The Whinfield Witch

Flinching across the misty downs towards the tree line, Simon’s heart beat as fast as the pounding of his muddy buckled shoes as he ran bent double under the burden on his back. As he ran he prayed, and his ragged whispered words slipped from his breathless lips in tufts of vapor in the chilly morning air, mingling with the scent of wood smoke and wet autumnal foliage from the rain the night before.

“I beg you, dear Lord, let no man look beyond the village wall! And if any man does glance this way upon his morning patrol, then let him mistake us for a deeper ripple of darkness in the wind buffeted grass!”

He was too frightened to even look over his shoulder, lest he see the bobbing watchmen’s lanterns. What if he had already been seen, and a mob of his angry neighbors were already on their way to stop him? Or worse, what if God listened to his prayers and the lantern bearer that might spot him lay dead in the road, unable to warn anyone simply because of Simon’s cowardice at the prospect of being caught?

“Oh God,” he panted through a cottony mouth, “Please! Kill no man for my sake! Simply turn their eyes another way!”

This was not the first time Simon had snuck away from Whinfield, but it was the first time he’d done it carrying someone else on his back. It was significantly harder than he remembered it being four years ago when he and three other boys from Sunday School went three weeks straight without attending their afternoon lessons. They snuck out during afternoon prayer and went to make play in the woods, but when the school master discovered where they were disappearing to, he told the minister and they’d been beaten and forced to copy pages from the bible. Simon’s father had beaten him again once he got home.

That second beating weighed heavy on his frantic heart as he at last dipped into a hollow that ran parallel to the path and boosted his mother so that her thin legs sat better upon his sides. The little hillock obscured them from view of the village-he was sure, he’d checked the day before- and Simon climbed the embankment to the road that led into the woods. They were only a half mile away now, if the rumors were true. A half mile away from sin or miracle, he did not yet know.

Simon’s guts twisted in protest. Was this sin? Had he spent weeks now with wickedness in his heart as he planned this trip? Worry had a way of seeping from its designated container and spilling all over everything else going on in his mind, and as Simon at last passed into the cover of the trees, rather than feeling relieved that they’d made it, he suddenly felt a fear rooted not to the machinations of man, but the condition of his soul. He’d been so sure the night before,when he’d secretly set aside his mother’s gray wool coat and braided her hair back neatly, that this was the right thing to do. He’d promised himself as he watched for a moment when his father was not home and carefully hid a bag of honeycomb from the pantry that this action wasn’t stealing if it meant procuring a miracle. He’d spent the entire night on his knees in prayer, talking it over with God, promising that he did not believe in witches or the crafts of the devil, but that he was sure that further proof of faith was needed and he was ready to act. Had it all been in error? Had he been so long from the path of light that the devil had his claws in him and kept him from seeing the truth? How long had he been damned or saved? The days blurred together in a slop of muddy gray sickness, and he could only stumble on, trusting his gut as he whispered his twentieth prayer since setting out that morning.

“I beg thee, God above… I pray that should my actions be sinful and not worthy of the miracles of which I beseech, that thou whilst see that I act out of love! Spare my mother! Damn me should a soul need damming, but spare mother! And again, if we were seen by a man on patrol, bless him that he will not recognize us and tell father!”

Deep moist coughs erupted from his shoulder where his mother rested her cheek, making Simon jump. The sticky barks echoed across the night in terrifying clarity, sending a small flock of quail in a panic as they raced to go hide elsewhere. Simon felt his pulse quicken as cold fear rolled down his spine. He shot a worried glance down the road towards the village and ducked off of the damp path to kneel under the tangled snags of dead underbrush. With care sullied by panic, he slid his mother from his back and into his arms, supporting her frail head against his shoulder where she continued to struggle though her fit. He pulled the hem of her wool coat over her chapped mouth to muffle the sound as he cast his eyes about in fear, just sure that they were to be found any second by wolves or watchmen. The worst part of it was watching her tortured face, gaunt from sickness and purpled around the eyes, contort and clench as if it were trying to cave in on itself. Her hazy gray eyes bulged, and her body, already so wizened from months of internal battle, shook so intensely that he worried it would simply turn to dust.

“Shhh, shhh, shh! Breathe mother!” he coaxed, but even that made his heart curdle with guilt. He knew full well that she had no control, but the noise was so jarring against the organic silence that he was convinced that it was bound to draw eyes upon them.

After several frightening moments of gasping and struggle, the storm of ragged sickness finally eased, and she leaned back in quiet exhaustion against his chest as lingering moonlight colored her already pale face ghostly.

“Hang on a little longer, mother, and I swear relief will come!”

