Circle of Secrets

by Kimberley Griffiths Little

  “A barn owl?”

  “Nope, a barred owl. Instead a spots, he has stripes along his neck, like bars of color. And he’s jest a bébé. Look how sweet, like a teddy bear.”

  “Um, yeah, I can see the fluffiness.”

  “Found him this spring, fallen from a nest, his mother disappeared. I hate to think hunters might have got him….”

  I know all about mothers disappearing. “What are you doing to his wing?” I ask as Mister Lenny starts making a strange barking noise.

  Mirage smoothes the bird’s feathers with her fingers and Mister Lenny cocks his head, then pecks her on the nose. Mirage just laughs. Then that owl starts hooting and gurgling.

  I grip the table like I’m clinging to a life preserver. “He isn’t choking, is he?”

  “Nope, jest wants in on our conversation. He gets jealous.”

  “Never heard of no jealous bird before,” I tell her, rolling my eyes. I hear my own voice and wonder at how easily I’m talking like Mirage again. Grandmother Phoebe’s been trying to squeeze the swamp speech out of me all year long, teaching me how to speak more proper like ladies in the big cities instead of a bayou girl. Even though I lived out here when I was real young — before my memories kicked in. And grew up with a mother like Mirage. “So what’re you doing?” I ask again.

  “He got a broken wing, and I been usin’ my healing spells on him.”

  “Healing spells?” I wonder if she does that hoodoo magic stuff like folks in New Orleans. Does my daddy know where he’s dumped me? My gut starts to jump around like I got a mullet in my belly.

  I want to grab a boat and follow him back up the bayou, but I don’t know how to row. Or which direction to point the boat. He’s probably getting soaked in all this rain. I start worrying that he’ll catch pneumonia and die before he can come back and get me.

  “Today is Mister Lenny’s last prayer day.”

  Mirage closes her eyes, puts her hands on top of the owl’s fluffy little head, and begins to pray, murmuring French words in a soft, quiet jumble.

  At first I bow my head like for Mass, but then I peek through my hair so I can watch. If she goes into a trance and the owl starts pecking my eyes, I better stay alert.

  But there’s no trance or candle lighting or incantations at all. When Mirage finishes praying, she lifts her head. “You ready for supper, shar? We’re havin’ crawfish gumbo. Winifred is quite excited. She loves crawfish, and I left some raw ’specially for her.”

  “Thought it was chicken and sausage.”

  “Caught some crawfish today and couldn’t help throwing it in, too.”

  I lick my dry lips, rubbing my hands against my jeans. “What was that — that praying stuff? Are you really a swamp witch?”

  Her black eyes turn dark and stormy. “Who said I was a swamp witch?”

  “Um, I don’t remember.”

  “Grandmother Phoebe, I s’pose,” she says, and I get the feeling it bothers her, but I’m pretty sure she and Grandmother Phoebe haven’t spoken two words in the past year. She always makes me answer the telephone when Mirage calls.

  I think about all that icy silence in our house before Mirage left for good, and I can’t help shivering. After Daddy started traveling more with his new job, the house was dead quiet. We even started eating dinner separately.

  Then Mirage started taking trips out here to the swamp to tend her own mamma, my grand-mère, who got sick. I’d always heard my grand-mère was a traiteur, too. I guess she couldn’t heal herself like she could other people.

  After that last terrible fight, Mirage just never came back.

  Grandmother Phoebe pretended Mirage never existed.

  I was supposed to act like everything was normal.

  Now Daddy’s left.

  I think about my daddy getting farther and farther away and my stomach starts to hurt. I stare at the blue flame of gas under the pot on the stove. A dented pot sits by the back door, catching drips from a brown stain in the ceiling.

  “Grandmother Phoebe says,” I start to tell her, and the words are like little darts of pain in my throat, “that’s the whole reason you and Daddy split up.”

  Mirage tries to reach for my hand, but I move it off the table and stick it in my lap.

  The kitchen falls into a sudden hole of silence while I stare at a tiny rip in my jeans.

