The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense) Read online

  A sudden rustling of leaves brought an immediate attention to the surrounding environment. Startled, I watched as an owl, perhaps the exact one from two nights before, soared down from a nearby branch and sailed along the dappled path straight ahead. I stepped along the sloping trail more mindfully, the night predator in the lead until the clearing below was reached. I then observed the creature circle upward above the forest trees and disappear into the night.

  I refused to entertain any interpretation of the owl's curious behavior and returned to the communal festivities, which in the late hour had moderated to a more temperate pace. I joined a table set inside the church with Clara and her doll, now attired in an absurd pajama jumpsuit, complete with a small stuffed bear tucked under the hard plastic arm. Clem announced his infant son’s return to robust health and Adelaide Pennock protested her husband's careless inebriation.

  I had made my definitive choice of perception modification a long time ago, and declined several invitations to imbibe from the jug passed from several of the men. I was met with minor jeering, but generally shrugs of bleary-eyed cheer.

  Clem at last roused a dozy Merilee, and they each bid their good nights amid the well wishers of continued health for their child.

  "You take care now, Dr. Broughton," Clem said, shaking my hand with a firm grip. I imagined a glint of dark foreboding in his eyes, but dismissed it as an illusion of the late hour. Clara yawned and complained to Mrs. Pennock that the time for Molly Lynn's bed was long overdue; however, she had wanted one last view of the festivities and would Mrs. Pennock mind so very much walking them home?

  A rather handsome young man, sporting a nostalgic slicked back haircut and pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt, sat down lazily across the table. He chewed on a toothpick, with languid preoccupation, as he concentrated on Clara walking out the door in arm with Adelaide.

  "Crazy, that one" he remarked. He asked if I were the Dr. Broughton he had heard tell about and when I replied I was, he swooped an arm across the table easily and shook my hand.

  "Jesse Lee Isaak," he introduced. He sat back and scanned the dance floor. "You from Boston, then?" I replied that, indeed, I was and he told me he had been as far as Charleston, but really wanted to try Richmond, maybe even live there and earn better money. I estimated him to be in his late twenties, at best, and restless.

  "The wife won't have it, though," he lamented. "Says Richmond ain't no place to raise the boys. Got family here in Tennessee, but sometimes a man just wants to go someplace different, know what I mean?"

  He remained intent on the slow dancers across the floor.

  "I'd like to get off the mountain," he went on. "Maybe even move into town, where I work at the paper mill weekdays. The woman she's stubborn. Says we can live off the mountain, if it comes to it, but that's Porringer talk. A man wants a better life, ya know? Jemmy gets sick, sometimes, has the asthma. No medical here, 'cept Possum. In town, they got real doctors. Wife won't hear of that neither. Says Possum knows more than those doctors down hillside."

  "I take it you're unsure," I suggested carefully.

  "Maybe she does," he said, twisting the toothpick between his teeth, "and maybe she don't. Old Boone, up there with Westmore, still blind as a bat. Hell, she can't help Coobie none. Wife won't hear nothin’ else, though. Keeps feedin' the boy liver." He shrugged. "She's all right, I s'pose, but a man gets to wonderin', ya know? Jemmy gets real sick with the asthma and the mountain witch comes t'save him, but it gets a mind to wonderin'"

  Jesse Lee turned and leaned his elbows on the table.

  "Them witches been up here since before the State's War. How come they know more than them doctors in town know? And Possum, she's all white like that, all freaky lookin'. Her mother weren't though. A real beauty, some say. That's why she has that pretty face, but her granny was just the same. All white like that. It's in the blood. Old folks say it's always been that way. One dead white, one regular.

  He sat back with a contemplative ease. "Well, she's done all right by Jemmy, I can't fault her that way. Still, a man wants to move about, show his son a TV set once in awhile; have lights in every room and hot running water."

  "I wouldn't give up on it," I offered. "Your wife might change her mind one day."

