The Devil in Ellwangen, 1608-1618
I suppose I should begin with my birth, ordinary though it was. My mother was busy toiling in my father’s tannery when the first of her labor pangs came over her. A stubborn, practical sort of woman, she kept right on working until she could no longer stand for the pain.
My father went to fetch the midwife, but she was two towns over at the time, tending to farmer Ehrlich’s mare. So, the horse had the midwife, and I had only my mother’s cries and the fulsome scent of tannins to guide me into the world.
Those first years were relatively peaceful, or so I gather. I have little memory of them. The town we lived in, Ellwangen an der Jagst, was an unassuming small place, much like any little town you might find on the border of Swabia and Franconia, with its tradespeople and taverns, its chapter house and church, its storehouses and market square, surrounded by rolling grain fields and forests of feathered spruce trees. The river Jagst, which had its source nearby, was a reasonable stream, good for fishing and for turning the waterwheels, but nothing so boastful as the Rhine or the Danube or the Elbe.
Like the lands around it, Ellwangen is part of that wide territory we call the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But in those days, we gave little thought to the Emperor in faraway Prague or Vienna. The German Nation is not one country but thousands, each with its own prince, duke, or bishop to rule over it. In Ellwangen, which had been a monastery town in days past, it was the Prince-Provost of the chapter house who enforced the laws and took the tax.
My parents were Godly folk and well-respected in the town. My father prayed every morning and night and taught me to do the same. I’d sit on his lap while he guided my small fingers over his amber rosary beads.
He always dealt honestly with his customers. A tanner by trade, he dabbled in leatherwork, and he was happiest with a mallet and stamp in his hand. If he had a fault, it was that he never stopped believing that the world was just and would one day repay him for his suffering according to his virtue.
My mother was the more forceful of the two by nature. What could not be said directly ought not be said at all, in her view, and she rarely hesitated to speak what was on her mind.
Like many folk, my mother was a fervent believer in the prophetic power of dreams. From a young age, she’d make a record of what she dreamt each night and study the imagery for portents. Over time, she became known for her skill and wisdom in the interpretation of these dreams, so that the people of Ellwangen came to her often, bringing the best of larder and loom in hopes of receiving a good sign.
I’ve long debated with myself whether her dreams contained any real power, or whether it was only my mother’s cleverness, her talent for reading people’s feelings and desires, and her prodigious imagination at work.
I can recall one dream in particular. In it, she saw crows circling a house. Five times, they circled, but they left when white smoke started to rise from the chimney in puffs. She was sure it was a portent.
That same month, all five of Mrs. Krause’s children fell ill with smallpox. My mother, remembering the white smoke from her dream, told the woman to burn the green branches of saplings in her hearth, and soon all five children recovered. For a year after that, Mrs. Krause came by each week, bringing my mother a loaf of bread and a bottle of goat’s milk in gratitude.
I remember my mother now in glimpses only, framed in the doorway of our house while hunched over her sewing. She looks up, smiling and calling me by name, but the note in her voice is false: there’s a tremor that betrays her attempt at joy. I was too young then to understand such sadness, but I felt it.
Now, this memory appears to me as the portrait of a woman ensnared. The threads that fix her in place are so diaphanous, you’d be forgiven for missing them. I can see them, though; they reach out to wind themselves around me, too, cocooning me for weeks at a time in deep and unrelenting melancholy.
After my mother’s death, my father was always quick to insist that she’d loved me. Night after night, he’d repeat it, as if repetition could make the words true. I want to believe it. When I first held my own daughter in my arms, I felt as if my very soul had been transposed into that fragile being. But I’ve also seen children enough left in ditches, in shallow graves, or in the hollows of trees, sometimes by choice but more often by necessity, to know that the relationship between mother and child rarely follows a straight path.
My mother did not abandon me, at least—not exactly.
Here is what happened: when I was not yet four years on this earth, old Barbara Rüfin—past seventy and her teeth long rotted out—attended Easter Mass, and when the time came to put Christ’s body in her mouth, she found he’d gone stale. The Lord Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, proved to be too tough for her tender gums to chew. So, she spat him into her cupped and wrinkled palm, thus profaning the host and making plain to all that she was a witch.
At the time, there wasn’t a soul who would dispute the charge. Even my mother believed it. She’d had a dream years before, you see, in which she saw the old woman, or someone very like her, lay a plague on farmer Holhansen’s herd. In the end, Mrs. Rüfin’s son and daughter-in-law both testified against her, and she was found to bear the devil’s mark.
