I Only Speak to the Dead Because They Don’t Accuse Me of Witchcraft

i.

Reverend Bancroft nodded to me. I stepped forward, and took a handful of earth, just as he’d explained. It was soft, and smelled of the freshness and life of Spring. I held it out over the casket and hesitated. When I dropped my handful of earth, it would be over.

I burned with a sharp regret: for now I was alone.

I wasn’t ready to bury the dead.

ii.

Brother John Porter was taken by an unnatural swift fever. In the last weeks of his life, he sank into devastating financial ruin. No one knew what had happened to his money. The child Goody Porter carried was a curse, some said, and wasn’t it unnatural for a woman to go fourteen years without conceiving, only to get with child weeks before her husband took ill?

When Goody Porter went on bed rest, her daughter Thomasin started missing Church to stay with her mother. When she did leave the house, her face was pallid and her eyes hollow.

The baby was born silent and cold as a stone. Goody Richard said it had hooves instead of feet. Goody Andrews said it was neither male nor female but some thing without a sex.

Goody Porter outlived that malformed child by two weeks. The day she died, Thomasin Porter showed up at our house, her hair disheveled and her eyes unfocused, in bare feet and a filthy dress, and begged my father’s compassion.

He is a strict man, but he is also merciful, and as he says, she has nowhere else to go. What sort of shepherd would he be if he could not care for the meekest of his flock?

iii.

I am to share a room with Reverend Bancroft’s eldest, Amity. She is a year my senior and helps to teach the younger ones their Scripture. She has given me a passage to learn this week. It is from Ecclesiastes. I have been thinking on this piece:

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

I think that she has chosen it especial for me given my own circumstances.

I wonder if I should have accepted Josiah Siddons’ suit when he offered it. I thought myself too young; Father thought that Brother Josiah was a little too eager to inherit a piece of Father’s business. Now he would not have me: I am an orphan, and penniless. But I am no meaner a thing than I was before. I shall do as the verse says and rejoice in my own works, however meager they might be.

iv.

Thomasin is a strange and solitary girl. Still, she does whatever work Mother and Father give to her without complaint, and she has been very compliant when I have sought her help with William, Nathaniel, and Constance.

But ofttimes I will find her standing at her parents’ graves, and the sorrow in her eyes is palpable.

v.

I am trying to make sense of things, and no matter how I set them out, they do not hold in reason. My father’s money…I know not what happened in those last days, but I kept his books for him and it is not prideful of me to say that I could not have erred so greatly in my accountancy.

His sudden fever…well, that cannot be helped, and I suppose that if my mother suffered the same fever, that might have done harm to the baby. I do not like to hear people speak of family curses. They say it even when I am in the room, as if I am an object that has no ears.

Amity is kind to me, though. She has the most lovely hair; it glistens red in the firelight when she takes it down from her bonnet, and I cannot take my eyes from it. Her husband will be a most fortunate man.

vi.

There was a sharp downpour which began without warning this after-noon, and I had to take in the washing very quickly. There was the most ferocious rumbling of thunder. I went looking for Thomasin to help me, but I could not find her.

Once I had brought in the washing and she was still not at home, I went to seek her out of worry.

She was in the churchyard, without a cloak, her hair down and streaming over her shoulders, her feet bare and blue from the chill. When she looked at me, her eyes were glassy as if she did not see me at first.

vii.

I was at my parents’ graves when the storm began. The rain trickled down my face, my shoulders, pouring over me and frothing into mud upon the graves.

I remembered my Bible verse. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. I thought upon how the water unified my body which would become dust with the bodies of my parents which were comingling already with the dust in which they were interred.

And it was then that I heard a voice. A voice that sounded like my father’s.

Thomasin, it said.

viii.

I chastised Thomasin quite forwardly for risking a chill, and again for the mud on her poor bare feet, and I helped her up to our room and sat her down and began to remove her wet things.

She shivered, and her teeth clattered against each other, and I did my best to make her clean and dry, and then I went to gather up her nightdress.

I brought it back to her, and saw her, sitting on the edge of our bed, her body pale and her face moonlike. I bade her put the nightdress on.

ix.

I saw the way Amity looked at me, the way her green eyes played over my skin. I saw the affection in her gaze, and it made me feel warmer in that moment. But I cannot ask her what she meant by it. I shall strive to forget it.

x.

Even after Thomasin dressed, I could not help but look at her as if I could still see her nakedness. I fetched her something warm to drink, and it was only then I could get the image of her from my mind.

She sipped at the steaming mug I brought her, and slowly the color came back to her cheeks. She reached for my hand.

“If I tell you something, something terrible, will you swear not to tell another soul?”

