Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Read online

  Thick and heavy heels clicked on the cobblestones outside. It was growing nigh to dark, the twilight throwing ribbons of gold through the window and across the floor and the burning sun was hot on my right shoulder.

  I stood.

  The priest held a hand up to keep me in place.

  Father shook his head and looked as if he might cry.

  I whispered, “What have you done?” But he only shook his head and buried his face in his hands as the priest stayed put and O’Connor hid beside the wall next to the open doorway that led into the living room bordering the hall.

  The door opened.

  My father cried out, “Sarah!”

  And I cried out, “Mother!”

  Both of us intending to warn her, but she rushed into the house as if to save us from the worse calamity. She was thin and wore a black bonnet over her long yellow hair. The paper sack she held bulged with items from the Dry Goods store. She clutched it like a maniac, noticing us first and seeing that we were okay and her eyes coming to rest accusingly on the priest who only smiled at her. She had failed to see O’Connor out of her peripheral vision due to the bonnet, so, when his arms closed around her arms in a massive hug she dropped the groceries, surprised.

  His arms tightened and her scream died upon her lips. I ran forward and punched him in the side but he didn’t acknowledge me or cower from the pitiful strike. My mother’s face was white but her forehead even whiter as if the policeman’s grip upon her had cut off the oxygen to her brain. He said, “Easy now,” shifting his feet among cans of spilled food. A tin of peaches rolled near me and I stooped to pick it up and throw it at his face but the priest’s fingers closed over my wrist and shook my arm so violently that the item flew from my hand and my shoulder ached in its socket and tears stung my eyes.

  “Enough,” he said.

  Father and Mother were looking at each other as I held my arm to my stomach. In her eyes I could see a dismal light that was matched and multiplied in my father’s. He said, “I’m so sorry.” Then he choked out, “But they know of your crimes.”

  “What crimes?” she said, breathlessly. She had ceased struggling, but I could tell that it was a trick on her part and waited expectantly for the moment that O’Connor would loosen his grip on her and give her feet purchase again.

  It came a moment later, after my father said, “They know about your witchcraft, my dear. Don’t deny it. It won’t do any good.”

  She was looking at him, hard, but then she looked inside and seemed to accept what he was saying, some part of it at least, though I knew she was only thinking of her sister’s, and of my, protection. She turned her head to O’Connor and said, “Set me down, damn you.”

  The priest said, “You won’t be damning anyone, not anymore.” He had a bible in his hand that I did not remember him having. He raised it, pointed the spine at her, and spoke something in Latin that hurt my ears. My father trembled again and backed deeper into room, separating himself from my mother, from me, from the authority that had barged into our home.

  I said, “I lied.” I pointed at my father. I said, “He made me do it.”

  The men ignored me.

  My mother closed her eyes for a moment, her mouth red and teeth snow white. I could hear people shouting in the streets, the pitter patter of rain beginning on the roof and against the living room glass. My mother sagged in O’Connor’s arms. He struggled to keep her against his chest but failed and he sagged, too. He loosened his grip, meaning to grab lower around her waist to make her more manageable, him figuring that she’d fainted from all the excitement, but the seconds his grip loosened my mother smashed the side of her head into his face.

  The Irishman cursed as she slipped out from between his arms and shoved him back. He stumbled into the wall where he had originally been hiding. The priest waved his bible as if the Lord Our God would tether her to the floor, and he seemed shocked when she kicked a can and it flew from the tip of her shoe, arced through the air and punched him in the stomach.

  She spun toward the hall, meaning to head for the door and I cheered, but my father had a hand on her shoulder now, pleading with her not to run and make matters worse.

  She didn’t hesitate. Like a cornered animal, seeing O’Connor regaining his composure and balance, she bit my father’s fingers and they crunched loudly as they broke. Then he screamed, staggered back toward me, holding his bloody hand to his chest, disbelief alive in his sad, sad eyes.

  My mother disappeared into the hall, her shoes loud, tattooing the floor with escape.

  The front door slammed.

  I merely blinked and O’Connor was gone from the room, and the door slammed again. Father moved to the living room window that offered a view of the wet street. People trundled about beneath umbrellas, or simply holding the day’s paper over their head. They did not hear or see Mother or O’Connor outside our window with all the rain and the thunder brewing and the lightning cutting jagged pieces of black sky into sections like a jig saw puzzle.

  Mother must have sensed the policeman behind her because she looked over her shoulder, and my father said, “He has her now…”

  But I had hoped his thick leather-soled shoes would slip on the soaked street and that I’d see my mother disappear into the mounting gloom, that I’d lose her behind a curtain of rain so black forces neither human nor divine might ever find her.

  But it was not to be…

  O’Connor smacked her in the head with his Billy club and my mother went silent and still on the road, a buggy stopping near them and a richer looking gentleman raising his nose at them for a moment before he shut the door and hollered for the driver to continue on.

  The policeman grabbed beneath her right arm and the priest beneath her left arm, and together, they dragged her away. My father should have done something to stop them but all he had the strength for was a long sigh.

