The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning

by Audrey J. Whitson

  But that only makes Father Pat’s face darken and twist. You can see that he wants to say something, but he gains control of himself, as if he’s reminding himself that the church is closing, after all, and this is one last cross to bear.

  FLORENCE

  Daisy and two others from the local Catholic Women’s League toil the rest of the day to get the hotel in shape. They work with shirt sleeves rolled up in the cool air, careful not to disturb the body and to keep the doors and windows closed. They wash the floors and all the curtains. Change the buckets of ice around the table. Give everything a good once over.

  I’d forgotten the place is all pine inside. The floor, one of those properly sprung for dancing, when they still had bands and dances at the hotel, and it was the thing to do on a Saturday night. Everyone used to bring their children, lay them under a bench with a blanket, let them fall asleep to big band swing and old time music, dance till four in the morning and not feel tired. We used to have a twelve-piece brass band in these parts, amateur theatre every winter. That’s something else we’ve lost. The bounce in our step, the heel and toe of pure celebration. People coming together around seasons: summer weddings, harvest balls, New Year’s Eve dances, spring teas. Time was a going concern.

  ANNIE

  My father’s job in the Great War was to guide the packhorses to the front lines. The ones carrying ammunition, guns. Almost all of the horses met their deaths eventually. He said their chances of survival were worse than the common foot soldier. He went to sleep and woke to the sounds of their dying in his head. No amount of coaxing could fool them. They all followed his voice, worked for him out of raw sacrifice, the knowledge of friends facing death together. There was no other explanation for it.

  My maman told me the Canadiens were shier on the front, more polite than the Americans, not so forward as the British. She told me how my father put her finger on a big empty map of North America and guided her hand. “Ici,” he said, “up in the northwest corner.” How it was hundreds of miles from any city markers, a long flat plain. “This,” he said, “this is my land. It’s got good clay, the best for bricks. Just on the edge of town.”

  Where she was from the hills were made of clay too, but they grew wheat, oats, and orchards. Or did once.

  “What grows?” she pressed him.

  “Barley,” he said, “and cattle. Potatoes, carrots, and beets.”

  “But so far from any water, so far north?”

  “Oh, there’s water. Plenty of it. We’ll live right up against a brook and there are wells everywhere.”

  “Are there any vineyards?” she asked him.

  He laughed. “No, none of that.”

  “Or almonds?”

  “Maybe at Christmas.”

  Almond trees, she meant, she told me. The fragrance of their white buds in spring. The hills filled with yellow-skinned plums, pears, and apple orchards, beech, boxwood, and wild geranium. Fields of tomato, wheat.

  He told her they could have an apple tree if she wanted it. A pear might survive if they were careful.

  What kind of place had she agreed to come where fruit might not grow?

  When they arrived that first August, there was an apple tree already growing in the yard that gave a small, hard, stinging fruit. All seed, hardly a mouthful, that made you grimace with the tartness. “Crab apple,” my father told her. “Not fit for eating.” Yet this is what they used to make their jelly and cider.

  6

  KRISTIAN

  I come back to town on foot and hang around all day Thursday, giving the hotel a wide pass. I see an ambulance deliver the body through the front door and some women coming in and out.

  A scruffy magpie hops from tree to tree while I walk the block from the church to the hotel and the schoolyard and back again. He’s probably a baby — doesn’t even have all his head feathers yet. And then it comes to me. The nosy magpie at the meth shack. You don’t happen to have any relatives east of town? He gives a low whirring sound almost like the purr of a cat and the colour of sadness, a dull brown. I try to shake him then and start in the direction of the old brickyard.

  I don’t feel like eating, just thirsty, but I refuse to drink. Maybe I’ll die too, I think and that would be all right, because I’ve really screwed up this time, haven’t I?

