Page 111 of The Witch's Orchard
“You were going to get rose hips?” I ask. The question comes unbidden,as if from the ether of my brain. I’m almost surprised to hear myself ask it.
“Yes,” she says.
“Deena told me that she visited you,” I say. “That she came to get her fortune told.”
“Yes,” she says. “Right after Harvey died.”
“What did she want?” I ask.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
She snorts and looks away from me and toward the windows.
“She was grieving,” Susan says. “She wanted help. A potion or some such. But I told her there is no shortcut through grief. There is only one road, and it is a long one. I offered to read her some cards. Make her some tea, that’s all.”
“Did it help?”
“In the end, we found we had more in common with gardening than anything else. That’s how I started picking the rose hips. Now hush up and drink the rest of your tea.”
I take a few more slow sips. It seems to warm me from the inside out.
I close my eyes and, for a few seconds or minutes, I fall asleep. When I wake, Susan is at the windows, peeking out the side of the shades. I watch her, the black cardigan puffy with the humidity of the cabin interior, her dark eyes keen and searching.
“Do you know the story of the Quartz Creek Witch?” I ask her, my voice bleary.
“Of course,” she says without looking at me.
“Will you tell it to me?”
“Will you drink another cup of tea?”
I nod.
“Okay.”
She sighs and pours more tea into my cup. I hadn’t even remembered putting it down. I watch as steam wafts off the surface, and I inhale the aroma and cough.
“There was a witch woman,” she says, sitting down in front of me again, watching me as I pick up the cup. “She lived within an orchard of apples that, as long as she tended them, would never rot. Always, they would grow bright and green, as long as she sang to the trees each morning. She loved her apples more than anything, but, as all women do, she grew old. Her voice began to turn and sour. She knew that she would have to teach another voice the song if her apples were to go on.”
I drink my tea and listen. The taste of grassy green meadows and tangy apples and sweet honey swirls on my tongue.
“As it happened, that winter was the coldest she had ever seen. All the land lay frozen under many feet of snow. Every day the folk of this valley prayed for sun, but only more and more snow fell. Nothing could grow. Nothing could survive. Except for the witch woman’s apples.”
Susan pauses and lets out a sigh. Her shoulders under the black scarf and sweater heave as if she might take flight. She settles, instead, into her chair. The wood creaks. She goes on.
“It was deep into this winter that a beggar woman came calling. She had nothing but two beautiful daughters. They were, all three of them, terrible hungry. The beggar woman pleaded with the witch woman to take her daughters and feed them. The witch woman said that she would, on the condition that they would beherdaughters from that day forward. They would belong to her and her alone and she would grow them as proud and bright and beautiful as she had grown her apple trees.”
I hold the mug close to my body, let its warmth sink into my skin and deeper, into my bones and the soft places, hidden away.
“The beggar woman agreed. She traded her daughters for all the apples she could carry. The witch woman raised the girls as her own, just as she promised. The girls grew bright and proud and beautiful. And that was its own curse. The girls did not sing to the apples. They were too curious about the outside world, too entranced by their own beauty, too taken with the wonders which beguile the young. The witch woman’s voice faltered and the apples began to sour and, in a last gasp of her magic, the witch turned both girls into songbirds—a robin and abluebird—so that they would be forced to sing each and every morning with the dawn.”
I realize, distantly, that I have closed my eyes while I listened. That I was picturing the green apples and the beautiful daughters and the orchard. It was only the witch woman I could not picture. Only her that I could not see or hear. I open my eyes and watch as Susan toys with a loose string on her sweater. The piece of gauze that was on her wrist is gone. In its place is a red line, still puffy, but healing.
“They were beautiful birds,” Susan says. “The most beautiful. But, one morning, they escaped their cage and flew away. The witch woman was devastated. She turned herself into a crow and flew after them. She cried for them, night after night, while her apples withered and died. And, to this very day, she cries for them still.”
“Still,” I repeat.
