A witch remembers

The cabin seemed awfully empty with him gone. But he’d be back. She wondered if he realized how much she liked him. They think they’re so smart, she thought, but they never get it, even if you paint a picture for them. He looked a bit old with his grey speckled hair, but a man could get away with looking older; as soon as a woman showed a touch of grey she got left on the curb with the old newspapers. She remembered her grey-haired father, a lieutenant in the army, talking with Captain Forest at the table by the window, the sunset shining in their tumblers of whiskey. Captain Forest loved to talk when fuelled by a few whiskies. The drunken old devil would often tell stories of old battles while dad’s dinner went cold, and then dad would send her out of the room when they wanted to share a dirty joke. She liked those army days with their pretend battles and regiments passing in review. She loved the red and black of the Royal Canadians’ kilts and tartans. The military had romance in those days. She would like to have a man, now, to kiss her so long and hard it would burn down into her soul and paralyze all her feelings, and what would be the harm in that? A woman needs to be hugged twenty times a day to look young.

She sat down on her cot.

All romance had gone out of the military. The picture of the naked Vietnamese girl came to mind. Then she thought about her son, who died of pneumonia when he was just three. She wondered how old he would be if he had lived. For many years she cried through every birthday, April 11. She shouldn’t have buried him in his good, wool suit, she thought, she should have given it to another boy – so many needy little ones. And did the boy’s father come to the funeral? He didn’t even know. It served her right for having it off with a trampoline salesman. She remembered the summer when he, the first non–military man she ever talked to, came to the base to set up his trampolines. He let her jump on a trampoline in the sun and then gave her lemon gin in a paper cup. They made love in the grass. Oh, he caused her so much trouble and boy did it hurt when she found out he hadn’t told her his real name.

After her boy’s death she rode the train out to the coast, where she stayed in a rooming house until she blew up the kitchen while brewing potions from grandmother’s old recipe book. The night of the accident she slipped out quietly before the house burned down, and then acquired a house in a Vancouver suburb. She grew cold as she remembered that house. Heavy cedars sheltered it and filled the eaves with leaves. She always left the radio on in the kitchen so she would not feel alone. It was the summer of love but it rained. She collected hundreds of little blue bottles, row on row like soldiers.

All the fellas she knew then were mad, going mad, or maddening. None of them noticed her power growing. They willingly took the potions she gave them, because she told them they would get high. But she really wanted to make one of them as powerful as her, and hoped that he would stay with her, and love her. She wanted a husband, but all she did was prove that men are animals. They wolfed down her potions and their animal natures grew stronger until they turned into beasts and didn’t want to turn back into men. Each one of them ran away to the forests as a dog or wolf, bear or crow, cat or coyote.

She looked around the cabin and her gaze fell on her red backpack leaning against the wall, where she had set it down many years before.

“No where left to go,” she said.