Bob is weeping, covering his eyes, his head down on his knees. Vera is comforting him, patting him on the back.
In the time of their visitation, they shall shine, and shall dart about as sparks through stubble. So they will.
Dear Bob, now I’ll always be present in your roses, the light in the stubble. I’ll always be where I fell, where they marked the well. I didn’t have to count. Sixty feet deep, twenty-five gallons per minute. Not deep at all in these times. A blessed aquifer you’re living on top of there.
“Annie,” he whispers, down on his knees, rubbing his ears then his eyes, weeping. He dries himself carefully with a sleeve. “Truly?”
Truly I tell you, as the sparks run through the field, as on the day of visitation. Go back and check for yourself. The place where I put all the little flags, around the body, where the lightning burned the ground. Drill. It’s no wonder I got hit — so much water there.
He’s crossing himself now, “Holy Mother of God. It’s a miracle,” he’s saying to anyone who will listen. But no one is paying attention yet. They have their own mortality to come to terms with first. No miracles in that.
Buster is behind him, wrinkling his brow, thinking how Bob appears to be talking to himself.
It’s funny what you can see from this vantage point.
As a deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs. . . What is your name? When shall I see your face? When shall I see the face of God? All my life I’ve wandered roads, fields, rivers looking for you. In the moment of the finding, overcome.
Deep calls to deep. . . In the roar of your torrents all your waves and breakers sweep over me. All the oceans, the rivers, the streams, underground tributaries run through me. As long as there is water. That is your promise.
Awake, O Sleeper. . .
Wake, Oh wake, sleeper, wake from thy slumber wake! Wake, wake me, stay awake, wake the dead. Sprinkle water, make a blessing, like a children’s game. The magpies keeping vigil. I saw them too, caw caw a hundred-thousand times the chorus. To be loved like that. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. To fill the ache in me. The roar of fellow creatures, the highest compliment. My passing noted in the hearts of birds. Who says they have no heart-brains? We are not far from each other in nature’s terms. Only our thoughts need to turn towards them.
I have gone nowhere I have not been before. Mine has been a life of living between the worlds. The artist sees, the sage knows, the saint prays. Mike, Jack, Florence. Close to death, close to life. It’s the way we come at things, slanted, a sidelong glance. Never approach the source of water directly, circle round, and come at an angle, a side-stepping journey. Where Florence goes with the rosary, where the paints take Mike, the stories, Jack. How I find the water.
Creatures are naturally shy of their talent, like the young Kristian frightened by his own gift. Come Holy Spirit. Yes, come. The priest is young. He sees the least: less than the boy, less than the girl, Kelsey. He does not yet know the terrible holy. He does not begin to know true evil or true good.
I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
ALEX
I don’t say this now, but a person needs their experience, the good and the bad. Needs a clarity of where they’re going. And other people for shade and mutual nurturance. There is sacrifice and losing oneself. It’s always a risk. There are never any guarantees of harvest, but whatever you put your faith in, it has to quench your thirst, it has to warm you inside. There’s a certain stillness in the process. Even for me, I realize, it can’t only be about the farming. Busy won’t erase the loss.
I make a point of standing up to speak, my hat in hand.
“There are at least three omissions in that gospel. There needs to be death in the soil too — soil needs dead plant matter. Death feeds the soil. There needs to be light and there needs to be water. All three. Death, water, light. Everyone knows, without the three, the grain won’t germinate.
“Annie was the death and the water and the light.”
As I settle back into my seat I glance over at the young priest. His eyes narrow, his cheeks puff up. Too late, I want to tell him. You’re no match for the salt of the earth.
ANNIE
The birds were an omen that spring twenty-eight years ago. Wax-wings flinging themselves against the large picture window, drunk on fermenting mountain ash berries still clustered on the trees out front, driving themselves hard against the windows, like bully boys out on a night’s spree. Maybe that’s why they call them bohemian. Or maybe it’s their dress, their bold colours.
They kept coming even when I rushed outside with a red dishtowel, the only thing I could find quick, wakened out of my own dozy wine-drugged sleep. I tried to warn them away. Spring was late in coming, the snow was still crusty and deep, and they were starving.
Afterwards I stood vigil over the little bodies, those that had crashed their wings, broken their necks, keeping the magpies at bay. A half dozen of the brightly painted folk, languishing, putting up a show of survival, pushing their chests out, slowly spreading their wings, their eyes half-closed, their breathing laboured, their heads sunk low and lower on their chests till they nodded off.
I saw myself in that moment as I had been for many years — trying to fill myself with things that didn’t feed, flinging myself against unnatural structures in my own mind — hate and fear — not being able to stop myself. It was my own life I was seeing before me. I had no base from which to speak to the birds. I could not warn them from something I was doing to myself.
I buried every one. Picked up their cold feathered bundles carefully in my warm hands, laid them down at the foot of one of the apple trees in the backyard where my nana used to bury afterbirths of the women she helped to labour. Dug a hole in the hard earth and made a place for each of them, a bed to rest. Said a prayer over the graves and swore to Our Lady I would stop drinking if she let me live out my last days in peace. I chose to confide in Vera. She was different. I could see that. She never was one to run with the other children. She was always off by herself, thinking, watching. If someone fell on the playground she stopped to check on them. She wasn’t one to force herself. She would just say, “Are you all right?” And with me, unlike some in town, she was never afraid.