  "Yeah, well, I ain't holdin' my breath, know what I mean?" he said. "Folks around here don't take it so well, you start talkin' different than you was raised." He surveyed the crowd once more and then turned to me curiously. "Whatcha doin' here anyway, Doc? Folks say you're lookin' for some medicine or somethin'. You sick?"

  I smiled with a polite amusement. Jesse Lee was, indeed, a likable man.

  "My grandfather recovered from an injury, through the use of a medicinal plant, in this area some years ago," I told him. "I hope to, perhaps, confirm his story."

  "So, bein’ you're a doctor, " said Jesse Lee, "do you work in one of those big city hospitals?"

  "No, no" I replied, shaking my head. "My work is in research."

  “Is that like medicine?" he inquired.

  "Plant medicine," I smiled, absently toying with an empty punch glass and setting it upside down on the tabletop.

  He leaned his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands. "Well, Possum knows about all that, I suppose, bein' she has the healer ways. Maybe she knows about your granddaddy, too, or least what cured him.”

  "I am hoping she might," I said. I glanced through the dwindling crowd and spotted Aaron Westmore contemplating the conversation between Jemmy's father and I from across the room. I nodded in acknowledgment. He raised his jar of home brew in silent toast and drank the liquor thoughtfully.

  "Jesse Lee, will you take Jemmy please," pleaded the young man’s rather sallow and rounded wife, struggling with a sleeping Jemmy sliding from her arm, while steadying a hold on Coobie's shirt collar.

  Jesse Lee stood up with a sluggish tolerance and tossed Jemmy adroitly across his shoulder. "Well, Doc, good talkin' t'ya," he said, grasping my hand once more. "This here's the wife, Jilly."

  The voluptuous Jilly nodded pleasantly, if not wearily, and exited the shrinking evening crowd alongside her sleepy children and remarkably resigned husband. ***

  Later into the evening, I turned inexplicably at my doorstep and looked straight into the inquiring eyes of the somber opossum crouched on a tree branch.

  Ah, my ghostly familiar.

  I closed the door, shutting out the spectral creature and ingested four sedatives. As I drank the warm water from the jug, I pondered the pale of the ripening moon through the dusty glass of the window, and thought of Ana and the riddle of her prismatic changes in mood. I reflected over the ambiguous regard in which Jesse Lee held this mountain witch, but it was old Fitch's condemnation that possessed my mind.

  I scribbled one word in my notebook and the word was Evangeline.

  ~*~

  Chapter VIII

  I spent the following three days in what I imagined to be an unspoken truce with Ana Lagori, gathering bloodroot from the damp bogs near the creek and piling moss in my arms, which she lifted in pallets from rotting logs on the hillside. I marvelled when she charmed the honeycomb from the bees, and cut the early thistle and greening nettle without a slip in rhythm. She shared hidden places where the ginseng waited seven years for harvest, and inspected the first clusters of herbs that would be harvested come late summer and early autumn: the mullein, the wild bergamot, the second year burdock.

  She evaded discussion beyond her purpose, but one morning while gathering spring strawberries, I was compelled to delve more deeply:

  “What is it with this Reverend Fitch?”

  “Fool,” she replied tersely.

  “What happened with Clem and Merilee’s child?”

  “Cured.”

  “Do you know anything about the snake incident in 1935?" I asked. "Any story which may have been handed down regarding a hiker bit by a venomous snake?”

  "Your grandfather."

  "Yes."

>   “Spared down by the Cutler, so you say.”

  “Do you have any knowledge about a local antidote which may have actually spared him?"

  “Knowledge is as knowledge does.”

  “I see," I replied. "I’ll put it this way, then: Do you have any knowledge of a plant known as blue poke?”

  “Do you?”

  “Not specifically, no.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “It seems I have forgotten my knife, Ethan Broughton," Ana stated. "I need some lichen cut from that old Ash over there.”

  I bloodied my index finger with my own penknife while scraping her lichen from the bark, and she pressed her lips against the oozing cut.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” I remarked, while she salved the minor injury with the juice of a wild strawberry and deftly utilized a sticky spider’s web as a bandage.

