Chapter 9: The Good Witch

I am the wickedy witch

I am the trickety witch — boo!

My spells are fierce and strong

My magic never wrong — ooh!

— Johnny Gruelle

Rev. C. Blossom Alcatraz stood at the center of a hill. The month was now May. A wood ringed the hill. The sun was setting. The trunks of the pine trees radiated back the day’s light in a rosy glow from their big velvety scales. Trunks of dogwood and red bud, now past blooming and well-leafed out, glowed with a dimmer light. Under the canopy shadows were gathering. Leaves shaded down from green to gray and violet. Rev. Bea turned in a circle, dragging a long staff along the short grass. Where its tip passed, the ground glowed silver for a minute and then faded. Cats gathered from the edge of the wood to watch. None crossed into the silver circle. Stars prickled out and swung low and bright. The air smelled like pines, honeysuckle. A wetness to it. Cooling, it seemed to touch Rev. Bea’s cheeks. Her features were almost indistinguishable in the starlight, but, close enough, you might have seen her profile curving witchlike on itself, big nose to big chin. She murmured to herself in a singsong voice.

What is she casting?

It’s an exchange.

Her mind is opaque, yes, and I can only see her from a distance. She’s a silhouette in the twilight, surrounded by other, moving shapes — cats. Or she’s a shadow on a distant hill. She’s beside me, sweeping the floor. She’s riding a bicycle, candy-striped stockings flashing under her flapping black skirts. She’s stepping over an old spool of chicken wire on a little rock ledge a few feet above the bottom of a mucky ravine. She calls to see if anyone’s in the cardboard shanty perched on the ledge beyond the spindly birch trees.

“Anyone heah?”

A man’s blond, bearded head pokes out. Curls, deep creases, ground-in dirt. Green eyes, so green. “What you want, sister?”
She says in her shy lilt: “I’m just seeing if anyone might be hungry down here.”

He is, he is.

I know what she does, but why? She’s alone. Who does she talk to? She doesn’t share her secrets with her strays, the homeless kittens, the girl called Gospel she rescued in the back parking lot, the men and women in the cardboard and canvass and chicken wire shanties. Nor with me. Is she not a minister, perhaps, but a witch?

A preacher, certainly, would not believe in exchange. Jesus paid all, right?

Please, Rev. Bea mutters. Let it be me. Put me between them. Between the light and the shadow. Between the hand lifted and the blow that falls. The thought to strike and the lifted hand. This body between —

Not much of a body to offer, she thinks. Lumpy, not graceful, not young.
She loses track. The spell goes unbound on its way. Rev. Bea flops down on top of the hill in the starry dark. A bat skitters behind her. She wraps her knees in her arms.