Crime Spells

Maybelle scowls, an expression that suits her poorly, but she nods. Taking that as my permission, I study the people who crowd the door of the dairy.

Most are known to me. Farmers in their denims and roughspun blouses, townsmen wearing wool trousers and gartered cotton shirts, a scattering of women bustled and gowned for the sake of their appearance before one another. The wind has stolen a few hats and sent hair flying, so this assembly bears an unintentionally disrupted aspect, as if some tiny demon of disorder has descended upon Neverance’s well-starched citizens.

What I do not see in evidence are firearms or ropes or shovels. This is not a lynching awaiting its moment. These people are worried, frightened even, but they have not turned to hunters of blood.

The bottles would have told me if they were.

I listen now for whispers in the windows, echoes of truth, but the wretched wind snatches so much away out here in the street. Instead I nod to Maybelle, and we push forward.

To my surprise the crowd parts like loose soil before a plow.

Thin as a fence rail and with a face just as weathered, Caleb Witherspoon sits upon a coffee-stained settee in the co-op manager’s office. In here the howling wind is little more than a murmur, a substitute for the voice of the crowd waiting outside for justice, or at least law. The room reeks of male fear and rage mixed in a sour perfume all too familiar to me.

The manager has absented himself before the face of justice, but in his stead is Ellsworth Clanton, the elderly beadle from Neverance’s sole church. Clanton stands shivering with age beside Witherspoon, hiding a hard smile that he ca

I am witnessing the fall of a man.

Clearly it matters nothing what Caleb Witherspoon has actually done, whether Maybelle has the right of her father’s i

Though I have not lived here so long, being one of the few immigrants in living memory, I know well enough for what sorts of sins these countrymen punish one another. They can be read so easily.

Clanton the beadle always craved the pulpit for himself. He nurses a coal of resentment in his heart for Witherspoon as the faith holder who took the word of God from his mouth. There is old blood between them, a thorn prick scarred by time and never healed.

Cromie rushes to judge lest he be judged himself. Of his misdeeds I hold more certain knowledge, having emptied the wombs of two of his daughters by the dark of the moon in my years here. Not long after my attentions, his Ellen Marie drowned herself in the mill pond. Jea

Caleb Witherspoon has measured all of these men time and again and found them wanting in his holy scales on each occasion. Now that the preacher is caught on the point of justice, they have no more mercy than ferrets on a rat.

Maybelle has requested a Foretelling. Even so, I know without asking that these men desire a Truthsaying, which they might use as a cloak for the vengeance each nurses in his heart.

“Do not tell me aught.” I address Cromie, for he is the power in this room. “I know there has been a murder, and I know where the blood is found. Let me first do my work untrammeled by testimony, then we shall see what we shall see.”

“He is guilty, Thorne.” Cromie’s voice is cold as a child’s headstone. “There does not even need to be a trial, except for the form of the thing.”

I meet Cromie’s slate-gray eyes. “Then why did you trouble to send for me?”

“I did not.”

Though I do not glance at Maybelle, I know she blushes like the fires of dawn. I ask the next question, the true question. “If I am unsent for, why did you await my coming?”

Though the words seem to choke him, Cromie manages to spit an answer. “I could do nothing else.” This time he looks at the girl.

There is nothing more to be said. I shed my cloak, sweep the dairy’s business journals off a small table, and set out my inkwells.

These are the essential inks with which I sketch the visions of my art. You will forgive me if I do not tell the precise secrets of their processes of creation.

Culpability-Made from lampblack and the ashes of a hanged man’s hand. It smells of a last, choking breath.

Vision-Made from the humors of an eagle’s eye and the juice of carrots, much reduced. A sharp scent of nature.

Realization-Made from photographer’s chemicals and the bile of a dying child, strained through pages torn from Latin Bibles. Tingles the sinuses like an insult not yet forgotten.

Action-Made from paraffin and the crushed bodies of bluebottle wasps. Stings the nostrils as if to sneeze.

Regret-Made from grave dust, the tears of a nun, and the juice of winter apples. A musty odor that will close your throat if you are careless.

I tip them from their wells by drop and gill and mix them in proportion to the need that I have at the moment. A scrivener’s greatest works are meant to be drawn on vellum scraped from the flayed skin of kings or presidents, but most purposes can be inked onto any paper at hand. Always, it must be something that I will eventually burn. Fresh wood, living skin, or stone are therefore not ideal.

All children draw, if the stick or coal or pencil is not snatched from their hand. All children represent the world they see in a language that reflects the essentials of their vision. For most, growing up means accepting the way the world is said to look. But a few cling to their craft. A few hang onto their lidless vision the way ants cling to a rotting apple.

Very few find their way to the essential inks.

Very, very few find their way to someone with the wit and craft to instruct them further.

Someone, at some time, must have been the original autodidact. There was a first teacher. Perhaps more than one. In the lands across the ocean where little yellow men write their thoughts in tiny pictures, mine is presumably a powerful art. Here on the country frontiers of America, where no one recalls that “A” stands for ox, the forms of the words themselves do not mean so very much.

Here is the trick to the craft: Consider that there is no present moment. We have anticipation, then we have memory. The present flees our grasp at least as fast as it arrives, slipping from future to past before we can take note. Everything we experience can only be a memory of what has come immediately before. Try to find the space between the earth and the sky-that is the present moment.

If you can see that space between earth and sky, if you can find that present moment, then you can craft a Foretelling, or a Truthsaying, or a Sending, or any of the dozens of forms it is given to me and my fellow scriveners to render.

Today I set to scribing a Passage. I spread out a sheet of birch bark pounded with quicklime and thrush’s bile, anchoring the edges with my inkwells. I lay down the jade tortoise, which has come from the lands across the ocean. There I begin to mix my recipe in the shallow cup upon its head. As I pour, each tiny ring of glass on jade tells me something, in the ma