That might have been the end of it, but this wasn’t the first time a witch had been found in Ellwangen, and in the years between, the courts had taken the lessons of the past to heart. For the sake of the town, for the sake of the mortal souls of everyone involved, they applied the full and dreadful power of the law to ensure that when all was settled, not a witch would be left alive to poison us with their diabolical corruption.
They brought in an expert, a man by the name of Gruber, who’d successfully drawn confessions out of countless witches in Obermarchtal just a few years earlier. His method was to suspend the accused by the arms and tie weights around their ankles until their shoulders pulled away from their sockets.
Under Gruber’s careful hand, the old woman, once so sure of her own innocence, soon saw the error of her ways. Her memory, once empty, now recalled her sins in vivid detail, precisely as her interrogators described them to her.
In addition to hexing Holhansen’s cows, Mrs. Rüfin confessed to breaking into St. Wolfgang’s cemetery in the dead of night with her coven of witches. There, she said, they unearthed the body of a recently deceased child for use in their sacrament and rendered the fat from his bones for their salves. One by one she gave over the names of her accomplices, women who’d joined her in the unholy rite.
That first year some hundred people were arrested and sentenced to the pyre for witchcraft, including Mrs. Rüfin, although the Prince-Provost took mercy on her and ordered her head separated from her shoulders before the burning.
You might think that would have been enough: a hundred charred bodies, tossed in a pit, their property confiscated by the town (there’s always been good profit in witch-hunting), but the devil’s hold on Ellwangen was strong, his influence present in every sideways glance or whispered word. You could hardly kick a stone in those days without hitting a witch.
I was six or seven the first time I remember my father pleading with my mother to let him pack up and take her—us—away. But my mother was a wall. In the first place, she insisted, her dreams were harmless. Countless holy men and women in the Bible had both dreamed and interpreted dreams, and who would dare accuse the likes of Abraham or Daniel or Joseph, husband to Mary, of witchcraft? In the second place, it was no easy thing to pack up and find work elsewhere: would my father have us become vagrant wanderers, homeless, townless? And finally, she said, it wasn’t yet her time.
Year after year, they reenacted the old argument, but the conclusion was always the same: my mother embracing my father and telling him, “It’s not time.” I don’t know if he ever asked her, time for what?
Year after year, the population of the town grew smaller, and both my mother’s and father’s faces grew haggard and wan from swallowing so much grief. The reek of charred flesh hung perpetually in the air, and even in the quiet months, when there was hardly a burning or an accusation, you still smelled it, out of habit. Women became fewer on the streets, and the young men were forced to go elsewhere to find wives. A thriving town of more than twelve hundred shrank to two-thirds that number. On lane after lane, houses sat empty; there was no one left to live in them.
The living tried their best to forget the dead, but the dead always had the last word. The Prince-Provost insisted that it was all necessary to save the town from damnation. But no matter how many witches the town destroyed, still there was no end to disease and misfortune, to the curse the devil had laid on Ellwangen.
It was the summer of 1618, my tenth year, when the devil finally came to our door. It had been a hot, dry spring, and lightning storms had already set several fields ablaze between Ellwangen and Rindelbach.
My best friends at that time were the twins, children of one of the secretaries who worked for the court, taking down confessions. The older by two minutes, Albrecht, was a quiet, thoughtful boy who had not spoken a word in the first three years of his life. Everyone had been convinced he was an idiot, until the day his tongue finally loosened and all at once he started speaking complete, faultless sentences. His sister Anne spent their early years chattering enough for the two of them, and even after he’d begun talking, she was the loudest of the three of us and, therefore, in charge.
My mother wanted me home that day, helping with the washing, but Anne had taken the idea in her head to explore an abandoned barn outside the city, so I asked my father to let me go, and he did. You’re only a child for a season, he told my mother.
So the twins and I set out early that June morning, cutting through the tall grass that sprang up and threatened to consume the road into town. Fewer and fewer wagons traversed it in those days.
The heat of the day sticks in my mind. We were not halfway across the field that separated the town from the river when our clothes began to cling to our skin. When we finally reached the water, Albrecht and I had forgotten our mission. We stripped and ran into the shallows, splashing and laughing, while Anne looked on, disapproving.
“You two are such children,” she chided, clicking her tongue.
“And what are you?” I shouted back, laughing and swallowing a mouthful of river water as Albrecht slapped the surface and sent it spraying into my face. I lunged at him, pulling him beneath the gentle current, but he shook free.
Anne stared at us from the bank. “Are you finished?”
