened as they moved the earth to create the jetties and wharves and foundations for the warehouses. Not even along the narrow neck that led to the mainland, or when they were in the woods (most definitely not when they were in the woods) on the far side of the slender spit.

They knew there was something with them when they were otherwise alone in their small, dark houses—the windows some-times mere slits and often shuttered against the wind and the cold— and a man could write in his diary (his ledger, in essence, in which he would catalog the day’s events and his state of mind in an effort to gauge whether he was among the elect), or a woman could scribble a few lines of poetry about the trees or the rivers or those astonishing sand dunes that rolled in the night like sea waves.

Sometimes the presence was frightening, especially if there were other indications that the Devil was at hand. But then there were those moments when it was comforting, and they, mere sheep to their divinity, felt the company of their shepherd. It was soothing, reassuring, breathtakingly beautiful.

Either way, more times than not, the women and men took consolation in the notion that there were explanations for a world that was so clearly inexplicable—and, usually, inexplicable in ways that were horrifying: a shallop with a dozen oarsmen disappearing beneath the water somewhere between the piers and the massive, anchored ship with its barrels of seasonings, its containers of gun-powder, its crates of pewter and porcelain and pillowbeers. That shallop vanished completely. One moment, sailors on the docks in the harbor could see it plainly. But then the clouds rolled in and the rains began, and the boat never emerged from the froth and the foam, and the bodies never were found.

Never.

Or that farmer who was gored through the stomach by a bull and took three days, every moment of which he was in agony, to die in his bedstead. How do you explain that? By the end of the ordeal, the feathers and cornhusks in the great bag beneath him were as red as the linen in which they were wrapped. Never had it taken a man so long to bleed out.

Three days. A number of biblical import.

But, still. Still.

How do you explain a husband who will break his wife’s leg with a fireplace poker, and then chain her around the waist to the plow so she can’t leave his property? And who then goes away? The woman waited a full day before she began to cry out.

How do you explain hurricanes that suck whole wharves into the sea, fires that spread from the hearth to the house and leave behind nothing but two blackened chimneys, how do you explain droughts and famines and floods? How do you explain babies who die and children who die and, yes, even old people who die?

Never did they ask the question Why me? In truth, they never even asked the more reasonable question Why anyone? Because they knew. They knew what was out there in the wilds, and what was inside them that was, arguably, wilder still. Though good works could not in themselves change a thing—original sin was no fiction, predestination no fable—they might be a sign. A good sign. Sanctification followed justification.

And as for divorce . . . it happened. Rarely. But it did. It was possible. At least it was supposed to be. Mediation was always better than litigation, because this was, after all, a community of saints. At least that was the plan. There were the tangible grounds: Desertion. Destitution. Bigamy. Adultery (which was indeed a capital crime because of the Lord God’s edicts in Leviticus and Deuternomy, though no adulterer ever was actually hanged). Impotence. Cruelty.

It was a violent world, but still you weren’t supposed to strike your spouse. At least not without provocation. Mary Deerfield knew all this, she knew it because God had given her an excellent mind— despite what her husband, Thomas, would tell her. And though brains hadn’t helped Anne Hutchinson (Winthrop himself opined that her problem was that she meddled too much by trying to think like a man), and in later years brains most definitely would not help the score of women who would be hanged as witches in Salem, she knew intellectually she had done nothing wrong and didn’t deserve to be hit like a brute animal. She wouldn’t stand for it. It seemed that her mother and father, bless them, wouldn’t demand that she stand for it, either.

The issue, of course, would not merely be his violence, nor would it boil down to a debate over what she said versus what he said. The wrack of their marriage was not solely his cruelty, and the divorce petition would be grounded by snares beyond her ken. Here, she realized, there were times when she would have been better off if she could have been alone but for the angels or her God, and— conversely—there were times when she would have given a very great deal for a witness that was human.

Because even for a mind as sharp as Mary Deerfield’s, it was the recognition of her own mean desires and roiling demons where things began to grow muddy.

One

There were two mistakes young men would make when they would first pick up a scythe: they would try to do all the work with their arms, and they would make their swathes far too wide. They would attack the grass, as if they thought it would get up and run away if they didn’t kill it quickly. It would be their fathers or their uncles who would demonstrate how much better off they would be if they would put their backs into the motion too, swinging the snath in an almost indecent, leisurely, metronomical sway. Draw the blade back, hands on the nibs, as the right leg strides ahead; then cut--imagine that sickle moon is the tip of a pendulum on a tall clock--as the left leg walks forward. That was the way.

If the blade were sufficiently sharp, great tufts of grass would collapse around the metal as it advanced through the field, and their arms would not feel like anvils.

