The Witch

The Witch

or

Undermining the patriarchy is a dangerous business

The problem wasn’t so much that I was a witch, as that I was a strong, independent woman.

After all, witches have been revered and reviled, in turn, in all societies throughout human history. One century, in one place, we would be called upon to heal the sick and to fructify the harvest, and the next century, we would be hunted and executed summarily. That is quite unfair, I might add, given that witches have clearly outperformed priests as healers and stewards of the crop.

But a woman who lives a dignified and prosperous life alongside her male relatives – or worse, as I’ve found out the hard way, declines the shackles of the patriarchy and manages to thrive despite it – is not to be tolerated, at least in this place, at this time.

So I really should have appreciated sooner the risks of succeeding in my business. I admit, I may have used a small bit of magic to keep my business afloat, but only one or two desperate times, in the beginning, when things were extremely precarious. Don’t underestimate my business acumen or my hard work, though. It was my labor, and especially my thrift, that grew my business. My careful and sparing use of magic only provided me a handful of dinners when I had difficulty collecting payment.

---

The trouble began when my husband died. My trouble, I should clarify, started with the marriage, but the community’s trouble with me began with his death.

My husband died of stomach bleeding and lung ailments – and I did not intervene on behalf of his health and longevity the third time he was sick. I had healed him, the first two times, but no amount of magic could have stopped him from running back to liquor and tobacco as soon as he was well enough to get out of bed, so what was the ultimate use? He was not very pleasant, besides.

He left me very little but a small house with a leaky roof, among other disrepairs. And he left me an accompanying debt.

I made it firmly understood that I would not be taken in by my husband’s family. What a charity they thought they were extending. But I was finally free of the tyranny of marriage, and I would much prefer the life of an unfettered widow than to volunteer for another lifetime of subservience.

The custom of a widow, helpless and vulnerable, joining the late husband’s family was perhaps less socially negotiable than I had thought. In the eyes of the community, this choice of mine may have been the first strike against my name.

---

I worked hard, in the garden, and in the gardens of neighbors, and I took seamstress jobs and other work. I made cheese, which isn’t fun, and I sold it, which also isn’t fun. And I maintained, which is an achievement in itself.

I never had an interest in flaunting my achievement. I did not dress particularly finely, or decorate my house extravagantly, and indeed I was not in a position to. I remained humble and modest.

The village folk, though, wanted to see me in rags. When I presented myself as an equal, with the same quality of clothes, level of hygiene, and air of dignity as I had during the marriage, I could feel a tension building. I was supposed to be in decline. Rumors began circulating that I had usurped a secret inheritance from my husband rather than pass it to the family, and that I therefore had an unfair and in fact illegal advantage in my business dealings. In any case, the jealousy of my peers may have been a second strike.

But my failure to fail stirred in the village a disruption far deeper than jealousy. The final strike against my name was that I had demonstrated to the community that a woman could independently support herself. I was proof of concept that the women didn’t need the men in order to compete in the world that men had constructed. My success – really, mere subsistence with a small measure of comfort – deconstructed the old and honored belief in the necessity of male dominance. My success exposed it for the lazy and unexamined illusion that it was.

---

The sheriff approached me in front of my house one morning while I was busy washing a customer’s laundry. He presented a warrant for my arrest on charges of witchcraft. His unshaken, professional fearlessness showed that he was not convinced that I had any spectral powers. That changed when I actually accepted the warrant and read it – my literacy would be used against me by the prosecution. I would spend the weeks before my trial in a cold prison cell.

The trial itself was grossly flawed by any metric. I was not permitted to speak on my own behalf, and my defense attorney knew full well that I was in fact a witch – he had discreetly sought my advice to determine who had been pilfering his apples at night. It was the Johnson boy. I would babysit him when he was younger. He was a good kid, on balance. I told the attorney that it was a deer. I was condemned, of course.

---

So there I stood, hands bound, upon the trapdoor of the gallows, buffeted by jeers. A voice broke over the din of the crowd: “Burn her!”

In a very bad mood and without any more reason to reserve the expression of it, I replied, “Jedediah, you still owe me three shillings from three months ago.”

A bit embarrassed, he doubled down: “Er uh, the judgement of the Lord will be upon you!” He was appealing more to the crowd now than to me or to God.

“It’s not too late for me to curse you.” That shut him up, but also hastened the work of the hangman. The noose was applied around my neck.

The trapdoor fell open and down I went. With a sharp poof sound, my clothes fell empty into the pit beneath the gallows, and I flew off as a bat, to start again somewhere else. Undermining the patriarchy is a dangerous business.