A Salem Midwife’s Civil War Lament

from pre-1700 to 1862, following the Battle of Antietam~

Death-prayers dismantled the dawn, mocked the air, throttled the name of the Divine as if to rid the village of an evil — an assumed evil — burning at the stake. Burning in the form of those charged with witchcraft.
Their ashes released an ineffable vapor in the exequies breathed from the throats of their accusers — growling charlatans invoking terror and death in the place where life and love and laughter should have been.

In those years there was no laughter. Too long before the infamous witch-trials there was only hardness and worry, threat of death around every corner, and blame for evil ways voiced from the tongues of the true evil lurking in their midst.

“Die!” they’d shouted, throwing all manner of venom at the ‘guilty’ ones. Men, women, children, soon it didn’t matter — any were blamed as the ‘pure ones’ saw fit. To continue ridding the villages of the evil in their midst? No, no. To any outsiders, the evil was vivid in the shrieking echoes of “Die, Witch, Die!” that still, to this day ring in her ears. And she asks herself again, why was she not singled out? She, who held certain questionable abilities? She, who could have withstood the rope, the fire, the weight of rocks.

She was always a softy for a happy ending, always believed somewhere in the back of her throat that “all’s-well-that-ends-well” line. But the nefarious happenings of Mary Bailey Bacheler and Ann Hibbens, all but lost among the manifold of the misaligned, broke her belief in the goodness of others.

In Massachusetts, where she was residing in the middle of the seventeenth century, throughout Europe and other places, the witch-trials of set off a blaze of other trials — as if exposing fornication and witchcraft had come into fashion. But theirs weren’t tales told on All Hallows Eve. Their lives were real. So, so real, lighting up the blasphemy of puritanical religion — the true contagion of the masses. All those innocents that died slandered as heretics. Goody So-and-So standing silent while at the end of her daughter’s accusing finger stood an innocent woman, then another — the cause of the tale-spinning daughter and her mischief-making friends, bored perhaps, jealous perchance, whipping up accusations of a so-called witchcraft, or other pejorative suspicions. Looking to entertain themselves? Their mothers and other silent Goodies So-and-So standing by feigning helplessness, shrugging powerless, silently watching out of fear-salted gazes, waiting with bated breath lest they be the next ones singled out. When all the while it should have been she. And she question, why? Why was it not her — the one who should’ve hanged?

She had been alive for decades before the trials, lived in towns long since buried under new villages. In silence, she had cultivated invisibility. Invisibility — the thing women seem to fear most. She craved it. Invisibility kept her safe. The ability to blend with the narrow crowds, cause little to no stir wherever she was. In this everyman guise she married, grew her gardens, tended her children and her children’s children, buried mher husband when he died of a lung affliction, and brought others’ children into the puritanical world that beckoned them to grow into judges of the innocent and believers of the deceivers. She’d watched new generations thrive, harden, and bear their own children — a few of which were the very girls crooking their fingers in agitated entertainment at women who had no defense other than their panic. Girls who watched with eyes of flint that sparked terrified women to shrieks of innocence while the women were carried off to trial, then eventually to death.

How did her invisibility cloak her from those who desired all evil purged from their midst? Surely, her strange abilities should have given her away, fodder for the hangman if they’d only known. Why did they not see?

To this day, it baffles her…

She walked among those people and their descendants, and their descendants, a palimpsest in her common dress with her common tongue, avoiding conflict as she had, for centuries, done. Through the years, she was her own daughter several times over in villages far enough apart not to know that her grave held another set of bones that belonged to her real daughter a time or two — or no one. She traveled, offering a midwife’s assistance to mothers deep in their confinements, although, at that time there was no confinement. A woman worked until the pains set in and then just sort of collapsed in labor. She’d shake her head as they’d bring the laboring mother into the house and fetch her to see to the birthing.

