Chapter 8
I’m halfway across the backyard, feet buried up to my calves in grass that needs to be mowed, before the door slams shut behind me. The tightness of guilt catches in my throat. I’ve had it drilled into me since preschool to honor my father and mother, and I am acutely aware that walking out on my mom when she’s lying both to me and to herself does not comply with my childhood Sunday School lessons.
It’s not that I don’t understand my mom. She’s never been able to stand up for me or for Shelby or for herself. Made in her image, I wasn’t able to stand up for myself until a few years ago. I know how hard it can be. I do.
How can I fault her? I stayed with Quent out of hope for saving my marriage, and I did it for another six months after I had discovered he’d been responsible for our little girl being exposed to awful stuff on his personal computer at home. Not out of any malicious intent on his part to expose her, but more out of arrogance and carelessness.
I was over forty years old and had the help of the Dragon Hart Grand Coven, all its Elders, and a unique prophet named Lady Zephyr before I could stand up for myself. I’d started over, and I’d found a lot of happiness for me and for my family, with plenty of life’s little glitches sprinkled in. None of it had been easy, and I’d stayed with the devil I knew until staying with him scared me more than an uncertain future.
Sometimes I do wonder how much of life I missed out on simply because I followed my childhood teachings of being selfless. “Selfless” had meant not taking care of myself. It had meant allowing myself to be manipulated by takers. But I’ve turned my life around, and I’ve come into my own. Not that life is perfect now, but in general, I don’t have those big things to overcome that I did up until this decade. I faced my shadows, all of them except the ones dealing with my Uncle Bobby.
But dare I hope that my mom can do the same? She’s eighty. I think maybe she’s past the point of starting over, at least voluntarily. She’s too fragile, both physically and emotionally, to make any big sweeping changes now. Of course, she can’t take responsibility for not standing up for me or for herself. She’s lived that way for eighty years. All she can do now is try to make excuses, and I feel like I should simply accept that and look the other way, but at the same time, if I’m to stand up for myself, what I really want is for her to take responsibility. I can forgive that. I can forgive everything. But what I can’t forgive is when she, to ease her own guilt, ignores the hurt that Bobby caused me and continues to cause me now.
Why did you have to bring it up? I wonder. I could have lived the rest of my life without thinking even one more time of Bobby and what happened in the swamp that night.
But maybe it’s not too late for me to clear out all the old wounds. Sometimes, no matter how deep I go in dispelling old shadows, there’s always another one hiding in the corner. I can’t imagine that there are any left other than Bobby.
I’m not eighty yet. It’s not too late for me. Unlike my mom, I won’t break into a billion pieces if I turn and face this now.
Sometimes I think there’s a relatively narrow window of time for fixing ourselves and finding peace. Most people aren’t aware of how broken they are until their astrological first Saturn return or older—around the age of twenty-eight, and usually the time that our current generation starts to think of ourselves as adults. Few people address their shadows in-depth before midlife. Then when they’re eighty, they’re usually too old to deal with re-examining old traumas, so they simply turn to regrets that never fade. I think the ideal time for most people to work through their shadows is from forty to sixty years old, while there’s still time to enjoy the peace they find, but bless the ones that start much younger! If I’d found peace at a much younger age, then maybe I would’ve found real love younger, even if it hadn’t been my sweet Jesse, and maybe I wouldn’t have misconstrued the abuse I’d grown up with as a model for real love.
I choose my steps carefully across the pasture where, in my youth, cows had grazed and horses had frolicked. The old footpath is barely discernible under the overgrown grass. As a teenager, I’d found solace in this trail. How many times had I walked the perimeter of the farm, not even knowing I was leaving my energy in a clockwise circle?
