It was my mother, and I clutched her house robe, pressed my face into it, inhaled her sharp oaky scent. “There was an old woman,” I moaned into her clothes.
She ripped me away, bent down, saw the guitar string I was still clutching in my fist. “This isn’t a toy,” she snapped, pulling the string from my hand.
From the parlor came a creak like rusty wheels, and the string slipped out of my mother’s grasp.
She sighed. “Throw that away and go to your room,” she told me.
I peel myself away from the past. That was then. I am not a child anymore.
I remember standing there, though, my heart racing, thinking there were things in this house I didn’t understand, things that maybe I didn’t want to understand. I would have to take the long way around to the staircase, too afraid to pass the parlor, too afraid at the moment even to look up from the floor. My eyes were locked on the fallen guitar string, a line that seemed to divide the past from the future, that existed somewhere in between.
* * *
Elizabeth never believed me about the old woman. I guess it isn’t a surprise that she doesn’t believe me about Julian, either.
But that old fear comes back to me now, when I think of him. The fear of what might be lurking in the shadows of this house. It is a fear hard to shake with autumn dragging daylight away sooner and sooner, night encroaching on us in the afternoon, and earlier still within the curtained, closed-up house.
Even out of the house, though, the uneasy feeling follows me. It doesn’t help that it has been raining.
A storm has blundered through town, carelessly throwing branches to and fro and driving insistently against the roof of my car. It crashed into existence just as I was making my way home from teaching, stretching the forty-odd minute drive to more than an hour as I crept through the deluge. The rain puts me in mind of myths and legends; of ghosts and witches.
All I want is to go home, but first I have to stop in Shadydale to pick up eggs and coffee. I duck into the grocery store, shaking the downpour out of my eyes as it drags my hair into a wet tangle, and grab my purchases as quickly as I can.
The cashier knows me, just as she would know anyone else who frequents this market, but she acts as if she doesn’t, politely handing me the receipt without looking directly at me. As soon as I step away, I hear her whispering with the next person in line.
I’m nearly back to the door, back out into the rain, when I stumble around two small children playing at the front of the store, waiting for their parents to finish shopping. The boy looks up at me and calls out, “Hey, Wakefield!”
I make the mistake of acknowledging him by stopping and looking down. I can feel eyes on my back from the woman who was behind me in line.
“I heard your mother’s a witch,” the boy says.
His sister nudges him and asks, “Who?”
“Agnes Wakefield.”
The girl’s eyes go wide. “Oh. I thought she was dead. But she still haunts the house.”
“No, she’s a witch. She put a curse on the house. And she eats children.”
The girl turns her eyes to me. “Is it true?”
I consider telling them to stop saying such things about my mother, who is frightening to them only because she never comes out of the house, but instead I pull my lips into a grin, though it is really more a baring of teeth. “Yes, that’s right. And if you get too close, she’ll eat you up.”
Their eyes bulge and they turn, dart away from me, behind their parents’ legs at the register. The parents glance up at me and then away again.
I pull the back of my sweater over my head and rush out into the rain, throw myself into my car, wet and dripping.
A witch. I shake my head, start the car. They are confusing the tales about Wakefield Manor with the legend of the swamp. My mother is not the Swamp Witch—that’s an old legend, passed down through the ages: a way of warning young ones to stop them from straying. Isn’t it funny how we humans have evolved? Animals seem to know instinctively, but we must tell each other stories to warn of danger. And for that reason, folktales live in the swamp, just like the water moccasins that slither through the wetlands and the bobcats that skulk in the log fern.
As the legend goes, since time immemorial, the witch has haunted the swamp, leading wanderers astray in the form of a hovering light that guides them to quicksand, where they sink into the underworld. She is always seen as a dancing flame, for the witch’s true form appears only in reflections, so terrible is it that it cannot be tolerated by the unshielded eye.
I imagine the maroons telling each other these tales by the fireside in the olden days. The house has whispered things to me—about Jonah and Clementine and Meriday’s experiences in the swamp. And a Cherokee man they met, whom they called Wind Walker. He must have told them about the Swamp Witch.
Though there were real and present dangers in the swamp, I imagine it was the witch that haunted their dreams; that made the shadows twist crookedly in the firelight of a warm summer dusk.
Perhaps Wind Walker also told them of a mysterious tribe of Cherokee that lived in an even more remote part of the swamp—a place that has never been found by anyone, a place so isolated he wasn’t even sure it was real. It was said that the cult there had broken off from the rest of the tribe long ago, had gone to the center of the swamp not in fear of the witch, but to try to conjure her. They believed she had come to return their land to them, to kill and drive out the white man; to rupture the movement of time and begin a new world for them, one that exists outside time itself.
I wonder if those children sit around with flashlights telling stories about the Witch of Wakefield Manor. What would my mother think of that? Of having herself immortalized in legend?
Though I can barely see past the wipers swishing rain from the windshield, out of the misty distance the looming outline of the house appears. It is no wonder children tell ghost stories about this place.
I may be living in one.
* * *
Once I arrive home, I am stuck inside while the rain pounds the roof. And though my mother and sister are also trapped here by the storm, we have hardly seen one another. It is such a very large house for three people that we might spend all our time in separate rooms, blocked off from one another by a labyrinth of walls, and never even know the others are there. All the doors are closed, as my mother likes to keep them; all the many doorways, in a house with too many doors, fastened tight against the dismal halls.
I fear that one day I will open a door and what I am expecting to see beyond it will be something else entirely, somewhere else, a place that isn’t in this house at all—that I will open a door and fall into the abyss of outer space. And while these are fears, they are also fantasies, for wouldn’t it be perfectly adventurous to step through a doorway and go somewhere else, somewhere wild and strange and beautiful, and never return?
In any case, it is easy for us to avoid each other, in the way family members who live together find ways to do. And when you live in a house of twenty-seven rooms and numerous winding corridors, of hidden staircases and secret circuitous halls, it is almost easier not to see each other.
But inexorably there is the collision; I find my mother in the kitchen, one of our few areas of congregation, grown irritable with wine. “Storms do nothing for my nerves,” she says by way of explanation, as if we are always needing to explain to one another why we all drink.