“Lonny’s coming to walk me home,” Jolene announced. She winked at me and said: “And your pretty guest, here, didn’t quite take to my cookin’.”
I could not help but like Jolene Parker. Sardonic one moment, incurably flirtatious the next, she would one day make a man both desirous and incredibly crazy at once.
But I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust her anymore than I trusted Ana, regardless of Aaron Westmore’s drunken assessment of either of them, or any primordial attraction to one and reserved sense of gratitude to the other.
Ana sent home a jar of honey and a loaf of fresh bread with Jolene when the gauntly framed Lonny came stomping to the door, accompanied by a hyperactive yellow labrador.
“Ana, I need you to explain to me what happened here last night,” I said quietly, after the clatter of Jolene and her brother's chase of the dog faded beyond the clearing.
“You think nothing is as simple as it appears,” Ana shrugged. Ignoring my frown, she added: “Yet, how much is complicated by thinking so much?”
I didn’t know if I had simply slept too long or, too deeply, to grasp her statement or, if I truly did not care. I felt the sober aftermath of emotional ejection and desired only to understand what had occurred. I could not cope with riddles.
Sensing my somber contemplation, she said: “I will tell you what you need to know. If you leave here tonight, your whole body will shake by moon-set because you think too much. You will sweat to the bone and your mind will go numb by first light. By the time the sun rises over the leaves, you will reach for your bottles of poisons and they will fall from your hand to the floor.
"Like a child who has spilled his gumdrops, you will scramble for them one by one, but you will swallow too many. Because you are alone in that hour, your heart will stop beating. This is your tomorrow.”
I stared at her, astonished by what I considered quite a dramatic rendering of what she prophesied as my fate, should I refuse her aid.
Unstirred by my wordless reaction, she added: “You took too many for too long, Ethan Broughton. Like any masked ghoul, who kept your secrets well, it will try and kill you when you leave. If you allow me, I can prevent it. One more deep sleep. Perhaps two. Three more teas. Choose.”
Although I was quite aware of the perils of self-medication, I had no reason to think it out of control. Yet, I strangely believed her; a state I feared as irrational as Jilly’s offer of soup to sway her son’s morbid asthma episode. I scarcely knew this woman, Ana Lagori, didn’t trust her, and the majority of the time I would swear on oath, she was nothing less than a brilliant magician.
But I believed her. Against all rationale and despite any conflict regarding the question of her apparent abilities, I believed her. And in a complex and strangely sensual way, I found I didn’t want to fight that belief.
She raised a brow, as if surprised by my apparent inability to grasp the fundamental choice. She sat as Lady Justice, weighing death and life, falsehood and truth in her hands, blindly dispassionate as to the outcome.
Choose.
Although the choice would appear obvious, if her prediction held merit, she would have me say it, as though not speaking would serve neither as consent nor refrain.
My reply, whispered in the space between us, was subdued. “Yes...”
Ana seemed satisfied and set the water kettle on the range to boil. She lifted a cumbersome earthen bowl from the cupboard and ground the dried herbs Jolene had separated earlier, into pungent flakes with a wooden pestle.
“Why do you stay so far across the sea?” she asked, bringing down jars from the heavy cabinet shelves.
“In Prague?” I asked. Her hands, in their adept purpose, hypnotized my senses. “I work at the university. I visit my parents. It’s a magnificent city. Easy to get lost in.”
“But your people are not from that land,” she said.
“No,” I returned contemplatively.
“England, then?” she asked. “On the great ships?”
“In the beginning, yes,” I replied. “My mother and father, despite any history of family elitism, fancy themselves more the itinerant travelers. My brother was born in Montreal, my sister in Salzburg.”
“And you?” she wanted to know.
I laughed with light amusement. "Boston, actually."
She seemed to consider this for several moments and then said: “It was your grandmother, in Boston, who wanted the grandchildren home.”
“You are amazingly astute,” I remarked.
She smiled slightly. “I know the way of the grandmothers.” She poured the hot water over her leafy concoction in the tea mug.
