The Witch's Trinity (31 page)

Herr and Frau Zweig have still not had a child.

I have never seen the cat again, but Jost tells me he finds half-eaten mice in the mill, and I am hopeful that the beast will someday find me again, mewing at my new window.

A marker was erected for the friar’s grave, and a band of men came long ago, clad in black and white like him, to sprinkle holy water upon it. They were told the friar and his notary had died of fever, and they believed the lie. The notary has never been seen again. When the friar was seized for the pyre, some saw the man run to the woods. Herr Baum pursued him and the tales say he returned with a blood-covered knife. This is all reported through hushed words and significant silences.

Fronika has a grave that is a stretch of land like any other. If the villagers do not keep telling each other where she lies, the place will be forgotten.

In remorse, a tiny cross was put upon Künne’s grave, as best as anyone could see where it was.
By the tree,
I reminded Jost.
Remember how the man threw the shovel?
I am hopeful that the cross marks the right place.

There is a holy trinity of places I will not go: the church, where last I feared for my life and Alke’s, my old
Hütte,
and of course the woods.

Until the earth gave it freely, Jost brought us food. Last season the grain came, and this year all seems well again too. The seeds are deep in the dirt and sending upward their green shoots, he said. The runes were such that the entire village had pressed their lips to the magicked three that foretold the good harvest. In a line they stood reverently, Jost told me, to pass the sticks among them and kiss the goodness there.

He also brought us wood when winter yet stretched its painful fingers through the walls of the cottage, and brought water every day or two. Even in winter he did this, when we had naught to do but open the door and gather the snow. My son is a solitary pure lily in the bramble, and I love him for it.

One time I asked if he had seen an owl in the woods and spread his arm for its talons to rest upon. “I was feverish with hunger,” he said. “I saw strange things I question now. Did I truly see a woman’s head emerge from the snow?”

I have opened my reedy throat and sung the song until it lost its meaning, until the evergreen trees staved into the ground so I do not fly.

Matern is more like a man after all this. When he sits in our cottage to visit, I see no sign of the child who raced around my skirts to keep a toy from his sister. Jost is teaching him the trade, now that there is something to mill.

Sometimes my mind clouds and I think that Alke is Künne. When she sighs and tells me her true name, her blue eyes troubled, I kiss her hand and think, with a stab of delight,
Maybe that was a visit from Künne, and not a falsehood of my mind.

I dream of Fronika sometimes. She crouches in the cage upon the sled and everyone spits upon her, as they spat upon me in the church. She is calm, though. Her eyes are patient and sad. In my dream, I whisper, “This will soothe,” and I spit the
Pille
right into her mouth. Our lips touch as if we kiss.

I wake up crying. How can anything soothe anyone ever again? I walk the floor of this cottage as if I were the small dead creatures in the ground beneath, the dried spiders whose legs curl into balls, the rodents whose sharp teeth sink into their own diminishing lips, the worms that roll witlessly with the earth’s breath.

But then in the dim firelight, I look at Alke’s face in sleep, untroubled, sometimes even with a slight smile. And then I see quite clearly what soothes. This child. This growing woman who will wear white for May Day and race Libeste across the meadows, as Künne and I did. This being whose life I value more than my own, for she is here today because of me.

I saved Alke,
I saved her!
As I stood in the inquisition that day, with Herr Kueper’s black mark already upon Alke’s head, it was my own mind, which had failed me so many times, and still fails me yet, that did its utmost deed of my lifetime.

My mind, mine! That grayish place was bright as a knife blade that day, and I was able to come up with the one explanation that would suit the friar. The trinity, I had said. There were only three witches. And as Alke was a fourth, she was freed. Even if the hunters had not returned, she would have lived.

I shall never be able to say how that came to me, but I am grateful for that more than any other single thing in my life. When I see Alke giggle with Libeste and her throat work as she downs her frothy milk, when she comes so sweetly to me each night to deliver a solemn kiss in worry that either of us should not wake in the morning, I am flooded with joy of the most dazzling kind. I feel like Mary in the moment of annunciation, when a dove crafted of fire nestled its beak in the crook of her neck and spake.

That girl who huddled under a bench is now strong-backed and fast on her feet. She is more beautiful than her parents ever would have supposed. She is a shimmering, wholesome sign that there is good in the world. I look upon Alke and my heart, finally, released from the wracked pieces of crockwork that held it, beating moistly,
flies.
Over the evergreens like my spirit never did, like Fronika never did, in tandem with owls and swallows and hawks…my heart
flies.

19

I
N THE YEAR
1510

I
t took yet another season for more good to come.

The alewife came to my door in tears. Her daughter Ilg was in childbed and the babe would not come. “Can you help?” she asked me.

“I don’t know anything,” I said.

“But surely Künne left you with some herbs, whatever she gave me when I struggled?”

Alke stepped to the door beside me. “When the village dragged Künne to the stake, they took all the knowing of herbs with her.” Her voice was defiant and she flicked a cleaning cloth between her hands as we will do to shoo a bird.

“You know nothing?” the alewife asked, her voice breaking. “Ilg can barely breathe for the pain. There must have been something here in the
Hütte
when you came to live here, Güde. That was not so long ago. Please!”

“I’m sorry for poor Ilg,” I said. “But surely you know that the men spilled Künne’s herbs and killed her goat. It was worse than when rats sack the grain bins. Everything was ruined.”

She stared at me piteously, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“She told you nothing?” she asked me one last time.

“Nothing,” I said. Alke sent the alewife back with some bread so she’d have something for her hands to do.

