The Alabaster Jar
A short story of midwives and witches
— Warning: mentions still birth and death —
Rose sniffed. She was thinking about the man with the briefcase who had seen her slamming her palms on the steering wheel. He had disappeared into the pelting snow and gale-force winds before she’d been able to explain again that, if there hadn’t been a storm, if she hadn’t been stuck behind a snowplough, if her car hadn’t shuddered to a halt ten blocks away from the mother-to-be’s home—maybe, just maybe, she would’ve arrived in time to save the baby. If. If. If…
She flung her coat, a dusting of snow on its faux-fur collar, over the back of the sofa in her grandmother’s sitting room. Her winter boots lay upturned, sweating in the room’s cozy warmth. The blizzard continued to rattle at the sash windows, sifting the morning sun to a flat gloom.
Sinking to the floor, Rose leaned back heavily against the creaky armchair by the fire. Her blue-green eyes were swollen from the long night of tears, her thin lips chafed by the cold. As she sipped on her elderberry and honey tea (with a “drop of whisky to calm your nerves, dear!”), she absentmindedly stroked the damp wool of the sheepskin that lay on her lap; caressing it back and forth, back and forth, over and over again.
The tea soothed her throat. Nothing could soothe the mother-not-to-be. The distraught father had been nervous about birthing at home, but his wife had been adamant. “I trust her judgment—and yours,” he had said. Rose and the wife had held hands, weeping as they had wrapped the tiny porcelain body in the sheepskin that Rose had urged the wife to buy to receive the new baby. The husband had watched silently by.
Rose shuddered as she remembered the dreadful scene and looked up to see her grandmother sitting on the other side of the fireplace, studying her. Her grandmother had the shawl of rich lapis-lazuli blue that Rose had bought for her a few years ago from one of her trips to South America, wrapped closely around her shoulders, and her little black-and-tan dog was snuggled on her lap. Rose knew that her grandmother was watching the notes of despair crossing her high forehead, recognising the tell-tale twitch of her upper lip which bore the family mark. She did not buy her grandmother’s story that it was a mark of bravery.
Her grandmother flicked her long brown plait off her shoulder and, with a sharp intake of breath, pushed her bird-like frame up and out of the armchair. Rose looked up at the sound and chuckled to see the little tan-and-black dog tumbling sleepily to the floor.
Her grandmother’s gaze settled on the small alabaster jar on the mantelpiece; it was bathed in a faint luminescence, like moonlight in the mist.
Rose watched as the old woman stretched up on her tiptoes to take it down. She bent over and placed it carefully on the floor in front of Rose’s outstretched legs.
The little jar had been above the fireplace for as long as Rose could remember; and, for as long as she could remember, she had not seen her grandmother move it. Rose put down her tea and picked it up. It fit snugly in her palm. The alabaster was surprisingly cool despite its luminosity. She looked closely at its curved neck with its zigzag designs and the small opening stoppered by a shiny black stone. She ran her fingers over a fine crack that ran down one side; it was shaped like a lightning strike.
Rose lifted the stopper and bent her head to smell inside; she wrinkled her nose at the sweet and slightly sickly scent.
“This ancestral jar holds precious nard oil,” her grandmother told her. “Mary Magdalene used it for healing; she’s said to have anointed Jesus’ feet with it. Midwives throughout your lineage have used it to support their work. They all lost babies at some point in their careers; it’s the hardest part of our work, a weight we carry forever.”
“At least they didn’t have the Quebec government on their back,” Rose retorted, her lips in a sulky pout. “That man put his report in his briefcase before he even told me what he’d written! The government has got it in for us midwives, Gran, ever since the law to reinstate access to home births was passed in Quebec. It feels like they’re just looking for an excuse to shut us down.”
Rose folded her stockinged feet under her, safe from the heat of the fire. “And I gave it to them. Maybe Mum was right all along—I should never have become a midwife.”
As she set the little jar back on the floor, Rose heard a sound over the spitting of the green cedar logs: a low sound like the distant drone of bees. The fire flared up, casting long flickering shadows. Feeling a sudden draft, she pulled up the neck of her red turtleneck. She did not notice the drop of nard oil seeping through the crack of the white alabaster jar.
The humming grew louder, vibrating all through the room. Looking up to see where it was coming from, Rose saw her grandmother roll up her eyes, throw back her head, and grip the arms of the chair with white knuckles.
