An Angel

By Shreya Joshi

1692, June 9th

The Captain is standing before me, looking at my face speculatively. He is wearing a tool belt on his waist which is full of different kinds of paint brushes. On his side is an easel, atop which a canvas is placed. Our room is dark and musky and smells of linseed oil, which he uses as a binder for his oil paints.

The Captain’s process is slow. He has been calling me to different places, each day to painstakingly harp over some minor detail for months now. He is an old and virtuous man.

We don’t get to choose our fathers, but if I ever had one, I could only envision a relationship like the one I have with the Captain. His patience and dedication inspire me. The amount of work he puts into each inch of the canvas and the amount of thought he puts into each brushstroke; are qualities of an artist who is married to his craft. He views the world in terms of possible paintings, and each aspect of his day either inspires him or is so banal, that it could not possibly take away from any small source of inspiration that may come and buzz in his ear like a little housefly would.

While Salem, Massachusetts is warmer in the months of June, today is a particularly windy day. Even though we are in a closed room, the shutters on the window and the door, are not doing a good job, but rather, creaking under the force of the gale. It is mildly freakish, because of late, this town has become obsessed with witches. Out of nowhere, we hear that women who lived in our neighbourhoods, went to our local markets, and cooked for our families; have been practising witchcraft on the down low. Strange things have been happening in my once silent little town of Salem.

My fear also knows no bounds. I am scared about two things. The first, that I see so many women running around, doing their dailies in the town, and any one of them could be a witch and could put me under a spell, or hurt me and harm me. The second, that the town seems to have lost all sense of rationality when it comes to this.

Sometimes, I don’t understand how the townsfolk can differentiate between a witch and a woman. Take me for instance. I live on the streets and the only time I get to comb my hair is when the Captain lends me his comb before he is about to embark on the painting. Just because of the way my hair looks, what makes me any less of a witch than any other woman? I hope no innocent women become a scapegoat, and I hope that the witches are punished, and my dear town Salem is safe again.

If one day, anyone was to assume that I am a witch, they’d sink me underwater. The only way then for them to know I was woman and not a witch would be if I drown and die. If I could float, they’d stone me to death. I had made peace with these endings because the Captain wanted to paint me to look like a witch. He said, “this will be a historical memoir of what is happening in Salem right now.” For my part, I let him paint me like this because he pays me well, and if it were not for him, I would meet another eventual ending, which would be from starvation.

“I knew Tibuta,” I tell him as he focuses his attention on painting my hair completely well on the canvas in front of him. Tibuta is right now undergoing trial, ever since an 11-year-old girl, Abagail Williams, told everyone in the town that she saw Tibuta perform witchcraft. I always knew Tibuta as the slave girl, but never as a witch.

The Captain tells me to be still and not distract him, as the wind will stop anytime soon. As any man obsessed with his work, the Captain instead starts exclaiming about how this will be his greatest painting, and I will have to be a patient and still muse. He is trying to make the scene complete, and capture the hair strands as they fly. He thinks this effect will add to the witch-like aesthetic, and today, he will only focus on this detail in the painting.

He is an old man, who wants to make another painting before he dies. Due to his old age, he does not care about how making a painting like this will only make the others believe he is involved in all the dark magic going around here. Yet, he continues his work in secret. When he gets tired, he hides his canvas and goes to bed. Thus, day after day, I stand in front of him and he focuses his entire attention on some or the other detail.

Conversations about Tibuta end before they begin.

The Captain finishes with the hair. Now, he wants the right light and the right effects in his painting. To him, the idea of an old tavern seems to be the perfect background. For this, he has asked favours from a lady, Mrs. Bridget Bishop, whose tavern he frequently haunts.

***

It’s dark when we go in Mrs. Bishop’s tavern. A weird wind is making some strange howling sounds. I don’t know if it’s the superstition in me, but I feel like it sounds like a woman is crying and the sound is muffled. Yet I seem to hear this sound every time there is even a slight breeze in Salem. The tavern is damp and dingy. Since Mrs. Bishop closed down the tavern for this secret painting, it is only the Captain, Mrs. Bishop and me in this place.