I visited Florence too when I sobered up. Called at her house, unannounced. When she opened the door, she was shocked to see me. We hadn’t spoken for so long. “Let’s let bygones be bygones,” I managed to say to her. “Please, could you pray for me?” So Vera nursed me and Florence fed me prayers and casseroles.
VERA
People begin to rise, to speak. The sun is low in the sky, only the candlelight to see by. It’s as if the darkness were a mirror of all that we feel inside. A curtain to hide behind, a veil for refuge and a confessional. A teenage boy is weeping just back from the circle that’s formed around the bier. But he is not the only one. My Mike has a tear. Alex.
DAISY
“Most of you know that I’ve never been able to have children. I’ve had so many miscarriages. Annie understood women’s problems. She had them too. So how was it that she stayed so strong?
“I think she communicated with the water. Though I wasn’t ever sure how.
“When her grandmother died, that kerfuffle happened and Annie was sent away. When she first came back, people kept clear of her and her father — they didn’t want to be tarnished with town gossip. Till we needed a new well and my father remembering her grandmother, asked Annie if she could help. She used willow branches and walked in a trance around and round and the well continues to pump on that farm. After that, everyone started calling her, even when she was still drinking.
“I went to her too, after I was married, hoping for a cure. All I’d ever wanted was to be a mother. Annie gave me a bit of advice. ‘Daisy there are some things you cannot mend, but you can mend yourself.’ She was good that way with people. She could find just the right w
ord to make you think. ‘You need a purpose of your own,’ she said to me, ‘even if you could have children. Why not live and see what happens?’
“And that’s where I got the idea for my business, and I went home and told Buster and he said it sounded like the best thing since apple pie.
“‘I want to make things with my hands that will help other people make homes,’ I told him. We really talked then, for the first time in months.
“And that’s when he told me, ‘Daisy, I married you for you, not for how many children you can have.’”
But before I can properly finish the story, I start to bawl. Then again, I suppose everyone in that room already knows how happy Buster and I are together.
VERA
“I still remember one late winter day, Annie came to my parents’ house. We used to live the next block over from the old Gallagher place, where Annie took up residence when she came back to Majestic from the institution and after her father had died. I’d just finished my nursing degree and was going on to get my nurse practitioner certificate to go work up north. I’d done one of my rotations at a drug and alcohol treatment centre. My dad was always talking about me down at the hotel and what I was up to.
“She was starting to have blood come up, like her father had before he died. Blood in her stools, blood in her cough. But there was something else. ‘A sign,’ she called it. ‘I’ve had a sign.’ She had lost feeling in her hands, her witching arms. ‘I know what I have to do. Will you stay with me while I go through it?’
“First she walked me to all her stashes in the house and we poured them out.
“I stayed with her for three weeks. My dad ran the bar for her while she dried out.
“Alcohol affects women differently than men — the damage is quicker, harsher. Annie had lost function in one kidney. She had stomach ulcers. I had to hold her and she needed medication, she was shaking so much from the withdrawal. She had nightmares remembering the institution she was in as a child. The locked doors, the restraints, the surgery they made her have.
“She’d dreamed of her grandmother during that time telling her what she had to do to heal. That she had to cry all the grief out of her or she’d die. Even the grief that she could never have children. They had cut that part out of her at the institution.
“But there is more. I owe Annie my calling. She told me I was a midwife just like her grandmother, of souls. Annie made me realize I could work with people in crisis, that it is a privilege and a gift to work with people when they are at a crossroads. That change is the most potent magic. Some people it sets off; I thrive on it.”
I can’t say anymore after that. I have to sit down, and when I do, I find Mike’s arm is around me.
KELSEY
First thing, I look them straight in the eye, the way Miss Annie taught me. Hold up your head; you have nothing to be ashamed of. Sweeping my eyes around the room, even at Kristian, though he ducks when I glance his way. And then I speak.
“It was late April and still chilly at nights. Sometime in the early morning, Miss Annie said she’d felt something wasn’t right in the ground at her place and she’d been driven out to check the four boundaries. That’s what she called it. One of her cats had alerted her. I think she had x-ray vision. She just knew where to look. She came straight for me and she found me shivering and my teeth rattling where I was hiding under the caragana hedge. I told her everything that had happened and how mad my mom was with me. And she said, ‘Don’t worry, come in for the night. It’s cold out here.’
“She brought me inside into her kitchen and gave me hot chocolate and set up a bed for me with a crazy quilt in a bedroom she called the birthing room. I hardly knew Miss Annie before that night. She was just that funny-looking lady who lived next door and wore old coveralls and flannel shirts and a cowboy hat that looked oiled. She had a lot of cats that would come and go, and she would put food out for them in her backyard. Sometimes the Fire Department had to be called to rescue one of them off her roof. My mom said she was a witch of some kind, and that I shouldn’t talk to her. Sometimes I saw her out working in her garden and she used to make a point of straightening herself and saying Good morning and Nice weather, but I would never say boo.