The first time that Mary Deerfield’s husband hit her, she didn’t relate the motion to scything: she was in too much pain and she was too surprised. Her skin stung. It was the second time, half a year later, just before she turned twenty and just after the first anniversary of the day they were married, that she noted that he punched her the way a knowledgeable man would scythe. His arm swung effortlessly, the movement graceful and efficient. An arc. She fell against the pumpkin pine table, the pewter candlesticks toppled over, and the tankard of hard cider he had been drinking spilled onto the floor and into the trencher with their dinner. Still, however, she saw most clearly the image of the men scything--the details from her memory more concrete in her mind than even the way the cider was puddling that moment in the stewed pumpkin--and the wavelike rocking of their upper bodies and arms.

He called her a whore and she said he knew that she wasn’t. He said he had seen her looking at other men, younger men, with lust in her gaze. She said this wasn’t true, but she thought he was going to hit her again. And so she prepared herself for the blow, her shoulders scrunched against her neck and her hands before her face. But he didn’t hit her. He was shaking with anger, unfounded though it was, and she hoped a good measure of guilt, but he didn’t strike her again.

Instead he stomped out the door, saddled Sugar, a handsome eight-year-old gray gelding with a black mane, and he was gone. She placed her fingers on her cheek and wondered at its warmth. Blood gathering under the skin? There would be swelling, it was inevitable, and she was glad that they had been alone. She was dizzy with shame. She took his mug and held the cold pewter against the skin where he had hit her, and sat down in her chair. She contemplated a mystery: How is it I am humiliated when I am alone? Does not humiliation demand an audience? 

 

*                              *                              *

Four years later, Mary Deerfield’s husband snored beside her in bed. In public, he was never a loud or offensive drunk, which was probably why he had never been fined or sent to the stocks. He kept his anger inside his home, and rarely (perhaps never) did he allow it to vent when their young servant girl, Catherine, was present or when his grown daughter would visit. Mary thought she heard the girl moving downstairs now, somewhere near the fireplace, but she couldn’t be sure. It might have been the wind.

The poor girl’s brother was dying. The boy was Catherine’s twin, and he had always been more frail than his sister. The two of them were eighteen. He probably wasn’t going to make it through the fall. Like her, he was indentured. Catherine said this evening that he had managed to nibble at his supper and keep down a little meat, but otherwise his complexion was bad and a few pieces of pork weren’t going to prevent him from withering away.

When Mary’s husband had returned tonight from the tavern, she had pretended she was asleep. He had stayed extra late. She had felt him looking at her, but she knew that he wasn’t going to wake her to apologize for striking her earlier that evening. (And he certainly hadn’t been watching her because he had been contemplating the idea they would couple. There wasn’t a prayer of that, not after all he had probably drunk.) Over the years, a pattern had emerged. He’d drink, he’d hit her, and he’d go away to drink some more. The next day, he would say he was sorry. She presumed he would apologize in the morning for hitting her again tonight. He would insist on his own sinfulness before leaving for church. She recalled what they had squabbled about: the garden looked weedy and unruly, and he felt it reflected badly on him. At least that was how it began. She knew he had other demons that pricked him with tines as sharp as needles.

Thomas was forty-five, not twice her age, but close enough. She was his second wife, his first--the former Anne Drury--having died eight years ago, soon after Mary’s own family had arrived in the colony, when Thomas’s horse had kicked her in the jaw and snapped her neck. Thomas had shot the animal that night, even though it had been a docile beast until that terrible evening. He and Anne had had three children together, two of whom had died young, but a third, Peregrine, was an adult now. The woman had married only weeks before Mary herself had wed Peregrine’s father. Consequently, Mary had never lived under the same roof with her, and given the reality that the two were contemporaries, she was glad. After all, she was both Peregrine’s stepmother and her peer: she couldn’t imagine having to discipline someone almost her age. Peregrine was more like a stepsister than a stepdaughter, albeit a stepsister who, Mary suspected, didn’t much like her for the simple reason that she wasn’t Anne. Peregrine now had children of her own, which meant that Mary, though only twenty-four, was a grandmother. The idea on occasion left her doleful and reeling.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the autumn night. There were still leaves on the trees in the marketplace and the commons that hadn’t been girdled, but soon those leaves, too, would fall, and there would probably be a killing frost as soon as the moon was full. It was well beyond half now. She touched the spot on her face where Thomas had hit her, aware that people might ask what had happened in the morning. Then, while conjuring a reason for the bruise that she could tell them, she fell into a deep sleep. 

Excerpted from Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian. Copyright © 2021 by Quaker Village Books LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.