“What is this?” he asked, glaring at their gathered neighbors.
John looked untidy and half-wild, his shirt untucked, his beard untrimmed. Silence knew what they said about her family—her useless husband, her feral children, and her so cold and unnatural a woman—and in knowing, it was hard to hold on to the anger that had straightened her spine. The black wave of fury ebbed, and weakened, and became gray, gray as the wrongful winter day around them, gray as the hesitant morning light, and it seemed to her beyond absurd that she should be here with her water pail, defending a miserable little house and a miserable worthless husband and seven children she could scarcely look at some days, each one of them an ache in her belly that had not faded when they’d ripped themselves free, all because she wasn’t a witch and she hadn’t set a curse upon the land, and wouldn’t even know how, however attractive the idea might be.
Her husband was talking. Enoch Abrams was talking. They might have been speaking in tongues, for all their words meant to her, the empty rumbles of men. They would pretend now the quarrel was about their land, their religion, their rules, their pride, the things men claimed for themselves while women toiled behind them, working until their fingers bled so that husbands and sons could bluster and rage.
She looked back to the house. Prudence still lingered in the doorway, disobedient for the first time in her young life.
Go inside, Silence thought. Go inside, my child, go back to sleep.
“You will leave this land,” John was saying. He strode forward, more shambling than imposing.
Enoch Abrams’s lips curled in a sneer. “Your wife has brought wickedness to my valley. Our crops cannot take root because of the evil she has set upon us.”
“Your valley?” John scoffed. “Do these men gathered behind you know how you covet their farms?”
“Farms made useless by witchcraft,” Enoch Abrams countered. “By her witchcraft.”
He raised a hand and extended a finger. Silence did not let herself step back. She did not quake in fear and she did not flinch when John slapped Enoch Abrams’s offending finger down. She did not retreat when Gideon and Zadock charged toward him.
They would say, later, she was a woman of ice and stone, to watch open-eyed and unmoving as Gideon’s musket jerked and fired, to remain still as John yelped in pain, scorched by the muzzle flash if not the bullet, as he swung blindly in retaliation, as the Bible knocked from Enoch’s hands fell to the ground and the pitchfork brandished by Zadock, a barely formed man of greed and ire, swung and jabbed and found home in a hunger-tight gut.
They would say she was an unnatural woman to watch with such clear eyes as her husband, her own husband, stumbled with his hands clutched to his middle. The red seeping between his fingers was the only color on a gray, gray morning. Her neighbors faded into the wood, silent and cowardly, leaving a woman alone with seven children and a dying man, and a winter frost that would not break no matter how purposefully the days marched toward summer. They would say she was as cold as the unthawed ground to lift her eyes to the orchard as her husband passed, that the trees concerned her more than the man, but John Derry had not been born on this land. The orchard would shudder briefly for him when he passed, not weep as it had for her mother and grandmother. The lasting wounds would be hidden beneath the skin of the wife and children he left behind.
“Silence,” John said.
Prudence was crying, the other children waking, the morning full of sound and fear, but their screams might have come from another valley, or another world, so muffled were they to their mother’s ears. Silence’s hands were hot with her husband’s blood. She did not remember falling to her knees beside him. She did not remember pressing her palms to the wound in his gut.
“Silence,” he said, and he died.
She did not remember touching his face, but there was a smear of blood there, where his weathered skin met his graying whiskers, just below his eye.
17
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON Abrams Valley was crowded with tourists and day-trippers, families and couples and the occasional lone hiker wandering around. It was nothing compared to the crowds that filled Miami beaches on a typical weekend, but after only a week in Vermont, and most of that spent quietly in the orchard, the presence of so many people gave Sorrow a self-conscious itch between her shoulders.
She stopped outside a café called Cozy Coffee. There was a busy ice cream shop to her right, a store offering canoe rentals and fishing lessons to her left, and nobody was paying any attention to her except a golden retriever watching from a shady spot beneath a bench. There had probably been hip coffee shops and trendy food stores in town when she was a child, but she had certainly never gone into them. If she had, she would have been shooed out as soon as the shopkeepers saw her handmade clothes and muddy shoes. She could still hear the whispers: It’s the Lovegood girl, poor little thing. Why doesn’t her mother watch her properly?
She wasn’t wearing a patched skirt and ill-fitting hand-me-down boots now. She had as much right to be here as anybody. When she had asked for the car keys and made up an excuse about wanting a Wi-Fi connection, Verity had only laughed and said, “I’m surprised it’s taken you this long. This has to be a different pace of life than what you’re used to.” She had handed over the keys without question, and all the way into town, guilt had gnawed at Sorrow’s insides. She hadn’t lied. But she hadn’t been entirely honest either.
She pulled open the café door and stepped inside. It was a small place, decorated with bright patches of blue and yellow, and only about half of the dozen mismatched tables were occupied. There were a few people working on laptops, two women chatting while babies slumbered in strollers, an old man paging through a newspaper, and Julie Abrams.