Chapter 6 Witch
Witch
Lydia Brown
In one stack of random papers, I found a note on an index card that read by Birdie Rocas, medicine woman, found in family bible.
The card was paper-clipped to a single sheet of handmade paper but there was no Bible or family name or donor attributed to it.
The writing on that handmade paper was made with a quill, but the sheet didn’t hold a medicine woman’s herbal remedy or recipe as I expected.
It was a cryptic sheet that began with the partial sentence meadow of our ancestors and ended with the fragment Made with lapis lazuli from, and there was a paragraph written in the Celtic language I couldn’t discern.
But it was the illustration of a hand with a mark on the palm that drew me in.
It was a triangle exactly like my birthmark.
Beneath it was the word KEEPER. I was puzzled.
Why would Birdie Rocas draw a picture of my palm?
I turned the page front and back looking for more about the donor while my palm began to itch.
Why was this piece of paper even in Special Collections?
In the bits that came before and after in the donated stack, Birdie Rocas wasn’t mentioned again.
I wondered where she lived or if she was alive.
And if she was, could she explain her drawing of my palm?
I made a Xeroxed copy of the index card and note, and in the coming months I worked Birdie’s name into conversations.
At the university and farmers’ markets. On field trips to pick up collections, I asked about the medicine woman.
When Jack and I bought an abandoned cottage and guesthouse in the wood that was said to be haunted, I spoke Birdie’s name at lumberyards and the café and the post office, but the witch remained an enigma.
Every weekend for the next year we worked to make our dilapidated places livable.
We replaced broken windows and rotten boards and leaky roofs.
Repointed the fireplaces, removed stains from stones, and updated wiring.
In the summer of ’78, there remained only one step to complete the transformation: to bring Jack’s framed photographs of Roan Mountain’s flaming azaleas, Mount Mitchell’s moss forest, and Mount Pisgah in the mystic gloom.
I added to the stack the photo I took of Jack standing at our bluff while an eagle with the sun on his wings hovered just out of reach. Then I waited for Jack to come home.
It was Friday, June 17, the start of summer break. The framed favorites were wrapped in old army blankets when there came a knock at the door. It was Bob MacDonald and Jen Williams from Ramsey Library. They looked grief-stricken.
I’d seen that look before.
Without preamble, Bob said, “Jack is gone,” and he reached out to keep me from sliding to the floor. He had likely labored over what to say on the drive over, drawing the short straw, asking for consensus, choosing to be direct.
“He had a heart attack at his desk, Lydia. Bout an hour ago. We called 911. They came quickly but there was nothing they could do for him. We’re so sorry for your loss,” Bob said. “We’ll take you to see him.”
The numbing grief that came was heavier than my childhood grief.
My bones were thicker at forty than when I was seventeen.
My spine less pliable. The metallic thud of my older heart was duller in my ears, and like before, color leached from the world.
After the necessary work of a funeral that I barely recollect, I left Asheville and the university because without Jack there, I no longer fit.
I went to Little Switzerland with its solitary line of shops.
I burrowed into the solitude of my haunted wood that regrettably wasn’t haunted but where memories with Jack were most vivid and the cottage was filled with his oxygen.
I washed with his Irish Spring soap. I lit cherry tobacco in a bowl for the fragrance.
I wore his flannel shirts and hung his soulful photographs on the walls that stared back at me.
Over and over, I read the compilation of Jack’s poetry I bound for his last birthday, and over and over repeated an opening line I wanted desperately to believe.
I should hope to pray like the trees, roots running deep, limbs singing above.
Those words gave me weak solace and a goal.
The truth was, I was angry with God. I believed my anger was righteous and that I had been wronged yet again.
I nurtured that burning coal of anger as though my breath depended on it.
Not the expansive view from the porch nor the cooling calm of the wood nor the skill of our joint labors gave me respite.
I roamed our cottage like a trapped animal.
I wallowed for months, sleeping days away and spending nights by the cliff looking into the void.
At the start, the phone rang and rang, then after weeks of ignoring it, the phone went silent.
Until one day the phone rang and I answered.
