For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting short scenes from unfinished stories. Some of these scenes are part of larger works that remain unfinished. Others are a solitary, a single scene from a story that hasn’t come to me in any shape or form…yet.
The cup sat on the table before him, and he hung his face over it, willing the smoke from the candle in his hand down into its contents, to dance on the surface of the brown water it contained. The smoke glided up, not down, and he silently cursed for what felt like the hundredth time. He tried again, this time concentrated on the flame, directing it down, down down. Yes, good, this is good, he thought as he watched the way the flame dipped into the cup. The smoke began filling the vessel, but most of it escaped. He doubled his concentration, speaking to the smoke now, and smiled to himself as it started to descend, responding to his command be heavy and his plea show me what I seek.
When the smoke was dancing, swirling, hovering over the water within the cup, he blew out the flame on the taper and placed it on the table. Then he lift the cup to his face with two hands and peered into the smoke, watching how it formed shapes and pictures on the surface of the water, staining the surface of the liquid dark as ink. He smiled as he saw a girl dancing, before she was whisked away by friends, covered in a veil, presented as a bride. A slow chuckle burbled from inside him as he imagined it. He, a novice sorcerer, and her, a girl who kept the geese.
The door of the house creaked open loudly before it banged against the wall. he was so startled that his jump of surprise caused the water in the cup to splash up into his face. He could taste the dirt and the smoke in it as it ran over his lips. He blinked stupidly before looking towards the door, to see his teacher, Hargin, who was a real sorcerer, hauling in a load of firewood. He was grunting from effort as he moved towards the fire place. He spilled the load all over the floor of the house before he got to the place where the few logs that were already inside were neatly stacked. Hargin was muttering as he picked up the logs one by one, huffing and puffing as he placed them into the stack next to the hearth. Then, finally, he turned at looked right at Beagus, sitting at the table with smoke and water and shock still covering his face.
“What did you see?” Hargin asked as he stomped towards the door to close it. The man was huge; Beagus wondered why he hadn’t built a bigger house.
“The goose girl is getting married,” Beagus said.
“To who?” Hargin asked, shutting the door with more force that was probably necessary.
“Oh…” Beagus. He hadn’t thought it anyone other than him.
Hargin put his hands on his hips, and Beagus thought he couldn’t decide if he wanted to laugh or frown.
“Next time don’t use dirty water,” he said. “You can’t see as well if it’s full of dirt.”
I wrote everything out for Maddie. No code. She would need to understand everything as it was. Just like Gran did for me when I first joined the network. I hid this letter in the basket under the bathroom where I keep my menstrual supplies. Mark would never look there. It reminds him how different we are, and how powerless he is to change the way things work. There was a time when I thought I could trust Mark. When he married me, it seemed that he cared about me for who I was, not just as the woman who would give him sons. One night I ventured to tell him about my Untie Mat, a toe in the water, to see if I could reveal more. He smacked me and told me never to talk to him about Untie Mat again.
I cried to Gran that night. That’s when she told me about the letter writers.
I wrote out a second letter to Gilda. It was a tricky situation with Gilda leaving, and me knowingly doing something that would compromise me. Gilda would have to tell the woman who recruited her that she was going to Canada too. It would be the responsibility of that woman to make contact with me. But I was going to end up in the stocks, so that woman would have to make contact with Maddie instead. It was easiest to use the location that Gilda and I had used for last year to make pass the first letter. Maddie and Gilda’s recruiter could decided on a different location later.
I stuffed the letter explaining everything into the wall and replaced the loose brick. I took my shopping bags up and made my way back home to where I had left Mira and Simon to play in the yard. Maddie had offered to watch them again. It would be the last afternoon they would play there. Tomorrow they would be smuggled out of Massachusetts, and if they were lucky, they’d be in Canada shortly after. I fought the tears forming in my eyes as I walked. A woman crying was suspicious, especially to men. They only liked when we smiled.
Maddie was happily playing with the children when I arrived home, some game that involved running and freezing in place. I had purchased a few things for her at the grocery, and she helped me separate the items from my own when she saw me enter through the fence. I sent Mira and Simon inside to put the groceries away. Maddie gathered her own bag and her children and went home. I had slipped the letter into the bag as we sorted. She would find it, and after my children were gone, and I was in the stocks, hopefully she would follow its instructions to go to the loose brick in the wall. And if everything else worked according to plan, there would be a letter waiting for her from Gilda’s contact.
The plan had no room for error. If I was wrong about Maddie, I had just exposed everyone. But if I was right about her, then one day she might be able to escape too.
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. Mark would be home soon. I could not afford to let him see me cry.
As I tucked the children in that night, I whispered to each one of them how much I loved them. There was a heaviness in the words that I didn’t normally feel. My voice cracked because I knew it would be the last time I performed this ritual. If they noticed they didn’t comment. I lingered a little too long over them.
Mark was suspicious of my moodiness. “Did something happen today?” he asked, as I turned back the covered and joined him in bed.
“No,” I said, sinking into the mattress, attempting to escape his prying. “I’m just tired.”
He too didn’t comment. He didn’t really care.
I didn’t sleep. I waited until the clock showed 2:15, it’s huge red numbers like monster’s eyes peering at me in the dark. I dressed, crept out of bed, down the hall to Mira’s room. I gently shook her awake. She was confused and sleepy. “Mommy…what…?”
I shushed her. “We need to go. I can’t tell you why.” I woke Simon the same way, gave the same instructions. I grabbed the small bag I had packed for them from the back of the coat closet in the hallway. I had practiced a silent exit many times to make sure that we could get away without waking Mark. The door of the house closed at 2:19.
We stayed in the shadows as best we could. My heart hammered. The children were practically running to keep up with my quickened pace. We went across yards, and public lots and down alleys and through parks and play grounds, until we were outside the limits of Fulbright, trekking across fields and farms. Finally, we made it to the ruin of the US Postal Office. I checked my watch. It was 2:59. The smuggler was supposed to arrive at 3:15.
