The Weight Of Stones

Mr. Johnson Cutter, his face covered in a black bag with holes cut into it, asked her awkwardly if she was comfortable with the ropes where they were. 

“I suppose so,” she said flatly. 

Little towns popped up regularly along the paths the great migration west took as America came to fruition. People’s manifest destinies stopped driving them on, or they had too many people die of the droop during travel, or they ran out of supplies and money and time and love for adventure, or maybe they just got plumb tired, so they decided to settle with like-minded groups of adventure-less people in pretty little valleys and rivers and mountains and hills in picturesque little villages along the way to the promised land. 

The hay got stuck in Mr. Cutter’s shoes when he went up to ask, so he shook out the stalks stuck to his weather-worn brown working loafers and carefully waded out of the stack and away from the woman tied to the stick in the middle of it all. 

Once they were settled down, these adventure-less people grew corn and pumpkins and wheat and cows and lived off the land they collectively decided to name something like Barlow or Polka or some other folksy thing with a long storied history that gets washed away with time. The name sticks around though, and years from now, a historian will get the story all wrong and the only person who knows or cares will be some toothless gram-gram with a big book of family history, a single name, and all that’ll come from her will be a shrug and a shake of the head. 

Just not for this town.

Father Richard Johnson messed with his collar as Cutter came back, a collar too damn tight for this southern heat, and started choking out the decree. It was never a good time to do this kind of thing, but God’s will, all that. 

“Oh Lord, Hear me, and-“

Cutting in, the Townsfolk, and a teenage Mark, and a teen Bethesda, and a teenage Paul Goodman, began their heckling.

A good few of those towns were chock-full of little cultish fundamentalist Bible people who worked too damn hard and lived too damn frugally and existed too damn meanly for terrible things not to happen to good people now and then. There was too much work not to feel the pressure of survival licking at your back. It all had to go somewhere. 

The flame on the torch danced eagerly and willed Father Johnson to finish his sermon. It felt ready, even though Sandra Farmhand, the woman watching the flame with self-interest, was not. She was scared and confused and curious and disgusted and so, so afraid. Cutter hoisted the torch up and stood by for the final word of the sermon and a nod from Father Johnson. 

Even worse than all the pressure was that now and then, there were good men and women who were violently killed just because someone didn’t care for them much.

As the sermon finished and the flame was granted its freedom by the touch of the torch to the haystack, Farmhand screamed bloody murder and little girl Mary, in sudden shock of the noise, put her hands to her ears. She’d meet the same kind of fate one day, but right then, she had no idea why — why a woman would fornicate with another man instead of her own husband (they were supposed to be in love) or why she’d walk out and give herself up so easily to the mob, or why they’d solve a murder with another murder, or why it seemed like some men yelled “witch!” Or “burn!” In cathartic tones, or why the townsfolk yelled any number of obscenities filled with rage and hate and release of pressure. 

She’d get it one day, but not today. For her, the pressure began there, watching a woman burn alive with her hand in her mother’s hand. The wind blew a little harder and the flames sparked up in response.

Over the years, little Mary became just Mary. She’d learn little tricks, like what plants were good for cuts or bruises or which leaves would make good tea or spices or how if you talked just right to someone they’d just go ahead and calm down. 

“Of course, if you rubbed some aloe on it, it wouldn’t hurt as much.” Teenage Mary said as she bent her knees to tell a small boy about a sunburn he’d gotten on his neck. She had some in her hand, showed him, and rubbed it carefully. 

“It’s so nice and cold Ms. Mary.”

She smiled. 

Mary Gospel became her name after a marriage to a widowed man at twenty-two named Mark Gospel. Mark Gospel was older, Mark Gospel was a carpenter, Mark Gospel was a house-builder, Mark Gospel was a bit of a bully to his friends, and above all, Mark Gospel was a violent man towards Mary. After a particularly violent night, this was the topic of discussion once between Mary and her two’s company during Laundress’s day. 

“…For looking at another man, can you believe it Meredith?”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t be doing something so stupid that he thinks he needs to hit you square enough that you’d make a bruise like that.” The town ugly’s Bethesda Sherman quietly added to the conversation. She had no business being in the talk, and had said it without looking up from her sudsy wash-bin and a pair of particularly dirty knickers. Mrs. Sherman said things like this regularly, and like a drop of water to an uncaring mountain, it eroded Mary, just a little, every time.

Meredith frowned at the bruise, and said nothing to the jab. No defense, no outward love, just a cold frown and a knowing look. Mrs. Sherman felt a sudden headache, like her head had two hands crushed in on her. 

