I’ll See You on All Hallows
by Katie-Rose Svich
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
1692 — Salem, Massachusetts Colony
Wooden wheels of rattling carts traversed over dirt roads. When the weather was bad, passengers inside would cover themselves against hail and rain with a sheet of wax-coated canvas, propped up by hand above bowed heads. Failing to show on a Sunday at the meetinghouse for any reason other than the pox or something equally as sinister would make people talk, and sometimes it was talk that could be the most deadly thing of all.
It wasn’t uncommon to hear about a woman appearing before a magistrate for wearing a silken hood, or a man for attaching a gold strip around his hat. But usually people towed the line: grey and black dresses without a girdle, plain white aprons and bonnets, long-sleeved linen shirts and long breeches of tanned deerskin even when working the fields in the heat of summer.
Little towns and villages, no real roads; the only broad landmarks were in the form of crystal-clear rivers and thick forests of rich green, towering towards an unobscured sky.
Somewhere, in the middle of it all, like a tiny white pinprick on the landscape, stood a meetinghouse. Inside, stood a woman. She stood before the congregation in nothing but a thin white slip. The altar behind her was barren and bare, without a trace of gratuitous idolatry.
“Patience Crawford, having committed the sin of fornication, shall stand whilst holding the Bible above her head from now until sunset, for all the public to see.”
Nothing was as dirty and guttural as the mind of a Puritan minister.
As the hours dragged on, black ink from the cover would bleed into her sweat-soaked fingertips, arms trembling. Every time she let them drop, she’d receive a hard kick to the shins and a sneaky grope up the thigh from the minister. Stones were hurled at her by audience members filtering in and out.
Thomas Marshall’s name, on the other hand, was never publicised, maybe just a slap on the wrist behind closed doors.
But despite the initial shame and trauma, Patience and Thomas’s sacred bastard had finally made it to conception, after so many centuries. Their marriage and formation of a proper, godly family would have been the final, unbreakable seal of legitimacy. Would have been...
The truth was that even in this land of would-be freedom, or perhaps especially here, even the most draconian of holy seals couldn’t mitigate against the immalleable group-mind of an ideological mob. The foul breath of hysteria building throughout the town crept across skin, raising goose bumps, and even the most respectable of people started being denounced one by one. Patience never stood a chance.
“That Patience Crawford, she’s a witch. She came to me in my bed and tried to make me sign the devil’s book.”
“A witch and a whore. Who knows how many of Satan’s spawn she’s birthed into our world?”
“I hear she’s a thousand years old, maybe more.”
The dawn was deep orange when Patience was dragged from her parents’ house and thrown into a horse-drawn cart, two days before her planned wedding to Thomas.
“It’s probably that minister,” Thomas insisted to her distraught parents. “She refused his advances — even gave him a bloody nose when he tried grabbing hold of her when they were behind the meetinghouse. If she’d gone with him she’d have been a whore, but turn him down and she’s a witch. Either way, she was damned.” He seethed with rage but restrained himself, trembling fist clenched inside the pocket of his coat. “But I promise to do everything I can, I won’t let her or the child die like this.”
Thomas knew the best chance would be to convince her to name other names in exchange for acquittal, but to his distress, on the stand she was stubborn:
“These accusations are baseless and unfounded, so I have no way of truthfully giving you any other names. Besides, if a denunciation were really good enough with just the denouncer’s word and nothing else, I could stand here right now and give the names of each of you judges on that bench, then you’d be obliged to hang yourselves. Would you do it?”
As a consequence Patience would eventually give birth in shackles, on the filth- and sweat-soaked floor of an overcrowded cell of Salem gaol. Blood gushed into a pool around her, steam rising up from the freezing-cold stone. She bled out everything she had, blood intermingled with dirt, sweat and tears until she held the baby close to her, both drenched in her life force. It wouldn’t be for long that she held the child with her though; Thomas had managed to procure a sympathetic doctor to smuggle it out from the unsavoury air of the gaol.
The very next day Patience would climb Proctor’s Ledge, white as any spectre escaped temporarily from the other world on All Hallows Eve.
As the guilty prisoners were crammed into a wagon departing the gaol, a light rain began to leak down from the grey ceiling of clouds above — but there would be no waxed sheet of canvas to cover the heads of the dead.
