The Wishing Thread Page 6

  But when she knit a spell—a deliberate, concentrated, focused spell—she was not knitting for the sake of knitting. She was cinching up every last bit of focus and concentration in her mind; she was pouring herself out, wringing herself dry. And it wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the process on some level. She liked the intensity, the sense that she was being driven forward by some crazed coachman whipping his horses—faster, faster!—into a demonic momentum. But when the mêlée ended, when the knitting was done and she felt so vacant that she could sometimes hear the sounds of air particles bumping into one another, she had nothing left. Nothing but the dog-tired optimism that the spell would “stick” as she’d intended.

  Now the fingerless gloves were done. And with any luck, with the power of Ruth’s sacrifice and Aubrey’s concentration, it would work. Slowly, her knees creaking like brittle leather, she stood. She went to the dresser by the window, to the massive, clothbound tome that her family had used for record keeping since 1867. The Great Book in the Hall no longer occupied its original location, but the moniker had stuck—in part because it didn’t sound as impressive to call the thing the Great Book in the Spare Bedroom or the Great Book on Aubrey’s Dresser. Like the old Dutch Bibles of farmsteads past, the Stitchery’s sacred book moved from room to room over the centuries, but it was never far from a window. If ever a fire were to break out within the Stitchery’s dry timber frame, the Great Book could be tossed out to relative safety.

  After recording Ruth’s name, a description of her sacrifice, and her address—which Aubrey hadn’t needed to ask for simply because everyone in Tarrytown knew where Ruth Ten Eckye lived—she plucked up Ruth’s pin from the table beside her and carried it reverently, cupped in two hands like a firefly, up the kinked tower stairs. The moment Mariah died, Aubrey had become the Stitchery’s official guardian. It was hers now: her burden, her responsibility, her joy. All she could do was hope.

  She placed Ruth’s pumpkin pin among all the other relics. Then she went downstairs to her bed and fell on it belly-first, too exhausted to take off her clothes.

  “Do you think she’s happy?” Meggie asked. She and Bitty were stretched out side by side on Meggie’s old quilt, their feet hanging off the end of the bed. It was sometime in the middle of the night, but Meggie wasn’t tired. She was worried about Aubrey. There were troubling elements of Aubrey’s lifestyle that she hadn’t quite fully noticed when she’d left the Stitchery four years ago.

  “I don’t see how she could be happy,” Bitty said. “She lives like a hermit.”

  “She’s got a friend. Jeanette seemed cool.”

  “She’s knows people,” Bitty said. “But she doesn’t have a social life. Nothing but her job at the library, and the Stitchery, and the hedgehog. She’s cooped up in here all the time. And now that Mariah’s gone, it’s only going to get worse.”

  “So what do you think she wants?”

  “I don’t know.” Bitty pulled the long end of her ponytail in front of her face and squinted at the ends. “Maybe she thinks it doesn’t matter what she wants.”

  “I guess I can understand what that’s like,” Meggie said. And she paused, but her sister was lost in thought and didn’t ask what she meant. “If she stays here …”

  “I know,” Bitty said. “It’s dangerous.”

  They fell quiet, and Meggie knew they were both thinking of their mother.

  “We have to respect her choices,” Bitty said. “We can’t save her if she doesn’t want us to.”

  “Still,” Meggie said. “We have to try.”

  From the Great Book in the Hall: Where does the urge to create come from? Children will doodle a smiley face on a friend’s shoe. Mothers will braid their daughters’ hair. Fathers will teach their sons to use a jigsaw, or paintbrush, or awl. The impulse to create is a gift and a blessing. But take care that it does not become corrupted. There is a line between passion and obsession, between seeing and thinking you see.

  It was no stretch of imagination for the people of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow to believe in magic. From the beginning, they always had. Native people gathered around the big Hokohongus tree for decades, even centuries, during council meetings. The enslaved Kongolese men and women of Philipse Manor held that the mucky waters of the Pocantico were a boundary line between this world and the next. Even the old burgher Frederick Philipse, staunchly Dutch Reformed, had seen his share of the unbelievable.

