The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,15

she smiled and nodded, and I believed in that moment that Aunt and Uncle would come to love me as well.

From that time, there was not an hour that passed that I did not compare the fullness of my days with the dryness that was life with my own family. Where mine was reserved to harshness, Margaret’s was lavish with praise and care. Where my parents were silent or sullen, hers were animated with talk and laughter. And even though Margaret’s laughter was directed at me at times because of some slowness or ignorance on my part, I believed it made my own wit grow all the more, like a copper coin that is rubbed to greater brightness with a rough cloth.

Being with Margaret was like standing inside the casing of a lantern, one that kept the warmth in and the stinging insects out. I refused to think it peculiar if at times, gazing up at the tops of trees, she nodded to the air and said, “Yes. I will.” Or if, in carving out little hollow places in the snow, she placed her ear close to the ground to listen to some music only she could hear. I did not think it strange, because she was lovely and had claimed me. And because she was mine.

Once, when I was five, my mother had harvested a large crop of early pumpkins, more than we could keep without their rotting. We chopped them into fragrant pieces, salted them, and fed them to our cow. The milk and cream that she gave for many days was yellow-orange and tasted as though someone had ladled honey into the milking buckets. That was how it was in the presence of my cousin’s family: their sweet and salty natures mingled themselves with my own, leavening my suspicious and prickly nature.

My cousin and I did everything as with one hand. Whatever work one of us was sent to do, the other would find some strategy to accomplish that same task, so that Uncle would often say with great relish, “Ah, here come my twins.” And Margaret and I would laugh as we looked at each other, she with black hair and skin like potted cream and I with my flaming hair and spotted face. The only time we separated, waking or sleeping, was upon the Sabbath, when Uncle and his family went to the meetinghouse. Hannah and I could not accompany them, as we were meant to be home in Andover dying of the plague. My sister and I would wait, house-bound and bored, eagerly watching the road for the Toothakers to return to us again.

It snowed hard that winter, and the drifts often buried the house and barn within a few hours. Before sunrise every morning, we would clear a path to the barn with shovels and bowls or with our bare hands. Once a path was cleared, Margaret and I would walk hand in hand to the creek that ran hard by the house to get water. The snow was deep along the creek banks, waist high, and if we fell into the drifts our clothes were wet to our skin. Breaking through the crusted ice to fill our buckets blistered my hands, and however hard we tried, however big the hole, the following day the creek would be covered again with ice. Margaret always wore her mittens to save her hands from the snow, which made me loath to place my calloused palms into her own seamless ones. I would look at my hands and feel ashamed of their hardened places, the cracked and bleeding skin around the knuckles. But she, after kissing each fingernail in turn and slipping her own mittens over my hands until they were warmed to life, would sing in an odd, lilting way, “And thus I am you and you are me and I am you again, you see.”

Drinking the water from the creek was like biting into a piece of metal that had long been buried in the snow, and it would sting the back of our heads if drunk too deeply. After taking water to the house we would with Henry’s help lead the animals out one by one to the stream. I fear the animals suffered greatly from thirst as we hurried them, urging them back to the barn to save our frozen hands and feet.

Margaret’s family had more livestock than did mine. Their barn was not large but had been well built with the