The Witch's Trinity (17 page)

I went to the corner to relieve myself and swept dirt over the hole. This was how Künne’s bandage and skirts had gotten so filthy. I pressed my forehead to the earth. My mind was whirling such that I couldn’t linger on the memory of her thin frame surrounded by fire, it hurt too much. Thinking of Matern and Alke was too much to think about, too. And the thought that I might never see my son, Jost, again cut worse than anything. If the hunger never ended, would Irmeltrud feed Matern to Alke, weakest to strongest? Would she take a knife from the board and slice a thin rind of flesh to chew on? Would she venture into the night and steal the Töpfers’ hen and cut Frau Töpfer’s throat to catch the blood for a pudding? I wondered if the friar had already given her food or if I would have to go to the stake for that meal to be earned. I fingered the nub in my skirt where the herb
Pillen
were hidden. I would wait until the last moment possible, to see if Jost would return home.

Every time I let my mind fall to dreaming, I saw him stepping in the snow, weary. He was the only link I had to Hensel and the old days, the brightness, the larder full of food, the smiles of neighbors, the smell and stink of animals…And then I had to quickly wrench my mind somewhere else, for I couldn’t give up on him. I had to believe he would return.

At noontide, the door would open and someone’s quick hand would throw in a morsel of food and shove a bowl of water along the dirt. I never saw who it was, even though I would try to position myself and call out, but he opened the door only a crack and moved as fast as ever he could.

The first time food was thrown in, it was a large radish. I picked it up and brought it close to my nose, inhaling. In the autumn, someone from the friar’s city had pried this from the earth. Their radish field had yielded harvest, as our village’s had not. This very root had been in someone’s hands; they had pulled the green stem with its frond-edged leaves until the plump body of the vegetable had appeared, with its tail moving from rose to white at the very tip, which we called the cold hound’s tail. Perhaps in the friar’s city they had some other name for it. Perhaps the bland-faced man who bent to pull this from the dirt, like a bird pulls a worm, thought of the tail as a cat’s whisker or a crone’s gray hair.

The leaves with their furred undersides, such that Hensel used to tickle me with them, pulling a leaf across my cheek, were gone now, already boiled in some other woman’s pot and eaten, and the redness of the radish was now rusty. I ran my tongue along the smooth surface, tasting already the bitterness of its body. And then I bit and chewed. I had always loved this simple gift of the garden, because the triad of colors broke my heart. The lovely hazy green of the leaves, the bright red of the vegetable itself, and then the shade one must eat to find: the bright crisp white of the inside. Nothing was prettier upon a plate than the grace of the spreading profusion of leaves, and one bite taken from the whole. I looked upon my once-bit radish, devoid of greenery, and trembled. What right did I have to hold it, being so pale and undone in such a gray place as this? It was as if a butterfly had lit upon the butcher’s leavings. I ate in a circle until the red wore a white girdle. I snipped the tail off with my front tooth. I gave the radish all the appreciation I could.

Thank you, radish, for your firm flesh and brightness. For giving yourself to me.

The tower’s cold and rancid odor made me want to scream. Would that I were a woodland mouse, able to burrow down through the dirt and under the walls! I was tempted to take one of my
Pillen
now, simply to deaden the suffering of my mind, but I knew I would be wise to save them for the later suffering of my body. If only I could disappear, take myself into the woods and vanish against the grayness. Who cared what mischief I was up to, what thought I ever manufactured in my body? I was like seed fluff the wind takes: useless, of no import! Hensel had been the exact opposite, so alive. Even now, decades after his death, it was easy to see again the ruddy color of his cheeks and the impossible blueness of his eyes. I had had him for so brief a time. It seemed we barely put our hands together to dance before he was gasping some last wishes….

That first time we’d danced, he took my hand in his, even though the piper was still leaning over in conversation with a slip of a child who wished to purse her lips to the pipe. We stood, linked by our hands, waiting, not looking at each other, and I trembled at this simple touch. And then when the music started, such a roar from everyone’s throats, our hearts hammering at the rollicking of our steps, my braids loosening, ribbons flying, we women throwing back our heads and laughing at the impossible speed with which our men spun us. And in the space between songs, I clung to Hensel, feeling his heart and his sweat, already his, smiling up at his blue eyes smiling down, knowing his large hands at my waist would soon be knowing every part of me. To capture that again! To join the women in a circle taking off our caps and rebraiding our hair, making a grand show of spreading the locks over our shoulders for all the men to see, tucking edelweiss in and threading its stem in with our fair hair, to look across to see the men watched with half-lidded eyes, just waiting for the music to start again so we would stride toward each other, given permission by the dance to touch.

