Thomasin

Thomasin woke before the cock, as she always did now, because waking before anyone else meant she could decide

for one private hour what kind of day she was going to have. In that hour the cabin was only timber and breath and the smell of last night’s tallow. No one’s eyes on her yet. No one deciding, behind a held silence, what she was.

She pulled her shawl tight and went out to the goat pen first. Black Phillip watched her with his strange flat patience, the way he always did, as if he alone among

the family had not yet made up his mind about her. She gave him the last of the turnip ends and pressed her forehead, briefly, against his rough hide, the way she used to do with Caleb when they were small enough to share a blanket against the cold

“You’re the only one who hasn’t called me anything,” she told him. “Keep it that way.” The well water came up grey and cold. She carried two pails back without spilling, because spilled water was one more thing that could be laid at her door — clumsiness today, witchcraft tomorrow, the family’s grievances

had a way of growing teeth overnight. She built up the fire before her mother rose, so that when Katherine came to the hearth there would be nothing to find fault with, only warmth already waiting, as if it had made itself. It never seemed to matter. Katherine looked at the fire the way she looked at everything Thomasin touched now — with the suspicion of a woman checking bread for stones.

The corn was failing in the far field, black-kerneled and small, and so the morning’s labor doubled because failing crops meant more foraging, more mending, more making-do. Thomasin took the twins

out to gather what late berries hadn’t rotted on the bramble, mostly to give her mother a few hours without the sound of their bickering, partly because work outdoors was the only place she still felt like herself rather than like a story other people were telling about her.

Mercy ran ahead through the gold-and-rust treeline, fearless in the particular way of children who haven’t yet learned what waits past the fence line. Jonas trailed slower, watching Thomasin sideways

“Did you really speak with him,” Jonas asked. “Black Phillip. Like Mercy says.” “I speak with him the way you speak with a dog,” Thomasin said. “He doesn’t answer back.”

“Mercy says he answers you.” “Mercy says a great many things to frighten you into giving her your share of supper. You’re old enough to know better than to believe her.” Jonas considered this with the grave

seriousness of a boy of nine deciding whether to trust the only sister who still treated him like a person rather than a threat. He didn’t answer. But he walked a little closer to her after that, which she counted, privately, as a kind of grace

They came home with half a basket of berries and no game, because the game had gone from these woods the way faith seemed to be going from this family — quietly, entirely, without anyone marking the exact day it left.

In the afternoon her father sent her with Caleb’s old hatchet to gather kindling at the treeline, never past it, never past it, William always said, as if the line

between farmland and forest were a wall instead of a feeling. She worked methodically, stacking branches by length, and let herself, just for a moment, stop performing devotion or innocence or usefulness for anyone, because no one was there to see her do it

That was when the woods were almost bearable. Not safe — she’d long since stopped believing in safe — but honest, at least, in their indifference. The trees did not whisper her name behind her back. The wind did not stop talking when she entered a room

She thought sometimes, gathering wood at that border, about the version of herself that might have existed if Samuel had never wandered, if Caleb had never gone chasing the hare into the tree line, if her body had not begun, this past year, to make her mother

flinch and her father avoid her eye and the minister at the old plantation purse his lips at her in ways she didn’t yet have words for. She did not think the forest had made her family afraid of her. She thought her family had been afraid of what she was becoming long before the forest gave them a reason to name it

A branch cracked, off past where she could see, too heavy a sound for a rabbit. She did not run. She had decided, weeks ago, that she would not give this family one more frightened reaction to whisper about over supper. She gathered her kindling

unhurried, spine straight, and walked back toward the cabin like a girl with nothing at all to fear — because whatever judged her from the dark of those trees, she had already survived worse from the people who shared her roof.

Supper was thin stew and thinner conversation. William said the grace too long, the way he did lately, as if a longer prayer might patch whatever was leaking out of this family faster than words could fill it

Katherine did not look at Thomasin once through the whole meal, which Thomasin had learned to read as its own kind of verdict — not anger, which could be answered, but a settled, grieving certainty that nothing could be done

Afterward, washing the bowls alone at the basin, Thomasin allowed herself, for exactly as long as it took to scrub the iron pot clean, to imagine being somewhere this was not required of her —

proving, daily, hourly, that she was not the thing they feared. She did not know yet what she would do with that thought. She only knew she was tired in a way that sleep did not touch, the particular tiredness of being endlessly, carefully good and having it cost her everything anyway

She dried her hands, banked the fire, and lay down beside Mercy, who curled instinctively into her warmth even as she’d spent the daylight hours calling her a witch to her face. Thomasin let her. Some loyalties ran under the fear, even in children too young to know which one was true.

Outside, past the fence, past the dead corn, the trees stood the way they always stood, patient and black and full of whatever the woods were full of these days — wolves, or worse, or only the family’s own fear grown large enough to walk on its

own legs. Thomasin lay in the dark beside her sleeping sister and did what she had done every night since Samuel vanished: she got up early in her mind before she got up in her body, already planning tomorrow’s small, useless proofs of goodness, because it was the

only language she had left, and because some stubborn, unbroken part of her still believed that if she only kept speaking it, someone in this house might finally answer back in kind. She did not yet know how many more days she had left to try.