Monstrous Affections (24 page)

— Think backwards then, dragonfly suggested. Think of the time
you were born.

Swamp witch tried but it was like trying to turn a boat in a fast-moving river. Always she was bent back to forward.

“Need help?”

Swamp witch looked up. There, standing in the middle of the
road, his hands behind his back, was the yellow-jacketed tea-drinking man. He had a half-way grin on him that salesmen got
when they wondered if maybe you were going to buy that car today
all on your own, or maybe needed a little help. He unfolded his hands
and started strolling up the way to see her.

“You were banished,” said swamp witch. “I said
begone
!”

“I went,” said the tea-drinking man. “Oh yes. I
begoned
all right.
Right through the swamp. Steered clear of your home there too. Like
you demanded.”

“Then why — ?”

“Why’m I here?” He stepped up onto the curb. He shook his head.
“Let me ask
you
a question.”

Swamp witch tried to move — to do something about this. She
didn’t want him to ask her a question particularly: didn’t think it
would go anywhere good.

“Just hypothetical,” he said.

Shut up, thought swamp witch, but her lips wouldn’t move,
plastered shut as they were by contemporaneous regret.

“Oh what,” he said, “if the town were left on its own?”

“You asked me that earlier.”

“Well think about it then. What if you’d just left it. Left it to have a
name and a place in the world. Left the folks to see the consequences
of their activities. Vulnerable you say and maybe so. But better that
than this amber bauble of a home you’ve crafted, hidden away from
the world of witches and kept for yourself. Selfish, wicked swamp
witch.”

“What — ”

The tea-drinking man leaned close. He breathed a fog of lament
her way.

“I didn’t care for it,” he said. “Tossin’ me out like that.”

Swamp witch swallowed hard. “I don’t,” she said, “feel bad about
any of that.”

He smiled. “No?”

Swamp witch stood. “No.” She stepped over the crack. Away from
the tea-drinking man. “No regrets.”

As she walked away, she heard him snicker, a sound like the
shuffling of a dirty old poker deck.

“None,” she said.

Swamp witch lied, though. To hide it, she meandered across the
parking lot of the five and dime, tears streaming down from her
eyes, feeling like her middle’d been removed with the awful regret
of it all but hiding it in the hunch of her shoulders.

It was low cowardice. For what business had it been of hers, to
take the town and curl it in the protection of her arms like she was
its Goddamned mother and not its shunned daughter?

She took a few more steps, over to the little berm at the parking
lot’s edge. Then she walked no more — falling into the sweet grass
and sucking its green, fresh smell.

“You lie,” said tea-drinking man.

She looked up. He was standing over her now, his grin wider
than ever she’d thought it could be, on one so stoked with regret.

“You are beset with it,” he said.

And then he spread his fingers, which crept wider than swamp
witch thought they could — and down they came around her, like a
cage of twig and sapling.

“Begone,” she said, but the tea-drinking man shook his head. He
didn’t have to say:
Only works if you mean it, that hex. And then, it only
works the once
.

And with that, he had her. Swamp witch fell into a pit inside her —
one with holes in the side of it, that looked ahead and back with the
same misery. She shut her eyes and did what the sad do best: fell into
a deep and honeyed sleep, where past and future mixed.

She awoke a time later, in a bad way for a couple of reasons.

First, she was in church: Reverend Balchy’s church, which was
not a good place for her or anyone.

And second, dragonfly was gone.

In the church this was a bad thing. For swamp witch knew that
Reverend Balchy had against her advice gone in with the snake
dancers’ way, turning many in his Baptist congregation from
their religion, and welcoming in their place whole families of the
Okehole corner rattlers that the Reverend used. Sitting up on the
pew, swamp witch feared for dragonfly, for there was nothing that a
corner rattler liked better than the crunch of a dragonfly’s wing.

Swamp witch called out softly, looking up to the water-stained
drop-ceiling with its flickery fluorescent tubes, the dried, cut rushes
at the blacked-out windows, the twist of serpent-spine that was
nailed up on along the One Cross’s middle piece.

She poked her toe at the floor, and snatched it back again as the
arrow-tip head of a corner rattler slashed out from the pew’s shadow.
Swamp witch wouldn’t give it a second chance. She gathered her feet
beneath her and stood on the seat-bench, so she could better see.