“A long, long time ago, wise women were trusted aides for women and helped in birth, and in death,” said her grandmother, echoing an ancient authority. “They have always been persecuted for it.” The dog, installed once more on his mistress’ lap, looked up steadily at her.
The old woman seemed to be in a trance. Rose had seen this happen before, and her mother told her she was just “having a turn”. Rose had always felt there was something more to it. Her mum despised anything supernatural or off the mainstream, while Rose found herself drawn to it. Maybe that’s why she felt so connected to her Gran. Her grandmother didn’t tell her much—maybe out of respect for Rose’s mum who left the room if she heard her mother mention it.
“What is it, Gran?” Rose tried to keep the alarm out of her voice.
“I am going to tell you about Sera, Rose. It’s time; maybe I should have told you before. Come with me and I will tell you a story of your ancestry. Sera speaks through me. Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared, Gran. Is Sera here now?” Rose sat up to see her grandmother close her eyes.
The humming intensified, filling the room with an unseen presence. The fire crackled, casting eerie shadows on the walls. Rose held her breath as her grandmother’s lips parted, waiting for the voice of the past to speak.
“Yes, I feel Sera now; she is in me. I am fifteen,” the old woman said, dreamily. “I am sitting on an ancient throne hewn from the great rock, looking out over Maren’s Pond. The rock here is smooth under my palms; generations of women have caressed this stone. They are with me. My feet are touching the earth, my sun-kissed toes curling into the moist, loamy soil. I wear anklets with bells and amulets that ward off bad spirits, and a white summer shift with a neckline embroidered with moss and ferns. Can you see me, child?”
Rose’s heart contracted, forcing her breath to catch in her throat. Sweat started to bead under her arms as the room became hotter, and the fire shadows danced faster and faster around her. The humming intensified. Her grandmother’s fingers began flexing and curling, rubbing the arms of her chair.
“Around my waist, a strip of leather is cinching my dress and holding my leather scabbard. Over my left hip I am holding the gathering basket I wove with my mother. My brown hair falls in waves down my back, crowned with a garland of daisies and buttercups.”
Rose’s grandmother opened her green-blue eyes slowly and stared over Rose’s head. Her face was radiant.
“My ancestors walked this green and pleasant land, leading their families over the rivers and vales, following the seasons and the animals, bearing herbs, mosses, and crystals as they passed through countless villages helping the women,” she continued. “I am Sera. My kin lies on and under this land. The sun is sliding behind the great fir on the far shore of the pond—a hand to point me home. I am reluctant to leave this stone throne, but my heart remembers. I leap up, eager to be on my way. Home.”
Giggling girlishly, her grandmother closed her eyes again.
“My basket is filled with herbs, roots, and flowers from the hidden clearing up on the hill. The old folks say that, during the full moon, the fairies cast dawn sparkles there, revealing the birthing plants to knowing eyes.
“My neighbour’s first child is due! I picked red raspberry leaves to relax her belly, and young peppermint shoots to invigorate her. I am holding a single white carnation in my hand, expectant.”
The old woman began to speak faster. “I am running through cedar and pine-scented paths of crispy needles, tender green saplings, and the musty, fungal smell of the charming chanterelles; their fire-orange skirts lifting flirtatiously between last autumn’s leaves.”
Rose’s eyelids felt heavy and, as she closed them, she saw Sera running. The aroma of cedar and pine drifted through the room. The humming was getting louder again; more urgent. Relief spread over the old woman’s face like an iron smoothing away creases.
“There you are, my husband, my love. It’s me, Sera! I’m home,” her grandmother crooned. “Ah, you have your back to me; I know every curve and angle, every mole and scar from the pox that touched your childhood body. I can still feel your skin under my hands, velvety from bathing in the waters behind the big rock. Your back fits my body as a key fits a lock; ‘Two peas in a pod,’ you would whisper as we lay entwined on our mattress of sweet summer hay.”
Her grandmother’s voice was cracking as she spoke. “You turn your head at the sound of my bare feet on the flagstone floor; your eyes fix on the white carnation I am holding coyly before my belly. ‘What sweet secret are you bearing, my love?’ you ask.”
Suddenly, the humming eased to a low murmur. Rose opened her eyes to see tears sliding down her grandmother’s face. The old woman shook her head as if surprised. Her eyes opened cautiously, and she looked down at her age-spotted hands, then up at Rose, then at her hands again. She looked tired.
“Give me a blanket, would you, dear? It’s chilly in here,” she said.
