Galore - Michael Crummey [41]
John Tom White came to King-me with the opinion there was a widow’s hand to blame, that someone had set the old hag on the girl. John Tom was a walking aphorism with a rhyme for every ripple in the weather, a charm for any ailment. Seven knots in a piece of string worn on your wrist to cure toothache. A potato carried in a pocket to relieve rheumatism. “If the wind’s in the east on Candlemas Day, there it will stick till the end of May.” It was the queerest case he’d ever seen of someone hag-ridden, he said, coming on so sudden in the middle of the day, and there had to be a witch at the root of it. King-me turned his face away and nodded.
—You wants to set things straight, he said, you got to put a bottle up, Master Sellers.
King-me pissed into a glass bottle and he stuck nine virgin pins in the cork as John Tom instructed.
—That’ll block the witch’s water up, John Tom said and he hung the bottle in the fireplace to set the liquid to simmer. —She’ll come around now the once, he said, begging to be relieved of that.
But the bottle boiled mad and shattered over the flames and a second bottle burst the same. King-me was hesitant to repeat the procedure a third time. John Tom had him place the bottle away from the heat in a corner of the pantry where the liquid came to a boil regardless and King-me smashed the works on the flagstones of the fireplace.
John Tom stared at the mess, running a hand in circles over the bald pate of his head. —You know who it is we’re working against, Master Sellers?
—Never mind, King-me said.
—There’s one way to escape the sleep hag, John Tom said, has nothing to do with the witch. You hammers nails through a shingle and sleeps with it on your breast. When the old hag comes to pin you to your bed, he said, she squats down on the nails and the fright drives her off.
For the better part of a month Lizzie was forced to wear a board of nails hung round her neck all hours of the day and night. She thought of it as a leper’s bell, a physical manifestation of her humiliation, and she refused to be seen wearing it. Eventually Selina threw the contraption into the fireplace. But by then Lizzie had developed an outcast’s habits, disappearing in the nooks and crannies of the house, slipping into the woods above the Gaze or out as far as the French Cemetery, solitude her only relief from the affliction that had stolen her life.
Occasionally she went past the cemetery to Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Except for the African who’d built a tilt near the waterline and worked there as a tinker, the Pond was quiet, too far a walk to be useful for water or washing. Lizzie pushed through the skirt of alders on the shoreline opposite the black man’s property, wading the shallows to catch spanny-tickles in her palms. Ralph Stone never paid the slightest attention to her there and it became her favorite excursion when the weather was decent. She spent hours sitting out of sight across the Pond for the sensation of being completely alone and still enjoying the company of the man pottering across the water.
She knew almost nothing about Ralph Stone. Callum Devine and Daniel Woundy came upon a lifeboat in a bank of fog off the Rump, the black man adrift with a crew of corpses, half a dozen fellows dead of hunger and thirst after three weeks on open water without provision. He was like to have died himself, lips swollen and cracked and his eyes wild, refusing the food and water offered him and carrying on a conversation with his dead companions as the boat was towed into the Gut. On his back by the fireplace, he was fed broth through a cloth tit until he could stomach solid food. Devine’s Widow thought his skin burnt or scorched black by the sun and for several days she covered him in a Jerseyman salve of Sea Doctors crushed and mixed with cod-liver oil before trying to scrub him clean with ashes and soap. He stared up at her on the third day, enough in his mind by then to see what she was about. —It won’t wash, Missus,