The Honey Witch

Chapter IX





As abrupt as my awakening was, I had quick enough wit to consider if the wrath of Fitch’s devil came at the door, at best, or Ana Lagori straining to break my next, at worst. I slid into a pair of jeans and opened the door, struggling with the buttons on my shirt.

“Yiddy! Yiddy! Yiddy!”

An hysterical Coobie Isaak tugged at my sleeve. Jolted into coherence, I grasped the child’s shoulders.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Yiddy! Yiddy! Yiddy!” the boy begged louder, pulling at my wrist with remarkable command.

“Is it your mother?” I asked. “Coobie, calm down. Is it your mother?”

“Yiddy!” he replied succinctly.

“Jemmy?”

“Yi, yi, yi, yi, yi, yi!” he cried, yanking my sleeve.

“Ok, ok,” I told him. “Let me get my shoes on and I’ll come with you.”

I could hear the loud chirp of the katydids among the lighted clusters of fireflies in the brush, but the all-encompassing darkness of the mountains was as compressed as what I imagined death to be. I could feel my insides shudder. Like a rabbit with night vision, the boy found his way with an astonishing ability to my front door and with that same sight, pulled my hand through the equal density of blackness back to his own front door.

With some measure of relief, I could just make out the singular light of a kerosene lamp on the Isaak’s settling doorstep.

The air inside the house was contrastingly humid to the cool of the night; the dimly lit corners thick, almost oppressive in uneasy motion of shadow. Jilly Isaak stood disheveled in her long cotton nightgown, her features morbidly nondescript behind the light of the lantern.

“It’s Jemmy!” she informed me frantically. “He can’t breathe!”

She reached for my arm and led me to a corner cot where Jemmy sat pale and snotty nosed, heaving congested breaths in short, strenuous bursts. I took the rag Jilly offered and wiped the mucus from his nostrils and mouth.

“This child needs a hospital,” I said. “What medication is he on?”

“Don’t have none,” said Jilly.

Abruptly, I asked: “What do you do when he gets like this, then, Jilly?”

“Steam roots,” replied Jilly, “but they’re all run out! He ain’t been sick in a long time. I thought maybe he was cured.”

I sighed heavily. “Jilly, we’ve got to get him into town. Pennock has a phone. We'll go wake him up and have him call emergency. We'll get Aaron. He has a vehicle.”

I felt for Jemmy’s collarbone where it met just above the chest, and lightly pressed my fingertips against the fragile structure.

“Try to breathe in slowly, Jemmy,” I instructed. “Then let the breath out.” He caught his breath quickly and coughed up a good amount of mucus. His skin was clammy, his breathing husky and sparse.

“You’re a doctor!” Jilly exclaimed in a shaky, hopeful voice. “I heard everyone say!”

“I’m not a medical doctor, Jilly,” I told her succinctly, watching Jemmy closely. I could feel the frail weakness in his limbs and the tightness of his chest wall. “Try to breathe slowly, Jemmy. In. Out. That’s it. Try to be as quiet as you can.”

I demonstrated my instruction, by breathing steadily in and out, and then addressed the child’s mother as calmly as I could manage. “Jilly, he will be all right, if we take him down the mountainside as quickly as possible.”

“There’s no time!” Jilly cried out. “What are we going to do? Only Possum knows how to help him! I could heat some soup and we could take him up the hill first thing when the sun comes up.”

“She’s not a physician, Jilly,” I replied impatiently. “And no soup is going to help this little boy.”

Jemmy coughed, wheezed tightly and inhaled a quickened breath, unable to exhale completely. He started sobbing and I wiped the mucus that strung from his nostrils to his chin.

“He ain’t never been this bad before, Doctor,” Jilly repeated, in a way I knew she still failed to comprehend my lack of medical qualification. “You got to do something.”

“You say Ana has helped him before,” I stated.

“She knows how to make him well,” Jilly nodded.

With slow deliberation and hoping Jilly would understand simple directions, I said: “You run and tell Aaron to go up and get Ana. I'll take Jemmy to Pennock's and call for an ambulance. If Ana can stabilize him, even a little, we can get him down the mountain, to the road, and meet the paramedics there.”

“No one goes up there at night,” she replied anxiously. “No one ever goes up there at night!”

“And why is that?” I asked remotely, concentrating on Jemmy’s direful breathing.

Jilly hesitated.

“Well?”

“Something’s up there,” she said.

