The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

  What I don’t understand is why a witch like Margery, who could see so clearly through the king’s public face, didn’t look at the people on the scaffold preparing to die and also think, “Why should it be you and not me?” But of course the future only seems short after the fact, it tends to be slow in coming and its dangers only obvious later. I do not think I am in danger right now. Who knows? Maybe I’m even not.

  There is the one where the devil tells the father he’ll make him a rich man if he gives him what’s behind the barn. The father thinks it’s the apple tree behind the barn, but of course it’s his daughter.

  The daughter was a clever girl who drew a protective circle and kept herself inside. She was too clean for the devil to take her this way. So the devil gave her father a choice: Take away her water or die. The father took away her water, but she cried enough tears to wash herself. So the devil gave the father another choice: Cut off her hands so can’t wash herself or die. She held out her hands while her father cut them off. Then she cried enough tears to wash herself clean once more, down to the bloody stumps. So the devil gave up. She too left her father’s farm after that, in the opposite direction, for obvious reasons, and ended up later on married to the king. While the king was off to war and she was giving birth, the devil came back to try again. She had the baby tied to her back and set off into the forest. An old beggar man appeared in time to hold the baby to her breast so it could eat. Then he pointed her to a magic oak tree and when she wrapped her arms around it, her hands grew back. He showed her an empty cottage where she lived in simple happiness with her baby. In time the king found her there and they lived in joy for the rest of their lives.

  My husband treads water in this blue lake ringed by mountains and trees, while our daughter practices pushing off from the shallows to reach him at the edge of deep. I sit on the banks watching an eagle grab a fish from the waves lapping the far shore. We ask each other if that was really a happy ending, or if the devil will just keep coming back from time to time, to see if he can’t catch her now. We wonder who that old man really was. We are, of course, thinking about our own lives, to which we must eventually return, and thinking about what might be waiting for us when we do.

  “Not only do memory and hope make a difference in our feelings as regards past and future, but almost our whole vocabulary is filled with ideas of activity, of things done now for the sake of their future effects.”

  Unlike her servant Margery, Eleanor Cobham was highborn, so her punishment was not execution. Instead she was paraded through the street while a candle tied to her hand burned down into a nub atop an agonizing wound. Then she was exiled to the Isle of Man to spend the rest of her life looking across the water toward her old home.

  Did she really want the king dead? Or did she just need someone to chart all of the possibilities for the future so she wouldn’t feel so rattled with hope and fear of her own stars? These are among the endless sky of things we cannot possibly know.

  The Invention of Roses

  Dorothy, according to this and that lying storyteller of a medieval historian, was taken before a judge and tortured for the witchcraft of refusing to marry a powerful man.

  And then tortured for the witchcraft of returning from the tub of boiling oil unharmed.

  And subsequently for surviving unmarked for nine days in a deep prison without food or drink.

  For saying she was fed on the succor of God’s angels.

  For being fairer and brighter to look upon than ever before.

  For the descent of a multitude of angels and the sound of the demon fiends in the air wailing, “O Dorothy why dost thou destroy us and torment us so sore?” she was hanged on the gibbet and rent with hooks of iron. On and on it went, graphic and strangely erotic, as the martyrologium always are. What more proof could a judge possibly need?

  To understand the actions of the judges, it is helpful to remember her crime was never that she displayed too little of her power.

  Near the end of her trial, she gave a very long speech about faith in God that only a priest could love. The judge asked, “How long wilt thou drag us along with thy witchcraft?” She answered, “I am ready to suffer for my lord, my spouse, in whose gardeyne full delicious I have gaderd rosis and apples.” Then she bowed her head and the man cut it off.

  She bowed her head and the man cut if off, but not before she was dragged through the streets to the place of execution.

  She bowed her head and the man cut it off, but not before Theophilus, a notary of Rome, mocked her from his jeering place on the side of the road by asking for roses and apples from her spouse’s garden even though it was midwinter.

  She bowed her head, but not before a child with star-filled eyes came to her carrying a basket with three roses and three apples. And not before she sent that boy to find Theophilus.

  To convert him and save his soul and set him on his own path to glorious martyrdom, the fifteenth-century account claims. But you could also say she was trolling him. In any event, by this miracle the city of Caesarea in Cappadocia, which is in present-day Turkey, was converted and saved.

  This was a reassuring story to medieval Christians who liked to tell themselves they understood what they needed to of this faraway place where their soldiers set forth on crusades even as heretics at home began to burn in ever greater numbers. In this way it reminds me very much of our war, our president, our police beating batons against their shields as they chant through body armor and face masks, “Whose streets? Our streets.” It reminds me of every headline in the paper every morning of this year or that one.

  For preaching of Dorothy’s miracle in the streets, Theophilus was cut into small pieces and fed to the birds.

  For reasons that are unclear to me, the Church has since sanctified Dorothy and Theophilus, suggesting we should take comfort in this tale.

