Jed's Sweet Revenge

“Wait, child, wait! I have to tell you! Trouble gonna fall!”

Startled, Thena Sainte-Colbet lifted her silver eyes and cupped a hand over them to block the intense Georgia sun. At once she spotted a wiry, ancient black woman marching quickly toward her across the scarred wood of the Dundee municipal dock.

Shrimpers and pleasure fishermen eyed the odd, energetic little woman with amusement. A faded print dress billowed about her thin body as she came to a hurried stop at the edge of the creaking planks and looked down, her face scarred deeply with lines of worry.

“You always fret about me too much, Beneba,” Thena said in mild reproach. With movements made sure and graceful from years of experience, Thena left her old cabin cruiser’s open cockpit and climbed atop the walkabout. She smiled. “I’m going to come over to St. Andrew’s and see your new dock tomorrow,” Thena added. “I’d visit today, but the pelicans ate five of my tomato plants and I want to set out some new plants this afternoon.” She glanced around the municipal docks. “Where did you leave your skiff?”

“Don’t turn the subject, child. Don’t talk to me like I’m old and crazy,” Beneba Everett said in a broken voice.

Thena’s eyes flickered with surprise. She quickly
maneuvered her way between crates of groceries and other supplies stacked on the cruiser’s creaking fore-deck and stepped over the bow railing. Beneba stuck out a scrawny hand and Thena grasped it, frowning as she did. The elderly woman wasn’t being playful. She was truly upset.

“Trouble gonna fall!” Beneba repeated. Thena knew that Beneba only slipped into the odd phrasing of the old Gullah coastal dialect when she was very upset.

“Trouble’s coming to me?” Thena asked. She shook her head. “Maybe if I lived here on the mainland. But out on the island I’m protected, Grandmother.” It didn’t matter that their skins were different colors and their families unrelated. Beneba had always been her grandmother.

“I seen it, child. Change in the wind. Trouble is comin’. Not like before, when it found you on the mainland. This time it reaches all the way to your island. I dreamed it.”

Descended from Jamaican slaves and Creek Indians, Beneba had a rich heritage of mysticism. She’d been born with a caul over her face. She spoke to ghosts. She also foretold the future, sometimes with disturbing accuracy. Thena felt a chill creep along the back of her neck.

Beneba kept holding her hand, and they sat down together on the hot pine planks. Thena tucked her loose smock between her knees and let her bare legs swing over the green water of the Atlantic.

“What kind of trouble, Grandmother?”

“I don’t know for certain. In the dream I heard a man with a voice like low thunder. A man from somewhere far away. He could hurt you and the island. I don’t know if he will. I can’t tell.”

Thena laughed to cover the trickle of fear that ran down her spine. “I’ll pepper his behind with buckshot and the dogs will chew his hide. Everyone knows that I can take care of my island and myself. Look,
Grandmother.” She pulled a wad of bills out of a pocket in her smock. “I sold four of my watercolor paintings to the tourists today. Two hundred dollars. I’m having good luck, not bad.”

Swollen rain clouds pushed in front of the July sun and shadows covered the ocean. Thena squinted toward the horizon, suddenly wishing she were back on the island that lay just out of sight. A gull screamed with a strange note that cooled her tanned skin.

“Child, I’m afraid,” Beneba warned. Her pure white hair was wound in a fat braid around her head. When she nodded in rhythm with her words, her braid nearly tumbled loose. “The signs say maybe bad luck, child. Change. The man will come and change everything. You watch out. Keep your eyes to the beaches and the coves and watch for him.”

Dark lashes the color of mahogany closed over Thena’s narrowed eyes. “No one can hurt me,” she said grimly. “When I’m on my island, I’m safe.”

The gull screamed again.

“From this man, you will not be safe,” Beneba whispered.

   “Yep, that’s what Sancia is. A haunted island, owned by a witch woman.”

“Nope.”

Jed Powers looked calmly at grizzled Farlo Briggs, who pressed a surprised, rheumy gaze on him and his answer. Farlo silently steered his fishing boat toward the green jewel of land growing larger on the horizon. Then he spoke loudly to be heard above the chug of the engine and the slap of salt water against the boat’s bow.

“Mr. Powers, you sayin’ it ain’t haunted or it ain’t owned by a witch?”

“Both.”

“How so? H. Wilkens Gregg of New damn York
used to own Sancia, but we ain’t seen or heard from him in forty years. Everybody around here figures it belongs to the witch woman, Thena Sainte-Colbet, now.”

“H. Wilkens was my grandpa. He left the island to me when he died last year.”

Jed almost smiled at the disbelieving look he got for that bit of information. Farlo’s old eyes roamed over Jed’s work-scarred hands and weathered face, faded jeans and plaid shirt.

“Son, you sure don’t look rich like a Gregg. You don’t look like New damn York, neither. And I’ll tell you another thing. Them cowboy boots ain’t right for island walkin’.”

“Reckon that’s all true.”

Farlo waited for an explanation that never came. The pungent ocean air rushed through the big windows of the boat’s canopy, and the engine grumbled beneath their feet. It was a southern July day, but the wind made it temperate.

“You ain’t much for yakkin’, are you, Mr. Powers? What you’re doin’ here ain’t none of my bizness, is it?”

“Nope.”

“You talk funny. Where you from?”

“Wyoming.”

“You ever seen the ocean before?”

“Nope.”

“Mr. Powers, you sure you want to camp on that damned island for three days? I can come back early.”

“Yup. I want to have enough time to look the place over. I don’t mean to ever come back again. I’m gonna sell it.”

“Well, if you run up on that witch woman, cross yourself and don’t look her straight in the eye, ’cause she might put a spell on you. She growed up around old Beneba Everett, and Beneba is a witch. She taught her everything she knows.”

Jed leaned in his usual posture—relaxed, but ready
for whatever came his way—against a metal support for the boat’s canopy. Standing six feet tall, he had a tough, work-honed frame without a spare ounce of fat on it. Fact and image bespoke a purposeful strength of character and body.

Now he squinted at the approaching island, and his mouth slid into a slight smile. The lawyers had told him when he inherited this godforsaken place that the official caretaker, Lewis Simmons, had died in 1950, and that his relatives had taken up squatter’s rights on Sancia ever since.

He’d give this Thena, this last squatter, a few thousand dollars so she could find herself another place to live, and she’d probably be thrilled to leave. Farlo’s beer-stained voice broke into his thoughts.