Page 22 of Magic Lessons

“People will not understand you,” he’d told her. “The way you look, the clothes you wear, what we are to each other.”

“What are we?” she had said, her face hot.

“We are what God will allow us to be,” he’d said, which was not the answer she’d wanted.

It was spring, with the world suddenly alive and green, magicked back to life. Maria walked quickly, for it was mud season as well, and she didn’t wish the muck to stain her red boots. On Washington Street, Cadin dove down from the sky, pulling out strands of her hair until she waved him away. Clearly he disapproved of the path she took. But a crow was a crow, and a woman a woman, and there were some things she believed he couldn’t understand. She had written a letter with ink made from her own blood. It was a last attempt to see if John would do the right thing.

The house with the black shutters was only steps away. The black elms were festooned with a thousand dark buds that would soon unfurl into heart-shaped leaves. Maria was standing beneath the tree when she spied a woman and a young boy on the other side of the fence, there in the warm spring sun. Ruth Gardner Hathorne and her boy, three-year-old John, were seeing to the garden. Ruth wore a white cap, her blond hair hidden, her fair skin blotchy from hours of gardening. It was then that the new black leaves began to fall. The elms could not abide Maria, nor she them. A wet gust of wind came up and blew the fallen leaves away. She had seen Hathorne walk away from her in a vision where there was black water and a black heart lying broken in the grass. She’d discovered the reason he could never stay with her, why he kept her on the outskirts of the city, why he had begun to avoid her. All along he’d had a wife. Even a woman with the sight can be taken for a fool in matters of love.

Maria could not take her eyes off Ruth Gardner Hathorne, whose parents had been Quakers, persecuted for their religious beliefs by the Puritan magistrates of Salem. They had been forced to leave Massachusetts and had followed Ann Hutchinson to Rhode Island, leaving behind their fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruth. Thirty-three-year-old Hathorne had taken the girl in, then had married her. Ruth was now nineteen and her son meant all the world to her. Hathorne had betrayed them both, on Curaçao and now again, and there was reason to burn with anger. The leaves around Maria’s boots caught fire and turned to cinders, and the sparks flew down chimneys all over town, so that women had to drench their fireplaces with pitchers of water.

Ruth had a basket on her arm as she cut the first of the season’s parsley and sage. She’d urged her son to keep out of the billowing phlox, the first buds to bloom in this season, but he only grinned and let out a joyous whoop before disappearing into the tall white flowers, trampling a few on his way. He was a naughty, delightful boy of three, whose father would soon take a cane to him for his own good, for headstrong behavior was not tolerated. The little boy came up to the fence, and when he realized he was not alone, he wrapped his hands around the posts and stared at Maria, for she appeared to be an angel hiding behind the phlox. There were petals in her hair, so that the black strands were woven through with white, as if winter had already returned after only a few days of joyous, muddy spring. The boy had John’s dark eyes. Faith’s, on the other hand, were silvery gray, her mother’s eyes, but paler still. Faith waved at the boy and he stared at her, considering. Their features echoed each other’s. Straight nose and small ears, their father’s high cheekbones, his pale coloring, marked by ruddy cheeks. Maria crouched down and slipped the letter between the railings of the fence. If this was her enemy, there had never been a sweeter one. She flung the child a smile, which he was quick to return.

“Be a good boy,” she said in a soft voice. “Give this to your father.”

John’s son nodded with a serious expression, a child who knew nothing of the cruelty of the world. But he saw the black leaves falling and the crow that came to perch on the woman’s shoulder, and in this town even someone at such a tender age looked for evil everywhere, not trusting a stranger’s smile. Perhaps she was not an angel after all.

Maria put a finger to her lips. “Don’t forget the letter.”

When his mother called to the boy, Maria learned he had been named for his father, lawfully his only child. Maria turned and ran, Faith riding on her hip.

Love was the thing that tore you apart; it made you believe the lies you were told, obvious as they might be. It was nearly impossible to see your own fate while it was happening to you. It was only after, when what’s done had been done, that one’s vision cleared. She thought of the man who had turned against Hannah, and of her mother’s husband, trekking across Devotion Field with his brothers and revenge in mind, and of her father, so handsome and vain he hadn’t thought twice about selling her into servitude.

