Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (49 page)

“Get away,” I said. “Our mother is home, inside!”

Pammy took another step toward the boy.

“I won’t take your punishment,” I said to her. “You’re on your own for this.”

“Next pitch is in the dirt! Unbelievable. Marichal is wild. Bailey goes over to calm him down. Two pitches into the inning and he’s already out of control. The next pitch . . . and it’s high. Wills is on with a walk!”

“Don’t go,” I said, but Pammy shrugged me off.

“Keep the radio,” she said. “I’ll come back for you soon as I can.” The boy held her hand and together, they walked through the side yard, then disappeared from view.

My throat began to close and I sat stunned, afraid to stay, afraid to move. With no one out, Wills was certain to steal second. I broke into a cold sweat and tasted something sour twisting in my stomach. I stopped myself from breathing, because I was afraid my breath would blow a bad omen from my yard to Chavez Ravine, and Wills would be thrown out. The Devil only knew what would happen then.

“Marichal comes out of his stretch and throws and Wills is off and running. . . . ”

Breezes gathered from all directions. Then from nowhere a gust blew strong enough to knock the radio over on its side. I moved to right the radio. “Please don’t get caught,” I prayed, but I didn’t know who I was praying for—Pammy or Maury Wills. The winds pressed against my back and forced me upright, pushed me toward the side yard, then into the front. My neighborhood was a ghost town, with papers and loose garbage rolling along the empty street. There wasn’t a soul anywhere, no birds, no barking, the only noise I heard was of freeway traffic in the distance. I found myself running along the sidewalk away from our house toward the intersection. I pulled the crystal from my pocket and held it up. As I stared through the glass, my world became many.

Winds gusted and hot breath rushed under my heels, lifting me out of my thongs and into the air. I raised my arms and looked upward, praying I’d see heaven and not the Devil. The sky was so bright it stung my eyes. When I looked down, I saw my neighborhood had become a quilt of color, alive except for one small patch of brown.

I gripped the crystal tight and tried to imagine what Maury Wills was really like, but the man I pictured was all a blur, as if he were running past me.

Mrs. Garcia had told me not to worry and for the first time, I started to believe her. The most important thing was that Pammy had gotten free and Mrs. Garcia had given me the magic to get away when I needed to. I felt strong enough to face whatever was about to happen.

The Santa Anas carried me on a carpet of air that raced above the city to Chavez Ravine and the fastest man in baseball. Below, the road meandered up the dry hill, asphalt shiny as glass. I floated over the ridge of a stadium shaped like a broken bowl, where inside, a thousand fans stood screaming. Something streaked across the brilliant green of the diamond and I looked down—just in time—to see number thirty, Maury Wills, slide free into second.

Leah Bobet writes of a modern-day witch whose roots lie in the idea of the “herbwoman.” Although similar to the “cunning folk” tradition, this concept of witchcraft grows more from seeds planted by fantasists than history or superstition. According to Jennifer A. Heise, this witch-type made her fictional appearance in the early 1970s with the rise of feminism and the development of female roles in fantasy, a time that also saw a surge in the number of women reading and writing fantasy. During the same era, there was renewed interest in herbal medicine; getting “back to the land” and a distrust of “establishment medicine” were in vogue. As Heise points out, this interest was at least partially related to a justifiable backlash against science-based medicine in the women’s movement. (The abysmal state of female health care in the 1960s has been well documented.) “Natural” cures provided by knowledgeable women—whether set in fantasy worlds, supernatural versions of our past, or modern times—became a frequent genre trope.

The Ground Whereon She Stands

Leah Bobet

Alice sent me flowers. I didn’t realize until midmorning, when I walked through the hallway into the kitchen and greening stems twisted and crushed under bare feet. Then I looked back, and saw the petals shading the carpet, pulping on the grout. They didn’t like tiles. I backtracked, and there were daisies rooted in the shower drain. They smelled like the second day of spring.

“Oh, Alice,” I said to the flowers, and instead of grinning or crying put the coffee on the stove.

After the third cup, two cream, two sugar, I closed the laptop and went up the road to Idaho.

I lived in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. Alice’s house was past mine, up on a rise where the red oaks shrank to larch and bristly sumac. There was only one trail there, an old logging track wide enough for her asthmatic red old truck. She clipped the branches clean when they battered at the windows in the summertime.