  Andy is long gone, said he was done with the drug running business, said he was disappearing for a few weeks, maybe Vancouver, maybe Highway 101 all the way down to San Diego, as far as he could go till this whole thing blows over. This situation just weirded him out. There was no trace of her under the wheels when we checked later, but we saw her and she was dead.

  I see things different than most. I see colours around people. I see colours when I hear music. Even words, names or numbers, when I see them or hear them, have colours. The number five is the colour of mustard. The letter A is dark red. Though mostly I try to turn off that part of my brain and pretend I see and hear like everyone else.

  That’s why I like meth. Not the way it affects other people. All the altered perceptions, the distorted shapes and sounds, the vivid colours. With me it’s the opposite. Weird but not weird, if you know what I mean. Everything toned down. I still see colours but so does everyone else. I feel normal. Calm. That’s what’s got me into this trouble.

  On the road she was swathed in white light. It was swirling around her. I’ve never seen white light around anything before and it scares me. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Kelsey about any of this.

  I met Kelsey Sands at a party. She has a good light about her too, a kind of purplish red, like the fuchsia my mom used to grow on the front porch when she was alive, only stronger. Kelsey’s into all these causes: environmentalism, clean up the Tar Sands, clean up the air, the rivers. She’s smart, eh, and artistic. Says she wants to be a fashion designer once she gets her high school.

  That first night I tell her all kinds of jokes to keep her laughing. Hey, my mind goes a hundred miles a minute, sometimes I talk my face off, but if I’m amped, I can really be funny. All the connections slow down.

  She’s doing ecstasy. You should try meth, I tell her. More intense, more focused.

  The second time we go out, I bring her some crank and we make out. She really likes it. And then she gets pregnant and she won’t touch the stuff anymore or me either. I am such a loser.

  On my last round of the town, the curtains on the hotel are shut, and there is a lettered sign on the door: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, and below that a printed message that says “Annie Gallagher has passed away and the wake will be Friday, viewing during the day and service at seven at night. Funeral rites on Saturday at two o’clock. Residents should note that this may be the last funeral held in St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Majestic as the church is closing. Everyone is welcome.”

  KELSEY

  When I see Miss Florence waiting at the school bus stop in Majestic, the baby gives a little kick inside and I know. “What’s wrong? Where’s Annie?” I ask coming down the last step, holding my stomach with one hand and the railing with the other.

  “There’s been an accident,” Miss Florence says. But even then I know that there’s more to it.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “You’re staying with me for now,” Florence murmurs.

  “But why?”

  “We can go to Annie’s later and get a few things if you like. First, let me take you back to my kitchen and fix you a cup of tea,” she finishes cryptic-like.

  She keeps me talking by asking about school and teachers, teasing me about when I was in grade one, how I’d learned to read right away, how I loved my books. She was my teacher.

  The trees seem to reach out while we talk, the new leaves, so green, play with the light in the breeze. I am careful to walk over and around the cracks in the crumbling sidewalk that runs through the centre of Majestic and all around the grade school, all the way to Florence’s house. I resist the urge to circle the horse c
hestnut tree that guards Miss Florence’s gate with its yellow-winged seed pods, the only tree of its kind in town. I mark how the orange tiger lilies are blooming around Our Lady at the corner shrine. I walk up Miss Florence’s front path, past the statue of Mary and notice all the garden gnomes in her yard, the birdbath, the old two-seater swing, like my mom’s, only with mom’s the paint is chipped and faded. I see that one of the lilac bushes in her yard is in bloom. I mark these small details all down in my head not knowing why but knowing from the way Miss Florence avoids a direct gaze, the way she diverts my questions and a certain sadness to her voice, a faraway look, that something bad has happened.

  Miss Florence’s kitchen is done in cornflower blue, bordered in striped yellow wallpaper that is fading in places, an apple tree looking in through the back window, blossoming white. All I can think is that for such a plain person, Miss Florence has the prettiest kitchen.