Something is making me feel very uneasy. My gut tells me to change paths, and go somewhere else. I can sense strange energy and it is making me restless and itchy. I can tell that the Captain has also sensed something, but said nothing.

In the tavern, the Captain is looking behind me, trying to find a place where he can make me stand holding a candle. Behind me are a few empty wooden tables and chairs. The candle is flickering and funny shadows are being formed with the aid of all the haphazardly placed furniture in the tavern. The Captain can somehow capture in a still painting the light as it flickers and the shadows it creates.

Meanwhile, I feel Mrs. Bridget Bishop enter the room we are in from a door behind me and silently stand and watch the process. I can feel her eyes fixed on my back. The flame of the candle I am holding violently flickers and dies.

“Oh hullo, I have a match with me, how lucky,” Mrs. Bishop says and lights the candle again. She goes back to standing in the same spot she was at, looking at me from behind, and I can feel her eyes pierce into my body.

When all of this is happening, a tall man barges into the tavern. Mrs. Bishop sternly tells him that the tavern is closed.

To me, it appears like he hasn’t seen the Captain, but he has seen me, holding the candle and looking as much as a witch would, if there was any discernable difference between her and any normal woman.

This doesn’t seem to faze him, and rather he smiles and looks through me at Mrs. Bishop. He tells Mrs. Bishop that he has come from Boston to renew vows with her. I have a strange sense of déjà -vu. I focus on remembering when I had heard something like this before. My mind goes into a haze.

The flame on my candle is swaying vigorously, back and forth, and to the right and the left. This movement is making the shadows look like they are dancing and leaping as if they are frenzied. While people of Salem don’t take these to be strange co-incidences, I wonder, why is the tall man from Boston not afraid of all of this before him. The scene looks straight out of a séance and yet this man continues to smile.

Mrs. Bishop replies to him, assuming it is one of her drunk patrons, “Go away. I don’t have time for all of this.”

“My child, you have just met your maker”, the man replies.

He takes his hat, bows at us, and leaves. He meets eyes with me, and I look down in an instant. I can still feel his stare. Then I remember what Tibuta had said before the court during her trial. She had confirmed that she was indeed a witch and Satan had dressed up as a tall man from Boston and had made her sign in his book. I wonder, was that who I think it was? I can feel his eyes burn now, and he turns his face away from me. I see that the Captain has dropped his brush. My head feels dizzy, and I feel the floor giving way below me.

***

The Dream

There is a darkness that is broken by the spot where the candle burns. I feel two feet running towards where I lay, and two feet gliding. I feel weightless, as my father lifts me up.

I feel thorns.

I feel pain.

I feel her touch me.

Is death full of so much agony I wonder?

I feel a burning sensation.

I feel my neck twist and my hands getting tied together.

I feel the convulsions.

I feel my father trying to protect me. Father thinks she is helping and doesn’t know she causes pain. I feel the fear.

***

1692, June 10th

Word spreads around Salem fast. I wake up to a sunny morning on the road where I sleep at night and overhear a conversation between two of my homeless fellows, about a girl whom the demon of Mrs. Bridget Bishop had taken over. They talk about how the girl was in the hands of an older man who was last spotted leaving the infamous tavern. My fellows continued talking about the girl, and I then heard them say that the girl’s hair looked like it was in a dire need of being washed and brushed.

They continue talking. “I bet she will be sentenced to death today at Gallows Hill.” “But what about the man who was carrying that girl out of her tavern in his arms?”

That is when it hits me, I am the girl they are talking about. I continue overhearing them mention that the Reverend’s clerk is going around telling people that if they find the ‘girl from the tavern’, she is being summoned for questioning.

In the midst of this conversation, my fellows begin folding the rugs they sleep on and their other scanty belongings into little sacks and find hiding places for them whilst they go and search for meagre jobs that will be able to pay for their dinner.

