Authors: Suzanne Weyn
Invisible World
With thanks to Bill Gonzalez for your research help, suggestions,
and unflagging enthusiasm; to David M. Young for your
unfailing and generous willingness to always brainstorm with me;
and to David Levithan for being the best, most supportive, and
brilliant editor on the planet.
“I cannot help it; the Devil may appear in my shape.”
REBECCA NURSE
, 1692
Hung for witchcraft
“The black dog said âServe me,' but I said I am afraid.
He said if I did not, he would do worse to me.”
TITUBA THE SLAVE
, 1692
Confessed to using witchcraft
FROM THE ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTS OF THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS
, 1692
E
VERY TIME THE GUARD ARRIVES, IT IS AN EXCITEMENT
. The moment his keys jangle in the door lock, my fifty or so cell mates stir excitedly, roused from their listless despair. Filthy hair is tossed back. Sleepy eyes are rubbed clear.
The guard is very tall, with a starkly pale face. On these patrols, he does not wear the metal helmet that reminds me of a horseshoe crab. His musket remains holstered at the side of his doublet. He is not fearful of us captive women.
Or that's what he wants us to believe, at any rate.
He's revolted by the stench of body odor and spoiled food that greets him. With raised chin, he makes no effort to conceal his contempt.
A few women plead on bended knees, arms outstretched.
“My husband cannot look after the children and also tend the harvest. Our crops are withering.”
“I'm told my baby is ill. Release me, I beg you.”
“I have done nothing wrong! Please!”
One woman assaults him with logic. “Why would I kill Goodwife Smith's cow? I simply complained that her milk was becoming too expensive. That doesn't mean I wish her â or her cow â any ill. I need the milk that the Smiths sell. How can they accuse me of killing the cow with evil spells?
I don't even know what a spell sounds like.
This is not right. I demand to be let go.”
The slave woman Tituba sleeps shackled in the corner, dreaming of her little girl, Violet. They are in the rye field behind the house, playing among the rustling stalks. I know this because her dream thoughts are vivid and flow easily into my clairvoyant mind. I am grateful that she is not recalling the terrifying episodes of demonic possession that put her here.
These women are innocent. I'm sure of it. Yet â innocent or not â in the coming days they will dangle from the hangman's noose on Gallows Hill. Seventeen have been executed already. One man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death. Two have died in jail.
Four-year-old Dorcas Good looks at me, big-eyed and scared, from across our cell. The demonic thing running rampant through Salem has not even spared this child.
Dorcas begins to sob pitifully and I cross to her side, rubbing her skinny shoulders as she whimpers into my skirt. The guard, clearly unnerved, hurries through the door, locks it, and disappears.
The pleading women slump to the ground, as though the guard has taken their last sparks with him. No more arguments are voiced once he's gone.
I lean back against the wall. After fifteen or so minutes, voices enter my head, as they always do in the moments just before I drift off to the distant shore of sleep. I can hear my cell mates thinking.
I have always been able to hear the thoughts of others. Not just imagine them. Really hear them inside my head.
Tom must get word to Uncle James. He can help.
I am so scared. I don't want to hang.
My baby will die without me.
It is driving me insane.
I focus on a memory that helps me shut out the voices; I try to see it in my mind's eye as clearly as possible.
It is spring. I am beside a forsythia bush; its flowers have already burst open in shades of fiery yellow. My sister is there. We are about to crawl into an opening in the bush, to its dark center.
The other women's voices are blocked by my memory's images and no longer plague me.
Instead, it is my own voice that warns me. My own voice that expresses fear.
I try to sleep. But sleep won't come.
There is too much to worry about.
Will the evil come back for me?
It might.
The hideous, demonic creature that I have let loose on Salem Village might not be through with me yet.
I
N MY EARLIEST MEMORY, I AM SIX AND MY OLDER SISTER,
Kate, is nine. We had crawled to the center of the wide-spreading forsythia bush at the rear of our manor house. At that time, it was my favorite place on earth.
Through the lemony umbrella of petals, dappled sunlight played over the loose, dark soil. The flowers had no scent, but the branches, moist with sticky sap, enlivened the air with a woodsy greenness.
When Kate tossed back her luxurious dark curls, I saw her smooth cheek was speckled with dirt. The lace collar of her blue brocade gown had become rumpled and dotted with the soil she had been digging with her hands.
“I'm ready to bury him,” Kate said in a low, solemn voice. “Please hand me the bird, Elsabeth.”
Striving to match her dignity, I unfolded the embroidered handkerchief on my lap and lifted the lifeless body of a wren. I couldn't resist tenderly stroking its soft chest.
We had buried several birds, a garden snake, and even a few of the mice our black cat loved to kill, here in our secret animal burial ground. The largest inhabitant of our graveyard was an exquisite red fox that Kate and I had found while walking in the woods that past winter.
“We should pray for the bird's soul,” Kate suggested. “But first we need to cover him with dirt.”
I dug my hands into the loosened earth Kate had piled into a mound and began to assist her. As we worked, I plucked up a large rock embedded in the dirt and discovered a world of insects living beneath: larvae, beetles, spiders, worms. They scurried off for safety, alarmed at being so abruptly uncovered.
“Ew! Bugs!” Kate said, recoiling in disgust.
