Chapter 14
Elsebeth
Here’s a riddle: What is worse than hunger?
Some might say pain, but that’s not always true. Pain is not accompanied by hunger, but hunger has a friend in pain, pain in the belly, the joints, and the head, until everything aches, and you feel weak and faint.
Others might say losing a loved one. Though I agree that there’s little more dreadful—and I should know, for I have lost my grandmother, my mother, my father, my big sister, Margarethe, and my little brothers, Friedrich and Johannes—I still think hunger is worse, for it makes us care not for such loss and in that manner sullies our love.
The priests and other godly men might say sin, for it stains our souls and displeases the Lord, whom we must strive to please and love above all other things.
That is true for papists and Protestants alike, but then I ask you: Is hunger not at the root of many sins, if not all of them?
People hunger for pleasure and power, but even hunger for bread can twist us into liars and thieves.
(And sometimes even fornicators, like it did me.)
And so my answer to this riddle is simple: Very little is worse than hunger, mayhap even naught.
The Aufhocker’s mother is so starved, she can’t walk anymore, only crouch and crawl as she takes us inside her house.
It’s a humble home: a hearth, a table with some chairs, a bed.
The woman drags herself to the bed like a lizard, then sits down against it, likely lacking the strength to crawl in.
For a while, she is beyond speech, just sits panting.
Her face has gone slack and strange again, making her look like one already dead, which no doubt she soon shall be.
I have seen people like her lying at the side of the road, too weak to stand, too weak to crawl, too weak to defend themselves against those rifling through their pockets or tugging at the boots on their feet.
I would like to sit down on one of the chairs, for my back is sore from having to carry the Aufhocker all this time, but he still won’t let go of me, there’s not enough room for the two of us, and I fear I won’t get up if I lie down again, so I keep standing.
“Where is your husband?” ask I.
“Dead,” the woman croaks.
Ursula, always so generous with her love and attention, sits down next to the woman and pushes a strand of hair out of her face. “Did you bury him next to your son?” she asks.
The woman looks at her hands. They are thin, the nails brittle and broken.
They’re stained green on account of her ripping out all that grass to eat.
“No. The ground was too hard, and I lack the strength. He’s in the shed outside.
Couldn’t keep him laid out in here once he began to stink. ” Her voice is as dead as her eyes.
Ursula gives her a bit of our water to drink. “I see,” she says. “I’m very sorry for your loss, and I am sorry to trouble you at such a difficult time, but please will you tell us where your little boy’s grave is? He won’t let go of my companion until we have taken him there.”
“I don’t know.”
Ursula takes the woman’s hands in hers, blows on them to warm them. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” she asks, her voice gentle.
I lay my hand on Ursula’s arm, for I have the truth of it between my teeth now, and it is bitter, and it is vile. “Ursula,” I say softly, “this Aufhocker has no grave.”
She frowns. “But you said that an Aufhocker always wants to be brought back to his grave. You said—”
“The boy told me he wanted to go home, and so I thought that must mean his grave, for what home does a corpse have if not his grave? Mayhap that was the truth in the old days, when people were properly buried in churchyards, but it’s not true for this one.”
“But then how…?” Sister Ursula asks.
I am still not looking at her, only at this wretched woman.
It’s as if her face is a splinter that my eyes have snagged on.
“Your boy has no grave, for he wasn’t buried at all, but left to lie where he died, which was someplace in the woods, wasn’t it?
Methinks he must have crawled into the undergrowth because he couldn’t walk anymore.
He was too tired, too hungry, and too weak to keep wandering, and so there he died and there he lay until I happened upon him. ”
My hand is still resting on Ursula’s arm. When she finally understands, I feel all the muscles draw taut inside of it till it’s hard as a piece of wood. “You took him to the woods and then left him there to die,” she whispers. “But why? How could you do such a thing?”
The Aufhocker’s mother sobs, but only once.
“Look around you, woman,” she says tiredly.
There are odd pauses in her speech, as if she’s forgotten how to speak or finds that this takes too much strength.
“We are poor. When winter came, there wasn’t enough food for the three of us to last until spring, but if it were only two of us, we might just manage.
