“I know, but… It’s better if she doesn’t see me. I don’t want to confuse her,” he replied. Maybe that’s what our father used to think and then he just forgot to come back.
“I miss you so much, Georgie.”
“I’m not hard to find.” He grinned as she reached out to touch his cheek, but her fingers went right through him. “I’d better go.”
“Put a good word in for me to Hetty, will you?”
“I can’t. The line is too long,” a disembodied voice answered her. “Bye, mom.”
“Why are you crying, Grandma?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about your daddy.”
“Is this one his?”
“Yeah, it is. Here, put the flowers down next to mine.”
“I saved the biggest bouquet for Daddy.”
The little girl kissed the headstone as my eyes welled up with tears. Maybe it was a good thing that my dad never came around. I turned to ask Wesley if he agreed, but he was already walking up the line of graves of his predecessors, leaving a bouquet of shimmering silver hyacinth on each one. I decided it was better to leave him to his own thoughts.
Our cemetery wasn’t organized in the conventional way. It was basically a spoke system with Hetty’s grave in the center. There were four more lines like the one that lead from my father to Hetty’s oldest son for each of her three daughters that remained in Dewdrop and her youngest son. The rest of the graves weren’t clustered into sections of families, this was oddly the least organized part of town, so you sort of had to know where everyone was.
Technically, I had a few connections tracing up to Hetty’s Airy daughter Aspire, but so did everyone else. Literally every single one of us because Eliza wasn’t exactly wrong when she alluded to them breeding like rabbits. But nothing was matrilineal for me, so it didn’t count for much. Other than that, I was only related to the male side of the family, which left me with a lot fewer graves to visit and a lingering feeling of jealousy. I mean, it was still a bunch of ancestors, too many to visit in one night. But I wasn’t descended from virtually all the older graves like so many other witches were.
I stopped by a cluster of our family plots that was up on a little knoll with a good view of the entire graveyard. Now it was easier to spot the tourists, looking things up on their phones and gathered around maps of the cemetery to find their ancestors. The girls I’d seen before taking selfies in town were now doing the same thing at the gravesite of Aspire’s great granddaughters. So they were Airy girls. Not really all that surprising and not particularly special. Their bright camera flashes were so out of place amongst the candles and lanterns the real witches were carrying.
I watched them for a while, quite judgmentally if I’m being honest. They didn’t have many graves to visit and none of them were recent, so the antecedent that connected them to Dewdrop must have left long ago. That’s when I noticed that they looked quite alike from certain angles and that they all visited the same graves. They were probably related, not just friends. The shortest one had a faint navy blue aura around her that I could only see in bursts. What did that mean?
The idea that those powerless little twits might technically be Daughter’s Daughters by default was more than a little infuriating. They knew nothing about us, only what they’d read on some obscure website. I scanned the graveyard, now easily spotting the tourists with pamphlets in hand, wondering if one of them ran that site and had started this trend.
The sound of a cat’s hiss pulled me out of my pity party, and I was grateful. I wasn’t normally such a sourpuss, or at least I didn’t think so. The outraged calico sitting on top of a grave swatted at my dog and hissed again, but Bliss didn’t even turn her head. She was more concerned with my sour mood, which she could clearly sense. My loyal friend licked my wrist and sat down at my feet, resting her head on my toes.
I took a deep breath and spotted Peridot. She was sitting on a bench near one of our greater aunts, my namesake actually, a powerful woman who died in 1816. Dot was with a cute boy I’d never seen before. He laid a bouquet on that grave and flashed her a wicked grin. That baggy cardigan she always wore was nowhere in sight and I wondered if she’d snuck a confidence potion before we left.
I started doing the mental math. They’d probably be what, 7th cousins if that was their nearest relation? Maybe more? In the human world, that basically wasn’t cousins at all. And Dot would love to have her children double related to such a wonderful witch. I smiled at the thought of having a couple of little blonde kids running around the farm. A brown haired child popped into my fantasy and I felt a familiar longing that I often ignored. Maybe I did want to stay here and raise a little witch or two of my own. The property was starting to feel empty with just the four of us and fields of flowers. Just please, let them all be girls.
The idea of a brighter future made me more excited about reconnecting with my past. Those outsiders were just visiting headstones. I knew the stories of the people resting beneath them.
Now that Wesley was on to visiting other ancestors, I wanted to walk the Line of the First Sons all the way to Merit on my way to Hetty’s grave. I was surprised to see an outsider doing just that, Thomas’s friend with green eyes so similar to mine and my brother’s. Juno. Those eyes were puffy and bloodshot from grief and I didn’t see her friends here. She didn’t bother me very much, although if she recognized me I bet that I’d bother her. I knew deep down we were more closely related than the others that were with her.
She seemed more peaceful now, carrying a bunch of white lilies that my aunt’s may have grown. A good choice if you asked me. They were out of season everywhere in the country, but seasons didn’t mean much when it came to growing flowers in Dewdrop.
