Which Witch is Which? (The Witches of Port Townsend)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “I was alive?” she asked.

  “Alive and wailing like you’s being skinned,” Sal said. “I flipped the snapping turtle over the side and scooped you up. You’s so muddy we couldn’t hardly tell if you were a he or she at first. Mookey motored us back toward the dock while Red and me got you cleaned up as best we could. You didn’t think much of your first bath, I’ll tell you that right here and now. I s’pose I wouldn’t have neither, with the ice and all.”

  “Ice?” Moira asked, the gears in her brain grinding. “What ice…” The image came to her at once and complete: the battered green beer cooler that stored both beverage and bait on her uncles’ fishing excursions. “You cleaned me off in the beer cooler?”

  Sal’s bony shoulders jerked toward his ears. “Was the best option at the time.”

  “So you pulled me out of the bayou in a crawdad net and cleaned me up in the beer cooler. Then what?”

  “We figured you might be upset on account of bein’ nekkid and cold, so Red stripped off his shirt and we made you some britches, and I wrapped you up tight in a gunnysack like I seen ladies do sometimes. When that didn’t quiet you down, we figured maybe you was hungry.”

  Or maybe I wasn’t thrilled with a sweat-stained diaper and a onesie made of burlap, Moira thought. A pent-up breath hissed out between her teeth. “Please tell me you didn’t feed me nightcrawlers.”

  Sal managed to look shocked. “Of course not! What kinda fool you take me for, girl?”

  Several answers suggested themselves, but Moira kept her mouth closed around them.

  “We gave you a beer,” Sal continued.

  “You gave beer to a baby?” Cheeto squeaked in protest at Moira’s raised voice. She laid a hand on his back to quiet him.

  “Well we was out of grape Nehi,” Sal answered. “And we didn’t think you could manage the pickled pigs’ feet Mookey’d brought, since you didn’t have any teeth.”

  Moira saw Cheeto’s eyes narrow, and she gave his curly tail a little tug. The pig returned his gaze to the window.

  “So what happened when you got me back to town?” Moira asked.

  “We took ya home of course. Gave you a proper bathin’. Made you some grits. Red’s little girl had just growed out of her baby clothes, so he had Mavis run some over.”

  “But you didn’t take me to a doctor? Or call the law?”

  “We thought about it,” Sal said.

  Moira knew protracted silence marked the coming of something he didn’t want to say.

  “Moira, if you’s kidnapped, or missing, we’d have heard about it. People don’t come pleasure cruisin’ through this neck of the woods. You know that better than anyone. Best we could figure, whoever…” Sal paused, the effort to find better words digging creases into his face. “It wasn’t an accident, you being in that swamp. Whoever put you there done so on purpose. We figured it was best if they went on thinkin’ they’d finished the job.”

  So they didn’t come back and try again. The unspoken sentiment fluttered through Moira’s mind like a dropped handkerchief.

  “That, and we’s afraid of what might happen if folks found out about your…”

  “My what?”

  Sal pushed himself up from the bed, the floorboards releasing a chorus of groans as he paced the small length of her room. “We were all over the bayou that day, you see? We was alone. If someone had left you, we’d have seen it. By the looks of you, you’d been in that water for days. You shoulda been dead.”

  Truth stabbed as deep as any blade, and Moira felt it slide between her ribs, her breath escaping from the puncture.

  Sal knelt before her and wrapped one of her hands in his leathery grip. “You know how funny people round here can be about anyone who’s different.”

  Moira knew all too well. She had daily felt the barbed stares, the suspicious glances scalding her skin like acid, the disapproving huffs and whispered words that trailed in her wake.

  The familiar empty ache found her.

  “You should have left me.” Her tears were warm as they fell on her thighs. “Saving me was a mistake.”

  Sal’s bony hands tightened around her own. “Don’t you never say that,” he insisted. “You wasn’t a mistake. You was a miracle.”

  Bitterness hardened around the edges of Moira’s words. “Different names for the same thing.”

  “They’re not either. But you are right about one thing,” Sal said.

  “What’s that?”

