Page 44 of The Witch’s Orchard

THIRTY-SIX

T HE DOOR TO SUSAN’S cabin is unlocked, and I throw myself inside.

“Susan?” I call. But there’s no answer. “Susan?”

“Shit.”

“Susan!” I shout. But she isn’t here. The house is empty.

I go to her sink and find a clean cloth, press it to my side.

“Shit,” I breathe. I look around the house. Does she have a landline? She must, I think. The shots have stopped, but it doesn’t mean the shooter isn’t just following me, waiting until I step outside to try again.

My breath comes in hot, rasping gasps. I cough. And the pressure from coughing makes the blood from my side come faster. I hold the cloth tight.

And then there are steps on the porch.

I drop my phone, pick up my gun, and aim straight at the door.

“What the hell’s going on out here?” Susan shouts as she swings the door open. She’s wrapped up in her thick black sweater and wide-brimmed hat. Her black eyes stare at me in alarm. Her hands go up beside her, empty.

“Shooter,” I say. “Shooter on the mountainside. Where were you?”

“On my way up the mountain. We had a soft frost, so I was going to pick the rose hips and—good God, have you been shot?”

“Yes. I need to call the police. Don’t stand near the windows.”

“I’m not an idiot,” she says. “And your cell won’t work here. This whole mountain’s a dead zone. I keep a satellite phone for emergencies.”

She gets the phone down from a high shelf and calls 911, tells them what’s going on. Then she goes to a cabinet and opens a drawer, gets out a fresh washcloth, goes to her line of jars on the back shelf, takes one down, and opens it.

“Do you think they’re done?” she asks. “I haven’t heard anything since I was on my way back.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “They might just be waiting for me to go back up the hill toward the cabin but… if they see the cops, they’ll probably split.”

Susan uses a spoon to dab some yellow-green ointment onto the cloth and then, before I can react, she tugs up my sweatshirt and T-shirt.

There’s an angry line of red right above my hip bone.

She presses the cloth to it and then grabs my hand and mashes it onto the rag. The rag is damp and smells like weeds.

“Grazed,” she says. “It ain’t pretty, but I’d say you got lucky. Hold it there.”

I watch as Susan goes around the house closing her shutters.

She flicks on the lights and adds another hunk of wood to the woodstove in the middle of the house, then goes to the battered old couch and pulls an orange and burgundy afghan from it.

She comes back to me and wraps it around my shoulders.

“You’re in shock,” she says.

“No,” I say. “No, I’m not. I’ve… I’ve been under fire before and this isn’t—”

But I can barely get the words out. It’s as if I’m hypothermic. My teeth chatter. I shiver. The blanket begins to fall, and Susan squeezes it tight again. She pulls a pin from her scarf and sticks it through the afghan, and now it holds as tight as she does.

“I’ve been shot at—” I say as much to myself as her. A reminder of who I am. What I can do. What I can recover from.

“Don’t matter,” she says, rubbing her rough palms over my shoulders. “Don’t matter. You burn yourself on the stove, you’re always wary of that stove. Days or weeks or months pass. You’ll never forget the stove—the pain it caused, the scar it left.”

She leaves me and puts a kettle on and picks a mortar and pestle up from the counter and brings it back. She pulls sprigs of dried things out of different jars and then sits at the table in front of me and begins grinding.

“You’ve got a fever,” she says. “Did you know you’re sick?”

“I was sort of trying to ignore it,” I say, my voice raspy.

“Running yourself ragged, I’d say.”

I cough. It’s an ugly, wet sound.

“I told you to take better care of yourself. But no. You ran off and blew up a meth lab instead. You go scampering around in the fog in the most ungodly hours with no socks on. You don’t take care of yourself, Miss Gore. It’s almost like you don’t care what happens to you.”

I cough some more. Susan pours the crushed herbs into a ceramic mug.

“Did you get a look at them?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“Sounded like a rifle,” she says.

The kettle whistles. She gets up and pours a stream of steaming water into the mug.

A green, herby smell rises in a cloud. She pulls a jar of honey, the comb within, down from another shelf and sets it on the table, dips in a big spoon.

She adds it to the tea, stirs for a while, sets it in front of me.

“What—”

“Just drink it,” she says. “Just drink it and feel better.”

I’m too tired to argue. The tea tastes like summer. Like a meadow and like sunshine and flowers.

“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 be her daughters 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 a bluebird—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.

“Yes,” Susan says. “Because a mother’s grief is everlasting. That is the sound the crows scream at night. They learned it from her. It is the witch woman’s cries. Her mistakes made manifest.”

“My question,” I say, drinking the last of the tea and feeling more like myself, “is what happened to the beggar woman who traded her daughters for food?”

Susan smiles. And then there’s a knock at the door.

“Miss Gore? You in there? It’s Sheriff Jacobs.”

Susan opens up and he steps inside, takes his hat off, looks around.

“We’re clearing the hillside now,” he says. His cheeks are red from the cold air and exertion and, probably, the constant low-level aggravation he feels. “When you’re ready, I’ll walk you back to the Andrewses’ place.”

I look up at him and smile blithely.

“My hero.”

He rolls his eyes.