“
Dragonfly!
” she hissed.

There was no answer, but for the soft
chuk-a-chuk
samba of snake
tail.

That, and an irregular thump-thump — like a hammer on
plywood — coming from the hallway behind the dais.

Swamp witch squinted.

“Annabel?” she called.

“Yes’m.”

From around the top corner of the doorframe, Annabel Balchy’s
little face peered at her.

“You come on out,” said swamp witch.

Annabel frowned. “You ain’t going to transform me into nothing
Satanic, are you?”

“When have I ever done that?”

“Papa says — ”

“Papas say a lot of things,” said swamp witch. “Now come on
out.”

Annabel’s face disappeared for a moment, there were a couple
more thump-thumps, and the girl teetered into the worship hall,
atop a pair of hazelwood stilts that swamp witch thought she
recognized.

“Those your brother’s?”

Annabel thrust her chin out. “I grew into them.”

“You’re growing into more than those stilts,” said swamp witch.
Like the rest of the Balchies, Annabel was a blonde-haired specimen
of loveliness whose green eyes held a sheen of wisdom. Looking at
her, swamp witch thought her brother Tommy would no longer hold
title as the family’s number-one heartbreaker. Not in another year
or two.

“We got your dragonfly,” said Annabel, teetering over a little
slithering pond of shadow. “He brung you here, in case you didn’t
know.”

“I didn’t know,” said swamp witch. “I’m not surprised, though.
He’s a good dragonfly. Is he all right?”

“Uh huh. We got him at the house. Figured you could take care of
yourself, big old swamp witch that you are. But we didn’t think he’d
be safe among the Blessed Serpents of Eden.”

“They’re just plain corner rattlers, hon, and I’m no safer than
anyone else when one decides to bite. But thank you for protecting
dragonfly. Did he say why he brung — brought me here?”

“Figured it’d be the one place where the angel couldn’t come.”

“The angel.”

“In the yellow suit,” said Annabel. “With a vest underneath black
as all damnation.”

“Him.
Huh
. He’s no angel.”

“That’s what you say. He’s huntin’ you, and you’re a swamp
witch — ”

“ — so it follows he’s got to be an angel.” Swamp witch sighed. “I
see.”

“Papa said you’d probably be wondering why we didn’t give you
up to that angel.”

“Your papa’s a bright man,” said swamp witch. “The thought did
cross my mind.”

“Papa said to tell you he don’t like the competition,” said
Annabel.

Swamp witch laughed out loud at that one. “I believe it,” she said.
“Oh, yes.”

Laughing felt good. It may not be the antidote to regret, but it
sure helped the symptoms fine. All the same, she took a breath and
put it away.

“He sent you to see if I was dead, didn’t he?”

Annabel looked down and shook off a rattler that was spiralling
up toward her heel. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, a little ashamedly. “But
he said you might not be. If, I mean, you was righteous.”

“So I’m righteous then?”

Annabel crooked her head like she was thinking about it.

“I expect,” she said. “Yeah, good chance you are.”

“All right,” said swamp witch. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll take no
more chances. You still got that spare set of bamboo stilts I know
Reverend used to use in back?” Annabel said she did, so swamp
witch held out her hand. “Think you could toss ’em my way? I’d like
to go see my dragonfly and maybe your Papa too.”

A moment later, the church hall was filled with a racket like summer’s
rain on a metal shed. Swamp witch was making her escape, and that
pleased the corner rattlers not at all.

Swamp witch dropped the two stilts by the Reverend’s porch
and went in for her meeting. The porch was screened in and the
Reverend was there, sitting on an old ratty recliner covered in
plastic. Dragonfly was sitting quiet on the table beside him, in a big
pickle jar with a lid someone had jammed nails through, just twice.
Reverend looked as smug as he could manage, his face stiffened
like it was with all the rattler venom.

Swamp witch understood there were days he’d been different:
all stoked with holy-roller fire, straight-backed with a level gaze
that could melt swamp witch where she stood. That was before he’d
found the serpent spittle, before swamp witch had found her own
calling.

Did
he
have any regrets? she wondered. Maybe taking the snake
tooth into his arm, letting it course through him ’til he couldn’t even
sit up on his own? Raising his young by nought but telepathy and
bad example?