Gilda was standing against the back wall of the old building, ushering people through broken window to hide inside while they waited for the smuggler to show up. I had no idea how many were already inside, but I watched her help 2 people through before she notice me and the kids. No one stood between us, and she left her place at the building and came towards me quickly.
“Emily,” she said, a question hanging in the air. She looked at the kids, then back at me. “The last two?” She was shaking her head.
“Gilda, please,” I said. “Please.”
“I can’t take your children from you,” she said. “I can’t do that to you.”
“You have to,” I said. The children were both now clinging to me, having figured out why were outside of Fulbright in the middle of the night. They had heard stories of people disappearing from Massachusetts all their life. Now they were about to do it themselves.
“Mommy, don’t send us away,” Simon said. He was pulling on my arm. “I want to stay with you.”
But Mira was silent. Mira, at only seven, already knew what life would be like for her if she staying. She cried silent, fat tears and remained at stoic as stone.
Gilda was about to say something more, when we heard the truck pulling up to the building. It’s lights were off, and as soon as it parked, they killed the engine. A person climbed out of the driver’s seat, and pulled something from their pocket. It was a flashlight, and the driver clicked it on and off three times quickly.
“It’s safe,” Gilda said. She took off towards the truck and I followed, the kids clinging to me as I moved after her. She called into the old post office, and then we were being handed children, and helping women climb through the window. Two men came last. I turned around to see that the driver had opened the back of the truck, and was similarly helping women and children climb into it. When everyone else had gone the driver looked at the two of us and the kids and said, “Can’t take both of you. Which one of you is going?”
Gilda and I looked at each other, and before I could say anything, she pushed me towards the truck, saying, “Go, Emily.”
“No, Gilda. Take the kids. Go to Canada. Get away from here.”
“No,” she said again, more forcefully. “Go with you children, Emily. They need their mother.”
My hands were trembling so hard that I almost dropped the bag I was packed. “But, Gilda, they’ll put you back in the stocks,” I said.
“You think they won’t do that to you?” she said.
“Ladies, we have to go,” the driver said. She came towards us, and lifted Mira from the ground, pushing her into the truck. She stifled a cry. Simon went into the truck more willingly, but I could hear them both sobbing as soon as they were inside.
Gilda shoved me towards the truck. “GO!” she said, almost angry now. “I’ll get out later!”
I looked over my shoulder at her, the guilt almost unbearable. But Gilda didn’t look disappointed or disapproving at all. She looked just as hard and as determined as every time I had passed her in the stocks. She was a fighter. She would survive.
The driver shut the door of the truck, and then my kids were huddled against me, crying into my dress in the dark.
The worst part of recruiting anyone new to the network of letter writers was the uncertainty. It was always lurking in the shadow of your surety, waiting to pop out of the darkness and scream that you were wrong. It whispered to you that it wasn’t worth the risk, that it would be better to stay hidden, silent, safe. I had to remind myself of the truth- I wasn’t safe. Mira and Simon we’re safe. And neither were Maddie and Tom or their boys. We all needed to get out of Massachusetts so we could live as our full selves.
There were plenty of women who welcomed the rigid rules that governed their lives. They pretended it was piety, but God has fallen out of their lives long ago. What they clung to instead was what Gran used to call Patriarchy. She was always careful to use that word around us, because it was on that list of things that you couldn’t say. Women ended up in the stocks for uttering it, along with any of the other forbidden words: feminist, equity, organize, fair. These things did not exist according to the government. There was only the one right way: men in control, and everyone else subservient to them.
I prepared myself to cross the boundary of my lawn into Maddie’s. It was a ritual I took very seriously. When I left my home, I was entering enemy territory. Only at home, when I was alone, did I ever feel truly safe. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply through my nose as I stood there at the boundary, marked out with a line of stones. When I exhaled, I let go off all the worry that had been bubbling. I had left a letter in the stone wall for Gilda to let her know that Mira and Simon would be the last two. I had written that I was recruiting my neighbor. She would find a way to get to my children if anything happened to me. The network had some resources- women who were trained for espionage when it was needed. I had to trust that Mira and Simon would get out even if bringing Maddie into the network went wrong.
I stepped over the boundary stones, telling myself that there was no going back. There would be no backing down, no pretending. My life as I knew it would be over in 3 days either way. This knowledge gave me resolve and propelled me forward without fear of the conversation ahead of me.
I knocked on Maddie’s door three times, a hard knock, but not an urgent one. I waited, hearing playful squealing in the house, and heavy footsteps moving towards the door. When the door opened, I pasted a smile onto my face so I would look pleasant. I had become adept at smiling under duress. It was how I had survived.
“Oh! Emily, hello,” Maddie said. I could see trust and surprise and excitement dancing in her eyes, reflected in her young face that hadn’t yet hardened with suspicion of others. I ached for her naiveté, a part of me longing for it in the same moment. I reminded myself that she was purchased, sent her to be kept safe, to help play a role so her husband could hide. Maybe she had learned how to act and her expression was just at disingenuous as mine.
“Would you and the boys like to go with us to the park?” There was a nearly secluded playground, old and crumbling, tucked away behind the grocery. It was where I had been taken by Gilda. Almost no one went there twice. It wasn’t a kind of place you returned to once you had been. Young moms wouldn’t necessarily know that, so it was easy to disguise the visit as ignorance. Older moms with older children wouldn’t necessarily care that it wasn’t the safest place for children to play. I had only been there twice myself, and each time, Gilda and I had been the only people there.
“Yes!” she said quickly. I tried not to make a judgement about how quickly. “I’ll meet you in the yard in about five minutes. Let me get the boys ready, and a few snacks packed.”
I went back to my own house to gather my own children. Children used to go to school, Granny had said, but that was only for boys now, and only for those families which could afford the expense. Everyone else attended the school of every day life, which involved cooking, cleaning, yard work, shopping, mending, and staying on the good side of whatever man governed your household. Simon would eventually go with work with Mark, learning his trade as a carpenter and architect, and that’s what Simon would do for a living for the rest of this life. There were no options for him, but just there were no options for Mira or me.
