more weight--halloween edition.

My older children, especially Zachary, are fond of one particular legend from the Salem witch trials. In 1692, Ann Putnam, Jr., Marcy Lewis, Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mary Walcott (five girls, in a way, all teenagers) accused Giles Corey of being a witch. At this point in the dark unfolding of accusations, hangings, and the dissolution of family and town alike, the trial was a well-oiled machine. Wiitches could save themselves from hanging only by perversely confessing to being a witch and providing a set of convincing details, most of which were borrowed from the storyline provided by Tituba, a woman who was enslaved by the minister of Salem, who, once accused, held the courtroom rapt with her stories of meeting the devil in the woods at night, signing his book, and (my favorite detail) suffering when a small yellow bird lit between her fingers and sharply pecked at her. When she spoke of the bird, the accusing girls writhed in pain, "seeing" the same bird flitting amongst them in the very courtroom. Tituba was jailed, and later freed. Such is the power of the story.

Giles Corey refused to play along with this game. He stood mute during his trial. The court decided to press him with stones--the pain of the weight would surely convince him to plead guilty. The stones were piled on, the sherrif would tell him to plead, and legend has it that Giles Corey would answer: "more weight." After being pressed to death, his body was buried, along with the bodies of the women hung for witchcraft, in an unmarked grave. Historians continue to speculate about the location of this grave. Another legend provides a clue. Rebecca Nurse was found guilty of witchcraft. She was a woman with an impeccable reputation in the community (unlike many of the other "witches--Giles Corey had been accused of murder in the past; other of the accused were guilty of being poor, unmarried, or having what looks to the modern eye like mental illness.) Not so Rebecca Nurse. Whatever it means to be a pillar of the community, Rebecca Nurse was such a person. In fact, some historians believe that the killing of Rebecca Nurse was the beginning of the end of the Salem witch trial era, suggesting the townspeople were aghast at the blood of Rebecca Nurse on their hands.

After Rebcca was hung, another legend tells us that one of her sons left his own house under cover of dark, and rowed a canoe down the creek to the North River until he reached the hill where the witches hung that day were still hanging. He cut his mother's body from the tree to bring her home for a proper burial on the Nurse homestead, which stands in Danvers, Massachusetts, not far, for those of you who care, from the decaying Northshore Mall. Any of you watching the Handsmaid's Tale will find echoes of these hangings in the show's (and the novel's) hanging wall, where the bodies of the accused women in that once and future society hang as warnings to those still breathing.

More weight. It's quite a moment to consider--finding yourself accused of death by a coven of teenage girls, unable to defend yourself in front of the dark, stony judgment of the adults in your town, the light of day closing in fast, the unbearable pressure of the heaviness of pure rock. And the poor Nurse children--I imagine them bereft, their grief making them children again. That long canoe ride, the quiet oar cutting the water, the deadly loneliness taking up residency in the heart of the child. And what of those girls? Consider the cost of time for them--do their own words choke them as they drift towards sleep? The memories of their voices chanting together, the heady rush of the accusation, the corrupting power to sentence the odd, and the different, and the stubborn to death.

Halloween is upon us, and our house has five- year- old boys in it, so we are excited. Carlisle is a funny little town, with a tiny town center and the houses on sprawling, forested lots. There are no sidewalks and no street lights to speak of--in the very late night, it's almost Puritan in its silence and darkness. So the town has invented its own version of trick-or-treating. In the week before Halloween, we all are meant to drop off a bag or three of candy at Ferns, the only store in Carlisle, which sits at the edge of the only rotary in town. The candy is distributed amongst the thirty or so odd houses in the town center, and the kids all come downtown ("downtown") to get candy. Some of the home owners in the town center really get into the swing of things, and decorate their homes, and sit out front, covered in cobwebs, drinking wine. This year, we will have a spider monkey and Captain America in tow.

I'm still considering whether to go out or not. I feel pretty good these days, and I keep making the mistake of pretending I don't have cancer, where I act all fine and dandy, and then spend two days in bed, rueing the day I thought I was strong enough to go to an apple orchard. It might be worth the price, or it might be foolhardy, Perhaps I'll sit on the porch of Ferns and watch the ghouls and superheroes pass by, hoping for a glimpse of my skinny spider monkey and my nervous Captain America.