  She clears her throat and puts Mister Lenny back on his perch. His head swivels around as Mirage dishes up two bowls of gumbo and sets them on the table with the pot of rice. I secretly admire her purple flowered skirt and the sparkly rings on her long fingers, but mostly I’m watching her eyes, her face, wondering what she’s going to do next.

  Tiny little pieces of crawfish float to the top of the roux, but I hunt down the chicken and sausage instead and take a bite, burning my lips it’s so hot.

  Rain sheets the kitchen window like gray dishwater. “Bad storm, ain’t it?” Mirage says with a small smile. “Hope your daddy made it back to his car okay.”

  “Me, too.” I stare at my gumbo again, fishing out some okra to chew on.

  “Shelby,” she tries again. “There’s a whole long story you wouldn’t understand, but I ain’t a witch. That’s an old wives’ tale. I’m a traiteur. That’s French for healer. Traiteurs go way back when Cajuns first got to Louisiana and had no doctor for fifty miles.”

  “You’re a doctor?” I say, blowing hard on my next spoonful.

  “Oh, non, I ain’t no doctor. A traiteur just has a special talent for healin’ folks. I learned about plant medicine and the special healing prayers from my mamma before she died. Certain people liked to call your grand-mère a swamp witch because she was old and kept to herself, mostly because of arthritis that knotted her up the last couple a years. Calling a traiteur a swamp witch is jest plain ignorance. Most a town didn’t understand her ways, but she had a friend in her mailman who brought out her letters and groceries couple times a month. No amount of gossip or rumors could stop her from helpin’ folks.” Mirage gives a small laugh, but her voice sounds funny, almost like she’s gonna cry. “Folks liked my mamma’s cough syrup remedy better than anything on them store shelves. And after she laid her hands on your head and whispered her prayers, you felt a hundred percent better.”

  “Sounds like magic,” I say, wondering if it was really true or just a story.

  “Not magic. Faith in God. She had a spiritual gift, jest like the Bible says. But the healing comes from God, not her, not me. Never me.”

  She gets real quiet like it’s important that I understand what she’s saying.

  “So what happened to her? How’d she die?”

  “She got real sick. That’s why I came out here so much last year, and then just stayed. Got so bad, she finally couldn’t get out of bed at all. Passed a few months ago in her sleep. By then she was just a wisp of a thing, but she knew just about everything there was to know about healing. I got her recipe book to keep forever. And the prayers in my head.”

  I want to know why Mirage never came back to New Iberia after Grand-mère’s funeral was over and done. Why she left me and Daddy forever. But I can’t get the question to come out of my mouth.

  Besides, she should be giving me the answers without me having to ask.

  I push the spoon around my bowl, thinking about the night she left when I screamed at her to come back, to stop walking down the steps to the car.

  She’d paused, then knelt to take my hands in hers. “Shelby, Grand-mère is real bad sick and I gotta go.”

  “You coming back, right?”

  She shook her head, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes. Just kept staring back at the house, back at Daddy standing on the porch. “If I don’t leave now and get away from here, I’m gonna die myself.”

  “That don’t make no sense,” I’d told her.

  “I love you, Shelby Jayne. Wish so bad I could take you with me, but you got school here, and everything you need. I can’t take care of you for a while. Grand-mère is gonna ta
ke every ounce of strength I have.”

  But I didn’t believe her. I stopped believing anything she said.

  I once wrote her a letter, but she just said it was too complicated to explain. Which wasn’t an answer at all. One of those things grown-ups do when they don’t want to talk about something. Or don’t want to admit they did wrong.

  Maybe I really don’t want Mirage telling me the truth. I don’t want to know that her love was fake, that I wasn’t worth it. That she’d been pretending her whole life.

  I feel a shudder go right up my spine and into my brain. Even though I want answers, I’m afraid of them, too.

  At that moment the sun bursts through the clouds, wiping the darkness away as if the sun’s rays were long golden hands.

  The chattering rain stops.

  The trickles of water running in squiggly lines down the window slow.

  And on the other side of the kitchen windows, the air is suddenly filled with an extraordinary blue light.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHAT IS THAT?” I ASK, SHOVING BACK MY CHAIR. “IT’S LIKE the entire world turned into the sky.”