I nodded. “Of course,” I answered. “We are sisters now.”

She shivered, and it was all I could do not to wrap my arm around her. I told myself it was only my instinct to comfort her but I must admit that I was thinking of my own comfort.

“I spoke to them,” she said softly, and did not look at me. “To my parents. In the graveyard.”

“I know it must feel like that,” I told her. “When you can be close to someone you have lost.”

“Not like that,” said Thomasin. “No. They said they were murdered.”

xi.

Josiah Siddons came to the house today. He asked if I could recount something that my father said before he died; he said that it was related to their business dealings, but I knew not of what he spoke. When I said I could not help him, he flew into such a rage as I have not seen before.

As the Reverend was not at home, it took all three of us, myself and Amity and Goody Bancroft, to send him forth from the house.

Amity came to me when he was gone and stroked my hand and said gentle words.

xii.

William is very ill. We are saying extra prayers to relieve his suffering.

xiii.

Little William’s symptoms are so like my father’s. He is lost in a fever. The last time this happened, people spoke ill of my mother’s unborn child, but this time, I can feel their eyes turning upon me.

xiv.

William cannot eat; he does nothing but call for our mother and there is naught to soothe him.

xv.

I have learned two things. One thing is that it is only in the rain that I can hear the voices of my parents speaking to me. Second, they have confirmed what I suspected: that Josiah became enraged when my father would not give him my hand in marriage.

I went to confront him. He looked at me with cold eyes and told me to go back home.

xvi.

It is around town that Thomasin went to Josiah Siddons’ house, and this morning he has fallen ill with the same sickness that has stricken William. Brother Josiah claims that the day he came to see us, Thomasin had scolded William for some childish infraction, and consequently William took sick.

Father says there is little he can do to protect Thomasin. He may be the leader of the church, but fear turns people from the lessons of the Lord.

xvii.

William is dead this morning. The town elders have made it very clear that if Josiah Siddons does not recover, I shall pay. I am sure his symptoms will persist until he has his punishment of me, although I know not what he would take but my life.

xviii.

All is lost. Mother is in terrible grief. Father is trying to be strong but there is little he can do, and his own son lost to him.

They came for Thomasin, today in the rain. She was not to be found in the house, and I knew in a moment where she was. I prayed they would not look there, for I knew how she would be; wild and barefooted among the muddy graves. They say she was speaking to an invisible devil when they came upon her, and they have moved her directly into jail where I fear she will catch a chill or worse. Father says this looks very bad, although he is sure that Thomasin is only a little girl who misses her mother and father.

xix.

There is only the barest sunlight in this cell, and everything is damp and smells of mold. It is quiet and chill, and my clothing has not dried since yesterday.

This morning they allowed Amity in to see me, and she brought some bread and jam and a piece of ham. She bade me come to the door of the cell, and to hold my hand out through the small window, and she pressed her lips to my fingers. They were warm and moist and I can still feel the spot on my index finger where her breath brushed my skin.

xx.

Thomasin is as dear as a sister, and yet more dear in a way I cannot express. My bed which had been mine alone for so long now feels empty and forlorn when she is not beside me. I have lost William, I cannot lose Thomasin as well.

I must have the truth of this.

xxi.

They have come to my cell and told me to renounce Satan and all his evils. I told them gladly I would, but they say that if I had truly renounced Satan, Josiah Siddons would be well.

xxii.

The Lord in Heaven be praised, it rained again this morning. I stole away to the churchyard. I removed my shoes and stood in the mud over the Porters’ graves, and shut my eyes and thought of Thomasin.

“Brother John,” I said softly. “Goody Porter. I am a friend to Thomasin. I wish to help.”

I let the rain fall over me, soaking into my clothing and my skin.

When I heard a voice, a chill ran up my spine, but I held fast and offered myself as a vessel of the Lord.

And then John Porter told me what to do.

xxiii.

Josiah Siddons is dead, but it is not from the fever. It is difficult, while I am still imprisoned, to hear a reliable narrative of these events, but from what I understand, Amity Bancroft went to my parents’ house and found the pouch that Josiah Siddons had left beneath our floor. A pouch with a dead mouse and some tree bark, and blood and hair. And then she went to his own house and found the cloth dolls he kept, decorated to look like people. One of my mother, one of my father, one each of all the Bancrofts.

One of me. I tremble to know if he ever tried to use it.

xxiv.

They say that when Josiah Siddons learned that his guilt had been revealed, he was struck down dead that very moment by the power of the Lord.

What they do not know is that there was a doll of him, also, or the destruction I have visited upon it.

Father says that Thomasin will be returned to us.