Read Online Conjurer by Cordelia Frances Biddle - Free Book Online Page B

curling up backward around a scrawny calf.
    Unlike Ruth, he’s white and because he’s male has been assigned both a cell for sleeping and a solitary one for exercise. The advantage of such beneficence is lost upon him.
    Long ago and despite his affliction, he glimpsed a better future for himself. He envisioned a man of modest means, his own small shop (he was a tailor by trade before his arrest for thievery), and a wife and children dwelling comfortably above his place of business. He pictured a weekly supper of roasted meat, a jug of ale upon the table, neighbors to whom he spoke and among whom he was admired.
    From his earliest youth, he worked toward this gilded dream, teaching himself to walk erect and tall, not giving in to his withered right extremity. When he turned eight—he was called Dicket back then—he strapped the first of many hand-hewn sticks to his leg. His father by then being dead, his mother apprenticed him to a tailor. It was the last Dicket saw of her or of home.
    His tailor-master renamed him Josiah, as his own name was deemed too juvenile for the trade he was entering. The tailor was a religious man beside being a shrewd one.
    When Josiah reached sixteen, this master died, leaving his estate in ruins and his apprentice adrift. Josiah strapped on a “good” leg and walked carefully—and without a crutch—through the town seeking a new position. By then he’d learned to attach an empty shoe to the stick, to wrap the harsh wood in cotton batting, to stitch on a clean stocking. The bogus foot often looked better than the real. Josiah’s secret remained his own.
    The slim beginnings of prosperity ensued, and Josiah (now a hired man) dared to take a wife. She produced a daughter, a pink and round-faced child almost perfect except for her predominant brow. All babies have big heads , Josiah told his bride. Susan will grow into hers like every other infant .
    The child proved him wrong. Her head grew and grew; her body followed fitfully, turning fat where it should have been long, her shoulders rounding into pasty lumps, her hands lying listlessly at her sides. She rarely reached for objects as other children did; instead, her eyes became milky, staring at nothing. When her mother held her, spittle ran from the little girl’s mouth; when her parents tried to teach her the sounds and meaning of speech, she merely gurgled and drooled all the more.
    Josiah’s wife grieved, then grew angry. Alone with her baby she berated the child’s sluggishness, her inattention, her vapid quiescence. The bitter words turned to pinches, then furtive slaps. Susan mewed like a hurt kitten and retreated further into her silent world, while inside the mother’s head, frustration and wrath roared louder and louder.
    Spilled porridge, lost milk, a broken dish: One of those infinitesimal moments brought ruin to Josiah’s wife. When the child’s insignificant transgression had concluded, mother and daughter eyed each other, the dawning of understanding etching terror on the child’s face, endless hatred on the mother’s.
    Josiah’s wife snatched up her baby, shaking Susan so fiercely that vomit belched from her mouth. Finished, the mother flung her daughter and herself on the pallet that served as mattress and commenced to wail, then shriek, and finally to beat her head against the wooden floor.
    It was the noise of this rhythmic self-destruction that eventually brought the neighbors and the day watch who removed the screaming woman to the Asylum for Relief of Persons Deprived of Their Use of Reason. Susan, motionless except for her quivering fingers, accompanied her mother in the wagon.
    When Josiah returned home, his tiny apartment was all but bare. When, days later, he was finally allowed to visit his wife and child, both were as dumb and immobile as clods of earth. He left his false foot in the Asylum’s carriage entry, kicking it away as if driving off a