by Hawke, Jessa
It was a wonder that in a town as conservative as ours, few people ever bothered the hill witch. She was not a particularly likable character, with her antisocial personality and the long rags she wore for clothes. But nobody ever said a word. Since she grew everything herself, she rarely had occasion to leave the house; anything she wanted from the general store, she sent me, Enoch, or Orion for.
I was seven when I noticed what was going on. I had been stricken with a fever and slept through most of the day, thanks to the herb concoction the witch had brewed for me. However, as the sun rose high in the sky and then nosedived behind the horizon, I woke, shivering and cold again. I did not know the mixture of herbs she had used and was unable to create the draft again, so I went looking for the hill witch. The house was quiet, for the boys were out in the woods, foraging and hunting the squirrels. And then I heard the voices from down the stairs, towards the garden. I followed the sounds until they grew barely discernable and I caught the wisps of words on the night air.
Baby
Help
Seven years
So young
Please
The hill witch stood with her back to me, speaking to someone beyond the fence. She barely moved, her steel-grey curls a wild halo around her head, her back straight, her walking stick planted firmly into the freshly dug ground. I crept behind the wild cucumber vines, behind the tall planters, impaling my pale fingers with their thorns and willing myself not to gasp aloud. I strained my ears, listening, hoping to catch the night secret, and before long, I was rewarded.
It was the young couple who ran the general store. They had been trying to conceive a child for seven years, with no luck. They were pleading with the hill witch for help. She listened, not speaking at all, just drinking in the desperate looks on their faces, the blanched skin of the blond wife and the tuft of red on the scalp of the husband; they clutched each other as if to prove their union, but when they were done, hill witch only shook her head.
“It will not be good,” was all she said, her voice like the gravel that lined the paths in her gardens, for she seldom spoke.
“What?” asked the young wife in a desperate whisper. “We will give you anything, anything you want.”
“I want nothing,” said the hill witch hoarsely. “The child, it will not be good. It is not in your stars to have this spawn.”
I could feel the husband wince at the use of the word. “What do you mean? All people want a child.”
“I did not say you did not want it,” the hill witch responded. “I said it is not your fate to keep it. Fifteen moon cycles shall it live before it leaves you.”
“Leaves us? Oh, but why would it leave us?” asked the young wife, her voice naked with pain. “We want it so much.”
“Want is not the concern here.” The hill witch paused, tapping her stick in the soft muck below a few times thoughtfully. “Yes,” she finally whispered, more to herself than to the faces washed white in the moonlight before her. “Yes, it must be so, it all plays a role.” She stepped to one side and pulled at a bush that grew ripe with red flowers, pulled three of them off, and stretched out her palm to the young couple, who looked, for all the world, as if she were handing them poison. Which, for all they knew, was exactly what she was doing. “Take it,” she said brusquely, and then suddenly, her voice took on an ethereal, singsong quality. “Fifteen years, and then you will blame me for it. You will come to me with fire, and I will not run.”
“Oh bless you, bless you!” gasped the young wife, falling to her knees in the soft ground. “We will take it for as long as it is with us. Fifteen years is better than not at all.”
The hill witch merely glanced at her. “We will see. Or rather, you will.”
And with that, she turned on her heel with the alacrity of a woman who needed no walking aid known to man or beast, and marched into the house. Without pausing, she passed me by and called my name, as she had known I was there all along. Perhaps she did, for the hill witch knew all. It was her business; she ran it at night, far away from us, rarely accepting payment, but getting something far more precious in return—the knowledge that her peace would be undisturbed because of the gratitude of the town’s residents, or perhaps, their fear.
She knew that there would be no congratulations, and there were none, when the couple conceived a baby the following year, when a full moon hung with its pregnant belly over our town. She knew that unlike the rest of the neighbors, she would not be invited to the celebration, and it did not bother her one whit. She simply quietly went about feeding her critters, ignoring the fireworks that filled the sky, normal celebrations of ordinary folk. They did not concern her, not yet.
Growing up in the hill witch’s house was like roaming free in the enclave of a master. Enoch, Orion, and I explored her gardens, which ran green acre after acre and extended far back into the woods. It was there that we learned the names of the crows that flew with black extended wings and became ours through practice and entrapment. I gathered berries and prickly pears from her trees for fruit stews made in cast-iron pots both heavy and dark while the boys took apart everything in the house and learned how to put it all back together. There was no clear gender divide in particular, and the hill witch never told us what to do, but that much freedom seemed to infuse in us an early maturity and a sense that as long as there was peace in the house, all would be well.
