Free The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

small hand-sickle, cruelly hooked and gleaming in the sun; and, at his feet, stricken flowers, presumably past their prime, and a heaping of last-year’s grasses, that had been cut down.
    Annabel had never seen this man before, she was sure. Though often there came to Crosswicks Manse, to visit with Grandfather Slade, individuals not known to her, of significance.
    She supposed that the stranger, not in gardening attire but in formal, just slightly old-fashioned clothes, like clothes Winslow Slade had worn decades ago, was one of her grandfather’s visitors: possibly a Presbyterian minister, or seminarian, who’d wandered out of Dr. Slade’s shadowed library to breathe in the freshness of the April morning; and, out of restlessness perhaps, had decided to try his hand here, with the sharp little sickle.
    “Hello! Are you a friend of Grandfather’s?”
    There was laughter in Annabel’s voice, as there was so often a light sort of laughter, or joyousness, in her face.
    The reader must not think that nineteen-year-old Annabel Slade was accustomed to addressing strange men, even in her grandfather’s garden; she was not a bold girl, still less a brash girl; but some sort of childish elation had come over her, on this perfect April morning, with her diamond engagement ring—(square-cut, fourteen carats, surrounded by miniature rubies, an heirloom of the Bayard family)—sparkling on the third finger of her slender left hand, in the sun. When Woodrow Wilson had spoken critically of “headstrong” young women born in the North, lacking the natural graciousness of his daughter Margaret, as of his wife, Ellen, both Southern-born, he would certainly not have included Annabel Slade in this category!
    Strange it seemed to Annabel, yet not alarming, that the mysterious visitor didn’t seem to hear her, or to acknowledge her—“Hel -lo? ”—as with childlike persistence she called out to him again, though shyly too, smiling as her mother might smile, or her grandmother Slade, in the feminine role of welcoming a guest to the house.
    On this April morning several weeks after Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Crosswicks Manse, Winslow Slade’s beloved granddaughter Annabel was picking flowers for the dining room of Crosswicks Manse. In her hands was a small gathering of jonquils, Grecian windflowers, daffodils and narcissi—how fragrant, narcissi!—almost, Annabel felt light-headed. It seemed probable to her, this stranger would be dining with them at lunch, which gave to her task an added urgency.
    She recalled now, she’d heard it mentioned at breakfast, that an emissary from the highest echelon of the Presbyterian Church was coming to visit with Winslow Slade that day, and to enlist his support in the awkward matter of a “heresy trial” within the ranks of the Church.
    (Poor Grandfather! Annabel knew that he wanted very badly to be totally retired from his former life, yet fervently his “former life” pursued him!)
    Annabel knew little of such matters but understood that, through his many years of service in the Church, Reverend Winslow Slade had participated from time to time in such closed trials; for heresy was a terrible thing, and must be combated at the source, though such disagreeable matters upset him deeply. Josiah had told her that in such actions, their grandfather was not to be distinguished from any responsible Protestant clergyman of his day, charged with the mission that the “special character” of Anglo-Saxon Christianity be protected from “anarchist” assaults arising both within, and without, the Church.
    “Of course,” Annabel had said to her brother, in an undertone, so that no adult could hear, “these are not real trials —no one is imprisoned, or sentenced to death, I hope!”
    “Not in our time,” Josiah said. “Fortunately.”
    Annabel knew that, fierce as Protestants might be in their zealous protection of their Church, they were not nearly so fierce, or so bloodthirsty, as their