The car engine grew louder. Out of the corner of his eye, Michael
could see the glimmer of headlights. Finally, they grew very bright,
illuminating the ground beneath him like a moonscape, and the
engine stopped.
Michael heard a strangled moan then — dimly, he realized it
was his own, carried through the tube that began in his mouth and
ended a few feet away.
There was another tube, he saw — sticking out of the ground, just
a few feet in front of him. If he listened, he was sure he could hear
the faint noise of breathing coming from it.
The car doors opened and closed, and Michael heard voices:
“Mother,” said one — sounding very much like Uncle Evan. “Are
we too late?”
“You
are
late,” said Grandmother, grunting as she continued to
work at Michael’s back, “but I am managing.”
“Well now you can take a rest,” said a woman — Aunt Nancy? “We
can take over from here.”
“Very well.” Grandmother let go of Michael, and he tried to
struggle. But he was at an odd angle — bent forward about forty-five
degrees. He could thrash his shoulders, wave his head around, but
that was as much as he could hope for.
Soon, he felt more hands on him. Together, they pushed down
harder than Grandmother could — so very soon he was nearly
upright, waist-deep in the ground. His breath whistled through the
tubing, cut by sobs.
He could see the other car now. It was a big American sedan, a
Lincoln maybe, and as he watched the back door opened, and a third
person got out.
It was Suzanne.
He tried to spit out the tube, so he could speak with her,
plead
with
her — but as quick as he did, Uncle Evan pushed the tube back in.
Suzanne’s feet crunched on the debris as she walked over to him.
He couldn’t see her face well — as she approached, she became not
much more than a slender silhouette in the Lincoln’s headlights.
“Do I have to do this?” Her voice was quavering as she bent to
her knees, put her hands on Michael’s shoulders. Michael thought
he could see the glint of moisture on her cheeks — and was absurdly
touched by it.
“It is the only way, dear,” said Grandmother. “Don’t worry — he’ll
be fine. The Earth looks after its own.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I thought we could work it out.”
Suzanne pushed down on Michael’s shoulders, and he felt himself
sinking further — the Earth tickled his collarbone, enveloped his
throat and touched his chin. Suzanne had moved her hands to the
crown of his skull, and now she pushed down on that. Desperate,
Michael spat out the tube.
“Suzanne! Wait! Maybe we can work it out!” he gasped, as the
ground came over the cleft in his chin, pressed against his lower lip.
“Help me up!”
Suzanne took her hands from his head at that.
“No,” she said — although her voice was uncertain. She reached
down, picked up the tube, and jammed it into his mouth. “Your
Grandmother explained what happens when I help you up.” And
then her tone changed, and it sounded very certain indeed. “I can’t
let you use me like that.”
Then she pushed once more, and Michael was into the ground
past his nose. He sucked cold, stale air through the tube. All he could
see now was Suzanne’s boots, her blue-jeaned knees, and the inch or
so of space between them and the flattened ground.
“That’s enough, dear,” said Grandmother, her voice sounding far
away. “The Earth can do the rest.”
Suzanne’s hands lifted from Michael’s head, and he watched as
her feet, her knees lifted further from the ground. He heard laughter
from above — liberated, unbound from the Earth — and then that
same Earth came up to fill his ears. The only sound was the beating
of his heart.
The beating of his own heart, and faintly, the beating of one
other.
“Grandfather,” he said, but the words were mangled through his
tube and must have sounded like a bleat to anyone who lingered
above. His tears made little pools on the ground in front of him.
Although it was cold and hard that night, tightly packed in its own
formidable grip, the Earth swallowed them greedily.
Swamp witch rode her dragonfly into town Saturday night, meaning
to see old Albert Farmer one more time. Albert ran the local smoke
and book, drove a gleaming red sports car from Italy, and smiled a
smile to run an iceberg wet. Many suspected he might be the Devil’s
kin and swamp witch allowed as that may have been so; yet whether
he be Devil or Saint, swamp witch knew Albert Farmer to be the
kindest man in the whole of Okehole County. Hadn’t he let her beat
him at checkers that time? Didn’t he smile just right? Oh yes, swamp
witch figured she’d like to keep old Albert Farmer awhile and see
him this night.
