Daughter

She came to me in the night, like so many of the spineless do.

I live on the edge of town, a little ways into the woods. Deep enough that the brats think twice about coming to bother me every single time they’re bored, which is often enough. We’re a little spit of a town days away from anything resembling civilization. All these children have is farmwork, schoolwork, fishing, and throwing pebbles at each other. And, of course, me.

They still dare each other to come into the woods, of course. I still occasionally hear them giggling out the window, daring each other further. Toss the eggs. Push over my pile of firewood. Whatever it is these ankle-biters find funny. Usually all I have to do is step outside and off they go, running and screaming back through the woods to the village to tell lies to their parents.

I know who belongs to who. I see them when I go into the village. Yes, I go into the village. No, I don’t like. I minimize it. Build up a list of things I need and go when I get desperate. I can do most things for myself, in my little hut in the woods. Not all. Fabrics. Flour. There is a marvelous man back east named Hershey who makes these chocolate bars…scrumptious. I cannot get enough. Mr. Reedy, who owns the general store, always orders an extra box and stows it away for me until I come.

This may come as a surprise, but not everyone in town fears or despises me. Some do, of course. Perhaps most, but there are those that let their fear known and those that are at least smart enough to simply keep their mouth shut and move around me without fuss. Others, though, do seem to genuinely like me. Mr. Reedy, the schoolmarm, and the woman who does the tailoring all view me as a fellow in business. Some of the townspeople greet me in the street as they do anyone else, smiling and asking after my homestead. One man, a bachelor usually camping on his little plot, is my favorite. Mr. Joseph Randolph. Not only is he pleased to see me when we cross paths, he has defended me on no less than three separate occasions, when one of the bolder, meaner sort has decided to say something. If either of us had any interest in the opposite sex I’m sure our relationship would have progressed. For now, I simply make sure his little plot regularly gives him enough gold to keep living the life of his dreams.

The children who come through the woods to harass me have dreadful parents who spit on the ground as I pass. They call me things like ‘sinner’ and ‘devil whore,’ either behind my back or directly to my face. They blame when anything goes wrong. Two years ago cholera crept into the town and they almost formed a mob to burn my house down. Never mind that I’m the reason it only killed two before ‘mysteriously’ vanishing. But if I tried to take credit they would just say I was a devil trying to steal grace from the lord or some nonsense. Honestly, it’s exhausting.

They still come. Asking for things. Asking for help. But always after dark.

The ones who are nice to me come during the day, when I’m awake and ready. They ask for reasonable things. Weather predictions. Pest control. Mr. Reedy once came to me looking for something to make him more charming to the ladies, and when I told him he was already plenty charming for the Widow Smith his eyes lit up and he paid me as though I had actually done anything more than notice way she batted her eyes at him and they were married three months later.

The other ones, the ones raising their children to hate, they come at night. In the dark. When no one can notice. Waking me from my sleep. They think I’m awake all night, communing with evil or whatever. No. I sleep like a regular person and, like, a regular person, do not enjoy getting woken up in the darkest hours by a rapping on my door.

Despite their terrible behavior, I still let them in. It’s my duty to help whoever needs it. I am definitely colder than I am to the people who visit me in the daylight. Those who come at night do not get offered tea and biscuits. And, often, those who come at night do not get what they want. And not because I hate them almost as much as they hate me. Believe me, it gives me a certain amount of pleasure when I make them leave empty handed, but I don’t refuse out of spite. I refuse because what they ask for is usually patently ridiculous.

One of the busybody church ladies, Colleen Hanover, came to me one night to ask me to make sure she got to sing the solo at the Christmas mass. When I told her that would mean changing the behavior of at least four people – the pastor who made the decision and the three women in the choir who were patently better at singing than her – she told me to do it anyway. When I reminded it her it wasn’t very Christ-like to forcibly control people’s minds and actions she threw a fit and told me I was going to hell.

Mayor Simpson asked me to make the railroad change their routes so the train came to our town. Change the minds of entire boardroom of men hundreds of miles away! I laughed so hard I’m sure they heard me in town. The only way I could keep him from starting a campaign from running me out was giving him several virility potions for free.

And of course, plenty of them come to me asking for the literal mother lode. A nugget here and there, sure, I’ve been doing it for years for Mr. Randolph without him even asking. But to change a person’s fortune so swiftly in such short a time? Unreachable.

These people do not understand witchery is a skill, and one I am not particularly good at. Maybe if they did understand they’d also understand that if I was good enough to do these things, I wouldn’t be living outside a half-functioning mining town in South Dakota.

As I said in the very beginning, she came in the night. Mrs. Jody Farmer. Young wife of Dennis Farmer, not a farmer. He was actually the butcher. A sweet man who did not stand up for me in front of those that hated me – certainly not in front of his wife – but if we were alone in his shop would give me all sorts of smiles and small talk and usually toss some free bacon into my order. Good enough.