  The water is on and in no time boiled, the tea steeping. She starts by saying that she has to remind me that no matter her news, I have to think of the child first. That is the way it is with mothers. She pours the tea and waits till I’ve had a sip, before she tells me about Annie.

  ANNIE

  Yes, I have scars. The second year I was at the institution, they pulled me out of the kitchen where I was scrubbing vegetables and ushered me into a room. Three people sat at the front behind a table. There was a chair facing them, set several feet back. The ward lady pointed. “Go, sit.”

  I looked at her. “Who are—?” but with a jerk of the arm she stopped me mid-sentence. I was always asking questions and always in trouble for it. She steered me to the chair and set me down. She left and I faced the panel alone. One was a lady with a fur-trimmed hat that nearly danced above her dull brown suit. I knew it for a red fox fur of the kind that the boys used to trap at home. Another was a man in a green tweed suit. The other, in a white coat, was the institution’s physician. I smiled when I saw him in the room. He did our annual check-ups and was often in and out to check on sick residents. He was a gentle man.

  I started towards him. “I’m all right, Doctor Williams, aren’t I?”

  “Just take a seat, Annie,” he said. “All in good time.”

  And I sat back down, tried to smooth the corners of my apron, the hem of my skirt.

  “That a girl. These two people have a few questions for you.”

  The lady said Good morning to me.

  “Good morning, Ma’am.”

  They had a file folder in front of them. They were passing it back and forth, reading it out loud.

  “Found sleeping in the beds of other inmates.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Both it would appear. She doesn’t discriminate.”

  “So far nothing untoward reported. Just sleeping, surely seeking comfort, the warmth of a human body,” the man in the tweed suit was saying.

  “The Superintendent feels it’s only a matter of time,” said the lady with the hat.

  I liked her hat. It reminded me of my mother’s best hat. Like throwing cares to the wind that hat, so puffed up, such flair. I had never met the Superintendent. He travelled around the school with a couple of orderlies in tow.

  “Natural urges,” agreed the doctor. “A common by-product of institutional life.”

  “Have you ever been promiscuous?” asked the lady with the hat, looking at me directly this time.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t know what the word meant.

  “‘Below average intelligence’ too it says here.”

  “Trouble in school.”

  “Teacher says she never learned how to read.”

  “Yes.”

  “The first stumbling block on the path to moral decay, gentlemen.”

  The tweed man cleared his throat. “She is very attractive, almost in a primitive way,” the man said as if he were trying out a new theory. He pronounced “primitive” as if it were a code for something.

  “Well,” the doctor looked me up and down, finding me not a child anymore, and I found myself crossing my arms over my breasts. “Perhaps, but surely. . . .”

  The lady caught him blushing. “She is very desirable, isn’t she, Doctor?” The doctor kept staring straight ahead, red-faced.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That will be all, Annie.”

  He pressed a button and the attendant came to fetch me.

  Months later they sent me to Ponoka and said I had to get my appendix out.

  But I knew it wasn’t my appendix.

  One of our neighbours, old Mrs. Granger had died of appendicitis before the doctor could get to her. She came to my grandma to get help for the pain. She was screaming, worse than a woman in labour — there was no ebb or flow, no stopping it. Nana took a willow switch and shaved off bits of bark and made a tea for her.

  “There must be a mistake,” I told the nurse in the ambulance. “I’m not sick.”

  “No, Dr. Williams is confident of it.” But she bit her lip when she said it and looked away. And when they put the restraints on me going into the operating room, just like they did every night at the training school, and the nurses held me down tighter than need be and they put the mask of ether to my face, I knew something was not right.

  7

  KRISTIAN

  When I finally get home the Old Man says to me, “Where have you been all day?”

  “None of your business,” I say.

  “As long as you live in this house, you are my business! Where were you this morning.”

  “Huff and puff and blow your house down!” I tell him. Old-red-in-the-face.

  “What you running around in the dark for, Son? I see trouble in your eyes.”

  “Leave me alone,” I say to him and make a beeline for my room.