Did he regret any of it? She thought that he didn’t.

“Papa says you look like hell,” said Annabel.

“Thank you, Reverend. You are as ever a font of manly
righteousness.”

Reverend lifted his hand an inch off the armrest, and his lips
struggled to make an “o.”

“Papa’s cross with you,” said Annabel. “He called you a
temptress.”

“Well make up your mind,” said swamp witch, laughing. Then
she made serious. “We got problems here, Reverend.”

The Reverend agreed, making a farting noise with his mouth.

“This tea-drinking angel,” said swamp witch. “You reckon you
know what he’s here for?”

“You,” said Annabel.

“You answered too fast,” said swamp witch. “What’s your Papa
got to say?”

The Reverend’s hand settled back onto the arm of his chair, and
he sighed like a balloon deflating. Dragonfly’s wings slapped against
the glass of the jar.

“Angel wants Okehole.” Annabel put her head down. “All of it.”
She looked up between strands of perfect blonde hair. “Its souls.”

Swamp witch rolled her eyes. Everything was about souls to the
Reverend. Flesh to him was an inconvenience — a conveyance at best
and lately, a broken down Oldsmobile. The tea-drinking man wasn’t
an angel and he didn’t want souls. But she nodded for the Reverend
to keep going.

“He’s aiming for you,” said Annabel, “because
you
got all the
souls.”

Which was another thing that Reverend believed. This time
swamp witch would not keep quiet. “I do not have all the souls,
Reverend. You know what I done here and it’s not soul stealing.”

“Ain’t it?” said Annabel. “Puttin’ us all in a jar here — just like
your bug! Comin’ to visit each Saturday and otherwise just keepin’
us here? Ain’t that soul stealin’?”

Swamp witch sighed. “Tell me what you know about your soul-stealin’ angel.”

The Reverend sighed and coughed and his head twitched up to
look at her.

“He came by here this afternoon,” said Annabel. “Annabel —
that’s me — brought him some iced tea made like he asked. He talked
about the Garden — about the day that Eve bit that apple and brung
it to Adam. He asked me, ‘What if Adam had said to Eve:
I don’t want
your awful food; I am faithful to Jehovah, for He has said to me: “Eat not
that fruit.”
What if Adam had turned his face upward to Jehovah,
and said:
I am content in this garden with Your love, and want not this
woman’s lies of knowledge and truth. She has betrayed you, O Lord, not I.
Not I.
If that happened, would you sustain on serpent venom? Would
she
be the keeper of your town’s souls?’” Annabel nodded and looked
right at swamp witch. “By ‘she’ I took him to mean you. That’s what
Papa says.”

“So what did you say to that, I wonder?” said swamp witch.

The Reverend’s lips twitched, and Annabel hollered:

“Begone!” The Reverend’s eyes lit up then as his little girl spoke
his word. “I am not some shallow
parishioner
, some
Sunday-school
dropout
, some holiday churchgoer — oh no, the venom as you call it
is holy, the blood of the prickly one and I am His vessel! Begone! Git
now!”

“Your faith saved you,” said swamp witch drily.

“Papa ain’t finished,” scolded Annabel. “He says the tea-drinking
man got all huffy then. He was calm up ’til then and suddenly his
face got all red. The rims of his eyes got darker red, like they was
bleedin’, and the lines of his gums got the same colour as that. And
his teeth seemed to go all long and snaggly with broke ends. And he
said to my Papa:

“‘
You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t tell me nothin’. This town will
weep for me, like it wept for her
.’”

“Her being me,” said swamp witch.

“Ex-actly,” said Annabel.

“So how’d you best him?” asked swamp witch.

“Didn’t,” said Annabel. And the Reverend grinned then. “Just
agreed to keep you occupied. ’Til the tea-drinkin’ angel were ready
to finish you off.”

The Reverend’s hand rose up then, and fell upon the jar. His
fingers covered the two air-holes in the lid. Dragonfly fluttered at
that, then calmed down — no sense in wasting oxygen.

Swamp witch reached for the jar. But the Reverend found the
rattler’s quickness in his elbow and snatched it away so fast dragonfly
banged his head on the side and fell unconscious.