The Patriot Witch

by C. C. Finlay

  He set Jedediah's musket down in a dry spot inside the barn and went to help her. She slammed the spade into the ground over and over again.

  “Miss Deborah,” he said.

  Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, her face blotched, and her hair plastered to her head from the rain. But her lips were tight, her tiny chin firmly set. Without a word to him, she turned back to her work, deliberately marking out the edges of a grave.

  “Let me help.”

  She shook her head and slammed the spade into the ground harder.

  He stood out of her way. The rain soaked through his clothes to his skin in moments. It was bad enough feeling useless while a woman did that kind of work, but he was starting to shiver from the cold. He returned to the barn, to the spot where Jedediah hung his tools, and found a pick and shovel.

  Without asking her permission, he began to scoop away the soil from the rough rectangle she had marked out. He could tell in moments that she had done physical labor on their farm before; the two of them fell into a comfortable rhythm without speaking. She moved around the edges, spading through the turf and levering up the larger stones. Proctor followed half a plot behind, breaking up the soil and shouldering shovel after shovel of rain-sodden mud into a pile beside the grave. The rocks weighed the same no matter what, and he began to be glad for them. The work warmed him enough that after a while, he unfastened the top button of his shirt.

  Finally the hole grew deep enough that Deborah could no longer help without climbing down inside it. Proctor stepped into it first. There was an inch of brown water in the bottom, and the mud sucked at his shoes as he shifted position for a better angle. Deborah paused. The work and rain had washed away most of the sorrow from her face. He wasn't sure what it had left behind, beyond a certain grim determination.

  He jammed the shovel into the ground, folded his hands over the top of it, and met her eyes. “Don't you have family or friends to help out with this?”

  “No, there's just us.”

  “What about folks from your church?” he asked. “Can't your pastor gather the deacons or someone else to help out you and your mother?”

  She was silent for a long moment while he squinted against the rain and listened to its steady splash in the puddle at his feet. “We're Friends,” she said.

  “Well, sure, that's why I'm out here helping you.”

  She opened her mouth to explain that Friends meant Quakers, and then saw—he hoped—that he was teasing her. “The Society of Friends has no pastor or deacons for our meetings,” she said. “We all come before God equally.”

  “But there's somebody like that,” he said, believing there had to be. If they came to help, whoever they were, he could pass the responsibility off for the safety of the women onto them, and he could head home. “Elders. Or somebody.”

  “There isn't. The Friends aren't organized like that. But it wouldn't matter if we were—my mother and father were read out of meeting years ago.”

  “Read out of meeting?”

  “It means that the other members of the meeting asked them to leave.” She sighed, letting the spade drop. Her shoulders sagged. “I don't know if it had more to do with my father's beliefs that the colonies ought to be free of British rule, or with my mother's … practices. I was too young to remember and my parents never spoke of it. Are you thirsty?”

  He was still trying to understand the idea of being read out of meeting. “I'm sorry.”

  “I said, are you thirsty?” She lifted her head to the sky and emitted a short, sad laugh. “As if one could be thirsty in all this wet.”

  “I am,” he said.

  “I'll be back in a moment.” She turned and went to the house.

  Proctor dug vigorously while she was gone, emptying the grave of soil and rock. The sides constantly caved in around his feet, and he had to shift from one side to the other. He was almost chest-deep when her shadow darkened the rim of the hole again.

  She handed him a crust end of black bread and a slice of sharp cheese. “I put on water for coffee, but it will need another moment to steep. I thought you might be hungry too.”

  He swallowed the bite of cheese that already filled his mouth and said, “Thank you kindly.”

  “No, thank you.” She stood there patiently silent, soaked by the rain, while he chewed and swallowed.

  He went to brush wet crumbs from his cheek and tasted the mud on his hands. He was trying to spit out the flavor when Elizabeth came and stood by her daughter with two steaming mugs in her one good hand. The older woman's face was marked with all the grief that had been written in Deborah's features, and for the first time Proctor saw more than a casual resemblance between them. Deborah handed a mug to Proctor.

  He looked up at the rain. “I better drink it quick before it's watered down too far to taste.”

  Deborah took her cup and tilted her chin at the rain. “Mother, you must stop this now. Our neighbors' crops will rot in their fields with all this rain.” She spoke low enough that Proctor didn't think he was supposed to hear.

  Thunder rumbled in the sky beyond the trees and past the hill. “Thou art welcome,” Elizabeth said, and turned away. The rain did nothing to lessen.

  After a few sips, and then one long drink from his mug, Proctor passed it up to Deborah. “I should keep working.”

  “I don't know how I would've finished this without you,” she said.

  “Oh, it's not finished yet,” he said. The deeper he went, the slower he worked, as he had to lift each shovelful up and over the edge of the grave. Several times the pile of mud collapsed and flowed back into the hole, and he had to toss it out all over again. By the time he had dug the hole as deep as his chest, he was soaked through to the bone, sore from shoulders to feet, and covered in a layer of mud from toe to waist. He tossed the shovel over the edge and climbed out, slipping back twice before he finally pulled himself to his feet. Standing hands on hips, he caught his breath for a moment and felt good about his work.

