The Tooth

In my line there is one name that is never written down. My grandmother said it to me once, at a crossroads, and then laid her hand over my mouth so that I would not say it back too soon. It belonged to the first woman in our family who was burned.

The story came to me from my grandmother, who had it from her mother, and so on back to a girl of twelve who stood at the edge of a crowd and watched the fire. It has always been told in her voice, so that is how I tell it.

I have left out the year and the name of the parish. You will not find her in any book. That was what they wanted, and it is also why the rest of this story happened.

Many of you asked me where the little story of the crows and the tooth came from. This is it.

I. They burned her name from the records

They took her up the hill on a Thursday, because the bailiff wanted it done before the market.

I was twelve. My aunt held me by the back of my dress at the edge of the crowd, the way you hold a dog that might run, and every time I leaned forward she pulled me back against her apron. It smelled of onions and lye. I remember that better than I remember the faces.

My mother did not look at the crowd. She looked at the church roof, where the crows sat in a row along the ridge like stitches. I thought she was praying. Later I understood that she was counting them.

They had read the king’s letter about witches from the pulpit three Sundays in a row that winter. After the third reading, our neighbour remembered that his cow had gone dry the week my mother passed his gate. After that he remembered his little boy, who had died of the cough in the autumn, and that my mother had been in the house. She had been in the house because his wife sent for her in the night. Nobody remembered that part.

I will not tell you all of it. You know how it ends on a hill. The smoke went straight up at first, and then the wind took it over the village, and for two days everything we ate tasted of it. The bread tasted of it, and so did my aunt’s hands when she touched my face.

What I will tell you is what they did afterwards, because that is the part people forget.

When the fire was cold, the bailiff’s men raked through it. Fire does not take everything. Bone is stubborn, and teeth are more stubborn still. They put what was left in a sack and carried it down to the churchyard, but not inside. There is a corner outside the stone dike, on the north side, where the ground never quite dries. That is where they put the ones who could not lie with the rest: the ones who had hanged themselves, and the children who died before the priest could reach them. They dug a hole there that was not as deep as a grave, and they put the sack in it, and they kicked the earth back over it with their boots.

Then they went to the books.

The priest kept a book of who was born and who was married and who was buried, and the court kept another. In both of them there was a page with her on it. The priest cut his out with a knife, close to the binding, so that you could only see it was missing if you knew to look. The court scribe did the same. They put the two pages in the stove at the priest’s house and stood and watched them go.

On Sunday the priest stood in the pulpit and told us it was done. He said her name one last time, so that we would know whose name it was we were never to say again. He said that a name is a door, and that we should keep this one shut, and that anyone who opened it would find out what was waiting on the other side.

My aunt pressed her thumb into the back of my hand all through the sermon. When we came out, she bent down and said into my ear: “Forget it. If you love me, forget it.”

They said it was done. They said it was over.

I was twelve, and I said nothing. But I did not forget.

II. But the land remembered

The first snow came eleven days later, and it did not lie in the north corner.

It lay on the churchyard and on the dike and on the road. It lay on the roofs and on the backs of the cows standing out in the field. But in the corner outside the dike there was a patch of black earth the length of a woman, and the snow would not settle on it. The flakes came down and went to water before they touched. Children went to look at it until their mothers stopped them, and then they went to look at it anyway.

The priest said it was the damp. The sexton said there was a spring under there and always had been, which was a strange thing to say about ground he had dug a hole in two weeks before.

And there were the crows.

They had been on the church roof the day of the burning. When the fire was out they did not go back to the fields. They circled. They went round and round above the hill and the churchyard and the north corner, low, lower than crows fly, so low you could hear their wings. They did it for days after the verdict, and they did not call. That was the worst of it. A crow that calls is only a crow. These went round without a sound, and every so often one of them would drop out of the circle and sit on the dike above the black patch of earth and look at the village, and then rise and go round again.

Our neighbour, the one with the cow, began to walk the long way to church so that he did not have to pass under them. His dog would not go out at night. It lay under the table and shook.

My aunt kept me in. She said the crows were nothing. She said it so often that I knew she was frightened of them too. At night she pulled the shutters to and pushed a knife into the crack of the door frame, and in the morning she took it out again before anyone could see. She thought I was asleep. I was lying with my face to the wall, saying my mother’s name inside my mouth without moving my lips, over and over, the way you hold a coal in your hands to keep it from going out.