  Mirage points to the back door. “Go on out. Door’s unlocked.”

  In two seconds, I’m standing on the back porch — which is more stable than the front porch — and I just look and look and look.

  A giant tree grows up from the center of the yard, the top of it reaching the sky. And it’s filled with dozens and dozens and dozens of blue bottles. Every single branch, big and little, higher than a cypress and lower than a weed, has a blue bottle stuck on it.

  A pillar of sunlight pierces straight down through the storm clouds, almost like a spotlight. The light catches all those hundreds of bottles, throwing a blue tinge of color over everything in the yard. The tomato plants in the garden look blue, the lawn chairs, a set of old tires, fishing nets stacked against the exterior of the house, a wobbly card table off to one side of the porch cluttered with work tools, and an old chipped ceramic fountain, filled with rainwater. Even the water in the fountain is puddled into a soft, pretty blue.

  Mirage’s whole yard is surrounded by cypress trees and hanging with curtains of moss, and the blue glow of all those bottles makes it look just like a fairyland. Never seen anything like it in my whole life.

  “It’s a blue bottle tree,” Mirage says, coming up behind me.

  I start laughing, even though I don’t want to act happy around her. The name Blue Bottle Tree is so obvious. And perfect.

  “Go look, Shelby,” she says, leaning against the porch railing and wrapping her arms around herself like she’s cold.

  I jump down the steps and walk closer to the tree.

  Raindrops are running down the sides of the bottles, dripping off the ends. There’s a plinking noise as all that rain drip, drip, drips onto the bottles below, like the tree is creating its own magical rain shower.

  I throw a look over my shoulder. “Who made the tree that way? Where’d all those bottles come from?”

  Mirage’s face looks sort of red and splotchy, but maybe it’s just the light from the clouds and the rain. She clears her throat. “My daddy was the one started it when he and my mamma got married and moved out here. We been adding bottles ever since I was a girl. One a your grand-mère’s favorite things to do was collectin’ blue bottles at garage sales and on the side a the road.”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing it before.”

  Mirage shoves her hands deep into her pockets and sways on the top step of the porch, and I notice that she doesn’t come any closer. “You haven’t been out here since you were real little.”

  “You really grew up way out here?”

  “Yep, spent my whole childhood here, fishin’, gardenin’, trappin’.”

  A thought suddenly occurs to me. “How do I get to school?”

  “Used to be a school boat came for all us kids when I was growing up, but there are more roads in Bayou Bridge now, although I’ll have to take you to school by boat.”

  “Oh. Boats make me seasick, you know.”

  “Hmm,” she murmurs. “Glad you didn’t get sick coming out here today.”

  Without looking at her, I say, “I could stay back at my house in New Iberia, you know. Then you don’t have to boat me to school. I can take care of myself while Grandmother Phoebe is in the hospital.”

  I feel Mirage give me a quick glance. “I’m sure you’re real capable, Shelby Jayne, but eleven-year-old girls can’t stay alone in a house for weeks at a time. Against the law, for one thing. You’d get lonely, for another. And you can’t drive to the store to get groceries. Besides, I don’t mind rowing you. Grew up surrounded by water, as you can see.”

  It occurs to me for the first time in my life that I know almost nothing about my own mamma before she married my daddy, and I’m not sure I want to know more. Even if I do like her silver heron earrings and that blue bottle tree. I’d forgotten that she used to wear unusual jewelry. Grandmother Phoebe would call it costume jewelry. That the only proper jewelry was a string of pearls or modest gold studs, if a woman had to wear it at all.

  “Can I call Grandmother Phoebe tonight and see how she’s doing?”

  “You can call her and your daddy anytime you want.”

  I wish she wasn’t trying to be so nice. I wish I could yell at her. I’ve spent a lot of time the last year wishing I had a different mamma. That Grandmother Phoebe was my real mamma. That I didn’t have to think about Mirage out here in the swamp, staying away on purpose.

