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Authors: Alice Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Short Stories (Single Author)

Blackbird House (3 page)

BOOK: Blackbird House
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In an instant she knew everything she had hoped for was impossible. She cut off all her hair, and she tore the clothes she wore with a carving knife.
 
She threw away her frying pan and her kettle, her spices and her liberty tea, all tossed into the pond.
 
She might have starved to death if Hannah Crosby hadn’t seen that bird circling over the property, like a vulture or a ghost.
 
The doctor was called in; some sassafras tea and bed rest were recommended.
 
Hannah, to her credit, suggested that Coral come back and live in the lodging rooms the family had occupied before John built the house.
 
But she could tell, with one harsh look from Coral, the answer was no.

In another town, a widow’s vandu might be suggested, and a year of Coral’s labor put up for auction so that she could met her expenses, but this was not the sort of place where people were sold to the highest bidder.
 
The Hawkes family brought over an old cow that was still a good milker, and Hannah Crosby was happy to oversee the garden to ensure there’d be a decent crop of turnips, if nothing else.

By the end of the summer, Coral Hadley was selling her turnips by the side of the road, set out in crates, trusting folks’ honesty.
 
The turnips were particularly large; one alone could last a week.
 
People said they were so sweet, a single bite could bring a man to tears.
 
Buyers tended to leave more money in the cash box than they needed to.

Even the British soldiers took three boxes of turnips along with them

for their voyage home, and they left Coral

Hadley eight shillings per box, far more than they were worth.

Seven years after the May gale, the white blackbird could still be spied.
 
It was said Coral Hadley had tried to chase it off; she’d fired a musket at it, she’d thrown a bucket of ashes in its direction, but it wouldn’t go away.
 
Even after all these years, people remembered her suffering.
 
Perhaps her neighbors thought it was luck to help the luckless: some of the men put up a fence around Coral’s garden, and another around the barn.
 
One spring a pair of sheep was left in her field.
 
Another May, a dusty-gray horse that looked very much like one that belonged the Maguire family was tied up to the post outside the house.
 
People took to leaving out food for the crow as well, crumb cakes and molasses bread, for such gifts were said to be good luck.
 
Hannah Crosby, who so feared birds, left morsels on a stump in the center of the meadow and swore the blackbird had once eaten from the palm of her hand.

One summer day, Coral Hadley went out early to feed the sheep, and the cow, and the horse she had named Charger, and there was a man in her yard.
 
Each spring she had planted sweet peas; now they were everywhere, knee high, blossoming, purple and white and pink.
 
Coral knew she wasn’t the person she used to be: her teeth were falling out, ground down by nightmares; her hair had turned white.
 
People in town said she was hurrying her old age, rushing forward to meet her husband, John, and her children in the hereafter, but really she was rushing toward this moment, this instant, this very breath.

III.

The May gale had surprised them, as it had surprised everyone else who was fishing in the Middle Banks.
 
One moment there’d been a sea of glass, the next a sea of mountains.
 
They did the best any crew might have done; even Isaac managed as well as could be expected as they tried to drive leeward.
 
But in the force of the storm, the sloop broke apart, and there was nothing anyone could have done.
 
It happened not slowly but all at once, as though a giant had picked them up and crushed them with a single stroke.
 
Everything splintered; everything broke; everything was devoured by the sea.
 
Things that couldn’t be were.
 
Things that should never have happened were there before their eyes.
 
Vincent knew how bad it was when his brother threw the blackbird into the sky, threw him with both hands, a last desperate act of love.

John Hadley’s last act was to roll the molasses barrel to Vincent so he could float with it.
 
John then grabbed his younger son around his chest, and he and Isaac disappeared almost at once.
 
To his great shame, Vincent clung to the barrel.
 
That was how the British schooner found him; they’d had to pry his frozen fingers from the metal band around the center of the wood.
 
Though they were the enemy, and had no choice but to take him to Dartmoor Prison, the soldiers congratulated him on his fortitude.
 
They did not ask if he’d been at sea all alone, and he did not tell them that he had watched his father and his brother drown.
 
If that was fortitude, it was something he didn’t care to possess.
 
If that was strength, he wanted none of it.
 
He wished he’d let go of that barrel that had saved him.

Vincent Hadley was in prison in England for five years, until the war was over, and then he was released without a shilling.
 
Prison had been a strange dream of hearing other men talk and rant and list their regrets.
 
As for Vincent, he never said much, although it was evident he had regrets as well.
 
He cried for the first year, pathetically, horribly, saltwater tears, and then he stopped.
 
By the time he was released, he probably could not have cried if he’d been stabbed through the chest.
 
There was no water left inside him.
 
There was nothing inside him at all.

He got the only sort of work he felt capable of doing, signing on to one ship after another, always checking for a route that might bring him closer to home.
 
Another man might have carried with him a justified fear of the sea; he might have lived in dread of storms a man couldn’t fight, of gales that came up suddenly at the hour when the sea seemed calm as glass.
 
But in fact, Vincent was fearless.
 
If there was something dangerous to be done, he need simply be asked, not even commanded.
 
He would dive into the coldest tide and scrape barnacles from beneath a sloop.
 
He would retrieve anchors from the deep.
 
He would wrestle with bluefish, and he had the marks of their teeth on his arms to show that, although he’d won many fights, the battles had been fierce.

At last he got to
Virginia
.
 
He was a man of twenty-seven by then, and he still didn’t talk much.
 
He had no answers, and he wanted no questions.
 
He’d spent so much time in the West Indies that his blood had thinned; he was no longer used to the cold, and he knew as he traveled it would get colder still.
 
The first thing he did after arriving in
Virginia
was buy a deerskin jacket.
 
The second was to start to edge his way north, always fishing, always taking on the most dangerous work.
 
