Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (38 page)

“Is it all right if I take him to see Poor Little Saturday?” Alexandra asked her.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she answered. “But no teasing.” And she turned her back to us and bent again over her test tubes as Thammuz nosed us out of the room.

We went down to the cellar. Alexandra lit a lamp and took me back to the corner farthest from the doors, where there was a stall. In the stall was a two-humped camel. I couldn’t help laughing as I looked at him because he grinned at Alexandra so foolishly, displaying all his huge buckteeth and blowing bubbles through them.

“She said we weren’t to tease him,” Alexandra said severely, rubbing her cheek against the preposterous splotchy hair that seemed to be coming out, leaving bald pink spots of skin on his long nose.

“But what—” I started.

“She rides him sometimes.” Alexandra held out her hand while he nuzzled against it, scratching his rubbery lips against the diamond and sapphire of her ring. “Mostly She talks to him. She says he is very wise. He goes up to Her room sometimes and they talk and talk. I can’t understand a word they say. She says it’s Hindustani and Arabic. Sometimes I can remember little bits of it, like:
iderow,
sorcabatcha,
and
anna bibed bech.
She says I can learn to speak with them when I finish learning French and Greek.”

Poor Little Saturday was rolling his eyes in delight as Alexandra scratched behind his ears. “Why is he called Poor Little Saturday?” I asked.

Alexandra spoke with a ring of pride in her voice. “I named him. She let me.”

“But why did you name him that?”

“Because he came last winter on the Saturday that was the shortest day of the year, and it rained all day so it got light later and dark earlier than it would have if it had been nice, so it really didn’t have as much of itself as it should, and I felt so sorry for it I thought maybe it would feel better if we named him after it. . . . She thought it was a nice name!” She turned on me suddenly.

“Oh, it is! It’s a fine name!” I said quickly, smiling to myself as I realized how much greater was this compassion of Alexandra’s for a day than any she might have for a human being. “How did She get him?” I asked.

“Oh, he just came.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted him so he came. From the desert.”

“He
walked
?”

“Yes. And swam part of the way. She met him at the beach and flew him here on the broomstick. You should have seen him. He was still all wet and looked so funny. She gave him hot coffee with things in it.”

“What things?”

“Oh, just things.”

Then the witch woman’s voice came from behind us. “Well, children?”

It was the first time I had seen her out of her room. Thammuz was at her right heel, the fawn at her left. The cats, Ashtaroth and Orus, had evidently stayed upstairs. “Would you like to ride Saturday?” she asked me.

Speechless, I nodded. She put her hand against the wall and a portion of it slid down into the earth so that Poor Little Saturday was free to go out. “She’s sweet, isn’t she?” the witch woman asked me, looking affectionately at the strange, bumpy-kneed, splay-footed creature. “Her grandmother was very good to me in Egypt once. Besides, I love camel’s milk.”

“But Alexandra said she was a he!” I exclaimed.

“Alexandra’s the kind of woman to whom all animals are he except cats, and all cats are she. As a matter of fact, Ashtaroth and Orus are she, but it wouldn’t make any difference to Alexandra if they weren’t. Go on out, Saturday. Come on!”

Saturday backed out, bumping her bulging knees and ankles against her stall, and stood under a live oak tree. “Down,” the witch woman said. Saturday leered at me and didn’t move. “Down,
sorcabatcha
!” the witch woman commanded, and Saturday obediently got down on her knees. I clambered up onto her, and before I had managed to get at all settled she rose with such a jerky motion that I knocked my chin against her front hump and nearly bit my tongue off. Round and round Saturday danced while I clung wildly to her front hump and the witch woman and Alexandra rolled on the ground with laughter. I felt as though I were on a very unseaworthy vessel on the high seas, and it wasn’t long before I felt violently seasick as Saturday pranced among the live oak trees, sneezing delicately.

At last the witch woman called out, “Enough!” and Saturday stopped in her traces, nearly throwing me, and knelt laboriously. “It was mean to tease you,” the witch woman said, pulling my nose gently. “You may come sit in my room with me for a while if you like.”