Rebecca Hathorne didn’t speak or acknowledge her son’s desperate plea. She only leaned back and continued to labor at breathing as if it was an unnatural task she must focus on, like she was afraid to lose count of the breaths and drop a stitch.

They were blessed to be spared any such attacks during their flight through the outer fields where there were no trees to dampen the noise. Simon knew better than to rest upon this victory, though. Now that she’d had one attack more were sure to come.

Whispering another prayer, this time asking for a little more time, Simon placed one hand each behind her back and under her knees and rose back to his feet with a grunt.

“Just a little farther!”

“Where are we going Simon?” She finally breathed, eyes closed in exhaustion. Her bonnet had slipped behind the crown of her forehead, exposing her blonde hairline, which had grown thin in the past weeks. Simon wished he had another free hand to fix it for her. She so hated it when her bonnet slipped.

“We are going to see someone… Someone who can help.”

“Where is your father? Did he not send you with any syrups to administer?”

Simon hesitated. Doctor Cotton Hathorne had long given up on fixing his wife, and instead gave her a syrup made from some flower picked in Europe. It stopped the coughing, but in the weeks since Doctor Hathorne began giving it to her, mother had only gotten weaker and worse.

“We used the last drop yestermorn, mother. Father sent us to go retrieve more from a healer nearby. Hush now.”

Simon was so busy fussing over his mother’s pitiful state that he did not look up to see that he was no longer alone upon the narrow gravel road, so when a stern young voice challenged him in the dark he nearly dropped the sickly woman in his panic.

“God does not listen to the prayers of liars, Simon Hathorne!”

“Gad’s tears!”

Simon stumbled back, nearly falling over his own muddy feet and only catching himself in his desperation not to spill his mother. At first he saw no one, but then the darkness seemed to part and the owner of the voice became apparent as if revealed in vision. A young woman wreathed in black traveling clothes loomed like a phantom in the middle of the lane! Her pale round face was visible amidst the tightly wound fabric, and she stared down at him with straight, severe eyebrows knit in accusation.

“Who art thou to sneak up upon us so!” Simon shouted, aflush with embarrassment and fear as he took several steps away from the sentinel who hadn’t moved an inch in the sweeping wind.

“Seek you a blow about the head! Be on your way!”

“A liar and a man of violence,” the young woman tutted, shaking her head in disapproval.

“And a sneak thief, it would seem. Pray, what demon told thee to steal fresh honey from thy father? Such a treat could do much to heal the afflicted people of Whinfield, if he were smart with it. Which I doubt.”

Stubborn anger flared up to meet the already challenging mood of young Simon, but he was distracted from his temper when at last his eyes adjusted to her strange appearance and he recognized the young woman, which made his heart leap with a surge of providence!

“Wait, I know thee! Goldie Pritchett! Thou werst sent away from the village with thy mother nearly ten years ago! What art thou doing, wandering in the dark at nearly three in the morn?”

Aside from answering my prayer, he wondered.

She stirred at last, and Simon saw with great relief that she was not a smudge of devilish ghost in the road when she lifted her arms from her sides and crossed them haughtily in front of herself.

“I am on an errand for my mother, who bade me walk this path. Zounds! She could have told me the nature of my quest, then perhaps I would have told her not to bother! Go home Simon Hathorne! Seek the aid of thy rotted father!”

With a huff she turned on her heel and walked, crunching, off into the darkness of the woods.

“Wait!”

Simone hurried after her, hefting his mother in his arms to better distribute her weight as he struggled to follow after the girl who seemed perfectly at ease walking through the tangle of dead nature that sought to grab at his feet with every step.

“Goldie! Tis true, I seek thy mother! Please, wilt thou take us to her? I brought the honey as payment and I hoped-”

“You hoped, what!”

Goldie rounded on him, and Simon nearly crashed right into her. Though the New England sky was still horrifically dim beneath the skeletal capitulum of wood and dead leaf, he could see the gold flecks of color in Goldie’s green irises that he’d long forgotten existed. Those owlish eyes that would wander the chapel hall during prayer and linger for too long on the faces around her. He’d only been nine when she and her mother were cast from the village on charges of practicing the devil’s craft. Everyone said they were sure to die by winter. He’d watched the two of them go with their meager cart of possessions, holding his mother’s hand, wondering if those strange green-gold eyes would remain so once frozen by the cold.

“You’d hoped to buy my mother’s forgiveness?” She spat, “That she would do what thou hast failed to do?”

“Forgiveness?” Simon asked, taking a step back so that the plume of her warm breath would not touch him. He wasn’t sure what the vapors of a witch might do to a man of God, but he was afraid to find out.