We walked in comfortable silence to the playground. Like always I never looked anyone in the eyes, and I moved out of the way for everyone man we encountered. Maddie awkwardly followed my example. She would learn, I told myself, and one day it would be second nature.
The playground was deserted just as I expected. Maddie took a look at the leaning jungle gym, and the rusted swing set, concern creeping across her forehead. She turned to her boys and said, “Just use the slide for now, and I’ll push you on the swing in a minute.” The four kids all went running off, mine unafraid to use the equipment which needed replacing. I watched them climb the rickety tower, the whole thing wobbling as they went. Maddie’s two did as she instructed, taking turns using the slide, the only thing in the whole play yard that looked safe.
I waited to say anything to her. Waiting the only power I had. Waiting and silence were my tools and my weapons. It kept me safe from revealing too much, and it forced others to speak first. Maddie was fidgeting with her hat, and the buttons of her blouse, and she hair, and the pleats of her skirt. Finally, I laid my hand on her shoulder to still her. She went slack under my touch.
“Emily.” My name was her whole sentence, all her worry, all her anxiety, wrapped up with my name as its bow. Our eyes met and as her lips quivered, I pressed my finger to my mouth, a sign to silence her.
“I know,” I said. It was all I needed to say. She bit her trembling lip but it still shook under her teeth. “Do you want to do something about it?” I asked. She frowned , but she didn’t ask any question. “Because I need someone to take my place.”
“Your place?” she echoed.
No going back, I reminded myself. Without Gilda and without me, the network would need someone new. “Writing letters,” I said. “Working to smuggle people out of Massachusetts.”
Maddie let out a tiny gasp, but she stymied in quickly, though her eyes remained wide. “How?” she exhaled.
I had hooked her, or else she was an incredible actress. “There’s a group leaving soon. The spots are all full.” I had to give me enough information without revealing anything specific. “My contact in the network is leaving. My work on this particular endeavor puts me at risk.” I paused, watching her horrified and yet hopeful expression. “Maddie, I might end up in the stocks.” I swallowed the fear that was running away with my heart rate. “Forever.”
She nodded vigorously, suddenly stone faced. “I understand,” she said, all hint of awe gone. She was as stoic as death.
I knew I had chosen well. “On Wednesday, I’ll take you to the drop spot. It will contain directions for you. Whatever you retrieve must be destroyed after it has been retained.” I tapped my forehead, indicating that she needed to memorize whatever was written. “Everyone uses code. You’ll have to learn.”
“Can you teach me?” she asked.
I didn’t have time. “Some,” I offered.
A squeal from Isaac echoed through the play yard. The boys has moved from the slide to the base of the wobbling jungle gym. Maddie took off across the grass, hollering, “No! No! Let’s do the swings now, boys!”
I watched her pushing her children on the swings, wondering how long it would be before they too could be smuggled out.
I’ve leaving on the next shipment. There are two placements remaining. If you need to get something to Africa, send it by airmail. There won’t be another opportunity until the guard changes in the old capital. Be on your best behavior.
I folded Gilda’s letter tightly and stashed it into my bra. I picked up my shopping bags from the ground at my feet and moved off down the gravel path that would past the cemetery to the street where a row of brick houses stood side by side with barely any yard between. I walked past the church, not looking at anyone, thinking about Gilda’s words. Cryptic for a reason. Dangerous and full of hope. Sacred.
She was going to Canada. That’s what we called Africa in the letters. She was being smuggled out, and there were two spots left with the smuggler. The pick up location would be the ruins of the US Post Office outside of Fulbright. It would happen in four days. It would be the last one of the year. If I stayed behind, she didn’t want me to end up in the stocks. I was so practiced at reading and deciphering Gilda’s messages that I hadn’t had to wonder about anything the letter contained.
Two spots left. I couldn’t go alone and leave the kids with Mark. I didn’t want them to grow up here, where they would have to learn to conform and repress. I couldn’t go with just one of them. How would I ever choose between them? And the thought of sending them alone without me made me shudder. What would await them, orphans, in Canada? And what would Mark do to me once he learned what had happened?
Assuming they made it to Canada at all. Not everyone did. There were quotas for how many refugees for political asylum they could take each year. Going west wasn’t an option. We didn’t have an open border with the Free State of New England, a territory composed of what used to be New York, New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. There wasn’t any point in going south either. Connecticut and Rhode Island had never fully recovered from the collapse of the United States. It was a lawless land riven with drugs, gangs, disease and despair. North was the only choice, into the territory that Canada had adsorbed. But it had to be done carefully. If you were caught, you would rot into the stocks.
Was it worth it though? If Mira and Simon made it out of here, wasn’t my life worth giving for that?
I continued up the street, towards the cul-de-sac where my story and half stone house sat. It looked older than it was. All of Fulbright was built when Massachusetts became its own nation, modeled after colonial America, carved out of the land that used to be a state park. It was intended as a refuge, but the militia had quickly seized it and made it part of the new regime.
I opened the gate to the yard where I had left Mira and Simon with my neighbor, Maddie, and her two boys, Isaac and Jacob. My children were on the swings, and her boys, significantly younger than mine at ages two and three, were chasing each other around the yard with sticks.
“Everyone doing okay?” I asked as I approached. I didn’t know Maddie well, but I trusted her to watch my twins for a the time it took me to do the shopping. We helped each other in this way often. She had been married to Tom, the man next door, four years ago, purchased on the bridal market. She had come from outside of Fulbright. It always seemed to me that she didn’t belong here.
“Everyone is great,” she said. “The little boys were in the sandbox for a while. Your two mostly were on the swings and the slide,” she said.
Simon came running up to me, his face sweaty and cheeks red from outside play. “Did you buy apples?” he asked.
“A few,” I said. “They didn’t have many today.” I handed him the shopping bags. “Take this inside with your sister and start putting it away for me.”
He took the bags without complaint, calling for Mira as he headed for the back door of the house. She jumped from the swing mid-arc, landing clumsily before she found her footing and jogged to house. They disappeared into the kitchen.