  Deborah picked up the spade and took a few paces to one side. “Let's dig the next one here.”

  “What?”

  “We've got two more men to bury. If you don't keep working, we'll never be done by nightfall.”

  “Shouldn't we tell the authorities?” he asked. “Have them come out and identify those men.” If he had thought to offer to do that this morning, he wouldn't be digging now. He might even be on his way home.

  She marked the outline of the grave with the spade. “We don't want the attention. Not if we don't know who sent them out here.”

  “Well, it's obviously the British,” he said. “Wait a minute. How do the British know you're all witches? Have you been putting curses on them?”

  She stopped her work. “Let's be clear about one thing up front. No woman here, no student of my mother's, would ever use magic to make a curse or bring harm in any way to another.”

  “What exactly do you do here?”

  “We teach women how to use their talents to be better midwives and better healers. Sometimes we have a preacher's wife come stay with us for a while, or someone else with the talent. But we do God's work. We make sure the women use their talents to help their communities, and that's all.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets, the rough fabric sore on his work-raw knuckles. “If you say so.”

  “I say so,” she said.

  “So you've done nothing to draw the attention of the British?”

  “My father was outspoken against the Parliament and their taxes, true. He did not want his taxes used to support any wars, and I may share some of his opinions. But we had never done anything to antagonize them. And there are many other people around here who have been eager to harm witches in the past.”

  “But you said the widow came after you because of what you did to one of their officers.” He tried to ask the question casually, as if he didn't know his own part in it. To disguise his unease, he shoveled mud out of the area she had marked.

 
; “That's what we gleaned from the few things she said.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were lucky, much as we were last night. We would never have known the danger, except Cecily woke in the night and went outside. Lydia followed her and spied the widow using some kind of compulsion to force information from Cecily. That's why she was so terrified when we were attacked again last night.”

  “I don't blame her,” Proctor said.

  “Cecily doesn't remember anything about the widow, but Lydia heard angry questions about some British officer. She woke my mother for help, and when my mother ran to confront her, the widow tried to set the house on fire.”

  “How did you escape?” This spot of soil had more rocks in it, and larger ones, and Proctor had to stop frequently to toss them out of the hole.

  “My mother drew all the fire into herself and then sent it down the well.” She smiled. “Steam rose from the well for a day. Even though it took only seconds, she was badly burned.”

  “And then she put a spell on the widow, to bind her?”

  “No. Then my father came out of the barn and hit her on the head with a shovel while she wasn't looking. I put the binding spell on her while she was unconscious. We sent word ahead and then set out at once to see friend Emerson.”

  He knew the rest of the story from there, but he couldn't shake loose thoughts of the fire. He had seen animals burned to death in a barn fire once, and the thought of that happening to this houseful of women disturbed him greatly. The thought that it might all have been his fault, because of what he did to Pitcairn, disturbed him even more. “I saw her start fire from nothing, no steel or flint or spark, just a word from her lips and flame.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “I don't know,” she said. The way she shuddered made him believe her.

  The two of them worked with the same easy rhythm again, and the hole grew steadily deeper. When he stepped inside it, she walked over to the same spot on the opposite side of her father's hole.

  Proctor stopped digging. “If we make this one big enough, we can put both men in it.”

  “It's not right to elevate one man above others,” she said, indicating her father's grave.

  “Seeing as how they're the ones who came to kill him, it seems just fine to me.”

  She shook her head and started turning the soil with the spade. “No, we are all made equal in the eyes of the Lord. They deserve to be mourned too, as much for the loss of their souls as for the loss of their lives. I'll do it by myself, if the work's too hard for you.”

  “I bet you would,” he said grudgingly and went back to work. He didn't dig the second hole quite as deep. By the time he finished digging the second grave, she was more than knee-deep in the third hole, shoveling away the mud and rocks in small, slow, steady scoops.

  The rain continued steady. All three holes were filling up with water. He couldn't get any wetter. Mud coated his entire body, and his waterlogged hands had the texture of prunes.

  “I can finish that,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, clearly tired. She slipped as she tried to climb out of the hole, so he offered her his hand.

  “I'm sorry about the mud,” he said, seeing his handprint on her sleeve.

  She looked at it, then laughed, and he laughed too. She stood and watched him for a while, then went up to the house.

  The sky, dark all day from the clouds, was descending into truer darkness by the time Proctor decided he had shoveled enough mud from the third grave. It was the shallowest hole, little more than three feet deep. His arms nearly gave out as he climbed over the edge of the pit. He sat on the ground, arms folded across his knees, head leaning on his arms.

  Deborah had been moving back and forth between the house and barn, but when she saw him finished, she came over to his side. After he said nothing to her, she picked up the shovel where he had dropped it. Holding it out to him at arm's length, she said, “One more.”

  He lifted his head and stared at her blankly. “What?”

  “One more.”

  “For who?” he said, not hiding the weariness in his voice. “Did we find the third Indian?”

  “For Nimrod,” she said.