  As legend goes, he’d just started construction on the Old Dutch Church—his slaves quarrying rock and mixing mortar—when a freshet flooded his millpond. The dam crumbled and water sluiced through the vale. Philipse pulled the plug on the church’s construction to stop up the pond, and when the water was behaving subserviently once again, the slaves returned to the church on the grassy mound—heaving its fieldstone walls higher and higher toward God and the big valley sky.

  But once again, the millpond blew its dam. And once again, the church construction was halted. Repeatedly this happened. Rupture, pause. Rupture, pause. Until finally, one of Philipse’s slaves pulled his master aside to tell him that God had sent him a dream. Until the Old Dutch Church—which was of course the new Dutch church at the time—was overflowing with people and prayer, the dam would never hold. And sure enough, once the little chapel was up and running, the millpond did not burst again.

  At least, that’s how the old folks told it—a story unchanged since 1697, when wolves still howled by night in the wooded hillsides of Manhattan, when the Weckquaesgeck hunted beaver in exchange for teakettles and guns, and when mast-thick forests were still dotted with healthy American chestnuts.

  But the story of the Stitchery was not so firmly fixed in people’s minds as the story of the Old Dutch Church. Nor was it so cheery. Some people had heard that the Van Ripper house was haunted by a girl with yellow braids, a pointy white-winged hat, and little wooden klompen on her feet. But more than likely, the true story of the Stitchery—if such a thing existed—was the story that the Van Rippers told one another, a tale passed down from generation to generation, guarded like the treasure in the tower room. And like so many stories that are meant to explain things, that come sifting down through the ages like falling snow, the story of the Stitchery was a love story, a magical one.

  On fall evenings when the river was a placid brown-gray and the Palisades were at stone-faced attention, Mariah bundled the girls into her bed—my three little birds, she called them—and told the story of the Stitchery’s beginnings. It was important, she said, that they always remember where they came from. For the Van Rippers, the Stitchery was at the heart of every decision they would ever make, whether they liked it or not. A person’s future could branch into infinite directions and redirections, but her past always had the same, reliable beginning point.

  And so, the story started the way so many do: Once upon a time. Back when the Stitchery was born, Mariah said, the Hudson Valley was a battleground. It echoed with the sounds of camp songs, drillmasters’ orders, and gunfire. The summer of 1779 was hot, smelling of pond scum, boiled potatoes, and lightning. The Headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow was scratching behind his ear and complaining about lice, with no notion of how he would go down in history. George Washington was stooping nightly over his maps and his Madeira and halfheartedly daydreaming about Sally Fairfax, who was perfect except for being a loyalist’s wife. The women of the Revolution camped not far from their husbands, boiling the laundry, knitting stockings for men who could wear out a pair a day, and twirling their drop spindles to make strong flax thread.

  Helen Van Ripper, whose maiden name had been buried by time, was among them. She lived in a tent near the army encampment so that she could be with the husband she had married only a few months before. Helen was young and strong; she had predictable blond hair beneath the flaps of her Dutch cap, but her fondness for a sweet koekie or two each evening lent her a bit of stylish plumpness beneath her chin. Every day she woke to the hot summer sun, the chirp of crickets and clatter of locusts
, the cardinals whooping and blackbirds chirring in the trees, and she wondered if today she would be widowed.

  One day a sentry rushed to General Washington’s side with news that a line of lobsterbacks were marching on the camp. He saw them across the distant clearing, their bright red coats flapping in time to an inaudible fife and drum. Alarms were raised. Muskets and rifles were made ready. But when Washington himself laid his gray-blue eyes upon the line of advancing redcoats, he was said to have given the watchman a look of such steely disapproval that it momentarily turned the child to clay. The fearsome invading soldiers were nothing more than the women’s knit red petticoats, hung across a line to dry. It had been a moment of mirth for Helen and her fellow wives.