Maddie had crossed her arms as I was watching my twins. It was a stance that signaled how uncomfortable she was, either with me or with something she was hiding. I was cautiously curious. “Are you cold?” I asked.
She shook her head, not looking at me, watching her boys chase one another around my yard. “Well, I guess we should go,” she said.
I was disappointed, and it led me to be reckless. “Was there something on your mind?”
She slid her eyes to me. I studied her face, the way her eyes grew wide and unfocused, the subtle twitching of her brow, the slight pout of her lip. She grew a quick breath through her nose, holding it for too long. “Tom doesn’t like me,” she said.
I pretended to know what she was talking about. “Nobody likes being beat, Maddie, but it’s not something you can escape from. You just have to find the people who understand how hard it is, and endure.” Mark didn’t beat me. Plenty of men did beat their wives though.
“That’s not what I mean,” she whispered.
I leaned forward, and she realized that she was trapped. The fear grew in her eyes, her whole demeanor shifting to one of penitence. I didn’t want her penance. I wanted her honestly. I craved honesty in my life. There was too much dishonest harmony around me. It kept me alive, but it was suffocating. “What do you mean?” I asked.
I could see the clockwork inside her calculating the risk of lying versus telling the truth. “Tom doesn’t like me because…I’m a woman.”
It made sense. Tom, a bachelor until nearly age 40, buying a woman as a wife. He was hiding. I looked at her eyes more closely, wondering if she had seen her 20th birthday yet, wondering why he parents had agreed to sell her at such a young age to a man who didn’t live in the same community. Perhaps she was hiding too. I thought about the two placements, silently considering how I would tell Mark that the parents of the two boys next door disappeared and we had to adopt them. But would she leave her boys behind to be free? Why would she make a choice I was unwilling to make for myself?
“Don’t say anything else,” I said carefully, my tone a mix of reassurance and warning. “Not to me, not to anyone.” She nodded, swallowing her fear noisily. “You’ll be safer that way,” I said. I smiled at her and the tears that had threatened to spill from her eyes finally did.
She wiped her face with her hand, then called to her children. I waved to them happily as they exited my yard. I watched her go through the front door of her house before I went into my own. I thought about those two little boys, living with two closeted parents, wishing there were four placements with Gilda, and not just two.
The placements had to go to Mira and Simon, and I would have to live with the consequences.
I drop the letter to Gilda in the normal way. There is an old brick in the stone wall behind the post office that wiggles loose. I always fold the letter three times, tuck it to the right of the brick, then shove the brick back in place. I check the brick every few days. I mark my letters with a red line so that I know they are mine waiting to be delivered, just not picked up. Gilda marks hers with a blue line so that I know it came from her. It’s an easy system. We’ve never been caught.
Other women have been caught. They ended up in the stocks. Jenny Masterson, Laurie Headsworth, Abigail Bingham. Once a woman ends up in the stocks for being caught with letters, she never gets any new letters. We take her out of the network. It is too much of a risk.
The thing about letter writing is that you have to know the code names for everything. Once you learn them it’s never hard to figure out what the message is. Sometimes a new code name appears in the letters and you have to spend days or weeks deciphering. And sometimes you have to create a code name, putting enough details into the letter that your contact will know what you are passing on, but not putting so much detail that anyone not in the network can figure it out if they find the letter. It’s a fine balance.
Once the letter is behind the brick, I pick up my shopping bags and head towards the middle of town. I need a few groceries for supper and I need to pick up cough syrup. I hate spending money on cough syrup when hot tea sometimes will work just as well, but Mira has a nasty cough and she can’t sleep through the night. I adjust my scarf, pretending not to notice that Gilda is still in the stocks. The blood hasn’t been wiped from her head. Perhaps she really is dead this time.
The lines are always long at the grocery. They have to check your purchases against the list of rations you’re allowed. Massachusetts instituted rationing when the war first broke out, and all the states broke up into their own territories and nations. They’ve never gotten rid of the system of paper coupons, although they are no longer hand written by the city official. They print them now, on perforated paper, and they get delivered with the rest of the mail every week.
I stand there with my bag of potatoes and my bag of carrots, and my one onion, leafing through the coupons until I find the ones for fresh vegetables. The cough syrup is kept behind the desk. I’ll have to use one of my coupons for medicine as well to purchase a bottle. When It’s my turn at the register, the clerk takes my basket and my coupons, then rings up the order. Just as she is about to tell me the total I interrupt her by handing her the medicine coupon. “I need cough syrup,” I saw.
The clerk takes the coupon to the desk, where the manage is sitting on a stool, surveying the store. They have a short conversation, and the manager goes to the shelf behind him where all the medicines and razors are kept, pulling a bottle off the rack and handing it to the clerk. I watch her make her way back to the register with the cough syrup and the coupon. She stuff the coupon into her register drawer and bags the bottle with my other items. She types in a few numbers on her keypad and then turns to me.
“That’s $35,” she says.
“$35,” I repeat. I shake my head as I count out the bills. They look a lot like the old money I used as a kid. I wonder where this money is printed. I had heard that one of the mints (the one near DC, I think) was printing money for all the countries in the northeast and Atlantic coast now. I didn’t understand how one country could do that for all the other ones around it, but it didn’t matter too much, I guessed. I wondered if everyone was using the same money and we just didn’t know it.
I tucked the rest of the bills back into my wallet and took my purchases from the clerk. On the way home I glanced at the stocks, quickly, to see if Gilda was still there. Someone had set her free since I had come through. There was a new woman in her place. I wondered how long it would be before she had the courage to check for my letter behind the brick.
We don’t talk about the women in the stocks. Not openly on the streets. Not openly in our homes. Not openly in the most intimate of settings with our spouses. It’s never safe to talk about them, and how they got there, because if we ever discuss, it could be seen as questioning. We can trust no one. The women who ended up in the stocks made that mistake. So we say nothing, not to each other, not ourselves. We simply avert our eyes as we pass, and move on with our daily business.