“My sister was never a child,” her brother explained, wiping the liquid from his eyes. “The elves took her at our birth and brought her back grown.”
“Liar,” Anne snapped back.
“Doppelgänger,” Albrecht teased, splashing water at her ankles.
Anne raced down the muddy bank toward her brother and plunged into the water without bothering to undress.
I don’t know how long we played. Minutes, hours—time is cheap when you’re young. I only know that my sides ached from laughing, and we might have forgotten the barn entirely, but for the clouds.
Never in my life have I seen a bright day turn black so fast or felt such a chill as when the wind swept across the river and touched my bare, wet skin: fingertips on my spine. We scrambled up the muddy bank, seeking hand- and footholds among the rocks and roots, and hurried to dress ahead of the coming rain. Anne ran ahead, and I followed close behind, with Albrecht in the rear, struggling to pull on his boots. Eventually, he gave up and chased after us, barefoot.
We’d just reached the edge of the field where the old barn stood when the sky burst open in front of us: a white-hot flash, blinding, accompanied by a sound so terrible I didn’t so much hear it as I felt it rip through my body. And after: darkness, silence, and the peculiar sulfuric scent of approaching storm.
When I could see again, all three of us had lost our footing and were lying on the ground. Albrecht was rolled on his side, curled up like a bug, hands over his ears. But Anne was looking straight ahead, mouth agape, at the field in front of her.
Once, it had grown wheat and rye, but the last two seasons it had lain fallow with no one to plant it. In the official records, it belonged to the town now, having been confiscated when the farmer that worked it was arrested for his sins against God and humanity, but farms are worthless without hands to plough and plant and harvest. So it was overrun with tufts of wild grass and dandelions. They’d ignited the instant the lightning struck, and Anne and I stared, half-dumb, as the field spit up sparks and white smoke.
The rain brought us to our senses. It followed close behind the lightning, coming down first in heavy drops that struck us like hammers, and then more rapidly, thousands of needles pricking our skin. I took Albrecht by the arm and helped him to his feet, and we raced for the barn.
By the time we reached it, the fire had been doused, but we were soaked through. There was a chain fastening the door, but the wood at the latch was so rotted, one quick tug splintered it without resistance. Inside, the barn stank of wet straw and old manure, and the rain that pounded the roof slipped through the cracks and puddled on the muddy ground. Albrecht collapsed into the dirt, sputtering and stammering, and Anne knelt next to him, choking back sobs.
I was the first to notice the intent gaze of a pair of wary eyes, watching us from the shadows of one of the stalls, glinting with each flash of lightning. Beneath the din of raindrops rattling against the roof came a low, weak growl, resolving in a high-pitched whine. I moved cautiously toward the sound, heart in my throat, not sure if I expected something living or dead.
The bitch lay in a pile of moldy straw, her brown coat patchy with mange, her hide revealing the shape of her ribcage with each fresh intake of breath. She’d whelped recently, and four of the pups still suckled greedily at her swollen teats. She renewed her growling as I approached, baring sharp yellow teeth set in black gums, but she made no move to stand, and from the looks of her legs, bone-thin and trembling, I do not know if she could. Here and there, her neck and shoulders were pocked with white pustules—ticks that had planted themselves in her skin and gorged themselves on her blood. A frayed length of rope hung loose around her neck, the only sign that she had once belonged to someone.
Since then, I’ve seen many such creatures—dogs half-starved and half-feral wandering the roads, horses rendered lame and abandoned to their suffering or killed, and humans treated no better—but for all that had happened in Ellwangen in the years since my birth, I was still young, still unready to comprehend the depth of the world’s miseries. All at once, the shock of that afternoon struck me—not just the ugly sight in front of me, but the lightning, how close we’d all come to death. I doubled over and emptied my stomach into the neighboring stall.
Then there was nothing to do but wait for the storm to pass.
“We should tell someone about her,” Albrecht said. He’d regained his speech and was seated on the ground, leaning his head against his sister’s shoulder.
“Of course we will,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” It was Anne. “Do you think if there was anyone to take care of her, she’d be here? She’s an unwanted creature.” She snapped a stalk of straw between her fingers.
“Maybe they don’t know she’s here,” I said, looking toward the animal, its eyes crusted but still shining.
Anne shook her head. “That sick thing? No one wants that.”
“Hardly seems fair,” said Albrecht, with a philosophical cock of his head. “A healthy dog doesn’t need anybody, and a sick dog, nobody wants.”
“It’s just how it is,” said Anne, and that was the final word.