  So you see, Mariah told the girls, this is what life felt like when the men were not fighting. But there was always the specter of tragedy looming over them all.

  The valley was dark with the shadow of death, and the soldiers ate and drank and slept with the weight of it pressing their chests. British forces had taken up residence not far away, at a rocky outcropping on the Hudson called Stony Point. Their intention was to push north up the river: If they took the Hudson, they took the Northeast.

  Helen’s husband came to her while the cicadas were giving their evening concert and the sky had softened to a pretty pink. He had red-brown locks that had been passed down to him from some northern bloodline, gray irises, and a mangled left ear from a childhood skirmish with a feral dog. That evening, there was a wild, dagger-sharp gleam in his eye. Helen listened, not looking up from her knitting, while he told her what he was not supposed to have told her—the plan. The daring, terrible, and completely mad plan to take Stony Point.

  The fort, as everyone knew, was impregnable. To the west was a murky swamp that festered like a moat, and land that was marked by sharpened timbers, trenches, earthworks, and a squadron of cannons. Along the river were rocky cliffs, and in the waters below, the British sloop-of-war Vulture waited for easy pickings.

  And yet, despite the probable failure of any plan of attack, General Anthony Wayne intended to attempt the impossible: to take Stony Point with 1,350 men. The strategy was deceiving: Two companies of Carolinians would stage a direct and distracting barrage, while the real attack would come in stealthily from the sides. To ensure perfect silence, the troops would not be permitted to load their muskets—they would advance with only their empty guns and their bayonets. Some of the men, brave soldiers specially chosen for the honor, would lead the midnight advances. The vanguard would wade through the muck of swamp and scale the steep and rocky slopes; then, once they penetrated the fort, they were to begin brandishing their empty weapons above their heads, yelling like bedlam, The fort’s our own! The fort’s our own! whether it was their own or not. The men had a nickname: the Forlorn Hope.

  Helen’s husband spoke of the advance with such pride and boyish excitement that her heart sank deeper and deeper with each glorious new description. Even before he told her, she knew: Her husband, who still had a boy’s youthful grin and leggy build, had volunteered to be among them. He was the Forlorn Hope.

  She pulled him into the semi-privacy of a copse of paper birches that cut white slashes against the dusk. With soft green leaves shimmering around them, she gave her husband a piece of her mind. It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to him.

  What were you thinking? she told him. She did not need a husband who was a war hero. She needed a husband who was alive. Now more so than ever. Her heart felt as if a hundred little fissures were running through it, like the red clay rocks that washed up along the creek beds, and one small but precise tap would make the whole thing shatter. Why couldn’t her husband have spoken with her first? She was a good Dutch woman, groomed to be the head of her home, not some Anglican church mouse too fearful to so much as whimper should her husband raise a fist. He was not to make such decisions without consulting her.

  To his credit, her husband looked contrite, like a child who had expected praise but instead found censure. And the heart in Helen’s chest that had been struggling to stay in one piece crumbled to bits. She began to cry. Her husband put his arms around her and rocked her, while a gentle breeze stirred the birch leaves to expose their undersides to the sky.

  And there’s more, Helen said, teary. She had not wanted to tell him. Not until she was sure. But her courses had not come in many weeks. And she suspected she was carrying their first child. Her husband gathered her tighter, and while on another occasion he might have whooped with joy and loaded his rifle to fire a few celebratory rounds, tonight he only whispered some prayerful words and kissed her ear beneath her cap.

  So you see, Helen said. You must come back to me. You must return alive.

  Her husband consoled her with assurances and brushed her tears from her face. He promised he would come to no harm. But Helen knew that while a man could make such promises, he had no say over whether he could keep them. Especially not if he was under orders to storm a fort full of trained soldiers without a single bullet to his name.

  The night before the raid on Stony Point, Helen and the war-battered women she had come to call friends convened. Helen was not the only one who was afraid of slaughter. Many of the women who were with her had men—husbands, brothers, fathers—marching to their deaths at Stony Point. But only Helen’s man was among the forlorn. Desperation drove her to panic. What could she do?