Every child learns this at a young age. I had to teach my own children not to ask long before I was ready to have “the talk.” Granny used to tell me that before the laws all changed, “the talk” was explaining sex to kids who were getting close to the age where they would want to start having it. Now, “the talk” was much simpler. Don’t ever ask about the women in the stocks. They are there because they deserve it. Inevitably, this would lead to more questions- why Mommy? What did they do? The answer is like poison inside me, but I couldn’t tell the children the truth without risking ending up in the stocks myself. So I gave the standard, government approved answer, “They didn’t follow the rules.”
I had twins, a boy and a girl; although I had a suspicion that maybe I actually had two girls, and that one of them just happened to have a different physical body than my other one. That used to be legal. Granny said they used to call it Trans. Her sibling, Matilda, had been that way. I remember Untie Mat (that’s what we always called them, back when we still could), and sometimes it breaks my heart. Untie Mat went into the stocks too. But that was a long time ago. The tears were all dried out, just like my ability to feel anything.
We didn’t live in one of those big cities, like New York or Boston. No, we lived in a small town in western Massachusetts that was perfect for a movie set, with a main drag that was only about four blocks long. Anybody could walk anywhere, and that was a good thing now, because gasoline had become so expensive that only the super rich could afford to have a car. Some of our neighbors had a horse or a mule, but they were expensive too. For most of us in Fulbright, we walked. There was a big town square, with a park and a courthouse and a fountain, and it was always full of people walking here and there.
That’s where the women in the stocks were. Right where everyone could see them.
“Mommy,” my daughter Mira said, tugging on my arm. That’s all she had to say. I followed her eyes to the newly imprisoned woman. I had known her all my life. Her name was Gilda Hughes, and she was married to one of the most rotten, abusive men in Fulbright. He was always accusing her of infidelity, or disloyalty, or disobedience, or a host of other invented vices. Everyone knew that Gilda wasn’t any of the things Victor said she was. But it didn’t matter. Whatever men said about you was true, and into the stocks you went. Gilda’s face was swollen with a black bruise on one side, her eye squeezed shut from the trauma. Her hair still had blood in it from where she’d been struck on the head. If she hadn’t been moaning, I would have been afraid that she was dead. Someone walking by took a moment to offer her a drink of water (we weren’t allowed to do that; a government man came by around noon every day to do that on behalf of the city). I didn’t get a good look at who the kind stranger was. I wondered if it was someone who was involved in the letter writing.
The letter writing was the only way that information we could trust got to us. In the wake of the complete collapse of the federal government thirty years ago, each state became it’s own sovereign territory. The political battles had turned to actual battles. That’s when Massachusetts set up it’s own standing army. I’m fuzzy on the details of what happened after that. I think everyone who was alive then is too, and that’s why we don’t have a true record of events. All I know is sometime after the standing army was established, it took control of everything, turning Massachusetts into a police state. That’s when they brought in Cotton Smith, and set him up as the puppet dictator. Cotton Smith couldn’t have possibly been his real name; it was supposed to make people think about the old Puritan colonies, and religious figures like Cotton Mather. He wound the clocks all the way back to the 17th century and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to stop him by the time he took power.
He wasn’t even a good governor, or so I’ve been told. He was a bafoon who had a lot of connections and money with absolutely no walking around sense. But you can’t argue with the rich when thy decide to do something. And for some reason, they wanted Cotton Smith, backed by the Army of Massachusetts. We all had to either get out, or fall in line.
Untie Mat and Aunt Jill made a plan to get out, but they never made it. They took Untie Mat in the middle of the night, raiding the house while they slept. Mat went into the stocks. Jill was shot trying to fight off the soldiers who stormed the house.
Granny told me that story through a letter before she died. She wrote it all down, and stuffed it under my mattress. When she was dying, she whispered in my ear that I should check there for her last gift. That letter had bits of the history she had lived through, and it passed on the information for her one contact within the letter writers: Gilda Hughes.
I looked longingly at Gilda, hoping that she’d get out of the stocks in a day or two like usual. I did not want to have to go hunting for another letter that contained her contact, but I would if I had to.
“Let’s go,” I told Mira, as I ushered her away from the square.
I knew the moment that King Eadwig died. I woke in the night with a sigh escaping me, as my heart felt faint. I felt him close his eyes just as mine opened. There was no one wail for him. Not yet.
“Osburga,” I whispered. She stirred next to me. “Osburga, he’s dead.”
She didn’t respond. I slipped from beneath the blanket, stirred the fire, set a few more logs in the hearth, and pulled my shawl around my shoulders. The sight had given me the knowledge of now. The problem was not that I could not see things present. The problem was that I was too afraid to see some things at all.
I watched the fire, trying to find my way back to King Eadwig. The sight showed me him easily, now that I had seen him once. His body was still warm. I pondered how long it would be before anyone knew. A servant had recently replenished the fire. It was crackling wonderfully while his body cooled in the bed. I shivered, watching his cheeks grow gray, his lips ashen. I listened, but his body made no sound. There was no life in the room at all.
But then I heard a faint whisper. The sight showed me a woman, a nun, praying. She was on her knees beside her bed, her habit slipping back, showing her brown hair. I listened until the words she prayed filled me.
“May his days be few; may another seize his position. May his children be orphans and his wife a widow.”
An odd prayer. A curse.
Osburga stirred in the bed and I startled at the noise. The sight left me.
“Did you find her?” Osburga asked.
My gaze flew to where my teacher was, now sitting up in the bed, the blank piled in her lap. “You did know where she was.” It was almost an accusation.
She shook her head. “I knew nothing,” she said, “except that you would find her, hunched over the fire like that.”
I stood, surprise moving through me, propelling me towards the bed. “You can see the future?”
She laughed. “Sometimes,” she said. “Only when I really care to know.”
This puzzled me, and I cocked my head the way a curious dog would. “Why did you care to know where my mother was?” I asked.
Osburga’s long hair was loose around her shoulders. She brushed with her fingers, gathering it into a braid. “It is good to know who the wise women are,” she said simply.