  “The people in town talk. Don’t think I don’t know what they say. And that girl. Do you have anything to do with that girl, the one that’s pregnant?”

  “Screw off!” I slam the door in his face and lock it. Just then my phone rings. It’s been ringing all day. The Man in Black. Probably wants to know where the product is. In a ditch off the side of a highway? Dumped in an ocean? I don’t know! I keep looking at the phone and then putting it back in my pocket again. The third time I cut the ring short, turn it off, and throw it across the room.

  The old man shouts again, “And where did you get that phone? Tell me the truth!”

  “Annie Gallagher is dead,” I shout back. “Annie Gallagher is dead!” I hear a pause and then a shuffling of feet on the other side of the door, and then, nothing.

  I try to sleep but I keep dreaming of the crash on the road, the witch’s last words and my mom’s face before she died, how she was always smiling.

  By the time I surface out of my hideyhole the next morning, the sun is high in the sky and the Old Man’s truck is gone to feed the cattle. I don’t stop for anything: toilet, breakfast, or shower. I walk into town.

  At Main I see the street lined with half-ton trucks and cars of all descriptions. Like it was for Mom’s funeral. I catch a cry in my throat. Everyone said how young she was. So many hands touching me all at once, pumping my arm, punching my shoulder, ruffling my hair. Lips saying “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” over and over again, “you poor kid,” and then nothing. The long silence. Like the day was swallowed up in itself and nobody could talk about it anymore.

  I see the women walking in loose, chattering groups up the street with plates of food in their hands, and it dawns on me how hungry I am and how much I’m shaking. My body hurts in every spot. I duck into an alley, take a quick piss, search for a quiet backyard and a coiled up garden hose. I turn on the tap and try to wash my hands and face. Slap my hair into place and think about how I might slip into the hotel, how even a cup of coffee might steady me.

  ANNIE

  Every year my maman would mark the Fête des Rois with us, Epiphany, the Feast of the Three Kings. She fashioned me a gold crown from the foil of an old chocolate box. Set it on my head and I
was queen for the day. She baked a cake for me, a strange pastry really, that called for frangipane: almond paste layered between the pastry with a dry bean hidden in it. She used marzipan because it was all she could get from the local German shopkeeper and mixed it with butter and eggs to make a cream.

  “Chew carefully, ma petite,” she would say. “Regarde le fève.” Watch for the bean.

  I was always queen those first years before maman went away. Before she turned sad. Before her gardens died. Only the bean survived, whose seed she had mail-ordered all the way from Toronto, whose vines she had laboured over. Even the nuns at Victoire couldn’t master the fève.

  Nana said Maman had small orange and lemon trees growing in the windows, seeds she first husbanded from gifts, but the winter dark killed them all eventually. They miss le soleil she would say to me. They miss their maman soleil. Her seventh winter of seed ordering, she left. I was only five.

  So when the oranges came that first Christmas without her, I knew who they were from, we all knew, though we pretended not to. I tore into the box, gorged myself, ate six in an hour before Nana found me in the potato bin in the basement. The perfume of citrus on my hands, filling the air. I pushed the box towards Nana, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, wiped my hands on my dress. The juice so sweet. I would not change that dress for days. The smell of my maman.

  FLORENCE

  They begin arriving at the hotel Friday about ten o’clock — the usual time they arrive for the mail. The bell on the door rings when it opens. The men wipe their boots at the threshold, crowd in, take off their ball caps, their Stetsons. All the grain companies of the world are represented in those hats: United Grain Growers, Wheat Pool, Monsanto, Cargill, Agrium. The women follow cautiously, bearing sweets and sandwiches, straining to see into the next room. Some of them have never been beyond the mail wicket, the coffee shop and into the bar. Even the men hesitate to cross the boundary between vestibule and beer parlour today, till Jack sits himself down by Annie’s head, hat on his knee, hands crossed on the head of his cane.