On the ninth night I heard them on the roof.

There were many of them. Their feet on the turf above my head, walking. A soft scraping, back and forth, as if they were pacing. My aunt heard it too. I heard her get out of bed and stand in the middle of the room. Then I heard her go back to bed and pull the cover over her head like a child.

In the morning the roof was empty. But along the top of the shutter, on the outside, there was a line of small black feathers pushed into the crack, one beside the other, neat as a row of stitches.

My aunt pulled them out and put them in the fire. They did not burn well. They curled and stank and lay in the ashes like little black fingers, and she had to push them under the coals with the poker before they would go.

III. One came to me

It came on the twelfth morning, while my aunt was at the well.

I was alone in the house, sitting on the bench by the window with the shutter open a hand’s width for the light, picking the stones out of a bowl of peas. I did not hear it land. I looked up and it was there on the sill, between me and the yard, so close I could have touched it.

It was bigger than the crows in the field. Its feathers were so black they were almost blue where the light caught them, the colour of a bruise going old. It did not move the way birds move, in little jerks. It sat still, and it looked at me, and its eyes were not a bird’s eyes. They were black all the way through, with something lit far down in them, the way there is light far down in a well when you lean over it on a bright day.

I knew it. I cannot tell you how. I knew it the way you know your own mother’s step on the stairs before she comes into the room.

It opened its beak, and something fell onto the sill with a small hard sound, like a pebble dropped on a table.

Then it was gone. I did not see it go. The sill was empty except for what it had left.

It was a tooth.

A back tooth, a big one, with the roots still on it, yellow-white and ridged. And I knew that tooth as well. My mother had a crack across her back tooth on the left side, from biting down on a plum stone the summer I was born. She used to tell me that story whenever I complained about anything. “I broke a tooth on the day you came,” she said, “and I would break another.” Then she would open her mouth and show me with her finger the little dark line running across the top of it.

The tooth on the sill had the little dark line running across the top of it.

I picked it up.

It was warm.

There had been no sun that morning, only grey sky, and still it was warm, the way a hand is warm, or a cheek. It lay in my palm and the warmth went into my skin and up my arm, and I sat there on the bench with the bowl tipped over and the peas rolling away under my feet, and I did not cry. I had not cried on the hill, and I did not cry now. I closed my hand over the tooth and held it, and it stayed warm, and I understood that it would stay warm for as long as I held it.

When my aunt came back with the water, she found me on my knees sweeping up peas. She asked me why the shutter was open. I said I wanted the light. She looked at me for a long time, and then at the sill, and then she shut the shutter and put the bar across it.

That night I tied the tooth into a corner of my shift with a thread pulled from the hem, and I slept with my hand over it. All night it lay warm against my ribs, like a small animal breathing.

IV. Crows speak in threes

There was an old woman who lived at the end of the fjord road, past the last farm, in a house so low that the roof came down to the ground on the windward side. Everyone called her Old Mother, though she had never had children that anyone knew of. My mother had gone to her as a girl, and had gone on going, two or three times a year, with a cheese or a hen under her arm, and come home late smelling of smoke and said nothing about it.

Old Mother had not come to the hill. My aunt said that showed what kind of friend she was. I thought it showed something else.

I went to her on the fourteenth day. I told my aunt I was going to gather kindling, and I took the basket, and I walked until the farms ran out.

She was sitting outside her door on a stump with a pipe in her mouth, as if she had been waiting for me since morning. She did not ask me why I had come. She held out her hand, palm up, and I untied the corner of my shift and put the tooth in it.

She closed her fingers over it and shut her eyes. She sat like that for so long that her pipe went out. When she opened her eyes again they were wet, but her voice was steady.

“So it was the big one,” she said. “I thought it might be.”

She gave me back the tooth. Then she told me what the old women had always said, the ones before her and the ones before them.

“A crow speaks in threes,” she said. “Once is a crow. Twice is a crow that wants something. Three times is a message, and you had better listen, because it will not say it a fourth time. It has already spoken twice, child. It circled, and it walked on your roof. Now it has put something in your hand. That is three. Now you listen.”

