Jake Ziemba / The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season Jake Ziemba

The winter of 1708 arrived boldly, ahead of schedule, and unapologetic. By late September, having firmly established itself, it began to make demands. Our first loss was the harvest. The frosts destroyed nearly half of our crops. After that, it came for the light. As the season progressed, the margins of night expanded to overtake the day. For many weeks it appeared that the sun was unable to rise until ten, and it set shortly after two. During the day, the sky was perpetually gray and overcast.

Now that cold, hunger, and darkness were the foundations of our existence, winter came at last for the intangible treasures, those elements which are impossible to see and just as difficult to recover. Our optimism, our faith in one another. Then the snow came, and that is when the real troubles began.

In the absence of food, we subsisted on suspicion and blame. It was the product of witchcraft, this winter that swallowed the harvest and froze the fingers from our hands. The church established a panel, overseen by Father Caleb, tasked to identify those who had made themselves instruments of the Devil and nullify these witches’ power to do harm in His name. Trials were convened, and many faced judgment. We held our palms above the burning flesh of our neighbors, but still they pulsed with cold.

The first to be judged were the loners, the eccentrics, those who lived on the outskirts of our settlement. Richmond was barely a town in those days. This segment of the population, so reviled by Caleb and his Panel, were my sister Sarah’s best friends. One night my father asked Sarah why she spent so much time among them. “They tell the best stories,” she replied.

“Better than what’s in the Bible?” he challenged. “Better than Samson? Or Daniel and the Lion’s Den?” He was very devout, and had been close friends with Father Caleb since boyhood.

“Those are excellent stories,” she answered with the soft tones of diplomacy. “But everybody knows them. Some stories matter more when not so many people know them. They only have so much meaning, and if everybody takes a piece, they don’t mean quite as much. There’s something special about a story only a few people know.” Father sent her to bed without supper that night.

While awaiting trial, and the execution that inevitably followed, prisoners were kept in a cell near the southern fields, an hour’s walk from our home.

46

During the interval between arrest and execution, Sarah took to bed whenever possible.

I had my own suspicions though, as to what she was doing, but had to wait until the Panel arrested a new suspect to test my theory. I didn’t have to wait long.

Elisha was a very old woman. She had been old even before Richmond became a proper settlement. Some whispered she had been born old. She lived along the western frontier, and was on good terms with many of the Indian tribes, including those who still attempted to raid us, a fact that did little to make her popular. She had even been in trouble with Father Caleb before. Years ago, she claimed to have found a book in a cave beyond town. A Devil’s spellbook, Father Caleb called it, and he forced her to publically burn it. If anything, we were all surprised the Panel had waited this long to bring charges against her.

That night, after the townsfolk saw her being led into the cell, I stayed awake long after sunset, biding my time, waiting for my suspicions to be confirmed. Several hours later, looking out the window, I saw a lantern bouncing across the backyard, flickering through the falling snow. The light moved away from our home.

Walking as silently as I could, I snuck down the hallway to Sarah’s room. I gingerly opened the door, and found her bed empty. I knew she had gone to see Elisha, but I didn’t know what I would do about it.

Immediately following Elisha’s death, a new phenomenon plagued the town. The morning after her execution, as if by magic, holes appeared all over town. These holes were never more than a foot wide, and two feet deep at the most. Every morning, there were more holes, and more rumors to accompany them. That the holes were the result of Elisha’s soul tunneling its way out of Hell to torment us further. The Panel conducted nightly searches, by torchlight, in the attempt to catch her spirit in the act. Or, if not her spirit, then to find the culprit aiding her damned soul in its quest to return to the earth.

These torchlight searches were always deadly. Usually the victims were respected members of the community who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes they were outsiders with whom the Panel did not want to waste time on a proper trial. On several occasions, it was members of the Panel who died, either as a result of mistaken identity. Or perhaps it was sinister plotting within the group, to weed out members whose behavior warranted suspicion. The Panel reported every death as a success, one less

soldier in Satan’s army. I suspected the deaths were something else entirely, the inevitable result of frightened people mad with starvation, gone out with guns and knives to fight demons, but finding only each other. At the time, I still believed the Bible was the true Word of the Lord, but I had also begun to see how men could repurpose the Gospels as weapons to justify ungodly behavior. My faith began to falter, and this distressed me profoundly.