  “I told you once before: you forget to understand the question in seeking your answer.”

  “By this you mean what…exactly?”

  “How can a man ask a question by day when he is fearful of the night?”

  “And you think I am fearful of the night?”

  “We are not through picking berries.”

  And when the evenings came, we parted at the oaks bordering her homestead. I returned, without answers, to the quiet of the rented cabin, notebooks, games of chess with Aaron Westmore and an increasing number of tranquilizers each night.

  On a morning of steady precipitation, I was awakened from a particularly buried sleep by the sound of scratching against the windowpane next to my bed.

  Reverend Fitch stood sullenly on the other side of the glass, the rim of his hat drooping like a tattered awning beneath the torrent of rainwater.

  A sense of morbid curiosity compelled a motivation to actually open the window and face the grizzly parson, who gripped the lapel of his drenched coat with quaking hands. The old black Labrador sat wet and shivering at his booted feet.

  “Yes?” I inquired bleakly. “What is it?”

  “I know ‘bout the plant what grows yonder in those woods,” said Fitch. “I can take you there.”

  Suspicious, I asked as to which plant he referred.

  “Blue poke,” he returned plainly. He nodded toward the forested hillside. “Up there. I know where it grows.”

  I felt a rush of anticipation, despite the chemical fog swirling in my head. “Go to the front,” I instructed. I dressed sluggishly and opened the door to the waiting Fitch and his dog. “Come in. Bring the dog, too. It’s all right. Come in.” I pulled out a chair from the table. Fitch sat down and I reached for the khaki army surplus jacket carelessly slung over the opposite chair. “I need to get some coffee. Can I bring you some?”

  “If it’d be no trouble,” he said, “that’d be right Christian.”

  I told him to dry off and I’d return in ten minutes. I purchased a half a dozen plain doughnuts, which I stuffed in a sack underneath my jacket, and two mugs of steaming coffee that Mrs. Pennock covered with aluminum foil. I found Fitch and his dog in the same position I had left them in. I split the bag of pastry between the three of us.

  “Right Christian of you, sir,” repeated Fitch, raising the mug in a toast of gratitude. He then warmed his hands over the humid vapor rising from the hot liquid.

  “Ok, now,” I said, pulling around a chair and straddling it from behind, “what do you have to tell me about the plant and why?”

  Fitch leaned closer and in a conspiratorial tone, said: “I know where it grows.”

  “And how do you know?” I asked.

  “I know,” he assured me. “I seen.”

  “How do you know it‘s the plant I’m interested in?” I questioned.

  “Blue poke,” said Fitch, “only grows in the hollow of dead oaks. I seen the witches gather it for years up there in the hills.”

  I remained skeptical. “What witches,” I stated rather plaintively. I thought about Jesse Lee Isaak’s description. At the time, I assessed it to be only a local term with no real meaning, and certainly not one he literally believed. Now, I wasn’t quite certain.

  “The same ones that’ve been livin’ up in these hills since before the State’s War,” he stated, as though I already ought to know. I thought deeper into Jesse Lee’s remarks. Things were not as they seemed, as I suspected many times since the beginning, and I did not wish to misjudge any obscurities rising to the surface now.

  Still guarded, I said: “So, you’ve seen these witches, as you call them, gather this blue poke from the dead oaks. How do you know it is, in fact, the blue poke and not some other plant?”

  “I know,” he stated soberly and held up his hand where I could clearly see a deep scar across the palm. “I cut this here on an ax blade.”

  I took his hand and examined the jagged mark. I guessed it to be several years old.

  “I seen the old granny right on down to the witch, Ana, take from the stumps, and from the dead roots below,” Fitch went on to say. “When I cut this here hand up in those woods, I ran to them hollow oaks and squeezed the flowers of the poke, and this purple blood comes out like a snot. I rubbed it on the cut, over and over, and the bleeding stops and gets all gummy. I stitched it up with a needle and fish wire.”

  I could clearly see he told the truth as he knew it. The wound had clearly been stitched with a primitive skill.