I asked her how.

“You keep your mouth shut,” she said. “Three days, and no word out of you. You say nothing to your aunt or to the cow, and nothing to God either. Every word you say lets a little of it out. You keep it in until it has somewhere to go. At night you dream, and you remember what you dream, and on the fourth morning you come back here and tell me.”

I did as she said.

Three days of silence. My aunt thought grief had struck me dumb, and she wept over me, and then she slapped me, and then she wept again and held me against her so hard I could hear her heart. I said nothing. I held the tooth and kept my teeth together and let the words pile up behind them until my jaw ached.

Three nights of fire-dreams.

On the first night I was on the hill again, but I was inside the fire, and it did not hurt. It was only very bright and very loud, a roaring like a river in spring, and through the roaring I could hear the crows.

On the second night I was standing in the north corner outside the dike, and the black earth was moving, very slowly, the way dough moves when it rises.

On the third night my mother turned to me in the fire. Her hair was burning and her face was calm, and she looked at me the way she looked at me when I was learning something and had nearly got it. She told me what to bring. She said: salt from my barrel. She said: the nail from the cart. She said: all of the names, in order, the way I taught you.

Then the fire went out, and it was morning, and there was a crow on the roof, walking.

V. So I gathered what I needed

On the fourth morning I went back to Old Mother and told her my dreams, and when I had finished she nodded as if I had brought her the right change from market.

“Then you know what to fetch,” she said. “Go and fetch it, and do not bring it back here. When you have all of it, wait for the dark of the moon and go to the crossroads below the hill. I will be there, or I will not. It does not matter which. It is your work.”

The salt was the hardest.

After the hill, the court took my mother’s house and everything in it to pay for the trial. That is how it was done then. You paid for the wood they burned you with. Our neighbour bought the house cheap and put his hired man in it, and the hired man slept in my mother’s bed and ate off her plates. But the salt barrel was not in the house. My aunt had taken it on the night they came for my mother, before anyone thought to stop her. She rolled it up the road in the dark on its edge and hid it under the hay in her loft. She never told me why. I do not think she knew why. Her hands had simply done it.

I knew it was there because I had heard it go up the ladder.

I went up while she was milking. The barrel was half full of grey salt from the coast, coarse as gravel, and when I put my hand into it I could feel my mother’s hands in it, the way a cushion keeps the shape of someone who has sat there. I filled a little linen bag and tied it and put it in my bodice, and I laid the hay back the way it had been.

The nail I took from the cart.

It stood behind the bailiff’s barn, where it always stood, with its shafts down in the mud. It was the same cart they used for dung and for turnips, and it was the cart they had driven her up the hill in, sitting on a sack with her hands tied in front of her. Nobody had washed it. There was ash still caught in the cracks between the boards.

I went at dusk. I worked a nail loose from the side board, from the place where her hand had held on, a black square nail with rust in flakes along it. It came out with a sound like a small bone breaking. I put it in my bodice with the salt. It was cold, as cold as the tooth was warm, and all the way home I was cold on one side and warm on the other.

The names I already had.

My mother had taught them to me the way her mother taught her, every spring when the first leaves came on the birch. We would go out behind the house where no one could hear, and she would say them, and I would say them after her. First her own name, then her mother’s, then her mother’s mother’s, and back and back, until we came to the ones who had no names left at all, only “the one before” and “the one before her.” She made me say them until I could say them in my sleep. She said that a name said is a name kept. She said that the dead go only as far away as we let them.

The priest had said that a name is a door, and that we should keep it shut.

My mother had said the same thing. She only meant it the other way round.

VI. Three things buried at the crossroads

The dark of the moon came eight days later. I waited until my aunt was snoring, and then I took the shovel from beside the door and went out barefoot so the gravel would not sound under my clogs.

The crossroads lay below the hill, where the road from the church met the road to the fjord. There was a milestone there, and a thorn bush that the wind had bent flat, and nothing else. On a dark night you could not see the hill at all. You could only feel it behind you, the way you feel someone standing at your back.

Old Mother was there. She was sitting on the milestone in her shawl, and the bowl of her pipe made a small red eye in the dark. She did not get up and she did not speak. I understood that she would not help me, and that it was right that she would not.

