“The kid in the black hat”—Ethan pointed to the little boy wearing an oversized Pilgrim hat made of cardboard and construction paper—“he’s Clement Abrams.”
“Definitely don’t cheer for him,” Sorrow said. “He was a creepy, misogynistic, fire-and-brimstone preacher. Like a hundred years late to be a proper Puritan, but totally a Puritan at heart.”
“True,” Ethan said. “Don’t root for him. And the kids over there, that’s Ebenezer and Eliza Smith. They’re the ones who are going to be attacked.”
A red-haired girl with a paper bonnet over her braids and a too-big apron had a baby doll dangling from one hand and a glower on her face. The boy playing her husband, Ebenezer, was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the stage, plucking dandelions from the grass and eating them.
“Mama Smith looks like she’s not taking any shit. I’ll cheer for her,” Kavita decided. “Unless she murders anybody’s ancestors. Does she?”
“No, she’s good,” Sorrow said.
“Where’s your ancestor? Isn’t she in this too?”
“I’m guessing she’s the one in the corner there with the black dress and the pointy witch hat.” Both of which, Sorrow noted, were trimmed with distinctly anachronistic glitter that sparkled in the sunlight.
“Oh, I see her. This isn’t going to go all Salem witch trials in the twist ending, is it?”
“Not unless they’re taking a lot of creative license,” Ethan said.
“What’s with the kid with the historically accurate Super Soaker?” Mahesh asked.
“That’s the weather,” Ethan said.
What happened on that night in June of 1763 was that it started raining as Clement Abrams and his eager but not particularly skilled militiamen were disguising themselves as French soldiers and Abenaki warriors, taking up their long muskets and farm tools, and sneaking through the downpour to surround the Smith homestead.
What happened in the play was that at the first squirt from the Super Soaker, little Clement Abrams in his paper hat promptly burst into tears.
“Please tell me that’s also historically accurate,” Kavita said.
The crowd tittered with laughter, which only made the boy cry harder. The teacher waved frantically, trying to stop the rainstorm, but the girl armed with the Super Soaker ignored her. The rest of the raiding party—now leaderless—belatedly remembered to encircle the Smiths and shake their plastic Halloween tridents in an enthusiastic, if confused, display of menace.
Eliza Smith, exactly on cue, kicked her dandelion-munching husband to his feet and pointed imperiously across the stage. Rejoice Lovegood, grinning beneath her sparkling witch hat, waved happily back at her.
The real Eliza Smith, upon waking to discover her house under siege by unseen assailants shouting in bad French, had sent her husband to the nearest neighbor for help. That neighbor was Rejoice Lovegood, who was clever enough to realize that Ebenezer Smith’s tale of being attacked by wild natives and mad Frenchmen was perhaps not the most accurate representation of the events currently unfolding at his farm. She sent him back to his wife and took it upon herself to visit the other farms in the valley to find out what was going on.
“She went from house to house all night,” Sorrow explained. “None of the men in the raiding party had bothered to tell their wives what they were doing, but it didn’t take long for them to figure it out. They marched up to the Smith house to confront their husbands.”
The girl playing Rejoice Lovegood raced gleefully around the stage with her arms spread wide. She knocked into her classmates as she ran, and one by one little girls in paper bonnets joined her.
“I’m guessing this doesn’t end with everybody going home and having a laugh over the big misunderstanding,” Kavita said.
“Not quite,” Ethan said. “When the raiding party heard somebody else coming through the forest, they thought that a real raiding party had found them, so they ran out of hiding and—well. That.”
Onstage, Eliza Smith hurled her baby doll at the raiding party, striking the still-teary Clement Abrams in the face.
“She threw her baby at him?” Kavita said.
“No, she shot him,” Ethan said. “The teachers probably thought toy guns were too violent.”
Clement Abrams screwed up his face to howl even louder.
“She killed him?” Mahesh asked.
“If only,” Sorrow replied.
“Hey,” Ethan said mildly. “I wouldn’t be here if she had.”
“He survived,” Sorrow said. “He claimed it was God’s will, which, whatever, it would have been fine, but he also said—”
There it was: Clement Abrams pointing a wobbly finger at Rejoice Lovegood and her grinning posse of little girls.
“He also said that Rejoice—my ancestor—had bewitched Eliza Smith, and the only reason his men were in the woods that night was because they had gone to save her. And that Rejoice had tried to stop them by flying house to house—”
“Hence the witch hat.”
“Right. He said she had bewitched all of their wives and made them abandon their children to attack their husbands.”
“And people believed that?” Kavita said.
“It didn’t matter if they believed it or not,” Sorrow said. “Nobody was going to believe his stupid story about the French anymore, so blaming a witch was the next best thing. I guess people liked that better than they liked thinking their neighbors would attack a family while they slept and risk restarting a war they were all only just getting used to being over.”
The scene onstage had devolved into chaos. The teacher was still trying to get the kids to remember the final act of their play, but the actors were drifting away toward their parents, and confused applause from the audience drowned out the rest of what she was saying.
Sorrow watched the kids scatter, and as she was following little Rejoice Lovegood’s sparkly hat through the crowd, a glimmer of long blond hair caught her eyes. Her heart skipped, but the woman disappeared behind a group of senior citizens in sun hats, and she couldn’t tell if it was Julie.
“The kids did better than the co-op,” Ethan said, “but it still wasn’t as entertaining as the dogs. The dogs actually made it all the way through to the end.”
“That’s not the end?” Kavita asked. “What’s missing?”
Sorrow said, “Well, after they accused Rejoice of witchcraft, they had to arrest her, but . . .”
A dark room, a barred door, and winter air so cold her skin burned. She looked down at her hands, pale and dirty from scrabbling in dark corners—
Sorrow blinked. Again, and looked up, and the park quivered around her.
It had been summer when Rejoice Lovegood was arrested. Not winter, not cold.
“But what?” Kavita said.
She was confusing the story with the memory of hearing it told. She had listened to her mother’s stories on so many winter nights, the whistle of wind in the chimney a constant accompaniment to Verity’s voice. That was the reason for the blending in her mind, the overlap of history and memory.