Rose lifted herself up and covered her grandmother’s lap with the soft lambswool blanket they had bought together at the sweet, though somewhat overpriced, giftshop near Long Meg’s stone circle.
“Gran, are you okay? What is making you cry?”
Her grandmother sighed and scratched behind the dog’s ears. She was out of her trance now.
“My great-grandmother told me some parts of the story, and I have pieced together the rest. Sera comes to me sometimes, like tonight. It is a sad story,” she replied. “That day was the last time Sera saw her husband. Early the following morning, arriving back home after delivering the neighbour’s first baby, Sera was met with a holy mess in the house: an overturned chair, her white alabaster jar cracked, its precious nard oil leaking over the earthen floor, her husband’s bag of nails burst open, lengths of wood chopped for a baby’s cot, stacked in a corner untouched.
The white carnation lay ruined by muddy boots; her husband was gone.
“The villagers told Sera the government had taken him,” her grandmother continued, sharp creases etched on her brow. “In those days, young men were rounded up to work on trading ships headed to the New World. Many went to the land we now call Quebec. Sera drowned her grief in flooding tears as she imagined him in a new land, with a new wife, tasting maple-laced bread and sage-scented meat. We don’t know for sure what happened to him. All we do know is that he disappeared without a trace and Sera was pregnant.”
“For weeks, she waited,” said her grandmother slowly. “Desperate for a way out of her grief for her unborn child’s sake, she had gone to the medicine man from the market. He had stared down at her, eyes like flint. ‘Female hysteria. Little wonder your husband left you, dearie!’ was all that he had said as he wiped his hands through his lank hair and rummaged inside his dark leather bag, full of stinking potions and rough tools. When she declined his expensive cures in front of the gathering crowd, he dismissed her loudly as a Magdalene whore and a witch.”
The old woman snorted impatiently as she sank deeper into the chair; the creases on her face became deeply shadowed, and her eyes misted over.
“Sera’s life was harsh after that. Her honey-scented house fell into disrepair: the door hung askew where the hinges broke, never to be fixed; the jamb was swollen and ill-fitting; the winter shutters were cracked, leaving the dark winter to blow coldly through the open spaces of her home and her heart.”
Her grandmother shivered again despite the blanket and the roaring fire. “As the story goes, Sera gave birth that winter to a baby girl. She called her Miriam… ”
“That’s your name, Gran! You’re named after her!” exclaimed Rose.
Her grandmother smiled. “Sera became a highly respected midwife and leader of local healers in her area. People called on her services from far and wide. She was much loved.”
“Just like you,” said Rose.
She was proud of her Gran. Miriam had been well known for her work promoting women’s reproductive rights in the 1970s. Politicians in Quebec (‘Mainly men, of course,’ declared Miriam, frostily) were promoting hospital births as the safest option.
Outraged at the legal barriers imposed on home births, her grandmother, a young midwife at the time, had dedicated herself to campaigning for a women’s right to choose. Over twenty-five years later, the barriers to homebirths were gone.
The old woman shook her head and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, as if trying to block out something.
“Gran, are you alright? Did something else happen to her?”
Her grandmother replied, her words slow and heavy, “Sixteen years after her husband disappeared, an event changed everything for Sera. Again. She was accompanying her neighbour’s seventh delivery. She had warned the woman that she might not survive another birth; she had even told the woman’s brute of a husband to control his advances. Furious at her interference, he struck out at Sera, shouting for all to hear that she was a whore and a witch.
“Less than a year later, he came banging on Sera’s door in the middle of the night, begging for her help; his wife was in labour and suffering. Sera rushed over, but it was too late. Somehow this death affected Sera more than any other—maybe she was close to the woman. We don’t know, but I was told Sera never forgot the feeling of the clammy weight of that lifeless babe in her sweating hands; years later she was still haunted by her neighbour’s howls of pain, ripping open the night.”
Tears welled up in Rose’s eyes as she remembered her own deathly scene earlier that morning. The anguish of the bereaved mother, as she held her stillborn child tightly to her breast, was too much to bear.
“In his grief, the woman’s husband denounced Sera to the church inquisitors; the greasy medicine man gleefully testified to support his claims of witchcraft,” the old woman continued. “My great-grandmother told me that
Sera did not blame the husband; people in the village were increasingly mistrustful of wicce women.
Sera knew that, like many others, the husband had fallen under the spell of the witch-hunter Hopkins, a staunch Puritan and an ally of the Pope’s witch-hunt.”
