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Number Fifty-two: Winifred Benham, Hartford, Connecticut, October 7, 1697
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179 viviAn shipley Number Fifty-two: Winifred Benham, Hartford, Connecticut, October 7, 1697 Joseph, my husband, could not hold his tongue, said selectmen were no more fit for office than dogs, threatened to shoot a neighbor who’d named me witch. Ours was prime land on the east side of Main Street just south of Center Street in Wallingford. Watching the surveyor and tax assessor finger pears, spit grape seeds around my orchard, I knew to train for holy water. Lowered in a barrel, my life, our six acres would be taken if I was damned, gnawed by demons that caused me to rise. Pulled down to blackness, encircled by the hand of God, three minutes would prove my innocence. My accusers rehearsed their lines: John Moss, 15, only grandson of Wallingford’s commissioner and Elizabeth Lathrop, 19, daughter of the New London Court judge, testified I had frequently and sorely afflicted parts of their bodies too private for inspection. Charges were posted: I read Shakespeare, not scripture; I appeared as apparitions, allowing Satan to take my form. Stripped in court, searched for signs of possession, stretch marks where the devil must have suckled were found. They matched a row of spots that appeared while bathing the corpse of the infant son of Joseph Royce, a founding father in Wallingford. Other physical evidence was Winifred, my daughter. At thirteen, she could only be a child of the devil, being born so late when I was forty-five. Attending more than thirty trials, I had seen women who could not sink, struggling upward to surface for air the rope would suck away. I witnessed women forgotten a minute too long. Innocent, but hanging in holy water, no breath of an angel for breeze, dresses 180 gArnet poems undulated as if to Purcell. I prepared for the judge, whose brother lived across the street from us, to become distracted, perhaps by a fit of coughing or a baby teething. Declared unclean like the cormorant in Deuteronomy, I learned from gutting the bird how the rounded sea pebbles in its stomach served as a diver’s weight. Forgetting my skill as seamstress, the judge didn’t slit braiding on my skirt for rocks or prod the oval panels. I had prepared my answer: bombast, your honor, cotton stuffing inserted to bulge my dress in Elizabethan fashion. In bed, I practiced kicking with feet tied, learned how to count out three minutes, studied where women’s fingers rested when bound to their sides. Burning, lungs were about to consume me. Pulling the two threads I had left next to my hands to release slip stitches binding smooth stones, I kicked to surface, to salvation. Under holy water, thinking of the judge above me, I found a darkness I would grow into. Unable to nail my world back into shape like I did the arbor in my garden the judge could not confiscate in God’s name, I craved a reason, an explanation to justify my trial. Reading Milton’s description of Satan in Paradise Lost who sat like a cormorant in the Tree of Life preparing to work mischief in the Garden of Eden, I slicked my hair back like a tulip, used India ink to cover the gray. Deliberate as Joseph unbuttoning my blouse each night, I wanted my neighbors to watch me reach up to pluck down stars as if they were eyes, then bend to uproot ferns with shovels, sometimes with spoons. Crushing bottles in my hand to seed the garden, I thought of their swelling nerves, joints aching as they swiveled while my hatred worked its way into their hearts. Rubbing my belly while mixing tea, I added herbs for stomach venom, roots for fever to shake awake mouths blubbering in sleep. Time surely will swallow up my place in history as the last witch tried [34.201.122.150] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:42 GMT) 181 viviAn shipley in Connecticut, but the sight of a cormorant, shining like a black angel struggling to fly, will keep alive the cry of a believer fallen. With no final word, unable to make up one truth to give my daughter a sliver of comfort, each October, I tell her to imagine God at an easel, painting leaves sunflower, crimson, ochre, copper, sienna. Freezing them to edge in crystal, a master with a trained eye, the artist stands back deciding what to crop from the canvas, which stand of forest should...