The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“We are nothing save what grace allows us, vessels to be filled in the holy river.”


The baby began to drink, swallowing as if to breathe, then closed her lips around her grandmother’s finger and began to suckle. It was the suckling that touched Grandmother Visser, making her remember how she’d once loved holding Amelia to her breast. She lifted the child from the water.

Evangeline smiled around her grandmother’s finger, unaware she’d survived drowning.

On her deathbed Amelia shone with sweat, hair stuck to her skin, framing her in darkness. To Sarah Visser, her daughter glowed like angels.

“I will raise the girl as if she were my own flesh,” she promised. Then Amelia was gone.

*

Sarah Visser read to Evangeline from a tattered Bible, sang hymns to her, and ensured the first names the girl knew were the Apostles. Days began with prayer before sunrise, followed by tending to the hens and goats, hours in the kitchen learning to cook like a proper Dutch wife, prayer, laundering, cleaning, and spinning. Each day was constructed so that there could be no rest, only devotion and the tasks of a righteous woman.

Grandmother Visser loved Evangeline; though she feared the sin that made the girl, the willful part of her soul praised God for the chance to begin anew.

Evangeline grew from a biddable child into a young woman with a face like a cat, eyes large like dinner plates, and black hair that tumbled to her knees. Despite Grandmother Visser’s vigilance, the river called, begging her to run and dive into its waters.

To keep her from running, Grandmother Visser took Evangeline’s shoes and extended prayers until the candles burned out. Evangeline would lay abed until her grandmother left, then climb out the window, drop to the ground, and breathe in the night. She’d run through the garden, uncaring if stones scraped her feet. She’d run to the water, until its cold slickness greeted her and the restlessness that clawed her let down. She did not know her mother had walked these steps to meet her father.

Grandmother Visser discovered Evangeline’s bloodied feet and remembered Amelia as if she’d died just days before. She began to lace Evangeline in stays so tight she could not breathe well enough to run.

“Good women do not run; they take measured steps, for sin lies in carelessness.” She pulled the laces until the boning became a prison.

Evangeline tore them open with a letter opener, her lungs spreading wider with the snap of each cord. Then she fled to the river. No matter the way it flowed, if she followed, the water would take her away.

Evangeline’s meetings with Will Aben spurred change in her heart. Will, the miller’s son, said that Evangeline’s mother had taken up with a traveler who’d stolen her soul. Will’s father had told him that once the man departed, her mother had grown so thin she’d vanished into the bedsheets and had blown away like dust.

Evangeline did not believe someone might die of heartache.

She was sixteen when they began to speak. Will was a young man of seventeen, strong in back, with hair so light it appeared colorless, and a charming smile despite a broken tooth. Evangeline sought Will to speak of things other than staving off sin and what Good Women did. Will, too, snuck away. Fascinated by the Visser girl and her wild eyes, he left the mill house to meet her, but he was not so practiced at stealth as Evangeline.

In late spring Dora Aben woke to the squeal of the mill gate opening. She watched from a window as Will walked to the river to meet the Visser girl. Still in her night rail, covered by a heavy dressing gown, she left the house. Once faced with his mother’s ire, Will fled. Dora Aben took Evangeline’s hand, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and dragged her to the Visser house. Dora pounded until the door opened, then promptly informed Sarah Visser that her granddaughter was a slattern set on seducing her son.

Grandmother Visser paid no mind to Evangeline’s pleas, or that she’d long disliked Dora Aben and thought her prone to idleness and blasphemy. What she saw standing in the doorway was that despite the years she’d spent loving Evangeline, teaching, and correcting her sins, the girl’s belly would grow as round as Amelia’s had. She grabbed Evangeline’s hair from Dora Aben’s clenched fingers.

Sarah pulled her granddaughter into the kitchen, bent her across the farm table, and held her down by pressing her full weight onto Evangeline’s back. Then she reached for the spoon. Sarah’s hands bore scars from where her own mother had smacked her knuckles with a long-handled cooking spoon each time she’d dropped an egg, showed willfulness or a slovenly nature. She’d been lenient with Amelia, so much so that it had cost her her life. As Evangeline kicked beneath her, Grandmother Visser grabbed the heavy spoon from where it hung on the wall, waiting to again meet flesh in anger.