INTERLUDE
The Witch Woman
My grandmother, Milba, was a witch woman.
Even as a little girl picking cranberries out in the bog, she could see things. Her visions did not happen unbidden, but by her studying the world around her. She would touch things, things of nature, things of the bog, and those things would show her what was coming.
If she found the bones of a snake, she could handle them, let them roll around in her small fingers and watch how the bog water ran off them, and therein she might see what would happen to her father later that day when he went to market, or how her sister might suffer a splinter under the nail of her toe.
She could smash the berries in her palms and read the red guts. They might tell her what weather was coming. By running her hands up the bark of a tree, she might learn what birds nested there, and by breaking the neck of a rabbit kit, she might learn where the rest of the rabbits had their warren.
Later, when I was a child and we had come to this country, my oma would sit out on the front stoop of our house, sharpening her knives across the sidewalk and steps. She would hull peas or break beans and close her eyes to see what they might tell her. By old age, Oma was small and withered, a bent stick with arthritic claws and a nose like a fish hook, and the neighbors thought her strange the way she babbled, and so they called her a witch.
They called her a witch as an insult. They did not know she had visions. They did not know the truth of it.
They would come to learn it.
There came a day when I had been abused at school again. I was a thin child, sickly, and it did not help that I had been born without a single sprout of hair on my worm's body. It also did not help that my English was not particularly good at the time, and I often had trouble speaking as well as the other children.
The boy who bullied me, a boy named Aaron, was a Jew. He was fat in the stomach, and had big muscles and curly hair, and he said he hated me because I was a German, a "fuckin' Nazi," even though I was not German. I am Dutch, I would tell him, Dutch.
It did not matter. At first the abuse was what you would expect. He would hold me down and beat on me until my nose bled and bruises covered my body.
But as the days went on, he did worse things.
He burned my arm with match-tips. He pushed things into my ears – little stones, sticks, ants – until I suffered from infections. He grew more brazen, crueler. He had me pull down my pants and he did things to me – he cut my inner thighs with a knife, and stabbed at my buttocks with it.
So I went to my grandmother. I wanted to know when this would all end. I said to her, show me, show me how it ends. I knew what she was, what she could do, but I had always been too afraid of it – too afraid of her – to ask. But now I was desperate.
Oma told me she would help me. She sat me down and said, "Do not be scared of what I can see, because what I can see is part of nature. It is natural. I read natural things, like bones or leaves or fly wings, and they tell me what is coming. The world has its strange balance, and what I can see is no more magic than how you look down the road and see a mailbox or a man walking – I simply see how everything will balance out."
Oma had a jar of teeth, teeth she had collected from many animals over many years, and she emptied that jar in front of me. She had me open one of the scabs on my arms from the burning matches, and she took some of my blood on her fingertips and ran them across the scattered teeth.
Oma told me, "Your suffering will be over soon. Tomorrow night."
I was excited. I said, "That soon?"
And she said yes. She had foreseen it. Aaron would meet his end.
"He will die?" I asked.
She nodded. I was not sad about this. I was not conflicted. I felt happy.
The next night, I waited in my bed the way that a child might wait for Christmas morning. I could not sleep. I was too excited, and a little scared.
I heard a sound outside. Scraping. Metal on stone.
It was Oma. She took one of her kitchen knives, sharpened it on the stoop, and then went to Aaron's house – which was only down the street by less than a mile. A withered shadow, she crept into his room. And while he slept, she stabbed him. A hundred times.
She came back to my room and told me what she had done, and she gave me the knife.
"Sometimes, we must choose what we see down the road," she said.
And then she went outside to wait.
They came for her in the early morning hours. She made no mystery about what she had done – her gown was covered in the bully's blood. I do not know what they came to do to her, maybe kill her, but it was too late.
She had died there on the stoop.
A bent little shape, a weeping willow, dead.
I wept for her.
I did not weep for Aaron.