The Witch House of Persimmon Point

by Suzanne Palmieri

  After the groceries were unloaded, Byrd wanted to resume the stories. But Eleanor needed a break.

  “I’d like to rummage around a bit myself. I know you’ve found all there is to find, but two sets of Amore eyes can’t hurt. Can you watch Maj?”

  “Sure. But yell if you find something. The clock is ticking, you know.…”

  Eleanor knew. Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

  She wandered the house alone, listening to the two girls running and shrieking as they played outside. Then she focused on the library. The door was stuck. Typical. She turned the knob and forced it open with her shoulder. Then she tumbled forward and fell sideways into the room, knocking over a humidor cabinet, which broke, splintering in front of her.

  “Nice one. Graceful,” Eleanor grunted.

  A thick white envelope had fallen out of the cabinet. It had a proper label on it, addressed to Byrd at “The Witch House,” but in the corner, where there would have been a postmark with a date, it simply said, “There is no such thing as time.”

  “Byrd! I think I found something!” Eleanor called. She got up, placed the envelope on the desk, and looked around while she waited.

  There were boxes of books next to half full bookcases. They seemed to be organized by name.

  Nan, Lucy, Anne, Opal, and Stella.

  Nan’s were lives of the saints. Lucy had plays. Anne had all the dark magic books. Opal’s box was full of romances and adventures. And Stella’s books were about families.

  “What is taking you so long, Byrd!?”

  “I’m right here! What happened?” asked Byrd, looking at the broken cabinet.

  “I’ll never be a dancer is what happened. I’ll clean that up. This is for you, honey.”

  Byrd hesitated, then carefully took the envelope and left the room.

  And even though she was curious, Eleanor let her open her letter alone.

  And past the juniper, on the edge of a cliff, Maj began to sing.

  3:00 P.M.

  One, two, three, four, five,

  Once I caught a soul alive,

  Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,

  Then I let it go again.

  Why did you let it go?

  Because its sorrow hurt me so.

  Which soul did cause this fright?

  This little one who likes to bite.

  Maj sat on the cliff watching the ponies with Ava and Crazy Anne.

  “So, Byrd will tell your mother my story next, love,” said Anne.

  “Yes.” Maj tried not to be shy around spirits—they could walk all over you. But Anne was different—stronger, angrier. Maj automatically became a polite, well-mannered child in her presence.

  “I don’t want you to listen. I’ve shown you all the important parts, but there are some things you cannot unhear or unsee. There are things that will be told that could follow you, haunt you. And I do not want that for you.”

  “Aren’t you already haunting her?” asked Ava, giggling. Maj braced herself. Anne exploded into a swarm of blackbirds and flew away.

  “Why did you do that? I don’t like when she’s angry.”

  “Because I want to watch the ponies. I don’t care about the stories. I always think those ponies will lead me home to my mama.”

  “You’re brave, Ava.”

  “I’m not really. Anne says all I have to do is call for mama and she’ll come. But I don’t do it. I don’t know why. Oh, and I have news. Anne said she’d tell you the secret!”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. But right now, I think you might be in very big trouble.”

  Maj turned around to see her Mama and Byrd running toward the cliff.

  4:00 P.M.

  “Dear God, Maj! What were you thinking!” yelled Eleanor, shaking her daughter.

  “LET GO OF ME!”

  “Are Anne and Ava still here, Maj? Because I can’t see them. Why won’t you let me see you?” cried Byrd.

  “You never took me to see the ponies and you promised and I wanted to!” Maj started crying.

  Eleanor shook with anger and fear. She looked to the bottom of the cliff, and thought, It would be easier to jump.

  Then, she took a breath and pulled both girls into a tight embrace safely away from the edge.

  “Wait, this is what it does. This house … it hits a panic button. We need to calm down and think things through.”

  All three stood still in a sort of shock, and then … calmed.

  4:15 P.M.

  “That was intense.” said Elly, walking back from seeing the ponies.

  “It just wants us safe.” said Maj.

  “What does?”

  “The house. The land. It loves us, and I got too close to the edge, and it lost its temper inside you. Because it doesn’t have a body.”

