Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  Aside from taciturn little boys, the only other person the witch saw early on Thursdays was a woman who combed the streets looking for things others had thrown away that she might drag home to sell at her weekend yard sales. “Looks like rain,” the woman said this morning.

  “Yes. Have much luck today?” Siena asked.

  “Some old shirts, and two nice lamp stands.” She gestured at the lamps, missing shades. Siena had hailed from the city once, and knew the lamps would sell for a hundred dollars each at a trendy retro boutique. But how would the woman get to the city? And how much would the store owner give her for the lamps? And so she just smiled and nodded, and only said, “The lamps are nice.” They’d already spoken more than they ever had. Speaking to a real person was actually quite hard.

  “Do you want to buy them?” the woman asked, startling Siena out of her reverie.

  “No.”

  “I guessed not,” the woman laughed.

  Was there a touch of derision in her laugh? Siena couldn’t be sure. “Why’s that?” she asked, a little belligerently.

  “They say you sleep under a heap of odds and ends, other people’s garbage and sticks.”

  It seemed hard to believe she’d survived winter doing that, but maybe she’d been so damaged by trauma Siena didn’t even know where she slept anymore. The rag picker looked at her, and Siena waited for the verbal spasm of hatred she knew must be coming, either from herself or from the woman. But they just looked at each other, and finally Siena pointed at the lamps and said, “You’ll get twenty dollars for them when the cottagers come to open up.”

  The woman looked immensely pleased. Siena looked at the black hooded sweatshirt draped over her arm. “My son would’ve liked that,” she said, suddenly not wanting to end the conversation, challenging as it was. She thought it might be the first one she’d had in years.

  The woman stared. “You used to have a family once, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Siena said.

  “Your daughter was very bad. She sold drugs at the high school and was killed by the bikers who supplied her when she didn’t pay. They cut up her body and distributed it in many places, so they could never be caught.”

  Siena figured then the woman had been so poor for so long it had driven her crazy, and forgave her this new assault. Besides, Noelle had been loud and unkempt and never did anything anyone asked, laughing at them instead, or crying, but that had been the extent of it. “That was Paul Hubert,” she said. “I heard that story too. It wasn’t Noelle, not at all. And even with Paul, why didn’t someone help him, teach him to love himself enough so he wouldn’t have to turn to drugs?”

  This last line she knew came out of the witch wisdom her own mother had taught her. She hadn’t said anything like that in years, was surprised at herself. After Noelle’s disappearance, what had any of it mattered? She couldn’t believe in it anymore. If her magic hadn’t been able to protect Noelle, it was worse than useless.

  The woman looked startled. “They said you couldn’t even really talk anymore.”

  “I couldn’t. But I had to defend Noelle. Usually I don’t hear the rumours. No one says them to my face.”

  “That was so long ago,” the woman said, memory dawning like daybreak on her creased face. But she didn’t continue, and Siena didn’t know whether she was referring to Noelle, or to Paul Hubert, or to her own demise. “We’re not any of us as young as we used to be,” she continued, peering into Siena’s face. She looked familiar, as if they’d once sat on committees together. They’d baked for the same fundraisers, surely. “Sally,” the woman said, stretching out her hand. “Sally Fish.”

  Ah, the minister’s wife. What had happened to her? Siena must’ve heard, and then forgotten, just as Sally had mistaken Noelle’s story for Paul Hubert’s. Even in a village, memory was fickle. And what about Siena herself? Did she really sleep under sticks? The village had watched her lose everything, and grow prematurely old because of it. Whatever her life had become, it sure wasn’t what she’d planned. Siena shook Sally’s hand. “Siena Straw.”

  “I know who you are, Siena. You had the most beautiful gardens, flowers and vegetables both. You were a really good herbalist and you always looked elegant.”

  “I was just born with skinny genes, is all. And I was good at putting together outfits from thrift stores. If I had money for new clothes I gave it to the kids.”

  “It was always so important to them,” Sally said, “the right kind of sneakers and jeans at school.”

  “Yes.”

  They parted, and the next Thursday Sally wasn’t out, nor the next. Siena went back to piling sticks and talking to herself. “The paths through the cedars all grown over with brambles and garbage. The slabs of Styrofoam and piles of old shoes replicating each night so that in the morning there were even more. Why always this bleak blackbadness, inconsolable beyond hope at the core, at the bottom, collecting at the fallen logs. The beads of dirty Styrofoam, disintegrating. Siena thought she might die under the weight of it. But she couldn’t; what if her daughter came back and her mother wasn’t there? Siena knew at one time or another she’d felt a little of what Noelle might’ve felt when she’d run through town shouting obscenities at the minister and the principal and the constable. Perhaps what Siena could not speak, the girl had. And so the stones they threw at Noelle had in their way been meant for her.

  “Maybe they’ll give Noelle back if I take their garbage as well as my own. Heaping it into a higher and higher mound each night after spending hours and hours and hours collecting it. And then burrowing beneath it to sleep, in spite of it smelling rather badly. There, I’ve just admitted it, even to myself. I’m looking for my daughter’s body,” Siena muttered, piling sticks. She’d misplaced it somewhere, she knew. “My daughter isn’t dead, only mad or missing. Maybe she’s not out here at all. I bet they’ve got her in a basement somewhere.”