Over the next several days, Sarah remained tired and irritable, even though nobody else had been properly arrested and the witch’s cell remained vacant. I stayed up again to watch for her. Sure enough, I saw the lantern go bouncing out into the dark once again. She didn’t head for the cell, however. She stopped in the backyard. I dressed and slipped out the back door. Her footprints were easy to track in the four inches of snow the sky had lowered upon us since that morning. It was still falling, an airborne latticework of white lace backlit by the full moon. I followed her tracks slowly, and as I came upon her, I saw that she was digging in the backyard. “Sarah,” I said.

She paid me no mind. She dug relentlessly. All around her were holes, previously dug and abandoned. Already, the snowstorm had begun undoing her work, replacing the dirt my sister had removed with snow. Standing in the dark, the holes looked bottomless. As I watched the snowflakes drift into them and disappear, I felt that the blackness of the holes went on indefinitely, into fathomless depths Man was never intended to approach.

“Sarah,” I said again. Once more, she did not respond. She was standing in a hole about one foot deep. I reached out and touched her shoulder. She whirled violently, nearly striking my face with the shovel’s blade.

“It’s me! David!”

Reassured, she took a deep breath, and drove the shovel’s blade hard into the earth. “What are you doing out here?”

“You’re the one digging holes in a blizzard,” I replied.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I am.”

“You’re not worried about the Panel seeing you?”

“I’ve bigger concerns than the Panel,” she said simply.

“What are you talking about?”

“Leave me to my work,” she said.

“I’m going to get a shovel,” I told her, “And I’m going to help you fill in these holes. The snowstorm will cover them up, and nobody will see them until spring, when we’ll have more food, and everybody will be in better spirits.”

48

“What makes you think there will be food in the spring?” Sarah asked defiantly. She was naturally a short girl, even shorter standing in her hole.

“Food starts growing when winter ends and it warms again.”

“What if winter never ends?”

“You’ve been alive for fourteen winters, Sarah. All fourteen have ended.”

“None have been this cold. None have started this early or lasted this long,” she answered. Although I did not admit it to her, she was right. “This is a winter like none other. Elisha understood that,” she sighed, with the voice of a woman much older than herself. “And that is why I dig.”

Panic flashed through my mind. “It’s not true, is it? You’re not…digging to bring her back?”

“Nothing can bring Elisha back,” she answered, and her orthodoxy soothed me. “I’m digging so that more won’t die along with her.”

“I don’t believe I understand.”

“Do you remember the book Caleb made her burn years ago? The one she found in the cave? Written in pictures, that she translated with the old Indian man?”

“Witchcraft, Sarah. You ought not to speak of it.”

“It wasn’t witchcraft. It was a book of the Bible that hadn’t been discovered yet. God put it in that cave for her to find and share. She told me all of this before she died.”

“You’d been going to see her.”

“Obviously,” she said sharply. “I’ve gone to see them all out of this world. To let them know someone will take up their stories when they’re gone.”

“What did she tell you?”

“You mustn’t tell anyone. Anyone,” she insisted, and I agreed.

“She showed me the book. The real book. The one she burned when Father Caleb threatened to have her hanged was a copy she and the Indian made. She kept the real one hidden, and brought it into the cell with her.”

“What did it say?”

“I couldn’t read it, because it was all in pictures, but she showed it to me, the new translation she was working on, better than the first one. She’d been working on it in secrecy for years. There was a calendar in it, and the calendar said there were five seasons. The four we get every year, but then another, one that only happens sometimes. She told me its name, but I could never say it right. This made her grieve, that the sound of the word would die with her. She and the old Indian man could never agree on how to translate it. The Indian read it as ‘Double-Winter,’ but she read it as ‘God’s Neglect.’”

“Do witches cause it?”

“God doesn’t care about witches,” she said dismissively. “It only happens when God when people aren’t thankful enough for the things they have.

“When the fifth season comes, it kills everybody. It freezes all the people and all the food. Then God brings new food out of the earth, makes new people to eat it, and starts the world over again.”

“I’m not saying that I believe this, but if this is the fifth season, and it’s going to kill everybody, then what does digging have to do with what you’ve told me?”

The snow was falling more heavily now. A wide band of clouds stretched over the moon, and the light left us. All was darkness and cold. “You came alone?” Sarah asked me.

“Yes.”

“And you won’t tell any of this to anyone?”

“I swear it.”

Sarah was invisible in the darkness of the snowstorm. I saw a small, abrupt breeze blow to the left, then to the right, disrupting the fall of the snowflakes. That was her looking around to be certain it was only us in the backyard.

“There’s a picture on the last page of Elisha’s book. Of God. He doesn’t look the way Father Caleb says he does.”

“What does He look like?”