  “Of course,” said Byrd.

  Eleanor, Maj, and Byrd continued to talk, as stars twinkled in the darker half of the sky and the house stood up straighter, with a sly smile, its angles, spires, and shadows reaching inward to embrace its new darlings.

  9:00 P.M.

  “She’s asleep,” said Eleanor to Byrd, who was sitting in the library under a glowing green stained-glass reading lamp. “Good. I don’t care what Maj think she knows, this isn’t a story for her. This is horror. The real kind. You ready?”

  “Byrd?”

  “No time to waste here. Is this question you’re about to ask me pertinent?”

  “Everything is pertinent. I’m hearing all this for the first time. But you aren’t. And it’s all much closer to you, honey. We are talking about things … genetics … I don’t know. I hope you’re okay with all this.”

  “The way I figure it, everyone’s family has hidden shame. I’d be a piss poor witch if mine weren’t downright horrible. And as bad as you think it is, it gets worse. The sooner I tell you about Anne, the sooner we find out the secrets this place hides. And about that … well, uh, see … we’re going to have a guest tomorrow.”

  “And who would that be?” Eleanor raised an eyebrow.

  “Well…”

  “Spit it out, Byrd!”

  “I may have called a psychic. You know, like a medium.”

  “You called a psychic? Byrd … technically speaking, we are psychics! That’s the last thing we need. What if this person…”

  “Amazing Andy.”

  “Oh, God. What if Amazing Andy hooks up with Johnny Colder and they—never mind. What’s done is done.” Eleanor sighed. “Tell me about Anne.”

  “Well, Anne’s story is my favorite, even if it’s the worst of the bunch. She was the one woman who loved the Witch House the way it wanted to be loved.”

  The Book of Anne

  1940–1999

  16

  Intermezzo

  Look at them, the women of this house. It is night and they are sleeping soundly. The moon is full, so we can get a good look. It is midsummer and the windows are open and the ocean breeze is making for perfect sleeping weather. Salty air floats through this house with the moonlight. The women … their hair fades gray to black and black to gray. They are old and young, and young and old.… They are crazy and sane. They belong to each other, and they belong to no one.

  Look at Lucy, how she sleeps. She looks like a young girl, her curly hair sweeping out onto the pillow beside her, her graceful hand, palm open, next to her cheek. Lucy is dreaming, dreaming of a life before this one, one with the sticky sounds of a happy baby, boats coming in from the harbor, and her Vito coming in from a long day of work. “Dance with me, my Lucy, dance with me, Forever Lucy.…” Lucy’s lips turn up in her sleep. She always wants to be dreaming, longs never to wake up. There are wind chimes in her dreams, and mourning doves. She smiles; she is happy.

  See Anne; see her tucked into her grandmother’s bed. See the ghosts on either side of her. Anne does not dream. She sleeps balled up like an infant in the womb, yet she is all angles and tense lines.… See how she curls her thin body around Ava protectively. How she holds her tight.
Ava is snuggled with her face buried in Anne’s chest (she need not breathe), her little ghost hand entwined in Anne’s hair. Gwyneth spoons them both, absorbing Anne’s dreams, and watching over Ava in a continuous act of redemption.

  See Nan; her sleep is orderly, everything just so. See the blanket tucked in neatly, hardly disturbed. A cup and saucer are on the nightstand, out of place. Nan was tired this evening. Nan dreams. It is always the same one. Nan dreams of playing with her sister outside their farmhouse in the Italian countryside. She dreams in Italian. She can smell the grass and the dirt baking in the sun. Her mother is cooking inside; Vincent is singing in the fields. She is laughing and spinning and teasing her sister and her brother.… There is nothing but comfort here. Nan dreams of home. When she wakes up, she will carry that dream with her all day, like she does every day, and she will resent everything around her, because she will never be home again.

  It is coming on morning now, andiamo …

  17

  Lucy in the Bedroom with the Crucifix

  1940

  Lucy was screaming and God wasn’t listening. She’d labored in her mother’s bedroom because that’s what Nan said she should do. Something about God and Sin and being unmarried. The window was open, letting the winter in. She needed the air. The first snow collected in delicate layers on the wide, wooden sill.