  Sal’s eyes were bright with a sheen of tears when Moira finally found them. “Good can come from both.”

  A sob closed Moira’s throat as she flung her arms around her uncle’s neck and squeezed him to her. The scent of salt, tobacco, and cheap aftershave bloomed from the leathery neck she wet with her tears.

  “It’s all right, girl,” Sal soothed. “You go on and do what you need to. You just don’t forget us.”

  Moira felt Sal’s bones beneath his slackening skin as she hugged him tight. Each year sanded a little more of him away. His shape in the world, in her life, became less precise with each passing day. How much of him would be left when—if—she found her way back? “I won’t forget, Uncle Sal,” she promised, scrubbing away her morbid thoughts. “Never could.”

  “Good,” he said. “You about packed? S’pose I can help you get your things out to the Badger.”

  The Badger seemed as good a name as any for the 1969 Plymouth Barracuda parked beneath the cypress tree beside their shanty. Low, growly, and densely built, the Badger had mowed over more than a few ditches chasing down a soused Uncle Sal. Some nights, Sal’s phantom butt cheeks jiggled above the shifting mist as she motored home from the HooDoo Shack after a long shift of slapping away the patrons’ unwelcome pinches and gropes.

  Sal found britches a sight too confining after a night on the bottle.

  A fresh wave of grief assailed Moira as she peeked out the window at the Badger. Leaves stuck to the glossy black hood from the night’s mixture of wicked wind and strange omens.

  As a child, she had walked these roads until the soles of her feet were tougher than leather. The thought of not blowing down them in a cloud of dust was as disjointing as waking up to a different face in the mirror. They were as much part of her spiritual topography as the veins that carried blood to heart. “I’m gonna have to leave her here, I’m afraid,” Moira said.

  “Leave her here? Why?”

  Sal looked properly shocked. In previous days, Moira would have sooner left her beloved pig for the buzzards before parting with the predatory machine she powered down the tangled back roads of Terrebonne Parish.

  “I’m headed to the airport,” Moira explained. “And I can’t leave her settin’ in the lot till Judgment Day. Lord knows what I’d owe for parking by the time I got back. I’ll pole Skip over to Little Earl’s dock and have him run me into St. Bernard. I can catch a ride into New Orleans from there.”

  “So you know at least that much about where you’re headed.” A wary shine waxed Sal’s eyes. “What are you gonna do when you get there?”

  Moira shrugged and scratched beneath Cheeto’s chin with her index finger as the little pig leaned into her hand. “I’ll know.” Of this, she had total confidence. Some unseen anchor had sunk deep into her middle, binding her to a larger force whose trajectory she could either follow willingly or be dragged behind. The longer she sat talking here on the bed with Sal, the tighter the rope pulled, the more unbearable the pressure to take flight became.

  “You got money?” Sal asked.

  “Enough,” Moira answered. The lie clung to her throat as she swallowed it down. But she found she was glad she had spent her last wad of tip money stocking the fridge and cupboards now she knew Sal and the boys would be on their own for a while.

  “Well,” Sal said, rising from the mattress, “I guess you better get on your way then. Light’s best on the water with the sun overhead.”

  Moira knew. Knew the way she had always known when it came to the water.
She could look at its surface and read it as clearly as the expression on a beloved’s face. She reached for the oversized shoulder bag she had stitched together from the worn-out camouflage pants Red always picked up from the Army Surplus. Almost three decades out of Vietnam, he’d still wear nothing but.

  Lifting the flap on the compartment she’d sewn especially for the purpose, she tucked Cheeto inside, sliding his collapsible water and food bowls into additional pockets.

  Last of all, she slid her feet into the worn flip-flops by the door, already hating the thought of keeping them on until she reached whatever destination was in store for her. The stairs sang their familiar lullaby of squeaks and groans as she and Sal made their way down and out the screen door.

  Moira paused at the patch of dead grass by the Badger’s tail pipe, grass daily blown flat when she’d light out for wherever she was going. She laid a hand against the car’s rear spoiler, already warm from the spring sun. “You be good,” she instructed.