We thought that, God willing, the harvest might be plentiful this year, and then I’d crop again and birth another child.
My husband said I might forget this one then… ”
“And did you?” Ursula asks, her voice trembling.
Something like scorn passes over the woman’s face. “Of course not. I can tell you have no children of your own. It’s a wonder, to have a babe grow inside of you for three seasons, to feel him flick around inside you like a fish…”
I shudder at her description. I cannot help it.
The idea of a babe growing inside my belly has always horrified me.
I saw how the women in my village went into marriage young, healthy, and smiling, but as they dropped child after child, losing teeth and hair with each one, they grew gaunt, sick, and old before their time, until they died of a fever or something else, their bodies all used up.
Finally, my eyes unsnag from the woman’s face.
I look at Ursula, whose chin has puckered like a prune as she tries not to weep.
“If he has no grave, we must make one for him,” say I, “else I know not how I am ever to get rid of him. He won’t let go till I am dead or he falls apart, whichever comes first.”
While Ursula tends to the Aufhocker’s mother, I stumble to the back of the cottage.
It’s good land that lies behind it, though untilled and choked with weeds.
Likely the woman doesn’t know she can eat those, too, or she wouldn’t be stuffing her mouth full of grass.
I know well how grass only pains the belly.
In the shed, I find her husband’s body, as she said I would. His face, hands, feet are looking quite well for someone who has been dead some months now, likely on account of the frost, but other parts of his body have rotted to the bone.
No, not rotted, I think as I look at the clean edges at his wrists. I have to press my mouth to the inside of my arm to stifle a retch, it’s so awful. An edge that clean can only be made by a knife.
“Vati,” the Aufhocker croons.
“Yes, yes, that’s your father,” I say, “or what is left of him after your mother made a meal out of him. Now let’s see if we can find something to wrap him in and then a shovel so that we may bury the two of you.”
Using one of the blankets on the bed—the woman says I may, for soon she won’t have much use for it anymore—I wrap the corpse quickly, cutting away the fabric around his mouth, grunting with the effort.
I swear this boy grows heavier and heavier with each passing hour.
He reminds me a little of my brothers, who would cling to my and Margarethe’s skirts after my mother had been struck down by the plague, always crying or clamoring for something.
When they died, first Friedrich and then Johannes some days later, a part of me died also.
I want more than anything to have them back, want it so much so that I have thrown in my lot with a papist even though I don’t believe in any of that stuff, because a small stubborn part of me can’t stop asking what if, what if, what if.
All the same, I’d be lying if I said I missed my little brothers’ constant neediness.
I pray I shan’t ever have any babes of my own.
Though mayhap your prayers have been answered already and you are barren.
If not, you’d have a mewling babe at your breast already, wouldn’t you?
The thought wells up from the pit deep inside of me where I bury all the horrors, and it takes me a moment to push it down again, which is a vast improvement; last time all that filth bubbled up to the surface, it took me days, and poor Ursula suffered because of it.
Focusing on the dead man in front of me and the task at hand helps. I don’t want Ursula to see him and realize that his wife has been eating pieces of him. If she does, I’ll lie and tell her wild pigs did it. It’s better that way, for her and that wretched woman both.
When I am done wrapping him, I grab a shovel and mark out a spot in the garden. The ground is tough. I am used to hard work, for there was nothing but on the farm, but this past year, I’ve grown soft, though not as soft as Ursula, who has come out to help me dig.
A good grave should be so deep a grown man can stand up in it and his head not reach the lip. If it’s not as deep as that, the stink of the corpse will attract wild dogs and pigs, who will dig it up and eat of it.
Or his wife, I think and shudder.
To dig such a grave can take days even if it’s done by two strong gravediggers. Ursula and I aren’t that. We pant and sweat before we have even dug a foot. Soon, poor Ursula’s hands are blistering something frightful.
“Why don’t you go sit with the Aufhocker’s mother and talk to her, one papist to another?” I suggest as she stands waving her hands in the hope that the cool wind will blow away some of the hurt. I’d hate for her beautiful hands to grow as red, tough, and ugly as mine.
