On a day so warm I needed no shawl, I walked beyond the garden to clear new ground with the hoe while Alice swept the house. I was determined to plant bayberry so that I would not have to go so far into the woods hunting it. The seeds would lie in the ground over the winter and sprout in the spring. I imagined every chop of my hoe coming down upon Wallace Spencer. White stone came up with the dark brown. First two white stones, then a dozen. I bent low and picked up a couple of them. They were not stones. They were bones. I chewed my upper lip with my teeth. I went to find Roland. Gwenny’s children played outside in a puddle, merrily painting stripes upon their legs with mud, a few yards from where she had hung a freshly washed blanket to dry in the sun.
Roland and James came with shovels. Together we scraped away soil until we came to a human skull. If it had been a grave, I thought, it was a rude one, no more than a foot at the deepest, and less than six inches of soil covered it at the head. It was tall. The man had been wrapped in a black cloak and buried. In his still awkward English, Roland said, “He seems buried quickly. By someone lazy.” James crossed himself.
I added, “Or perhaps someone not strong enough to dig it.” I stared at this form, a reminder of what little fiber was a man, what little time our flesh had upon this earth.
Roland turned over another shovelful of soil by its head. The remains of a three-cornered hat came up on the end of the shovel. It was not a fine one of beaver fur, but a roguish felt well tarred, as they wore on the ships. As the hat came up, it tore itself in half by the weight of soil which had collected within its crown.
“Do you suppose he haunts the dell where he would rather lie in peace, next to his child? He is always there, by the little unwritten stone. Should we move him? Is it sacred to leave him here or put him where he would choose to lie?” I asked.
Roland looked at me with fierce determination. “If we disturb his bones, he may change from haunting the graves to haunting the house.”
“We must ask l’ pasteur to move these bones,” James added.
I was not happy with leaving this skeleton open to the sun while we went to seek counsel from Reverend Clarke so I said, “Will you fetch him? I will wait here in case the children come this way.”
Reverend Clarke arrived in about an hour with three other men. They helped Roland dig a proper new grave, and they lifted the bones onto an old horse blanket to carry them to their new resting place. Roland tipped the skull to set it atop the crossed bones, and something small and heavy slipped from its opening to his feet. He jumped as if he had been stung, but he stooped and picked the thing up and said, “Maybe the disease that killed him was lead in the brains.” On his hand, a smashed ball from a musket.
Reverend Clarke prayed a lengthy prayer over the bones before we covered them with the blanket. We tucked in the hat and laid his rotted cloak over him, then fashioned a cross out of red maple leaves over it. Last, they started shoveling in the dirt. I said my own secret prayer, talking to the man himself, asking him if these were his bones that he might rest in peace now, amidst the others buried here, and stop walking the earth.
I went to the graveyard on All Hallows to clean and decorate the graves for All Saints’ Day. I stood next to the small, unmarked stone, facing the vine-covered rocks. I turned about. Turned again. The spirit in the black cape did not appear. I said another prayer, hoping for the man, at last, eternal rest. I smiled. I patted the headstone of my darling Barbara. The wind began to blow. A gust flung leaves about me, spinning as if I were caught in a whirlwind. I hurried home and did not look back.
That night, I sat alone at my bedside by a single candle. I had gone through my trunk and pulled out Goody Carnegie’s old book of leechcraft and herbs. Much of it I could not read, for it was in an old style of words and lettering, though some was in modern hand toward the last pages. I paged through it, scanning for anything readable, until I found a page that seemed writ not in ink but in some faded brown. The words chilled me so that I pulled my shawl closer about my shoulders and read it again.
Fairies ha tak my husbnd. I teld them to bring him home and say’d many charms for it, tho this one demanded I be mad. No, say I, I shall not be had by fair folk, & I pointed at it a smoking pistol. The fairy left him, then, when the bullet went in, but my husbnd was not returned to me. I buried the old fairy skin out in the pasture and the cows are afraid to eat the grass thereof.
I crossed myself as I might have in the old days, and turned still more pages, filled with receipts for concoctions and cures using herbs with names I knew not. All seemed then to be written in ink, and in English. Until again, a page writ in brown—could it have been blood?—and telling a story that brought me tears.
Abigail be tak by fair folk. I saw them running with her beyond the field where the cows graze, and what was left in her place was an old nasty fairy woman. And I teld it I would burn it to bring back my child, yet it did naught but whimper. I say’d to it, leave her be, And then it called up a storm. & so I burned it and buried it in the dell below the house. Water cress and a salmon’s tail I put therein, and walked around it three times three.