Interlude 1751
It was spite that still animated my body as one season gradually faded into the next. The wheel of the year ever turning onward as Florence’s rage tethered me to the living world. It ate of me even as I wondered what there could have possibly been left to take.
The illness took me apart in small bits and found pleasure in that gradual decline.
It was exactly as Florence had asked, so when I woke in the night, my very blood humming with the desire to go to the tree, I was astonished.
I had thought this illness would carry on until I was a living corpse.
A stretch of desiccated skin over stinking bones.
A heart shriveled and black but pumping still because she had willed it so.
I had never imagined any sort of salvation for myself. The acceptance I spoke of with Florence would not be granted to me, and I knew it as surely as I knew my daughter’s loathing.
Even as the need grew, I went to the tree slowly. My body could not withstand the strain, and I found the need to rest and to spit the blood from my mouth frequently. I’d long forgotten any pretense of civility and spat like a man. I would carry this small, carnal pleasure with me into death.
There was no moon. I’d long lost track of its cycle. Whether it was new or simply hidden by clouds, I did not know. Yet another thing to grieve. Her cold light gave me such comfort throughout my life. It felt like a betrayal to leave this world without her pale touch on my skin.
As I passed through the final group of trees and into the clearing, I knew, somehow, that she would be waiting for me.
Florence, beneath the tree, her once lovely mouth covered in those sores I’d come to know so well.
The pain they wrought become such an intimate bedfellow, I wondered what sort of woman I was before.
If I had ever known life without that deep ache.
“I felt it would be tonight,” she said, stepping out from the shadows.
I could barely make out her face, but I could see how gaunt she had grown.
The space under her cheekbones sunken, and the sockets of her eyes hollow.
Her belly withered. She’d had the baby then.
My granddaughter. In that moment, I desperately wanted to see the child.
To hold her in my arms and bless her with what magic still lingered in my wasting bones.
Florence continued. “I wanted to be here. When you came to the tree. I wanted to see it happen.”
I bowed my head. The exhaustion of having come so far pulled me toward the earth.
“You found me a hard mother. Unyielding. Believed I foisted my beliefs upon you and then frowned in disapproval when you turned elsewhere. That I schemed to turn you from the life you so desired. The god you wished to worship. I cannot plead innocence in that. I have been fallible, and those faults are my own. Whatever anger you have for me, cast it aside. Even if for a moment. I do not want to take your hatred with me, Florence. You are a mother now. You must understand that.”
“Do not speak of my daughter.” She barked a deep, wet cough.
“Are you also afraid, Florence? That soon enough it will be your turn to come to the tree?”
She did not answer, but I saw the fear in her face. The shadow that passed over her countenance.
“I may be damned, but there is still time yet for you. To accept the darkness in yourself as well as the light. To not draw away from it. If nothing else, to try. To see your daughter grown, wouldn’t it be worth it?”
I wanted to face her, my daughter, but the tree’s pull was too great. The curse called me home, and there would be no allowance for me. Florence had made sure. I took a step toward it.
“I will not condemn my soul to hell. No matter the cost. I am no witch. I have not signed my name in the devil’s book,” she said.
“Oh, Florence. You would be so willfully blind. Even now.” I was at the tree, my hand on the bark that held the sap that gave us so much.
“You’ve seen what its magic can do. The sap and then our blood.
Yours and mine. How it brought us riches.
Plenty. Good health. But we must take the good with the bad.
You must accept it all, and only then will this illness recede. ”
“I gave it my blood, but I am no witch,” she shouted. Her voice echoed back, an endless litany of denial.
I began to climb the tree, my body hungry for its branch. I wept, the tears obscuring my vision, but I did not need to see. My body knew where to go, and I would not need to go far.
“Perhaps you will not claim it in name, but you offered it your blood in exchange for what you called justice. You carry the tree’s magic in your veins.
As do I and Hope. As did Joan. As will all our daughters.
Yours included. They will prosper even as they suffer unless you tell them what I’ve said.
They must accept all parts of themselves. The light and the dark.”
I stopped climbing, my feet steady against the branch as I stepped forward.
It extended over a shorter branch, the leaves stripped away to reveal a sharp point.
Seeing it, I felt myself let go. Whatever fear I felt vanished as I studied the branch.
With what strength I had left, I would be able to grasp the upper branch and let my body swing down and onto the lower.
This way, I would be looking at Florence.
It felt right I leave this world looking at the only thing that ever made me want to keep living in it.
When I reached the end of the lower, pointed branch, I turned to face the trunk, pressed my body flat, wrapped my arms around the bark, and then pushed myself backward until my legs dropped over the branch’s edge.
Never in my life had I contained such strength, but I knew there was an outside force making certain its end of the bargain was held.
Another push, and I swung, the final inches dropping away as my chest went over the edge and only my arms circled the upper branch.
Beneath me, Florence let out a garbled cry, and I gazed down at her, wanting to see her eyes one final time.
But she was not looking at me. Instead, she stared past me, her face stricken.
“Gideon,” she said.
Once more, my body swung, the branch rising to meet it. As it pierced my chest, the skin tearing away, my arms and chest blood slick, I watched as my daughter fell to the ground, her hand covering her mouth as her husband advanced on her.
“A pity. I had hoped there was nothing of your mother in you. That her influence had been torn out by the root.” He cocked his head as he looked at his wife.
At my daughter. “But it is not as I hoped. You are your mother’s daughter after all.
Engaged in the very practices you claimed to refuse. Marked by Satan’s finger,” he said.
The world around me grew dim, as if I observed everything beneath me from a great distance. I could not cry out. Could not tell Florence to run. Death was fast approaching, and it would allow me no voice.
“I have not—”
“I have heard all, Florence. That you have engaged in a blood ritual at this tree. That you have participated in witchcraft. There is no denying it.” He gripped her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet.
“Gideon. Please. Think of our daughter. Think of Felicity.”
“I will raise her in the way she should be. Without your poisonous influence, she will grow into a good, Christian woman.” He lifted her easily. She’d grown so thin; it couldn’t have taken much effort.
He looked on her with disgust and turned to face the tree. “You know the Bible verse as well as I do, dear wife.”
As the blood leaked from my body, he smiled.
“‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”