Ilg lived but the baby didn’t. However, something good came of this. The alewife spread the news of the night Künne’s cottage was thieved. Some women had known, as their husbands had brought home goat meat with no good explanation. The rest were angry.

And as they thought over my friend’s battle with the boiling kettle and the way she had fearlessly faced the flames, they began to be ashamed. At various firesides around the village, Jost told that he was now unsure of Fronika’s guilt. I began to notice that rather than glancing away to avoid the evil I might still harbor, people looked into my eyes with sympathy.

After consulting with Ramwold and casting the runes for a solution, the villagers sent for a glassman to come from Stuttgart. They knew he could not create a stained glass window for the church, given the subject matter, so they constructed a special tower just to hold the glass. It was round, like the Witch’s Tower, and stood where the stakes had erupted in flames years ago. I was there the day the men brought stones, tumbling in their carts, to build the tower.

The stained glass was meant to memorialize our wrongly murdered women.

The glass story moved from the bottom to the top, so closest to my level gaze was my dear friend Künne depicted in her pebble trial, her arm glowing vicious red and her face filled with savage despair. Then, moving up the window, were the hunter’s party, all the men treading in snow, and the dark-haired girl confronting them, their eyes wide with fear and mistrust. Finally, at the top, where my neck hurt to look, Fronika and Künne burn together, mouths round with woe and the flames consuming their bodies. Ringed all around are angels weeping behind their wings, standing in pools of gray tears, their feet sogged.

Although these burnings were separate, the glassman chose to render them together and I don’t believe either woman would mind. The friar is absent from the window; it is as if Künne had put her hand in boiling water of her own will, and as if the friar had not been the third in the trilogy of fire. I’m pleased by the omission. We need nothing to remember that man by. His absence from the windows means that he is not honored, and is also to fortify the lie of his death by fever, to protect the village.

There is a small fireplace in the tower, to keep us warm as we look up at the glowing sprawl of colored glass. But I prefer to stand outside on winter evenings, when the fire makes the images glow from within. I feel the flakes of snow against my cheeks and look at the unreal tints that the glassman created. It is otherworldly and causes my eyes to drift closed.

Nothing can bring Künne back to me, but that window brings me comfort.

Künne and Fronika’s names aren’t on the glass. But each child shall be told whose agony flickers through the molten glass, and they shall tell their own children. Tierkinddorf will remember.

The glassmaker has long since returned to Stuttgart now, but one day I saw him eating a sausage outside as he rested during his labor, and made myself known to him. He told me a beautiful thing, that he believed that the glass in the window was forever moving, although too slowly for our eyes to see.

“I blew into the glass and it continues to move with my breath,” he told me. “It presses against the lead soldering as if wanting to overflow.”

I’m glad of this. I like to think Künne is moving her arm out of the kettle, that Fronika is turning to run away from the hunters, that the flames will easily subside and the women step down from their stakes and rejoin the world.

Author’s Note

Although
The Witch’s Trinity
is a work of fiction, it describes a world that was very real. No one knows how many women were executed for witchcraft over a four-hundred-year period. A major trigger was the publication in 1485–86 of the
Malleus Maleficarum,
the witch hunter’s bible. Gutenberg had built his press just thirty years earlier, and this allowed dissemination of the book in unprecedented numbers. One misconception is that the Catholic Church was entirely to blame for this holocaust. Secular courts were just as eager, and sometimes more so, to capture and punish witches. Although women were largely targeted (the title
Malleus Maleficarum
gives the word
witch
a feminine gender), it is important to note that in the 1300s men were named as witches as frequently as women were. And northern countries such as Scandinavia equally targeted men and women throughout the craze. The idea that midwives or healers formed the bulk of the accused has now been disproved, but it is still understood that the elderly, the poor, and people outside of society were the main targets. These unfortunates suffered the torments of imprisonment, torture, and death by hanging, decapitation, impalement, or being burned alive.

Several years ago, I learned that one of my ancestors, Mary Bliss Parsons, was accused of witchcraft in 1600s Massachusetts. Although she faced the accusation twice (and possibly a third time, but the court documents have disappeared), she was acquitted and lived into her eighties. In the following pages, you can learn a little bit about her story.

M
Y
A
NCESTOR
G
OODY
P
ARSONS
¹

Living in California, far from the New England I grew up in, I received an e-mail a few years ago from my mother. “Someone sent me this link,” she wrote. “Our family has a witch in it.” I clicked on it to find a complex Web site devoted to Mary Bliss Parsons, who was forced to defend her innocence twice. My connection to her traces back eleven generations through my mother, an only child and the last of our particular line to bear the Parsons name.

I marveled at the story that unfolded. No one in my family had ever spoken of this true black sheep, because none of us knew. Mary’s husband, Joseph Parsons, was spoken of proudly whenever lineage came up: he was one of the founders of Northampton, Massachusetts, where Smith College is today. But his rumor-tortured wife was never mentioned. I asked my mother to send me some genealogical materials, including photocopied pages of a 1912 family history that goes on at length about Joseph but does not mention Mary’s lifelong fight against accusations of witchcraft. To my amazement, when I located the original book in San Francisco’s Sutro Library Mary’s troubles
were
documented. Someone in my family had very specifically chosen which pages to photocopy—and left out Mary’s trials altogether!

Perhaps shame lingered, or perhaps the relative responsible for the photocopying felt Mary’s story was moot since she was acquitted. It is a myth that the accusation of witchcraft always carried with it an immediate death sentence. The magistrates of New England ruled more sensibly than we might give them credit for and New England history is full of stories of witchcraft acquittals.
²