The last time I walked the land was a couple of hurricanes ago when I traced the property line with a bowl of red, white, and black ground pepper, an old powwow, or Dutch magick, trick. At each corner of this portion of the farm, I drew sigils in the air. I would’ve done it at all corners of the farm, but most of the five hundred acres was pastureland rather than timber and homestead. And swamp, now mostly dry because of the weather patterns of this century. Not much there for me to ward except “patches of land that hold the world together,” as my dad used to say. I’ve reinforced my wards from afar, the last time being around a year ago, but it’s time for a major installment of protective energy in concert with the Nature spirits.
Today I have no trifecta of pepper magick with me nor black salt nor anything else to leave an energetic residue—aka, a force field—to keep out both natural disasters and unwanted relatives. I’m at a point in my skills as a witch where I rarely use any tools except for the pure love of them. I might pick up an athame or a wand, but for years now, I’ve been able to practice my magick in my mind, with a simple thought and a smooth manifestation. All I carry with me today is my energy, and it’s still in half a rage.
I can see auras and others’ energy, but I can’t see my own. Christabel and other witches with the gift of sight tell me that it’s a violet-bluish purple that envelops me and trails behind. I can tell where my mom has wandered around the house by the pale pink fog that drifts here and there. The trail of pink energy is thicker between the side door and the mailbox. It’s not as thick between the house and the garden where she focuses on only a few small flowerbeds now instead of half an acre of mail-ordered plants that she’s nourished to full color every year. And then there’s a thinner pale trail from the side door to her car and back. I can’t explain to her how I know, but she’s almost entirely homebound now. She almost never drives. She rarely goes anywhere except her garden. And yet, since I saw her at the turn of the year, she’s led me to believe that she’s as active as I am.
There’s something she’s not telling me.
The footpath leads to a rusty fence that skirts the perimeter of the farm. It’s been rusty for as long as I can remember it. I suspect that my dad, cheapskate that he could be, never bought new fence wire but salvaged what he could find at the junkyard. As a result, livestock routinely escaped and, more recently, uninvited guests have been trespassing. The fence is rusty, but it’s still mostly intact. It’s not so much that there are breaches in the fence, but it’s more like it’s having trouble holding a shape anymore. As if the fence were made of a living breathing thing that can’t keep itself together.
As I follow the fence line away from the house, the condition of the farm’s sole barrier to trespassers only gets worse. The fence is mostly crumpled and only a few inches from the previous fence that fell down and was never removed. I could at almost any point step over both fences and into the oak dotted pasture land owned by my parent’s neighbors, the Colemans.
I shake my head. No, not the Colemans. Dixon and Virgil.
The only thing holding the newer, but still decades old, fence upright is a thick hedge of blackberries. As a little girl, I used to walk this fence row with my mommy on warm school-less days. We’d stroll together, hand-in-hand, and with me carrying an emptied and washed gallon-sized ice cream bucket. We’d pick juicy blackberries so plump that I couldn’t close my tiny fist around a single one and drop them into the plastic container. The bucket would be too heavy for me to carry home, so my mommy would carry it. Then back in the kitchen, we would wash the blackberries in the sink. Well, she would wash them and I would watch, also known as “helping.” She’d put the freshly washed berries into a large glass jar and let me sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar on top. From there, they went directly into the chest freezer where she kept packages of vegetables from the summer garden. Later in the year, after winter came, those icy, sugarcoated berries would be my treat.
My heart fills with love when I remember Mama this way—much younger than I am now. But I understand better now that those outings we took were often to spirit me away from my dad so that normal child noises wouldn’t anger him unnecessarily and cause him to strip off his belt and pursue me across the yard, always winning. It’s funny how your lens on childhood events changes as you get older. What was normal as a child takes on far more ominous tones when you realize the layers of dysfunction.
Like paint over wood rot.
I pirouette on the ball of one bare foot and stare at the old house. Mama’s health is failing, and I don’t want to admit it. Her mind as well.
But when did it get this bad?
I want to run back to her and throw my arms around her. I will. In a few minutes. Once I’ve calmed myself.
Her frailty is like the proverbial frog boiling to death in water, one degree at a time, none of us noticing the subtle but steady progression towards doom. I’ve talked to her daily for years—years!—usually very short calls, but I haven’t noticed anything concerning.