It was close enough to walk, but not without hiking boots. By the time I reached the turnoff Russian sage nosed through the eyelets, fighting my shoelaces for sunlight.

Alice was in the back garden, coaxing a ripe heirloom tomato off its heavy stem. Idaho had three gardens: the back was the farm garden, stands of tomato plants and curling cucumber standing sentry between fat and heavy lettuces, patches of collard greens, toddler-fat corn, potatoes. There were four kinds of potatoes. “Well, it’s Idaho,” she’d said diffidently last summer when I’d first had the tour. Her hands were in the pockets of her dirt-stained jeans, head down and looking just away. She’d been smiling.

She was humming now, a folksong in time with the pull and roll of vegetable flesh. I shifted my feet; I didn’t want the sage rooting down in her beds. Its leaves rustled and rubbed against each other, and the noise brought her head up. She smiled again when she saw me, that crooked half-wince which was the closest she ever got.

“Hi,” I said, and tripped over a fragrant stand of fresh-bloomed lavender flowers.

Her mouth opened, shaped a syllable. “Let’s get you inside.”

The light in the farmhouse was orchard-light, coming from the east. Alice shed her ballcap with one hand and settled me in a chair, a carved wooden one that might have come from the Heritage Festival down in Newfane. I picked my way through the brush toward the laces, snapping off green branches as they hardened into wood.

The boots came off in tangles. I worked both feet free and wiggled my toes. They smelled sweet, and sharp, and green.

Alice came back in with scrubbed-clean hands, dirt still hiding under a fingernail. She took my right foot in her palms. “Russian sage,” she said mildly. “Good for fevers.”

Her hand was cool. The sweaty muscle in the peak of my arch relaxed against it. This close I could smell her shampoo, sharp with tea tree oil and vinegar. “It started growing this morning. There’s daffodils in the shower.”

I looked out the window instead of down at her, to spare myself the sight of it. It didn’t matter. I caught the motion; the line of her mouth pressing together and her head turning down. “Someone put a spell on you,” she said, perfectly even.

Because you’re mine,
my head filled in. Someone. Of course, Alice. I eased my foot away.

She looked up, no change in her face but the oh-so-white whites of her eyes. “Could take a few days,” she muttered.

“Mmhmm,” I replied. She knew full well I was rotating into town next week.

“Come take these down with me,” she asked, barely a question. Eglantine spilled from between my toes onto her polished wood floor. The prickles tugged skin along with it. She winced watching, and I felt cruel.

“All right,” I said. I crushed the opening petals when I stood.

We sat side by side on the tailgate at the side of 147 with the sign out, and watched the tourists roar along the highway. L
OCAL GROWN,
it announced. B
EST VEGGIES IN
C
ALEDONIA
C
OUNTY!
I had painted it in bright blue and yellow at the end of last autumn. Alice coaxed taut and sweet early squash out of soil the farmers had left for dead, but she was clumsy with things like advertising. I swung my legs back and forth over the muddy shoulder and felt the traffic wind blow, golden dandelions fading and sporing from the creased soles of my feet.

There was no wireless signal here; it was barely a rest stop, just a collection of picnic tables and parking spots where the brush had been hacked away. I rested the laptop on my thighs, half-open against the summer sunshine glare.

Alice watched me from the edges of her eyes, in the way the old men called Indian. “Gonna need a few things.”

I clicked the laptop shut.

“To take off the spell,” she said. Cars pulled off the highway: sleek family sedans. A thick and sleepy blonde ducked out from a Honda’s passenger seat and lit up a cigarette.

“Gonna find out who’s enchanting me?” A trio of children tumbled from the Honda’s backseat, the oldest dark-haired and pouting, her two little brothers pinching with sly and sloppy grins. I watched them, watched her Indian-style.

“Don’t have ’em all in the garden. Have to look around.”

The dandelions dropped to the pitted asphalt, their stems baking hot and sweet. Hissing marigolds and daisies sprung up in their place.

“So you’re not going to find out.” I shifted onto one thigh and turned to look her in the face. She had long, sharp lines in her cheeks, a straight nose. The kind of straightnesses you wanted to touch, which would maybe send the message: give it up. I’ve known for months. “Have to start sleeping with a rowan cross.”