And the pressure mounted. 

To be fair to Bethesda, Mark had hit her pretty squarely. The town had figured he wasn’t a very wise man, and at first, his dumbness had been attractive to Mary— but then came the accusations that she’d besmirchedhis manhood by way of education and cleverness and her constant teasing him in public for unawareness or not having the words right away. Besmirched! She’d wondered where he’d learned that word, she retorted when he angrily threw it at her. He couldn’t even read, and she’d learned how to read the Bible from her mother, and— Bwap! He would smack her back-handed, or closed-fisted, or hard with an object in his hand like a mug or a plate when she’d get a little courageous with her back-talk. 

“You ain’t got a clue what I do for you Mary! Not a clue! You got no clue that you can’t keep a town runnin with yer damn books! I do it for you!” He’d always look at her on the ground and say as if it would make up for the violence. 

He’d been upset at her for looking at another man one day on their evening walk around the town. She said she hadn’t, but she had, but she wasn’t sure if being punched was the reasonable response to glancing at another man. Reeling from the second hit, leaning against the table, she rubbed her jaw and retorted quietly.

“Oh, I can feel what you do for me just fine, Mark.” She often thought. 

And the pressure mounted. 

When Mary had met the simpleton farmhand Joel Billson, she was enamored, and he was drunk on the attention of a pretty girl his age, and he didn’t much mind if she had a husband as long as they met and made love in the cornfields- his daddy once killed a man there and said that the Lord wasn’t much watching the corn these days, just the houses and the trees and the people who mattered out on the coasts and wherever the devil was creeping. “As long as you ain’t tell anybody what’s been done here in these cornfields,” his daddy explained, “there won’t be no reason for God to come lookin’ here.”

So Mary and Joel made love. Mary liked Joel just fine and felt like she was finally getting one over on Mark like she never had before. It made her hot and excited and powerful and godly.

God didn’t pay much attention to the cornfields, and Mary was caught by the heat of it all, and afterwards he told her all about everything, and she listened, and smartly decided to pack that story away where she didn’t have to think about it. Joel got worried that because he told Mary, God was there now. 

And the pressure mounted. 

It was fall now, and the autumn began its slow creep in to kill the trees that got a little too uppity and warn the people that the corn and the wheat and the pumpkins and all the rest of the crops needed to be harvested. The winter was going to be hard and long and the sweetness of fall made everyone antsy for the other shoe to get over itself and drop already. Mary felt it in the fields she made love and the house she was beat and the chore-places she was shit-talked.

And the pressure mounted.

She was allergic to fall in one way or another, and pimples broke out on her face. 

Some disease swept in, and killed some corn, the very corn she made love in. It spread and spread and made life so much more difficult and the poor sick kids wouldn’t make it through the winter without the food they’d lost. She felt it was God punishing her, and so did Joel, and they decided to break it off until the end of the winter. 

But they couldn’t keep away. 

And the pressure mounted.

Her husband Mark began to suspect that she was whisking away for the hours she was gone (fucking her lover) doing some kind pagan ritual to destroy the crops. He noted that her face broke out in sinner’s marks and she felt cold and distant to him, and snapped so much more often than before, so much that his hand began to get tired and her bruises started to get worse. He’d also noted all the things she did, all the picking plants and talking to children that weren’t hers and chewing on leaves like a cow. He’d seen this before with Jeb Farmhand’s wife, before she stabbed him and before she was burned, when he was a teen. So he started questioning her, making everywhere she went and everything she did fuel his fire. He slept with his knife. 

And the pressure mounted. 

Bethesda, sick for a while, had let out an aching gasp whilst spinning some wool and fell dead on the spot. She had died mysteriously, and the last person she’d been with was Mary. Mary, who’d spent the morning alone with Bethesda and thought about Mrs. Sherman’s heart stopping while she droned on and on, was perplexed and honestly a little relieved. Mark Gospel, however, silently put another notch on the chalkboard. 

“What a damn shame.” Meredith noted once. 

“Yes.” Dreamily agreed Mary, trying to figure out if she did that.

And the pressure mounted. 

Joel’s simple mind turned the events of the crops and his affair and the friendliness of Mark whenever he helped out harvesting over and over again like a kalidoscope. And when Joel had fallen off a horse and was almost trampled and Mark pulled him just in the nick of time to not lose his legs, Joel cried deliriously and guiltily in Mark’s arms. 

“Jesus and Mary Joel, what’s with being so soft? Yer cryin’ like yer in yer mother’s arms!” Mark joked. 