The ground was half frozen. I dug where the two roads crossed, in the very middle, where the ruts of both of them ran together. It took a long time. When the hole was as deep as my forearm I knelt down beside it.

First I untied the tooth from my shift. It was still warm. I had carried it for twenty days, and it had not once gone cold. I poured salt from the little linen bag into the palm of my hand and laid the tooth in the salt, and I closed the salt around it until it was covered, and then I laid it in the bottom of the hole.

Then I took the nail. I set its point on the salt, above the tooth, and I pushed it down with the heel of my hand until it went through and into the earth beneath, so that the tooth was held there, and neither the frost nor a priest could shift it.

Then the names.

I leaned down with my mouth almost in the hole, and I said them into the earth, in order, the way she had taught me. I started with my mother’s. I said it aloud, the name they had cut out of the books and burned in the priest’s stove, and it was the first time anyone had said it since the pulpit. It came out of me rough, like a thing that had been kept in a box. Then I said her mother’s name, and her mother’s, and on back through all of them, until I came to the ones with no names left, and I said “the one before” and “the one before her” into the dark.

When I had finished, Old Mother spoke for the first time.

“What are you asking for?” she said. “Say it plainly. They need to hear it plainly.”

I knew what most girls in my place would have asked for. I had thought about the neighbour’s barn every night for a month. I had thought about his dog.

“I want her name back,” I said. “I want her remembered, in the place they cut her out of.”

Old Mother took the pipe out of her mouth.

“That is the harder thing,” she said. “It is also the only one that lasts.”

I filled the hole in with my hands and pressed the earth down hard, and I stood up.

Up on the hill, in the wood behind the place where the fire had been, smoke was rising.

Nothing up there was burning, and there was no light anywhere on the hill, but the smoke came all the same, pale in the dark, coming up out of the trees in a slow column and leaning over and drifting down the hillside toward us, and as it came I smelled it. It was juniper. It was the smoke my mother had hung the hams in and laid on the hearth when someone in the house was sick, and that I had smelled in her hair every winter of my life.

It came down to the crossroads and lay along the ground around our feet like a cloth laid over a table.

The forest had answered.

VII. The night she returned

I walked home with the smoke at my ankles. When I looked back from the bend in the road, Old Mother was gone, and the milestone stood there alone.

It was on the road that the air changed.

For a month the wind had come off the sea, cold and wet and smelling of weed. Now, between one step and the next, it stopped. Everything stopped. The thorn bushes stopped rattling and the reeds in the ditch stood up straight, and for the space of a long breath there was no wind anywhere in the world. I stood in the middle of the road and could hear my own blood.

Then it came again, from the other way.

It came down off the land, off the hill, and it blew toward the sea, and it carried the juniper smoke with it. The reeds in the ditch bent over the wrong way. Up on the church tower the iron cock on the spire swung round on its rod with a long scream of rust and pointed back the way it had come. In the village a shutter banged, and then another, and somewhere a child began to cry and was hushed.

The wind moved backwards all that night. It blew from the land to the sea, against the tide and against the way the trees had grown. In the morning the old men stood in the road and argued about it, because none of them had ever seen it happen, and their fathers had never told them of it.

And the crows sang.

You will say that crows do not sing. They do not. I had lived my whole life among them and never heard anything from a crow but a crow’s voice. But when I came into the village that night, they were all along the ridge of the church roof again, the whole row of them, the way they had been on the morning of the hill. And they were making a sound I have no word for. It was low and it was many-throated, and it rose and fell together, the way women’s voices rise and fall when they hum at the loom and do not know they are doing it. It went on and on. It was the sound of something that had been waiting a long time, and had stopped waiting.

I went in and lay down in my bed with my clothes on and my feet still black from the crossroads.

I do not know how long I lay there. The crows went on singing over the village. My aunt did not wake. That was the strangest thing of all, that she slept through it, when she had stood up in the dark for a few crows walking on the turf.

Then the straw tick at the end of my bed went down, the way it did when someone sat on it.

My mother used to sit there. When I was small and could not sleep, she would come and sit at my feet without a word, and lay her hand around my ankle, and stay until I slept. I always knew it was her by the way the bed went down, a little more on the left than on the right.