“The next day she said, ‘You can stay with me as long as you like, but you have to go to school or get a job. Your mother’s right. There are no free rides. Everyone has to do their part.’
“She was the one that made me think about church too. It was nothing she said. I just asked if I could come along. She hesitated a minute and then she grinned. ‘It might be good for the baby. Churches like babies,’ she said.
“I’d had my first communion when I was a little kid and Miss Florence said that’s all I needed to be an altar server, that it would build heart in me. And that’s what I needed to be a mom.”
JACK
Between the tissue box and Florence standing by her, the young woman is pretty emotional. When she gets to the end, she almost breaks: “I just want to say that Miss Annie — saved my life. And I don’t know where I’d be without her. I mean, I was like that reading, lost. I would never have turned it around.”
Then she has to stop to wipe away her tears.
That young Mueller at the back of the bar looks like a jack-in-the-box, popping his head up and down all the way through, taking in every word the girl has to say. One minute sitting, one minute standing, looking up at the proceedings, then down at his feet.
When I get up to speak, I take my cue from the girl: “Yes, I imagine Annie’s saved a lot of us around this room.” And I see that young boy jump to attention.
“Years ago I fancied Annie. After she came back and before her father died. She was a beautiful thing, it was like the wild coursed through her. I knew she was dangerous too, so much power in one body. I sought her out. I would go to the bar just to catch a glimpse of her, to hear the roughness of her voice.
“My parents caught wind of it and forbade me to see her. ‘That family’s cursed. The mother abandoning her like that and not right in the head. Her father, a drinker.’ According to them, nothing good had ever come from that home. My parents never spoke of the healing, the wells that were witched, the troubles mended, the bricks that built houses in these parts after the Great War, even our house.
“It was Annie’s power and her grandmother’s power, the power of the earth that made me want to study geology. So I lived between city and wilderness for thirty-odd years. I spent six months of the year in the field, chipping rock, drilling core samples, wandering mountain trails, forest floors, cutlines, and road allowances. Watching and listening. Having a family, a loving wife, and a good life. My wife has passed on, my children are grown and happy now, and I have no regrets. But I often wonder what would have come of it if I had defied my parents. I’m not ashamed to say that now I’m an old man, I know we’re capable of loving many people in a lifetime.
“People would ask her to witch for them but she wouldn’t accept any money, just like her grandmother. ‘It’s a gift,’ she’d say. Only a gift could be given in return, and nothing that would cause hardship. But in the early years a bottle of whisky wouldn’t be turned away.”
The room laughs.
“She also accepted food as her grandmother had: eggs, milk, chickens, a cut of beef.
“After my wife died and I had moved back here, I visited her often. Once when we were alone, I asked her, would she marry me? ‘No Jack,’ she said, ‘I was never meant to marry anyone. But you may love me if you wish.’ And so I did.
“I used to have a ring of silver, a common enough ring in my profession. There are crossed pickaxes on it. I asked Annie if she would wear it for me, for the divining. She said ‘Yes,’ and she did. That was enough.”
At the end of my speech, it is all I can do to find my seat again, even though I am standing right over it. The young girl hands me the box of tissues. It is my turn for tears.
FLORENCE
The good Father is scandalized by
Jack’s declaration. “This is an abomination!” he whispers in my ear and starts to rise to put a stop to the whole proceeding. I put out my arm to stop him, get up instead myself to speak.
“We were estranged, Annie and I, for so many years. When she came back to the church, she refused communion. Out of respect for me. When I was very young, I had an abortion.”
Some ladies gasp, some men clear their throats, check the positions of their chairs, scrape the floorboards as they shift a quarter of an inch. I feel my eyes starting to fill, but I will myself to stand taller, not to cry.
“Annie was a witness, though I don’t think she understood the full import of what was happening that day. We were both very young.”
Someone lets out an involuntary “Ah!” that ripples in the evening air, the release of innocence and sorrow.
The good Father starts to rise again; I stop him again.
“Not to worry, Father, I have long repented of my part, the child who had a child who she couldn’t bear with the countenance of her father. . . . Dozens of priests have tried to absolve me; but only now have I been able to forgive myself. What I want to say today is that she is present in the water.”
The good father rises abruptly and with both hands on my shoulders, feigns to help me find my seat, gives a curt nod to Kelsey, who opens the book upon cue, whereupon he starts to pray for peace in the world, for all those who have died, for all those who had gathered to worship and for Annie, that God might free her from punishment and darkness and forgive all her sins. And we all cant, “Hear us, Lord, and have mercy.” The priest blesses us in the name of the Trinity, making the sign of the cross in the air over our bent heads. We take our collective revenge in the singing. Singing louder and longer, all three verses, making him wait.
Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing;
You reign now in heaven with Jesus our King.
Ave, ave, ave Maria,
Ave, ave, ave Maria.
Hail Mary. Only afterwards do I notice my wet cheeks. Again, the blessed water. I let them fall, let others fuss to uncover the dessert squares we’ve been saving to the end, break out the lemonade behind the bar. Pass out the coffee, and yes, the spirits.
The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning Page 11