The Witch's Trinity (14 page)

“Tomorrow at first light. We see no need to delay, we are all so terribly hungry.”

The cat squirmed, upset at being confined, and finally yowled. Everyone turned to look at me. I released the beast, and it leaped to the foot of my pallet, where it yowled again. Irmeltrud grabbed the broom from the corner and advanced upon the cat. “I see something we can eat,” she said grimly. “I’ll cook it up and we can defeat its evil in that manner.”

“Mutter, no!” cried Alke. “Wait for Vater to come home with venison. We don’t want to eat evil!”

The cat batted at the broom, and Irmeltrud smacked its flank. Behind her, Jost moved to open the door. “There’s not enough meat to bother,” he said. “It’s a wee beast.” The cat ran a diagonal path away from Irmeltrud as she continued trying to hit it with the broom. I got out of bed, barely noticing the cold, and tried to grab the broom away. The cat darted to the open door, running through Jost’s legs, and was gone. Jost closed the door and Irmeltrud stopped fighting and let me have the broom.

“There, then!” she said. “You won’t lift it for an instant to rid this cottage of dirt, but you have all kinds of vigor when it comes to protecting one of the devil’s own!”

“Stop, wife, it was only a cat!” said Jost. “You were glad enough of them when there was grain in the mill and the cats kept the rats from it.”

“That cat is uncanny,” murmured Irmeltrud. “It came from Güde’s bed, as shameless as an incubus….”

“It’s merely a thing to keep an old woman happy,” said Jost.

“No one in this household listens to me,” said Irmeltrud.

That night, Jost and Irmeltrud said goodbye in the way that lovers do. They grunted and panted and made such revel that I knew the children were awake next to them, hoping it would soon cease.
Should they make another child,
I thought bitterly,
so there is another mouth that is hungry?

Long after things became quiet, I could not sleep.

I heard scratching at the door and this time did not hesitate. There was no bad in that cat. It was simply a mouser, and one that would cuddle against me, the only one in this household that had to sleep apart from the others. I opened the door to it and raced it back to the straw. I held up the blanket again, so that it might crawl under, but this time it perched on my chest and simply stared at me. Irmeltrud’s words chimed again in my ear. This was how the incubi came to women in the night, sitting atop their bodies with eyes shining. I stared back at those eyes, riveted. The cat was a dark shape outlined by the remnants of the kitchen fire behind it. Its ears were alert and triangular, making me think of the pagan shapes we had been told to no longer think of. I breathed uncomfortably under its weight, wondering if this was friend or foe. Then, on an eerie pivot, its head slowly moved, and as its eyes caught the last glow from the fire, the face became alive with a demon’s malevolence. The green eyes shone through the dark like lanterns, and I felt the palpable beat of evil in the room. These eyes were the brightest light in the dark cottage.

“The cat is Satan’s apprentice!” I screamed, and tossed my bedclothes from me, hearing the thud as the cat hit the ground. Jost was instantly at my side. I screamed again, pointing to where I last saw it. “Oh, Jost, its eyes!”

Irmeltrud joined me in screaming, and I clung to her, terrified. She had been right! How I wished she had pounded it with her broom until its wrong heart stopped beating. To think I had slept with it nestled at my breast! I shuddered to think how its eyes must have glowed beneath the blankets.

Jost scooped it up and tossed it out into the night.

“Lock the door!” I cried. The children were on my straw now too, hugging the mass that was Irmeltrud and myself.

“What did you see?” asked Jost.

“Its eyes shone in the darkness bright as any candle,” I said. “I have never seen such a fright!” But just the day before I had seen innocent Künne Himmelmann burned at the stake. Was the cat’s gleaming face truly worse? “It was pure evil,” I continued, subdued. “The wildness of its gaze…I saw how much harm it meant me.”

“I know not what to say,” said Jost. “I believe you, Mutter, but I also…” His voice trailed off.

I let go of Irmeltrud. My own son did not believe me.

Jost left in the morning as planned. We all kissed him at the door and then stood there in the cold, watching him gather with the other men and then disappear.

9

T
HREE DAYS SINCE THE HUNTERS LEFT

T
he days passed. At each meal hour, I watched Irmeltrud hesitate and wonder whether to call the children to the board for the mere ceremony of it or to hope that they forgot this family ritual. She began an endless accounting of what food had once been in our larder: the berries in profusion, the meat that softly bled into the cloth we wrapped it in, the breads, the carrots, and the cabbages all lined up like children on a bench. She wouldn’t stop. Onions whose outer film we discarded—“Just tossed away, because we had so much!” she mourned—the oily meat of a goose, the jelly inside a cow’s hoof, the cheeses of various colors and thicknesses, the knife one might choose to attack a particular cheese.

This afternoon, as we sat with the wind blowing open the window cloth and sending in little sniffets of snow, she spake of her father’s sheep herd. These were hardy creatures that never minded the snow, even if it came to the height of their woolly heads. They tramped through it and bleated their happy cries across all the hillsides. In summertime, they were a gorgeous sight, like clouds come to rest upon a green sky. The sheep gave so much: their thick wool was carded and spun into strong thread, their mutton was juicy and renowned across this land. But when her family fell ill to the plague, the only untouched ones were too young to know how to care for the sheep. Irmeltrud remembered her mother saying, “Go and gather them and bring them to the barn for their meal,” and she went so far as to go outside and walk toward the sheep, but being so young, she only tried to drag one to the barn by its feet. It resisted and sprang out of her grasp. “The sheep died of starvation, Güde,” she told me. “They all tried to come to the barn eventually, but I was so young I couldn’t understand what they wanted. A week later, a neighbor man came. He had been ill himself and, remembering the sheep upon recovering, came to see if he could help. The sheep were all on their sides, dead as trapped houseflies. We did our best to salt the meat and store it, but so many had already begun to rot that we had to simply leave them for the birds that could eat around the worms. Such an incredible waste, I can’t bear to think of it!” And with her head on her arms, Irmeltrud began to cry.