Thomas managed to catch up just before the wagon reached the foot of the ledge. He held their newborn son, semi-concealed for warmth inside his coat — a tiny weight pressed up against his chest, the centuries’ yearned-for wish, somehow he felt it must be centuries, now finally delivered to him alive in blood, flesh and bone.
“I’ll make sure our son knows you were brave,” he called out hoarsely as he reached up for Patience’s limp hand, soaked in rain and sweat, “and one day, history will know it, too.”
“Maybe...” Patience smiled minutely, physically too weak to tremble with fear. “And maybe not. Who knows? But there’s one thing that will never change: everyone loves a good witch hunt.”
Her legs were unsteady when she made the upward climb, but they carried her all the way onto the wooden platform at the top where the noose hung waiting. The truth was she didn’t dread the noose as much as she dreaded the full obliteration of her mind, the mind that still held a picture of the son she’d never see grow. She’d have hung a thousand times over just to keep that memory untouched...
* * *
1905 — Moscow, Russia
The heels of Amaliya’s shoes echoed as she walked along the tiled floor of the hospital corridor. Her hair was neatly covered by a white nurse’s cap with a short veil underneath, and she wore a matching white apron with the bright red emblem of a cross embroidered onto the bodice. The hem of her long black dress billowed behind her as she opened the double doors onto a long, almost empty ward. Windows lining one side let in the pale, grainy sunlight, illuminating rows of beds with metal frames painted white.
She approached the bed at the very end, a military uniform hanging up on the wall behind: long trench coat, navy blue, and double-breasted with gold buttons. The raised collar was a bright red, just like the cross on her apron, with piping in the same colour running along the cuffs. In the bed lay a young officer, Aleksei, sent back from front line duty in the ongoing Russo-Japanese War. He’d been in the cavalry stationed at the Mukden front in Manchuria before coming down with dreaded tuberculosis.
The long journey back had been arduous, and Amaliya was surprised he’d even lived for them to meet.
“Captain?” She roused him awake, sick and pale beneath the sheets, as she placed the tray she’d been carrying down on the bedside table. “I’ve got some medicine to help clear your chest, then some beef goulash for your lunch. Nutrition is the most important thing for your recovery, so you need to try to eat it all.”
Aleksei looked up at her, dark shadows smeared like coal beneath his eyes. “Thank you.” He grimaced as he pulled himself up, but when Amaliya went to help him, he refused. “Please don’t. This is the least I can still try to do.”
He coughed into a white handkerchief, and Amaliya bit unconsciously down on her lip at the noise, a trickle of blood tracing down her chin. It matched with the blood that appeared on Aleksei’s handkerchief when he pulled it away from his mouth. She didn’t know what it was, but the sight and sound of this disease in particular evoked something deep down — vague, nameless and shapeless — a distant memory of sorts.
Sometimes she’d dream of a woman wearing a green dress and holding a sword. And each time it was the same: the woman collapsing in a field at night with only the orange glow of bonfire flames illuminating the dark. She, too, always had blood leaking from her mouth, but Amaliya could never put her finger on exactly where or when she knew the scene from.
She watched over Aleksei as he swallowed his medicine and then began to take slow spoonfuls of the goulash. His wrist sticking out from his pyjama sleeve was thin and his face hollowed. It should have been hard to imagine such an emaciated figure not so long ago wearing the great, weighty military coat that hung, imposing, on the wall behind him. But the spirit and determination in his eyes overrode the feebleness of his sick body, and all Amaliya could see before her was a soldier.
That night she sat at his bedside as he wasted beneath the weight of fatigue, night sweats and the white phlegm marbled with blood that choked him. Feverish and delirious, his voice spilled out weakly in the dark: “Don’t I... know you... from somewhere?”
“Other than here? I don’t see how you could,” Amaliya responded gently.
“Sometimes I don’t know even who I am,” Aleksei continued, “but I know there’s someone I miss very much.”
Amaliya considered his words for a moment then nodded. “Yes. I think I know what you mean. Whom do you miss?”
“I don’t know...” Those were the last words Aleksei spoke before collapsing, unconscious, back onto the mattress.
The skeletal hand of death loomed over his head in the dark, black vapour pouring down between long spindly fingers. But Amaliya stayed sitting with Aleksei, her hand, delicate yet strong, holding onto his until the sun rose again.
He’d survived another night.
