The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense)

by Thayer Berlyn

  “Jilly,” she said evenly, “I want you to put Coobie to rest on the bed. He shouldn’t be up. There are clean linen shirts in the trunk at the end of the bed. Do you wish me to help this child?”

  Jilly gulped and nodded affirmatively. Obediently, she brought Coobie to the large metal-framed bed and coaxed her eldest son into a linen nightshirt, before slipping him under the feathery coverlets.

  “Now, start a fire in the stove,” she then told Jilly calmly. “I want water brought to boiling. Quickly now. Run outside and gather wood. You’re a strong woman, Jilly, you can do this quickly.”

  Jilly brought in two small logs from the back doorway and started a flame. Once accomplished, she filled a pot of water from the back pump.

  In the midst of Jilly’s ordered tasks, Ana rested her head on Jemmy’s chest and massaged her fingers against the bony wall and narrow ripple of rib cage. She turned him on his side and traced her fingertips along his spinal cord, pressing her head to the back of his lungs. Jemmy’s breathing was becoming so shallow and labored, his lips were turning blue. Dark circles began to form under his eyes and his skin paled before our eyes.

  I inhaled an uneasy breath. Ana’s glance was grim and without warning, she lifted the boy swiftly over her shoulder. Dipping his body forward, she again traced his spinal chord with nimble, exacting fingers from the skullbone and back again to the tailbone. In a state of paralytic apprehension, I watched her fingertips, skilled like a spider weaving its web between the rafters, race along the small discs of his backbone. My nerves tightened to the point of anguish at the abrupt crack of vital bone structure.

  Suddenly, the rushing, tremulous sound of Jemmy’s deep intake of breath filled the confines of the cabin room. He coughed from deep within his chest and I could see the phlegm running thick and clear from his nose and mouth. Ana looked over at the wide-eyed, visibly shaken Jilly, standing motionless next to the pot of warming water on the range-top.

  Ana nodded and smiled reassuringly.

  Summoning her composure, Jilly handed over a dry cloth from the countertop and Ana patted the boy's face. She held out her hand to Jilly and placed it on Jemmy’s chest. Exhausted, but now breathing deep, unobstructed breaths, Jemmy Isaak’s cheeks flushed a bright pink.

  Relieved, I dropped listlessly on the table bench. Ana stepped to the heavy apothecary cabinet and took two or three jars down from the shelves. Skillfully mixing a solution in a narrow glass of liquid, she forced a grimacing Jemmy to swallow the concoction. She placed several handfuls of dried leaves and roots into the frothy water: yarrow, mullein, comfrey, burdock, lavender, and stirred the ingredients to a steamy haze. Within moments, the humid and earthy vapor infiltrated the entire room. She regulated the fire beneath the pot as the steam turned to a boil, and retrieved another nightshirt from the trunk. She instructed Jilly to take Jemmy to the back room, wash him clean and put him to bed.

  “Stay with your children,” she said, stepping out of the front screen door and onto the dark porch. After I had satisfied myself as to Jemmy’s continued well being, I followed Ana outside. I found her with her knees curled up to her chest on the cot, steadily watching the fireflies in the encircling brush.

  In the depth of exhaustion and deliverance, I felt incapable of expressing either my full admiration or my sense of exquisite mystification. I was not unfamiliar with the theory of chiropractic method to ease, if not eliminate, asthmatic symptoms in children, but struggled over such an impressive skill acquired within the context of Ana Lagori’s isolation. Looking out over the darkness of the lawn, and dotted emerald lights of fireflies in the thickets, I breathed in the cool and damp scent of earth particular to the moments before daybreak.

  “How did you know what to do?” I asked, my curiosity clouded in weariness, as I sat down beside her.

  Ana exhaled a light, barely audible sigh that gently rippled through the darkness and she rested her head against raised knees. “There is no more than I opened his body to breathe.”

  Her answer was not enough, but in paradox, enough to satisfy the moment of inquiry. I was too blessedly relieved to question further. After several moments, I inquired about the white hound. Where had it gone?

  “Out there...somewhere,” she replied softly.

  “Thank you for what you did tonight,” I said. “For Jemmy.”

  She curled up into a tighter ball, her head still resting at her knees. “It is enough the child lives.”

