by Giovanni Carmine Costabile

“Witches! Elves! Fairies! Werewolves! Fie on those hellish creatures!” the preacher shouted from his pulpit. “We shall not let them take over our Christian community of Boston!”

In the wooden building of the church, painted in white, the assembly applauded him, yelling: “We will not!” in response.

The preacher continued in a calmer tone, although his expression was still stern and stark: “About the year 1000, the bishop Burchard of Worms wrote a Decretum. Therein one reads: ‘Have you believed…that these women exist, called Fates by the people, and that they possess the powers attributed to them? Have you believed that at the birth of a man they do with him as they please, as if that man could, if he wished, transform himself into a wolf, which the foolishness of the people calls a werewolf, or take on another form? If you believed it possible or plausible that the divine image could take on any other shape or appearance except by the will of almighty God, you must do penance for ten days with bread and water. Have you believed…that there exist sylvan female creatures who are called women of the forest and who are said to be creatures of corporeal substance who show themselves, when they please, to their lovers to take pleasure with them, but who, when do they want, hide and vanish? If you have believed this, you must do penance for ten days on bread and water’. 

Now, what did he mean by saying that we should not believe that they exist? Does it mean that we should ignore the existence of supernatural powers? Why, then, is he perhaps saying that there is no God?”

The crowd shouted: “God forbid!” and signed themselves with the cross.

The preacher reprised: “Oh, well, but what does he mean then? Have we not seen, and heard many witnesses testify, that men indeed become wolves, and that men have children with women who then simply vanish? Or women have children who are swapped in their cradles? What do we make of these stories?”

An old woman said: “Hell and fire!”

A man joined her: “Hell and fire!”

The preacher intervened: “Yes, yes, yes. Hell and fire. That is the Devil’s work and nothing else. Only Satan may turn a man into a wolf, and only his minions could join a man in carnal pleasure under the fair appearance of a beautiful woman, and only the devils could steal children from cradles!”

Precisely at that moment, an arrow flew high within the church, above the crowd, above the preacher, to fall on the wall on the other side of the building.

“Who threw that?” the preacher yelled, but nobody was in eye-range anymore.

“It’s the Elves!” a woman shouted, before being told by her husband to shut up.

The preacher dislodged the arrow from the wood and unrolled the parchment that had been enveloped around its shaft. He read aloud: “Ther is noon oother incubus but he, / And he ne wol doon hem but dishonour.” The preacher frowned, as a girl laughed amid the crowd.

The old physician, Wembley Lambston, addressed the preacher, avoiding the usual familiarity of calling him Jacob: “That is just a stupid joke, Reverend Foster. Those are lines from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tale of the Wife of Bath. Satire. Absurdity. Nonsense. There is no need to pay any serious heed to such…”

The preacher was red: “Pearl!” he shouted, addressing the girl who had laughed. “This is your work, isn’t it?”

Pearl got up from her chair and laughed again: “Reverend Foster, I was sitting here all the time! Everybody saw me!” The people around her could testify to that.

The preacher tore the message to pieces and left the church, furious with anger.

The crowd disassembled, but Pearl remained inside the church. She got on her knees and joined her hands in prayer. “Thank you, Jesus, for making Reverend Foster so furious and impotent.” She smiled at the Crucifix that was hanging on the wall, and she was sure that He smiled back at her.

* * *

The twilight glowed like a barn set on fire on the horizon and Pearl stood before her mother’s grave. It was a simple slab of stone that she shared with her father, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, and an inscription had been carved upon it bearing the writing: “A.” on a black field. The letter A stood for what the community of Boston were afraid of even naming, although they were not shy about frowning when they heard Hester Prynne’s name, or Arthur Dimmesdale’s. If one could have hoped that time healed some scars, well, that scar would not heal at all. It was a burning mark impressed on the skin of the whole city’s memory, despite their hypocrisy in not venting it in the open. 

Pearl liked to think that the A stood for Christ himself, since he had said that he was the Alpha and the Omega, the first letter and the last. That was why the slab also bore a blurred Ω in her own writing, years ago, which they had done their best to obliterate once they found it, even though they could not. Pearl would not presume to wear her mother’s sign, but she had made sure a letter Ω was sewn onto all of her dresses, even the one she was now wearing. When she had first sewn that letter on a gown of hers, when she was just fifteen, her guardian Mark had confiscated the gown and set it on fire. Nonetheless, she had been so stubborn as to repeat the feat until everybody had given up complaining and accepted it as just another of her quirks.

Pearl knew how weird she was thought to be. She was aware of the fact that everybody would have liked to pretend that she did not know her origins. But it was a little too late for that, since they would have had to take her from her mother at a very early age for her not to remember Hester Prynne. Or her father Arthur, for all that mattered. She still recalled Hester calling her “my sweet little elf,” or “my elfin child.” Pearl really believed she belonged to the fairy people. In her mind, she explained it by telling herself that an elf had bewitched her parents to make them fall madly in love despite their incompatible social positions. 