“Twas not I who slighted thee!”

“No, twas your father! Tis not he who stands before me with his dying wife, but his son! So if the son can take on the duty of the father then I do not see why he cannot also take on the sins?”

Without warning, Simon’s mother lurched forward and began to choke on her air. The cacophonous barks of illness tore at her ragged throat and caused her to buck against his grip. A blue forked vein in her forehead bulged, and torn with fear while standing awkwardly over the dead fall of the woods, Simon was ill prepared to handle her fit. She slipped forward from his hands and almost spilled to the forest floor had Goldie not surged forward to catch her. The odd girl’s tight hood fell away as she lowered her carefully to the ground, revealing a long plat of braided ginger hair that seemed the exact color of the honeycomb in his pack.

“Goldie, please!” Simon pleaded, but the girl ignored him, reached a porcelain hand into the dark folds of her cloak, and brought out a little blue tincture stopped with a cork, which she opened with a pop. A sharp unfamiliar smell made his eyes blink with sting as she pressed a finger over the mouth of the jar and upended the liquid inside to coat her own skin. Simon was afraid his mother would recoil from the strange scent, but when Goldie rubbed her moistened fingers on her upper lip, the woman’s fit seemed to ease. Rebecca took a shuddering and sticky breath that did not catch!

“What is-”

“Ssh!”

Goldie undid the buttons of his mother’s coat and shirt at her chin and pulled the top of her dress down, exposing her clavicle. Simon looked at the sky, tempering his urge to swat the girl’s irreverent hands away,choosing to trust her- trusted God. He thought a prayer as Goldie muttered something too soft for him to hear and rubbed the smelly balm over his mother’s chest before doing back up her buttons.

“Did that cure her?” He asked, gathering his now still mother into his arms and scrunching his nose against the strong smell that wafted off of her in the still air of the wood.

“No. Tis a balm to comfort her for now. She needs the hands of a true healer. Which is why you have come…”

Goldie sighed in exasperation and Simon bowed his head in shame.

“Your father is the doctor who claimed to know better than my mother. What does he say is the matter with her?”

“My father cannot help her,” he choked, unable to muster any sound beyond a whisper, “he has stopped trying! He says that her soul is in God’s hands-His to take any day now- but I cant!… She can’t…”

“I know, I know…” Goldie said, annoyed. She kicked at a pine cone and sent it bouncing off into the woods, and the two of them watched it go while Simon blinked prickling tears from his eyes.

“What you do is a sin, you know,” she said, “At least, according to the men of the village. They shall surely cast thee out should they discover your betrayal.”

“Tis not a sin!” Simon pleaded, standing back up with his mother in his burning arms and venturing a tentative step forward, “Tis faith! I prayed for days and thy mother was the only answer that came to me! If she does not help then my mother will surely die!”

“How do I know you won’t get thy cure and then condemn us?” Goldie shot back, “When your father asks how such a miracle was wrought, wilt thou not speak the truth?”

“You said thyself that I was a liar!” Simon admitted, loath to adopt the sinful moniker but willing to do so to convince her.

“I shall lie! Tell him I know not how it was done but must be a miracle of God!”

Her eyes narrowed and Goldie took one giant step forward. Woody groans like the creaking of ancient knees screamed out above, and Simone flinched, afraid that they would be crushed beneath a widowmaking branch. He didn’t even realize that Goldie had pressed the pad of her middle finger to the center of his forehead until he looked down from the horrible noise and saw her standing with her nose practically pressed to his.

“Why should I believe you, Simon Hathorne?”

The sound of her voice did not pass first though his ears, but seemed to originate from the back of his mind. Without his permission or summoning, visions of his mother’s progressing sickness flashed before his eyes, fleeting and unsteady as candle light. He saw her go from the strong and dedicated servant of the town doctor to the frail, dying creature in his arms. He saw visions of the sleepless nights spent at her side, soothing her through the bouts of wicked coughing that he often thought would be the ruin of her. A single cold tear fell from the corner of his eye, and he blinked in confusion as the visions and wind stopped.

Goldie stood back, arms crossed, a disappointed look on her face as she waited for him to come back to himself.

“Dost thou promise not to tell?”

“I swear it!” Simon vowed, shunting aside his fear of the visions just forced upon him, accepting that they might be of the devil and willing to risk it anyways as his mother took a shuddering breath in his arms.

“Fine.” She huffed, brushing past him back towards the road.

“Follow me and be quick, mother is expecting us and she does not like to be kept waiting. I swear I shall leave you behind if you dawdle!”