“Even then they were trying to suppress us?” said Rose. “Weren’t wicce witches? I never knew they were midwives too?”
“They were both,” her grandmother replied.
“Witches provided women’s health care and were seen to be the spiritual power in their communities. It was the Church that re-cast the wicce as evil to turn the villagers against them, in favour of the priests. The Church led a successful campaign of persecution; the witch hunters killed thousands of women.”
Her grandmother paused, enveloping the room in a leaden silence.
“Months later, Sera rode her horse to the woods to meet with her fellow wicce women,” she said. “The meeting was risky; the women had been warned that the witch hunters were coming for Sera.”
The humming in the close air of the living room picked up again, more urgent and more intense than before. Her grandmother sank back into her armchair, her hands gripping the arms of her chair. Rose saw she was possessed by Sera again and closed her eyes, letting herself be pulled into the mystery.
“I am Sera,” the old woman’s voice soared above the humming. “I am sitting in the centre of a circle of wise and beloved women, healers and midwives, one and all.
“Above me, the branches of the trees arch, their leaves shushing in the airy breeze. Below, the ghostly scent of damp earth, decay, and new life fills my senses; quivering flames cast shifting shapes across my body. My faithful horse pricks up her ears, sensing a distant tremor. The wind rises through the trees and puts an icy hand on my spine. I pull the soft lambswool blanket more tightly around my shoulders.”
Rose’s heart began to race as the humming became a roar in her ears.
“I tell my sisters they must leave now; they must leave quickly; they must protect the wisdom of the circle and continue their calling, despite the Church’s malicious decrees.” Her grandmother’s words flowed like a swollen river. “‘I am not afraid,’ I tell them; ‘I have done what I was born to do.’ The women are weeping and swaying under the weight of my words; their hair of all colours streaming and swirling in the wind, mixing with the sweet scent of nard oil.
“Miriam, my only child, is the first to stand up and peel herself away from the circle around me.
She carries the white alabaster jar with the lightning crack high above her head as she walks away into the dark woods, chanting songs from seven generations behind for seven generations to come. My tears run free and fast now.
The other women rise slowly after her; each one looks at me before she nods and turns away to follow Miriam.”
Rose could hardly breathe, her heart clenched.
Her grandmother pushed on, “My hands tremble. I feel the breath of the horses before I see the eyes of the men. My horse tips her noble head up and whinnies, her breath caught like a frozen white gauze in the moonlight. I feel the riders forcing their reluctant steeds forward with sharpened spurs, cursing their skittishness. I rise slowly, unleashing my horse from the tree and, with a last caress to my only means of escape, I slap her flank. She gallops away after the women, deep into the forest.
“The velvety soft muzzles of the witch-hunter’s horses are within touching distance of me; their breath smells of sweet tea.
I turn around in the newly formed circle, now with the grim faces of angry men instead of the caring eyes of the wise women who had stood there just moments before.
I look up at my persecutors. White hoods and long staffs silhouetted against the moonlit sky close around me.
“Malleus maleficarum.”
The urgent humming stopped abruptly. The old woman slumped in her chair, eyes closed, tear stains on her face, her breath short and jagged. Rose’s heart swelled in her chest. It put it all in perspective: her grandmother’s career, her own mother’s complaint about Gran being too busy campaigning to take care of her… Rose realised she belonged in this long lineage of midwives; she felt a deep pride for her profession and her vocation.
Her grandmother yawned, sucking in the warm, humid air of her sitting room.
“What happened to Sera?” Rose asked.
“The story I was told stops here. From what I have read, she may have been tried for ‘wilful and unrepentant heresy’ as defined in that terrible Malleus Maleficarum manual, a 15th-century guide to finding and torturing witches,” she replied , anger audible in her weary voice. “Despite the dangers, brave women continued to operate secretly, keeping the wisdom alive, generation after generation—right up to today, Rose; right up to you.”
Rose picked up the white alabaster jar sitting at her feet. She recalled the joy in her grandmother’s face when, at seven years old, Rose had announced that she wanted to be a midwife “just like you, Gran!” When she looked into those green-blue eyes, she saw Sera and her daughter looking back at her, encouraging and hopeful.
Her grandmother winked at Rose, the familiar mole moving as her lip twitched slightly. Rose looked down at the white alabaster jar in her hands: a drop of Mary Magdalene’s nard oil dripped onto her wrist; the sweet and slightly sickly scent brought back visions of the wicce women in the woods dancing, singing, and laughing with flowers in their hair.
November 2024