Love is what you make of it, and she had made it into her undoing. As she walked through the farmland ringing Salem, the rows of wheat she passed withered in the fields. Her hair was in knots, her complexion pale. She thoughtlessly tore her flesh on thorn bushes, and the blood that fell scorched the grass she walked upon. In her arms, Faith patted at the tears streaming down her mother’s face, but a witch’s tears were as dangerous as they were rare, and they burned the child’s fingers. Even Faith, whose touch could heal a bird with a broken wing, couldn’t heal her mother’s despair. Nothing could give her back the time she had wasted on a worthless man.

They went to the lake, where Maria knelt to dash water on her face. Surely John would answer her, for a letter written in blood has consequences for both the writer and the reader. You could not forget what you had read. He would have to answer. Faith was his child, after all, and deserved his name and attentions. What his response would be, no one could foretell, for a man’s fate changed every day, depending upon his actions. When Maria gazed into the still, black water, she could see pieces of what was to come. The tree with white flowers, the woman in the lake. Summer would come, and the world would grow greener, and, she could already see, John would disappoint her. She realized it had never been love between them, for you cannot love someone you can never know.

Perhaps his neighbors had told him that a woman with black hair had been seen peering into his garden, speaking with his son, with some insisting that she seemed to rise above the bricks. They said that a black bird had followed her, often a sign of bad luck and a harbinger of death and disaster. Everyone noticed she was not like any other woman in town; she wore blue rather than gray, with no bonnet covering her hair, and her leather boots were red. It was clear she did as she pleased, despite the magistrates’ rules. If indeed she was a witch with bad intentions, she could have easily had her revenge; she might have stolen the Hathorne boy and left a changeling in his place, a faceless poppet made of straw. Even an ordinary woman who had been betrayed might have started a fire in the garden, a flame that would have quickly spread to the roof and the gables. But Maria did no such damage. Revenge was not in her nature. She knew full well that whatever she sent into the world would come back to her threefold, be it vengeance or kindness.

Cadin, however, wasn’t as generous. When Hathorne came home at the end of the day, he was puzzled by the small gray rocks on his roof, tossed down as if some imp had marked his house for doom. This past winter he had done his best to leave behind his other life, the one in which he’d been enchanted. Whenever he yearned for Maria, he went out to a shed behind the house, removed his coat, then his loose linen shirt, and he beat himself with a rope, leaving marks on his back to remind him of the failures of the flesh. He had considered speaking with his father, that stern and illustrious man who had led troops to victory in King Philip’s War against the native people, and was said to be the most upstanding man in Massachusetts. But he knew what his father would have told him: even a fool must pay for his wrongdoings. John was not ready to pay, and yet what was done could not easily be undone. There was proof of his sin after all. There was the child.

When John stepped inside his house, he spied a letter on the table in the parlor, folded and sealed with melted candle wax.

“What’s this?” he asked his wife.

“The boy says a witch gave it to him.” Ruth had been worrying all day, ever since little John had deposited the letter into the basket of herbs. The woman who’d given it to him had had a black bird with her, their son had said, and she wore red boots. Weren’t these the signs of a witch? Ruth had kept the shutters closed and the door locked. She made certain their son remained in a small chamber that had no windows, where he would be safe. There was evil in this world, just as there was good, and it didn’t hurt to be careful. Ruth had never spoken back to John, or discussed what had happened to her parents, but she wasn’t a fool. Something was wrong. She’d washed her hands three times after touching the letter. She had a sinking feeling inside of her, as if she’d swallowed rocks. She’d heard stones pelting against the roof all afternoon, and she shuddered with each one that was thrown. Now that her husband had at last come home, she kept her eyes downcast, as she always did when speaking to him. He had rescued her from the fate of many Quakers, and she felt she owed him everything. Why was it then that her heart hurt as it beat against her ribs?

“Our boy is telling you a story.” Hathorne addressed his wife as he might a child, doing his best to convince her as he spoke, and convincing himself as well. “Don’t be silly.” He opened the letter, unfolded the message within, then quickly refolded the parchment and slipped it into his coat. “This is pure nonsense,” he told his wife. “Nothing more.”

