Martin had accepted it so easily. He never asked about her again.
I kicked at the snow that I knew covered the coals of her old home, remembering how she kept the front door painted green, explaining that only good spirits would enter through a green door. As though you could keep evil at bay so easily.
It was not only the burnt remains of wood and nails and clothing and pots and a bed that I stood over now. Somewhere in all of this were Auntie’s remains. That is, if anything was even left of her after all these years—after the animals, the crows, the endless winters followed by summers. Was there a skull, a few teeth? And what was I hoping to find?
The truth was, I had come up the hill hoping to find nothing at all. Because part of me worried that when Martin dug her old ring up, maybe he’d called her spirit back. And I could only imagine how angry, how vengeful, her spirit might be.
Vengeful enough, perhaps, to lure a little girl into the woods and push her down a well.
My mother died only hours after giving birth to me. Auntie was the midwife who helped bring me into the world. She was also there to guide my mother out of it.
My sister, Constance, was twelve then. My brother, Jacob, eight. They told me later that our mother was not fond of Auntie but Father insisted she accept Auntie’s help.
“I don’t trust her,” Mother had confessed to Constance and Jacob.
Father told my older siblings that Mother’s suspicions were unfounded.
“Your mother,” he informed them, “has a weak constitution. Auntie has helped plenty of women bring healthy babies into this world, and she will help your mother, too.” Father thought she needed all the help she could get, particularly since this pregnancy had happened so late in life—my mother was nearly forty. Auntie made her tonics and teas to help with the pregnancy and labor. My mother, Jacob once confessed, believed Auntie was trying to poison her.
“Please,” she’d begged her children, “you’ve got to help me. The woman wants me dead.”
“But why would she want that, Mother?” Constance had asked. Constance shared my father’s belief that the pregnancy had affected my mother in some profound way, making her distrustful, even slightly mad.
“She has her reasons,” Mother had said.
My mother, who spoke fluent French, had her own name for Auntie: La Sorcière—the Witch. Auntie spoke French, too, and Father thought it would be a comfort for my mother to have someone to converse with her in her native language. But Constance and Jacob reported there had not been much conversation between them, and neither they nor my father knew what words they did speak, in hushed, sometimes ominous tones.
I used to ask Auntie about my mother—questions I could never bring myself to ask Father. What color eyes did she have? What was her voice like? (Brown ringed with gold, said Auntie. And she sang like a lark.) That was the thing about Auntie: she would tell you whatever you wanted to know. She did not believe it necessary to keep things from children. She saw me as her pupil, her protégée, even, and did everything she could to educate me—to teach me to hunt mushrooms, to plant by the moon cycles, to use flowers and bark to stop a fever.
“How did my mother die?” I asked her once. I was seven or eight years old. We were sitting together in her cabin, and she was teaching me how to embroider. I was making a little pillow with a daisy at the center. There was a fire burning in Auntie’s potbelly stove, and a pot of venison stew was simmering on top, filling the cabin with a wonderful, homey smell.
“She bled to death,” Auntie said without emotion. “Sometimes, after a difficult birth, there is no way to stop the blood.”
Some nights, I would dream of my own birth: of little squalling me coming into this world in a sea of blood, of Auntie’s strong hands lifting me up and out of it.
Constance was engaged at nineteen, saying yes to a suitor she only half cared for, because she couldn’t wait to leave our house. She never dared say it out loud, but I knew she had come to loathe Auntie. I’d see the way she glared at Auntie, the false smiles she gave when Father was around. I heard her sometimes using the name my mother had: La Sorcière.
Jacob, on the other hand, worshipped Auntie. He went out of his way to please her, did all he could to spend time with her. Auntie taught us both to hunt and trap, how to skin any animal and tan the hide. Jacob took to it, making his own snares and pit traps, carving a hunting bow and arrows, always eager for Auntie’s approval.
“Like this, Auntie?” he asked, sliding a chipped stone arrowhead into a straight shaft he’d carved from a beech branch.
“Perfect,” she said, patting his shoulder. “That arrow will fly straight into the heart of a buck.”
Jacob all but glowed.