The sight came back to me, and I saw my mother end her prayer. She pulled the habit higher, covering her hair again. She smiled to herself, a coy smile, before she rose from her knees and slipped back into the bed. I felt her pleasure. The curse had worked.
A distant scream echoed through my mind. The sight took me back to King Eadwig, who was cold now, and stiffening. The maid standing over him was yelling, and soon the room was filled with men with lanterns, crowding around him, afraid to touch him, afraid of death.
“It was her,” I realized. “That’s why he was sick.”
Osburga raised her eyebrow. “Perhaps,” she said.
I swallowed down the fear that felt like a frog climbing my throat. “Do you think, if I go to the nunnery, she’ll remember me?”
Osburga stared at me blankly, for long enough that I almost looked away. “You are a wise woman now, little witch,” she said. “She will recognize you.”
Somewhere, far away, I heard a woman whisper my name. I closed my eyes. I’m coming, mother.
I lived with Osburga until the season started to turn, and the cold set in, the mornings frosty and the evenings holding a chill that crept into my bones. I had seen my father once, his eyes understanding, even if he was sad. He knew he couldn’t protect me. Only another woman like me had a chance of doing that.
Osburga didn’t teach me anything about the sight. We gathered herbs, and dug roots and chopped ingredients for soups and potions, and sometimes a man would show up and she would send me out of the cottage for a few hours. She slept soundly at night, thought I would wake at the faintest scratch in the forest. She said I would get used to it. As the autumn stretched on, I wondered if she was right about that like she was right about nearly everything else.
“You’re too careful,” she said one wintery morning, when not even the fire could warm me. She was sipping mead from her mug, and gnawing a hunk of bread, wrapped in a huge blanket as she sat at the table. I was crouched near the hearth, warming my hands, watching the flames, listening to the fire crackle. It reminded me of the snap of the horse’s leg.
“Don’t want to get burned,” I said over my shoulder.
“I wasn’t talking about the fire,” Osburga said.
I had known that, but I was afraid of her pushing me. This was not the first time that she had commented on my timidity. “How do I conquer the fear?” I asked, wanting more. The taste of something greater was within reach, but I couldn’t quite open myself to it. It had killed my gran, and driven my mother away. Why did I want it?
“You don’t conquer the fear, little witch,” she said. The term was endearing now, after months of it rolling off her tongue. “You accept the fear, and go forth in spite of it.”
“Accept the fear,” I echoed. My hands and face were finally warm. I stood and turned by backside to the hearth. I met her gaze as I tugged my shawl tighter around me. Osburga sipped from her mug without taking her eyes from me. I felt my throat tighten, and my mouth go nearly dry as I thought about all that I had seen of my mother’s journey from home. I had learned how to see her, to follow her path from our village to the forest, and from the forest to the open wild lands, and to a churchyard where she had met a nun, and then into a nunnery. The sight had taken me with her across these years. I could see where she had been, but I still did not know where she was.
“Perhaps she is still in the convent,” I said. Osburga and I had talked about this often. She knew that it was the last thing I could see about my mother. She went with the sister into the convent. She did not wear a habit when she went to prayer. That was all that I knew. “Maybe that’s why I can’t see her. I can’t see things that are, only things that were.”
Osburga was still studying me. She took another sip from her mug. The fire was roasting my rear, so I took a step towards her. She put the mug down on the table, and took a bite of the bread in her other hand. Saying nothing as I reasoned out a problem was Osburga’s preferred method of instruction. She said nothing, so I knew I had gotten it wrong.
“Accept the fear, ” I said again. Osburga continued chewing slowly. I sighed and crossed the room to the table, sitting opposite her. She tore off a hunk of the bread and passed it to me. I bit into it and methodically chewed along with her.
“Did you know that King Eadwig is ill?” she asked me.
A test. Osburga could see what was as easily as she could see what had been. She wanted me to accept the fear to see for myself.
A shiver ran over me, one that wasn’t related to the chill in the house. It was the kind of chill that accompanied a fever. Fear shook me. A fever could kill. I swallowed the lump in my throat, waiting for what the sight would show me. I closed by eyes, slowed my breathing, and felt the fear in my belly like a stone. I focused on it, drifting down to meet it. I opened to it, and then suddenly, I saw him. King Eadwig was burning with fever, in a grand bed, nearly out of his mind with pain. There were men standing around the bed, observing, powerless to do anything for him but offer beer and wine. He was sweating, and his skin was pale, like death had already touched him. I pressed a hand to my face, feeling the fever in my own cheek.
“He’s dying,” I croaked, my throat tight with fear. It was not to be spoken. The King was anointed by God. To speak of his death was to speak a curse.
I opened my eyes, peeling myself away from the vision that the sight had given me. Osburga was smiling at me. “Do you think they will accuse a woman of bewitching him?” she asked.
I knew nothing about King Eadwig, except that Cynewulf was his ealdorman, and that Cynewulf had ruined my mother’s life. “If there is a woman near enough to him that has offended the wrong man, I suppose they will.”
This seemed to please Osburga. She finished eating her bread and picked up the mead mug again. She took another drink, her eyes shifting from the golden liquid to me. The blanket she wore tumbled off her shoulder, and she tugged it up around herself again with her free hand. I shivered, wishing I had stayed near the fire. I munched the part of the loaf she had handed me and waited for whatever it was that she was turning over in her thoughts to escape from her mouth.
“Are you afraid to learn the truth about your mother?” she asked.
It made me wonder if she had known all this time, and not told me. I pushed away the thought. You could go looking for an answer, surely, but that didn’t mean that the sight would give you one. “I am afraid that when I find her, she will be dead.”
Osburga nodded. “Use that fear,” she said. She finished the mead and placed the empty mug on the table between us. I looked into the empty vessel, trying not to imagine it as a metaphor for what I would see when I finally found my mother.
Osburga wasted no time with me. As soon as the offer to teach me bewitching left her lips, a powerful wind blew through my spirit. I gasped at its bite, the chill of it snaking along my limbs. But I held Osburga’s eyes until it passed. She seemed pleased with my tolerance and my stoicism. “Good,” she said. “You can feel the power and already have a respect for it.” She paused, tilting her head as she considered me more thoroughly. Her gaze was a test, though I didn’t understand what she was testing. My spirit was thrilled by her gaze, though I did not understand why. She smiled at me broadly. “And you have respect for yourself as well,” she said.