“And what is exactly up there, Jilly?” I asked quietly, watching Jemmy carefully, even as I steadied the firm pressure of my fingertips against his chest bone. “Keep breathing quietly, Jemmy. In. Out. You’re doing good, Jemmy. Just keep breathing as slowly as you can. In. Out. Calm.”

“It’s the grave’s own she-wolf,” whispered Jilly hoarsely. “It protects the witches at night!”

“Christ, Jilly,” I complained irritably, “you don’t really believe that.”

Either Jilly was too simple-minded or, too flustered to think beyond the pale reasoning of this disengaged place, but time was drawing a critical line. I wrapped Jemmy up in the thin quilt and picked him up in my arms. I couldn’t fight Jilly’s fervent abstractions. In the urgency of the moment, my own mind began to weave imaginings of Ana as our only hope and the only chance Jilly was capable of understanding. I only prayed Coobie’s radar could get us to the destination intact.

“Look, Jilly, you win. We are going up the hill,” I stated. “If there’s some strange animal, we will deal with it when we get there. Now, if you won’t go and wake Pennock, at least you can go and get Aaron to do it. Tell him Coobie and I took Jemmy up to Ana's and he will need to call an ambulance.”

Jilly grasped Coobie’s hand and lifted the lantern. “We can’t find the way without a light.”

Oh God, I breathed, my head beginning to spin, this kid is going to die in my arms, and I can’t get it through the sediment of this woman’s head her son is in imminent crisis.

The night takes on a penetrating menace the deeper one descends into its darkness. I considered, with fleeting introspection, how vividly removed the parting clouds seemed through the starlit heavens in our moment of plight.

If wrong in my desperately deranged decision of the moment, Jemmy would not survive. If it turned out to be fortunate, what would happen the next time the boy couldn’t breath, and Jilly would not go down the mountain nor climb up the path to seek some measure of help after sunset?

At the clearing beyond the oaks, I found Jilly’s fear of some phantom canine to be no figment of local myth. A haunting, almost melancholy howl issued from Ana Lagori's front porch. In the reflected light of Jilly’s lantern, each of us could define the shape of a white furred, wolf-like animal running in our direction with an almost dreamlike motion. None of us made a sound, but our own breathing became a sparse unison, broken only by the critical rasping from Jemmy’s constricted lungs.

“Damn,” I cursed under my breath. And then, without conscious forethought, I astonished myself, in the face of all I held sane and rational, by pleading: “Get Ana for us. Jemmy is seriously ill!”

If, indeed, I had suddenly lost my reason by explaining my purpose to an animal, no one appeared to take notice, least of all Jilly, who did not question my method. I could hear her swallow the anxiety in her throat. The child, Coobie, remained as silent and attentive as the impenetrable night, itself.

The white furred canine moved a cautious step forward and I felt an erratic skip in my heartbeat. The animal sniffed at a trailing tear of fabric in the quilt I wrapped around Jemmy and in a swift turnaround, ran toward the barely visible outline of the cabin. The three of us, Jilly, Coobie and myself, stood together in the heightened alertness of our uncertainty, and Jemmy’s rattling chest, when we heard another plaintive howl sailing through the dark.

At last we saw the bobbing light of a lantern at the cabin door. We ran quickly with our failing patient to the foot of the porch steps, where Ana stood blanketed in a heavy knit shawl over a long white nightgown, her hair tangled from sleep.

“It’s Jemmy,” I breathed, as Ana took the child in her arms and handed me the lantern.

“Come inside, quickly,” she commanded. “Keep the light close.” Once inside, Ana pushed aside a crock bowl filled with pungent rosemary sprigs and laid Jemmy on the wooden table. She unwrapped the child carefully from the cocoon of the quilt, her assessing eyes never leaving him.

“Jilly,” she said evenly, “I want you to put Coobie to rest on the bed. He shouldn’t be up. There are clean linen shirts in the trunk at the end of the bed. Do you wish me to help this child?”

Jilly gulped and nodded affirmatively. Obediently, she brought Coobie to the large metal-framed bed and coaxed her eldest son into a linen nightshirt, before slipping him under the feathery coverlets.





“Now, start a fire in the stove,” she then told Jilly calmly. “I want water brought to boiling. Quickly now. Run outside and gather wood. You’re a strong woman, Jilly, you can do this quickly.”

Jilly brought in two small logs from the back doorway and started a flame. Once accomplished, she filled a pot of water from the back pump.