After I freshly ward the property to keep out intruders, maybe I’ll pick a few of the untouched berries on the fence row and carry a double handful of them back to Mama as a peace offering.
The afternoon sun glints off the windows of the old farmhouse. Rainbows catch in the oversized panes. Up close, the glass looks as if it’s melting, the product of a manufacturing process from a bygone era. Gravity has caused the thicker parts of the glass to appear to flow downward. And yet, the windows have never been more beautiful with their mind-blowing swirls in glass that have been there probably seventy-five years, maybe longer. The distortion in the glass is an extremely slow process, one not typically noticeable within a human lifetime. Like the frog in increasingly hot water, some things take a long, long time before you can sense the change, but not everything changes in an ugly way. Some things in life, with age, have an artistry of their own.
I frown at the trails of pale pink energy. I couldn’t see it back then, but I know in my heart that there was a time when every inch of this farm was covered in bright pink with numerous trails to town, to school, to church, and to all the neighbors and family in the area.
I squint a little harder and, for the first time, I notice other colors, other trails of energy, and they’re neither pink nor mine.
A muddy red trail leads from a spot in the backyard where guests usually park to the back door. It’s a well-worn path, but not thick. She’s had a visitor.
Other threads of energy waver in the front yard between the two huge oaks and the front door or in the backyard to the porch. Infrequent visitors. She’s been here almost entirely alone, if the energetic signatures are accurate.
Then a thick wall of blue energy appears next to the ruddy path, side-by-side with it, yet thick, heavy, well-worn from many visits. It’s a sapphire blue, the color of the electrical spark I see when I plug one of my mom’s appliances into the electrical outlet. I’ve seen blue fire like that in powerful witch circles but never here on the farm. Holding my breath, I squint harder until my eyes are almost closed.
“Come on, come on,” I whisper to the Old Gods. “Show me what I need to see.”
A path of murky energy whips past me like gas fumes on fire, from behind me to all the way from under my feet to the side door of the old farmhouse. I see the same energy in a few other places where it follows a path to the back door. The pathway spirals around the farm, stopping at the old barn door, stopping at each shed. The paths of energy leading from the main road in front of the farmhouse to the back door are old, but the stream of energy rippling under my feet, across the pasture, toward the house, and all over the farm, is still fresh.
I whirl to see where the stream of energy is coming from. It’s not one but multiple. Almost braided. The first, a deep gray so murky that it’s almost black. The second, a chartreuse green. The third, lesser but still present, is a sickly pink puce. I wasn’t always powerful enough as a witch to be able to read intention and energy, but I’ve been gifted for the last two years, and I’ve learned to base decisions on the clarity of the other person’s life force.
The three trails of nauseating energy stretch beyond the fence row and then disappear across the neighboring property, down a winding dirt road to the nearest highway. At the fence line, the trails break and roll backward. A sky-tall wall of electric blue energy rises above the crumbling, rusty fence. The same blue fire traces the fence on either side, as far across the farm perimeter as I can see. Not tall, but blocking the bad energy in the most vulnerable spots and ready to surge anywhere else that’s needed.
If I stare long enough, I can discern bits of faded black energy from the last time, maybe a year ago, that I warded the family farm from a distance, but the blue fire overpowers it. Not negatively. More like reinforces the wards I left in place and forgot to sustain with a fresh wall of protection.
When was the last time I actually walked the farm to sink my energy into it? Not just reinforce the old wards from a distance but to build entirely new ones? More than a year ago. Maybe several. Warding the farm hasn’t been a priority in a long time. It didn’t need to be. And when I’d put a restraining order against the culprits back in late January—oh, I know whose energy this is and exactly which three cousins—I’d handled the manner in a mundane way to make sure there was a public record of their trespassing, and they’d supposedly stopped bothering my mom.
Then why has someone else erected wards around my mom’s farm to keep them out?
I can think of only one person who might have that ability: the man with the clear white to bright blue aura.
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