  She told the women who were with her about an old folktale, and as she told it, she began to wonder if she might believe it. Her grandmother on her father’s side had always knit one red thread into her husband’s garments to protect him. And she had liked to say that no one ever took her charms seriously until one day her husband went out with a June hunting party and was attacked by a band of angry Mohawks. Only he returned with his scalp affixed to his head.

  Helen did not need to explain what she was proposing to the women of the camp—her own mad plan to match the general’s. The women were not entirely convinced. But they were helpless enough to try.

  In the hazy dark, fat-soaked cattails were touched to the cooking coals and coaxed into sputtering, stinky light. The women sat in a circle and they knit round after round, the smell of wool and smoke and sweet summer greenness in the air. Bored watchmen appeared in the quietest hours, prodded for conversation, and—finding none—went on their way. Red threads were pulled from petticoats and passed around. A woman suggested: Perhaps we should make an offering. Just in case. And each wife, sister, or daughter agreed to give up something important to her—just so God knew they weren’t asking to get something for nothing. Helen wove a red thread into her husband’s stocking and bowed her head, her prayers taking shape in the low Dutch of her parents and their parents before them: Oh God in heaven. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t take him away from me so soon. She knew she had to offer something more than prayers.

  When it came time to head out to meet their destiny, some men went to Stony Point with new stockings on their feet—red fibers woven within—and some did not. Helen made her husband promise not to take his stockings off, not for anything. Then she kissed him good-bye as if they were in private, as if she might never kiss him again. With a crooked smile and a slouch that meant she should not worry, he turned his back and was gone. All of General Wayne’s men were. The women stewed in the twilight of the valley, knitting and darning. Helen’s worry was like the itch of the poison ivy pustules that sometimes ringed her ankles, and the more she scratched at it the worse it seemed to get. She lurked away from the fire, away from the other women, and sipped a bitter tisane of wild carrot. She worried that her sacrifice would not be accepted.

  But—soon enough—promising news arrived. And then—even better—her husband returned. All the men who bore red-flecked stockings returned. Helen threw her arms around her husband and cried with relief. He smelled of river water and rifle oil and sweat, and she buried her face in the rasp of his homespun shirt. Her husband declared that the plan to take S
tony Point had gone off in near perfection. Mad Anthony Wayne was a genius, the Forlorn Hope would go down in history, and best of all Helen and her husband were rich.

  He held her by the shoulders, his eyes bright with reflections of fire and his own proud tears. There was a prize, he told her, for the first man to reach the fort—and he won it! He’d waded through the swamp with his rifle high and silent and empty over his head, and he’d pictured her—only her—and the life they would have if he could swallow his fear and win. He told her: Now they could buy that bit of land in Tarrytown. They could build a house on the ridge overlooking the river. He pressed his hands against the small of her back. They could raise their baby on land they themselves owned.

  Helen hung her head. The sluggish dawn of guilt and dread was like a dark river swallowing its banks, a slow, thick flooding.

  What is it? her husband asked.

  She pulled herself up straight and told him: I’m so sorry.

  His grip on her shoulders slackened.

  She said: Oh my love. There never was a child. She explained with her palms facing the sky that she would have said anything—anything—to compel him to return to her safely, to fight to save his life. She hoped he could forgive her. She trembled, waiting, believing in the folklore, in her grandmother, in her prayers, in anything she could get her hands on to believe.

  He blinked once, slow and dumb like an old cow, before breaking into laughter. The sound was a volley of cannon fire. So full of trickery was his little wife. They would just have to try again. He lifted her and kissed her and swung her around.

  The end, Mariah said. And the spell of the Revolution encampment cleared like the last hiss of smoke from a doused fire. Then she tucked each girl into her own bed with her own kiss and a wish to sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite. Outside, the hills of the lower valley were bright with neon and traffic and the noise of human life, and it was a great comfort to the Van Ripper girls.