  The dock shifted beneath their feet like a funhouse hallway as they made their way out to Skip, the old pontoon lashed to a metal peg by a length of slimy rope. Moira hopped down first and waited for the boat to settle before reaching up to take her duffle bag from Sal. “Promise me you’ll get Bunky out to look at the dock.”

  Sal snorted and spat another brown glob into the already murky water. “Bunky Robichaud’s got a pecker for a head and brain small enough to fit.”

  Moira bit her bottom lip to keep from smiling. If Uncle Sal had actually seen Bunky’s junk, he’d know that was more compliment than insult. “That may be,” she admitted. “But he’s a decent carpenter and he’s already agreed to fix the dock. Ordered in the new poles an’ everything.” After I rode him to glory and back, came her mind’s unwanted addendum. “Promise me?”

  “Oh, all right,” Sal grumbled. “But I’m hidin’ the beer before he comes over.”

  “I told you,” Moira said. “You ain’t got to worry about that no more. He and Layla are back together. He’s not drinkin’.”

  “You never did tell me how you managed that,” Sal said, that familiar suspicion creeping back into the creases of his face.

  “Never told Layla neither,” Moira winked. “And it’s better that way.” A brief flash of borrowed anger welled up inside her, shaking her enough to sit her down hard. She covered it up by reaching for the rope, which Sal unlooped in three practiced swings.

  Sal paused at the top of his motion, holding the last line tying her to the life she knew. His eyes filled with unshed tears as he reached across the distance to put one leathery hand on her cheek. “You be careful, Moira Jo. Okay?”

  Moira laid her hand atop his before pulling it to her lips to kiss his bony knuckles. “Only if you are.”

  Sal gave her his customary nod and hooked his thumbs into the straps on his waders as she slid out the pole she would use to push her clear of the weed and swamp grass at the end of the dock. The can opener-sized motor bogged down if a duck so much as farted near the blades.

  Uncle Sal shrank into a slim shadow on the horizon as Moira was pushed farther away from home by time and tide, disappearing entirely as she rounded a lazy bend toward the mainland.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Moira cut the motor and waited for the water to still before looking over the side of the boat. Her own image stared back at her on the shifting surface, her wide aquamarine eyes taking on a greenish cast from the surrounding moss. The hair she unbound from its penciled pin-up spilled well past her shoulders in dark, unruly waves. Her full lips whispered words upon the water’s face as she dipped a single finger into the bayou.

  The familiar surge of warmth flooded her, swimming in her blood, dancing between her cells, rippling out from this one point of contact. Perfect silence descended. A stillness beyond thought and being.

  She submerged her hand to the wrist, turning it palm up like a cup, waiting for the silken slide of the body she beckoned. The briefest flash of gray announced the arrival of one of the swamp’s own elder statesmen—a catfish she had named Methuselah, who had long since grown too large to comfortably rest in one hand.

  The simple stream of his thoughts wound through her anxious mind like a cool ribbon. A pure distillation of life at its core: the search for food, mate, and progeny.

  Words were not needed, but Moira spoke them anyway. As much a prayer to soothe her soul as a supplication to the fish. “I’m not going to be here for a while. You think you could see that Sal and the boys do well enough to eat? Not too good, mind. You know where the extra goes.”

  Moira had fished enough beer cans out of the bog under Methuselah’s watchful eye to know he took her meaning. The return message arrived in the sensation of ripples pushing through Moira’s mind.

  He would do so.

  “Thanks.” She stroked her thumb between his wide-set alien eyes, but only once. Catfish were more like cats in this respect than most people would guess. His departure sent a spray of droplets flying, jewels that caught the sunlight just in time to disappear back into the swamp.

  Hand still in the water, Moira drew to mind her destination, and asked the bayou to comply.

  And it did.

  It always had.

  Chapter Two

  “Awful lot of young men around here going to be disappointed,” Little Earl teased. A crooked grin occupied only the half of his mouth facing Moira. The side nearest the driver’s window of his ‘78 Ford F-150 had been largely uncooperative since the stroke that felled him from a barstool at the HooDoo Shack a couple summers past.

