“I can wait,” Coral said. That and nothing more.

  She had planted the field, the way she thought John would want her to. Though the ground was cold, she dug in row after row of turnips, then she planted corn; at last she sprinkled the seedpods of pink sweet peas, feed for the cows they would someday have, and for remembrance as well. John had favored sweet peas, and had brought her armfuls of the flowers when he was courting her. Her mother had said they were weeds, but, as was often the case, her mother was wrong.

  Coral worked with a pick in the hot sun all summer long and into autumn, unafraid of dirt or hard work, dressed in black, refusing to eat anything her neighbors might bring. In honor of her family, and what they must be suffering, she ate only johnnycakes and catfish caught from the pond, simmering in an old pan over the woodstove. She kept in mind those men who had reappeared at their own funerals: Robert Servich and Nathaniel Hawkes, for instance, both of them lost for months in the Indies, and now living right down the lane. She thought about turnip stew and turnip cakes and how pleased John would be when he tasted the fruit of her labors. How he’d be surprised to hear there were green onions growing wild in the far field, that there was a grapevine so huge it would keep them in jellies and jams and pies all year long.

  And then, the next spring, when May arrived and the leaves were budding in shades of yellow and green, Coral realized that the blackbird had returned. It was some time before she recognized it, because the bird had turned entirely white. It sat in a branch of the big oak, where it could have easily been mistaken for a wisp of a cloud. It looked like something Coral could blink away, but it wouldn’t disappear. First the bird was on her roof, then it was at her window, and then, one morning, the white blackbird tapped at the door, and that was how she knew they were gone.

  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, plumberry, 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 witchknots 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.

  Anyone would have guessed the six cows would have bolted for someone else’s farmland and a field of green grass, but they stayed where they were, on the beach, beside Ruth. People in town said you could hear them all crying at night; it got so bad the fish were frightened out of the bay, and the whelks disappeared, and the oysters buried themselves so deeply they couldn’t be found.

  It was May, the time of year when the men went to sea. Perhaps a different decision might have been considered if the men been home from the Great Banks and the Middle Banks, where their sights were set on mackerel and cod. Perhaps Ruth would have been run out of town. As it was, Susan Crosby and Easter West devised a plan of their own. They won Ruth Blackbird Hill over slowly, with plates of oatcakes and kettles of tea. They took their time, the way they might with a fox or a dove, any creature that was easily startled. They sat on a log of dritfwood and told Ruth that sorrow was what this world was made of, but that it was her world still. At first she would not look at them, yet they could tell she was listening. She was a young woman, a girl really, nineteen at most, although her hands looked as hard as an old woman’s, with ropes of veins that announced her hardships.

  Susan and Easter brought Ruth over to Lysander Wynn’s farm, where he’d built a blacksmithing shed. It took half the morning to walk there, with the cows stopping to graze by the road, dawdling until Ruth coaxed them on. It was a bright-blue day, and the women from town felt giddy now that they’d made a firm decision to guide someone else’s fate, what their husbands might call “interference” had they but known. As for Ruth, she still had a line of black cinders under her fingernails. There was eelgrass threaded through her hair. She had the notion that these two women, Susan and Easter, known for their good works and their kindly attitudes, were about to sell her into servitude. She simply couldn’t see any other reason for them to be walking along with her, swatting the cows on the rear to speed them on, waving away the flies. The awful thing was that Ruth wasn’t completely opposed to being sold. She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to remember anything. She didn’t even want to speak.

  They reached the farm that Lysander had bought from the Hadley family. He’d purchased the property mainly because it was the one place in the area from which there was no view of the sea, for that was exactly what he wanted. The farm was only a mile from the closest shore, but it sat in a hollow, with tall oaks and scrub pine and a field of sweet peas and brambles nearby. As a younger man, Lysander had been a sailor, he’d gone out with the neighbors to the Great Banks, and it was there he’d had his accident. A storm had come up suddenly, and the sloop had listed madly, throwing Lysander into the sea. It was so cold he had no time to think, save for a fleeting thought of Jonah, of how a man could be saved when he least expected it, in ways he could have never imagined.

  He wondered if perhaps the other men on board, Joseph Hansen and Edward West, had had the foresight to throw him a side of salt pork for him to lean on, for, just when he expected to drown, something solid was suddenly beneath him. Something hard and cold as ice. Something made of scales rather than flesh or water or wood; a creature who certainly was not intent on Lysander’s salvation. The fish to whose back he clung was a halibut, a huge one—two hundred, maybe three hundred pounds, Edward West later said. Lysander rode the halibut like he rode his horse, Domino, until he was bucked off. All at once his strength was renewed by his panic; he started swimming, harder than he ever had before. Lysander was almost to the boat when he felt it, the slash of the thing against him, and the water turned red right away. He was only twenty at the time, too young to have this happen. Dead or alive, either would have been better than what had befallen him. He wished he had drowned that day, because when he was hauled into the boat his neighbors had to finish the job and cut off the leg at the thigh, then cauterize the wound with gunpowder and whiskey.

  Lysander had some money saved, and the other men in town contributed the rest, and the farm was bought soon after. The shed was built in a single afternoon, and the anvil brought down from Boston. Luckily, Lysander had the blacksmith’s trade in his family, on his father’s side, so it came naturally to him. The hotter the work was, the better he liked it. He could stick his hand into the flame fueled by the bellow and not feel a thing. But let it rain, even a fleeting drizzle, and he would start to shiver. He ignored the pond behind the house entirely, though there were catfish there that were said to be delectable. Fishing was for other men. Water was for fools. As for women, they were a dream he didn’t bother with. In his estimation, the future was no farther away than the darkness of evening; it consisted of nothing more than a sprinkling of stars in the sky.