One morning she accompanied him for his exercise, walking around the hospital gardens out in the fresh air. It was starting to get chilly; their breath visibly white, but the crisp coolness in proper doses was good for his lungs. When they sat down side by side on a bench, next to a bed of thorny red roses, she leaned over and adjusted the woolen scarf around his neck, which had started to fall loose. White breath intermingled and the distance between them began to quietly close until both of them came to their senses and pulled away just short — a kiss with Aleksei could easily mean suicide.
But just the thought, being so close together and yet so excruciatingly far apart, gave Aleksei the extra fuel to keep fighting through each night. He fought through the pain, through the hopeless exhaustion, no matter how menacing the horrible hand tried to make itself, hanging above his head.
Then, at long last, the day came when he was discharged from the hospital. Amaliya handed him his suitcase at the door: “Promise you’ll do what you want with your life. Don’t waste it. Go on all the adventures you dreamed of as a boy.”
Aleksei stood silent for a few moments before responding, hesitantly. “Will you go with me... if I live?” He felt guilty asking. There was little chance of permanent recovery and someday he would likely relapse and die.
His eyes had started sinking to his boots when they were hooked back up again by the sound of Amaliya’s voice, clean and clear: “Yes.”
So, amidst a devastating military loss to Japan and the simmering of civil unrest, Aleksei and Amaliya got married. The ceremony was held in the chapel where Aleksei was baptised, in his home village of Kolomna. Then they began their travels together.
Traversing across land they reached Yaroslavl, with its multitude of domed Orthodox churches, pure white with roofs of vivid turquoise and resplendent gold. The Volga River, the longest in Europe, shimmered beneath the pale sunlight of summer as they sipped on kompot filled with sweet berries.
Then they rode the Trans-Siberian express into Mongolia, where they spent time living with a nomadic tribe: round ger dwellings made of white canvas pulled from place to place by herds of yak. When placed down at the next location, the front door always faced the sun, and inside, the wooden columns were beautifully painted in bright colours; orange, pink, blue and green. They would sit together by the fire — smoke billowing out the chimney — drinking vodka and eating roasted goat and sheep.
As the years went on, they braved the Ural mountain range and crossed into Kazakhstan. According to legend, somewhere in the city of Almaty was the site where Eve had picked the forbidden apple from the tree. They would search whimsically for said apple tree, the source of all sin, but never find it.
By now ten years had passed since they began, and they decided to try making it to Persia via the Silk Road. But it was in a lodging house on the Turkmenistan border that Aleksei finally succumbed. Amaliya tended to him tirelessly at his bedside, the room quarantined off — the doctor would be there soon, by morning at the latest...
“I’m sorry...” Aleksei spoke with a throat full of blood and phlegm. “I think it’s finally got me this time.”
“Don’t say that,” Amaliya scolded as she bathed his forehead with a rag soaked in water. “It’s treatable, and you made it through before.”
Aleksei looked up at her through half-lidded eyes, his smile exhausted. “Treatable is an optimistic word. You and I both knew it would catch up with me eventually. I’m sorry I couldn’t outrun it for longer.”
Just as in the Moscow hospital ten years ago, Amaliya held his sweaty hand in the dark as his lungs heaved beneath the restrictive weight of his ribcage. The skeleton hand of death hovered above in the dark, but this time it managed to sink all the way down and snatch his soul out of his body as it writhed in pain on the mattress.
With Aleksei’s death Amaliya followed his remains, transported back to Russia. In 1916 she arrived to a country embroiled in the Great War and on the brink of disaster with its own domestic turmoil, relations between the Tsar and the Duma parliament growing increasingly hostile by the day. In contrast, Aleksei’s funeral was held at the same chapel in Kolomna — baptism, wedding and funeral — a complete and perfect circle.
“The curse of our mortality...” A fellow mourner, an elderly woman with a black shroud covering her face, spoke to Amaliya as they watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. “But you’re still young and healthy. This isn’t the end for you, not yet.”
Amaliya smiled sadly and nodded, silent tears streaming down her face. Only in her own head did she reply: I can think of something far worse than mortality.
She knew she couldn’t stay in Russia. A constant, invisible force pushed her to keep moving for the rest of her life. She would continue to travel the world, half-exploring, half-wandering; always seeking something she could never quite verbalise. Perhaps she was trying to chase the ghost of Aleksei, somewhere at the very edge of the world, at the portal between the physical and spiritual.
Amaliya, the immortal soul, wandering the earth once again, alone.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Katie Rose Svich