  Times like those were an unwelcome reminder that those closest to her were the ones she could help the least. The kind of healing she had a knack for required a hands-on approach Moira just couldn’t bring herself to apply to her uncles, unofficial or no.

  Her knuckles had been bloodied on more than one occasion at the suggestion that particular Southern stereotype might be applicable to her. Doc Fontenot, St. Bernard’s dentist, had gotten awfully good at bridgework thanks to her. Without his efforts, she’d wager half the parish’s female population could suck sweet tea through a straw without opening their teeth.

  “And an awful lot of women going to be pleased as punch,” Moira retorted.

  “That’s the truth,” Earl agreed. “You never been too popular with the women folk around here.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Moira reached into the camouflaged bag on her lap to offer Cheeto a bite of potato chip, which he eagerly snaffled up. “Hell, Edna as good as ran me down at the Piggly Wiggly the other night.”

  Earl’s ruddy face tightened at the mention of the steel-haired battle axe who presided over his home with an iron fist and a rolling-pin used more often for thumping skulls than making biscuits. “She’s just got the wrong idea about you. That’s all.”

  “I don’t care if she is your wife,” Moira replied. “She’s two parts hen and one part gator. All beak and a big bite.”

  “It’s just that not everyone understands how you…” He paused to scratch the back of his neck, hork, and spit into one of the many discarded wrappers littering cab before continuing. “How you help folks. When she caught you in Earl Jr.’s hospital room that night—”

  “He woulda died,” Moira insisted. “He was more tore up than a trailer park in tornado season.” The memory of Earl Jr.—Little Earl’s son—jacked into a multitude of tubes and machines surged back to her. Big Earl—Earl Jr.’s granddaddy—had only nodded as he cleared the room, knowing of Moira’s abilities firsthand. At least, it had been her hand that pulled the Earls’ eldest statesmen back from a heart attack he’d suffered on her porch one sticky evening.

  “I know that,” Little Earl assured her. “But seeing as he’d just rolled his truck and was in the intensive care waiting for surgery you bein’ on top of him like you was just didn’t set well with his momma.”

  “Surgery,” Moira pointed out, “that he didn’t end up needing after all, if you’ll remember.”

  �
��Oh, I remember.” Earl’s easy laugh filled the truck like a floodlight. “That doctor did get mighty fetched up at you, though. I think he was actually looking forward to doin’ something other than sewing up a bar fight for once.”

  Sudden exhaustion crept over Moira like a fog as the sensory memory of Edna’s disgust and rage filled her head with broken glass. Lord, was she tired of other people’s psychic backwash. The trees on either side of the road seemed to sag with it as well, their hanging Spanish moss making them look like mourners at a procession of which she was always the deceased. “I don’t like the means any better than Edna does.”

  “Neither would your Uncle Sal,” Earl said.

  They were coming to ruts they had already worn in the road now. A conversation as at home in this old truck as the chain of beer tabs hanging from the rear-view mirror.

  The cracked ridge around the old truck’s bench seat pinched the back of Moira’s thighs. She readjusted the coarse saddle blanket that doubled as a seat cover. “You swore you wouldn’t tell him.”

  “And I won’t. I’m just sayin’ you might oughta think about what helpin’ folks has cost you. That’s all.”

  “Would you rather Earl Jr. had died?” Moira asked.

  A rim of white appeared around Earl’s thin lips as he pressed them together. He squeezed the steering wheel like it might give back some reassurance in return. “No, Moira Jo. I’m glad of what you did. I’d be lyin’ if I said otherwise.”

  He paused, but Moira knew better than to speak into the silence.

  “Earl Jr. was the fool who drank a twelve pack with his buddies and thought it’d be a good idea to drive home in the dark.” Earl’s eyes fixed on hers for as long as the road would allow. “You understand?”

  Cheeto’s small hooves folded down the edge of the bag closest to Moira as his wet, pink nose twitched in the direction of the chips she held at her side. “No more,” she said. “You’ve been eatin’ like a—” she paused, looking down into his shining black eyes. “Well, you haven’t been eatin’ very good.”