“So,” I asked, breathing in the fragrance of steaming herbs, “tell me about your people. How did they come by these hills?”
Ana rubbed the dried herbs between her fingertips and let the nearly powdered particles sift like sand into each tinted jar.
“Where does one go, but to the hills and the forests,” she returned, “when one has nowhere else to go?”
“Do you always answer questions with questions?” I wanted to know, but I was beginning to feel the effects of the blended herbs simply from the steam. “What’s in this?” I asked numbly.
“The healing earth,” she replied simply. “Drink.”
No matter how fiercely I willed otherwise, my eyelids weighed heavily by the fourth swallow.
“That’s not quite the answer I was looking for.”
“Sleep,” she whispered. “It is the only way.”
Had I been of clear mind, I might have accused her openly of strange deliberation. As truth would have it, I was becoming quite indifferent to anything beyond the heather soft quilting of her bed and quite indifferent to anything beyond the confines of her company, come the rising sun.
~*~
Chapter XIII
While I slept, she wove into the night on a loom under the light of the kerosene lamp. While I dreamt images I could not fully recapture on awakening, she slept somewhere I could not determine. When I awoke, the be-speckled Jemmy Isaak sat on the edge of the bed.
“Whatcha doin’, Yankee Doctor?” he beamed. “You live here with Possum now? You goin’ up t’Melvin’s with us today?”
“Melvin?” I asked, suddenly, and very desperately, confused.
“Black lung,” the child replied.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes with the palms of my hands and glanced around the room. It was the light of true morning this time around. I noted that my clothes were dispatched to a folded pile on a nearby chair.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Jemmy, with some residue of disorientation in my tone.
“Egg day!” Jemmy exclaimed, holding up a basket of eggs for emphasis.
I felt an extreme sense of bladder urgency, as I had the evening before, and an even greater sense of nausea, as I had two evenings before. I covered my mouth and managed to roll from the bed with the quilt wrapped around my torso. Fleeing to the edge of the forest behind the cabin, I regurgitated a substance with such force, it left my body weak and shaken. I lost complete bladder control.
Shit, I am dying. She has poisoned me.
I leaned against the rough bark of a nearby maple, catching my breath.
For the love of Christ, they’re going to find nothing but a pile of moss bones in fifty years.
Damn you to hell, Josiah Fitch.
I felt an instant panic, but then a flush of unadulterated lightness. I breathed in a final, clarifying breath as the world came back into focus. I glanced over at the grass and wildflower tangled cemetery. For a fleeting moment, I experienced such an intense morbidity, that the weightless release of the moment before vanished with the brush of a passing breeze.
It’s time to get away from here.
But then, I turned to the sound of pumping water and my resolve weakened. There Ana Lagori stood, the morning sun shining an aura of light around her willowy and pale body in such a way she appeared almost seraphic. It came to me, in that moment, th
at nothing untoward, nothing sinister, could come from such pure vision and my feverish anxiety was borne from little more than the unexpected severity of nausea.
I exited the forest boundary and tightened the quilt around my waist. I stepped to the well and rinsed my face over and over again until my flesh numbed.
“Here,” she instructed, “put your head under the water.” She pressed my shoulders down and soaked my hair, scrubbing at the scalp with her minted soap until the roots tingled; scrubbing my arms and back until the skin felt contrastingly electrified under the heat of the sun and the striking cold of the water. She then pumped the cistern briskly, while I rinsed my scalp and arms.
I pulled away and experienced such a rush of energy flowing through every pore of my body, that I imagined such sensation as equal only to a vast and fabled mammal rising from the sea, to breathe breath for the first time since captivity.
Ana handed me a fresh towel in exchange for the quilt. I removed the ax from its wood stump and sat facing the full sun’s warmth.
“Today, we go to Melvin Fuller’s,” Ana informed me as she rubbed my head dry with another sun dried towel. “I promised the boy you would help gather mushrooms.”
“You think it wise to let Jemmy think he is some sort of magical gnome?” I asked.
“Wise is as wise does,” she replied.
