The Honey Witch

Chapter VI





The modulation of grating repetition, of straw sweeping against wood, snapped my senses out of the barrenness of a deadened sleep. For a disarranged moment, I lost comprehension of where I actually was or how I managed to move from the cot, to the braided rug, with no memory of having done so.

I tossed aside the patchwork quilt that I also didn't remember covering with.

"Hey,” Jolene greeted wryly. She set the broom against the rim of the door-frame and poured a tall glass of cider from a red tin pitcher set out on a small table.

"You didn't expect to see me, did you, Mr. Boston," she remarked, handing me the glass. She picked up the crumpled quilt and shook it over the porch rail. "You were shivering in your sleep," she added, placing the coverlet on the back of the rocking chair. "And on such a warm day, too."

I rose to my feet and attempted to sort through the haze in my mind. Jolene withdrew my folded sunglasses from her pocket. "I found these in the garden. Shame to cover those pretty brown eyes. Don't know quite what you're thinkin’, then." Unfolding the sunglasses, I placed them on top of my head and watched Jolene rattle a potted geranium of excess water over the step ledge.

"Ana?" I inquired, more abrupt than I wished to sound. “How is she?” I was unnerved by a sudden desire to demand answers from this woman, who contemplated me now through dark, attentive eyes and whose very self-possession was no less disconcerting than Ana Lagori's, herself.

"Asleep," said Jolene, replacing the blooming plant on the step.

She sensed my skepticism and raised a brow. Opening the screen door, she gestured inside. I peered into the large, dense room and in the corner, on a metal framed bed, lay a disheveled Ana, curled into a fetal position beneath a down spread. On the bedside table, someone placed a mason jar of fresh spring wildflowers.

The air was heady, spiced with collected vegetation piled atop a claw foot oak table at the very center of the room. I briefly surveyed the shelves of canned fruits and vegetables near a dry sink; the large cast iron oven at the end of a long counter space, an outdated wooden icebox and the ceiling strung with drying herbs and roots. A massive apothecary cupboard, placed against a back partition wall, was filled with powders and barks in labeled containers.

I turned away and stood at the top of the porch steps, looking out over the lawn to the towering oaks at the edge. A fire had been lit beneath the iron cauldron and a basket of linens sat waiting beneath the clothesline.

"You think you've seen a monster and not the woman," surmised Jolene, "but in all this, you forget the child who was healed. A child who would be dead before the road below the mountain was reached." She closed the door and stepped to the railing, leaning her backside against it. "You think you have witnessed something unholy and you fight with your scientific mind: was it real? or, did you simply imagine it? And yet, you know nothing at all. You think you want to know and then you think maybe you don't want to know after all."

I inhaled a deep contemplative breath, exhaling it slowly. I wanted to say that all I had witnessed was the demonstration of an extremely ill woman. I wanted to say that any truth in what I had seen was possible only in the mindset of a superstitious mountain people who desired, above all, to believe that in the face of poverty and isolation, they did not need the services of qualified professionals. I wanted to say that it was far less despairing to place faith in an uncommon woman who, though possessed of provisional medical skills, was, at best, a mere folk healer and at worst, a proficient actress.

I wanted to say these things. I wanted to believe these things. In the end, all I was left with was the self-doubt over what I had witnessed being little more than a distortion. I knew the effects of shock: all things vivid, yet blurred at once.

And I recognized these symptoms now in myself.

Jolene turned and gripped the wood of the railing. "When you come to call tomorrow, bring some white lilacs that grow on the edge of the Four Corners. They are her favorite."

"Tomorrow?"

"The picnic," said Jolene. "You haven't forgotten already? Fickle as any man, you are."

I smiled with little humor. "Yes, the picnic." I stepped from the porch and slid the sunglasses down over my eyes. "How did you know?"

"Know what?" replied Jolene pensively.

"That I asked Ana to this picnic event."

"Why wouldn't you?" Jolene smiled.

"Indeed," I responded with a lingering distraction, "why would I not?" Presumably, Ana was in no condition to tell anyone anything. Then again, it would be difficult to sustain such an elaborate ruse alone.

I looked at my watch and it was three forty-five, which meant I had slept over three and a half-hours on the hardwood of Ana Lagori’s front porch. I glanced up at Jolene, who continued to smile in that fixed, indulgent way of hers, and asked if she didn't find any of this odd. She shook her head with no hesitation, a negative hum her only response.

"Is she going to be all right?" I inquired.

For all that reason argued that this was little more than a carnival side show, even given the gravity of the child's condition, Ana Lagori had expended sufficient energy in her demonstration to cause some concern in my mind.

“Yep,” smiled Jolene, as though the answer were quite clear.

"Tell Ana..." I began, considering I would extend some sympathetic thought, but thinking twice, simply sad: "Tell her I will see her tomorrow afternoon."

I turned and walked away.

"The white lilacs, remember," Jolene called out.

"I won't forget," I replied.

"See that you don't," Jolene stated dispassionately. I waved my hand in distracted acknowledgment and kept walking. I could feel her gaze at my back, until I was well out of sight down the dirt trail that gently sloped to the uncomplicated retreat of my own rented space.

