Hour of the Witch

by Chris Bohjalian

How is it I am humiliated when I am alone? Does not humiliation demand an audience?

But then, where in the Commandments did the Lord God forbid a man from stabbing his wife? Murder was a sin; sticking a fork in one’s wife was…what? Thomas claimed it was discipline. She wasn’t even sure what the colony’s law was when it came to a man’s cruelty toward his wife.

Yes, she thought, revenge belongs to God. But justice? That will be mine.

There are many things in this world we should fear, but to bend one’s knees to the smallest of minds? That is beneath a mind as sharp as the one that the Lord God has given thee.

I wish the men in their black robes had risen to the majesty of their clothing. Timid little creatures they are.”

“She was sent to the scaffold because she had a sharper tongue and a shrewder mind than her accusers. It is always the case when men hang women. Look at Magistrate Caleb Adams: there is nothing that frightens that man more than a woman who does not live happily under a man’s thumb.”

“Men call bright women dim whenever they are threatened. So, take no relief in the names that any man calls thee. There is no safe harbor there.”

I have no desire to meet [the Devil]. Not ever. I have seen too much of His likeness here in Boston, even among the saints.

I will take comfort in the knowledge that our Lord knows my sorrow and feels my grief. He felt the sting of every thorn in His son’s final crown. He felt the bite from every Roman lash. He felt the agony of each and every Roman nail. That is where love and lamentation chance upon one another, and that is where we find God.”

She had learned the hard way that this was a world in which a woman such as Constance hadn’t a chance at having a reputation unsullied by slander and meanness.

“There was no room for Christ when He first came into our world and there was no room for Him when He died. He was scorned by authority and He was crucified because He demanded that the poor and the sinful and the children and the women be”—and she took a breath as she sought and found the correct word—“respected. Respected. The lowly for whom, just like Him, there was neither esteem nor hope. We separated and came here to this wilderness, and so far we have shown only that we are as flawed and mortal here as we were across the ocean. There is no act of horror or violence of which man is not capable. My husband stuck a fork in me and thou demandeth I live with him still. Hast thou seen the idea of charity we bestow upon the heathen? Hast thou examined the accounting ledgers of how and what we trade with them? We are scoundrels.

I cannot open the minds of men whose brains have doors locked shut.

They will believe that in their lifetime they were indeed present for the hour of the witch.”

There were people in the world who were good and people who were evil, but most of them were some mixture of both and did what they did simply because they were mortal.

“Yes, this may be the hour of the witch. But the Devil? He most definitely wears breeches. The Devil can only be a man.”