  “So, you’re saying the bleeding stopped long enough for you to stitch this without cauterizing it?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “And it stayed stopped. So, you want me to show you now?”

  I released his hand. “Why? Why do you want to show me? Aren’t you a bit concerned over what your witch might do?”

  “I ain’t afraid of no Evangeline,” he stated brusquely, taking a long, continuous gulp of his coffee. He then nodded his head toward the door. “I’ll show you where it grows.”

  I sat back. I had to think. Any possible agenda must be weighed. This was a man who threatened to spill my intestines on the dirt, but that he held some vendetta against Ana Lagori, there was little doubt.

  “I ain’t gonna kill you, if that’s your fear,” he said.

  Perhaps I was far too inquisitive and perhaps old Fitch would spill my guts for it, but I agreed to follow the deposed reverend into the forest and see for myself if the plant, this fabled blue poke, should actually exit.

  The rain tapered to a steady mist the deeper the old man and I hiked under the leafy, damp umbrella of thick forest. I judged a good mile or more had been passed before reaching a moist, foggy clearing. Fitch walked up to the brittle column of decaying bark at the center of the grassy expanse.

  He slapped the tall, hollowed out stump and gripped the dried, scarred surface.

  “This here’s one,” he declared.

  With a curious pressure of an almost ominous apprehension, I stepped closer and inspected the wide split in the dead wood Fitch stood beside. I parted a stringy, dank moss that curtained the interior cavern and discovered a cluster of exotic botanical, choked with striking cerulean florets, each resembling the bloom of the wild lady slipper.

  The plant appeared to absorb nutrients from the wet moss growing inside the decomposing trunk. The thick, twisting stem was sectioned and spongy, with an orchid-like leaf structure. At the rotting floor of the stump, the young plants grew in patches, the infant pods immature. On closer inspection, I could see how the stem climbed its way through the cavity of the tree’s remains, attaching itself to the wet moss draping the inside wall. An obvious shade dweller, the plant seemed parasitic in nature. I snapped off a piece of the slightly sweet scented bloom. Breaking a portion of stem, I found the juice contrastingly glandular in odor.

  With a nagging sense of trespass, I pulled a penknife from my pocket. I scraped the base of the vine, exposing a root attached to the decaying womb of the brittle, corrupted wood beneath the loose layer of moss.

  Fitch looked on expectantly as I squeezed the blue sack of
the flower, releasing a purplish adhesive over my fingertips.

  “That nectar sticks the wound together,” Fitch pointed excitedly. “The devil’s poke, sure as your born.”

  “Why devil?” I inquired with some distraction, examining the gummy substance closely. The odor emanating from the brief dissection was nauseating.

  “Only the witches know of it, that’s why,” explained Fitch. “Else, why don’t nobody else know of it?” He grimaced. “Stinks, don’t it.”

  “It’s nothing to do with any devil,” I replied incisively. “It’s just a plant...although a remarkable one.”

  The liquid had begun a transformation, adhering to the skin and forming a warm bonding matter.

  “No, sir,” Fitch argued vehemently, “it be the devil’s elixir. I followed them witches up here when the granny and mother was still alive. They collect it when the moon is full!”

  “Better to see, I imagine,” I noted offhand, slicing a thin sliver of flesh from my thumb. I pressed the liquid onto the cut.

  Fitch hovered closer. “Say, whatcha doin’ there, Yank?”

  The liquid adhered to the surface wound and clotted the blood flow, with only a minimal amount of stinging discomfort.

  “See?” said Fitch, bobbing his head like some child’s toy run amok. “What’d I tell ya? The devil’s poke!”

  I withdrew one of several small plastic bags, with snap enclosures, routinely kept in the inside pocket of my jacket.

  “Hardly,” I replied, “there’s a substance quite similar found in a South American tree. In Peru, actually.”

  “There is?” Fitch asked curiously.

  “Yes,” I said, placing the specimen carefully in the transparent bag and snapping it shut.

  “The devil, he do work in mysterious ways,” Fitch’s concluded, shaking his head.