  Earlier, when the pains were coming farther apart, Lucy went to the bedroom window and held her hands against its icy glass to cool them off. The cold beneath her palms was lovely, it calmed her. She watched the dancing snow and wished she could be standing in it, letting it glitter in her hair, letting it clear the antiseptic, old-woman smell of the midwife from her nose. She wanted the snow whirling all around her, in her, through her. She knew that if she could just get out into the snowy night, all would be well.

  When the pains came on stronger, with no relief or pause, she began to panic. She opened the window, struggling to unstick it from its frame. She felt a fleeting sense of victory when it lurched open, and she breathed in the night. The snow cooled her face. The feeling of respite lingered, and she rolled her body to lean against the wall, pressing her face against the wallpaper. It was covered in blue flowers blooming in a constant spring. Lucy traced the leaves with her finger before doubling over in pain. This aching was urgent and tore at her fragile mind. She kneeled on the wooden floor.

  She was naked. Her suffocating nightgown had been tossed aside. Damp curls clung to her face and spilled over her shoulders.

  Lucy closed her eyes, clutching a set of garnet rosary beads to her with clenched, white knuckles, and she prayed. She prayed to the statue of the Virgin Mary on the dresser, she prayed to the crucifix above the attached mirror, she prayed to the house.

  “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Another pain ripped through her. “Oh, damn it!” Her eyelids flew open and she jerked her head up, staring with bright, lunatic eyes at the statue. “I can’t do this! I don’t even remember the whole prayer.… Please, sweet lady, please make this child come out and I swear … I swear to God I will name her after you!”

  “Lucia!” Nan shushed her, entering the room with the midwife, Zindonetta, to see her there, crazy on the floor, arms outstretched to the statue, her body shaking with sobs. They brought her, scratching and kicking, back to the bed and held her down. Her struggle against them, coupled with her screaming, forced the baby swiftly out.

  “Let me see her, let me see her,” begged Lucy, only the baby did not make a sound. She was absolutely blue. The room was silent and heavy with worry. It was as if the house were heaving … pushing now that Lucy’s turn was over. The floorboards, the doors, windows, and even the walls bloated from strain. Lucy knew the house was trying to give birth to something of its own.

  Finally, the midwife broke the frightened paralysis and put her mouth over the infant’s nose and blue-tinged lips, sucking out the mucus and spitting it on the floor. The baby’s eyes snapped open and she turned pink, but she did not cry. The house went straight again.

  In the attic of the house, snow fell in through a cracked window onto the small square floor of the cupola and arranged itself in the form of a marble Madonna and child, just as a phantom woman held a phantom child in the attic and twirled away the snowflakes, dancing in wide circles, soundlessly. Chaînés, chaînés …

  Later, after Lucy slept off the haze of pain, she held and examined her new baby. She had a strange fluttering feeling, like a life leaving her. And even as she cradled the baby, ready to love her, ready to coo and coddle like she had with Dominic, she noticed that the feeling would not leave. It was still there, a strange … grayness. And the child! She just stared. Was she broken?’

  “Have you decided on a name? The child could die any moment. Zindonetta, go get the priest. Just in case.” Turning back to Lucy, she said, “I know you liked the name Peach, but how about Plum or Strawberry? Maybe Pineapple?” Lucy was too tired to play Nan’s game. When Nan predicted a baby girl, Lucy had thought that Peach would be suitable, something bright and vibrant to help ward off the evil in the house. But there had been no end of recrimination from her mother.

  “Well, I suppose you win again, Mama.” Lucy pointed half-heartedly to the statue she had prayed to. “I promised the virgin over there I would name this baby after her, so I guess she will be Mary.”

  “Lucia,” the old woman said, “that isn’t the Virgin Mother, that’s a statue of Saint Anne. Notice the hair and the color of her robes? As that good-for-nothing excuse for a man is gone now, we don’t have to name her after his mother. What kind of Anglo name is Ivy anyway?”

