Wood Witch

The village tells stories about me, some more true than others, from the time babes are young, wriggling, still wet from the womb, til they’re grown and their tongues are fleshed enough to tell lies and their breasts wide enough to hold secrets.

The precipice between youth and adulthood. That’s when most come to me.

Some are dared. I dare you to seek out the Wood Witch. I dare you to sit at her hearth. I dare you to spit on her and see if she melts.

Some want wishes fulfilled. I want my parents to love me as if I were a son. I want my husband to love me more than he craves the milkmaid. I want her death to look like an accident. Most I don’t grant. I don’t have to. It’s enough for them to be heard. To think it’s not their will but my intent, freely given. Compelled by magic.

And some stumble upon me through sheer dumb luck, though it’s rare. I’m missing a sheep, did it come this way?

They expect an old hag with a bulbous nose and a hunched back, so often, that’s who I am. But I hold no given shape. I gave it up long ago along with everything else that came before what they made me: Wood Witch.

They expect tricks. That I might throw them into my cauldron (that I do have, cast iron and black) and turn them into a stew no matter how many times I explain that I don’t eat meat, that I request only their time, their company, as little or much as they are willing to give.

It’s lonely business being the town horror.

It’s often brief. There are few that I like. Even fewer I consider keeping on some pretense of sleuthing away their mortal coil, but I always stop short—remember the cat I turned out because it wouldn’t stop trying to usurp my sun-soaked seat near the window all hours of the day every time that I stood up and killing my birds out in the garden—sigh, flick my wrist (it’s not necessary, but I’ve found it makes them feel like something profound is happening) and send them on their way.

They won’t remember this place or how to return. They won’t remember me. It’s my curse for being a creature apart.

Until one remembers. Until one returns.

Jackdaw Gorge. His name sticks crooked in my maw when I fling open my door one crisp, autumnal day and find him milling about in the pumpkin patch. He’s older. Eight years older and nine moons to be precise, though he was old already when he came to me the first time. I never forget a name. I never forget a face. (The curse.)

He doesn’t know this. “I don’t know if you remember me.”

“I do.”

He says anyway: “Jackdaw Gorge. You granted a wish of mine once before.”

My wife and I want a child.

“I remember. How is the child?” I ask though I can already guess by the pained look on his wizened face and the way he stares at the ground, toeing a rotten gourd with his boot.

“Dead.”

I make a noise in my throat. “And your wife?”

“Also dead. Passed in childbirth.”

“Ah. I’m sorry to hear.” I startle myself to find it true.

Memories fogged by the years rise in my mind’s eye unbidden of a child I had hoped and prayed and bled for only for him to be taken away.

I suppress a shiver and invite him inside.

“Cup of a tea?” I ask, already reaching for the kettle.

Nursing the cup, he sits down in a worn armchair near the hearth. I sit opposite him and wait and wait for him to speak, guilty that I’m grateful for the company no matter what horrid means by which it comes. Horrid, I’m certain are the circumstances as I watch his face, crumpled like a worn scab.

“He was murdered. My son.”

There are moments when words will do no justice. I say nothing.

He startles like he’s just realized where he is, adjusts in his seat, and moves to set the cup, tea untouched, on the floor. Then he cradles his head in his hands and chokes, words thick with tears: “I’m sorry.” I sit and I watch and finally he tells me: “He was a bit dim, my son, but I loved him dearly, dearly. But the other kids, they didn’t like to play with him. So when they—” he pauses, wipes his tear on his buffalo-checked coat, “they came by the house and asked could they play with Emmett, I was wary, you know, but he, he was excited and what could I say?”

He looks at my imploringly, genuinely searching for an answer, I realize. I say nothing.

Jackdaw continues quietly to himself: What can a parent say? Then louder, to me: “So I let him go,” and his voice cracks on go.

He sits up, visibly uncomfortable, adjusts his coat and runs a hand through his white, thinning hair. “Dinnertime came around and he hadn’t come back. I told them not too far into the woods.” Here, his eyes flick to mine and away, the double meaning, his shame that he should admit to me that I was the one he’d feared, laid bare on his face. “I wanted them to stay near. But you know kids.”

I do.

“They don’t listen.”

They don’t.

“So I took a lantern. The sun was setting by then, and I, I called and I called. There was mud from last night’s rain and I could see their footprints. I followed them into the woods and I—I”

It sticks in his throat and the anticipation is enough to gut me raw. I want it out of him and in the open air between us as my heart beats with a distant ache of an old memory of another child. I flick my finger and he blurts through hacking sobs: “They killed him. With rocks. They beat him. Smashed his skull in. Broke his body.” His hands, palms up, sprawled open in his lap, his eyes go distant with the memory.

The truth of it settles in my chest like a stone.

I tell him what I will do. He has no questions. No demands. No remorseful hesitancy. He picks up his tea, throws it back cold and leaves. I watch him disappear into the trees from the front window. He does not look back.

Most wishes I don’t grant. Not explicitly.

A vision of a boy from another time with a laugh like windchimes and hair the color of a sunburst fills my mind.

I spend the afternoon weaving dolls. A wooden splinter from my floorboards nestled in each of their straw guts, a thimble-sized tuft of cotton from the bolls in my yard I keep alive with a bit of magic throughout the colder months hold the splinters in place. I wait for sunset, then put on my cloak and pull the hood low. It’s been years since I’ve returned to town and I wonder if I will remember the way. There are new streets. Paved now, not dirt. There are more houses. More taverns. More lights in windows as mothers kiss their children goodnight. In the end, it’s easy; I remember the way. Jackdaw Gorge gave me their family names, some of which I remember, and the old magic guides me straight to their homes. I plant five dolls below five bedroom windows of five condemned children.

I do not peer in. I do not peek at the faces that will soon be gone.

I think of the boy who was once mine when things like love and flesh contained me. When my eyes were wide and the world was bright with possibility before I fell for a married man who rathered decry I’d ensnared him with wayward witchcraft than admit he’d craved me no matter the cost, because it wasn’t his cost to bear, not really, but ours: his mistress and his bastard. A man of prominence brought low by a salacious woman at a time that salacious women were being burned at the stake. It was an easy thing for them to put my boy in a bag laden with rocks thrown into the river. It was slightly harder for them to drag me kicking and screaming to the pyre.

And I’d survived, because in that moment with the fire on my soles, I’d prayed to any gods who would listen, and here I was. A thing apart that kids wade through the woods on dares to spit at. Until Jackdaw Gorge who had come and chosen to pray to me.

Maybe. Just maybe, this is what I was made for.

It’s the thought that sustains me as I sit in my chair back at the hearth, waiting, watching the sunrise. It’s then that I walk back outside, and I can hear their screams. The parents who are walking into bedrooms to wake their children are instead discovering saplings in the shape of children, young trees taking root right there atop their beds, roots snapping through floorboards to take root in the soil where they will remain until their trunks are cut and their limbs are used for firewood.

A lesson in generational sin.