Wisdom
The news that Elisabet Turner is with child takes most who hear it by surprise, for it has long been understood that Elisabet Baker has never known, will never know, the touch of a man.
Even the village drunks have been seen to pale and turn away when she approaches, refusing to meet her eyes for fear she might use a moment’s glancing contact to somehow make a claim against them, might find a way to call herself defiled and hence force them to her bridal bed.
The chances might be slim, the likelihood low, but such is the reality of Elisabet Turner’s existence.
Her own mother was ill while she was with child.
It seemed all but impossible Elisabet should be born, even less likely that she should see adulthood.
Yet born she was, and grown she is, and from the swelling of her middle, pregnant as well, even as none might name the father.
She is no witch. They are civilized people, living in a civilized time, and they no longer believe in such nonsense as women who dance with the Devil and set their names to his book in exchange for power.
But if the Devil were to truly exist, and if he were seeking his brides as the old stories said, well.
Elisabet Turner would no doubt be the first such recruit to reach for the pen, trading everything she was in the hopes of being repaid with some better circumstance.
Instead, she walks the world alone. Her parents are long since dead, and even if they had been among the living, she is an unmarried woman of twenty; she would only have been a burden upon their house.
She is ugly by any standard, not blessed with pleasant or uniform features, with a comely voice or with a pleasing silhouette; to these early misfortunes she has sadly added two bouts with the pox, the second more violent than the first, leaving her complexion pocked and scarred.
Port-wine stains that have been hers to bear since birth blotch the few patches of smooth skin which remain between the heavy scarring, and her right eye is a reddened, rolling horror, her brown iris floating in a sea of bloody sclera, pupil never fixing long on anything.
Her limbs are weak and twisted inward, making her unfit for farming or most forms of labor; her back is hunched, her mouth a ruin of snarled scars and missing teeth.
She is ugly, without question, and those who would say ugliness is not a sin are first to sneer and turn away when she draws near, setting their eyes against God’s will.
Her parents were farmers, and she was born a farmer’s daughter, destined for a life tithed to the land, but her mother’s brother lives in Boston, the distant, dazzling city; when her parents passed, he sent word that he would be glad to have her join him, to trade her muddy boots for dancing slippers and her planting tools for needle and thread.
He would have made a lady of her, and gladly, in his sister’s memory.
She sent her refusal not two days before her first bout with the pox, and by the time her strength returned, it was clear that the opportunity had passed.
They are civilized people, living in a civilized time, and still, no one likes to bring reminders of sickness into their home.
To remember what the wind might carry is to invite it to blow in your direction, to kindle the embers of plague in the bosom of your own family.
Her uncle’s invitation was rescinded before she had fully recovered.
And so it has been for all of Elisabet Turner’s life.
One door closes, and two more follow in quick succession, while she stands and complains that she cannot leave the room.
When she began to show the first signs of her condition, no one could believe it, and now, some three months on, they still can’t believe it, but neither can they deny it.
Perhaps Elisabet Turner is a witch after all.
She walks the village streets during the day, pays for meat and milk with coins scrabbled from what little remains of her family fortune, and sets her eyes toward the horizon, watching the sky as if she seeks to steal its secrets for herself.
She sighs longingly at the sight of clouds, but says nothing to anyone that might answer why.
The villagers watch her and mutter among themselves, trying to figure out whether she understands her condition, whether she knows why her body is changing.
Only the village priest is brave enough to approach her directly, and afterward, he claims not to remember their conversation in any true detail, only to know that Elisabet is under no circumstances to be troubled or forced into accepting charity.
“She is serving in an older story than her own, and how she has the telling of it will determine all our fates and futures,” he says, which seems queer indeed coming from a man of the cloth.
The villagers whisper about it behind closed doors, but they’re far enough from the city that finding a replacement is all but unthinkable: he’s their priest, he keeps them in the eye of God, and he will keep them so until the end of everything.
They ask no more questions. Elisabet Turner is with child.
She will bear her infant when the time is right, as people have done from the beginning even to the end of time.
This will not be changed by questions, and so her neighbors fall silent, forming the hush before the sermon, and they wait for the miracle to arrive.
Elisabet Turner is no witch. She has never signed the Devil’s book, never held his pen beneath the summer moonlight, never shed her clothing to dance around the fire.
She would have done all those things, had she been but asked, but no one has ever thought to ask her such a thing.
She is a living afterthought, a woman well accustomed to being ignored by all around her.
She has no powers beyond those natural to a young woman raised in the farmland of Massachusetts, her back to the wood and her face to the sky.
She knows herself well enough that certain sentinel truths are etched firmly in her mind: she knows she is not lovely, that any chance she may have had at loveliness fled forever when she fought her first battle with the pox.
She knows a third bout would kill her, without question.
She is lucky to have survived the first, much less the second.
The scarring she carries runs far deeper than the skin alone.
The secret, hidden parts of her body are just as riddled with the damage done by the disease, and they will fail her if forced to face another challenge.
She knows God has no plan. Because despite everything she’s been through, everything she’s survived, she is not yet a bad person.
She speaks no lies against her fellows, commits neither crime nor sin, save perhaps for the crime of ugliness, which some seem to fear as the greatest sin of all.
If God had a plan, if her suffering were to serve some grand design, she would surely have seen signs of it by now.
There are a thousand tiny signals before the spring.
A quickened egg will show a venous system when held before a candle.
But she watches the world she walks through, and she sees no signs of God’s design, nor indications of His existence.
She has seen other signs, however, signs that would surely see her condemned to death by hanging, were she to speak of them in another’s hearing.
She has seen women who walk through the woods in the deepest part of winter, their arms bared and their hair so full of ice that it gleams like a cloak of diamonds across their backs.
She has seen men who walk in summer, their heads bare to the sun, trails of flowers growing bright and shining in their wake.
She has seen the people stepping out of the sea with scales across their chests and webs between their fingers, and seen the women who ride down on shafts of moonlight when the moon is full and true and centered in the sky.
She has seen the smooth-limbed, sexless youths who dance by starlight, their steps so light as to not disturb the evening dew.
Elisabet Turner is nothing particularly special.
Just a woman who has survived her share of hardship, who has tried to cling to her virtue as she walks the long, inescapable road between birth and dying.
But as some people who are pushed to the outskirts are wont to do, she has learned to pay attention, and she has seen more than she was, perhaps, intended to see.
She isn’t sure that she believes in God, but she believes in gods. She knows they walk the world, pagan things from before the Bible was set in stone.
She knows one of them came to her in the guise of an early winter storm, and when he shook the lightning from his hands and the thunder from his voice, he was a handsome man to look upon, his skin smelling of petrichor and the electric burn of static, his body no more clad than any other storm.
She knows he looked upon her ugliness and didn’t shy away, didn’t behave as if she were anything other than a woman, as if he were anything other than a man.
He took her in his arms and took her to the bed she had always known as lonely, but would forever after know as a place of love and delicacy.
He loved her gently, carefully, as a man may love a woman, and when his lightning pierced the flesh of her form, the storm was all. She had never in her lifetime feared the rain. After that night, after those hours in the arms of that storm, the rain is a sacrament to her, as holy as any communion.