The Honey Witch

Chapter XXII





A persistent, throaty lullaby hummed its way onto the surface of consciousness, with all the disturbance of an ill omen. I opened my eyes to the jarring glare of the fully risen sun against my face. The grassy, tangible surface of earth strained against my spine before I became fully cognizant of its actual existence underneath.

Events and images flooded through my head like a lingering incense, but I was at a loss to decode its substance. Every corpuscle in my body and every pore in my flesh vibrated with an unusual and scintillating gyration. What was it? Where did it come from?

And where was I?

I surveyed the open glade to each direction. The scenery was stark with midday shadows, yet strangely placid, despite the rustle of a passing hare and the measured chant of a single cardinal, high atop some nearby cottonwood. I came to realize where I was, but how did I get here? I searched my mind, trying to piece together the jumble of imagery. What did I remember last? Fitch. Yes, the conversation with Fitch. The horror of the undead beast jumping from the grave. Walking out into the night, yes. Following that monstrous animal into the forest. Seeing Ana? An apparition?

Staggering to my feet, I leaned listlessly against the rigid bark of an oak tree. I could not conjure a clue as how to find my way back to the comparative refuge of Ana’s homestead. If there were more bones in this God forsaken place, I didn't want to be the one to stumble across any. I felt around in each jacket pocket until I found a pack of gum. Two pieces left.

Popping a wintergreen stick into my mouth, I studied the direction between the center stump of the dead oak and the encircling forest. Sniffing back a flow of mucus from my nose, I noticed several drops of blood splattering against my hand and the breast of my jacket. I sighed irritably and wiped at my nose with my jacket sleeve like an errant child. I then decided the best course, was to take the route I believed was followed on that rainy afternoon with Fitch.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a flicker of movement. The same melodious hum I heard earlier, permeated the stillness of the morning atmosphere once again. I soon enough spied the presence of a slender, caramel skinned woman among some wild raspberry brambles. She wore a tightly wound scarf about her head and carried a basket of nondescript items. Her yellow, homespun dress looked strangely out of date, by a hundred years or more.

“Hey!” I called out, as unobtrusively as I could manage.

The woman was at enough distance that I was unable to distinguish any clear features, but she appeared fairly young and attractive. I had not seen her before. The woman entered the wooded forest, ignoring my plea. No matter how fast I walked, she remained several yards ahead of me, humming and untouched by my chase directly behind her.

“Please,” I called after her, “I mean you no harm. Do you know where to direct me to a woman named Ana Lagori? She lives just up the hill from a place called the Four Corners. You must know where it is.”

The woman stopped and I stopped. She turned slightly and I could see a slow, affirmative smile curving her full mouth.

“I’ve lost my way,” I said rather helplessly.

She nodded sympathetically and turned again to walk confidently ahead.

The debris of the forest floor snapped and crunched beneath my feet. Branches whipped across my face. Still, I followed the guiding, humming stranger. She stopped suddenly and pointed directly to a dirt trail. I sensed this was one of the three or four footpaths that would somehow to lead to Ana’s door.

Before I could express any measure of gratitude, the woman turned the opposite direction and walked mutely into the depth of forest shadows. The pungent fragrance of cloves and mossy earth surrounded the immediate ground where she had stood. I called out an indebtedness, which she promptly ignored.

The foot trail ended just at the back edge of Ana’s patch of land. I walked through the orchard, stepped around the garden fencing and tossed my jacket on the ground. I pumped the well and submerged my head under the rushing water, wincing from the sting of assorted scratches on my hands and the single gash above my eye.

I soon enough became aware of Jemmy Isaak hovering near, and wordlessly accepted the dry towel Jolene offered over the boy’s shoulder.

“Egg day!” Jemmy exclaimed, holding up a basket filled with multicolored embryonic shells.

“Oh yeah?’ I smiled distractedly, wiping my face on the towel.

“Your boots is all full of dirt, Yankee Doctor,” Jemmy informed me.

“Where’s Ana?” I asked.

Jolene shrugged. “Dunno.”