  For reasons that are unclear to me, considering she was decapitated, not burned, Dorothy was named a special protectress against fire, lightening, and thundering.

  Everything is coming up roses, Sir John Mandeville said, in another fifteenth-century collection of marvelous and chiefly untrue accounts of far travels. In Bethlehem, he wrote, a woman was sentenced to burn for consorting with demons. She professed her innocence with the fervency of a Desdemona cultivar in full bloom. She prayed to the lord as if she were offering a bouquet of those award-winning Eleanors.

  When she entered her pyre, the branches that had been licking flames became boughs laden red with Happy Christmas, the branches not yet ignited became boughs of blossoms as white as the Sir Galahad. “And those were the first roses and rosers that any man saw, and thus was the mayden saved through the grace of God.”

  By Mandeville’s account, the place of this miracle became a great lake of rose bushes that stretch as far as the eye can see and many crusaders clipped huge blossoms of the damask as their horses waded through.

  One of the ways I know I am entirely and really here is to walk in the fall woods among the bare and fragile trees. Witches’-broom, the common name for a deformity in a woody plant, is a disease that changes the natural structure so that a mass of shoots grows from a single point. After the leaves fall, you might see some poor tree looking over-nested or, if it is very far gone, its crown looks like a heart pincushioned by arrows. In roses the foliage becomes distorted and frazzled. The leaves become so red they are almost purple. They refuse to open any further than a tight rosette and become excessively thorny.

  I have little interest in roses. They are ugly and too precious. I just like the way a dying girl flipped off an asshole and it got called a miracle. And then that asshole had a change of heart.

  I like the way people could imagine themselves making a mistake and God saving them from it, though people who think God will save them from their mistakes worry me too.

  The wild rose of the Teutons symbolized battle, death, the underworld. Their adolescent soldiers charged into the fight garlanded with roses. They called the battlefiel
ds where they fell rose gardens.

  Rose—Hebrew for first blood spilled on the earth.

  Rose—Greek for the blood of Xerxes.

  Rose—Christian for Mary the Mother, for virtuous suffering and virtuous joy, for virgins devoted to God.

  Rose—French for prostitute.

  Rose—Roman for decadence.

  Rose—English for a certain kind of power and the exchange of sweet secrets.

  I have never been given roses by a man who wasn’t making me uncomfortable with how hard he was, it seemed, trying to earn, or maybe even buy, me.

  Rose—nineteenth-century apothecary for headache, hysteria, and other female complaints.

  A popular opinion is that roses mean beauty. A popular opinion is that the pursuit of beauty will lead us to justice. Beauty means many things, of which truth and justice seem to be the most rare. Roses, of any color, are the symbol of people telling themselves what they want to hear and then giving a bouquet of it to someone else, with a note on the card that says in fine calligraphy, “Believe me when I say …”

  In one tale the foam that dripped from Aphrodite as she emerged from the sea turned into white roses. The tears she shed over the body of her beloved Adonis turned them red. In another version Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, emerged from the sea for no other reason than that was where Ouranos’s testicles fell when his son Chronos cut them off with a sickle.

  The Invention of Mothers

  Set chopped up his rival Osiris and scattered the pieces across the world.

  Isis was the first queen and the first witch. The first spell went like this:

  For a year Isis roamed the earth gathering up the pieces. Then she molded the one bit that could not be found out of clay. Was it his penis? His heart? His soul? It is unclear, but with this piece she made in hand, she could breathe the words that brought her beloved back to life.

  Her magic only lasted a night, but that was long enough to conceive a child who would grow up to make Set pay.

  The Gertrude bird first came into the world when a woman named Gertrude refused to feed Christ and Saint Peter. Now she is a woodpecker and makes unpleasant noises. I recognize this woodpeckered woman turned nagging bird by dissatisfied men. I recognize a version of myself and my mother and hers in such mean wizardry.

  Dido was the heir to her father’s throne, but the people would only accept her brother. She smuggled away a fortune on their behalf, but they called her prostitute. She sailed across the sea to found a new city on a hill, but they would only accept her husband as leader. When she is called Dido her name means beloved and wanderer. In an older version of the story she is called Elisha and her name means creator god and fire and woman.

  When she could take no more, she made a pyre and threw herself on it.

  I read the picture-book version of Jason and the Argonauts to my daughter on a day when she was shaken by a boy as he told her to “Shut up, Bossy.” She thinks a tale of adventure will make her feel better.

  Much about motherhood is a challenge, but among its comforts is how I get to read so many things I never knew before and never knew I needed. For example, I didn’t know Jason and the Argonauts is really The Witch Medea Gets Your Golden Fleece for You, You Fucking Incompetent.

  On the night of her escape with Jason and her father’s fleece, Medea chopped up her brother and strewed the parts of him around the forest so their father would be stopped by grief and the duty to gather the pieces of his son back up.

