Martin Greenberg - Crime Spells

I tip them from their wells by drop and gill and mix them in proportion to the need that I have at the moment. A scrivener’s greatest works are meant to be drawn on vellum scraped from the flayed skin of kings or presidents, but most purposes can be inked onto any paper at hand. Always, it must be something that I will eventually burn. Fresh wood, living skin, or stone are therefore not ideal.

All children draw, if the stick or coal or pencil is not snatched from their hand. All children represent the world they see in a language that reflects the essentials of their vision. For most, growing up means accepting the way the world is said to look. But a few cling to their craft. A few hang onto their lidless vision the way ants cling to a rotting apple.

Very few find their way to the essential inks.

Very, very few find their way to someone with the wit and craft to instruct them further.

Someone, at some time, must have been the original autodidact. There was a first teacher. Perhaps more than one. In the lands across the ocean where little yellow men write their thoughts in tiny pictures, mine is presumably a powerful art. Here on the country frontiers of America, where no one recalls that “A” stands for ox, the forms of the words themselves do not mean so very much.

Here is the trick to the craft: Consider that there is no present moment. We have anticipation, then we have memory. The present flees our grasp at least as fast as it arrives, slipping from future to past before we can take note. Everything we experience can only be a memory of what has come immediately before. Try to find the space between the earth and the sky-that is the present moment.

If you can see that space between earth and sky, if you can find that present moment, then you can craft a Foretelling, or a Truthsaying, or a Sending, or any of the dozens of forms it is given to me and my fellow scriveners to render.

Today I set to scribing a Passage. I spread out a sheet of birch bark pounded with quicklime and thrush’s bile, anchoring the edges with my inkwells. I lay down the jade tortoise, which has come from the lands across the ocean. There I begin to mix my recipe in the shallow cup upon its head. As I pour, each tiny ring of glass on jade tells me something, in the manner of my art. Even while listening, I begin a speaking to Caleb Witherspoon. The truth is already with us, after all, waiting only to be discovered.

Three drops of Regret . I guard my breath.

“Have you ever wondered on the brown of Maybelle’s hair?” The floorboards settle as the dairy building shifts in the wind.

Three drops of Realization . The burn touches me deep within my face.

“Your child’s eyes are most gray, though your own are oaken dark.” Something rattles on the roof. A few stray hailstones, perhaps, or the claws of a mighty wingéd creature.

Caleb Witherspoon begins to shiver. Rage, fear, the chill of mortality. Cromie stirs behind me.

“A prick of your finger, Mister Cromie.” His breath hisses his surprise. Amid a sweaty stink of fear, he struggles to answer me. “I…”

Reaching out without looking, my fingers find the judge’s wrist limp and dangling. I tug him toward my mixture and stab him carelessly with a silver needle. This does not have to hurt, if I do it better than I have bothered for him.

Three drops of an angry man’s boiling blood, reeking hot and metallic.

“Caleb, where is her mother?” Though his long-lost wife is said to have died in childbirth, this time the preacher groans as though freshly stabbed.

A drop of Vision . A tiny gust of forest scent.

“Who cries on the wind?” I am answered only by silence.

A drop of Culpability . Airs from the grave.

I dip my brush and begin to paint.

I know even before I begin that I will paint the portrait of a woman. I have already seen her on the wind. She is not who I might have expected. Witherspoon’s reach was long.

The bones of her face, the curve of cheek and jaw, are an older echo of Maybelle. Her hair falls differently, lighter in hue. This shows on the wet birch bark even though I do not work in colors beyond what my mixture gives me. Their hairline is not the same-despite my speculations about the beadle, Maybelle’s is more the shape of Cromie’s.

The eyes come to me, half-lidded and bright with standing tears. The secret of portraits is in the eyes. If people can see themselves and those they love peering back from the scribing, they will be convinced.

The outlines now, as if she is growing from a center. She becomes real. This has only taken minutes, with the passion and power that makes the room crackle as electric as the hot, hard wind outside.

It is about a woman. It is almost always about a woman.

“That is Alton Miller’s widow Chastity,” mutters the beadle behind me. “What lives up behind Corn-crib Hill.”

The words choke from Caleb Witherspoon’s mouth as if dragged on chains. “She is my daughter’s mother.”

“No,” Maybelle begins. She bites off whatever words were to come next.

Cromie’s voice is bitter with hollow satisfaction. “ Was . Now we know who Otis Blunt saw floating in the river today.”

“You knew all along,” Caleb Witherspoon says.

A woman no one would have mentioned had gone missing, even here in Neverance. Not their grass widow. Who would want to claim to have noticed her? I wonder whose back door the preacher had seen her stepping away from, checking the buttons of her dress.

Does it matter?

I finish the portrait of Maybelle’s mother. Caleb Witherspoon’s young love. Cromie’s conquest, whom Alton Miller had taken as a castoff after she’d borne her child in secret. Well before my time here, but even I knew that the preacher put out that his absent wife had died while the daughter was being sent on to be raised by him. All these men should be in the picture, as well, staring over her shoulder, daring their neighbors to sin.

There must have been a ruse, a carriage or a rider in the dark, in the last moment of friendship between the preacher and the judge before the child took the stage at the center of their lives.

It is a hurt nearly two decades old now but never really done with. Especially not for Chastity Miller.

I look at Caleb Witherspoon. There is no need to ask him why. The reason has been written on his daughter’s face every day of her life in the lines of another man’s jaw and cheeks. Still, it does matter, I realize. If only for the sake of her memory, which no one wanted to account for now. “Why now?”

“The wind makes madmen of us all,” he says.

“Hardly,” mutters the beadle.

I think back on the song of the bottles, my vision of a crying baby. “You saw her hurrying, to Mister Cromie once more perhaps?”

Caleb Witherspoon clears his throat. “From Cromie’s back step, actually.” He turns his face away from Maybelle, whose breath hitches in her throat.

I have it right, I realize. This is a thing to be finished.

Cromie appears uncomfortable, as if he now wishes for silence.

“Was there to be another child?” I ask him. He does seem short on daughters these days, and the widow Miller was not so old.

“It doesn’t matter now.” The judge’s voice is blurred with tears.

So there were two murders today. Did Witherspoon know? There is nothing else to say. The wind pushes at the building, sending dust spiraling down mote by mote from the grubby ceiling. I pack my inkwells one by one in my satchel, carefully avoiding Maybelle’s distress.

“Mister Cromie?” It is Clanton, the beadle, practically creaking in his excitement. “Might be a good idea if I preach this Sunday’s sermon, don’t you think?”