“How’d ya scratch your eye?” Jemmy wanted to know. “Better have Possum look at it. You could go blind, maybe.”

“I’m not going to go blind,” I replied moodily.

I saw there was blood dripping on the towel from my nose.

“Come in and take care of that bloody nose,” offered Jolene. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”

“Best have Possum fix you up,” advised Jemmy. “All your blood could fall out your nose and you could die, maybe.”

“I’m not going to die, Jemmy,” I told him. “It’s just a bloody nose.”

“Possum could make it stop,” said Jemmy.

“I’m certain she could,” I replied.

I washed up and brushed my teeth with the water and pitcher brought in by Jolene. Changing my clothes behind the partition, I was only half conscious of Jemmy Isaak’s chatter on the miracle of Randy Kelly’s healed brain. I studied the scratch above my eye and found it less dire than it felt. After several minutes of reflection, I joined Jemmy and Jolene at the table.

Jemmy counted the eggs in the basket. There were twelve, he informed me.

“Do you know what tomorrow is?”

“What is tomorrow?” I asked, silently acknowledging Jolene’s offer of warm biscuits, honey and jam set on the table.

“It’s summer solstice,” said Jemmy, smearing butter and jam on his biscuit. Jolene poured the child a mug of fresh milk she took from the outdated icebox. “Grammy Nana says somethin’ powerful unusual is gonna happen this night, though.”

“You listen too much to your Grammy Nana,” Jolene chimed in.

I glanced over at Jolene as she buttered her biscuit.

“Jemmy,” I said, “what do you think is going to happen?’

Jemmy shrugged. “Somethin’ powerful unusual.”

I smiled and took a sip of the hot tea Jolene had set before me and found the concoction oddly comforting.

“How come you was up in the woods, Yankee Doctor?” Jemmy frowned.

“I went for a walk," I told him, "and got lost, I’m afraid,”

“How’d ya get lost?” Jemmy wanted to know.

“Walked too far, I guess,” I replied indulgently. “A woman out walking pointed the way back.”

“And who was she, pray tell?” Jolene baited.

“She didn’t tell me her name,” I returned, in little mood for Jolene’s suggestive humor.

“Not many women wander the hills alone,” said Jolene, biting into the buttery biscuit.

“This woman seemed capable enough,” I said. “A little odd, but perhaps you know her: a young woman, dark skin, who might dress a bit more plain?”

“Ain’t no black folks up on Porringer no more,” Jemmy informed me, “’cept Mostly Blind Boone and his old bird dog, Daisy. Possum helps him what she can.”

“Mostly Blind Boone?” I inquired.

“Old Ray Boone,” Jolene said. “He can see some. Not much, though.”

“Perhaps he has a daughter,” I said, “or a niece.” I wondered, vacantly, what it might have been that Mostly Blind Boone did not wish to see.

The eyes hold the memory. I cannot alter the memory.

“Mostly Blind Boone ain’t got no family left,” returned Jemmy, “else we’d know ‘em.”

“Well, this woman seemed to know her way around the trees,” I said.

“Could’ve been a ghost!” Jemmy suggested blithely.

“There aren’t any ghosts, Jemmy,” I sighed.

“Randy Kelly cracked his head wide open,” Jemmy related steadfastly. “He could’ve been a ghost, but Possum fixed him.”

“Oh yeah?’ I returned. “Did you see her, then?”

“No,” Jemmy said. “But the whole mountain’s talkin’ about it!”

Jolene poured a saucer of milk and asked Jemmy to take it out to the cats on the porch. While Jemmy chattered over the two cats, Jolene took a bite of a jammed biscuit.

“Jolene, where’s Ana?” I asked.

“I told you the first time,” Jolene shrugged, "I don’t know."

“I saw her last night,” I told her.

“Did you now?” she asked lightly.

“And what do you think I saw when I saw her, Jolene?”

Jolene shrugged again. “Couldn’t be the one to say, Mr. Boston.”

“Oh, I think you could,” I stated, clasping my hands and leaning slightly over the table. “I think you very well could tell me what it was I saw last night.”