She rose from her place at the table paced to her door. She flung open the door to the outside air. “Come,” she said without looking at me before she disappeared outside.
I followed. There was no other choice.
We went on deep trails through the forest, going deeper and deeper until I had lost all sense of direction. Osburga walked two paces ahead. I imagined how we looked from afar- women determinedly marching through the woods, holding up their skirts to avoid snags and snares in the fabric as we passed by thorn and bur and branch. Two women, headed somewhere no one but wise women would go. We moved along without speaking, until finally Osburga came to halt ahead of me.
We were standing at the top of a small hill, and at the bottom of the hill ran a stream. Rocks littered the path down the hill and the stream bed. My eyes followed the flow of the water to an entrance to a cave. My heart leapt to my throat. “Are we going in there?” I asked, the dread settling in my bones.
“In the cave?” Osburga laughed. “No. No one can go into that cave.” She laughed to herself. “We’re going into the water.” Her laughter had a twinkling quality, like starlight. She moved down the hill and I followed her to the stream, crunching last year’s leaves underfoot. I followed her right up to the bank of the stream. I didn’t know how she deftly avoided slipping on the mossy stones. She was so light on her toes, while I could barely find my balance.
The stream pooled at the mouth of the cave before it ran underground. The pool was deeper than it looked from at the top of the hill. I peered into the depth, feeling the swirling power in the water.
“What do you see?” she asked.
I focused my eyes on the rocks at the bottom of the pool, which changed colors and shape as I stared. My vision swam with things of the past as I watched the rocks morph into the face of my mother, and the horse that carried Ealdred, that threw him to the ground when he tripped, the face of Cynewulf, leering in the dark of the woods. And there was my gran too, whom I had never met, hanging in the tree, as my mother watched her house burn. By grandad took her by the hand and led her away, swords pointed at their backs as they left the only home they’d ever know. I could see a long line of women, all the way back through the ages, each one’s face rise to the surface as the pool as they looked me in the eyes, smiling with magic and guile. No, stop it. I pleaded with them to go away, but I could not more stop the sight than I could stop my breath.
Osburga touched my shoulder, and the visions broke. I gasped, tears filling my eyes. I gulped in air as if I had been drowning. “I can only see into the past,” I cried, tears streaming down my hot cheeks. The stones at the bottom of the pool were just stones again. I wiped the tears from my face with the back of my hand. “I can’t see anything about now, or about the future.”
“Oh, it takes a great power to see the future, little witch,” Osburga said.
I whirled on her, feeling hot with anger at her words. “Goda said you could help me. But you’ve only shown me what I’ve seen before.”
Osburga crinkled her nose at me, as if I smelled like something she didn’t want in her house. “I’ve shown you nothing, Eadgyth.”
I calmed, her flat pronouncement of the truth registering as a indisputable fact. My anger cooled and I bowed my head. I did not want to meet her eyes. The wind rustled the leaves overhead, and for a moment, I thought I heard a call on the wind. It sounded almost like my name, but I pushed away the ridiculous thought before it could take root.
“Eadgyth,” Osburga said tenderly. She took my face in her hands, turning my eyes upward along with my chin. “To find your mother, you must first find yourself.”
My head felt as if I had drunk too much mead at the Easter feast. I pushed away the thoughts that threatened to creep across me. You’re weak. You’re not worthy of the power. You will never see anything of value. All lies. Told by the great liar, whom the priests called the Devil. But they called my mother and my gran of the Devil too. Why should I believe that the Devil didn’t speak to me as well?
Osburga frowned. It was as if she sense the thought that intruded into my skull. “You are thinking that this is not a gift?” she asked. “That it is too hard?”
I realized then that she didn’t know my thoughts; she had only guessed, probably based on what she had experienced when she had awakened to the powers she had. “They will call me names. They will cast me away, as they did my mother. They might hang me in a tree, as they did to my gran.”
Osburga dropped her hands from my face, only to take up stroking my hair. “Ah, they might, little witch,” she said. “Better then, that you stay with me.”
And the sight took me at her words. I saw the friendship blossom between us, and how she felt already like a replacement for the mother I had lost. I reached for her, wrapping my arms around her waist, and falling into her. She tucked my head against her shoulder, shushing sweetly as I let silent tears flow.
“I will help you,” Osburga whispered. “You will need protection from those who seek to do you harm.”
I shut out the image of the burning house, and the screaming horse that would not leave me. I looked for my mother among the images, but she was nowhere to be seen.
I peered through the bracken, staring at the smoke coming from the little cottage just deep enough into the woods that you couldn’t see it from the clearing. The mossy, rich smell of earth and wet leaves filled my nostrils as I crouched behind the fallen tree, mustering the courage to creep forward. I knew the woman inside the house wasn’t dangerous. My cousin had seen to her plenty of times. Goda came for love potions but I had come for something harder to find: answers.
My legs were cramped from crouching for so long, and the damp from the leaves was starting to take to the hem of my skirts. I rose unsteadily, clenching and unclenching my fist a few times to still my nerves. Then, I hopped over the fallen tree, and crunched my way through the underbrush to the front door of the house. Before I could talk myself out of it, I knocked softly three times. Goda said that Osburga, the wise woman, would answer from within before she opened the door. You had to tell her what you wanted first. If she didn’t like your reason for coming, she wouldn’t let you inside.
“Who comes and why?” Osburga called out from inside the cottage. I could hear the faint sound of movement towards the door. I closed my eyes, imagining her on the other side of the wooden slats between us, pressing her ear to the door just as I was.
“It’s Eadgyth,” I said shakily, “and I want to know what happened to my mother.”
