The Pariah Read Online Free PDF Page A

took a solitary walk across Salem Common, the collar of my coat turned up against the cold, my breath fluttering like smoke. All around the Common, the bare trees stood in the silent fright of winter, like a gaggle of Salem witches, and the grass was silver-faced with dew. I went as far as the bandstand, with its cupola dome, and sat down on the stone steps, while a little way away from me, two young children played on the grass, tumbling and running, leaving figure-eight tracks of green across the lawns.
    Two children like ours might have been: Nathaniel, the boy who had died in his mother’s womb. What else could you call a boy who was going to be born within sight of the House of the Seven Gables? And Jessica, the girl who was never even conceived.
    I was still sitting there when an old woman appeared, in a bundled-up Thrift Store coat and a shapeless felt hat, carrying a carpet-bag that was more backing than carpet, and a red umbrella, which she inexplicably opened, and left beside the steps. She sat down only four or five feet away from me, although she could have sat anywhere.
    ‘Well , now,’ she said, as she opened a brown paper bag, and took out a liver-sausage sandwich.
    I looked at her cautiously. She probably wasn’t as old as she had first appeared to be, 50 or 55 maybe; but she was so shabbily dressed and her hair was so white and frayed that she could have been mistaken for 70. She began to eat her sandwich, with such neatness and gentility that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
    That was how it was, for almost twenty minutes, on the steps of the cupola bandstand on Salem Common, on that cold March morning; the woman eating her sandwich and me covertly watching her, and people passing us by along the radial paths which crossed the Common, some strolling, some intent on business, but every one of them chilly, and every one of them accompanied by their own personal mouth-ghost of frozen breath.
    At five before twelve, I decided it was time to leave. But before I went, I reached into my coat pocket and took out four quarters, and held them out to her, and said, ‘Please. Just do me a favour, will you?’
    She stared at the money and then she stared at me. ‘People in your position shouldn’t be giving silver to witches,’ she smiled.
    ‘You’re a witch?’ I asked her, not very seriously. ‘Don’t I look like a witch?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I smiled. ‘I’ve never seen a witch before. I always thought that witches carried broomsticks, and black cats on their shoulders.’
    ‘Oh, superstition,’ the old woman said. ‘Well, I’ll take your money, if you’re not too worried about the consequences.’
    ‘What consequences?’
    ‘People in your position always have to suffer consequences.’
    ‘What position is that?’
    The woman rummaged in her bag and eventually produced an apple, which she polished on the lapel of her coat. ‘Alone, aren’t you?’ she asked me, and then bit into it, chewing on one side of her mouth like a Disney chipmunk. ‘Not long alone, but alone nonetheless.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ I said, evasively. I was beginning to feel that this conversation was heavily laden with unspoken implications; as if this woman and I had met on Salem Common for some predestined purpose, and that the people who walked all around us along the common’s radiating pathways were like chesspieces. Anonymous, but there for a special reason.
    ‘Well , you know the best of that,’ the woman told me. She took another bite of apple.
    ‘But that’s the way I see it, and I’m not often wrong. It’s a mystic talent, some people say. But I don’t see any harm in calling it for what it is, especially here in Salem. Good witch territory, Salem; best in the country. Perhaps not a place to be alone, though.’
    ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked her.
    She looked up at me. Her eyes were a peculiar pellucid blue, and there was a scar on her forehead like an arrow, or an upside-down crucifix, in the