  “I’d like to speak with you again, soon,” I confessed. “Not just about tonight, but other things as well.”

  “As you wish, Ethan Broughton,” she whispered, but it was as though she did not speak to me in particular, but to the embracing predawn stillness. Yet, even this, too, was enough.

  I closed my eyes, allowing the weight of my exhaustion of mind and body to rise up and envelop the very force that animated physical form.

  Hush, now, sleep, I thought I heard her murmur into the hypnotic hour, and without any private dismantling over what was said, or what remained only imagined, I slipped into an empty subterranean slumber on the cot beside her. ***

  I stirred restlessly under the sun’s warm light and the stark aroma of oleander shrubs below the porch railing.

  “Whatcha doin’ out there, Yankee Doctor?” sailed the voice of clear morning into the fragmented corners of my waking, half-conscious brain. I opened my eyes to find the resurrected Jemmy Isaak, still in white nightshirt, smiling brightly from behind the screen door. “We’re having cakes with strawberries and cream. Aren’tcha comin’ in?”

  ~*~

  Chapter X

  Perhaps to assuage some lingering sense of trespass over the rainy adventure with the disquieting Fitch or, perhaps simply avoid any complicated communication over the preservation of Jemmy Isaak’s breathing capabilities, I did not intrude on Ana Lagori for another three days.

  The story of my grandfather and his unusual scar began to fall from grace, the more I became lured by the riddle of the woman in the woods. Fabled Evangeline, resourceful chimera or authentic primitive healer, her cloistered existence and botanical secret in the hollow of a dead oak, was becoming the last impression of consciousness before an increasingly reckless pharmaceutical sleep. It was the first vision upon the smoldering perplexity of awakening.

  In more practical moments, I approached the entire venture with greater sensibility and considered taking my leave, as Fitch suggested. I had the plant specimen. What more did I need from this strange and isolated hill?

  Yet, in the sparse distance between days of seeing Ana Lagori and not, the more compelled I was to remain and satisfy the pull of insistent inquiry regarding her skill, her presence of mind, her very story.

  I handed my laundry to a cordial Adelaide Pennock, who, in turn, profited a fair business over my dependency on her domestic services, shower access and daily meals. In the restless aftermath of the Jemmy Isaak incident, it was a good day to go into town.

  “You’re the talk of the entire mountain, Broughton, bringing Jemmy Isaak up to Ana’s the other night,” Aaron remarked, while we followed the sloping trail to reach his bronze Jeep Cherokee, parked little more than a mile and a half down hillside.

  “The credit goes to Ana, alone” I replied.

  “Perhaps,” agreed Aaron, “but certainly no one else around here would have gone up there at night.”

  “Not even to save that boy’s life?” I asked skeptically. “There’s nothing up there, except some white dog I’ve never seen before.”

  “I doubt even then,” said Aaron. “Superstition runs deep here on Porringer. You must have figured that out by now.”

  By late morning, we reached Bernie Lloyd’s small pig farm, a homestead consisting of one dilapidated house, three slowly disintegrating outbuildings, a squeaky whirligig atop a sagging clothesline, a rusty chevrolet pickup truck and Westmore’s vehicle. After a brief admiration of Bernie’s seven prize piglets, we were driving on the paved road in the direction of Halstead
Mill, the nearest town by twenty miles from the Four Corners side of the mountain.

  Reviewing the obstacles in the bold light of day, little Jemmy Isaak may or may have never made it off the hill alive.

  In the three weeks which passed between the last time I had seen the mill town, I all but forgot the convenient splendor of civilization, even in a place as unassuming as Halstead Mill. Aaron carried his list of supplies for Sam Pennock to the local Piggly Wiggly, and I agreed to meet with him at a bar and grill down the street upon filling my own list at the Five and Dime.

  I stopped at the rather quaint brick post office, after calling an old colleague in Boston from a corner phone booth. I also called my sister, Nina, to whom I sent a padded envelope, that was to remain unopened and refrigerated. I speculated the item would arrive by the end of the week.

  Telling neither my sister nor my old colleague where it was I actually called from, I claimed, with an uncharacteristic compulsion, to be visiting friends in Maine, when asked. Who was I protecting? I wondered. Ana or myself?