  The week after that the geese were flying overhead in pairs, looking for nesting spots, just as Siena and her husband had come here from the city, looking for a quiet pretty place to raise their brood. The geese flew over her piles and honked derisively, and Siena built herself an actual lean-to out of deadfall and Styrofoam instead of burrowing under her shame pile that night, and tried not to talk to herself so much. Her conversation with Sally had been so short, and now weeks old, but still it had reminded her of the difference. Her husband had often made fun of her constant mumbling. She’d done it even then, when he was still around. But that too had been different. Mumbling to a person didn’t get you called crazy; it was just a little rude.

  She unwound string from a tangle of sticks and sat down on a pile of other sticks and began to make a spider web, part God’s eye, part dream catcher. It was obsessive but she couldn’t help herself; when Siena found string she had to make something out of it. Something more or less circular to hang in a tree. Siena told herself she was making magic; it was a witchy thing, not a dream catcher but a daughter catcher. Still the objects never seemed beautiful and powerful as she’d intended when she was done but rather sad and lonely as she felt, and possibly mad. And yet consciousness glimmered on, and Siena survived the spring’s windiest gale in her makeshift lean-to. Her shelter looked a little like an igloo from a distance, the water rounded white slabs piled into circular walls. The Styrofoam had good insulation value.

  The geese flew overhead several times each day, and at last Siena broke down and cried, missing her husband so badly she couldn’t give the pain a name. Geese mated for life, as she’d always felt she and her husband would. As the years passed and Siena outgrew her youthful restlessness, the boredom that came after the first thrill of marriage was replaced each year by joy at discovering its yet undiscovered riches: for each year there were more. She should’ve gone with him. Then they could’ve still had a kind of happiness, if not the ridiculous happiness they’d had before. Now she was alone
without any of them, cleaning up after people who scorned her.

  But he’d left, and their son had gone with him, although the young man was old enough to go out on his own now, seek a wife and a fortune. But he and the old man got along well. Any wife the lad found would have to make herself part of their life more than they’d ever make themselves part of hers. She could do the books and mind the clutter; they had never been high on organizational skills, Siena’s men hadn’t. They liked the same things: military history and beer. They worked together now, she’d heard back when she still spoke to people, in some faraway town, setting up a shop selling memorabilia of oh, so many wars. But between them they knew most of their facts, would be able to back up each piece of begged or borrowed or stolen or scavenged bit of merchandise with a story, quite likely to be true. Siena missed them desperately. Twice in the woods she had found old old guns, and saved them for her men, should they ever pass back through. But why would they?

  And so she talked to herself, and performed her forest cleaning tasks, even though there was always more to do; it was an obscenely endless job. Sometimes she realized she’d thought she was talking to her daughter, and then Siena would start to cry again. She and Noelle had been as close as the old man and the young man, in their way. They’d liked the same things: poetry and painting and witching. It got you every time, that witching. They should’ve chosen different professions. A witch would always have stones thrown at her, at one time or another in her life, it was true. Her own mother, a witch also, had told Siena that, trying to herd her to a gentler occupation. But for Siena the witching was the gentlest task she knew, and the most necessary. And so she’d turned her back on her own mother’s words, her own mother’s tears, sure she and her daughter could together change things, together change the world’s view of what a witch was. She longed for the days her mother had told her about: the days when witches were well paid and cared for with kindness, invited to good parties and not forgotten but necessary, and not ostracized in the ragged woods at the bottom of the gardens. Her mother had been right of course, except that Siena herself had avoided the stoning her entire life; and the gossip she’d inured herself against. It was her daughter who hadn’t found the strength of will to turn the stones back in midair, or as Siena herself was able to do, before they even flew. She’d been too young, the girl had, and too full of fun and too full of love; that had bothered people.

  Siena herself had always been a quiet unassuming sort and so people had largely left her alone even though they knew what she was. And if anyone ever pointed a finger right at her and began to speak of what was wrong with her witchery, how ungodly it was, she knew how to deflect them with a joke, or flattery, or a spoonful of hope for their poor little brokenhearted souls, and so they put down their pebbles and unkind words. But all that had been before they’d stoned her daughter, and Noelle had gone mad or missing or maybe both, and the mildly, as most everyone’s are, broken hearts of her men had broken further and they’d left. They’d asked Siena to go with them, but she hadn’t.

  If she moved and her daughter returned to find her, Siena had to be there, didn’t she?

  She knitted, wondering as always why her burrowing and her knitting didn’t coerce the villagers to give her daughter back. It was witchy magic, after all. It was supposed to work. Her mother had taught her that, taught her how clear intent poured into the creation of an object would amplify its power to heal.

  But they hadn’t worked, not one of them, and there were thirty or forty spider webs now, strung here and there in the woods. No wonder no one came down here much anymore, not even the dog walkers. Siena’s daughter catchers were disturbing, never mind unsuccessful. Perhaps she’d take them all down. And so she wandered the woods with a new purpose, ostensibly to find and detach and burn all her creepy hanging things. She found and detached and bagged six, and where she thought she’d hung the seventh, she instead found a tall boy with wild red hair, stuffing it into his pocket.