“Hello?” My voice sounded broken, out of practice.
“Lydia, it’s Jim Baylor in Special Collections. I hope you’re doing better.”
“I’m okay,” I lied.
“Do you have a minute to hear a proposition?”
“A proposition?”
“Yes. There is fieldwork to do in your area for Special Collections, and I could use your expertise.”
“Doing what?” I felt a pinprick of light pierce my grief. I smelled my unwashed body. My scalp itched.
“There are collections in Mitchell and Yancey counties that have been offered to us. One is compiling the unique history of Penland School of Craft. There’s the oral history, architectural renderings, maps, and publications as well as photographs and films that need preserving and documenting.
Another is the life’s work of Judge Heriot Clarkson, who founded Little Switzerland where you now reside.
Would you be willing to do fieldwork for us? ”
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday.” He said, then added gently, “October seventeenth. Jack died four months ago.”
“Oh,” I said, only mildly surprised. I thought it had been longer.
At Jim’s suggestion, I rented a workroom at the top of the stairs at the bookstore two miles from home.
It was a whitewashed room with a long porch across the back that reminded me of my family farmhouse.
The smell of coffee and the hum of voices and footsteps below were a comfort and helped me return to the land of the living. It became my healing place.
This Friday morning in May, the phone rings in my office; it’s librarian Jen Williams who stuns me. “Lydia, I found your Birdie Rocas.”
My heart skips a beat. “Where?”
“In a remote place called Baines Creek, north of Burnsville. My source says it’s hard to get to.”
“So, she’s alive?”
“He thinks so. Would you like the directions?”
The next day it’s raining, and I deliberate the wisdom of looking for a place hard to get to.
I have a convenient ploy that will help my visit make sense: an article I owe Appalachian Folklore magazine.
I called the editor last night with the idea about medicine women, and he gave me the go-ahead.
At the Diamondback Café, for lunch I eat basil tomato soup and homemade crackers and watch heavy rain turn the slanted blacktop into a scurrying river, and feel an urgency I can’t tamp down.
It’s been three years since I found that card and saw that sketch and read that name. Answers are long overdue.
I drive through hard rain into Spruce Pine with my wipers on high, and turn west across the valley, past the road to Penland, through Micaville and into Burnsville where I review Jen’s directions.
I turn north into hills and follow winding roads that climb.
The final miles are brutal and the road narrows and turns muddy, and there are switchbacks with potholes and steep drop-offs.
If I meet another vehicle, there’s no room to pass.
I lean forward over my steering wheel tense, trying to see around blind curves.
I come to a stop at the edge of a violent creek but see the road continues on the other side.
Determined, I drive onward with water up to my floorboards that threatens to float me over the edge.
Thankfully my tires find purchase and I round the curve into a clearing.
Here unpainted buildings stand as sentinels to guard a virgin forest. The secluded settlement carries few signs of the modern world.
I step out of my Jeep into the wet chill that is Baines Creek at the end of May.
My watch reads two-thirty but it feels like evening because of looming mountain walls and low clouds soggy as cotton balls.
The small church on the hillside is marked by a cross of two-by-fours.
The Rusty Nickel is closed, but through dirty windows I see mostly bare shelves.
There are the charred remains of a house beside a square building that could be a school.
Lastly is a two-story house that leans to the left, with a faded, hand-lettered sign that proclaims rooms to let.
There’s not a lick of paint on the buildings.
The bleached boards curl at the edges and the raised grain is raw.
This is not a pampered place.
I am forty miles from home yet I have arrived somewhere outside time.
It’s 1980 but it could be 1880 except for a rusty Edsel parked in the weeds and a single power line that connects five buildings.
A curious someone in the boardinghouse peeks out the limp-curtained window.
I knock on the door and step back. The floorboards creak, but the door doesn’t open.
“Hello?” I call out. “Can you help me please?”
The door remains closed.
“My name is Lydia Brown. I’m looking for Birdie Rocas.”
Moments tick by and I wonder if I’m in the right place and I turn to leave when I hear a woman’s muffled words, “What chu wont wid’de witch?”