There was nothing I liked better than to sit in the witch woman’s room and to watch her while she studied from her books, worked out strange-looking mathematical problems, argued with the zodiac, or conducted complicated experiments with her test tubes and retorts, sometimes filling the room with sulphurous odors or flooding it with red or blue light. Only once was I afraid of her, and that was when she danced with the skeleton in the corner. She had the room flooded with a strange red glow, and I almost thought I could see the flesh covering the bones of the skeleton as they danced together like lovers. I think she had forgotten that I was sitting there, half hidden in the wing chair, because when they had finished dancing and the skeleton stood in the corner again, his bones shining and polished, devoid of any living trappings, she stood with her forehead against one of the deep red velvet curtains that covered the boarded-up windows and tears streamed down her cheeks. Then she went back to her test tubes and worked feverishly. She never alluded to the incident and neither did I.

As winter drew on she let me spend more and more time in the room. Once I gathered up courage enough to ask her about herself, but I got precious little satisfaction.

“Well, then, are you maybe one of the northerners who bought the place?”

“Let’s leave it at that, boy. We’ll say that’s who I am. Did you know that my skeleton was old Colonel Londermaine? Not so old, as a matter of fact; he was only thirty-seven when he was killed at the battle of Bunker Hill—or am I getting him confused with his great-grandfather, Rudolph Londermaine? Anyhow he was only thirty-seven, and a fine figure of a man, and Alexandra only thirty when she hung herself for love of him on the chandelier in the ballroom. Did you know that the fat man with the red mustache has been trying to cheat your father? His cow will give sour milk for seven days. Run along now and talk to Alexandra. She’s lonely.”

When the winter had turned to spring and the camellias and azaleas and Cape Jessamine had given way to the more lush blooms of early May, I kissed Alexandra for the first time, very clumsily. The next evening when I managed to get away from the chores at home and hurried out to the plantation, she gave me her sapphire and diamond ring, which she had strung for me on a narrow bit of turquoise satin.

“It will keep us both safe,” she said, “if you wear it always. And then when we’re older we can get married and you can give it back to me. Only you mustn’t let anyone see it, ever, ever, or She’d be very angry.”

I was afraid to take the ring but when I demurred Alexandra grew furious and started kicking and biting and I had to give in.

Summer was almost over before my father discovered the ring hanging about my neck. I fought like a witch boy to keep him from pulling out the narrow ribbon and seeing the ring, and indeed the ring seemed to give me added strength, and I had grown, in any case, much stronger during the winter than I had ever been in my life. But my father was still stronger than I, and he pulled it out. He looked at it in dead silence for a moment and then the storm broke. That was the famous Londermaine ring that had disappeared the night Alexandra Londermaine hung herself. That ring was worth a fortune. Where had I got it?

No one believed me when I said I had found it in the grounds near the house—I chose the grounds because I didn’t want anybody to think I had been in the house or indeed that I was able to get in. I don’t know why they didn’t believe me; it still seems quite logical to me that I might have found it buried among the ferns.

It had been a long, dull year, and the men of the town were all bored. They took me and forced me to swallow quantities of corn liquor until I didn’t know what I was saying or doing. When they had finished with me, I didn’t even manage to reach home before I was violently sick and then I was in my mother’s arms and she was weeping over me. It was morning before I was able to slip away to the plantation house. I ran pounding up the mahogany stairs to the witch woman’s room and opened the heavy sliding doors without knocking. She stood in the center of the room in her purple robe, her arms around Alexandra, who was weeping bitterly. Overnight the room had completely changed. The skeleton of Colonel Londermaine was gone, and books filled the shelves in the corner of the room that had been her laboratory. Cobwebs were everywhere, and broken glass lay on the floor; dust was inches thick on her worktable. There was no sign of Thammuz, Ashtaroth or Orus, or the fawn, but four birds were flying about her, beating their wings against her hair.

She did not look at me or in any way acknowledge my presence. Her arm about Alexandra, she led her out of the room and to the drawing room where the portrait hung. The birds followed, flying around and around them. Alexandra had stopped weeping now. Her face was very proud and pale, and if she saw me miserably trailing behind them she gave no notice. When the witch woman stood in front of the portrait the sheet fell from it. She raised her arm; there was a great cloud of smoke; the smell of sulphur filled my nostrils, and when the smoke was gone, Alexandra was gone, too. Only the portrait was there, the fourth finger of the left hand now bearing no ring. The witch woman raised her hand again and the sheet lifted itself up and covered the portrait. Then she went, with the birds, slowly back to what had once been her room, and still I tailed after, frightened as I had never been before in my life, or have been since.