  I didn’t want to think about the good memories all mixed up with the bad. Like her leaving right before my birthday last year — after she promised to make me a castle cake for finally turning double digits — ten. I stuck the picture I’d been saving from the cake-decorating magazine under my pillow and cried. A castle cake with a moat and a drawbridge and gold candies to make it look fancy. She’d promised to take me to lunch with LizAnn and her mamma on a special outing to Lafayette, too.

  Instead, I got a plain white cake in a square pan with vanilla ice cream.

  Grandmother Phoebe doesn’t like to bake, and that year Daddy said he didn’t have the energy. Later, he apologized for giving me a terrible birthday, but I remember how he sat in the chair every night and moped and didn’t talk to no one.

  I’ll bet Daddy bribed Mirage to take me while he was over there by Russia and Grandmother Phoebe was having her hip surgery and rehabilitation.

  That’s what all that money in the white envelope was for.

  We stand there, me under the tree and Mirage still on the porch, and don’t say a word.

  I listen to the drip, drip, drip of rain plinking on all those blue bottles hanging from a hundred branches. I shield my eyes and squint into the sunlight to see the very top of the tree.

  Something brushes against my legs and I almost jump right out of my clothes. “It’s a alligator!” I scream, running toward the tree. I wonder how fast I can shimmy up the trunk even if it means I might break a few bottles on the way up. I can practically feel that gator ready to chomp on my toes.

  “Shelby Jayne,” Mirage calls. “It’s okay!”

  I hit the bark of the trunk and look for a place to stick my foot. “Can gators climb trees?” Another stupid question, but it just pops out of my mouth.

  “Shelby, stop running, it’s only Miss Silla Wheezy.”

  Gripping the stringy bark of the tree, I steal a quick glance backward. A pure white cat slinks around Mirage’s ankles. Her swirly purple skirt poofs out like a parachute as she crouches down to stroke the cat.

  “Miss Silla Wheezy is a funny name,” I say, my heart still pounding.

  “She’s real old now, but when she was a baby she was a silly kitty, bumping into things and sliding on the floors when she got to running too fast.”

  A second cat, this one all black except for a tiny white patch on its throat, lifts its head from the bottom of a turned-over wheelbarrow under the eaves of the house.

  “That’
s Mister Possum Boudreaux and he’s taking shelter in the barrow because rain puts him in a sour mood.”

  I’ve always liked cats, but Grandmother Phoebe does not. No pets allowed in her house and that is for certain.

  “So why do people put blue bottles onto a tree anyway?” I ask. “It’s kinda strange.”

  “The tradition comes from the African people long time ago. Folks believe the blue bottles will trap bad spirits floatin’ around their yard and keep ’em from comin’ into the house. The blue bottles hold the bad spirits inside so they can’t get out.”

  “What kind of bad spirits?”

  “Oh, things like imps or fairies or haunts, gremlins and critters that’ll play tricks on you, bring bad luck or evil into your life or your house. Maybe even ghosts.”

  I look at her and swallow hard. Ghosts?

  “Nowadays, folks mostly make blue bottle trees for fun, to decorate their yards.”

  Inside the house, the phone begins to ring.

  “Expect that’s your daddy on the phone, Shelby Jayne. Me, I’m also expectin’ company so I gots to get ready for ’em.”

  My stomach gives a little twist at the thought of other people, strangers I don’t know, here with us. “What company?”

  “Not really company, more like a customer, if you want to call it that. Except I don’t charge and I don’t get paid. It ain’t right and I wouldn’t want it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Someone’s comin’ who wants some healin’.”

  “Do they make an appointment?”

  “Not usually, but sometimes I just get a feelin’ come over me. Sooner than later, someone’s at the door. Rain seems to bring folks, too.”

  The phone keeps on ringing as I back away from the trunk of the tree.

  “You get the phone, Shelby Jayne, and I’ll get the door.”

  Mirage bounds up the porch steps as I take one last look into the blue bottle tree.

  A dizzying array of light- and dark- and medium-colored blue bottles reaches up to the sky. My eyes go cross-eyed, with all kind a blue as far as I can see. I want to get a blanket and sit under it, although the ground is sopping wet now.