“And how could I know that?” she asked. “I was in my bed sleeping.”

“I do not doubt it,” I said, sitting back. “And where does the white dog go when the sun comes up, I wonder?”

“You’ll have to ask Ana,” said Jolene. “It’s her guardian.”

“But I’m asking you.” I replied.

“I’m not Ana’s keeper,” she told me.

“But you are her friend,” I said deliberately.

“My, my, we are testy today, Mr. Boston,” Jolene teased easily, though I detected a sober undertone.

“I don’t take well to waking up in the middle of a forest,” I retorted.

“You found your way back,” she smiled.

“Yeah,” I replied with a humorless laugh, “by way of a girl no one seems to know and you all know everybody on this mountain. So, tell me how that makes any sense?”

“Probably you just described her wrong, is all,” Jolene proposed. “You were probably delirious.”

“I was not delirious,” I told her curtly. “And we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you and what you know.”

Jolene raised a brow. “I’m just a simple country girl. What do I know?”

“Quite a bit, I imagine,” I told her. I buttered a warm biscuit and tossed it aside.

She smiled decisively. “You and your big city ways. Come to the wildwood and wonder how things can be so different. Maybe some days you think you might leave, but there’s no goin’ back and don’t you know it. Everybody knows it. You’re part of Porringer now, whether you stand on this mountain or fly off to another.”

“You think so, do you?”

“If Ana didn’t want you here,” she said, “you’d have been off the mountain the first week.”

“Is that a fact,” I stated.

Jolene nodded soberly. “Though more’s the pity, I’d say.”

I sighed irritably. With mug of tea in hand, I walked out to the front porch. I felt unsettled and trapped. What Jolene knew, and would not say, suddenly became an unbearable annoyance, in contrast to the lighter humor I often found in her vampish banter.

The warmth of the early afternoon sun felt equally stifling. I sat on the rocking chair and listened as Jemmy repeated the names of the two calico cats: StarLight and StarBright.

“Like the rhyme!” Jemmy declared.

“Yes,” I agreed, taking another sip of the hot tea and wondering if I was likely not poisoning myself further in the process. As much as I was moved by the dream that may have been no dream, I found nothing enchanting this day, least of all the innocent child’s rhyme.

The screen door opened.

“I’m going to walk Jemmy home,” Jolene informed me. She dropped coins into Jemmy’s pocket for the eggs. One of the cats jumped off the porch and I watched casually as the boy chased the creature across the lawn. Jolene leaned across the railing and then turned to me, inclining her head to the side.

“Do you find us so very peculiar here?’

“Often,” I replied truthfully.

“Ana will be home directly,” said Jolene. She breathed in a wistful breath of air and closed her eyes. “It’s a swelling moon. An auspicious moon.” She stepped off the porch and called for Jemmy. “And it’s a white wolf, not a white dog,” she said in parting. “A beautiful, white she-wolf.”

“To white she-wolves, then,” I offered, raising the mug of tea only slightly in mock toast to Jolene's furrowed brow.

She was not pleased, but then neither was I.

“See ya later, Yankee Doctor!” Jemmy waved from beneath the oak trees.

I sat in the rocking chair on Ana’s front porch long after Jolene and Jemmy disappeared down the path to the Four Corners. Again, I pondered the mysterious and silent guide who had led me from the forest maze and began to wonder if I had not, indeed, encountered a ghost after all. I had witnessed enough to almost convince myself that anything I might otherwise find ludicrous, was possible.

Almost.

***



As the hours of the day wore on, I grew more agitated, not only by my dangerous slip into the world of shades and suggestion, but by the absence of the woman who had become a singular stability in a world where familiar perceptions grew more mutable by the minute.

The immediate environment became palpable by her absence. The things she touched became thick and unmovable: the loom where she wove; the antiquated range where she cooked; the apothecary cabinet filled to the brim with roots and barks. The earthy scent of her body, fern and rose, seemed to loiter and agitate the very air itself.

