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25-Feb-08
I am Mary
I am a witch. Or so some would call me. ‘Spawn of the Devil’, ‘Witch child’, they hiss in the street, although I know neither father or mother. I know only my grandmother. She brought me up from a baby. If she knew who my parents are, she has not told me.
‘Daughter of the Erl King and the Elfen Queen, that’s who you are.’
We live in a small cottage on the very edge of the forest, Grandmother, me and her cat and my rabbit. Lived. Live there no more.
Men came and dragged her away. Men in black coats and hats as tall as steeples. They skewered the cat on a pike, they smashed the rabbit’s skull by hitting him against the wall. They said that these were not God’s creatures but familiars, the Devil himself in disguise. They threw the mess of fur and flesh on to the midden and threatened to do the same to me, to her, if she did not confess her sins to them.
They took her away then.
She was locked in the keep for more than a week. First they ‘walked’ her, marching her up and down, up and down between them, for a day and a night until she could no longer hobble, her feet all bloody and swollen. She would not confess. So they set about to prove she was a witch. They called a woman, a Witch Pricker, who stabbed her all over with long pins, probing for the spot that was numb, where no blood ran, the place where the familiars fed. The men watched as the woman did this and my grandmother was forced to stand before their gloating eyes, a naked old lady, deprived of modesty, dignity, the blood streaming down her withered body, and still she would not confess.
They decided to float her. They had plenty of evidence against her, you see. Plenty. All week folk had been coming to them with accusations. How she had overlooked them, bringing sickness to their livestock and families; how she had used magic, sticking pins in wax figures to bring on affliction; how she transformed herself and roamed the country for miles around as a great hare, how she did this by the use of ointment made from melted corpse fat. They questioned me. Demanding, ‘Is this so?’ She slept in the bed next to me every night. How do I know where she went when sleep took her?
It was all lies. Nonsense and lies.
These people accusing her, they were our friends, our neighbours. They had gone to her, pleading with her for help with beasts and children, sick or injured, a wife nearing her time. For she had the skill, in herbs, potions, in her hands, but the power came from in her, not from the Devil. The people trusted her, or they had until now, they had wanted her presence. Birth or death, my grandmother was asked to be there to assist in the passage from one world to the next.
They were all there for the swimming, standing both sides of the river, lining the bridge, staring down at the place, a wide pool where the water shows black and deep. The men in tall hats dragged my grandmother from the stinking hole where they had been keeping her.
they cross bound her, tying her right toe to her left thumb, and vice versa, making sure the cords were thin and taut. Then they threw her in.
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