The door creaked open slowly, and the woman who stood in the doorway was not as I had imagined from Goda’s description of her. She was tall, and she looked much younger than I had thought she would. Her hair was a rich brown that hung in waves to her waist. She was wearing a simple brown dress and an apron. Her eyes were kind, but there was also wariness there. I could feel the hurts she carried, for just a moment, a flash of the sight that had me seek her, to ask for her help in seeking out my mother. I shut my eyes against the vision that was taking me- a woman hanging in a tree, and a fire that consumed the place where she had lived, a horse screaming in pain, and a man who walked with a limp. I gasped at the clarity of it, but shook it away from me as I searched the eyes of Osburga, waiting for her to invite me in.
“What do you need me for if you have the sight like that, little witch?” she asked.
The dreaded word on her tongue stilled my heart. It was one of the only things I remembered of my mother. Witch. That’s what my father said she was. That’s all she was remembered for. “Please,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I don’t know how to control it, and I know my mother would, but I don’t know where she is.”
Osburga opened the door wider, and stepped out of the door frame, to allow me room to pass. “You don’t control the sight. You learn how to let it not control you.”
I hesitated at the threshold, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “Can you teach me?” I asked, tentative as a mouse, my voice barely more than a whisper. As if in response, the wind rushed through the trees around us, rustling the leaves in an eerie way that made my skin crawl. My mouth went dry, as the feeling of power moved through me. I shut my eyes again, stilling it, willing it away.
When I opened my eyes, Osburga was still standing before me, her hand resting on the door as if she had half a mind to close it on me. We stared at one another for a time before she finally asked, “Well, are you coming in, or not?”
I dipped my head in a bow to her, and ducked through the doorway into the dim cottage. She had a fire going in the hearth. Herbs were drying, hung from the ceiling along the walls. She had a stack of books, which astounded me. Only the monks had books. She smiled at me, as if she knew what I was thinking. She gestured to the table, shoved against the wall, next to a bed that looked too big, too grand, for a single woman alone in the woods. She had fabric over the windows, rather than shutters. I wondered how she kept out the chill.
I sat, and Osburga joined me. “Now, little witch,” she said. “Tell me why you’ve come.”
“I told you. I need help finding my mother…”
She interrupted. “You also said you want to learn how to control the sight.” She raised at eyebrow at me.
I swallowed hard as my hands began to sweat. This was a test. I held her eyes as she held mine. There was a spark of amusement there. She laughed after a moment, a short, pleasant sound that reminded me of an owl. I wondered what she would look like as an owl. A wise one, haunting the woods. It seemed fitting.
“Eadgyth,” she said slowly, as if she was savoring the sound and the feel of my name in her mouth, “you are a strange little witch.”
“I’m not a witch,” I protested. I thought I did not sound confident at all. “At least, I don’t want to be a witch.”
“Neither did I. But we don’t get to choose these things, do we?” Osburga reached for my hand, and she stroked my palm with her finger. She hands were weathered, the nails caked with earth. Her touch was light and soft. A smell of honeysuckle filled the air. I sighed with pleasure. Osburga smiled back at me, lovingly, like a proud mother. Like I had done something wonderful, though I wasn’t even sure I had done anything at all.
“How long have you had the powers?” she asked. She withdrew her touch from me, and the honeysuckles faded along with the pleasure.
Fear replaced it, a tightening across my chest and in my throat that threatened to have me squeaking out answers to her again. “It awakened in me before my mother disappeared… I was four, maybe five.”
Osburga nodded. She looked thoughtful, eyeing me as if to determine how old I was now. Would she know my age as she knew my name? Her eyes wandered to the hanging herbs. “Your mother was Wulfrun,” she said, her tone inquisitive.
“You knew her?” I asked.
“I know of her,” Osburga said. “They say she cursed the son of King Eadwig’s favorite ealdormen.”
I nodded, confirming the story that had propagated like gnats. “That is what is said of her.”
Osburga wrapped her knuckles across the table three times. “Tell me what really happened, little witch,” she said.
I wished she would stop calling me that, but as the sight took me, I knew I couldn’t argue. “Lord Cynewulf wanted her,” I said. The vision of my mother with Cynewulf was shadowy, the darkness of the forest at night, obscuring what had happened. I had seen this many times before, and the memory of it, though not entirely mine, lived inside me. I let the sight take me further into the dream. “She was gathering in the dark… something for her medicines. She did it at night so no one would see. Except he was there that night. And his son was there too.” I watched as Cynewulf and his son, Ealdred, confronted her, tried to persuade her, offered to pay her. She refused, and she had run from them to save herself from their violence. I felt the sweat begin to soak through the armpits of my shift as my heart raced. My mouth felt dry as a old bark.
Osburga touched my hand. I gasped in surprise and the sight left me. She leaned her face towards me, her eyes searching for something within, some kindred flame to which she was drawn. I could feel it too, our shared nature, as if we had been wrapped together in the same package once. There was a similar color to her soul, and I could smell on her the power that took hold of me sometimes. “I know Cynewulf, ” she said, her words like iron. “And his son would have been just like him, except for that fall from his horse.”
The horse had tripped over a stone. I heard the horse scream while I was darning socks. But the horse was not near at all. I saw my mother react to it too, dropping her knitting. I shook with fear, wondering, later, as I watched Cynewulf’s men carry Ealdred into the village on a litter, how I had heard it happen. Ealdred’s leg was twisted, he was screaming in pain. His cry was like the scream of his horse. Even then, the sight had me, even as young as I was. I had seen the horse go down, saw Ealdred fly from the saddle. The snap of his leg in the vision sent a shiver through me. His howling woke the dead. My mother had heard it just as I had heard it. I swallowed down the taste of his marrow that filled my mouth as I remembered. “They blamed by mother. Said that she had bewitched him.”
“Did she?” Osburga asked, her eyes now sparkling with mischief.
“Of course she didn’t,” I said, but the protest was weak, and grew weaker as I watched Osburga’s smile grow. “What do you know?” I asked.
“I know that if you are accused of bewitching, it usually means you have the power to do it.”
A shiver ran over me, as hair of my arms stood on end. “And… how would I know if I have the power to do it?” The question slid from me before I knew I was asking it.
The Quick and the Dead 