  Passing a small flower shop, with an attached greenhouse, I gave into an impulse to find a white lilac bush. As fortune would have it, I was able to chose from the only two remaining.

  I found Aaron leaning patiently against the passenger door of his Jeep Cherokee, parked in front of an establishment called Maxine’s Bar & Grill, thoughtfully smoking a cigarette.

  “Planting a garden?” he asked, opening the back hatch of the vehicle, where I placed the potted bush and the plastic bag of assorted toiletries from the Five and Dime. I tossed a half-consumed liter of 7-Up on the front seat.

  “A lilac,” I smiled absently. “For Ana. I thought she might like it.”

  “Ah,” returned Aaron with what sounded like approval. He stretched his back and said: “I’m hungry and thirsty as hell. Let’s go into Maxine’s and get some food.”

  Maxine’s Bar & Grill was clean and richly paneled in the polished knotted wood befitting the taste of any local sportsman, who, while he drank among his peers, could admire the mounted plaques of fresh water northerns and glass-eyed, horned buck heads sharing wall space with neon beer signs. I followed Aaron passed framed photographs of rushing waters and thirsty fishermen, proud hunters with rifles and dead bounty in tow, to a quiet booth at the far end of the lounge.

  "I'm going to get a beer," Aaron announced. "You want something?"

  “I’ll just order coffee,” I said. “You go ahead.” I pushed my sunglasses on top of my head and sat back against the wall beneath the fake green ivy spilling over the high window ledge. I plucked out a menu from its metal bracket and viewed the variety of choices.

  Aaron appeared preoccupied as he walked up to the bar and I briefly wondered at the cause. I searched the sandwich list and decided on a Philly cheesesteak, made Tennessee style, I presumed, when Aaron returned to the table with an open bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. He slid into the booth, leaning forward with some reserve, as though he had some great revelation he wished to impart.

  “Listen,” he said confidentially, “what you saw the other night doesn’t happen all the time. It was an emergency with Jemmy, you know?”

  “Hey, sugar,” a thin, thirty-something bottle brunette addressed Aaron. She set down two glasses of water. “Haven’t seen you in awhile.” She flashed an unabashed wink in my direction. “Who’s the handsome stranger?”

  “Lacey, meet Ethan Broughton from Boston,” introduced Aaron with a wave. “Ethan, meet Lacey Jennings, waitress extraordinaire.”

  “Well, Ethan Broughton from Boston, “ Lacey smiled, “anybody ever tell you, you got the prettiest brown eyes?”

  I glanced at Aaron, who smirked in return. I smiled only slightly. “Not for a few days,” I told her.

  “Well, you do and that’s a fact,” she replied. “What’ll you boys have?”

  I pointed to the Philly sandwich and ordered a pot of coffee. Aaron ordered a roast beef on rye and another beer.

  “Don’t be such a stranger,” she told Aaron, tapping him on the shoulder with her pen. “And bring your Boston friend, too. Wednesday night is Ladies Choice, remember.”

  Aaron turned and watched her walk away. Assuring himself that we were again in private conclave, he stated: “You fell asleep afterward, didn’t you.”

  “It was four thirty in the morning,” I reminded him.

  “No,” he replied, “it was more than that. Remember how you felt after Clem and Merilee’s baby was saved from that bite, even though it was the middle of the day?”

  “Ok,” I agreed, “a little like that, I suppose. But the circumstances were entirely different. What are you getting at?”

  Aaron seemed to struggle for the right words. He leaned over the table a little more. “It’s like…how can I put it?…too much energy or something. This is why you went into some kind of sleep condition after Clem and Merilee and didn’t remember. It could be you were too tired to feel it the other night, but it was still there. I know. It happened to me.”

  I must have looked somewhat astonished. Aaron nodded his head knowingly, as though we both now shared some complicated affliction.

  I watched him steadily. Waited. Listened.

  “You know Scully Owen?” he asked.

  “The tall, bony guy with the arched spine,” I responded. Yes, I knew who he was.

  “Two summers ago…” Aaron began, just as Lacey brought the beer and pot of coffee.