That in the end she would succeed at one and fail at the other was
a matter of no small upset to swamp witch; for among the burdens
they carry, swamp witches are cursed with foresight, and this one
could see endings clearer than anything else. Not that it ever did her
much good; swamp witch could no more look long at an ending than
she’d spare the blazing sun more than a glance.
As for the end of this night, she glanced on it not even an instant.
For romance was nothing but scut work if you knew already the
beginning, the end and all the points between. The smile on her lips
was genuine as she steered past the bullfrogs, through the rushes
and high over the swamp road toward the glow of the town.
By the time she was on the town’s outskirts, walking on her
own two feet with the tiny reins of her dragonfly pinched between
thumb and forefinger, the swamp witch had a harder time keeping
her mood high. Her feet were on the ground, her senses chained and
she could not ignore the wailing of a woman beset.
It came from the house which sat nearest the swamp — the Farley
house — and the wailing was the work of Linda Farley, the eldest
daughter who swamp witch knew was having man trouble of her own.
She had mixed feelings about Linda Farley, but for all those
feelings, swamp witch could not just walk by and she knew it. There
was that thing she had done with her checkers winnings. It had
made things right and made things wrong, and in the end made
swamp witch responsible.
“One night in a week,” swamp witch grumbled as she stepped
around the swing-set and onto the back stoop. “Just Saturday. That’s
all I asked for.”
Linda Farley was a girl of twenty-one. Thick-armed and -legged, but
still beautiful by the standards of the town, she had been ill-treated
by no less than three of its sons: lanky Jack Irving; foul-mouthed
Harry Oates; Tommy Balchy, the beautiful Reverend’s son, who
wrangled corner snakes for his Papa and bragged to everyone that
he’d seen Jesus in a rattler’s spittle. Swamp witch was sure it would
be one of those three causing the commotion. But when she came
in, touched poor Linda’s shoulder where it slumped on the kitchen
table, and followed her pointing finger to the sitting room, she saw
it was none of those fellows.
Sitting on her Papa’s easy chair was a man swamp witch had
never seen before. Wearing a lemon-coloured suit with a vest black
as night rain, he was skinny as sticks and looked just past the middle
of his life. He held a teacup and saucer in his hands, and looked up at
swamp witch with the sadness of the ages in his eye.
“Stay put,” said swamp witch to her dragonfly, letting go of its
reins. The dragonfly flew up and perched on an arm of the Farleys’
flea-market chandelier. “Who is this one?”
The man licked thin lips.
“He came this afternoon,” said Linda, sitting up and sniffling.
“Came from outside. He says awful things.” She held her head in her
hands. “Oh woe!”
“
Awful
things.” Swamp witch stepped over to the tea-drinking
man. “Outside. What’s his name?”
The tea-drinking man raised his cup to his mouth. He shook his
head.
“He-he won’t say.”
Swamp witch nodded slowly. “You won’t say,” she said to the tea-drinking man and he shrugged. Swamp witch scowled. People who
knew enough to keep their names secret were trouble in swamp
witch’s experience.
The tea-drinking man set his beverage down on the arm of the
chair and began to speak.
“What if you’d left ’em?” he said. “Left ’em to themselves?”
Swamp witch glared. The tea-drinker paid her no mind, just
continued:
“Why, think what they’d have done! Made up with the Russians!
The Chinese! Built rockets and climbed with them to the top of the
sky, and sat there a moment in spinning wheels with sandwiches
floating in front of their noses and their dreams all filled up. Sat
there and thought, about what they’d done, what they might do, and
looked far away. Then got off their duffs and built bigger rockets,
and flew ’em to the moon, and to Mars. Where’d they be?”
The tea-drinking man was breathing hard now. He looked at her
like a crazy man, eyes wet. “What if they’d been left on their own?”
And then he went silent and watched.
The swamp witch took a breath, felt it hitch in her chest. Then
she let it out again, in a low cough.
“You’re infectious,” she said.
“What?” said Linda from behind him.
