The Vanishing Point Read Free

morning, she dredged out the honey-and-sperm-soaked wool and dropped it down the privy hole. Without uttering a word to Father, Joan brewed her decoctions of pennyroyal, tansy, and rue to ensure that her menses arrived promptly. May's belly remained flat as any virgin's. The village whispered it was witchcraft that she never got herself with child.
    This was when May felt the first hint of dread. A few years before her birth, a woman had been accused of bewitching a married man and cursing him so that his wife remained barren. The woman had been tried, found guilty, then strung from the gallows. The story went that her body had been so slender and lightboned, the hangman had to grab her around the waist and yank hard until her neck snapped. Father said that no educated man believed in witches anymore, but Joan had warned May that in some villages, wanton girls like herself were publicly whipped, then locked in the stocks, and left there for everyone to jeer at and mock. Though the stocks in her village were rarely used, May felt a tremor whenever she walked past them.
    Still, nobody troubled her. Father, after all, was a respected man. Half the village was in debt to him, for he treated the poor without asking payment. It helped that she looked so innocent with her large blue eyes. She never failed to appear in church, hands clasped and head bowed while the preacher railed on and on. When he addressed her sins—without naming her, thankfully—she put every ounce of will into appearing contrite. Only when the sermon was over did she raise her eyes to the Green Man carved in the church wall. His face emerged from a dense tangle of oak leaves. More leaves sprouted from his lips. The stone face smiled, as if to tell her that he understood her, even if no one else did. In the midst of all the talk of hell and damnation, the Green Man watched over her and gave her his blessing.
    The year she turned nineteen, the innkeeper's son, smitten with her, declared that he would put an end to her wildness. When he asked for her hand in matrimony, Father agreed at once.
An eldest son, he had good prospects. Properly affianced, he and May could court in public with no subterfuge or shame. On Sunday afternoons, they went for endless walks, Hannah tagging after them as their self-appointed chaperone. Still, May could not quite fathom marriage. In her dreams, they simply went on courting forever. Eventually the banns were posted. Joan and Hannah summoned her to the market to pick out the satin and lawn for her bridal gown. The wedding date was set.
    Three weeks before she was to be married, she and her fiancé went to the harvest fair in the next village. May wore green ribbons in her hair. She and her lover drank mead from the same cup. A piper and fiddler played, and all around them young people danced: shepherds and servant girls, milkmaids and farmhands. But May's fiancé did not want to join the dance. Instead he spoke with his brother about the cost of fixing the thatch on the inn roof, about how they couldn't afford to replace the thatch with slate. They spoke of their senile mother, how she needed a good nursemaid to look after her, and how none of May's father's remedies had done her any good. Then May's future brother-in-law, drunk on the mead, let his tongue slip, making a gibe about her lack of dowry. "What use is there bringing home a prized mare if she come not with a wagon of hay to feed her? And a used mare she is, besides."
    May waited for her fiancé to speak up in her defense, but he just laughed and pinched her cheek. Not wanting to pout, she pretended to laugh along. She reached for the mead, only to discover that the cup was empty, and then it seemed that the empty cup was an omen, informing her that life as she knew it would soon be over. After the wedding feast, there would be no more dancing, no more slipping behind the hedges in the village green. She would be nursemaid to her mother-in-law, laundering the