His wife was a monster. The leader of the busybody church ladies, and the one who bullied them the hardest. Jody, of course, got the solo every year at Christmas. Jody skipped the line at Mr. Reedy’s general store and took first pick of the new linen deliveries. Jody regularly skimped on her tailoring bill, claiming mistakes only she could see. Jody hated everyone that wasn’t like her. I was just at the top of her long, long list.

It was easy to avoid her. She had a schedule that ran like precise clockwork, and as long as I went into town on Sunday I’d never have to see her sneer, hear the peaks in her voice as she stage-whispered to her friends all the things she heard I did to please the devil.

(For the record, there is a devil, but he and I don’t cross paths.)

Honestly, despite all the other hypocrites in town who spoke trash of me during the day and came in the night, I never believed I would see Jody at my doorstep. She seemed the true believer type. I truly thought if I ever happened to come across her drowning in the creek she would not take my reached-out hand in case that also counted as taking the devil’s help.

And then there she was.

~

It was raining. Her hair, usually pinned back and up, poured down the sides of her face and over her shoulders. Usually, when they came to me at night, they carried at least a dim lantern. Not Jody Farmer. Her hands were empty. She had come to me, through town, through the woods, in the dark, in the rain, without a single speck of light.

Jody said nothing.

I said nothing.

But I opened my door.

As she sat by the fire shivering, I wondered what sort of catastrophe had befallen her. Surely her world had just ended. Her husband dead. Her house burned down. A letter had arrived, some family member back east had fallen down a set of stairs or contracted consumption. Surely Jody Farmer, woman of God, would not come to me for anything less.

“Do you not have tea?” she asked.

“Not at this hour.”

She stared at me some, in that way I had seen her use with others. It did nothing to me, however, half asleep and crazed with curiosity. Eventually, she gave up.

“I have heard…whispers,” she said, looking into the fire. “Rumors.”

“From whose mouth? Your own?”

I thought she might kill me right then, the way she looked at me.

“I keep to myself in town,” I said, sitting. “But you are in my house, now, and here it is you who shall keep her tongue.”

I realized I was playing a bit of a game with her. Seeing how much of my mind she could take before she gave up on asking. While I thought I would simply die if I didn’t know what could bring her to me, I also found tormenting her the most amusement I had gotten in months.

Jody made a face like she’d swallowed a lemon whole, but stayed where she was.

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I asked sweetly.

“You know…”

I tilted my head, and made my face the absolute picture of innocence. Me? Know anything? What could I possibly know up here in my little house in the woods?

She soured further, as though the swallowed lemon were fighting back.

“Are you…a…”

I leaned forward to hear her.

Jody gave up and sighed. “A witch?”

“Ah! Yes! That.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, you’re a witch?”

“That depends. What’s a witch can do for you?”

Jody looked into the fire again. While she collected her thoughts, I tried not to wriggle. I could barely contain myself, what had brought her to my door?

“I had my son, six months ago,” she said.

That I knew. Jeremiah. A dull boy who would be a butcher like his father, if he didn’t die of typhus in a couple of years.

She had stopped talking.

“Is there something the matter?” I asked. “Is the boy ill?”

“No, no. The boy is fine,” Jody said quickly, waving an arm. “It’s me. I…I…”

I thought I understood. She was not the first woman in town to come to me after giving birth. Sometimes women fell into something that was not quite sadness. It was deeper than that. Darker. It smothered them like a blanket and they needed me to-

“He’s ruined my body! Stretch marks. Tears. The round rubber of weight in the middle that will not go away. I do not know what to do. My husband will soon stop looking at me, I am sure of it.”

I blinked at her.

“It has caused you some…physical ailment?”

She held her head up high. “I cannot continue like this.”

It was not what I had expected. Women, and sometimes men, came to me all the time for little potions and draughts to pinch the waist, take away the gray, make their husbands eyes stop wandering and look at them again like they had when they had gotten married. It was so mundane. So…so boring. It was a disappointment.

I held my tongue. Because upon mentioning her son, I had cause to remember her daughter.

~

Samantha Farmer, seven years old, at risk of becoming exactly like her mother.

When she had been younger she had been one of the children who didn’t treat me like a toad. She did not come with the group that tormented me in the evenings. She smiled at me on the street and waved, even as her mother jerked her little body deep into the folds of her dress, almost causing her to tumble several times.

She came to me once, two years ago, crying and carefully cradling something in the skirts of her dress. I thought she’d hurt herself and didn’t know where else to go, but after some gentle prodding she showed me what she carried. A bluebird, bloodied, wing going off in the wrong direction.

“Stupid Colton! He threw a rock and hit it! He was laughing, they all were, they thought it was fun! But the bird is hurt, they didn’t even care! Please, please help! My mama says you do the devil’s work but there’s no one else to help! Please! Please!”

