Alma Katsu - The Taker

There were secrets, it seemed, that not every woman was allowed to know. Luckily, there was a woman in town who did, a woman about whom things were said, whose name prompted a smile from the men (if their wives were not nearby). She was a woman unlike any other in the village and I had to figure a way to get her to share her secrets with me.

On a well-worn path, hidden in the shadow of the blacksmith’s forge, was a small cottage. If it was noticed at all, you might think it an outbuilding or a toolshed for the smithy, a place to store pig iron. It was far too ramshackle and tiny to be a house, yet it didn’t appear to be abandoned and the path to the front door grew more worn with time. Certainly no more than one person could live there, and customary law against solitary living still prevailed at the dawn of the nineteenth century in our bleak Puritan outpost (for Puritans we were, make no mistake about that; the fathers of the town had grown up in the Massachusetts territories and were accustomed to blending religion with governance). However, in this northernmost reach of what would become the state of Maine, the sole reason for the edict against solitary living was that of necessity: it was unthinkable that one person alone could perform the multitude of tasks it took to get by in this harsh environment. By contrast, in a more strictly Puritan town, no one was allowed to live alone because, in solitude, one might stray. One might do ungodly things. The edict against solitary living allowed for the policing of one’s neighbors, but the citizens of St. Andrew valued their independence and guarded their privacy a shade more fiercely.

Someone did in fact live alone in that tiny house, a woman on the outer limit of her childbearing years, beautiful still, though faded. She rarely went out, but whenever she did venture onto the street in daylight, the townspeople gave her a wide berth. The men would contrive not to let their eyes meet hers, and the women would pull their long skirts aside. Some would glare outright at her.

But at night, it was a different story. Under the cover of darkness she had regular visitors. Men-one at a time, more rarely a pair-would scurry up the path and knock politely on the aged door. If no one answered the knock, the visitor knew to take a seat on the step and wait, his back to the door, pretending not to hear whatever sounds came from within. Eventually, the sounds from the cottage would fade into murmurs of conversation, then silence, and within a minute the front door would open for the waiting visitor.

Those who knew of her existence called her Magdalena. It was the name she’d given herself when she arrived in town seven years earlier. No one questioned the odd appellation at the time. She arrived with a small group of travelers from the French Canadian territory, and when they moved on, she stayed. She said she was a widow and had decided to relocate to more southerly climates, that is, if the towns-people of St. Andrew would let her stay.

The blacksmith offered to convert his old shed into a tidy little abode and the good women of the village helped her to settle in, bringing her whatever precious scraps they could spare: a wobbly stool, an extra bit of tea, an old blanket. Husbands were sent over with firewood and kindling. When asked what she would do to support herself-needlework, spinning, weaving, perhaps? Was she a midwife, skilled with healing and nursing?-she merely smiled demurely and dropped her head as if to say, “Me? What skills could I have? My husband treated me like a porcelain doll. How should a poor unskilled widow make her way in the world?” The good wives walked away puzzled, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads, not knowing what to say except that God would provide for all his children, including this innocent woman who seemed to think boundless charity was to be found in this rugged, lonely town.

As it turned out, she did not have to depend on charity. Mysteriously, sustenance appeared at her doorstep, unbidden. A crock of sweet butter, a bushel of potatoes, a jug of milk. Firewood piled outside the back door. And money-she was one of the few people in town who had actual coin, would count it out at the provisioner’s when she ordered her supplies. And what curious supplies: bottles of gin, tobacco. Neighbors noticed a lantern burning late, through the one window of her tiny cottage-did she stay up all night smoking tobacco and drinking gin?

In the end, it was the axmen who gave her away, the lumberjacks who worked for Charles St. Andrew a year at a time and lived far from their wives. Men like this are capable of sniffing out women like Magdalena from across a town, across a valley if the wind is right and they are desperate enough. First one, then another, then each of them in turn found their way to Magdalena’s doorstep once the sun went down. Not that the axmen were her only customers: they paid in coin, after all, not in eggs and cured ham. But through the axmen her reputation was spilled across town, like tainted water emptied from a rain barrel, and the ire was raised of many a good wife. Still Magdalena said nothing. Not while the sun was up. Not even when she was insulted to her face by an indignant spouse.

The wives, enjoined by the pastor, organized a movement to have her ejected from town. Her presence was the first sign of sinful city living to sprout up in St. Andrew, the sort of thing the settlers were trying to escape. Pastor Gilbert went to Charles St. Andrew, as he was the employer of the axmen, those customers who could be openly complained about.

Sympathetic as he was to the pastor’s request, Charles pointed out that there was another side to Magdalena’s services that the townsfolk were overlooking. The axmen were acting on completely natural urges-to which the pastor grudgingly agreed-separated by many miles from their legal spouses. Without Magdalena’s services, what might the axmen get up to? Her presence actually made the town safer for its wives and daughters.

So an uneasy truce was struck between the whore and the virtuous womenfolk and had held for seven long years. In times of trouble and illness, she contributed her part, whether they liked it or not: she would tend to the sick and dying, feed the destitute traveler, slip coins in the church donation box when no one was around to see her enter. I couldn’t help but think she must long for a small measure of female companionship, though she respectfully kept to herself and sought no discourse with the townswomen.

Magdalena’s actual circumstances were a mystery to many children. We saw that our mothers avoided this puzzling figure. Most of the younger children believed her to be a witch or a supernatural creature of some kind. I remembered their taunting cries, the occasional handful of pebbles flung in her direction. Not by me-even at a tender age, I knew there was something compelling about her. By all rights, I should never have met her. My mother was not judgmental, but women such as she did not associate with prostitutes, nor would her daughters. And yet I did.

It happened during a long sermon one Sunday. I excused myself and slipped out to the privy. But instead of hurrying back to the balcony and to my father’s side, I dawdled outside in the warmth of a beautiful early summer day. I meandered to Tinky Talbot’s barn to look on the new litter of piglets, pink with black splotches, whirled with thin, coarse hair. I petted their curious snouts, listened to their gentle grunts.

Then I looked sideways down the path-it was the closest I had ever been to the mysterious singular cottage-and I saw Magdalena sitting in a chair on the narrow window box of a porch, a long, blackened pipe clenched between her teeth. She, too, was enjoying the sun, wrapped in a quilt, her hair scandalously loose around her shoulders. The parts of her not covered by the quilt were slender and delicate, the birdlike bones of her clavicle visible under papery skin. She had no powders on her face, just a trace of lampblack smudged at the corner of her eyes, a ghost of stain on her lips.