Ursula looks away. “After what she did to her little boy, I don’t know if I can.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You are a nun, and a selfless one at that, and methinks she has a stronger need of you than I do. Besides, what use are you to me if your hands are all wounded? It’s bad enough your knee pains you so already.”
“I could clean and tidy, and maybe see if I can cook something for her,” Ursula muses.
I don’t much like sharing our food, seeing as it is likely wasted, this woman being at death’s door already. I tell Ursula as much.
Ursula’s eyes find mine again. “Might it not be a kindness to give her some food and let her die knowing that there are still decent people out there?”
I shrug. “Mayhap, but since she will die no matter what we do, methinks it’s better if we save that food for ourselves. We need it more than she does.”
Once she has left, I dig, and I dig, and I dig.
There’s not much more to say of it other than that, though of course that doesn’t really tell you what it is like: the same thing over and over again, yet full of pain.
At some point, I get blisters despite my calluses, and I have to wrap my hands in bits of cloth.
When it’s done, I am sore all over. My hands are raw and sting without pause, and my knees pain me something fierce. If this is what my grandmother felt daily, it’s not to be wondered at that she complained so often about her wretched knees.
My back hurts more than anything, though.
It’s as if my spine is made of wood, all stiff and unyielding, and someone has pushed a knife into the lower part of it and twists it every few breaths, sending shoots of pain up and down, burning so hotly that I can feel it even in my thighs.
Oh, but what a trial it is to have a body!
By now, Ursula has come back out to help me. Together, we carry the dead man and lower him into his grave.
I turn my head to the boy still clinging to me like a barnacle to the hull of a ship, and I say, not quite gentle for I am in too much pain for that, but not harshly either for he can’t help what he is and was made to be, “Get off, you. I’ve dug you a grave.
It even has your father inside, so you won’t be alone. More I cannot do for you.”
Finally, he lets go of me and crawls into the hole we have dug, where he curls up next to his father and grows still.
It’s such a relief to no longer have to carry him that I close my eyes and just bask in the bliss of it for a minute.
When I open them again, I find myself shying like a whipped horse from the task at hand.
It’s no small thing to bury the boy. He no longer lives, yet he is not quite dead either, and so it feels wrong to throw dirt on his face.
I swear that Ursula can read my thoughts as if they were written on my forehead, for she comes to me and lays her hand sweetly on my arm and says, “Would you rather I do it?”
For a moment, I am weak and almost tell her yes.
Then, I find some strength, and I shake my head instead.
“You will say it was God’s will for this child to cling to me.
Mayhap it was. Mayhap it was merely chance.
No matter what it is, fact is that he found me and trusted me to take him home. I must see it through to the end now.”
She lays her hand on my cheek and strokes a line with her thumb, and it’s as if she has branded me. “You truly are a good, virtuous woman, Elsebeth, no matter what you may say or think,” she says.
She goes inside to fetch the Aufhocker’s mother so she can see us bury her husband and son. The two of them watch as I shovel the dirt back into the hole. I try not to look, not to think or feel.
When it’s done, Ursula makes the sign of the cross over the grave and says a prayer, and I too bow my head and fold my hands and say, “Amen” when she’s done.
The woman crawls back into the house when the prayer has finished, groaning and sobbing softly.
Ursula comes to stand behind me and squeezes the muscles running from my shoulders to my neck. I moan. I can’t help it; her touch is half pleasure, half pain. I let my head fall back so it rests against her breasts.
“It’s all over now,” she whispers and drops a kiss on my head.
My throat is all tight, as if I still carry the boy on my back and he has his arm wrapped around it, softly strangling me.
“Do you think that, if it’s all true and there is a wish at the end of all of this, mayhap the saint will take away these horrible memories once we have given her her head back? ” I ask.
“Is that what you will use your wish on?”
I laugh a little. “God, no. I want to wish for my family to be returned to me. I hope she will heal my hands, your knee, and our minds out of the goodness of her heart, an extra reward for all our hard work.”
She rests her chin on the top of my head. “I hope so.”