She stood without moving in the center of the room for a long time. At last she turned and spoke to me.

“Well, boy, where is the ring?”

“They have it.”

“They made you drunk, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I was afraid something like this would happen when I gave Alexandra the ring. But it doesn’t matter. . . . I’m tired. . . . ” She drew her hand wearily across her forehead.

“Did I—did I tell them everything?”

“You did.”

“I—I didn’t know.”

“1 know you didn’t know, boy.”

“Do you hate me now?”

“No, boy, I don’t hate you.”

“Do you have to go away?”

“Yes.”

I bowed my head, “I’m so sorry. . . . ”

She smiled slightly. “The sands of time . . . cities crumble and rise and will crumble again and breath dies down and blows once more . . . ”

The birds flew madly about her head, pulling at her hair, calling into her ears. Downstairs we could hear a loud pounding, and then the crack of boards being pulled away from a window.

“Go, boy,” she said to me. I stood rooted, motionless, unable to move. “Go!” she commanded, giving me a mighty push so that I stumbled out of the room. They were waiting for me by the cellar doors and caught me as I climbed out. I had to stand there and watch when they came out with her. But it wasn’t the witch woman, my witch woman. It was their idea of a witch woman, someone thousands of years old, a disheveled old creature in rusty black, with long wisps of gray hair, a hooked nose, and four wiry black hairs springing out of the mole on her chin. Behind her flew the four birds, and suddenly they went up, up, into the sky, directly in the path of the sun until they were lost in its burning glare.

Two of the men stood holding her tightly, although she wasn’t struggling but standing there, very quiet, while the others searched the house, searched it in vain. Then as a group of them went down into the cellar I remembered, and by a flicker of the old light in the witch woman’s eyes I could see that she remembered, too. Poor Little Saturday had been forgotten. Out she came, prancing absurdly up the cellar steps, her rubbery lips stretched back over her gigantic teeth, her eyes bulging with terror. When she saw the witch woman, her lord and master, held captive by two dirty, insensitive men, she let out a shriek and began to kick and lunge wildly, biting, screaming with the blood-curdling, heart-rending screams that only a camel can make. One of the men fell to the ground, holding a leg in which the bone had snapped from one of Saturday’s kicks. The others scattered in terror, leaving the witch woman standing on the veranda supporting herself by clinging to one of the huge wisteria vines that curled around the columns. Saturday clambered up onto the veranda and knelt while she flung herself between the two humps. Then off they ran, Saturday still screaming, her knees knocking together, the ground shaking as she pounded along. Down from the sun plummeted the four birds and flew after them.

Up and down I danced, waving my arms, shouting wildly until Saturday and the witch woman and the birds were lost in a cloud of dust, while the man with the broken leg lay moaning on the ground beside me.

Nancy Holder’s witches fly on jets as well as brooms. Supernatural flight (also known as transvection) on a broomstick is one of the most common attributes of witches. The classic witch’s broom is a bundle of twigs or straw tied around a central pole—a
besom
or
besom broom.
From the fifteenth century on, it was thought that witches applied a magical ointment to themselves or the broomstick in order to fly. Flying, however, was a point of some contention among serious demonologists of the day. Some felt witches flew only in spirit, not in body, or that the salve contained hallucinogenic ingredients that made witches
think
they were flying.

Nowadays, thanks to J.K. Rowling, we know that flying broomsticks have come a long way—at least in fantasy. In her wizarding world there is a wide range of broomsticks—from the family-friendly reliable Bluebottle model to Harry Potter’s state-of-the-art, Quidditch-winning Firebolt. Still, even the Firebolt is a direct descendent of the medieval besom: its tail is described (in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
) as being made of “perfectly smooth, streamlined birch twigs.” In the movie version the twigs aren’t even smooth or streamlined; it looks quite besom-like.