The giant sobs that came out of that tiny girl were enough to make even the trees bend in to listen. They were so big, in fact, that I couldn’t get through them, couldn’t get her to listen to me, to even hear me. Bird bones are as easy to fix as they are to break. While the girl cried and cried, I look at the bird and reminded its bones how they were supposed to be. And they listened. She only stopped crying when the bird flew away.

Without the bird, without the tears, the girl became quite shy. She looked around, as though she was going to find her mother hiding behind a tree, waiting to scold her.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she said, still sniffling.

“Better run along then, before you get in trouble.”

That was all two years ago. Did her mother find out she had come to me? Or were we all getting older, the girl more attentive, the mother more demanding?

The change was swift. She stopped smiling at me in town. Then she started scowling. Hiding her eyes. Spitting on the ground behind me, just like her mother. The schoolmarm told me in passing that she had become a right little terror, pulling other girls hair and making even the boys cry. She now followed Jody into the general store with her head held high, barely looking at all the people they were passing in line, picking out the exact pattern she wanted her mother to have made for her.

But I had seen the girl before she started paying attention. I knew who she could be, if only she had better parents.

~

“I can turn back time,” I told Jody, trying to remain aloof. “On your body. It will be like you are eighteen again. It will be like you never gave birth.”

There was a hesitancy in the woman, but I knew I had her. It was her eyes. The greed there, the hunger for what I could give. I knew, in that moment, despite all of her spitting, all of her gossiping, all of her hate, that if the Devil himself had appeared to shake her hand she would have taken it.

“There is a price.”

“I’ll pay it. We have money, so much savings, I-”

I chuckled. “Not money. Never money. For work this large, I require something more precious.”

An insult she had to take for my help. And a lie. The human body was always as desperate to be as it had been as the human mind was.

“What then?” she asked, suddenly fearful.

“Your first born.”

I could see it all play out in her face. For someone so snide she was terrible at hiding her true feelings.

“First born son?” she asked.

I, on the other hand, managed to keep the rage off my face, thank you.

“First born child,” I said. “Not Jeremiah. Samantha.”

The look on her face. Pure, radiant relief.

~

We came up with a cover story, of course. Jody just had to save face in front of the church, you understand, don’t you? I was going back east. Jody had wanted Samantha to go back east anyway, to be enrolled in a girls’ school in New York. The Dakotas was no place for a proper young woman to grow up.

I doubt many in town believed it. But if even her husband was unwilling to stand up to her about it, the rest of the town wasn’t going to do it.

Mr. Reedy gave me what was left of a box of chocolate bars, almost ten, for the ride. And me and Mr. Randolph had quite the night saying our goodbyes, drinking until our throats burned and howling at the moon. I managed to give him a bit of luck that night, luck that would take a few months to bloom. Long enough that no one would ever think that maybe that old witch in the woods could show them the mother lode, they just didn’t deserve it.

Mr. Farmer brought Samantha to the stagecoach I had hired. Jody Farmer was nowhere to be seen. Unsurprising. And easier. I didn’t want to see her again anymore than she wanted to see me.

“You be good for the school mistresses,” Mr. Farmer said. “And write plenty of letters.”

She was a little girl being doted on by her father. She should have been loving it. But all Samantha could do was watching the group of children a few feet away, sniggering behind their hands.

“Father, yes, I’m a big girl!” she said, pushing him away. “I don’t need you smothering me.”

I wish I could have told him the truth. Maybe even have taken him with us. But there’s only so many people you can save. You have to focus.

“Come along, Samantha,” I said, and ushered her into the coach.

“This is so stupid,” she said to herself, arms crossed and pouting, after we had finally gotten far enough away from town that there was nothing to look at but rocks and trees.

“She wants you to get a good education,” I said, still playing the ruse.

“She wants me out of the house.”

“What makes you think that?”

“She told me so,” Samantha said, wiping at her eye. “She wants to have the house all to herself and father and Jeremiah. She said I could visit when I’m older. But I don’t want to visit when I’m older. I’m going to go to New York and disappear.”

“Oh,” I said, keeping my voice as casual as I could. “We’re not going to New York.”

She looked at me cautiously, big eyes under bangs. “We…we’re not?”

“I wouldn’t go back east if it was the only place left. Have you ever heard of San Francisco?”

Of course the girl had heard of it. It seemed every girl and woman stuck in the middle of nowhere dreamed only of it. The sunny place out west where the ocean could take all your worries away.

“Yes…” she said carefully.

“Well, I think that’s a better place for a new start, don’t you?”

I didn’t know anything about being mother, except for three things: It was going to be hard, I was occasionally going to hate it, and I was going to do a much better job than a woman who would sell her own child for own needs.

The arguments, the tears, the fighting, the boys, the magic. As I sat there in that stagecoach bouncing on the broken dirt road I saw it all coming. I saw it all and I beckoned it to come faster. I could take it all on.

It’s my duty to help.

---