The Honey Witch

Chapter XIX





Ana Lagori’s homestead stood as a tangible landscape against the sunlight settling in measured and bronzed descent at the evening horizon. The scene was one I had come to anticipate: home, hearth, and the promise of repose.

What I did not expect to find was old Fitch sitting on the log pile, awaiting my return.

“You been gone the whole bless’d day,” the old man accused with a sardonic undertone. “Been waitin’ here. Didn’t I say?”

For a moment, I scarcely recalled the morning’s encounter and the old man’s doleful promise.

“Is Ana home?” I asked.

Fitch shook his head. “Nope.”

“What are you still doing here?”

“Waitin’ for you,” he reminded me again. “Didn't I say?”

“Well, I’m back now, “ I replied impatiently. “What is it, then?”

It was in our mutual interest that I never revealed an involvement in Fitch’s scheme that rainy afternoon, so why did he keep up this wretched haunt? To make matters worse, I began to seriously doubt if I could sustain the ruse if ever directly confronted.

“What’s your hurry, Yank?” Fitch asked wryly. “Seems to me you’d be more obligin’ to an old friend.”

“I don’t have time for this…”

“Yeah?” he interjected covertly. “Whatcha got time for, eh? Time to lay with the witch?”

I sighed irritably. “Stay out here and rot if you like. It makes no difference to me.”

“Whatcha got time for, Yank?” Fitch repeated, his voice rising in its accusation. “Time for a swim, eh? Swimmin’ with all the witches? Naked as Adam with all those she-demons squirmin’ around?”

I stared at him fixedly, saying nothing.

Fitch snorted knowingly. “Ain’t that a worm up Jesse Lee’s butt, if he know’d what Jilly was up to, cavortin’ with witches and a Yank to boot. Ain’t ya got nothin’ t’say, Doc?”

Again, I refused to respond to the extravagance behind his allegation.

“Now, the Parker slut,” he went on, somewhat bemused, “she were born with the Jezebel ways. Weren’t no secret she had an eye on you from the git go, but it sure’s a kick to find crazy Clara in on the deal.”

“Enough!” I demanded with a cutting sweep of my hand. “If you witnessed anything, you would know nothing occurred.” I inhaled an agitated breath and exhaled it slowly. “Now,” I added with rigid calm, “you keep to your business in the woods, whatever it is you do there, and I will keep to mine. And quit following me.”

“Gettin’ a bit edgy, ain’t ya, Doc?” he responded, raising a brow.

“Look,” I said, playing the only card I held, “I’ll tell her. I’ll confess the whole goddamn thing if you don’t stop shadowing me wherever the hell I go.”

“Yea, you tell her,” he chortled, “and you’ll wind up cleaved just like young Duncan planted there, if they find you at all.”

Fitch rose from the woodpile and stepped over the sinking fence surrounding the overgrown cemetery plots.

“Cat got your tongue, Yank?” he mocked.

I remained unresponsive, cautious against his next move.

“Hey, looky here, Doc,” he begged petulantly. “You’ll want to see this.”

He shook up an uprooted clump of sod in his hand. I could see, from where I stood, that it was the grave of Madeline to which he referred, the woman who spit the venom from my grandfather’s wound on that long ago April’s morning.

I warily stepped over the fence.

“See here,” Fitch noted, “the earth ‘neath the old lady’s grave is loose.”

“Some burrowing animal,” I suggested drearily, regretting that I had not kept to my initial response and walked away three minutes into the confrontation.

“But look,” Fitch argued, “no other is disturbed.” He stepped up to the weathered grave of Jeanne Marie. “Not here,” he observed, “nor here at the grave of Quinta, the witch’s stolen slave.”

Peering at the grave of Quinta more closely, I read the only date recorded: 1842. I inspected Jeanne Marie’s: 1846. I was reminded, suddenly, of the Union soldier’s diary. It might easily be theorized that it was Jeanne Marie's granddaughter who rescued the young man in West Virginia during the war. The love-lorn, Letitia, may have been the granny, who demonstrated the curative properties of the mountain blue poke Dr. Holt witnessed in 1928.

I soon had my answer.