“Infectious. The dream sickness,” she said. “You look at the past
and start to think maybe that could be better than now. You can’t
move, it’s so bad — can’t even think.”
The tea-drinking man shrugged. “I been around, madame.”
“
Around
,” said swamp witch. “Surely not around here. This place
is mine. There’s no sickness, no dreaming sadness. These folks are
happy as they are. So I’ll say it: you’re quarantined from this town.”
She glanced back at Linda, who looked back at her miserably, awash
in inconsolable regret.
“That’s how it is.”
Swamp witch glared once more at the tea-drinking man.
The tea-drinking man smiled sadly.
“I am — ”
“ — sorry,” finished swamp witch. “I know.”
And then swamp witch raised up her arms, cast a wink up to her
dragonfly, and set a hex upon the tea-drinking man. “
Begone
,” she
said.
He stood up. Set his saucer and cup down. Looked a little sadder,
if that were possible.
“I was just leaving.”
And with that, he stepped out the door, through the yard, over
the road and into the mist of the swampland.
“Stay away from my hutch, mind you,” swamp witch hollered
after his diminishing shade. “I mean it!” And she thought she saw
him shrug a bit before the wisps of mist engulfed him and took him,
poor dream-sick man that he was, away from the town that swamp
witch loved so.
Swamp witch left shortly after that, and she didn’t feel bad about it
neither. If she’d been a better person, maybe she’d have sat with the
girl until she’d calmed down. Maybe cast another little hex to help
her through it. But swamp witch couldn’t help thinking that one of
the things poor old Linda was regretting was her own complicity in
the bunch that’d driven swamp witch from her home those years
ago and into the mud of the Okehole Wetlands for good.
Let her stew a bit, an unkind part of swamp witch thought as she
left the girl alone in her kitchen.
And even if swamp witch wasn’t feeling mean, she felt she had
an excuse: after having spent a moment with the tea-drinking man,
swamp witch couldn’t be sure what regret was real and what was
just symptomatic. So she called down dragonfly to her shoulder and
headed off to town. That’s what Saturday was for, after all.
It was very bad, worse than she’d thought. This tea-drinking man
hadn’t, as swamp witch first assumed, just started his visit to town
setting in Linda’s Poppa’s easy chair. That was probably his last stop
on the way through, spreading his dreaming sickness all over the
town. Wandering here or there, giving a little sneeze or a cough
as he passed by a fellow fixing his garage door or another loading
groceries into his truck, or worst of all, a woman by herself, smoking
a cigarette and staring at a cloud overhead wondering where the
years had gone. He would leave behind him a wake of furrowed
brows and teary eyes and fresh fault lines in healed-up hearts.
And those were the ones he’d passed. The others — the ones he
spent a moment with, said hello to or spoke of this or that —
— there would only be one word for those:
Inconsolable
.
Swamp witch was set to figuring now that the tea-drinking man
wasn’t just a carrier of the bug, like she’d first thought. He was guilty
as sin. He was a caster.
And swamp witch was starting to think that he might not be
alone. He might not, he might not . . .
She closed her eyes and took a breath.
When she opened her eyes, swamp witch headed across the
downtown with more care. Her dragonfly hid in the curl of her hair
and she kept underneath awnings and away from street lamps,
and as she did, dragonfly asked her questions with the buzz of its
wings.
— What does tomorrow bring? he asked.
Swamp witch opened her mouth to speak it:
sorrow
.
But she did not. She simply stopped.
— And the day after? wondered dragonfly.
— Who knows? whispered swamp witch. But she did know, and
she stopped, in the crook of two sidewalk cracks. All she could see
was her boy, whose name would be Horace, lying with the gossamer
yellow of new beard on his face and his eyes glazed and silvered in
the sheen of death. Her girl Ellen, old and bent, rattling in a hospital
bed. These were not tomorrow — nor the day after either. But they
were bad days ahead — days she’d rather not have happen.
— Dream sickness gotcha, said dragonfly. Only you regret what
comes, not what’s been.
— You are wise, said swamp witch, her voice shaking. She tried
to think of a hex to drive it off, but the ones she knew were all for
others.