“Like a man. At first. But the more you look at it, the more you see that’s not true. There’s something wrong about Him. He has very small eyes, but when you look at them, you see there’s just space there. The longer you look, the bigger the space gets, and then things start to happen in it…I cried when she showed it to me. Ever since I saw that picture, I’ve been having dreams.”

“What happens in these dreams?”

“I’m flying. Above the town, and I’m shown places. Places where the food might be buried. And then I’m somewhere else. It took me a few nights to figure it out, but now I know where I am. I’m on the last page of Elisha’s book, with that picture. And God is there with me.

“He says we haven’t appreciated what He’s done for us, and that…He says it will take a sacrifice to end it. Somebody who knows why they’re dying, what they’re dying for, and does so voluntarily. Burning the witches is simple murder. Because I’m the only one who understands, I’m the only one whose death can end it.”

“Sarah—”

“But I might not have to. I know there’s food in the ground. I know it, the

food that feeds the reborn earth. It’s only when that food comes out of the earth that the fifth season is truly over. If I can only find the food, people will stop dying.”

“Sarah, you’re cold and hungry. Your mind’s not working right. Nobody’s is these days. Letting an old woman’s heresy affect you like this will only hurt you.”

“I have more digging to do,” she said. “Go inside and sleep.”

I was prepared to begin the argument anew when I saw the torches on the horizon, their lambent tongues flickering across the void. “It’s the Panel!” I hissed, grabbing her by the arm. “We need to go!”

She grabbed the lantern with her free hand as I pulled her away. I ran towards the house, or in its direction, as we ran through impenetrable layers of snow and blackness. When we finally reached the backdoor, it seemed to materialize instantly before us, and I nearly ran into it. I fumbled in my pocket for the key. The lights of the Panel’s torches were already drawing nearer. I had just slid the key into the lock when Sarah reached out and clutched my arm.

“No!” she whispered. “Our footprints! In the snow! They’ll trace them from the holes to the house!” Sarah said. I was frozen fast with cold and terror, and had no idea of what to do.

“We need another way,” she said aloud, more to herself than to me. She released my arm and took off sprinting back the way we came, straight into the path of the Panel.

“Help! Help!” she shrieked. “Witchcraft! Devilry! Help!”

She was running directly into death’s arms. I ran after her. I couldn’t let her face the Panel alone. When she finally reached them, I was only a few steps behind.

Sarah took a running leap and dove into Father Caleb, then wrapped her arms about him and buried her head in his breast. “Witchcraft! Of the highest caliber!” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. Father Caleb looked as if he were a man recently handed a dripping newborn calf.

“What…what?” he stammered. “Slow down, I can’t—“

“It was horrible! Horrible!” Sarah wailed. “Scores upon scores of witches! A black mass, Father, a black mass on our property! I saw it through my window! A great goat’s head conjured out of the fire, with an evil eye, and three tongues, each befouling the Lord’s name in blasphemous harmony with the others! Oh bless me Father, bless me!” Sarah fell to her knees, weeping in anguish, as she clutched Father Caleb’s shins with all her might. The rest of

the Panel’s search party had formed ranks about them.

Caleb locked his eyes with mine as Sarah proceeded carrying-on. “You saw this?”

“I…I heard her crying out,” I stuttered, trying to play along. “I went into her bedroom, to see what the matter was, and she came running out, wailing… When she ran out into the backyard, I followed her, and saw something, people, shadowy dark people fleeing into the woods…I followed her to the light of your torches. Thank the Lord you arrived to chase them off when you did. They must have sensed your righteousness and fled.”

“Oh bless me, Father, bless me! In the name of Christ, bless me!” Sarah cried.

“Do you swear it?” he asked. He produced an old book from under his coat. “On the Bible?”

I placed my hand upon the front cover. It was leathery and coarse. “I do.” It was easier than I thought it would be. Caleb nodded somberly, then helped Sarah to her feet. He looked at her, then me, then her again. Would he have the heart to issue a death sentence to a hysterical fourteen-year-old girl, mewling for his blessing in the name of Christ?

“You’re safe now. The Panel and I will see you safely to your door, and continue on our way. You’ve nothing more to fear this night.”

They led us to our front door, then headed off into the woods, where I told them I’d seen the witches flee. Sarah shook and sniveled and invoked the Lord’s protection the entire time.

As soon as we were inside, with the door shut and locked, separating us from them, she took a deep breath, straightened her spine, and became herself once more. “Thank you,” she said, in her usual stable voice. “Your testimony very likely saved us both. I know it wasn’t easy. Thank you.”