It went down a little more on the left than on the right.

A hand closed round my ankle. It was warm, as warm as the tooth had been.

I did not look. I knew without being told that I must not look, the way you know not to turn round on a dark road when you hear steps behind you that keep time with yours. I lay with my eyes shut and my face to the wall, and the smell of juniper filled the room, and the hand held my ankle, and someone said my name.

She said it the way she always had, with the end of it a little higher than the beginning, as if it were a question she already knew the answer to.

That was all. She did not tell me anything. She did not need to. She sat there until the crows stopped singing, and then the tick came up again, slowly, and the hand was gone, and the room was cold, and I slept.

VIII. Remembered back into existence

In the morning there was snow on the north corner.

It had snowed a little in the night, after the wind turned, and it lay everywhere, thin and even. It lay on the black patch outside the dike, too, for the first time since the hill, smooth and white over the length of a woman, like a sheet drawn up. The sexton stood and looked at it for a long while with his cap in his hands. Then he went and got the priest.

The priest did not look at the snow. He went into the church and took down the book he had cut, and he opened it at the place, and on the narrow stub where the page had been, close to the binding, there was a mark. It was grey, and it was the size and shape of a thumb pressed into the paper. He tried to wash it out, and it would not wash out. He tried to scrape it with his knife, and the paper only grew thinner around it. In the end he closed the book and put it back on the shelf, and he never opened it at that place again. When he died, many years later, the new priest found the mark and did not know what it was. But I knew whose thumb it was, because I had held that hand.

That same morning, at the well, the neighbour’s wife said my mother’s name.

She had not meant to. She was talking to the smith’s wife about her bad knee, and she said that the only one who had ever been able to do anything for it was my mother, and she said my mother’s name, out loud, in the street, and then she put both hands over her mouth. The smith’s wife did not tell her off. She said: “Yes. She was good with knees.” And then the two of them stood there with their buckets and said nothing for a long time.

After that it kept happening. People said her name when they did not mean to. They said it when a cow would not calve, and when a child had a fever that would not break, and when something was lost. They said it the way you reach for a tool that has always hung on the same nail, and find the nail empty, and say the name of the tool anyway. By spring, women were going down to the north corner at dusk, one at a time, so that no one would see, and leaving things on the dike above the place. Mostly it was a heel of bread or a twist of wool. Once it was a coin, and nobody took it.

They could cut her out of the books. They could not cut her out of the village. The village had needed her too long.

And something had come back into me as well.

I began to know things I had not been taught. I would put my hand on a sick calf and know how long it had. I would look at a girl in church and know she was carrying before she knew it herself. When things were lost, I could often say where, and I was nearly always right. None of it frightened me. It felt like walking into my mother’s kitchen in the dark and finding everything where it had always been.

At first people came to me because there was no one else. Later they came because I was the one they came to. When Old Mother died, the year I was married, she left me her pipe and a box that I will not tell you about, and the low house at the end of the fjord road stood empty, and nobody wanted it, and so after a time I went and lived there.

Every spring, when the first leaves come on the birch, I go out behind the house where no one can hear, and I say the names. First my mother’s. Then hers, and hers, and back, until I come to the ones with no names left. I have taught them to my daughter. She will teach them to hers.

We do not write them down. They wrote her name once, and they cut it out and burned it. A name that lives in a mouth cannot be cut out of anything.

Some witches are made.

Others are remembered back into existence.

That is where the story ends, the way my grandmother told it.

She told me the rest without words, which was how she taught most things. She took me to a crossroads when I was about the age of the girl in the story, and said the name into my ear, once, and laid her hand over my mouth. Then she said the others, back and back, and I said them after her until I had them. I have said them every spring since.

The tooth is still where it was put, as far as I know. I have never gone looking for it. Some things are kept by being left alone.

If you have ever felt it, the burning behind the ribs, the weight of a silence that is older than you, then you already know what this story is about. Someone in your line was made smaller than she was. Someone had her name taken out of the books.

You can say it back.

— Hazel

The women in this story lived by older laws than the ones that burned them. If you want to begin where they began, that is what Day One of my Witch’s Journey is for.