“Melvin has black lung?” I then asked, knowing it was useless to argue the child's delusion.
“He returns from the mine with disease,” she said, almost contemptuously, “but it is not his time to die.”
“You seem quite certain of this,” I noted.
I heard her impatient sigh from behind as she combed her fingers through my damp hair. “Go inside and dress, Ethan Broughton.”
We breakfasted on syrupy cakes and fresh butter, the endless wild strawberries and cheese, Ana Lagori, Jemmy Isaak and I. It was one of those brief, commonplace moments, wherein one imagines all is right with the world.
I found a self-sustaining pleasure in the minor domestic tasks assigned to both Jemmy and myself: hang out the quilts and linens, pick the early summer peas from the garden. While we busied ourselves, Ana attended to a basket of jarred broth, bread, honey and precisely measured herb blends for the ailing Melvin Fuller. All the while, Jemmy chattered on: Grammy Nana made him socks, Coobie scratched his hand on a rose thorn, Mommy’s hens had a batch of chicks, Daddy brought him and Coobie a baseball glove from town. It was fun, he went on, to have Cousin Gracie visiting, as long as she didn’t interfere with his duties as a mud poke. I surmised said duties did not go much beyond gathering turtles and salamanders, wherever either creature might be stumbled across.
The worn path to Melvin Fuller’s failing homestead was near a two mile walk. Throughout Jemmy’s incessant babble and Ana’s indulgent patience, I followed behind with heightened self-absorption, doubting my perception in this unlikely province of riddle and allusion, yet convinced I was privilege to something intimately complex and inviolate.
We found Winnie Mae Clark standing on the dulling wood porch of the Fuller cabin, her brow furrowed with a terrible worry. The cotton dress she wore framed a rather stalky form, but she appeared more weary than frail.
“Mama says our Melvin ain’t long, Miss Ana,” Winnie Mae related mournfully. “Been coughin’ up tar and blood all the night long.”
“Where are the children, Winnie Mae?” asked Ana calmly.
“Home,” Winnie Mae replied. “Got Emma Tanner takin’ care of ‘em, ‘long with her own brood.” She eyed me curiously, if not somewhat suspiciously. “This the Yank the womenfolk been admirin’ so much?”
“Ah-huh,” Ana nodded and cocked her head to the side. “Winnie Mae is Melvin’s sister, isn’t that so, Winnie Mae?”
Before I could extend any gesture of acknowledgement, Winnie Mae brushed aside a stray lock of hair loosened from the twisted bun at the nape of her neck. “Pretty enough, I s’pose, but don’t look like he’s done a workin’ man’s job a speck in his life.”
“Ethan Broughton, here, is a Wort doctor,” replied Ana, “come to study our wild mountain plants.”
Winnie Mae nodded, unimpressed and only vaguely self-conscious.
“He’ll find ‘em in abundance,” she agreed.
“I came to help Melvin today,” said Ana quietly. “Do you mind?”
“Surely not, Miss Ana,” replied Winnie Mae, a trace of moisture welling in her pale blue eyes.
“Is your Aunt Ruthie here?” asked Ana.
Winnie Mae nodded solemnly. “Mama, too. Melvin’s Kate been at his side since he come home. Still sleeps beside him, too.”
Ana returned an agreeable nod. She turned to Jemmy. “Do you have your basket? Let me see.”
Jemmy raised the basket in his hand.
“Do you remember the mushrooms I asked you to gather?” Ana inquired. “Do you remember each one?”
Jemmy nodded excitedly.
“Then run along with our Ethan,” she told him, “and return only when you are finished.”
Jemmy pulled at the sleeve of my shirt. “This way, Yankee Doctor. Bye, Miss Winnie Mae! Bye, Possum! C’mon, Yankee Doctor.”
As I walked away with the child and his mental list of fungi, I thought I heard the whisper of Winnie Mae Clark’s peculiar inquiry: “Blood seed?” and the hum of Ana’s confirmation.