He went to his study and latched the door, letting his wife know he was not to be disturbed. Ruth was accustomed to doing as she was told and asked no questions even though she had taken note of his dark expression. She thought that he might be writing a sermon, for he often spoke in church, or perhaps he was drafting contracts for his shipping business, when in fact, he had locked himself away so that he might burn Maria’s letter in a brass bowl. The smoke was foul and red, and yet it made him feel something, a rush of desire, what he’d experienced in the tiled courtyard in Curaçao, the raw emotions of a reckless fool. He sat there with a throbbing headache, sprawled in a leather chair that had once belonged to his father. He knew that men must pay for their mistakes, for even men who tried to do good in the world were touched by original sin. Wicked actions sprang from a few moments of weakness in the face of the sinful ways of the world and all its indecent enchantments. Women could destroy men, he was sure of it, as Eve had tempted Adam. This was the reason women were not allowed to speak in church. To merely look upon them could cause vile thoughts, and soon enough such thoughts could become deeds. Hathorne believed that God and his angels moved through the mortal world, but the devil walked among them as well.

That night he fully admitted to himself that he had erred and veered onto a dark and unexpected path. Hathorne made no more excuses. He had sinned. He fell into a sort of madness as the two sides of him warred, the one who was the man who swam with a turtle, the other his father’s son. He stood at the window, looking into the dark. Halfway through the night, when the stars had filled the sky, Hathorne considered breaking faith with everything and everyone he had ever known and imagined taking Maria and their child back to Curaçao. But those treacherous thoughts lasted for only an hour or two, a heedless period of sin and lust, during which time he forgot he was a man with a family and a duty to the world in which he lived. Hathorne went to the shed and beat himself until his back was bloody and he gasped with the pain he’d inflicted upon his flesh. He could not do as he pleased. This wasn’t the land of the turtles and rose-colored birds, but a world whose only palette was black and white, where it was hard to think or move or breathe, and sleep was often impossible, for with sleep came dreams, and that was something he must avoid.

People said that a black bird was circling the magistrate’s house each and every day. It dropped stones, one after the other, and there was a pelting sound that echoed down the street. By summer, crowds came to Washington Street so that they might stand on the corner and gawk. Most people believed such an event portended a curse, and neighbors began to close their shutters, as Ruth Hathorne had done on the day the witch first appeared, even though the heat had become oppressive. Bad fortune could move from house to house, it was contagious, and if there was magic it was best to lock oneself away.

The crow stole flowers from gardens, and when he spied children’s shoes left on porches so that the mud on their soles could dry, he took them, too. He pulled open shutters and flew through windows to steal silver wedding thimbles, given here in lieu of rings, for a ring was nothing more than vanity and a thimble could be put to good use. Women’s fingers bled as they did their sewing, and they found themselves weeping and wishing they’d had another life, for the crow reminded them of who they might be if they’d been allowed to make their own choices. The crow was so brazen he pulled the white caps off their heads as they walked to church on Sundays. He woke newborn babies from sleep with his clattering, and set people’s nerves on edge. John Hathorne watched the crow from his garden and decided that something must be done. Time and time again, the crow perched in the tree with the black leaves, as if announcing John’s guilt. He could not have this creature denounce him in the face of others.

Hathorne gathered the men in town to say the crow was more than a pest. He was a creature sent by evil powers, an evil they must resist. They went out with their rifles, stalking through the fields that separated Salem Town from the forests where not long ago these same men had pursued the Wampanoags, murdering and beheading as many as they could find. The settlers felt this land was theirs now. They’d taken it in battle, and a crow was not about to spook their families and get away with what was not merely mischief, but clearly something darker, something that boiled the blood. Large numbers of crows had been roosting in trees at the edge of town, and to men intent on murder, one dead crow was as good as another. It would do them well, they soon decided, to kill one and all. They walked past rye and corn, and alongside wild blackberries and saplings that would become pear trees, if they weren’t broken by these men’s boots. They walked past the wild red lilies that grew nowhere else. Across the sky there were banks of clouds. A hunt made men feel they could protect what was theirs; spirits were high, and for miles it was possible to hear the hollering and shouts that rose up.