Orion, boy of the constellation, had green eyes and dark chestnut hair that fell in a wavy lock over his eyes. He was always grinning, always mischievous and charming; he was the one that always rode into town on the hill witch’s bicycle whenever she needed a better deal on the soap or moonshine she brewed at home. Enoch, son of the night was always darker and more brooding, sparing his words for when he truly wanted to speak or give directions. During our walks through the woods, all of us with scratched-up legs but no mosquito bites—we did not live with the hill witch for nothing, after all—Enoch would simply lead a distance up ahead, staying close enough for us to follow and warning us of a big jump or log. He had dark, spiky black hair and eyes like warm liquid amber, black irises like stones of jet. Where Orion was lean and lanky, Enoch was sturdy and broad-shouldered, with a hard-set mouth that softened only when he was talking to one of the hill witch’s rabbits, scooping them up into the folds of his jackets and whispering sweet things into their ears.
I tended to cart off the hill witch’s books to my favorite place in the woods under an apple tree by a brook. It was like being in a story myself, and I would take all the tales she had, leafing through tales of blood, gore, magic, and lust until the sun would set and it would be time to tidy up the house for a meal the hill witch and I would make together. I never called her Mother, oddly enough, would not even have known what it meant if it wasn’t for the townsfolk who came for the witch’s balms. It was during one of those golden afternoons that Enoch crashed through the bushes and invaded my favorite place. Luckily for him, my anger passes as fast as it arises, and it was not long before he was showing me a baby crow he had rescued after it had fallen from its nest, not strong enough to fly or make a peep. Someone else might have stomped on the poor bird to put it out of its misery, but not Enoch. He called the baby bird brother and nursed him back to health, mending his tiny broken wings until the crow could stretch himself out and flap against his hands. We leaned our heads in over the crow cupped in Enoch’s palms and I put my child’s hands against his child’s hands and together, we released the crow into his first ever flight.
The bird flew, but we did not release hands. Swallowing hard, Enoch grasped my fingers in his, and when I looked up, his irises had expanded to double their size. We had no words for what was happening, we were children yet and children rarely have the words except for the truth, and I knew in that moment that I wanted to go on a journey and that journey propelled me towards Enoch’s ruddy mouth. Centimeters away we were from each other, hearts pounding loudly in our chests, when Orion came bursting through the bushes and
startled us apart. We broke apart, guilty as thieves, but Orion, though he knew all, only smiled.
That night at the hill witch’s table, as I spooned hearty vegetable stew into wooden bowls and we waited for the boys to come back from their trek, the hill witch spoke.
“Not now,” said she, and my heart jumped because I knew of what she spoke. Still, I raised questioning eyes to her face, a face lined and familiar, a face more gentle and calm than a sea at the stroke of midnight. “You know of what I speak, Levana,” she continued, cutting deep into a soft brick of black bread, revealing the brown crumb inside. We baked it ourselves in the heart of a contained fire in a brick oven. “You may not go with the boys for many years yet, and that is the way of it.”
That was the end of our threesome treks, and everyone accepted it as thus.
It was the way of things that life continued, both in the house and in the town. The couple who had lead me to the discovery of the hill witch’s side profession had their baby, a beautifully ordinary child, chubby-cheeked and plump-limbed. The general store manager talked about it constantly; it was, in fact, the talk of the entire town. Nobody could believe that a couple who had been trying for so long could have given birth to such a healthy, charming little individual, but this was because nobody knew of the hill witch’s involvement.
The years went by, marked by the changing shapes of the moons. Harvests came and went, droughts and floods, and once, even a snowstorm that shut the entire town down from any real communication. The baby grew into a toddler that swam in kiddie pools pumped up by hand, into a child that ran around making tracks in the snow. It was calm at the hill witch’s house. So few words needed to be spoken at all that there were times when I forgot completely how it was done. Enoch and Orion grew tall and strong and took over the heaviest work in the house, drawing in firewood to relieve the chill of winter and building higher stakes for the pumpkins the hill witch grew. Their bodies filled out with muscle, the soft dew of hair on their upper lips and chests lengthened and coarsened slightly, and it was as if overnight, they became men. Now they had acquired motorcycles to replace the bikes they rode as children, great sleek machines they kept well-oiled and maintained, built from parts by the power and grace of their hands. They wore leather like a second skin and inked pictures onto their bodies with nothing to staunch the pain and nothing but a mirror and their own hearts to guide them.
I spent my days learning from the hill witch. In the twilight of her herb gardens, I learned the secrets of her ways. The days, filled with syrupy contentment, reminded us both of a calm before the storm. I barely noticed as my legs lengthened and my blouses began to strain against the buttons; I forgot to cut my hair altogether and it fell straight down to my knees, a fine waterfall I enjoyed braiding to keep out of my way.
It was the summer of my twenty second year that it happened. A terrible tragedy, the townsfolk whispered. I was bringing our gourds to market when the seller told me what had occurred. To say that I was surprised would be untrue, for I knew all along what was coming, I just did not know how it would.
The child was found broken on the abandoned tracks of the train that used to supply bolts of cloth to our town. Its body was twisted at odd angles and there were marks that indicated it had been violated while still alive. Rumors spread fast and wide and in the little town, one more horrific than the next. One said that it was a wild beast that had attacked and lost its senses, but I knew that animals do not do this. I pedaled as fast as I could to the hill witch’s house.