As soon as they are out of my sight, I run to the Captain’s house. This time, I take the sack that contains my belongings with me, instead of hiding it in some dry gutter in the street because of a weird hunch. My fellows won’t know I am gone. That’s how we are. One day here, the next day not.

Usually, when I am going to his house, the Captain waits for me on his armchair near the window, with a cup of tea steaming away on the side table and the canvas in the centre of the room, facing away from the door. Every time he is painting, his tea is left unfinished as he absolves himself in his creation.

Today, when I knock at his door and he opens, I first notice that there is no teacup on the side table. The curtains are drawn, and there is no canvas, no oil paints nearby and no palette.

He makes me sit down and tells me we were seen leaving Mrs. Bishop’s tavern. He says while he doesn’t believe it, she seems to have found herself caught in some devilry and may be executed.

“We are no longer safe in Salem, and we need to go to a different town”, he tells me. With the entire town of Salem on guard, we can’t leave in the day and so, he makes me hide in a small cupboard in his attic for nightfall. A few hours later, he comes to give me an update that he has heard that if I do not go to the Church to testify, the reverend will assume that I was an accomplice of Mrs. Bishop.

He is teary-eyed and he falls to my feet, begging me not to go to Church. No amount of truths I tell will be believed when the town has lost its sense of rationality. I believe the Captain and his intentions to be pure. I have faith in him. He was the father in my dream. He promises me we will run away tonight and both be safe. Father and daughter. I never knew that’s how protected you feel in a family. I’ve always just remembered growing up on the streets.

***

The Captain gives me a disguise to wear. I have my hair tied below a felt hat, all hidden. I have the hat on an angle where it hides my face. The ruff itches around my neck. The breaches and garters are a little too big for me and the cuff on my sleeves is too crisp and cuts into my arms. “You look like a darn fine sixteen-year-old boy, son!” chirps the Captain. He is putting on a jolly facade, while I am unable to hide the fact that I am scared. He assures me no one will be able to tell that there is a woman below this outfit.

He decides we should go to the town of Medford. To go there means covering two hundred and fifteen miles. “God knows we are no sinners,” he says. “God will take care of us.”

My heart is beating out of my chest. The last I heard; Mrs. Bridget Bishop was executed.

Strange things have been happening in Salem. I am not a part of the strangeness. My presence won’t be missed, but Salem will. My friends will. I wasn’t safe in Salem anyway, I tell myself. I would be a witch here. As the town of Salem falls asleep, the Captain and I commence our walk in the direction of Medford. It will be a long journey I know. But I won’t have witches coming at me over there. And I will have a father.

***

1705, May 7th

(Almost 13 years later)

The painting, which was almost complete, is intentionally unsigned by the Captain. We left it at an inn where we had hidden for a few nights on our way to Medford. The Salem tragedy to which we lost so many women, is silent for a while.

The last I heard, there was no conclusive proof of any woman being a witch. Just our minds making us believe in shared myths. I look at Salem with shame now. Women who walked amongst us; we called them witches and we watched them being hanged. It was our own fears that gave us the bad dreams.

The witches were just people like me. I was on the verge of being misunderstood but got lucky. But I would be termed a witch if someone had seen that painting of me.

So many pure people. None of us were sinners. None of us, witches.

It has been thirteen years now, and it all comes back to me. I am at the same inn where we left the painting. Nothing about this place seems to have changed, with the only exception of a painting hanging behind the front desk.

I look much older now. In the painting, I am standing in a dark setting with wood tables haphazardly placed behind me. My hair is flying, and I am wearing loose white clothes. The light of a candle is shining upon my face, and I am looking down at the floor with what could be called a serene expression. Below it is an embossed plate that says, “An Angel: A kind donation from one of our anonymous guests. Oil on canvas.”

And thus, my fathers’ last painting lies in some inn, lost to the world, and with a completely lost meaning. Nevertheless, a better meaning.

By Shreya Joshi