The Burning

I was not there.

This is the thing I have had to say plainly in every century since, when the story of Abigail Bishop comes up, as it does; as it always does. People want me to have witnessed it. They want the daughter watching from the crowd, the moment of meeting eyes before the end. I understand the want. It would be a better story.

I was in the woods. I had been there for several days by then, sleeping where I could, eating what I could find of what Sings had already taught me to find. I did not know what had happened. I only knew my mother had not come home, and the town had that sound to it, that tightened, righteous sound, and I had made myself scarce.

Sings found me on the third day. She came through the trees the way she always came, which was to say without noise and without warning, and she sat beside me without speaking for a time before she told me.

The town had found Abigail Bishop guilty. She had been hanged.

I asked Sings what she had seen. She told me, as plainly as Abigail had always spoken, the way one speaks to someone who has a right to the truth. I held it.

I do not know what I believed about witches at that age. I had grown up among people who believed in them absolutely; the word had the weight of the real. My mother had not been a witch. I knew this the way I knew the deer tracks from the mud, the way I knew the sound a branch makes when an animal and not the wind has moved it. But knowing a thing true and making the world know it true are not the same work, and I was sixteen years old in a colony that ran on God’s authority and its neighbors’ testimony.

She was gone. I was not gone. I was in the woods with a girl who had also lost everything her people had, and a truth I had not asked for, and the world I had grown up in had just explained, very plainly, what it thought of women who did not suit its purposes.

I have carried that explanation with me across three centuries. It has been a useful education.

Sarah Bishop began to die that week, in the woods near Salem. She would take a few more years to finish the job. But the name began there: ground down by everything Gallows Hill had proved about the world’s regard for the women in it.

I would find another name. I was already looking.