Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

by Rivka Galchen

There are two things a woman must do alone: she does her own believing and her own dying.

the mother’s imagination in pregnancy impresses itself upon the child.

I could see that Ursula had suffered from was grease stains on her blouse and hair that needed re-pinning. Unfortunately, I said as much.

Christoph set down his receipts. “Gertie, is there any mustard? This isn’t a soup, it’s a sheep’s meadow.” I said quietly that dill was very good for fertility, and also for bones. Gertie got the mustard.

“The third woman had red hair,” she said. “You know how that can be. That redhead was a real show. She stepped onto the platform laughing, saying that the executioner looked like a bumblebee.”

She had first met the devil when she was tending sheep. He was dressed in green. He was wearing a fine black wool hat with an unusual feather and was the most handsome man she had ever seen. The fiendish lover proved to be coldhearted, but he had made her promises.

soup, which I fetched for her. “The redhead contested only one point of her conviction. She said she had never danced at a witches’ Sabbath. She didn’t like dancing, and had always been against it.”

No one likes a lender. No one likes a borrower.

It hasn’t been simple to be a widow for so many decades.

It is sad that inheriting my dear father’s house was go...

He showed me his spare thumb. I’d seen it before, of course. Though I had rarely given it thought. You would think an extra digit would really stand out and command your attention.

“It’s those of us who do nothing wrong that get into trouble.

Job’s tears, Simon? It’s an odd plant, with no flower, and I’ve seen walkers make rosaries from the hard seeds, not that the rosaries bring them peace—they remain an anxious and fidgety bunch. God writes the gospel, Luther says, not only in the Bible but in the woods and in the stars.

Some people worry about being born under an unlucky star. I don’t. I worry about being born in an unlucky place.

Greta lacks the unhappiness and difficulty that has helped me so much in my own life, Simon. She thinks well of the world and everyone in it.

he’s made his way in the world the easy way, through his studies. We’re the ones who have stayed behind and managed.

The greedy misuse the world by striving to acquire it, said Martin Luther.

trembled. His fingers were blistered. A poultice of wolfsbane

try my best to like people. To expect good from them. If you see someone as a monster, it is as good as attaching a real horn to them and poking them with a hot metal poker. I really do think so. In order to avoid turning people into monsters by suspecting them of being monsters, I do my best to keep myself mostly to myself.

freely, I’ll share my one small rebellious conviction: Luther said man has an independent and direct relationship with God. If he had really followed his ideas out, or if the rest of us had, shouldn’t there be no church left at all?

best business came in the form of written requests. My reputation is separate from my personhood. I didn’t want to become more practiced at talking to people. I’m a happy person. When a soup tastes good, leave it alone. I didn’t need a friend.

Well, a relationship developed. The rough breeze of her blew life back into the dying ember of me. I am not speaking of love, or of any of its pale shadows. What we had was a sturdy and practical fellowship.

Herr Frick. He has that broad moon face, like a child. I sometimes thought that he pressed down on the scales a bit. But I will say he always yielded if I asked him to weigh the purchase one more time. He is like a child trying his luck, really.

“It’s difficult times,” Gertie said. I disagreed. I thought the times were not difficult enough, since people still made time for telling lies.

I felt as though the devil were in the room with us. He was laughing at us. He was a small man with a mustache and no beard and wearing a blue knit caftan.

I far prefer to be not known than to be known, even benevolently.

If the size of eyes is indicative of the size of souls as maybe Paracelsus says—someone says it—why isn’t there more praise of cows? She likes to lean her head against my neck. I have never wished she could speak, because we understand each other. I mention another thing about cows. They don’t cry. They mourn, they make lowing noises, and if they have an infection, then their eyes will water and pus—but they don’t put on a show of their emotions, but instead keep them to themselves, to whom they belong.

Susanna read on. The young man was saved. A goddess intervenes and saves the young man from being torn limb from limb. “Ah, this is one of those stories,” I said. “One of what stories?” “One of those goddess stories.” The goddess intervened to insist that the man should be put on trial first. Depending on how the trial went, maybe he would be torn limb from limb, or maybe he wouldn’t be. I said, “But who would the judges be? That’s the thing with a trial.”

“The voting is silly,” I said. “You can’t discover what’s true based on how many people think it’s true.”