The rain slowed and the dripping of water from the eaves grew sluggish. I crossed the barn once more to check on the bitch, but she’d fallen asleep, her pups curled against her. I thought to pick them up, but fear stopped me. Fear, and Anne’s words, echoing in my mind: nobody wants them.
When we left the barn at last, the clouds had cleared, and the sky was painted with the pale hues of the evening sun, bearing no evidence of the storm that preceded it. We hurried back the way we came, through the grassy meadow, cool in the aftermath of the storm. As we waded across the river, we did not speak. The mood was leaden with the signs we had witnessed that afternoon.
The next day, court officials arrived at Anne and Albrecht’s house and arrested the whole family.
The arrests happened on a Thursday. By Saturday morning, they had confessions, extracted in the usual way. The entire family had admitted to making a pact with the devil. Among the eyewitness testimony submitted to the court: the children had been seen at the abandoned barn alongside a third unidentified child, summoning lightning in the field, with the intent of setting the whole town ablaze.
My parents’ old argument started again. We should go, my father insisted. This time, my mother did not contradict him. Yes, she said. Yes, tell Josefine and pack up what you can. Leave this place and don’t look back. Don’t ever look back. I wonder now if she knew what was coming. I wonder now if she had seen it in her dreams.
Saturday afternoon, they hanged the twins from the gallows and tied their parents to the pyre.
While the smoke rose from beyond the fortress walls, the town priest knocked on our door. He’d been a vocal skeptic of the witch executions, and for his troubles, his sister had been accused and put to death. Now he came to our house with a warning: under torture, my mother had been named. If that were not enough, the twins had testified that I was the one in the field with them when the lightning struck. The court was preparing the warrants.
In the official record, the twins’ parents said that my mother had introduced them to the devil. They said she knew how to summon demons to her like swarms of bats, lifting her into the air and carrying her across miles and miles of land. By this means, she could travel halfway around the world in a single night to meet with other witches in their dread sabbaths, profaning the host and fucking the devil’s soldiers.
How I’ve wished the stories were true. Not a single night has gone by since that time that I haven’t wished they were true. Perhaps then instead of what happened, she could have taken to the sky and called down her diabolical army on the whole town, leaving it a smoldering ruin. Let all the judges in the courthouse, all the witch-hunters and interrogators with their implements of torture feel the flames rising around them, let them choke on the scent of sulfur and melting flesh.
Instead, she told my father she was going to buy bread for the journey. Then she left him and went down to his workshop, to the very place where she’d birthed me almost a decade earlier. There, she took rope, tied the knot sure, looped the cord over the eaves, and kicked the chair out from beneath her. There she fell, suspended between Heaven and earth, until the last breath went out of her.
I can’t know what went through her mind that afternoon. Did she think she could save us by sacrificing herself? Or had she perhaps dreamed of her own death long before? Was she trying to escape her fate, or was she flinging herself into its arms? How many times had she told my father, it’s not time? And why had this day been different? Oh, the countless hours I’ve wasted, wishing I could summon her here and make her answer for herself.
After waiting into the night for my mother to return, my father went down to the workshop to pack up his tools and let out a wail so loud I heard it in the rooms above; so loud it pierced my heart like the sharp end of a pike.
I went to my bedroom window, and I saw her, drifting down the lane that led to the town gate. Her white-blonde hair fell around her shoulders, and her dress shone just as if it were made of moonlight. I watched her until the darkness swallowed her up. She didn’t look back. I didn’t need to go down to the workshop to see it; I knew then she was gone.
When he’d finished his wailing, my father cut my mother’s body down from the rafters and dug a shallow grave behind the workshop. Then he packed his few belongings into a leather rucksack and arranged a ride for himself and his only daughter on the back of a wool merchant’s wagon.
As the wheels turned over the uneven track out of town, I thought I saw her again, her back still turned to me, her feet only grazing the earth, silver light streaming in her hair.
I leapt from the wagon and ran after her. My father’s shouts following me, I chased her toward the field where the lightning strike had seared the ground, all the way to the old barn, the door still swinging open, just as we’d left it.
There was nothing but empty darkness inside. My mother, if she’d even been there at all, was not to be seen. Only a low, persistent buzzing broke the silence, and the air carried the heavy scent of death.
As I drew close to where I’d first found the bitch and her pups, I saw clear enough why. The poor creature lay lifeless in the moldy straw, a miserable pile of hide and bone. Her whelps had wandered off or been snapped up by some other hungry creature—all but one, a boney runty beast, with one brown eye and one blue. He let out a little whine as I scooped him up and wrapped him in my skirt.