I was so tempted to go speak to her, inclined to formally introduce myself even. My pride wouldn’t allow it, and of course there was that awkwardness about Thomas’s murder, but I continued to watch her somber walk up the line of graves that I’d soon be taking myself. She wasn’t wearing her torn blue jeans now, instead appropriately clad in a black top and a long gray skirt.
The first grave with one of her lilies was my great grandfather three generations back from my dad. That would have made us as close of cousins as me and Feather, which was crazy to think about. Bliss sniffed the air in her direction and looked up at me as if she was expecting us to walk over there. I shook my head no, but I knew it would be hard to resist the urge if I saw her again.
I’d let her have her time with her grandfathers she knew so little about. There was one more grave I wanted to visit first anyway.
Well, technically, it wasn’t a grave because no one was buried there. Hetty’s youngest daughter did indeed set out to see the world instead of staying in Dewdrop. No one knew what happened to Wonder, but the earliest witches of Madison County felt that that the cemetery just wasn’t quite right without a monument to her. Since she had no descendants, none here at least, the tombstone representing her was lonely and bare.
I always left flowers there anyway. Other witches did, too, but my aunts said the headstone was bare when I did it the first time they let me wander around Hettymoot on my own. And tonight, I was the first to lay a big bouquet of hyacinth, cosmos, and ferns below her name.
It was a plain monument, reading simply ‘Wonder’ without any dates. No one knew when she died and putting the birthdate on there would have made it seem like she lived forever. There was never a name that suited someone more.
For some reason, I’d always felt connected to Hetty’s rebellious daughter. Neither of us were really outsiders, but we didn’t quite fit in either. I often pondered what happened to her after she walked down the road leading out of Dewdrop and never came back. But not as much as I pondered what would happen to me if I followed suit.
I cleared off the leaves like I always did and ripped away an ivy vine crawling up the weathered surface. It was pretty, sure, but I didn’t want it to overtake the stone. A thorn pricked my finger and I drew back in surprise.
Ivy didn’t have thorns. I eyed the plant curiously, trying to figure out what it was, thinking that perhaps I’d scraped my finger on a jagged piece of stone instead. That seemed unlikely as the monument was rounded and smoothed by centuries of rain.
My eyes locked onto a strange bundle of cloth sitting behind the headstone. Flowers were the only appropriate offering for Hettymoot, dictated by tradition of course. This shouldn’t have been there.
I felt a surge of energy as soon as I took the bundle in my hands. My mind’s eye flashed on an ocean dotted with white from choppy waves. A dulled sun peeked through the gray sky looming above, it’s clouds heavy with rain. I felt the rocky beach beneath my bare feet, I tasted the salt on the air, and I inhaled the telltale static scent of lightening about to strike.
Falling to my knees, my eyes blinked rapidly until that world disappeared and I was fully present in the familiar cemetery of my ancestors. Head swimming and my stomach fluttering, I sank my fingers into Bliss’s fur as she whined in concern. She nudged the package with her nose.
I peeled back the first layer of bluish gray cloth. The fabric was rough and loosely woven, reminding me of the kind of cloth some of the witches here still made. Eventually I got down to the contents of the curious package and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
A deck of cards. Soothsayer’s cards, similar to the Tarot and other decks that witches used, but I didn’t recognize it. The paper was weathered and wavy, yet thick and strong. The backs of the cards had a blue and white checkerboard pattern. I could tell that the ink and paints were very old, but the colors were still bright.
I flipped the first card over and swallowed a gulp of air. Death. The artwork of was beautiful in a macabre way, a classic depiction of a shrouded skeleton. A hand of stark white bones wrapped around a large scythe arching above its head. There was a cemetery in the background that looked all too familiar with a large center monument and five lines of tiny headstones spreading out from it.
I pulled the card away from the deck to more closely inspect it, but it dissolved between my fingertips in a cloud of ash that drifted into the air.
The cards grew warm and heavy in my hands as the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I sensed someone approaching and a figure materialized in my peripheral vision. Bliss stood up, her hackles raised, but she soon began to whimper and back away. I cautiously turned my head, my gaze starting at a pair of worn leather boots and working its way upward over a patchwork skirt and overcoat until I was staring into the wild eyes of an ancient spirit I’d never seen before.
Now, I wasn’t the most skilled witch when it came to dealing with ghosts, not by far. But I was used to them, their presence was something I’d become accustomed to growing up in Dewdrop. I’d never really felt fear before when seeing a spirit, aside from Thomas, but my heart was pounding.
The woman was faded and gray, like a black and white movie. Long tendrils of her wavy hair lifted around her as if she was standing in a breeze that didn’t affect anyone else. The feral expression on her face softened as she stared out at the crowd of witches young and old bustling between the headstones. She looked back to me with a smile that put me more at ease. Then she placed her finger against her lips as if to say “Shhh.”
I bit my bottom lip between my teeth before I said the name that I suspected she had in life. Wonder. She gave me a mischievous wink before evaporating into thin air.
“Gemma!”