The goddess spoke up, and made the final decision. She said: Free him. “So the goddess was okay with him killing his mother?” Susanna said it was a story with many parts. As with the Bible, she often got lost as to which way to feel. But she had trusted those who had recommended the story to her. Johannes, for example, respected this writer. Anyhow, that was nearly the end.

though I was glad courts existed, and I was eager to have my case heard—if it would ever be heard—and to have my name cleared, I also thought that sometimes the courts were there mostly to make money for the court scribe.

You do someone a favor and they hold it against you, saying it wasn’t favor enough.

“‘I will not take part in the fury of theologians.’”

“He’s too straightforward and German to live where people have been burned for not believing in eternal damnation,”

Simon, I could tell. I’m good with cows. Also with calves. I once asked a crowd of noisy swallows to quiet down, as I had a headache, and the swallows did. I have sometimes wondered: Why didn’t God leave the world as frank and easy to understand as a cow? Instead, it’s all a puzzle, for us to tease out which points of light are planets and which are stars, and who can be trusted and who cannot.

AS I WAS returning home that night on the narrow path that runs along the side of the Junker’s property, I saw a crowd of young peasant girls, eleven- and twelve-year-olds or so. Maybe one or two younger. The girls were carrying bricks to that kiln run by Lorenz Neher. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but, for some reason, this day I saw that I was walking to the end of my life, and they were walking into their bloom. They were walking toward the center of their lives, and I was walking toward my own perimeter. I’m not usually detained by fanciful nonsense like that. It was a curious angle of the sun, of late light.

firmly believe that the life of a spinster is often better than that of a married woman. No dying in childbirth. No beast in the house.

A hummingbird once rested near my shoulder. It was a very ill omen. For one who isn’t a flower.

boot. “Friendship,” he said. “I’m not going to put down family. Family is a field of hay, a well of water, whatnot. But friendship is a sausage. Or, no, it’s not a sausage. Romance is a sausage. Friendship is a lemon. Do you know what sailors take on their journeys to the here-be-monsters parts of the maps? They take lemons, because lemons are steadfast.

Your fears are feeding the beasts,

When I would feel a fire rise within me, I would sing to myself a little song from when I was a child: Can you count the meadows, Can you count the stars, Can you count the fishes and their scales and the dead of wars? God can count the mountains, God can count the stars, God can count the fishes, God knows where you are.

Be like a deer in the forest, Kath-chen, I said to myself. It is not easy for me to be a deer—if I were an animal, I would more likely be an owl, or a plover. But my situation was that of the hunted deer. I tried to be still and quiet,

Maybe a foolish part of me believes that God might concern himself with a flea such as myself. It is my place to concern myself with God, not the reverse—that is my view.

I’ve said more than I meant to. I thought I had left that all more than behind me. On another planet, you see. On a distant star.

“Though I was twelve years old, I was very small, and could easily have been mistaken for eight or nine. That saved me, I think. My smallness.” He saw the strongest man in his village with a rag in his mouth and dirty water poured over him. He saw no women, save a maidservant who was hiding near the stabled horses. Though she could hardly walk, she handed him a jar of honey and told him to run away. She said to wait until at least two full moons had passed before speaking to a single soul, that everyone I saw would be a devil’s servant or a ghost, that I could trust no one. Now, I’d never say that to a child. But she meant the best for me. Now I’ll tell you the strangest and maybe the worst part.”

Another story was about a land that had everything except for salt. They had brandy, bread, dumplings, cream, honey, almonds, chicken, radishes. But no salt. When mealtime came, the parents would abuse one another, or sometimes hit the children, until someone provided the tears. To salt everything up.

No one has anything negative to say about Greta. How could they? She has been nothing but kind, humble, virtuous, and quiet her whole life, and of course I worry she will one day suffer for that, or has already.

Widows generally keep to themselves and don’t go here and there all over town like a whirligig. Frau Kepler has been more like a man in her out-and-aboutness.

sing ghost names, but I did it cheerfully. It was a private thing. I had loved babies as a child, more than most people do, even. I loved their small fingernails. I loved the way they seemed to arrive older than their parents. I loved the courage they had to sleep as if there were no wolves, no soldiers.

prepared beans, I made certain that no sand or soil persisted in the mix. How a pregnancy proceeds is up to God and not us. But God doesn’t frown on those who take care of themselves.