  She flashed a quiet, flirtatious smile which seemed to suggest that beneath the tender surface of cheery banter, life had become painfully predictable, with little hope of reprieve.

  “Thanks, Lace,” said Aaron impatiently.

  “Anytime, sugar,” she replied. She turned and her expression brightened. “Hey, Jonesy!” she greeted as the tall, uniformed sheriff stepped lazily toward the booth where Aaron and I sat. He smiled reservedly and nodded, “Lacey,” and grasped a wooden chair from a nearby table. He straddled the chair at the edge of the booth, leaning his elbows on the back rim.

  “How’s Kay?” asked Lacey.

  “Real fine, Lacey,” said the sheriff.

  “You boys just be patient,” Lacey told Aaron and I. “Your order will be out directly.”

  The sheriff appeared to be in his early forties, at best, and as Jemmy Isaak once noted, he wore the mirrored sunglasses similar to my own. One could readily identify a man of implacable confidence, with a strong jaw and rugged good looks.

  He smiled through a row of even white teeth and toyed deliberately with an unlit cigarillo between his long fingers.

  “Westmore,” he greeted precisely and waited patiently, if not somewhat curiously, for an introduction.

  Aaron sat back and gestured his hand. “Sheriff Roland Jones, Dr. Ethan Broughton, a friend from Boston.”

  Sheriff Jones then held out his hand and grasped mine in a firm grip.

  “Doctor?” noted the sheriff. “What kind of doctor would that be?”

  "Ethan, here, is a research biologist," Aaron answered. "He's studying some indigenous plant life up on Porringer."

  Roland Jones’ evaluation of the reply was unreadable through the advantage of mirrored sunglasses, but I suspected that, not unlike Ana, he was unamused on meeting a stranger with a possible agenda.

  “How long do you intend on staying?” he asked.

  “Not too long,” I replied. “A month or two, maybe.”

  Jones nodded, apparently satisfied as to my answer. He inclined his head toward Aaron .

  “He has met our lady?”

  “I believe they have spoken, yes,” Aaron told him.

  The sheriff appeared thoughtful for a moment, and then swung his leg back around the chair and replaced it at the opposite table. “Your friend from Boston is a good looker, Westmore. See he stays out of trouble.”

  I watched the sheriff retreat with that same easy resoluteness he arrived with. He stopped and lit the filtered cigarillo, nodding pleasantly to the barkeeper. Lacey sailed passed him wit
h a, “See you Wednesday night, Jonesy. Say ‘hey’ to Kay,” and set our hot sandwiches on the booth table.

  “Here you go, boys,” she said. “Shout, if you need anything.”

  “What was that all about?” I asked, watching Jones as he stepped casually out the door.

  Aaron shrugged. “You’re a stranger. From what I’ve heard, Ana’s mother saved him from certain death as a rookie cop shot on the roadside. He’s the only one, below the mountain, who knows Ana exists up there. He was grateful, apparently. I think he wanted to make sure you weren’t going to be a problem.”

  “Problem?”

  “Telling someone,” said Aaron. “Maybe bring in outsiders, know what I mean?”

  Lacey set down another beer and Aaron handed her another empty bottle. “Darlin’, why don’t I just bring you a pitcher?”

  Aaron nodded. “That’d be just perfect, Lace. And two shots of Jack while you’re at it.”

  “You told me about Ana,” I reminded him. “Wouldn’t that make you a problem?”

  “It could,” Aaron agreed, “but since you’re the only one I’ve told or ever expect to, I don’t see it as any question Jones need worry about. As long as he thinks you’re a friend of mine, he won’t bother with any further inquiry.”

  “I see,” I replied, but I didn’t really see at all.

  Lacy brought a pitcher of foaming beer, a mug and two shots glasses filled with the requested whiskey. She asked about the coffee, but I waived any refill.

  “Do you know how to drive a stick?” asked Aaron.

  “I do,” I replied.

  “Good,” said Aaron, “because I plan to get stinking drunk.”

  He downed both shots of whiskey and seemed rather morose. I vaguely marveled at his obvious familiarity with liquor, a trait I had not suspected ran quite as deep as it apparently did.

  “So, what about Scully Owen?” I inquired, taking a bite of the Philly sandwich, which I found surprisingly agreeable.