And when Hensel courted me, I already knew what he felt like, how his head would bend down to mine to hear what I said.

The sweetness of those days. I could bite into it, tear it like a dog.

I shifted my position on the dried straw, trying to get warm even though it wasn’t fresh and capable of holding heat.

The day we buried Hensel, paying a man to dig since Jost was too young, was the day I’d needed Künne the most. She cried as sullenly as me, hating the priest whose words made it seem that this was a choice God made, that I should accept the divine reasoning I could not understand. And she was the one who suggested to her husband that he come and help me mill the grain, trading his plot of crops to another neighbor. Thus it was that Ortlouf Himmelmann became our village’s miller and later taught Jost the trade that his own father should have taught him. And soon after Jost began milling the grain in earnest, Ortlouf too sickened with the plague and died. It was as if the mill wheel determined who lived and died. I wondered now, bleakly, if Matern was strong enough to take over the milling—should there ever be another harvest—if Jost did not return.

The next day it was radishes again, two this time, rock hard. But I sat on the ground as shameless as a babe and ate of them as if they were soft, buttery lamb. I brought my bowl of water close to the scant fire, for what was left from yesterday was a thin plate of ice. I knew they would never retrieve the bowls: who could ever drink from pottery touched by a witch’s lips?

I had run my fingers over every stone in reach. It wasn’t that I wished to find a loose one; I knew I had no real hope of escape. My trudge in the woods to the village of Steindorf showed me that no one would take me in; wherever I went, I would be suspect as an odd woman, a witch. And if I escaped and found a way to live elsewhere, what good would that do me? The only thing I cared about was seeing Jost again. I had my herbs from Künne and my steadfast hope of his return, which was all the pleasantry life could offer me. But I did number the stones with my fingers, just a way to pass the time. To run something over my fingertips that wasn’t dirt. I would rest the hot flea bites against the cold stone to help ease them.

If I were a witch, I could move through the stones and fly through the woods to find Jost.

That would have been worth signing the book for.

I wondered when my trial would be, if I too would be tested by boiling water. I sat upon my tick and thought of how it would feel to put my hand into that pot, the pot we would warn children against in normal times. Perhaps if I prayed unceasingly, God would grant me flesh without sensation, so that I could put my hand in and gather the pebbles one by one.

I watched a flea bounce up onto my skirts, near the hem where the secret pocket was. I grabbed the flea and pressed it between two fingernails so that it popped open, flattened like a clove of garlic under the side of a knife, even while I thanked it for its choice of jumping. It had helped me remember that I already knew of something that took the sense out of flesh.

If I faced a trial, I could eat one
Pille,
easily pick up the three pebbles, and pass that part of the test. My flesh would no doubt burn, but perhaps gathering all three pebbles was the more important part? After all, they were representative of the Holy Trinity, and the sweet Lamb of God would know that I was innocent and guide my hands, as the friar had said to Künne. I could be proved innocent! But instantly my hopes plummeted. Irmeltrud would never allow that. Even if I passed a trial, she would think of more to charge me with. With my supply of two
Pillen,
I could only withstand one trial—and a burning.

I awoke to the cat’s cries, far above me. At first I screamed, thinking it hovered in the air like a demon, but then through the moonlight I could see it rested on the sill. It had managed to press its body through one of the slits but was now stranded. The height was too severe for it.

I stood and walked over, groaning at what the cold night air could do to a woman’s bones, but feeling a small sense of comfort at the sight of the small, striped beast.

“Did you climb a tree on the other side then,
Liebling
?” I called up to it. “And thought a tree would be on the inside as well?”

It meowed just as I finished my question, which made me shudder. The cat was surely speaking to me. It paced the thin walkway of the sill. “Come down and warm me, kitty,” I coaxed. “It’s a leap you can make.”

It meowed again.

As I stood there with my head tilted back, my neck began to hurt. The beast keened to me, showing its sharp, white teeth.

“If you have wings,” I whispered up to it, “sprout them and come to me. I will accept any comfort now.”

And then my head became too heavy for my neck and I walked back to my tick. For a long time, I lay looking at the arched shadow of the cat huddled above me.