Whenever the men he worked alongside said go back, whenever the sea was at its worst, Vincent said go forward.
 
He considered writing a letter home, explaining where he’d been, but he’d never been much for writing, and when it came down to it, what did he have to say?
 
That the blackbird had dipped its wings into the cold, roiling sea, where it was covered in foam?
 
That he’d guessed it would drown, but instead it had suddenly flown upward, that pet of his brother’s that had never before taken flight.
 
It had disappeared into a cloud.

It took him twelve years to think of what he would say.

He was a tall, handsome, quiet man; he took after his father in some ways.
 
Women fell in love with him, but he wasn’t concerned with such things.
 
He still had the mark of the copper band from that barrel he’d clung to so desperately embedded in the fingers on both hands.
 
Some people said the marks looked like rings, and perhaps that’s what they were.
 
He was wedded to something already and no woman in
Virginia
or
Maryland
or
New York
could tie him to her for longer than a few days.

It was summer when he reached the Cape.
 
He started down the King’s Highway, that rutted sandy lane that would take him home.
 
When he stopped at taverns, and heard
Massachusetts
voices, he felt as though he’d been gone far longer than twelve years.
 
He wanted to walk and get the feel of the place.
 
He wanted to take his time and see milkweed, and wild blueberries, and cranberry bogs.
 
He’d been at sea for so long, and was so accustomed to its constant motion, it was a while before he got used to solid ground.
 
He slept beneath the oak trees and ordered bread and gravy and little else in the taverns where he occasionally stopped.
 
He had taught himself not to long for water or hunger for food.
 
There wasn’t much he was attached to in this world.
 
The bite marks on his arms from the bluefish burned, but he paid the scars no mind.
 
He thought about how sure he’d been of himself, once; how he’d believed he was as knowledgeable as any man.
 
He thought about the damselflies gliding over the pond, and the sound of the frogs plashing in the water, and the yellow light coming in through the windows of the house his father built.
 
He thought about how love could move you in ways you wouldn’t have imagined, one foot in front of the other, even when you thought you had nothing left inside.
 
He smelled lilacs after a while, and the scent of wild onions.
 
There were the sweet peas, right in front of him, already in bloom, acres of them, grown carefully from seed, a pink-hued and endless sea.

THE WITCH OF TRURO

WITCHES TAKE THEIR NAMES FROM PLACES,

for places are what give them their strength.
 
The place need not be beautiful, or habitable, or even green.
 
Sand and salt, so much the better.
 
Scrub pine, plum berry and brambles, better still.
 
From every bitter thing, after all, something hardy will surely grow.
 
From every difficulty, the seed that’s sewn is that much stronger.
 
Ruin is the milk all witches must drink; it’s the lesson they learn and the diet they’re fed upon.
 
Ruth Declan lived on a bluff that was called Blackbird’s Hill, and so she was called Ruth Blackbird Hill, a fitting name, as her hair was black and she was so light-footed she could disappear right past a man and he wouldn’t see anything, he’d just feel a rush of wind and pick up the scent of something reminiscent of orchards and the faint green odor of milk.

Ruth kept cows, half a dozen, but they gave so much into their buckets she might have had twenty.
 
She took her cows for walks, as though they were pets, along the sand-rutted King’s Highway, down to the bay, where they grazed on marsh grass.
 
Ruth Blackbird Hill called her cows her babies and hugged them to her breast; she patted their heads and fed them sugar from the palm of her hand, and that may have been why their milk was so sweet.
 
People said Ruth Blackbird Hill sang to her cows at night, and that whoever bought milk from her would surely be bewitched.
 
Not that anyone believed in such things anymore.
 
All the same, when Ruth came into town, the old women tied bits of hemp into witch knots on their sleeves for protection.
 
The old men looked to see if she was wearing red shoes, always the mark of a witch.
 
Ruth avoided these people; she didn’t care what they thought.
 
She would have happily stayed on Blackbird Hill and never come down, but two things happened:

First came smallpox, which took her father and her mother, no matter how much sassafras tea they were given, and how tenderly Ruth cared for them.
 
Then came the fire, which took the house and the land.

On the night of the fire, Ruth Blackbird Hill stood in the grass and screamed.
 
People could hear her all the way in Eastham and far out to sea.
 
She watched the pear and the apple and the peach trees burning.
 
She watched the grass turn red as blood.
 
She had risked her life to save her cows, running into the smoky barn, and now they gathered round her, lowing, leaking milk, panicked.
 
It was not enough that she should lose her mother and her father, one after the other, now she had lost Blackbird Hill, and with it she had lost herself.
 
The fire raged for two days, until a heavy rain began to fall.
 
People in town said that Ruth killed a toad and nailed it to a hickory tree, knowing that rain would follow, but it was too late.
 
The hill was burned to cinders; it was indeed a blackbird’s hill, black as night, black as the look in Ruth’s eyes, black as the future that was assuredly hers.

Ruth sat on the hillside until her hair was completely knotted and her skin was the color of the gray sky up above.
 
She might have stayed there forever, but after some time went by, her cows began to cry. They were weak with hunger, they were her babies still, and so Ruth took them into town.
 
One day, people looked out their windows and a blackbird seemed to swoop by, followed by a herd of skinny milk-cows that had all turned to pitch in the fire.
 
Ruth Blackbird Hill made herself a camp right on the beach; she slept there with no shelter, no matter the weather.
 
The only food she ate was what she dug up in the shallows: clams and whelks.
 
She may have drunk the green, thin milk her cows gave, though it was still tinged with cinders.
 
She may have bewitched herself to protect herself from any more pain.
 
Perhaps that was the reason she could sleep in the heat or the rain; why it was said she could drink salt water.

BOOK: Blackbird House
3.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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