I turned away from the ghost’s direction at the call of my name. It was Aunt Maudrey. I wrapped up the deck of cards and tucked it into my pocket before I stood up. “Coming!”
“You’d better get a move on,” she said, glancing at the basket of flowers I carried. “Your grandfathers deserve your attention. The ceremony will start soon.”
“Yes, I know. Thanks.”
“You’ve always had such an obsession with Wonder.”
“I wouldn’t call it an obsession,” I countered as I carefully climbed down the hillside, dodging the smaller undecorated headstones.
“You know, when you were a little girl you used to say she came to visit you sometimes.”
“I did?” I’d never heard that story, nor had any memories of such a thing. My aunt nodded, laughing. “How old was I?”
“Oh, little. Very little, maybe three years old. Your father was still around.”
“Well, I don’t remember it.”
“That’s because it never happened, sweetheart. No one’s ever seen Wonder’s spirit and it certainly wasn’t from lack of summoning attempts.”
“Well, she has to be out there somewhere.”
“Not necessarily…”
Occasionally, a very powerful spell would call for a witch to surrender her soul and dissolve into the ether, the universe, or whatever was out there that we didn’t understand. That was the prevailing theory about what happened to Hetty’s youngest daughter and pretty much any of the old spirits we couldn’t get a hold of. Personally, I didn’t believe that. I always figured it was more like a phone call spirits didn’t actually have to answer.
Aunt Maudrey departed to spend some time sitting on a bench next to her sons’ graves. She was always in a good mood there even though they rarely visited, and never on Hettymoot.
I laid a bouquet on my grandfather’s grave and started working my way up the line, noticing there were more flowers here than last year. Maybe it was from the outsiders, maybe it was just because I was visiting later in the evening than usual. Honestly, it didn’t much matter to me. At that point I was just running through the motions, distracted by the cards in my pocket.
Eliza and the higher ranking witches were gathering around Hetty’s grave, preparing for the short ceremony before her appearance. They didn’t have to cast a summoning spell or anything. Honestly, they didn’t have to be there at all, it was just for show. There weren’t very many opportunities to show off in front of every witch that lived here and remind us all who was in charge, not that they legally were. That’s probably why it was so important to them in the first place.
I laid a bouquet on Merit’s grave, lingering there for a moment before getting in line to pay my respects to Hetty. She always appeared at ten o’clock on the dot. My watch read 9:50, giving me just enough time. I was the last in line, holding a large bouquet of our famed river hyacinth tied in a handwoven ribbon my aunts had been working on all year.
There were three witches ahead of me and the entire crowd was assembling around the center. My dog stood by my heels, eliciting a string of sideways glances and murmurings of disapproval from the witches around us, along with hisses from their many cats. Bliss ignored them easily, but I found myself about ready to tell everyone to… well, I didn’t like to swear or cause a scene, so I kept my mouth shut into an admittedly forced half smile.
The last witch ahead of me laid her bouquet atop the pile of flowers, which reached up to her shoulders. She took her time whispering what humans would call a prayer. After she was done, I began to ascend the small staircase, an unexpected sense of peace settling over me with each footstep upwards.
Bliss lingered at the top of the stairs, never breaching the circle of colorful gemstones the size of watermelons that surrounded the final resting place of our Matriarch. It was 9:53, leaving only a few minutes for the unnecessary pomp and circumstance. The all-important Eliza, Eldest Daughter of Hetty’s Eldest Daughter, tapped her foot and flashed me a plastic smile intended to get me moving along as she raised her wand above her head, silencing the crowd.
I was never one to ask Hetty for favors anyway. People say ‘Rest in Peace’ for a reason.
The wind picked up out of nowhere as I dropped the hyacinth on the top of the pile. A branch from the oak tree over Hetty’s grave cracked loudly and fell to the ground between the tomb and the gathering of the elite witches. The crowd gasped and I drew back in surprise. Bliss whined behind me, her toes a fraction of an inch away from the border.
I looked back up at the grave just in tim
e to see the ghost of Hetty flickering into our reality. She was early and the jaws of all the witches around me dropped in shock. The spirit of the tiny old woman floated toward me as I stood there speechless, my feet rooted to the ground.
Chapter 13
One of the high ranking Air witches, a kooky woman I rather liked named Alathea, rang the large silver bowl she was holding like a bell. The sacred sound was typically how they concluded their ceremony and announced Hetty’s impending arrival. It felt out of place in that moment, cutting through the whispers around us.
I locked eyes with the apparition of ancestor. “May I see them?” Hetty asked me.
Without thinking, I pulled the deck of cards out of my pocket and held them in front of me. She grasped them in her gnarled ethereal hands as the elite witches gasped. Ghosts shouldn’t be able to touch anything in the human world, no matter how powerful they were in life. Unless, of course, they were angry spirits.
“I painted some of these cards with my youngest daughter,” the matriarch said, opening the package. She plucked the first card from the top of the deck and faced it toward me. “But not this one.”
Resting Witch Face Page 13