Pearl was also aware that there were people who thought that her very conception was an offense against God, as much as the forbidden relationship between her parents. She replied to herself that those people knew less of God than she knew of the fabled land of China in the Far East, of which she had heard some people talk as though it was a very weird place, where houses were built in gold and wooden birds could sing.

“You always stand there and watch that stone,” the red boy teased her. He had arrived silently, and she would have not recognized him if he had not removed the hood from his head.

She smiled and pushed his shoulder, making him laugh. “Where did you get that hooded cloak?” she wondered. “You did a good job throwing that arrow in the church and running away unseen, though,” she recognized. “Some people actually think it was elfwork.”

He shrugged: “Maybe I am one of these ‘elves’ you keep talking about…” he offered, revealing the short bow he had been hiding under his red, hooded cloak.

Her relationship with one of the “savages,” the ones they called Indians, would have been even more reproached than her mother’s with the minister, if anybody knew about it, but she was the only person who would visit the forgotten graveyard outside town at that hour of day. Moreover, she would have loved to be found with him, although she would not flaunt him in the open either. She had to be like her mother in everything, but in her own way.

They kissed before the stone slab, and she called him by his secret name when their lips detached: “Stinging Bee.” He replied by calling her by her own Indian name, which he had given her when she first was introduced to his family: “Honey-flower.”

“Shouldn’t we hide, at least when we kiss?” he asked, laughing.

“Soon the time will come when they discover us,” she said, “and I want it to be so. Anyway, it could not be any different. You know you cannot resist me, and I even managed to convince you to learn English.”

“Well, I taught you my own language!”

“That is true, but I cannot come and live with your tribe as you ask. I have a lesson way more important to teach to my own people.”

“That being?”

“I have to teach them about God.”

“What about him?”

“Mercy before justice,” she uttered. “Forgiveness beyond punishment. Love above laws.”

“You know a whole lot about the Great Spirit, indeed!” he said, and she kissed him again.

* * *

Pearl’s guardian, Mark Overback, was a respected tanner whose family had been in the trade for generations. After the death of Pearl’s parents, she had been entrusted to his care, a task to which he had fully dedicated himself, with all his limitations, since he had lost both his own wife and son in a tragic house fire in the year of Our Lord 1651. Pearl had pitied him and sympathized with him until he had started becoming harsh towards her. His new attitude had started about the time she had become a woman, as they said in the town, but Pearl just called it her first bleeding. She had never been afraid of calling things by their names, but it always drove Mark mad when she did. Her sewing the Omega onto her dresses had not been just another incident in their relationship, and she recalled thinking, even back then, that perhaps things would never be the same again after that. But Pearl would never have imagined that the very day of her joke at Reverend Foster’s expense would be the same day she returned home in the evening to be told by Mark that she was now engaged to Alfred Ascott, the son of the Black Widow.

Alyssa Edison was not called the Black Widow in her face, but all the children in Boston were afraid of her since she was the meanest person one could ever fear to face. She scolded children for whatever reason from a very young age until they were old enough to become boring respectable people. The Black Widow was even rumored to have killed Peter, her own husband, herself, and Pearl recalled Tim Weaver, a boy she had once almost made friends with, telling her that his parents had personally witnessed her digging her husband’s pit. His body had never been found, but then again he was a very untalkative person and nobody knew what he might have had in his mind, even to marry a woman like her. Their son had been five when he had lost his father, and had since always lived in the company of his mother, avoiding all other people and growing up to be the local undertaker at the tender age of twenty-five. Now Pearl should marry that lump of coal? No, thanks!

“You have got to understand, Pearl,” Mark interjected, “that nobody in this city would take you for a wife, what with your parents and everything. This is the best chance we have got, and it is certainly better than becoming an old maid!”

“I will never become an old maid!” she replied.

“How can you be so sure of that!?” Mark retorted.

Pearl blushed: “Because I’m pregnant, you empty head! Haven’t you noticed I’ve not been bleeding for two months already?”

Mark almost fainted, and had to put a hand on the nearby armchair in order to keep standing. He was fifty-four already after all. After taking a couple deep breaths, he said: “Well, then. Blood runs thicker than water, they say. Who’s the father, milady?”

Pearl laughed: “God the Almighty,” she declared.

“Who’s the earthly father of your child is what I’m asking, and don’t test my patience again, little slut!”

That word hurt more than a thousand whiplashes, and her eyes started watering, but she was wroth rather than sorry, so she shouted: “As soon as you see his little head, you’ll learn the truth with your own eyes, and if that doesn’t teach you all a lesson, well, then, I am the first daughter of Henry VIII!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

But Pearl had fallen into a silence, the curtains of which she would not open until the Great Day of Elfin’s birth. For her own son could never bear another name, and, as soon as Mark had seen his reddish complexion, he would have had to doubt the way of his mind. If even that did not work, nothing would. Pearl knew that, should she and her son be banished from the community, they would always be welcome among Stinging Bee’s people. But she really hoped that the Lord would eventually open her own people’s hearts and minds, and the memory of her parents would finally be restored. Her fate had always been to be the Omega to her mother’s A.