I didn't feel the same. To me, insects were fascinating. And it was amazing to think that a whole world of them existed right there under a rock, just waiting to be discovered. I wondered what their lives could be like. Did they love each other as people did? Were they upset to have their rock taken away just as I would be if I had to leave my home?
“Do birds and bugs have souls, do you think?” I questioned.
“They must,” Kate replied. “Doesn't every living thing?”
Raising my chin, I gazed around the sun-specked cathedral of nature in which we knelt. “Plants are alive,” I said. “Do
they
have souls?”
Kate frowned, considering the question. “I don't know. But surely animals must have souls.”
“Do you think this bird will go to animal Heaven?” I probed.
“Yes. Animals must have a separate Heaven for themselves.”
This idea struck me as quite awful. “I hope animals and plants and even bugs all go to
regular
people Heaven,” I insisted fervently.
I returned to the job of tossing dirt into the bird's little grave. Suddenly, though, I lifted my head, listening sharply.
I'd heard a voice. But had it come from the outside world or was it speaking from within my mind?
I grabbed Kate's wrist in alarm. “Bronwyn is looking for us,” I said. In my head, I could hear our governess calling.
With my fingers still encircling my sister's wrist, we both closed our eyes and listened again, turning inward.
Now where are those girls? I told them not to wander off.
Bronwyn had one of those minds â clear and focused â that we had no trouble reading. Plus, she had been our governess since I was born. My mother had died in the process of giving birth to me, and Bronwyn was all I had ever known of motherly love.
“Hurry,” Kate urged.
“Out of there this instant, you naughty girls!”
“Bronwyn, is that you?” I asked, stalling for time as we filled in the grave.
“You know who it is! Now come out of there, I say!”
Quickly patting down the dirt mound above our dead bird friend, I stripped a handful of yellow flowers from their stalks and tossed them on the grave. Then I crawled out the opening in the branches that Kate and I used as a door. Kate followed.
Bronwyn stood waiting, arms folded, right hip jutting to the side, her lined, fine-boned face pulled into an expression of sternness. The day had turned gray and Bronwyn's salt-and-pepper hair danced at her cheekbones where the wind had pried it from its simple arrangement. “Didn't I tell you to stay by the back door while I supervised the hanging of the bedsheets?” she scolded.
Nearly a quarter acre of rolling lawn stood between us and the stone manor house. Kate and I had wild, uncultivated woods to our backs and the ocean just beyond that. “Sorry, Bronwyn, we â” Kate began.
“And what mischief have you two been up to?” Bronwyn demanded, brushing the dirt from Kate's cheek.
“We found a bird,” Kate answered, as though this were a perfectly adequate excuse for tiring of our game of hide-and-seek between the billowing sheets and wandering off. “A dead bird.”
A light rain suddenly moistened my face. “Bronwyn, could we sing a song for the bird we just buried?” I asked.
“It should have a burial song,” Kate agreed. “Could you sing it, Bronwyn? Your voice is so lovely.”
Bronwyn checked the sky, rain misting her. “Perhaps a
quick
song,” she allowed with some reluctance. She reached her hands to us and we each took hold. Bronwyn began a song that neither Kate nor I could understand, for she sang it in the Scottish dialect of her home in the north. It was beautiful and moving, nonetheless.
“What do the words mean?” Kate asked when Bronwyn had finished.
“It was a song for the death of an animal. My granny taught it to me,” Bronwyn replied. “It wishes the animal well on its way to the other side.”
“The other side of what?” Kate asked.
“The other side of the veil.”
“The veil?”
“The veil is lifted from time to time to reveal realms that lie beyond what can be seen here on this plane of existence, the worlds beyond our knowing, the invisible world.” That Bronwyn had some mysterious acquaintance with this realm had never been in doubt to me.
“As in Heaven?” Kate asked.
“Heaven means many different things to many different people,” Bronwyn answered. “But yes, it could be considered a world behind the veil.”
The rain began to fall more heavily. Bronwyn grabbed my hand and Kate's and we walked toward the house.
“Next time don't touch a hurt animal. Come to get me first,” Bronwyn instructed us, not for the first time.
We had brought Bronwyn injured animals before and knew that she had a box of ointments, salves, herbs, and oils that she kept under her bed. After consulting a thick and ancient-looking book, she would mix these together in different combinations and either administer the concoction by mouth or slather it onto the skin of the hurt creature. Sometimes the animal died anyway, but more often it was healed.
Bronwyn often told us of her girlhood in Scotland, spent in a rural village that was still steeped in ancient ways from the old times. She'd lived in a thatched cottage with her many sisters, aunts, and cousins, as well as a grandmother who was so far on in years that no one â not even the grandmother herself â knew her age. It was believed that she was well over one hundred! Bronwyn claimed that it was this old granny that everyone in the village turned to in times of sickness and injury. It was from her that Bronwyn had learned all her healing arts.
Kate and I thought of Bronwyn as a sort of wizard, a genius, and wanted to tell everyone about her skill, but she warned us against uttering a word. Her light eyes clouded over when she commanded us to keep silent. “You must swear to me that you will never tell a soul of this. Swear! You could put me in the greatest peril if you reveal what I do for these animals. I am a fool to do it.”
“We won't ever tell,” Kate swore as I nodded vigorously at her side.
We were full of promises, back then.