Relieved Birdie is known, I lean closer to the door. “I’d like to talk to her, that’s all. Can you tell me where she lives?”
I think she says up de creek. Boldly I ask, “Would you mind opening the door so I can hear you better?” and she surprises me when she does. I introduce myself again and she stands there blankly. I ask her name.
“I’m’a Jolly,” she mumbles, though there’s little that is jolly about this woman clad in a loose housedress the color of mud.
Her untrusting eyes take in my long, smooth hair parted in the middle and my bohemian dress in shades of turquoise, wrapped in a braided leather belt.
In this plain place I’m too bright. A butterfly in the land of moths.
“Ms. Jolly, I’m writing an article for Appalachian Folklore magazine about medicine women and want to include Birdie Rocas. Can you tell me where she lives?”
“She won’t talk to the likes’a you.” The corners of her mouth turn down in disdain. “She don’t take kindly to jaspers.”
“Jaspers. Oh, you mean strangers.”
She gives a quick nod.
“Could you at least point me in the right direction?” I ask.
“Won’t do no good.” Unflinching, the woman shuts the door with a soft click.
I glance around, unsure what to do next, when a tall woman comes out of the square building.
Her hair is cropped short, and she wears trousers and a man’s shirt with sleeves rolled up.
Her arms and face are covered in scratches.
She sees me and calls out. “May I help you?”
I hurry toward her, skirting mud puddles. “You certainly may.” I offer my hand. “My name is Lydia Brown, and I’m looking for Birdie Rocas. Do you know her?”
The woman is six inches taller than me, with an air of worry burdening her. Her handshake is firm, and she says, “Yes, I know Birdie.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” I say. “And you are—”
“Kate Shaw, the teacher here—at least for two more weeks.”
“Then what happens?”
“School will close for good. Come fall, students will go to county schools. We got the news last night.”
“They didn’t tell you sooner?”
Kate shakes her head and says, “No, and I think we’re in a pickle. I take an easier view to the class day. I don’t stick to the state syllabus or tests, and that’s gonna be a problem.”
“What do you think will happen to the children?” I ask.
“They’ll feel overwhelmed and confused. I wish I could sit beside each child those first weeks and tell them it will get better if they hold on.”
“Big change is coming, isn’t it? I had a devil of a time making that drive up here, so nobody comes here by accident, do they? How will they even get to school?”
“The men from the education department say they’re gonna build a bridge over that creek.
Lay down gravel in the potholes. Shore up the shoulders.
Seems like a lotta work over one summer for a handful of children.
And why go to all that trouble? I don’t think the education department expects them to succeed, but we have to comply. ”
Kate rubs the scratches on her forearms, and they start to bleed. She dabs at the blood with a man’s cotton handkerchief.
“What happened?” I nod to her arms.
She chuckles cynically, rolls down her sleeves, and buttons the cuffs.
“Was my own foolishness. Forgot my flashlight last night and had to stumble through the dark partway to get home.” She reaches in her other pocket and pulls out a penlight.
“Won’t happen again,” she says and puts it back. “How do you know Birdie Rocas?”
“I don’t know her, but awhile back I saw a page from a journal thought to be written by her. It was at the university library in Asheville. I was hoping to talk to her about a magazine article, but she doesn’t know I’m coming. What do you suggest?”
“I go by her trailer on the walk home, but I don’t know if she’s there. You can follow if you’d like, but you’re gonna get wet and muddy.” She looks at my long dress and sandals. “You need boots and a slicker. This morning’s rain might not be over.”
“They’re in the car. Give me a minute,” I say, relieved to find someone to guide me and give me an introduction.
I hurry to my car, step into boots, and drop my sandals on the floorboard.
I hitch my long skirt higher under my belt and slip on a red hooded raincoat.
In the glove box I find my flashlight, a pen and notebook and grab a copy of the magazine to leave with Birdie.
Lastly, I bring my walking stick with its steel point for defense.
“I’m ready,” I say and follow this wounded into gray woods on a furrowed trail lined with water-laden fiddleheads. The way is steep and rocky and a fitting path to the truth I seek. I struggle to keep up.