In the Forest of Light and Dark (8 page)

I thought as I tried not making any eye contact with her.
     As the woman continued to stare at us, her head bobbed and weaved up and down sporadically like that of a hen as she tried to get a better look at the two of us through the waxy red and white letters on the window that spelled out Maybelle’s Diner
.
    
I gazed fleetingly at the woman, and the sight of her big, black eyes popping out of her skull at me had started to unnerve me a little. That was when I began to whisper, “Mama,”
trying to get her attention across the table. But it wasn’t until the creepy woman had rapped her knuckles on the window and shouted, “You!” before pointing a bony finger at my mama, that my mama’s attention had finally been pulled away from her cell phone which she had been preoccupied with.
     My mama looked up at her and was quickly taken aback by the woman’s appearance and boorish nature. I thought I had even heard her gasp quietly before saying to me in a low tone, “
Oh
, dear…
Who is that?”
     The woman then began to make her way over to the door of the diner, and then straight up to our table. “YOU!” she shrilled once again and then she bent over our table while locking her bug-eyes firmly on my mama. “I would recognize
your
face anywhere! You’re Lyanna Barrett’s girl, aren’t you?”
     “Y-Y-Yes,” my mama managed to stammer out.
     “Why don’t you go back under whatever rock you crawled out from?” she said spitting her venom at my mama. “Why can’t you Barretts just leave our children alone!” the woman then cried, her voice ratcheting up to a scolding level.
     “I… I…” my mama began, but then her voice failed her.
     Not at all liking what was happening. I decided to step up in my mama’s corner because there was no-way I was going to let some senile, nasty bitch that was older than dirt get away with disrespecting my mama like that.
     “
What’s your problem, Lady?”
I shouted at the woman as I bolted upright from my seat. I then waited a moment for her to respond as I glanced around the room, and became aware of other people beginning to take notice at what was going on at our table.
     The harridan cocked her head now focusing her attention on me. She then stared at me as deeply as she had my mama and I watched as her face suddenly became ashen. “You’re one of them too, aren’t you?”
she asked. Then, her face slowly began turning dour like she’d just found a bloody band-aid floating in her half eaten soup. “
You’re another one of those Barretts…
WITCHES ALL OF YOU!!!”
She shouted as she pointed that bony finger of hers at the two of us. “Get out of our village. Get the
hell
out of here before you kill us all!”
     No longer willing to listen to any more of her ramblings I shouted,
“Listen, Bitch!”
and then stepped out from the booth so I could be face-to-face with her. “You’re fixin’ to catch an ass whoopin’ if you don’t watch yourself.”
     Now at this point my mama would have normally told me to hush my mouth and would have chastised me before having made me apologize to the woman for having used such words with her. But this time she had elected to just sit there wearing a frozen mask and not being able to get the words out her mouth even if she’d tried.
     “Alright, alright,” A man’s voice suddenly came booming from somewhere further back in the restaurant. Then, the voice lowered as he drew closer and said, “Let’s go now, Caroline.”
     The voice had belonged to an impressively large man with bristled salt-and-peppered stubble for a beard. He wore a tucked-in and slightly stained white T-shirt that barely covered his bulging abdomen. I watched as he gently took hold of the woman he called Caroline by her shoulders, then telling her for a second time, “Let’s go now, Caroline.” before adding, “I told you before that I wasn’t having any talk in my restaurant about witches, witchcraft, spells, curses, ghost and goblins, or whatever else that’s
got you riled up this time.”
     The woman—Caroline—turned to look up at him with those big-bug eyes. Her face contorted and locked as if she were having a stroke. She then blinked a few times before suddenly snapping out of her trance only to become agitated by the large man’s presence as he was now ushering her towards the door.
     Caroline quickly became aggressive and began to shout at him in that shrill voice of hers, “BARRETTS! BARRETTS! They’ve come to
take our children. They’ll take them back down to
Hell with the rest of them!”
     “Let’s Go!” the large man repeated, raising his voice back at her as he continued escorting Caroline assertively through the door, then back out on the sidewalk.
     “Abellona… Abellona Abbott will get you two!”  Caroline continued to yell at my mama and me from the sidewalk just out front of the diner. She then directed her anger squarely at the large man and shouted, “
Abellona will come for you too! She’ll kill all of us, and she’ll take us back to Hell with her if we don’t get rid of them.”
And the
them
was clearly directed at my mama and me as we watched through the window of our booth.
     Caroline then began to walk off just as quietly and nonchalantly as she’d appeared.
     The large man in the white T-shirt, who I had by now assumed was the cook and maybe even the owner of the diner, then came back up to our table once he had made sure that she was well on her way. He then apologized to us for the delusional woman, having came into the diner ruining our lunch. Then, asked us to pay her no mind, telling us that, Caroline Hemstock was just a harmless, old woman who was suffering from some form of Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia, or some other type of neurological disease, as he had put it. He then mentioned that Caroline could no-longer distinguish between reality and the old myths and wives tales that the village was known for. He followed that up by offering to pay for our lunch, to which my mama—finally no longer being taciturn—said, “Oh, that’s very kind of you, but it wasn’t any of your fault what happened. Your business shouldn’t suffer because of what someone else did. Besides, the old woman didn’t harm anyone, we’re just fine.” The large man then smiled warmly at me first, then at my mama before saying, “That’s very kind of you. You two ladies, be sure to let me know if you need anything else then.” He then turned around and headed back to the kitchen.
     After that, my mama promptly paid for our food and we left even though we hadn’t yet finished our meals. Neither one of us felt much like eating any longer anyways though.
     Once outside the diner I said to my mama while climbing on my bike. “
Sheesh,
what a fuckin’ bitch, right?” to which my mama just looked at me somewhat chagrined and said, “Cera,
come on now with the language. Knock it off. She’s just an old woman who’s starting to lose her mind in her later years.
Besides,
you don’t know it, but she used to be really nice a long time ago.”
     “You used to know that woman?” I asked, surely sounding shocked.
     “Caroline Hemstock was my math teacher back when I was in the eleventh grade. I didn’t recognize her at first when she’d recognized me. But after the man from the diner had called out to her by name, it dawned on me who she was.”
   