Most times the babies lived; at times, they didn’t. She had the gift though, so before the mothers knew their babies’ fates, she could simply rub their blue lips, their still bellies, breathe into them the will to live, and they’d sputter a gasp and cry, their parents none the wiser. Sometimes all it took was a brisk rubbing of their footsoles before they’d lust up with life, those feisty little ones.

Wherever she went, she was held in deep regard. At first a stranger, but soon, village women would nod as she passed by, eventually satisfied in the knowledge of their experience — when she was present, their babies lived. And bringing life kept the wolves of suspicion at bay. The villagers rejoiced, the mothers hesitant to birth until she was present. She’d show up with the humble confidence a woman as old as she carries. Nothing more. She knew the art of herbs but with herbs you have to take care. Herbs pose a question. The ignorant always question, so she was careful with herbs. She owned no cauldron other than that which is standard, speaks nothing obscure, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious. Just a sharp intake of “Blessed be the Bringer of Life” when each blue newborn voiced its pinking existence.

Some tried to call her when an older child was mortally ill, but this was dangerous. This may bring life, it may bring death. Only the child can will itself in her hands to return to life or not. So she took herself off in times of greatest threat without word, and moved on to a distant town, new and unknown.

She doesn’t hold life in her hands. She don’t know why she can breathe life into these tiny ones, but she does know that she haven’t died in six hundred and seventy-three years. An old, old girl, with the shrieks of those early puritan women still ringing their insistent innocence in her ears. She takes them with her, serves in honor of their names — from Bridget Bishop to Martha Corey who lost her husband under a pile of rocks — Giles, slain for non-compliance to the accusations presented to him — three days before Martha was hanged.

And then almost two centuries later, pausing only long enough to breathe as we remembered with a sigh how far we’ve come in those years following the trials. Our own country then, our own set of laws. Our own ability to tumble down a monarchy and set ourselves up as mini-minded gods. The ability to breathe the will to live as we want.
Some of us.

It only took a few decades to tear ourselves asunder, one from the other in our demand for the pursuit of happiness — even when that pursuit enslaved the brave and singed their freedom.

We were broken, North and South. There is no us and them. It is only we. But, indivisible? In those middling days she walked the bloody fields of the blue-and-gray willing them to live. Some rose, she tried, some shook their heads and closed their eyes. In their names she went on to assist the births of the children their young wives were carrying. And she wept for what we do to ourselves in this vast melee of crowded ignorance.

. . .

Years laid generations to rest, their biases inked into the minds of the future. The future became the present. A present that leaves its handprint on the graves of generations to come. Where are we now in the factions of intolerance — justified and embellished? A few of us contend with the civil mercy of rights.

Mercy, such a strange word — so selective, so misunderstood.

The same patterns reveal themselves to new people who fight life and soul for what they hold dear, even though it proverbially tears us limb from limb when not so very long ago, our forebears died because their freedom was suffocated out from under them, while greed fed the wounds on their backs. Greed and the fear intolerance brings.

Further still in the labyrinth of her mind, those Goodies So-and-So, decades and decades ago, said nothing — and she, all the while, assisted in silence, saying too little for the sake of saving more and more lives as the decades, then centuries, passed. Yet even that is now salted down in the germinal fear that still focuses itself behind charlatans’ haughty eyes. Eyes reviving the past — and the ghosts are again revealed from the wide-eyes of long-dead village girls who lived in terror for what they (what we) had unknowingly begun.

Still, we grow, as slow as the decades that pass, into people infiltrated with knowledge. We are responsible for that knowledge — to use it, to practice the bettering of our world through our learned history. Learn from vacancies that history left untold.

If we are not intentional, that knowledge slips through our minds and stains the soil of our ancestors instead of securing the visionary cornerstones for the next generations. We are responsible to harness a vanguard of equality, of generosity instead of fear, and the wild abandon of courage to fill empty spaces of our now, the moment at hand, with mercy, freedom, compassion, while we, today, have breath.

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