Bridget

In the Fall, the leaves in the cemetery change and some idiot’s been by with roses again, stems carefully de-thorned, wrapped in lengths of crêpey black ribbon which blows in the breeze. They are, she thinks, a thoughtless extravagance. Some days, she thinks that she likes that about them best.

Fall is a moving season.

She looks at the carved stone benches, the wet leaves, reddish and gold, and she things about these things and who knows what the other-she thinks. They have never pretended to understand each other. They come from the same house in different places.

The other-she wears a red bodice and she smokes a pipe, though the smoke is odourless and colourless here, in this place. The wind takes it. She sits with her knees wide spread on the wet stone bench, her ruddy skirt kilted between her thighs, her boots muddied, though God knows where the mud comes from. Because they never leave the bench. Someone carved their name there (their shared name), and kept them. They stay.

Bridget Bishop. Hanged June 10, 1692.

And that’s the truth of it, and there is no justice in the world but the justice belonging to God.

They sit together on that bench, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, a carefully black wrapped stem across their knees…the both of her. The two of them, and the children come running and laughing along the road. The children, not children at all but young women, tall and graceful in unfamiliar clothes, old enough to run homes and bear children, bear husbands, but still, they run like children, laughing, with the wind pulling at the unbound length of their hair.

And they are both jealous but they recognise that times do change, and that this is a moving season.

Here it is: to begin with, she was Bridget Wasslbee and she was not the best wife, but she tried. There was gagging in the marketplace and whipping, and all because she raised her voice. You shouldn’t raise your voice. Those girls, those running girls, they shout and laugh.

I am no witch. I am innocent. I know nothing of it.

Like it mattered what she knew and didn’t know. Women fall and are taken into history and sometimes they hang you so that, centuries later, the leaves will still turn.

“They made you up,” she says, when she’s feeling old and vicious and unloved. “They made you up because a good story is better than a bad one.”

The other shrugs, her linen stained above her red bodice, her pipe leaning between her fingers. Their shoulders brush and the roses falls to the floor and maybe someone will pick it up and maybe the wind will take it. There will be other roses.

“Better made up than forgotten.”

Too, too cruel. Too cruel by far.

These are the things which they do to each other. These are things which she does to herself.

June 10^th, 1692. Even if that wasn’t carved beneath her backside, she’d remember it. Red bodice and brown, they sit beside each other on the bench. Once, up on the hill, there was an oak tree, and they hanged her there alone, and both of them died.

And that’s the truth of it, and there is no justice in the world, not one bit.

(This memorial is dedicated to the enduring lessons of human rights and tolerance learned from the Salem witch trials of 1692).