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God,—knowing full well my parents did not believe in Him,—to help me, or to strike me for my sin; or, if He did not exist, to let my parents themselves rescue me from it; and one spring afternoon, in a whisper, begged Him to smite the usurper before it drew breath. Immediately I tried to take back what I’d thought, but my prayer had already sailed out, on a puff of smoke from the stillhouse, over the river. There it settled in some New-York treetop & grew.
    For as it happened, no prayer was answered but that one. My sister was born with a terrible defect to her vocal cords: Even when she emerged from the womb, she could emit no sound but a rasping sigh, such as a person makes choking on a fishbone. Had I dropped her into a boiling pot, she could not have turned an angrier red than when she eked out this exhalation. She would not take the breast. Johanna, who, though confined by infirmity to the house, ordinarily sat peeling potatoes or letting down my hems, now rocked my sister day and night. She sang her tuneless lullabies, in Dutch, English, and some tongue of her own devising, and tried to coax the baby to suck from a washrag a spoonful of our mother’s milk sweetened with maple sugar. When I was not out anxiously walking the fence, I sat by her & dandled Nell, as if this could nullify my dark deed. But though Johanna’s eyes were blurred with cataract, she could see me clear enough.
    â€”It’s your fault for cursing her, she said, as usual a bit too loudly, and with that odd lilt her voice had from having grown up speaking Dutch.
    I checked to make certain my parents were beyond earshot, but did not respond.
    Johanna cocked her head to the side.—I know you’re there, Prue.
    â€”I did’n’t curse anybody, I said lamely.
    â€”Did the Devil come and do that work on Nell’s head, then?
    It was true: Nell was nearly as bad off as the baby. I was considering burying her, next new moon, in the yard.
    â€”I know what you’ve done, Johanna went on, her voice lowering. I wondered what had possessed her to poke her fingers around Nell’s skull. She leaned in close to me, her milk-filmed eyes on the ceiling and the sloe-eyed bundle against her chest.—And the Lord knows, too.
    This babe is hardly longer for the world than those that come before. And I know who prayed that it be so. She transferred the baby into one arm, and took the other palm to her temple. She said
—Krijg de tyfus
. You make my head ache.
    A wellspring of tears bubbled up behind my nose. The baby frightened and disgusted me, but my prayers had mostly been for a change of heart I only now,—too late!—experienced, and for my parents to mind me, which would not happen now they had an ailing infant. I thought if my sister died, my mother might never look at me more. Waves of guilt crashed over me for having prayed to send a critter no larger than a loaf of bread yonder in the sloggy bottom of a
canoo
. She flailed her spindly arms as if to illustrate her helplessness.
    I ran upstairs to confess to my mother, but she was in bed, as she had been since the birth, knitting a frilled infant’s jacket. She did not look up, though she must have seen or heard me at the threshold; in those days, it seemed she only surfaced from beneath her thoughts for my father. Seeing her so intent on the jacket, which I felt sure would never be worn, made my nose and throat burn the more, so I ran outdoors to find my father; but I saw only the hired men out tasseling the Indian corn and picking cherries in the orchard, some workers shooting dice in the mill yard, & the Hessian soldiers from upferry, out practicing their drills in their spit-shined boots. I went up to the summit of Clover Hill, therefore, to brood by the fence. The onion grass was growing plentifully, and I pulled some up to eat the hot roots; but I found my mouth so full of tears, I could not enjoy them.
    For, dear Recompense, my father