  I felt vaguely hollow, possibly in shock. I looked at Father and waited until he found the strength to notice me. Then I said, “I hate you.”

  He nodded, as if he expected me to say as much.

  He said, “I hate me too.”

  “Good,” I said, taking in the view of the lane again, the dark smear of my mother’s blood that the rain quickly washed between the cobblestones until it was no more.

  *****

  After her trial, which my father restricted me from attending, he cried late into nights once he thought I’d fallen asleep. Each night his cries became deeper, more prolonged, as we neared my mother’s execution. He prayed to God for mercy, and for forgiveness, but mostly I thought he only prayed for the release of his own conscience. And I prayed, listening to him in his bedroom; I prayed that God would punish him for his betrayal.

  And, as the nights grew longer and the days filled with the buzz of the gallows preparation, I prayed to Satan, there at the foot of my bed, “Punish him. Punish them all.”

  As if in answer to my prayers to the principalities of air, Auntie came to me the night before my mother’s execution. Upon our stoop she looked like an old, weather-beaten buzzard. Father seemed to melt before her, backing inside, trying to shut the door as he did so, but she held up a hand and he coughed wretchedly as if being strangled. Whatever forces she had enacted lasted a moment longer before he doubled over and cupped his chin, gagging for breath, a small trickle of blood staining his lips.

  I ignored Father and smiled at Auntie, who let herself in, carrying a black suitcase.

  My father, still leaning, held a hand out to her and choked, “It’s not what you think.”

  “And what do I think?” she said.

  “That I had anything to do with what happened to Sarah.”

  “What’s happening to her,” Auntie corrected him.

  “Yes,” Father said, “all that. None of my doing.”

  “I know,” she said, and he looked relieved, yet skeptical. “You’re just a tiny cog in a much larger mechanism.”

  “What mechanism?” I said, nearly bea
ming, for where my mother lacked contact with me, which I craved, being only a small child, Auntie gave more of herself, some would say, all, to those who she shared intimacies with. She set the suitcase on the floor, ignoring my father as he said, “You can’t stay here,” and she scooped me up in her strong, wiry arms and planted thirteen kisses from the crown of my head to the point of my chin. She tweaked my ears with her fingers and said, “How is my favorite little ogre?”

  “Not good,” I said. “They took my mother.”

  I looked up at my aunt. She was taller than my father, as tall as the unnamed priest who I saw walking by occasionally since the day he’d come into our house, watching now and then for further signs of devilry.

  Auntie stroked my cheek and squeezed me tight to her. “It will be on their heads.”

  “Whose?” I said, hoping she meant the priest’s and O’Connor’s heads.

  “All of them,” she said, smiling as she looked over at my father. She released me and I slid down her hard front side and clung to her legs, hobbling her. She laughed softly and said, “Now, now. Help me carry my things to your mother’s room.”

  “You can’t,” Father said. “I won’t allow it!”

  “You,” Auntie said, “are very lucky that this little monster is present. But remember this… I cannot always shield her eyes from the truth. In fact,” she said, “I refuse to. Yet, what must be done tomorrow must be done, and then you and I will have words, darling. Oh,” she cackled, “such words!”

  Father scrabbled to his feet and for a second I thought he might make a cross of his index fingers and denounce her presence in the name of God. But he just hung his head and backed into the kitchen.

  Auntie waited until he was gone before she said, “I think your father is going to have a most unfortunate accident.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Really,” I said. “He let the cop and priest in and they beat Mother and dragged her away. And he made me lie.”

  Auntie’s face reddened slightly, which was a lot for her. She did not wear emotions well, mostly because, I suspect, she didn’t have any.

  She said, “Let’s forget about him for a while, okay? His time is coming to answer for his deeds.”

  “That’s what the priest said about Mother.”

  “I know him,” she said.

  “The priest?”

  “Certainly,” she said. “Men like him,” she waved a hand in the air as if they weren’t worth speaking of. “He’s about as bent in his moral compass as your father is a traitor.”

  “Why are they hanging people?” I said.

  “The men, you mean? They’re scared of women. They always have been. That’s why they strike so viciously, and so often, to remind us that despite our being smarter, they can rile a mob quicker.”

  “Do you hate them too?”

  “Men?” Auntie asked. “No. I just don’t trust them. They’re weak, and they’re selfish.”

  “But why do they hang people?”

  “Because they want to,” she said.

  She ordered me to grab her suitcase. It was heavy and by the way things, heavy things, shifted around inside it I wondered if she’d brought a case of rocks with her. My young mind could easily imagine her collecting rocks. She was a witch and they were in touch with nature, is what I imagined. Rocks, trees, hedgerows, water, all held some special holiness that the Christians abhorred because they thought they were above it all. Foolish, I knew, even as a tiny little ogre. I carried her suitcase behind her down the hall, following, until it became too difficult, and then I dragged it along the floor, hoping that she wouldn’t notice.