 
“WOW! What happened to her?” I quizzically asked feeling somewhat flabbergasted.
     [We began riding our bikes for home.]
     “I don’t know. Sometimes these things just happened to people when they get older.” My mama said, and I could tell that she really didn’t want to talk about it any longer, so I was just going to let things go. But then, I distinctly thought I heard her say under her breath, “Sometimes this village has a way of doing that to people.” But, when I had asked her to repeat herself my mama told me she hadn’t said anything else.
     When we got back to the house, I checked to see if the tuna I had placed on the deck for the disappearing cat was left unmolested. But, to my surprise, there it was, right where I had left it only being eaten. But it wasn’t being munched on by the white cat with orange ears that I’d found hiding out in the back of our shed. This was a completely different cat. Its fur was pitch black, and it had compellingly piercing-green eyes. Gauging from the petite size of it, I thought it might be a female which I was then later able to confirm.
   After seeing the cat I had pulled open the screen door to let myself out on the deck which caused the feline to then abruptly stop eating and look up at me. She remained completely calm at first but then let out a vociferous meow as she began to glide her way over towards me. As I crouched down beginning to pet her, she didn’t even so much as show me the slightest outward sign of being timid as I continued to gently stroke her soft fur.
     After just a few strokes she arched her back as if wanting to make greater contact with my hand, but I quickly pulled away out of reaction, fearing that she may rear up and scratch me. But then she let out anther low meow and I knew that she meant me no harm—she was just saying hello. I then sat down on the steps of the deck that lead down to the lawn so I could be close to her while I continued to pet her along her back. After a short while we became pretty acquainted with one another so she then hopped up onto me settling down into my lap, and that was when my mama came out on the deck.
     “Oh, I see you’ve found another one.” she said with a wan little smile curling up from her lips.
     “Looks like it.” I told her as I continued to caress the cat along her back down to her tail.
     “One thing we never had around here was a shortage of strays, that’s for sure.”  She then said as she sat down next to me on the deck’s steps.
     Suddenly then, without warning the black cat jumped from my lap into my mama’s, and began rubbing herself up against my mama’s chest while letting out another one of those soft purrs.
   
 
“
Hey…”
my mama said, now wearing a much brighter smile that took over her face as she began playing with the cat. “You’re certainly a friendly one, aren’t you?”
     It was at that moment. After I had noticed my mama’s spirits having been lifted by the cat that I decided to take advantage of her good mood by asking her the question that had been on my mind ever since we’d left the diner. “Hey, Mama, who is Abellona Abbott?”  I asked.
     “
Oh… Um…
She’s nobody, dear.”
My mama said as I’m sure her mind raced to come up with a way to avoid the question. She then delayed answering me even further by holding up the cat tightly against her chest while cooing at it. But finally, after seeing that I was becoming impatient, and that I wasn’t going to give up like I had with that thing in the basement, she said, “She was just some innocent, young girl, who the ignorant bastards around here called a witch for befriending an old woman who had lived in a cottage somewhere out in these woods. It was almost three hundred years ago and the people around here still talk about it like it has some relevancy.”
     It was weird hearing my mama swear. That was something she almost never did, except for when she was either really upset or angry enough to fly off the handle. It tempted me for a second to chide her about her language, like she had done with me back at the diner, but I elected not to say anything.
    “Well, I still would like to hear the story behind it.” I said beseechingly while trying my best to coax more information out of her. “I mean… If I’m going to live here I outta know its history, right?”
     “It’s…
It’s…
Really nothing, sweetheart.” She then began while shaking her head side-to-side as if deciding whether she wanted to get into it. And, as she paused to gather her thoughts, I watched as the black cat settled herself down deep into my mama’s lap as if getting ready for a long story.
     My mama, then began with, “There was this teenage girl named Abellona Abbott, who supposedly lived around these parts back in the 1730’s. She was about the same age as you are now, and apparently she had become friends with this old woman named Alcina Wilcott who had lived out in an old, rundown cabin somewhere in the forest high atop Mount Harrison. Alcina was thought of as being not all there anymore in the mind on account of her age, much like that woman at the diner, my old math teacher, Caroline Hemstock.
     “Anyway, like most of the isolated villages back then, all the uneducated people who lived here in Mt. Harrison thought of Alcina as being weird, strange… Perhaps deranged because of her senility
.
So, not having anything better to do with themselves, they spent a lot of their time gossiping about her and creating rumors about what it was she might be doing out in the forest all by herself.
     “You see, Alcina didn’t have a husband. He had died years earlier. Which
back then, was like the worst thing that could happen to you if you were a woman. Because in reality, life back then for a woman without the security a husband provided or if she wasn’t receiving any help from her community, was that she had to learn how to manage all by herself. She had to learn how to live off the land to survive that is. That meant figuring out what plants she could forage for food, or which ones were good to use as medicine, things like that. It wasn’t easy. Think about how hard life must’ve been for her with no modern technology and nobody to help her.
    “But she had managed. And, of course, the citizens of Mt. Harrison just couldn’t leave the old woman be. They thought it was bizarre. Her living out in the forest all by herself—that it wasn’t possible for a woman as old as Alcina was to still be able to do that. They thought that a woman of her age could only survive and thrive within the confines of the village. But the mere fact that she