  The dog. Of course, the dog had to be buried too. He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. When he reached out for the shovel, she snatched it away.

  “I was just joking,” she said. “You have no sense of humor. There's some water for you in the barn.”

  He looked up at the sky, at the puddles around them, at the water standing in the graves. “I have plenty of water out here.”

  “Clean water,” she said. “And I brought out some of my father's old clothes for you to change into. He won't be needing them anymore.”

  “As long as they're dry, they could be your clothes for all I care.” He walked stiffly toward the barn.

  The first thing he noticed in the barn were the two “Indians,” wrapped in sheets with knots at their heads and feet. Their clothes had been stripped off them and piled outside the door, waiting to be burned to kill the lice. Assuming the lice didn't drown first.

  His gaze encompassed all that in a split second and then was drawn to the steam rising from the tub. She'd heated a tub full of water for him, a pot at a time, and carried it out while he was deep in the graves. If he hurried, he might get not only clean but warm.

  He stripped to his waist and plunged his face into the water and decided to hold it there for as long as he could keep his breath or stand the heat. The former won out, and he pulled out with a gasp a moment later, shaking the water from his hair. By the time he'd scrubbed clean and changed into the dry clothes—who cared if they were too short in the ankles and sleeves, they were dry!—he noticed the smoked ham and pork puddings and fried potatoes set out for him beside a pint mug of beer.

  With his belly full, and his body tired, he didn't think about going any farther than someplace to sleep, at least for the night.

  In the morning, beams of light fell through a threadbare curtain of clouds. Proctor walked to the house, his feet squishing in the mud.

  The women were all dressed in their daily clothes except for Cecily, who had found a black dress somewhere. Jedediah was wrapped in a sheet that knotted at head and foot, just like the two “Indians” in the barn.

  “When's the minister coming?” Proctor asked.

  “Our faith makes do without ministers,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh.” Proctor had been planning on asking the other man for help carrying the body. His arms and shoulders were sore from yesterday, but he wasn't willing to admit it. “Well, it's no problem—I'm sure I can carry him by myself.”

  As he bent to pick up the body from the floor, Deborah went to the feet and took hold of the knot. “Don't be full of foolish pride. I'll help you.”

  Proctor was going to argue, but he saw the look on her face and realized how far it would get him. “That's fine, thanks.” He hooked hands under Jedediah's shoulders. “Ready? Up.”

  She pulled up as he lifted but the knot slipped out of her hand, and her father's feet slammed the floor.

  “I'll be glad to help,” Alexandra offered.

  “Don't be ridiculous, girl,” Cecily said. “Lydia was born to labor, it's in her nature, isn't that true, Lydia?”

  “Yes, ma'am,” the black woman said quietly. She positioned herself opposite of Deborah and said, “Are you ready?”

  The three of them carried the body out to the first grave and lowered it as far as they could. It splashed at the bottom, and the sheet immediately began soaking up the mud. Proctor looked to Elizabeth for a reaction, but she only sighed and nodded. Then she said, “Let's show the same respect to the others.”

  Deborah had started toward the barn, Lydia in her wake, and Proctor had to stretch his legs to catch up. They took the man with the mauled arm first, lowering him a little less gently into the second grave. The second Indian was dropped at the side of the shallowe
st grave when Deborah asked to catch her breath. Proctor put his foot on the body and rolled it into the hole, splashing mud and water up around their ankles. Being this close to them, remembering how they'd tried to kill him, made his hands start to shake again.

  To Elizabeth, he said, “I'm sorry I didn't dig a separate grave for Nimrod. I'm not sure where you want him.”

  “He can go in with Jed,” she said. “He was a good friend to us.”

  Her throat was thick by the time she choked out the last words. Proctor went and carried the bloodied dog back, getting mud all over his clean clothes. He gently lowered the animal over his master's feet.

  He stood up and stepped back from the grave. Elizabeth stared at her husband's body, while Cecily rested a hand on her crippled arm. The southern woman leaned close and murmured something into Elizabeth's ear, producing a wan smile. Elizabeth covered the other woman's hand with her own, patting it for reassurance.

  Magdalena paced nervously back from the edge of the graves. Lydia placed herself opposite Cecily, standing next to Alexandra, who glanced from face to face looking for clues.

  Deborah cleared her throat. “Friends, we are gathered here today to remember Jedediah Walcott, my father, a good friend to all of us here.” She wiped the corner of her eye, quickly, trying to hide the gesture.

  “Amen,” Lydia said under her breath.

  “We will also remember these two strangers who killed him. We hope they have found a better peace now than they knew when they were living. We should remember that all men are equal in God's eyes, if not our own.” She looked at Proctor and Alexandra. “For those of you not familiar with our ways, we have no set hymns to sing or prayers to say. We begin with silence. Anyone who is moved to speak may do so. You can share a memory or a prayer about any of the men we bury here today.” The longer she spoke, the harder it was to get the words out. She paused to regain her composure.

  “May Gott have mercy on us—this whole thing is terrible,” Magdalena said.

  Cecily spoke immediately. “Well, I, for one, am grateful—”