  I stopped outside the bedroom door. I wasn’t allowed in my mother’s room. Father’s was across the hall. I wasn’t allowed in there either. Auntie lit a lamp for it was full-on dark by now and she looked from bare wall to bare wall and said, “My dear Sarah has never had much taste. Bah, look at this. You’d think it was his room.” She pointed through the wall at the kitchen where my father hid, still nursing the broken finger my mother had given him when she’d attempted escape. “But, we’ll make do, won’t we, little ogre?”

  “I’m staying in here with you?”

  “Why not? Do you think your dear old daddy will object? Or,” she said, sniffing her armpits, “do I smell funny?”

  I giggled. “You smell old.”

  She guffawed and then joined me in giggling.

  “You’re horrible,” she said. Then she sat on the bed and said, “Leave the suitcase. Come here.” She patted her leg and I climbed into her lap and laid my head against her shoulder. She’d been gone a long, long time. Since my fourth birthday. She said, “Have you missed me, Dorothy?”

  I nodded. Her shoulder was bony. I imagined that my mother’s had felt similar.

  I said, “How long are you staying?”

  “Not long,” she said.

  I hung my head, hoping that she’d notice my disappointment and say she’d stay forever, but instead she whispered, “But when I go, I’m taking you with me.”

  “Really?” As much as I wanted to believe her, I couldn’t. Father would never let me go anywhere with her. He didn’t even like her. I don’t think he even liked my mother, if his having her arrested proved anything.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve been the world over, my dear ogre,” Auntie said, “and I think I’ve found just the place.”

  “Is it like here?”

  “Nothing like here.”

  “Good.”

  “You don’t like it, do you?”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t feel right.”

  Auntie giggled again and tickled my sides until I felt my bladder would burst. As if sensing it, she said, “Run on into the bathroom. I’ll grab my old bag and make myself at home.”

  I stood in the middle of my mother’s room, watching her. She didn’t look much like her sister, my mother, other than in the build of their bodies. My mom’s hair was yellow, Auntie’s black as raven wings. My mother had bright blue eyes that always had a defeated look about them. Auntie’s eyes were green and lively, and she liked to smile and make other people uncomfortable, the more of which she succeeded at the more her smile widened. She was a little devil and I loved her dearly, but I also loved my mother and worried about her. I stared at Auntie’s back a moment longer as she unpacked her things, which I couldn’t see from where I stood, and said, “Are they going to hang Mother?”

  Auntie turned slowly. Her chin was a sharp point, her lips a flat line, her eyes opaque. “Yes,” she said. “They’ll string her up by her neck.”

  “She’s not a witch,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why are they doing it?”

  “I told you already,” she said.

  I nodded, numb, and said, “Because they want to.”

  *****

  We stayed up late into the night and for once Father didn’t cry and beg. He was mute in his room, or maybe he’d left the house all together, in search of greener pastures, or to find a mob to back him in burning Auntie at the stake in the town square.

  The moon glowed like soft, malleable gold in the black velvet pouch of sky. I played with dolls Auntie had made of policeman O’Connor, and the priest, whose name she told me was Longfellow. The dolls she learned about on a trip to Africa where they were popular among certain tribes. She said that most people here in Salem and those back in England, would find them ridiculous and childish. “Superstitious,” she said. “Yet, they work. I’ve seen them destroy men and I’ve seen them heal others. To discard something as foolish without ever trying it only shows how pompous some people can be.” She smiled at me and said, “What do you think?”

  “I think they’re cuter than O’Connor or Longfellow,” I said.

  She rubbed my head and then gripped my
neck. “Just remember that they’re not toys.”

  “Do you have any toys?”

  “Sometimes,” Auntie said, “I forget that you are so young.”

  “And sometimes, I forget that you’re not.”

  She poked me in the side. “Give me those dolls. I’m sure we can find something in my travels that you can have for the purpose of your selfish games.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  We pulled item after item from her suitcase and soon a tower of possessions, more than could have fit into twenty suitcases, crowded the mattress and nearly struck the ceiling. There were clothes, bones, crystals, maps, love letters, rings, scarves, winter coats, balms, dried fruit, a shriveled bat, various insects in various states of decomposition, a single eyeball that appeared to watch us no matter where I hopped in the room. I said, “I want the eye!”

  “Ah,” she said. “That is not up for grabs. At least not until my passing which may be several eras in number since the silent gods grant me health and immortality.”

  “What is it for?” I said.

  She laughed and took it gently from my palm, where it had rested coolly, spinning slowly and tickling my flesh. “It is too much for one as you.”

  “Why?”

  “Look yonder for something else,” she said, done speaking on the matter. The lamp flickered. The night air was warm through the gap in the window near Mother’s bed. Dogs, perhaps strays, bayed in the dark streets; an occasional passerby would pause below in the road before hurrying on with fervor.

  I picked up a crystal and crawled onto the mattress which was soft in some places and lumpy in others. Mother and Father had not shared a room since as far back as I could remember, which wasn’t all that far, considering my years then.

  I asked Auntie, “Is there anything we can do to help Mother?”

  She was packing all the items back into her suitcase but paused to shake her head. She said softly, “Nothing. And I’m afraid it will only get worse before it improves.”

  “Worse for us, or for everybody?”

  “For you.”