  I can’t read this scene without wondering what that brother did to her, what her father did. The book says Hera cursed her to love Jason. But how many times have I read the word seduced when what happened was raped? Read loved but understood imprisoned? I think a curse from Hera meant escape from an abusive situation by any means necessary.

  In search of Dido’s Carthage I stumbled on the story of Furra, a medieval queen of Sidama, in present-day Ethiopia. She ruled for seven years, advising the women of her kingdom never to submit to the men. Eventually the men tricked her into riding a wild steed that tore her body apart.

  There is a little poem about all the places in the countryside that are named after her, Seyoum Hameso documents in The Oromo Commentary:

  Her shoulders dropped in Qorke,

  Her waist dropped in Hallo,

  Her limbs dropped in Dassie,

  Her genitals dropped in Saala,

  Her remains dropped in Kuura.

  In these places men, it is said, beat the ground in disgust. Women pour milk on the ground at the mention of her name.

  She is so young, this daughter of mine—does she even remember the boy in last year’s grade who wouldn’t stop kissing her? Elbows, the tip of her ponytail, small nuisances to make her cry with fury that she couldn’t make him stop.

  Beyond the sea came many more adventures resolved by Medea’s magic. She showed some daughters a spell whereby she turned an old ram into a young one after dropping it in her boiling cauldron. Do we believe the daughters when they say they only wanted to restore their father’s youth? They swore before his boiled corpse they thought surely it would work. Personally, I think of this chapter as Medea’s “Spell for a Good Cover Story Which She’ll Give to Any Woman Who Asks.”

  It’s true I pretty much never believe a white man assaulted by a woman didn’t have it coming. “What did you do?” I ask such a man, as I have so often been asked. “It takes two to fight,” I parrot. Maybe he should have walked away and hidden in a bathroom stall to cry like the rest of us.

  When she asked the teacher to make that boy stop kissing her, the teacher said it was sweet, he had a crush. That was when I told my daughter she should push this child as hard as she could and tell him to kiss the dirt instead. But already she was too afraid.

  Another of Medea’s clever deeds was to feed raw meat to the Witch of the Woods and her hounds so the Argonauts could pass safely. The men ran in terror past the crone crouched and devouring, her face blood-stained with gluttony, while our sorceress lingered to say goodbye with affection to a woman we realize is her friend and sister in the craft. If any moment in this story can be made real, I want this friendship with the woman who will grow up to become Baba Yaga in her house of sweets to be the one.

  Were I ever going to advise a daughter that boys will be boys, it would be in the face of what was done to Talos. Talos, a man of stone and fire, stood at the shore doing his job stopping people who should be stopped. It seems clear to me that Jason should be stopped. But Medea tricked the monster into letting her unplug the nail that held in his ichorous fire. He dies in her arms, floating in the sea, asking when she was going to fill him back up with the immortality she promised. How tenderly she cradles him as she is killing him. Then I remember he was a volcano man who wanted immortality on top of that. Typical.

  There was a boy my mother encouraged me to hit. Years passed before he forced me to the edge of my own courage. It’s true what the principal said to me in the office after sending him back to class, that he was smaller than the other boys and treated by them with cruelty. It is also true that when my mother was asked to pay for the glasses I broke in a bloody smear across his face she said the only part of this that made her sorry was that it had taken me so long.

  She’d promised me and I think she really believed that one good fight would be enough, but I had to hit him again a year later. And then came another boy and others after that.

  Gertrude Bell, 1868–1926, was an intrepid linguist, mapmaker, diplomat, and spy. She is credited as essential to the British endeavor of taking over Persia, making her the iconic embodiment of the white feminist problem. She was known as “Khatun, the Uncrowned Queen of Iraq.”

  What to make of her death by sleeping pill overdose?

  From Bell’s papers: “There is a moment, too, when one is newly arrived in the East, when one is conscious of the world shrinking at one end and growing at the other till all the perspective of life is changed.”

  I’m afraid
sometimes I’m becoming a Medea who can’t find the limits of her own vengeance. Who would destroy everything, including her own joy, to see the world made so fair a woman can commit any atrocity a Jason can. And I think of how a Khatun may prefer to hide her face in the lie that she has no power over the moral responsibility of knowing exactly how much she is capable of.

  On the day my daughter shed those hot tears, I had been in an important meeting. There is not much about it that I can tell you. I will say only that my HR rep began by noting he thought at first I was one of the undergraduates. I was thirty-six, had a child, a PhD and four books to my name. Shall I tell you how long my skirt was or how demurely my hair pulled back? Because I checked these things before and after, as this life has taught me to do. The man chuckled like it was some kind of compliment to call a grown woman “cute” in front of the university’s Threat Assessment Team and that giant binder of Title IX policies at the center of the table. The hour ended in bitterness and resentment on all sides.