The Tree Who Was A Witch

Horace Pendleberry had been the gardener. That much he remembered as he walked around the grounds which no longer looked familiar. Horace had kept these woods much neater.

Now they were overgrown. The pathway was difficult to find.

"Horace died three years ago," the lawyer told him. "It was a long illness that came out of nowhere. One day he was healthy; the next day he went to bed and never got up. All in all it took six months for him to succumb to whatever it was. The doctors were baffled."

Mark looked up from the carpet pattern to stare at the man relating the story.

"I am surprised my grandmother never wrote to me."

"Oh, she was far gone in her mind by then. She explained Horace's death to me by saying he had offended the garden witch."

Mark laughed outright, shocking the man behind the desk. "She would have thought so!

We all spent years tiptoeing around that witch." He realized as soon as he made the statement that it sounded as daft coming from him as coming from his grandmother. Not every one was privy to the story of the garden witch. When Mark had walked the length of the grounds yesterday he looked for her tree. Perhaps it was the overgrowth of so much else, but he could not find it where he remembered it.

"In any event, your grandmother left this all to you. To you alone,"the lawyer continued.

"The house, the lands, even the little bridge..."

"It should have gone to my parents," Mark murmured,"but the witch fixed that."

"Your parents were killed in a train wreck in Russia," the lawyer spoke in a worried voice.

"Oh yes." Mark Laughed again. "I know how my parents died, but it was the curse of the garden witch."

By now Mark was on his feet, thinking he had better leave before the man thought him ready for commitment. He put his hand out to the reluctant lawyer, shaking hard. "I will be staying in the garden house, if that is all right."

"I don't know who would complain. You are the last..." the man almost said ' survivor,' but at the last moment shaped another word,"of your immediate family."

Mark walked quickly down High Street, catching the creaky bus that took him within a mile of his grandparents' estate. As he came closer to the grounds he tried again to make out the outline of the tree he knew as a child. Again he could not recognize it there among the others.

Had some one cut it down? Perhaps Horace, thereby angering the witch? No. That would have been insanity beyond other insanities. His grandmother who pointed it out to him said it must stand forever.

Shaking off the first raindrops, Mark moved through the gates and found the path marked by rocks where he and Horace had built a small clearing for the witch. She came there to talk with them at her pleasure. Otherwise she was the tree, gnarled and itchy with the moss of Time.

Maybe she would come there again if he took the trouble to clear away brush and bramble. He felt certain of her breathing as he stood where the rocks formed a perfect circle.

Once when his cousin, Cybil, came to visit he dragged her there to listen to the sounds of the witch inhaling and exhaling. The cousin ran screaming back to her mother who pulled her away to the waiting automobile declaring Mark a troubled boy.

Cybil had just died four months previous. He saw her years before as a beautiful young woman about to be married.