A Matter of Coincidence

At eighty-two, it's probably a little late to be wondering if I'm a witch. I'd heard the whispers all my life, of course. But I knew I'd never purposefully poisoned anybody. There was that time the neighbor's power line snapped from the heavy ice, and I invited them over for a hot meal of potato soup and buttered biscuits. If the pompous and obnoxious husband spent the next three days violently ill while his wife remained perfectly fine, it was probably just a bit of gastroenteritis. While cleaning out the fridge, I'd stirred a bit of moldy cheese into his bowl, which made it more microbiology than potion or poison. I thought it possible that by aiding the exfoliation of his insides, he'd be slightly less pretentious on the outside. It hadn't hurt to try.

A woman with eight decades tucked beneath her serviceable elastic waistband can acquire an untidy little stack of these innocent coincidences and/or scientific anomalies. The local freckle-faced bully, back when he was a boy, frequently found his long-board flipped from beneath him on the sidewalk out front. It certainly wasn't from my whispered curse words as he passed. He just wasn't that good. And darned if those morning glory vines I clipped and strategically placed each morning on the cement didn't magically blend into the shadows with inconspicuous ease.

Dorothy had left her prize-winning quilt on display outside the fair barn at my encouragement. When it rained, it hadn't been a result of my jealousy. My arthritic knees were, and are, excellent forecasters. Usually, I'd have warned her. I'm sure of it. That day they'd just been mixed up with all the walking I'd done.

And if I always happen to know when somebody is lying, it's only due to my enhanced sense of smell and large Roman nose. I can sniff out stress-induced pheromones as easily as a bachelor's sour laundry. When the local preacher suddenly forgot his practiced sermon while railing against fornication and adultery, it wasn't due to my arched brow and derisive smile. It was the sweat at the back of his neck from his own guilty conscience.

My late husband had been a veterinarian, and the most gentle of men. Even so, I was never swayed to nurse the strays that found their way home in his care. Those were his responsibility, not mine. I never did have a predilection for puppies or kittens.

Bertrand never questioned or scolded me for leaving my morning glory clippings scattered about. He'd softly smile as he picked them up for me later in the afternoon, always waiting until school was out and the kids had gone home for the evening. He never questioned when I asked for anti-nausea medicine from his medical cabinet to take to our obnoxious neighbor. And he gently rubbed Ben-Gay on my knees whenever they acted up.

There was, however, a raven with a broken wing once that I pretended not to notice. I most definitely only snuck him extra worms and a few swept-up beetles, no more than a handful of times. Once, I left my hand mirror conveniently placed next to his cage. Everybody enjoys a bit of preening.

Occasionally I see a lone raven out my kitchen window, nestled in the crook of the tulip tree, I often wonder if it's the same one we nursed back to health many years back. He spends a good portion of each morning rooting through the old heap of discarded veterinary supplies Bertrand used to pile near the shed. I like to think it's him. It brings me comfort to think the raven and I both wear black and remember his kindness together.

A sudden, blinding ray of light struck my eyes, making them even rheumier than usual and snapping me out of my foolish musings. I wiped them with the dish towel and squinted through the window. There! There in the raven's beak was a small shard of glass from one of Bertrand's broken petri dishes. He gave a sharp, urgent "caw," dropped it back onto his trash pile, and flew to the end of the lane. There, he took a few hops, then looked back at me.

The raven's cacophony began in earnest when I stepped away from the window. Birds have no understanding what it means to rush an old woman out the door before she finds her cane. A broken hip at my age is a death sentence almost as assuredly as a broken wing is without doctoring. Unable to find my cane, I grabbed what I could, a broken broom handle I'd saved. One can always use a good stick. I then tied the silk Babushka head cloth tightly around my ears to ward off the October chill. Bertrand had found the scarf for me on our very last trip together, a memento from a beautiful little Slovakian village.

Out the door I went, as nimble as my stiff joints allowed. The raven's insistence did not shorten the rest of the lane, nor quicken my beleaguered pace up the grassy hill to the deserted tree line beyond. The broom handle and I made an enjoyable rhythm together: Tock-clack-step, Tock-clack-step. I'm wise enough to know that slow and steady gets me to the destination. No need to become an emergency room anecdote before one's time.

Twenty feet before I reached him at the top of the hill, the raven gave one quick head bob- a punctuation mark, if you will. I did my part, it seemed to say. The rest is up to you. Then he took flight - back to the tulip tree and his garbage pile of discarded trinkets below.

My nose smelt him before my eyes found him. Nastiness of character has its own pungent stench. Years before, when he'd just been the freckle-faced bully who ripped tails off the innocent live rodents he raised, and threw them in girls' hair, he'd smelled of young muskrat. Whether it stemmed from a total lack of hygiene, the mice themselves, or some chemical allomone-who's to say? But now, as a grown man with no excuse, there was the added sickly-sweet smell of watermelon vape. It matched the antics that turned a petty bully into a cataclysmic scourge.

I'd heard the rumors. It's my eyes that suffered, not my ears. I'd seen his wife's black eyes and heard her blame them on open cupboard doors. In the dead of summer, I'd seen her hide the marks of fingerprints beneath woolen turtlenecks. I'd seen the woman's poor young child trying to ride his old man's long-board to make him proud, only to be ridiculed by the bastard for having limp wrists.

My past attempts to trip him into a kinder person had obviously not been successful. If I were of a more philosophical nature, I might have taken the time to wonder if I'd just added more fuel to the fire. Fortunately, I always left that kind of deeper thinking to Bertrand. He never seemed to mind.

At the top of the hill I inhaled deeply. No matter how many downward dog yoga poses I did each week, or how slow I went, I still found my breath hard to catch. But that deep lungful of air was a costly mistake. The familiar watermelon vape could no longer mask the cloying sweetness and metallic tang of blood added to the cool October air. Had I turned around at that moment and ambled back to my cottage, I could have chalked the walk up to a nice bit of exercise with a touch of mystery added for enjoyment. What had that silly raven tried to lead me to? A carcass he'd been proud to find? Or more likely, what simple animal behavior had a lonely old woman imagined as conversation?

Instead, there he lay, pinned beneath a fallen oak. From bully, to brute, to a highly questionable outcome. His pride wasn't quite so puffed at the moment. In fact, from my vantage point he looked deflated everywhere except the head, where he still had the mental clarity to feel pain.

When the sound of my shuffle was as loud as his groans of pain, his eyes fluttered open and pleaded for me to get help. I think I've already made it abundantly clear that I no longer hurry. Not for a bird, and certainly not for him. Using my broom handle (a very useful stick) I poked around to find out just exactly where the damage lay.

“Here?" I asked, pressing the blunt end of the broom into his side. He let out a wet wheeze. "How about here? Does it hurt when I press hard?”

Knowledge is power, after all. It would be crucial to tell the 911 operator exactly where his injuries were most critical.

With my questions satisfied, I began the trek home. What had Bertrand told me once? Death from uncontrolled hemorrhage could take anywhere from two to thirty minutes. My pace down the hill would take at least twenty, but I could be home by then. I might even have time to put the kettle on and warm a bowl of soup before making the call; exercise always did make me hungry. Besides, Bertrand hadn't always been correct; surely one or two extra minutes wouldn't hurt. Afterward, by a snug fire in my rocker, maybe I'd be in a better state of mind to decide if I were truly a witch. Probably no more so than any of those poor Salem women. Though, to be fair, they'd probably be much quicker at punching in a simple three-digit number than an arthritic old woman.