They waited through the heat of noon and the dullness of a stifling afternoon into the falling dusk, when the air was thick with black gnats. By then an odd silence had settled, something uncomfortable. Still no crows flew overhead. A band of men was sent ahead to flush out the birds, Hathorne in the forefront, for his neighbors were fighting evil on his behalf. Privately, he wished Maria’s crow would simply disappear, and take her along, like a fever dream that vanished in a blink. But just as darkness was about to fall, a huge number of crows came flocking from the north, a thousand or more. At once, the men began to fire their rifles. They shot wildly and blindly, and several grazed their fellow bird-hunters by accident. One fellow was shot through the throat, and he lay in a pool of his own blood, and not even a kerchief tied around his neck could stop the gushing. The men went wild when they could not rouse their fellow hunter, and they set to firing off rounds as if in war. John sank back from them, for he stood out in the crowd; he was the tallest among them, and the wealthiest, and the reason why there had been a death on this day. He knew how easily people could turn on each other, how a man could be a hero one moment, and the cause of resentment the next. How he wished he had never been to that cursed island, or gone to sea, or told Maria about Essex County. And yet he imagined leaping into the blue-green water, thousands of miles from here, in a land where no one followed the rules set forth, where a sin might float like a flower in a fountain and a man was free to do as he pleased.

Maria heard the mayhem. The guns, the echoes of death, the calling of men and of birds. She had no choice but to leave Faith asleep on her pallet, so she might run through the dark, barefoot, in her blue dress. The first of the season’s fireflies drifted by, globes of light flickering among the blades of grass, then rising and falling between the trees. Maria felt danger all around her, burning like salt in a wound. It was then she realized she had not seen Cadin all day. She felt her heart beat as fast as his.

As she came upon the pasture, birds were plunging from the sky, a black rain of feathers. When a crow dies, the others band together and search for the killer, mobbing those responsible. Scores of birds attacked the men from town, diving beak and claw into the fray, their hoarse calls striking fear into the hearts of many of those who had believed themselves brave for the cowardly act of shooting at unsuspecting birds. Maria felt her arm burning, and it was only then that she realized her blood was spilling onto the ground, black and burning. In the mad volley of bullets and buckshot, she had been shot. She backed into the trees, breathing hard, feeling much as she had on the day she hid in the forest and watched Hannah’s house burn. She murmured a spell of protection, in Latin and backwards, quoting from Solomon’s book of magic, and as she did the men’s guns began to misfire. She called to the sky, and banks of roiling clouds appeared in the west, moving in like a wave at sea.

The crows realized they could not win the fight against the barrage of gunfire, and in response they split apart into two groups, half flying east, the others west. Crows could not be eaten or baked into pies, for their meat was dark and gamey and foul, and their harsh feathers weren’t used in pillows or quilts. They were worth nothing to these men and had only been killed because they were considered pests and scavengers, because it was decided they were evil beings. The men collected hundreds of bodies, whooping with joy, when all that they’d done could have been accomplished by a gang of ten-year-old boys armed with their fathers’ rifles and slingshots. There had been no reason for this to come to pass, but what was done was done and couldn’t be undone. Even a witch knows this. There are not spells for many of the sorrows in this world, and death is one of them. You cannot bring back those who have stepped into the next world, and should you try, they would not be the same beings that had once been, but rather they would become unnatural creatures, created by dark magic and desire.

Maria found Cadin in the tall weeds, a black heart lying still in the grass. The men in the field couldn’t tell one crow from another, but she knew her dearest friend immediately. She tore the skirt of her dress and wrapped him in the fabric and wept as she did so. Her cries could be heard as far as the wharf, as far as sound could carry, even at sea, and the men collecting crows stopped what they were doing, feeling haunted. Many believed that a female crow was mourning the loss of her mate. A hush fell over them, even though they were soaked with sweat. They had been elated by their hunting madness, but even the most thoughtless among them now felt pricked by fear, embarrassed by their foolish acts of cruelty.