A forewarning, of sorts, shadowed the corners of the lawn and attached its presence to the airy breezes that rippled the carpet of grasses. I read through my notebooks in effort to distract the hours, but my concentration failed. Each hourly chime of the mantle clock reminded me I hadn’t turned a single page.

As the late afternoon shadows fell, I went out back and filled a tin cup from the well. As I drank the quenching water, I caught sight of Ana in her orchard. How nebulous she looked in that moment...how terribly distant.

The evening lament of a neighboring rooster resonated over the hills, and the swift flutter of thrushes, flying through the nearby brush, broke the moment of silence. I walked around the garden gate and stopped at the fence which separated the orchard trees from the rows of flush vegetation and fragrant patches of kitchen herbs. It was as though I could not reach her; as though she were but a mirage and not corporeal flesh, blood and bone. Like the mysterious guide in the forest, the closer I stepped, the more unreachable she became.

“Do you fear me now?” Ana asked somberly, as though by cause of all I had been witness to, would somehow negate the affection between us. Her long hair flowed softly, like a seaweed at the edge of a shoreline, each silken tendril caressing the texture of the breeze, and brushing against the printed cotton of the summer dress she wore.

“Should I?” I asked.

She opened the palm of her hand and produced a small snail moving across the padding of flesh. Like a mother-of-pearl washed ashore, the tone of her skin shifted, from pale to wheat, to shades of green and back again to an almost translucent ivory.

“Have you not noticed,” she remarked, “even the smallest creature will fight for its life and in the very act of that self-preservation there is conscious will. The young will tear at their mortal chains; the old will linger, as though the promise of one more tomorrow will be an eternal arrest from dying.”

She closed her hand into a loose fist, opened it again and produced a small glass sphere.

“All is life conscious of life.” The sphere burst into a thousand particles in the air, each mirroring the same reflection of the settling sun and green forest branches. “Each holds the cell and the memory of its beginning.”

Again, she closed her hand into a fist and again she opened it and revealed a chrysalis. Closing and opening her hand once more, a plump striped caterpillar emerged. Once again and finally, she produced a single Monarch butterfly. “All is metamorphosis; all is change, but this you know, Ethan Broughton. That, which was revealed to you in the grove, is everything you hold in the palm of your hand already.”

The Monarch flew from her hand and fluttered high into the orchard trees.

The mirage continued. I was certain, should I extend my hand to touch her own, I would only find the point of contact illusory.

I felt the pressure of an ache behind my eyes.

“Ana…”

I reached out my hand, despite my intuition, only to find her vanished.

Wake up! Wake up! Surely, you dream.

I felt a dark mania rising. I searched madly among the barks and roots, crushed stems and bulbs inside sealed jars and dark crockery, for any substance which might produce a state of metaphysical hallucination.

I uncorked bottles and smelled the pungent odors inside. A base of mushrooms, perhaps?

First you see monsters, then you die.

Datura, maybe? God knew, she grew enough of it alongside the southern fence of the garden.

I probed through drawers and emptied cupboards while the sun lowered steadily against the western horizon, blending the colors of the room into a still-life of red and gold. So adept was she, there were no notes, no recipes, no references to any of the roots and crushed vegetation beyond strange symbols painted on container labels. The plants I could detect by smell, were compounded by the many I could not.

I leaned on the porch rail and watched the colors and objects on the lawn dim into twilight, eventually disappear into darkness and reappear in ghostly form at the first hint of moonrise.

What is it you cannot accept? That she is the anomaly she appears to be, or that she has outwitted you in a game of botanical roulette?

The smell of her, the ferns and roses, sifted through the air on a telltale breeze. I became acutely aware that if I were to ever have an answer, it would arrive at the Cutler Creek on this night.

In my mind, a battle waged. Is love the compulsion or merely the curiosity that eventually killed the cat? Did the two blend in a single knot to become so indistinguishable, that neither could be held in higher regard in the dance between fate and desire?

But you have come to love her.

Yes.

I stepped from the porch and onto the lawn.

Through the woods and down to the moonlit waters of the Cutler creek, I knew I would find her...and fate...there.





~*~