out and takes one of her hands in both of her own. Sarah strokes Kate’s hand as Kate sobs, but her expression does not change, and even her hands stroke Kate’s in a perfunctory way, as if she is consoling someone else, and it feels to Kate like Sarah is looking into someone else’s eyes, not hers, and that terrifies Kate all the more. Kate startles and tries to draw her hand out of Sarah’s grasp. Sarah does not let go.
Kate sobs to her, “Sarah, let me go.”
Sarah says, “It is all right, my dear friend; everything is all right.” But again, it feels to Kate as if Sarah Good is speaking to someone else, just beyond her, maybe just behind her, or just to the side, she cannot tell where, but just outside of her awareness. Then Kate catches a glimpse of whom Sarah is talking with. It is Kate after all. There is a rushing sensation of relief, similar to what it feels like to regain consciousness after nearly drowning or passing out from having the wind knocked out of oneself. Kate gasps and there is a flooding of herself back into herself, and she looks at Sarah, who now is clearly looking right at her, was looking right at her all along, and who is once again Kate’s dear, cherished old friend, born, grown, scapegoated, accused, condemned, and hanged, and Kate is once again herself, also born, also grown, beloved, struck down, and killed three centuries on, tomorrow, justthis moment, ages ago, on the very road laid out below them. Kate kneels down in front of Sarah and rests her head in her friend’s lap.
Sarah runs her fingers through Kate’s hair and says, not much louder than a whisper, “Sometimes, it’s hard to remember.”
4.
W HEN I WAS A KID, MAYBE TWELVE OR THIRTEEN, WHAT I MOST wanted was to be outside somewhere, in the woods or crouching in the high grass in the fields of Mrs. Hale’s estate, next to my friend Peter Lord’s house, late at night, almost dawn, and knowing that my friends were scattered about the field, too, stalking one another but mostly alone. There were revelations that occurred only at night. Some were horrors, like the muddy corpse of a dog, its gums pulling away from its teeth. But there were other secret, nocturnal processes that I observed and could ponder days later, failing to fall asleep on a weeknight, say, dreading school and the regime of home-work. I’d think about being crouched in the field, dilated, tacky with cool, mineral damp, inhaling the fumes of the grass and soil and hearing the wind move up behind the hill and come over it and swirl through the pine trees and stickto the pitch leaking down their trunks and push across the field in waves through the long grass, all beneath the stars and the pink moon, the flower moon, the strawberry, buck, and hunter’s moons, and the clouds lit up in silhouettes, their outlines turning and cresting and collapsing so intricately that I could never recall their true extravagances days later when I lay sleepless in my bed.
My friends and I scattered and hunted one another with flashlights across fifty acres of woods and meadows. The rules for hiding and searching were few and vague and seemed years later to have been kept so in order to preserve the respective solitudes of both those in their hiding places and those trying to find them, while still tethering us all within loose, shifting constellations along the stone walls and clefts, atop hillocks and across the fields. If being alone in the dark unsettled a hider, he was free to crash around and be found. If a hunter decided to turn his flashlight off and stalk the hiders in silence and frighten them to near fainting by pouncing on them where they hid, it was fine. No matter how deeply you crawled into the thickets or the muddy reeds in the swamp or how high you clambered up into a pine tree, if you fell and broke an arm or got spooked by the stars suddenly getting brighter or the leaves stirring without any wind or a voice grunting a single syllable a few yards away,
Kate sobs to her, “Sarah, let me go.”
Sarah says, “It is all right, my dear friend; everything is all right.” But again, it feels to Kate as if Sarah Good is speaking to someone else, just beyond her, maybe just behind her, or just to the side, she cannot tell where, but just outside of her awareness. Then Kate catches a glimpse of whom Sarah is talking with. It is Kate after all. There is a rushing sensation of relief, similar to what it feels like to regain consciousness after nearly drowning or passing out from having the wind knocked out of oneself. Kate gasps and there is a flooding of herself back into herself, and she looks at Sarah, who now is clearly looking right at her, was looking right at her all along, and who is once again Kate’s dear, cherished old friend, born, grown, scapegoated, accused, condemned, and hanged, and Kate is once again herself, also born, also grown, beloved, struck down, and killed three centuries on, tomorrow, justthis moment, ages ago, on the very road laid out below them. Kate kneels down in front of Sarah and rests her head in her friend’s lap.
Sarah runs her fingers through Kate’s hair and says, not much louder than a whisper, “Sometimes, it’s hard to remember.”
4.
W HEN I WAS A KID, MAYBE TWELVE OR THIRTEEN, WHAT I MOST wanted was to be outside somewhere, in the woods or crouching in the high grass in the fields of Mrs. Hale’s estate, next to my friend Peter Lord’s house, late at night, almost dawn, and knowing that my friends were scattered about the field, too, stalking one another but mostly alone. There were revelations that occurred only at night. Some were horrors, like the muddy corpse of a dog, its gums pulling away from its teeth. But there were other secret, nocturnal processes that I observed and could ponder days later, failing to fall asleep on a weeknight, say, dreading school and the regime of home-work. I’d think about being crouched in the field, dilated, tacky with cool, mineral damp, inhaling the fumes of the grass and soil and hearing the wind move up behind the hill and come over it and swirl through the pine trees and stickto the pitch leaking down their trunks and push across the field in waves through the long grass, all beneath the stars and the pink moon, the flower moon, the strawberry, buck, and hunter’s moons, and the clouds lit up in silhouettes, their outlines turning and cresting and collapsing so intricately that I could never recall their true extravagances days later when I lay sleepless in my bed.
My friends and I scattered and hunted one another with flashlights across fifty acres of woods and meadows. The rules for hiding and searching were few and vague and seemed years later to have been kept so in order to preserve the respective solitudes of both those in their hiding places and those trying to find them, while still tethering us all within loose, shifting constellations along the stone walls and clefts, atop hillocks and across the fields. If being alone in the dark unsettled a hider, he was free to crash around and be found. If a hunter decided to turn his flashlight off and stalk the hiders in silence and frighten them to near fainting by pouncing on them where they hid, it was fine. No matter how deeply you crawled into the thickets or the muddy reeds in the swamp or how high you clambered up into a pine tree, if you fell and broke an arm or got spooked by the stars suddenly getting brighter or the leaves stirring without any wind or a voice grunting a single syllable a few yards away,
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