“If they can lie before God in order to take lives, I can lie before God in order to save them.”

She hugged me and went to her bedroom. I lay awake all night, counting cracks in the ceiling. It was impossible to stop.

It continued snowing for the next four days. During that time, four more people starved to death. The Panel set fire to the Tilden homestead, with Mr. Tilden’s widow and two young daughters inside.

On the fifth day, Sarah was arrested. She had been digging in Father Caleb’s yard at dawn, only a few feet from his front door, as if waiting for him. When he accosted her, she told him that she had dug all the holes, so to be closer to the Devil. She was going to dig him out of Hell and let him loose upon the

earth. The night of our encounter, she had bewitched me to bear false witness on her behalf. Sarah confessed without hesitation or coercion to every charge of witchcraft and blasphemy and heresy he levied against her. My parents and I tried our best, but there was nothing we could do. The sentence was death. Under normal conditions, she would have been burned at the stake, but sympathy for my father and a shortage of firewood provoked Caleb to modify her sentence. Sarah was to be hanged.

When publically questioned on the gallows, Sarah reaffirmed her guilt in every matter she was charged with. It was snowing that day as well. Before he tied the noose, Caleb asked if she had any last words. She said “I know why I am dying, what I am dying for, and I do so voluntarily.” Then she said she loved us and walked off the platform.

We now faced the problem of what to do with her body. Father Caleb said that under no circumstances was she to be buried in the church cemetery, with God’s children, where her evil could take root in consecrated soil. We could bury her at the southern end of the town, where the ground was already barren, and nothing of substance had ever grown. In exchange for leaving her body intact, her funeral had to be public, so the people would be reassured she was securely entombed.

When I carried her body from the gallows to her grave, I did so in a burlap robe and elbow-length gloves, both of which were to be interred with her. I still remember how light she felt in my arms. How slight and insubstantial starvation had made her, and how the snowflakes still clung to her eyelashes when I went to cut her down.

I carried her past the southern limits of the town, the leader of a grim parade. Our parents were behind us, and the remainder of Richmond followed behind them. When we had passed the last of the trees, Father Caleb gave the command, and the gravediggers took up their shovels and began working. My family was forced to pay them double their normal wages for subjecting them to the sacrilege of burying a witch. They complained that the ground was too cold for digging. I wanted to take them to any of the holes that Sarah had dug, to show them what a fourteen-year-old girl had done out of desire to save them, to save the whole town, including the man who’d ordered her execution, but I didn’t. I held her and bit my tongue as they worked.

They hadn’t dug more than a foot and a half when one of them cried out. “There’s something here!” he yelled. “It looks like…it’s vegetables!”

The crowd of onlookers, who’d thus far kept their distance, came rushing up to see. “Potatoes!” somebody cried. “It’s potatoes!” The prospect of food

turned their rushing into stampede. People tripped over one another, tore at each other’s clothes, fought to be the first ones to reach sustenance.

I continued holding Sarah, and watched. As they ran streaming into the crowd to fight for the potatoes, countless people brushed against Sarah’s body. None of them would be ordered to cast off their clothing, to bury it in the ground. An hour ago, Sarah had been anathema, the apex of uncleanliness. Now, with food to be had, she was simply a dead girl, stiffening in my arms. With her eyes closed, and her head slumped over, she looked like she was sleeping. I wondered if that was how she had looked when she slept. How she looked when she dreamt of the food hidden in the earth, and negotiated the surrender of her life to bring it to us. When they pulled the first cluster of potatoes out of the earth, and hoisted it over their heads, the sky mended its wounds, and the snow stopped falling. I don’t think anybody noticed but me.

In the chaos which followed the discovery of the potatoes, I took Sarah away and buried her myself, near a hill beside the river. “Thank you,” I said as I laid her in the earth. “I know what you did. Even if nobody else does, I know. Thank you.”

When the sun rose the next morning, it shone with a brilliance we had forgotten it was capable of. The snow began to melt. Winter was finally breaking. The potatoes they’d found were tiny, skinless, and grey, but they were edible, and plentiful enough to feed the entire town for the next two weeks. She was the last person to die that winter, of starvation or any other cause.

I buried her in what they now call Shockoe. They built one of the tobacco warehouses right on top of her. I never told anybody else the location of her grave, save my mother and father, and they’re long dead as well. Sarah knew the power of secrets, that keeping things hidden made them more precious. The most I could do to repay her sacrifice was lay her to rest on the outskirts of town, where the most interesting stories dwell.