  “Why do you want that?” Siena asked.

  “Want what?” he asked, his hand covering the bulge in his pocket.

  “My spider webs. I made them.”

  “Oh!” he said. “We thought Noelle made them. They bring luck in love.”

  “How could Noelle make them if she’s gone?”

  “Maybe she’s a ghost,” the young man offered. How old was he? Had he known Noelle, or did they just talk about her, like everyone else? How old would Noelle be now, if she were here?

  Siena began to stare and stutter, as if to prove everything he’d heard about her was true.

  “You look cold,” he said. “Come to the fire for tea?”

  “Okay,” Siena said, surprised. And she did. There were four or five of them, sitting on logs and stumps and one broken chair arranged around one of her stick piles that they’d set alight. They made tea and gave her some, and when they poured a little rum in their own and asked her if she wanted any, she didn’t refuse.

  “Just don’t break the bottles, okay? I cut my fingers when I clean up down here.”

  “I wouldn’t,” the boy said. “What’s your name?”

  “Siena. You?”

  “Peter.”

  “Hello, Peter. Why aren’t you afraid of me?”

  “Because you’re Noelle’s mother.”

  “Maybe. But I’m evil. And she must’ve been evil too, or they wouldn’t have stoned her.” It was only saying it aloud that made Siena realize some small part of her believed it to be true.

  “You’re not evil, you just went crazy because you lost Noelle. That would happen to anyone. But don’t stop making those weird string things. They’re magic. They’re infallible.”

  “Who do you love?” Siena asked.

  “I don’t like anyone in that way, and no one likes me. Although Liz has been my best friend since kindergarten, so I’m not exactly alone either.”

  One of the girls in the circle smiled at Siena. She had black braids and wore a little skirt that in better light Siena would’ve known wasn’t made of leaves, and striped knee socks and sneakers. “But they’ve worked for lots of us,” the girl said.

  Siena smiled to herself, and fell asleep, the fire and the rum so warm. When she woke the moon had risen, the youngsters gone home to their families. Siena too should walk back to her igloo, but on the way she saw a glimmer of water beneath a heap of deadfall. She investigated further, stepping in it, and was shocked; the icy water came almost to her hips. Siena would’ve fallen as if she’d stepped off a creek bank, which was precisely what she’d done, except the mounds of deadfall and garbage prevented it. She hauled herself out before her muscles could seize up from the cold.

  Had there always been a creek here? It was as if she’d forgotten it even existed, but how could that be so? It was so full of garbage it was obliterated from sight, but that didn’t account for its absence from her mind.

  Siena saw another daughter catcher then, hanging just out of reach as if blown by the wind. She didn’t care what the young people said, to Siena it radiated evil. Her thoughts after all were full of malice when she made them; some tiny secret part of her wished terrible things upon the townsfolk because of what had happened to Noelle. But by the old laws of mirrors Siena knew this was a dangerous thing to do, that she brought judgement upon herself when she wove malice into her magic. People would talk about her even more than before, and she’d grow even more bitter and solitary because of it, and weave even more hate into her webs, and the villagers, sensing her hate, would call her an evil witch, and so on, in an unending circle of fear and hate.

  Still, she hiked her skirt and shinnied up the tree and pulled it down. There was love in the webs too, the yearning she felt for Noelle, or they wouldn’t work to find the kids the love they so craved. She took it home to her stick and Styrofoam shelter. Peter was right, she had gone mad. The villagers were right about her. How could she not have
seen it? Still, the shelter was a step up from the stick piles she used to burrow beneath. When had she built it? After she’d talked to Sally, she thought. And after she realized birds took better care of themselves than she did.

  In the morning she hoped the youngsters would invite her for tea again, but they would be in school. The same two geese flew overhead. They took a long time to make their decision of where to build their nest, or else they just wanted to drag out their weeks of dinners out and movies and sex, before the long work of raising a family began. Seeing them, Siena wished again her men hadn’t left. She wished her husband had stayed behind and helped her dig for her daughter’s body.

  She wished he’d believed, as she’d believed, that they could still find Noelle, that their love could find a way. Siena allowed herself a little resentment then, towards her missing husband. There was a streak of weakness in him, she’d always secretly felt, an inability to hold on, hold out. If he’d stood beside her it would’ve been easier to say, “You shouldn’t have stoned Noelle. She was just letting her hair down, letting off a little steam. Things would’ve felt better for you if you’d done it a little more yourselves.” She could’ve spoken before it even happened, but when she already felt it coming, said something like, “Noelle’s a little frisky, it’s true, but great care must be taken of the free-spirited; they teach us all that joy is still possible. To judge them is to judge ourselves. We’d do better to imitate than to decry.”

  But she hadn’t. Or if she had, she hadn’t done it enough. Or if she’d done it enough, it hadn’t made enough of a difference. They’d still stoned Noelle. She’d still gone mad or missing or both.