It was only right, Joel thought, if a man saves your life that you gotta tell him. If Joel came clean, the only person that’d be hurt is poor Mary, and they probably wouldn’t even do too much to her. Hell, the priest recommended it during confessions. It was only right. So he told Mark. And Mark’s eyes darkened. 

And the pressure mounted. 

She was churning butter when her husband burst in angrily with the whole town and the priest and even the kids and what felt like the devil behind him. She was whisked up screaming bloody murder by the armpits and dragged outside kicking. 

The door slammed shut from the wind, even though it was a windless day.

Mr. Goodman (of which was one of her usual company’s husbands) was the one to set it all up, and awkwardly asked if the ropes she was tied to were comfortable. She’d been tied to the ground and next to her was Mr. Goodman and a large selection of rocks he was set to put one at a time on top of her. 

“Mrs. Gospel, you know what’s happenn’ to you?” Mr. Goodman asked wearily. Father Johnson stood near, and the rocks sat eerily as the third participant of the conversation. 

“I venture I’m going to be executed.” She mentioned like the weather.

The past few days had been something of a blur; she’d been set up in the local jail as the trial (if it could be called as such, what with her voice not even an inkling being heard) and preparations were set and emotions were simmered by Mr. Gospel and the townsfolk who listened to his gripes about witchcraft and adultery. The good church had spared Joel for his honesty, and Father Johnson had prescribed stoning for Mary, who’d been vocally accusing saint Mark Gospel of beating her. 

After a bit of deliberation and feet dragging, the town wasn’t too comfortable with the idea of a communal murder, so Father Johnson prescribed a crushing to death with stones instead- something that could be done by one man in the executioner’s hood. There needed to be a separation of man from the murder, you see. Cutter had gotten too old to continue carrying out the sentences, so Mr. Goodman was up to bat for the past few years. 

The whole town had shown up to the event and they watched as old Father Johnson began his collar-tugging gut-wrenching ceremony and Mr. Goodman began the process of putting the stones down on Mary.

By the seventh or eighth or ninth or billionth stone, Mary was given her full rights and she couldn’t fucking breath god dammit! The weight of it all, of the stones on her neck and her chest and her abdomen and the shit-talk and Joel betraying her and the pimples on her face and the marks Mark had left that everyone seemed to ignore out of pity or guilt and the food drying out and the idea that she was pagan coming from the man she lived with and all the constant tiny drops of water that slowly broke her down until the pressure broke her bones and caught her breath and couldn’t go anywhere but out.

Female rage is borne from little rocks. There’s a jug in every woman with a little water on the bottom and they’re told that all the pebbles and stones and gravel and sand and shit they get thrown at them is meant to go into the jug and never come out. So a rock will go in with a pebble and a bit of shit and a bit of sand and up, up, up the water will go until one day-

She had her eyes closed, and suddenly, the weight went away. 

It all did, all the stress melted away and the stone dropped off her body and the ropes fell limp. 

Crunch, Crack, Clack she heard silently from around her. Father Johnson let out a breath, or maybe his lungs just expelled air as his ribs came in on them- she didn’t know. But around her, Mark, and Joel, and Old Cutter, and Goodman, and the women that shit-talked her during Laundress day, and the kids, and the mothers, and the fathers, and the men who called “witch!” Or “Crush her!” Or any number of obscenities were suddenly and violently….crushed, as if all the weight she’d felt through all the years had suddenly enclosed like a fist around them, cracking and killing and maiming and pushing and bursting people like grapes on the ground as the life was squeezed out of them. 

She stood up and looked out on the windswept plain and its beautiful river and its picturesque little town, looking away from the sudden carnage that had appeared before her. She knew she caused that, that disgusting thing in front of her, and she was everything her husband thought she was, and she felt vindicated in some weird way. 

The plains felt silent save for the newly-birthed wind. 

And the pressure lifted. She felt at ease, and knew that she had done evil, that she was Evil. Evil, as their God had called it, as their God had turned away from the Woman and the Trampled and the Afraid and called them Sinners who wanted nothing else but Power. These Trampled and Sinners and Afraid who wanted power that would not put them over their oppressors, but equal, equal enough to fight against the “Good” they did to them.

She would be Evil, fine, as long as the terrible, terrible life she had lived was Good and she was named as the avatar and leader of the tribe opposed to it. If she would be named Evil, then fine. 

She was okay with Evil. 

And the single un-crushed girl that stood among the carnage came forward, and took her hand, hand in mother’s hand.