Her hands clasped in her lap, long and strong and dirty. She swallowed, soft.

“Mama,” the youngest boy’s voice rose over the traffic. “Apricots.”

I hadn’t seen a flick of the fingers, a whisper of words, anything she could have charmed to turn the kid’s head our way. Luck; I bit down on a sigh and swung my legs again. Just a damned coincidence.

“Saved by the bell,” I muttered, and the surprise on her face held me over until the kids came barreling across the lot.

They took the apricots, and some new potatoes, red peppers, strawberries, and mint besides. “Good for the stomach,” Alice told the stringy-haired blonde, who up close looked too young for three school-age children.

“I get carsick,” she winced, looking like she wished the dirt would swallow her. Wondering how Alice had smelled her sour stomach, no doubt, with her breath covered in the smell of cigarettes. Cringing at the touch of a stranger’s attention on her for one flat minute.

I turned away.

The little girl was standing by the back tire of the truck, watching her shouting, bouncing brothers. “There’s flowers on your feet,” she informed me, mild. Her own feet were encased in plastic sandals.

“So there are,” I replied.

“Are you magic?”

“No,” I told her. “Just enchanted.”

Alice plucked a daisy from my toes and tucked it behind the little girl’s ear, her hands as careful as with her carrots.

When I got home the daffodils were blooming, and Alice had said not a word more. Butterflies nested along the kitchen counter, following the train and twist of flowering mint. I eased them off and into the air with the hem of my shirt. My mother taught me young about touching butterfly’s wings: so delicate the valleys of your skin would strip their scales away.

They fluttered through the open windows into the growing evening, while I tapped and cropped away at the job manual for next summer’s crop of state park guides. They tickled my toes, drifting to the floor, attracted by my sweat and the scent of roses. I walked like a sworn Jain monk across my sea-green kitchen tiles, placing every toe gently to avoid crushing living wings. Tiger lilies seeded in my wake, pushing uselessly at the solid floors.

I had brushed my teeth with Alice’s homemade mint toothpaste and tucked into sheets scented with her lavender before I remembered my hiking boots, still at Idaho, abandoned for the tingle of her hands upon my skin.

She woke me late morning from butterfly dreams, with the sun coming hard through the window. “Lisbet?” the leaves said, sawing one on the other like cricket legs. They smelled rich: sunlight on soft, hot veins, life churning and spreading into the summer skies. The smell of Alice’s skin, I thought, and shivered.

“Oh gods, Lizzie—”

A branch snapped. I opened an eye.

There were flowers in my mattress, curling around the springs. Ivy had strangled my alarm clock sometime before eight-forty-five a.m., and all around me, opening, were roses, roses.

And above them Alice, hands twisting in each other like drowning worms.

“G’morning,” I told her, and her hands stilled.

“I’ll fix the door,” she blurted, and reached out for the woody tangle around the nightstand. Ivy curled around her finger. She pulled her hand back.

“You broke in?” I mumbled, still half-asleep and pollen-drunk. There were no break-ins this far up, by the border. Everyone was neighbors here. I still locked my door come nightfall.

“You didn’t answer the door,” she said breathily, windy enough that I opened my other eye. Her mouth was twisted, not a wince, but pained like I’d never seen before. “It looked like a bier,” she said, and dropped into my wicker chair.

“Let—” I tugged with one leg “—let me make you some coffee.”

The rose-roots caressed my calf and ankle and held on fast.

“Oh,” I said, and my heart sped up to panicking.

“Shh,” Alice said, one hand flat on my forehead, cool and a little damp and smelling sharp like tea tree. “Breathe for me, that’s right, that’s good—”

She parted the roses with her pocketknife, murmuring an apology for every pruned-out life. Blossoms drifted down the comforter to the floor, parting and bruising on the hand-knotted rug that covered wood that stayed cold even in summertime. “Stay still for me,” she soothed. The knife blade touched my outer thigh.

I breathed.

The shade peeled off my legs like a long morning, inching down to full noon. When I felt the sun on my ankles Alice said, “Okay, up,” and thrust arms under my armpits, rolled and lifted and I was standing on the battered old rug. Underfoot was satin; underfoot were petals, ankle-high, delicate. Like walking on butterfly wings.