“Story is, that Jeanne Marie was the witch the old master’s son got with child over in West Virginia,” Fitch related without emotion. “She already seen in the girl, Quinta, a likeness to the healin’ ways and what d’ya know, but that old slave owner’s son lost his pretty head racin’ his horse at full speed, and not seein’ the branches for the trees. The witch, Jeanne Marie, and the girl hid on the mountain, there in West Virginia, and whelped the devil’s spawn together.” He pointed to the grave of Giselle. “That one.”

Fitch spit out a stained wad of tobacco from the side of his mouth. “The women made their way t’Porringer and been here ever since. That one,” and he pointed to the grave of Rosalie, “went back to the old place, sometime in the war, t’dig out the bones of Louisa Belle, the first witch t’sail on a ship t’ America, and her daughter, Emma. The bones rest here.” He pointed to an easily overlooked bolder nearly submerged under moss and overgrowth of unkempt grasses. “Story has it, the witch, Rosalie, came back with a little seed growin’ in her belly.”

Fitch studied the graves silently for a moment and then smiled cunningly. “All witches, ‘cept him what rests here,” he stated, standing at the grave of Duncan McGraw. “Fell huntin’ squirrel, some say. Well, some say it, I s’pose. Only thing is, that young Duncan went missin’ his head. When the old witch, Rosalie, was dead, Letitia gathered his dust and decreed no one dig what she planted here.”

He stepped between the engraved tombstones of Rosalie, Letitia and Lily Ann, returning full circle to the question of Madeline’s disrupted earth. He hunched over the clump he had dislodged earlier and loosened another handful of dirt underneath.

With unconcealed irritation, I warned him against Ana’s impending return.

“She’s up to the Kelly place,” Fitch dismissed.

“And likely to return anytime,” I said.

“She don’t care if I visit Lily Ann,” he replied, with a tone of regret. “Told me so, herself.”

The dog, Dulcy, whimpered, imperceptibly at first, and then with an increasing whine.

“Sun’s goin’ down,” Fitch observed sharply. He dug his hand further into the loose dirt. “Wonder what’s been in here.”

I leaned forward. “It’s getting too dark to worry about it now,” I told him with a fleeting pang of sympathy, making note of the settling shades of twilight. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Damn!” Fitch bellowed, when a reeling spiral of loosened dirt sprayed up from the ground.

Dulcy stiffened her limbs and barked repeatedly with rising agitation.

“Christ!” I breathed, sliding backward across the dampening grass.

Slipping out of the ground like a dolphin leaping from the sea, the white she-wolf, pristine and unblemished from her dusty bed below, dashed over the fence to the front of the homestead cabin. The skin beneath my shirt moistened as the pounding pressure inside my chest threatened collapse.

I grasped the venom in Fitch’s erosive laughter, before I became fully sentient of its reverberation against the disappearing shades of the impending nightfall. I felt the rough bark of a stray stick beneath my hand and hurled the brittle object at his head, scraping the side of his grizzled face.

“It’s Madeline!” Fitch exclaimed, when the blast of an unearthly howl pierced the final density of dusk. “I hear you, Madeline! You rotting old hag!”

With a rush of adrenaline, I vaulted to my feet. I tripped over the low fencing and burned the palms of my hands when skidding across across the dewy grass, but managed to reach the back screen door intact.

“Ain’t no place for you to go no more, Yankee Doc!” I heard Fitch’s voice shout from beyond the cemetery fence. “Trapped like a ghost in the attic, you are!”

Shaken by the mirror of my own fears, I leaned against the wooden frame of the doorway.

“The next time I see you, old man, I will drown you in the nearest bog.”

“No you won’t,” he countered. “I’m the only thing standing between you and sleepin’ Duncan’s fate!”

I slammed the door against the grate of his laughter across the lawn and inspected the burns on the palm of my hands. Peeling off my sweat soaked shirt, I discovered splatters of blood staining the material. The white furred beast sat with its backside against the door. I bunched the shirt into a ball and flung the bundle of stain and sweat against the screen. The brush of sound caught the creature’s attention only briefly. I reached for a clean shirt and washed away the insipid grime of the day behind the curtained partition in the back of the cabin.

Numbed to that very core where nothing seemed absurd, I lay on the bed fully dressed and contemplated the silhouette of the phantom hound under the rising moon’s light.





~*~