In the midst of Jilly’s ordered tasks, Ana rested her head on Jemmy’s chest and massaged her fingers against the bony wall and narrow ripple of rib cage. She turned him on his side and traced her fingertips along his spinal cord, pressing her head to the back of his lungs. Jemmy’s breathing was becoming so shallow and labored, his lips were turning blue. Dark circles began to form under his eyes and his skin paled before our eyes.

I inhaled an uneasy breath. Ana’s glance was grim and without warning, she lifted the boy swiftly over her shoulder. Dipping his body forward, she again traced his spinal chord with nimble, exacting fingers from the skullbone and back again to the tailbone. In a state of paralytic apprehension, I watched her fingertips, skilled like a spider weaving its web between the rafters, race along the small discs of his backbone. My nerves tightened to the point of anguish at the abrupt crack of vital bone structure.

Suddenly, the rushing, tremulous sound of Jemmy’s deep intake of breath filled the confines of the cabin room. He coughed from deep within his chest and I could see the phlegm running thick and clear from his nose and mouth. Ana looked over at the wide-eyed, visibly shaken Jilly, standing motionless next to the pot of warming water on the range-top.

Ana nodded and smiled reassuringly.

Summoning her composure, Jilly handed over a dry cloth from the countertop and Ana patted the boy's face. She held out her hand to Jilly and placed it on Jemmy’s chest. Exhausted, but now breathing deep, unobstructed breaths, Jemmy Isaak’s cheeks flushed a bright pink.

Relieved, I dropped listlessly on the table bench. Ana stepped to the heavy apothecary cabinet and took two or three jars down from the shelves. Skillfully mixing a solution in a narrow glass of liquid, she forced a grimacing Jemmy to swallow the concoction. She placed several handfuls of dried leaves and roots into the frothy water: yarrow, mullein, comfrey, burdock, lavender, and stirred the ingredients to a steamy haze. Within moments, the humid and earthy vapor infiltrated the entire room. She regulated the fire beneath the pot as the steam turned to a boil, and retrieved another nightshirt from the trunk. She instructed Jilly to take Jemmy to the back room, wash him clean and put him to bed.

“Stay with your children,” she said, stepping out of the front screen door and onto the dark porch. After I had satisfied myself as to Jemmy’s continued well being, I followed Ana outside. I found her with her knees curled up to her chest on the cot, steadily watching the fireflies in the encircling brush.

In the depth of exhaustion and deliverance, I felt incapable of expressing either my full admiration or my sense of exquisite mystification. I was not unfamiliar with the theory of chiropractic method to ease, if not eliminate, asthmatic symptoms in children, but struggled over such an impressive skill acquired within the context of Ana Lagori’s isolation. Looking out over the darkness of the lawn, and dotted emerald lights of fireflies in the thickets, I breathed in the cool and damp scent of earth particular to the moments before daybreak.

“How did you know what to do?” I asked, my curiosity clouded in weariness, as I sat down beside her.

Ana exhaled a light, barely audible sigh that gently rippled through the darkness and she rested her head against raised knees. “There is no more than I opened his body to breathe.”

Her answer was not enough, but in paradox, enough to satisfy the moment of inquiry. I was too blessedly relieved to question further. After several moments, I inquired about the white hound. Where had it gone?

“Out there...somewhere,” she replied softly.

“Thank you for what you did tonight,” I said. “For Jemmy.”

She curled up into a tighter ball, her head still resting at her knees. “It is enough the child lives.”

“I’d like to speak with you again, soon,” I confessed. “Not just about tonight, but other things as well.”

“As you wish, Ethan Broughton,” she whispered, but it was as though she did not speak to me in particular, but to the embracing predawn stillness. Yet, even this, too, was enough.

I closed my eyes, allowing the weight of my exhaustion of mind and body to rise up and envelop the very force that animated physical form.

Hush, now, sleep, I thought I heard her murmur into the hypnotic hour, and without any private dismantling over what was said, or what remained only imagined, I slipped into an empty subterranean slumber on the cot beside her.

***



I stirred restlessly under the sun’s warm light and the stark aroma of oleander shrubs below the porch railing.

“Whatcha doin’ out there, Yankee Doctor?” sailed the voice of clear morning into the fragmented corners of my waking, half-conscious brain. I opened my eyes to find the resurrected Jemmy Isaak, still in white nightshirt, smiling brightly from behind the screen door. “We’re having cakes with strawberries and cream. Aren’tcha comin’ in?”





~*~