Breathlessly, I related the tale, and for the first time, I saw her serene face turn ashen. It was dark at that point, and she gazed up at the bright, bright moon, her face sorrowful. It was a long time before she turned from it, and when she did, she was charged with a tense, fearful energy, and it infected me, for in all my two decades with her, I had never seen the hill witch show fear.
“It has happened,” she said. “The thing I foresaw so many moons ago has occurred. A darkness is gathering, a darkness so bleak that few will be able to escape the dampening power of it. It will sweep through this town like the plague, and we will be the most at risk. It is a gathering war. The storm is coming.”
At her words, I shivered. I did not understand the hill witch always, for sometimes her riddles were for her alone, but it did not take long for me to make sense of her words. A new rumor was spreading through our town, and as the hill witch had predicted, it was one of a festering darkness. The whisper went that it was no animal that had brutalized the child, but magic, a black magic that oozed perversion from its very pores. Blame was placed on the unknown, as it so often is, and little was known about the hill witch. Of course, in the secrets of their lives, many in the town had become aware of what she was capable of, but until now, until this great heartbreak, nobody had dared speak it aloud.
I believe it came from the couple which had birthed the poor cursed babe. Driven mad by the heartbreak that naturally followed their awful discovery, they went straight to the source of their gift, the hill witch. At first, they claimed she had played a role in the course of these events, but this quickly evolved on the tongues of their neighbors. Some said she cast a demon to lure the child away into the woods, to strip it out of the innocence into which it was born. How few knew that there was little innocence involved in the story from start to finish. When the story finally firmed in the collective town conscious, it went as thus.
Fifteen years prior, the childless couple had approached the hill witch for fertility assistance. This part was met with apprehension on the part of the townsfolk who were not ready to admit that they were not alone in this endeavor. It followed that the hill witch had promised them a child, indeed, but was so jealous of their love and beauty that she had cursed it, doomed it to die even before it was conceived. In the herbs she had given them lay a damnation that stemmed from the very evil of her heart, the one that knew it could never watch such a child bloom into loveliness and success.
The townsfolk were enraged with this turn of events, and the rage swept over them like a tide, uniting once separated grains of sand. A mob with no head cannot reason, and for a while, the rage simmered. It had no outlet. Nobody could prove the hill witch had done a thing, including aid in conceiving the child, but nobody too could stand the atrocity of something so beautiful so senselessly destroyed.
I too, did not sit easy with the occurrence. I could not imagine who had done such a thing, and I spent my days now under the apple tree turning over the events I knew had occurred. When I approached the hill witch directly and questioned her, she said only that it was not her doing. She claimed ignorance of the goings on of the tragedy, but she said all would surely be revealed in time. I thought about asking Enoch and Orion for assistance, but they were rarely in the house anymore. I could feel them getting antsy with the rumors that were floating around, with the rage of the townsfolk. None of us had called her mother, but that in no way changed the way we truly felt about the hill witch. She had protected us from the savagery of the forest when we were infants, and now, there were forces turning against her that were stronger than she could handle.
It began small, really, but the signals were clear even then. The cat had only been dead for a few hours before it was left on the doorstep of our house; someone had twisted its legs to mimic what had happened to the child, and the sight of it sickened me to my stomach. Someone knew we were opposed to the consumption of animals in this house, I thought with crystal clearness while I dry-heaved into our pumpkin patch. Wiping my mouth, thoughts assaulted me. Who was this monster who had mutilated the child and was now threatening to tear apart the only family I had ever known?
It was not long before the suspicion that had fallen on the hill witch as the perpetrator, if not enactor of the crime began to spread to those with who she lived, as well. It was not difficult for an outsider to see why Enoch, Orion, and I could be viewed as threats, given the unconventional way in which we lived. Most of the townsfolk considered us sib
lings, although none of us shared a single drop of related blood; we were siblings in name only, connected by the turnings of the moon and the hill witch we cared for so fiercely. Enoch and Orion talked to few of the townsfolk, although the girls in the town were often found lingering by the hill witch’s fence in hopes of a better look. Orion would sometimes give them a wink or a flower—he was ever more charming of the two and had grown up to be quite a site, towering over six feet with a rakish grin—but it was Enoch who started drawing more and more young female customers to the hill witch; we had seen many moons go by with many a love-addled girl begging her for a love charm that would surely turn his affections towards her. The hill witch warned them all that Enoch’s attentions would not turn, that he was predestined for another, but this stopped few of them from trying to coerce her. But it was all true. Enoch never softened for anyone, and only Orion and I knew the gentleness he held inside for creatures more defenseless than her.
The rumors of a teacher the child had been involved with were quickly squashed. This would have marred the child’s innocence and laid speculation on the teacher’s intentions, and so it was agreed upon without words that the teacher was interested only in the child’s education. I remained unconvinced. The morning that somebody threw a rock through the hill witch’s kitchen window, I went down to the teacher’s house, determined to find something that struck a discordant enough note in me to alert me to the truth.