I was filled with amaze: these sheep had been dead nearly twenty years! Did she think we’d still be eating of their salted flesh had she and the neighbor been more painstaking?

After she cried awhile, she propped her chin on her folded arms and proceeded to wonder aloud what food others in the village had. The Webers had five chickens but ten children; they would not be likely to share. Across town, the Brauers had a cow, but she knew it had been sickly; probably they had already slaughtered it while flesh still clung to its bones. The cheese maker had been slowly selling all her goods, but surely she kept back a few wheels for herself. Would she be willing to trade, and if so, what could Irmeltrud give her?

She went on and on, her eyes squeezed to the size of juniper berries in contemplation. She looked like an old miser in a fairy tale counting out his money.

“Ha ha!” she said, her head rising. “The Töpfers’ hen must be laying again, now that Künne’s spell has been broken! I will run over there now and see if they will let us have an egg or two. What shall I bring? What shall I bring?” She walked up and down the length of the cottage. “We have nothing. Güde, have you hidden away anything?”

I shook my head.

“A bit of embroidery? A pinch of salt? I’ll bring them some salt.” She poured a spoon’s worth into a napkin and tied it up. “Watch the children, Güde. I’ll be back soon, hopefully with some eggs.”

I did not stir from the table the entire time she was gone. Matern and Alke played a slow game of yarn. I knew none of us had energy to move, for we had last eaten on the ham earned with Künne’s wood many days ago.

Irmeltrud returned with a scowl, but she did have a bundle under her arm. The children ran to her with wide eyes. “Sit down, then, and we’ll eat, no matter the hour,” she said briskly. The children obediently took their places on the bench. Alke pushed me a bit, her small hands on my hip, for I had sat too close to her spot. They folded their hands and bent their heads, in a blur of motion, for they wanted to pray and eat.

“Thank you, Lord, for this,” said Irmeltrud. “We ask that you multiply it, even as you multiplied the fish for the fishermen, for this is scarcely enough for one to eat. We thank you for your mercy.”

I opened my eyes when she said “scarcely enough for one to eat” and saw the snarl on her face. This was a prayer made in anger.

She unwrapped the bundle. It was old bread, with a rime of green around the edge. She took a knife to it, biting out words as she did so. “The hen is still enchanted and will not lay. Or at least that’s what they say. I poked my head in and saw her looking pert as could be. But who would want to share in these evil times? They took my precious salt and gave me this horrendous loaf in return. Not fit to feed a dog. I wonder that they didn’t blush as they handed it over. I was of half a mind to spill the salt on the ground and sow its bitter seeds with my spit. But I held back. Maybe they will soften and share the eggs later.”

She gave the first hunk to Matern, who eagerly brought it to his mouth and began scraping it with his teeth. She struggled with the knife. “Should use an axe, for it’s wood more than bread. How did they dare give it? It’s something, though. Here you be, Alke.” Alke’s piece had the most green on it and she sniffed it for long moments before bringing it to her mouth.

“Don’t grieve on it, child, just manage it,” said Irmeltrud. The remaining bit was the size of Matern’s and we both stared at it.

“I’ll cut that in half, then,” she said. But she made no move.

Her eyes lifted to mine in a blaze of hunger. The children ate the bread, sounding like rats cutting their teeth on a table leg. Even though the bread was green and hard I wanted it. Fiercely. My head began to ache, a sharp, piercing pain as if someone had taken the fireplace poker and gone in through my eyes.

And I saw that pain in Irmeltrud’s eyes too.

But as much as I hungered, a part of me began reasoning.
Jost is gone. Irmeltrud is free to practice her cruelty without rebuff. We are frighteningly low on food. She cut wood, and made the children help her, to put an old family friend to death. All for want of food.
I thought,
Maybe this is one time I should go without.
I realized my hands were hovering in the air, ready to receive the cut of bread. I pulled them down into my lap and clutched my thighs through my skirt. “Irmeltrud,” I began, and it was but a whisper. I inhaled and made myself louder. “I am not hungry. You eat it all.” She turned her back on me, still sitting on the bench but now facing the fire. I watched her cap bob up and down as she ate the bread.

Later, I was fetching snow in the bucket to melt for water when I realized I hadn’t seen Jost for a while. I carried the bucket inside and used my hand to move the snow into the hanging kettle over the fire. It was thick snow and not easy to move. Irmeltrud sewed by the hearth. Alke and Matern played with the shavings of wood Jost had been whittling days ago.

“Where’s Jost?” I asked.

All three of them stopped their toil to look at me.

“Don’t you know?” I asked.

“Güde, the things you forget!” said Irmeltrud. “Your own son is out there in the cold, doing his best to find food for us!”

“In the woods?”

“No, silly old woman, far from here. He’s with a hunting party gone several days now, and you have been told all this before!”

I settled the rest of the snow and went back outside for more, disturbed. It sounded untrue, that Jost would leave us for so long. A hunting party? Why, our woods were full of stags and bears; why should he travel further? I looked out over the land, snow glistening under a dark sky. It was as if the dimness of the forest was spreading. Even the meadow looked close and small and tucked up against the sky.