  “Of course,” whispered Lucy. “I guess she will have to be Anne. Like you, Mama. And like the little orphan in the funny papers.”

  Lucy began to fall asleep. Though she loved dreaming, she didn’t like falling into sleep. It was suffocating. Usually she eased it along with a drink, but this tired wouldn’t wait.

  “Mama?” Lucy called out despite herself. Nan was quickly by her side. She took baby Anne and handed her to the midwife.

  “Yes, Lucia? Are you all right?”

  “Mama?” Lucy’s face was damp with sweat and tears. Nan resisted the urge to crawl into bed with her and instead took her hands. “Mama, I don’t want to fall asleep.”

  “How come, my Lucia? You worked so hard. How come you don’t want to sleep?”

  “I am afraid … I am afraid of the dark behind my eyes.”

  “Ahhh, yes.…” Nan released one of Lucy’s hands and began to push her daughter’s curly locks back from her face. “Do you remember when you were just a little girl, and you were so afraid of the night? How I would take you in your nightgown to walk down the hill to the river? Remember how beautiful the moon was, how the whole world was quiet? I told you to not be afraid of the night. God is in the night, Lucia. He created the night for us. It is like a dark blue velvet blanket, made to comfort us, not to frighten us. Do you remember, Lucia?”

  Lucy let go of Nan’s hands and rolled away from her.

  “I remember being dragged to the priest.” Then she brought her arms up to embrace herself.

  Nan sighed and glanced over at the baby. The child was fine, cooing in the Moses basket, reaching out already, pulling her arms free of the swaddling and grasping at invisible fingers in the air.

  “Zindonetta, come with me out of the room.”

  The two women conferred in the doorway, speaking fast with their hands, using their native language.

  “What is it, Nan? She can’t sleep?”

  “It is not just that, Zindonetta. You know very well she has never been right in the head. Now I have another child to raise.”

  Zindonetta knew. Everyone knew Lucy was damaged. It was so sad. And now this new shame brought upon the family, this child with no father. Nan was a saint to put up with it all. Nan, a respected member of the parish, was looked on as a wise woman or strega, the curer of the evil eye—so why would God gi
ve her so much evil to deal with? Zindonetta once sent for her in the night when her son was having fits. Nan took the curse right off him. It was the reason she agreed to help with this birth. She owed a favor.

  “Why can’t you get rid of these demons, Nan?”

  “I don’t know. I have tried. I pray all the time, nothing works.”

  Zindonetta went to her bag and brought out a few bottles. “Here. She must take these. They will make her manageable.”

  Nan grasped the bottles close.

  The midwife gathered her things and left. She was happy to leave. The house had a stink about it that made her sick to her stomach.

  * * *

  Days later, Lucy lay in bed, nursing her strange baby. And something happened. Anne looked right at her mother, not into space as she normally did. She locked eyes with Lucy and moved her lips around Lucy’s nipple into a milky smile.

  Lucy was caught off guard. Love, deep and full, washed through her. A greedy love, a love she had not known with her first baby. She wanted to devour her. She could tell Anne would grow up to be striking—her eyes were bright green like the sea before a squall. It was too much, this love. She could not do it. She could not be this child’s mother. She could not betray her true family this way. She would not love this child at all if she could not love her just a little bit.

  And why was she always staring into space? What could she be seeing? The old Italian women always said that when babies stared like that, they were looking into the afterlife. Could Anne be seeing Vito? Taunting him with her existence? No. This would not do. She popped her nipple out of Anne’s mouth and brought her downstairs to the kitchen.

  Lucy plunked the wailing baby into Nan’s arms and ran back upstairs. When safely back in her bedroom, she yelled, “I’m weaning her, you take her. Bring her to your church, give her to your God, make her a nun for all I care. I’m done!” And with that, Anne lost her mother.

  18

  Nan in the Kitchen with a Wooden Spoon

  1940–1950

  Anne was a good baby, by Italian standards anyway. She slept. She ate. She did not cry. Anne happily amused herself, even when there was nothing amusing around her. But when she turned three and could talk, things began to change.