A sudden and piercing whistle caused both Jemmy and I to turn and find Winnie Mae stepping toward us. She tossed a strapped .22 caliber rifle in my direction, which I caught firmly in my hand via a quick response for self-preservation.
“Wild things,” she stated, “live out there. You know how to use that gun?”
“I’ll manage,” I replied, raising the strap over my shoulder.
In a space deep in the forest, Jemmy Isaak stopped and stepped mindfully in circles, scouting like a dutiful truffle pig for the agaricales expected of him.
“Jemmy,” I said, “I hope you know where we are.”
“Don’t worry, Yankee Doctor,” Jemmy assured, “ya can’t get lost if you know the way you came.”
“Jemmy, I’m serious,” I said. “I don’t want to get lost in here.”
“A mud poke always knows his way,” Jemmy declared. “Possum told me so. I’m a mud poke and I always know my way.”
"I thought a mud poke was a magical boy," I reminded him.
“I am a magical boy,” said Jemmy brightly. “That’s why I can’t get lost.”
But you can die and you nearly did I thought dismally. I gave up trying to convince him of remaining closer to the Fuller homestead and attempted to note each nuance of our surroundings should we, despite the confidence of this wonder child, lose our way.
Jemmy collected a several morchella esculenta, common morel, mushrooms near a tree stump and slipped them into the basket. Finding another sun-slivered stump, he deposited several more.
“You know your mushrooms, then,” I complimented, inspecting the gathered specimens closely. “Did Ana teach you?”
“Teacher Westmore,” he said. “It’s one of our lessons at school. Possum says no teacher’s worth nothin’ if he can’t teach a child not to eat a toadstool and why.” He walked ahead and pointed to a cluster of amanita phalloides, Death Cap. “Those will make you sick and dead,” he informed me and pointed to a tight clump of fleshy orange toadstools not far beyond. “Those will make you see monsters and then make you dead.”
He found an assemblage of rare auricularia auricula-Judae, Judas’s ear, growing on the blanched wood of a fallen elder tree and painstakingly scraped the clump with his nimble penknife. We both inspected each one before placing it in the basket: he, with focused determination and I, with surprise that such a fungi, rare in North America, was on Ana’s instructed list at all.
I followed the child deeper into the thick coppice until he found a circle of red, warty fungus. He reached into his pocket and produced a bundle of neatly folded scrap papers, once used to cushion peaches in a shipping crate.
He pressed the stack against his knee to flatten each one against the other.
“Do you know what these are?” I asked him, bending down and plucking a single sticky stem from the ground, careful not to allow much of the moisture inside the forepart to touch the flesh of my fingers. “They are fly agaric and a bit early, too. I’m not sure you want these.”
Jemmy carefully plucked the mushroom from my fingertips and placed it on a single square of paper.
“It’s okay, Yankee Doctor,” he told me confidently. “Kill fly’s just for healin’ ways, as far as I know of.” He gingerly picked several more and wrapped them scrupulously between the pressed papers.
It can also cause hallucinations and violent expectoration. I felt my stomach tighten. Could this be the clue? Highly proficient in the use of plant resources, Ana would undoubtedly know how to prepare the exact proportions of the wild fungi to induce just enough response from the psyche, but not enough to poison altogether.
Did she think I was completely ignorant? I searched my mind for any purpose in her having allowed me to view Jemmy’s talents with identifying wild mushrooms. She was not a careless woman or, was she? Was she showing me that she, in fact, utilized them to induce desired responses or, indeed, had not used them at all? Was she answering my private suspicions or, increasing the stakes of the growing riddle?
Jemmy gathered a few more handfuls of coprinus mushrooms and wiped his hands repeatedly against the dewy grasses before announcing: “We can go back now.”
We were so deep into the woodland, the ground was still damp from the rains. I followed Jemmy’s lead in the hope he really did possess some internal compass, to steer our way back to our original beginning. The weight of the strapped rifle felt suddenly oppressive on my backside. The last time I had carried a weapon, of any measure, was in South America during a university expedition. I had not needed to discharge it then and I hoped my luck remained, with no incident between man and irritable beast.
The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense) Page 11