Footnote

'…he most greviously afflected me a great many times by pinching pricking and beating me allmost choaking me to death urging me vehemently to writ in his book.'1

The deposition of Elizabeth Hubbard against John Proctor Senior (Salem Witchcraft Papers)2

Each day fell into the delicious hysteria and stench of death. We shrieked in their incredulous faces and they believed everything we said. Everything. I have to say it twice just to believe it for myself but it’s true. 3

It began as a game, a childish distraction from the boredom of winter. The Minister’s daughter and her strange, orphan cousin, chanced to idle away the drudgery with the Venus Glass I taught them. They were so easy to mould, loving my weavings, conjuring the forbidden in their braided little heads. We knew our futures without any need of divination; chattels handed from impatient parent to husband, pausing momentarily to breed before they packed us into the cold uncompromising earth, a muttered prayer sending us off to greet our makers. My mama and papa had known an early grave but I didn’t remember them. 4

‘Death.’ A muttered monosyllable in that curiously low voice few were granted and my head snapped.5

‘What? Don’t be so stupid,’ I’m gabbling at her, attempting to disguise age as authority. ‘All you did was crack a few eggs, what’s the harm in that? What were you after? Your husbands’ names?’6

An imperceptible nod. 7

‘But you’re far too young for that, you goose,’ I chide, still laughing. ‘What put that nonsense into your heads?’8

‘We just wondered..’ embarrassed they look away, unsure how to continue. Paddling innocent toes into the sea of maturity was proving dangerous, but she would easily find a willing husband, unlike her cousin. Nobody approached that inscrutable and unflinching green gaze. 9

It was never difficult. All we had to do was squeal and tear our hair and watch them fall into credulity. History may record us as the pawns of adult manipulation, factions and land disputes, but I’m not so sure now. Of all, it was probably the cousin who actually believed all she claimed she saw. No one else was as violent in her writhings, howls and accusations. Like butter they slid between our fingers, convened a court and pushed too many into oblivion. Occasionally I find myself wondering why we did it; for some it was cheap avarice and ambition, for others the seduction of shattering a bleak existence.10

Snow blanketed the ground when it began, and as ever I had to hammer the ice encrusted water barrel. My winter-veined uncle refused to employ even a daily maid because they had me, the adopted daughter. At least he didn’t touch me, barely noticing my presence unless I transgressed. Even the minister had slaves, two jabbering savages. I knew both of them could speak English as well as any other, but they relished the power their strange tongue exerted over us. Power, the great aphrodisiac and it became ours. For the first time we tasted freedom and feasted. No more ordering to bed, whippings and enforced silences. No more turgid psalms and sermons, sacrilegiously relishing our juvenile triumph over the minister. 11

That slave was the first; she was even more of a commodity than us in spite of her maturity. Suspicion sires superstition and soon they were indulging in the old ways, baking witch cakes and feeding them to that poor hound. How I laughed when I saw it gobbling the sour concoction, and for what? All we did was thrust skinny fingers into the empty air, and another bedraggled unfortunate was hauled away to fester in damnation and the filth of a rat-infested dungeon. Anyone was vulnerable, anyone, we didn’t discriminate, but I was always uneasy about the old woman and the farmer whose single error was to attend his wife’s examination. That cousin had never even breathed the same air, never rested those unflinching green eyes on his open face before that April morning, but she didn’t care. The woman he’d attempted to support was his third wife, thirty or so years beneath him, barely older than his first son, and they weren’t always happy. I heard they named the hanging hill after him eventually, but there’s no trace of me because I didn’t really die.12

For six months we flew, thrilling the tired population with salacious detail. We were puppets made to dance to ambition’s tune, a song we barely comprehended, instruments in a fatal orchestration of our own fashion. The cousin’s smile was lethal. When she laughed we knew the end was inevitable.13

As spring grew to summer, the farmer rotted in his cell, his face grizzled and his sons forced to the horseshoe. They never hid the tortures and examinations, but we only cared for our game. Even the old and formerly lauded were routinely humiliated, compelled to the thrust of dirty fingernails. They claimed they were searching for excrescences and witches’ teats, but I know they savoured the denied, and still it sickens me. Yet we continued, their blood never stained our consciousness; we relished the prospect of death. The girls were relentless until they hurled me from their history. I found the baying bloodlust engulfing, couldn’t watch my friends conducting the mob. They laughed at the chained pathetics cowering or occasionally defiant in the face of death. Howling gleeful squeals as one after the other the innocents were forced up the ladder and pushed into oblivion. What pains me is they knew, they knew, each one knew the sensation they were hanging literally between life and a death. I can’t forget him or the old woman, how apt is it that she above all represents their martyrdom. It didn’t pass me when the history makers raised an impressive monument, starkly slicing her name in straight Roman script. He’s there too of course, and seventeen others, all rightly remembered and revered as the victims of malignant children, but there’s nothing for me. I’m not even a memory. 14

Yet in spite of my obliteration there’s too much of us in everyone. Even the tall bespectacled man, the one who turned us into allegory couldn’t forget. His generation demanded a flirtation with impropriety so he hacked the seams of our reality, moulded and refashioned us. I imagine it’s his tale you’ve probably swallowed, as accurate as snow to desert. For that lie they venerated and feted him, flung baubles about his neck and rewarded him with that beautiful blonde woman other men craved. A too clever man’s fantasy froze the child and the farmer, made him the contrite adulterer, begging forgiveness from a frigid wife and dying for the sake of his name. None of which is true; he did pen a plea begging for a change of trial, claiming the inadequate justices had no integrity, but it didn’t do him any good, they still hung him. And I faded until she found me. 15

Now I have a voice, an insignificant one at first, but a voice nevertheless. Yet she too has stepped into sensation, banishing the child and inflicting her with a burdening lust and unfulfilled passion to echo her own. Sometimes I hear her gasp his name as her hands flutter, praying he can hear her across the hours. She has them revel in their adultery, form bastard children and make me a reluctant midwife, a voice of constant good sense, impatient and practical. I quite like that. It still intrigues me why everyone falls to the mad child when they’ve forgotten me. I was the adolescent in bloom, aware of the locked eyes and swift glances, the power I held beneath my skirts. Scour the archives, find my name and you’ll see the truth. I was a chief accuser, it’s written for anyone to read. I can still feel the pen against my skin as I scrawled the indefinable mark in place of the name they’d given me, the name nobody wants to recall. 16

The woman spends her hours tapping at her truth, never accepting why no one else is interested. She sighs with mild annoyance, reads the casual dismissal, the barely concealed contempt for what she determines as fate, but refuses to concede. Passion leads her, desire fuels her and she wants him more than life. It’s hardly surprising she has the child woman behave as she does, though I doubt if any such thought ever filtered through those woollen wits. As for him, he’s fashioned in another man’s image, and she loves him. Now my story will never fall to dust so I watch over the woman with something like tender patience, allowing her to melt my fact into fiction. I like to see her face light when she discovers creativity is reality and I know our voices will one day be heard again.17

It’s dark now, and quiet, the memories are sleeping and the lies at last are laid to rest. I’m so tired, too tired. Sometimes I crave the repose of oblivion again but we can’t stop, not yet, not yet.18