***

Spreading both the floor and table with source material I brought from Boston, I gathered copy notes on known antiseptic plants into one pile, folklore into another and associated notebooks into yet another. Only the written accounts given by the Union Soldier in 1863, and my grandfather in 1935, offered any correspondence to what I had witnessed in Ana Lagori’s backyard this morning.

I deluded myself into thinking there was some revelation to be uncovered; some clue overlooked in the shuffle of the papers. As the afternoon faded, I was left with what I already knew: that a medicinal plant referred to as blue purse was rendered ambiguous as far back as the 12th Century. Yet, there were those herbalists who apparently did not dispute its existence even by the 16th Century, referring to...an efficacious property of the blue purse.

The lowering sun and I are not always compatible, and I pushed the papers aside. I ingested two sedatives with a contemplative swallow of lukewarm water from a corked bottle. I thought of Ana Lagori, and how, during those moments under the cold well water, she appeared utterly disconnected from her surroundings. I could not entirely dismiss the evidence of my own eyes, but neither could I wholly dismiss the entire drama; that, if not staged, was certainly some form of derangement.

"Hey Doc," Aaron Westmore grinned from the door, left open to circulate the congested air of the cabin room. By what I presumed to be an offering of peace over any controversy between us the evening before, Aaron held up a paper sack, pulling out a loaf of French bread.

I greeted him with the local, "Hey", and invited him inside.

"I see you've been busy," he said, dodging the piles of papers and books strewn about the floor. He reached into the paper sack and extracted cheese, grapes, ham slices and pears: "...fresh from the grocers," and a bottle of California wine. "What have you been eating around here?" he asked dubiously, and picked up an apple from a wooden bowl. "Apples?"

"Breakfast at Pennock's," I replied, picking up the scattered papers. "Sandwiches from Pennock's. And apples..."

"From Pennock's," Aaron finished with a grunt. "Well, sit down and have some decent food from town. Pennock's lucky if he gets supplies twice a month. As it is, he scarcely gets to the mail below the mountain twice a week. I usually bring it up or send a couple of the boys." He tossed an unfolded newspaper on the table. "Today's."

I pulled the only two glasses, included with the residence, from the cupboard and set them on the table.

"What are all these papers?" asked Aaron.

"Copies of documents I explained in Chicago."

He raised a brow and picked up several from a stack on the middle of the table. "Do you mind?"

"Go ahead," I said. "You might find what I don't seem able to."

"And what is that?" he asked curiously, skimming the documents, pausing here and there to read an insert.

"To validate, I suppose, a rather disturbing exhibition I witnessed this morning," I said, lighting the lantern against the dimming light of the hour. I sat at the table and picked up a single grape, toying with it between my fingers. I looked over at Aaron to find him waiting for some sort of elaboration. I turned my attention again to the single grape. "At Ana’s," I continued. "A young couple came with their infant son, who had apparently been bitten by some venomous spider. A recluse, I imagine. Ana took the infant inside and, after a little while, came back outside."

"And?" Aaron wanted to know.

And so I told him the story of what I had seen. The drama, the blood, the seeming trust of the young couple, the apparent cure of the child, the scream, Ana’s faint and the man, Clem, carrying her into the forest. To my astonishment, I told Aaron, after having witnessed all this, I then proceeded to pass out on the woman's front porch.

"You found nothing to connect to this morning in these?" he asked, thumbing through the papers curiously. "Nothing at all?"

I shook my head, popping the grape into my mouth. "The only thing even remotely similar is my grandfather's account and that of the Union Soldier, who credits his miraculous recovery to the mercy of some unexpected, if not divine, intervention." I referred him to the documents in a yellow folder at the bottom of the stack. "Thanks for all this, by the way. It's good to have some return to normalcy after this morning’s affair."

"Yeah, sure," Aaron replied absently, examining the two accounts. He sighed with some distraction and then, in a moment of what I imagined to be private consideration, he placed the folder on top of the pile of documents. “There’s some history or folklore associated with the plant, then?”

“The plant and some heretical herbal,” I said. “I photocopied what seemed to be the most pertinent notes, but my grandfather had piles of journals. I think he became obsessed with an hallucination equal to finding the plant Holt had written about in 1928.”

I picked at the grapes. I wasn't as hungry for food as I thirsted for a rational explanation to the morning's events. There were moments in our conversation where Aaron, again, appeared as though he would offer some deeper reflection, but remained silent to what it was he might have contemplated.

Aaron inquired as to my skill in a challenge of chess and having told him I was quite adequate, he left to retrieve the game from his own residence.

We played well into the night, Aaron and I, meeting a stalemate twice until he at last placed my knight in checkmate.

In an unassuming moment of reflection, I thought, once more, of the morning's events and a numbing coldness silted through my veins, like a morbid foreshadowing.

Aaron leaned unobtrusively in his chair, appearing pleased in his triumph. I raised my glass of wine, but did not drink. In my mind's rumination, I again saw Ana under the gushing spigot, blood at the corner of her mouth; her inert body under the droplets of sunlit water and then to be carried away into the solemn fortification of forest trees...to the earth, to sleep.

I took a slow, thoughtful drink of the wine.

You think you have witnessed something unholy...was it real? or, did you simply imagine it?





~*~