The Tree Who Was A Witch

The Witch herself related it one early summer evening when Mark was sixteen.

He felt a stirring of his hormones as she spoke in her peculiar voice.

"Horace was horrified at first. I know he had been with a lady once. I followed him into the town. But only once."

Mark laughed uncomfortably as she moved around him, continuing her narrative:

" I knew any man who would sing so persistently could be a good lover."

Mark wished to ask her what the correlation was between song and lovemaking, but he was afraid she would take offense  she often did!  and vanish before his eyes.

"And did he love you?" he asked instead.

" He made love to me. There is a distinction. Horace was too good a church-goer to love something as alien to religion as a witch. He could not resist me..."

" And that's not love?"

She twirled on one toe. "Decidedly not. Love is completely something else."

Mark blushed.. He was suddenly aware of the limitations of a young life. "And now?"

" Now I have him completely. Love is beside the point." She finished off with a long laugh, vanishing before he could ask further questions of her.

Mark had never fallen in love. Perhaps because of the statement at the end of her summer narrative:" Love is beside the point." The visioning of this fluid creature with someone so steady puzzled Mark until many years later when he had been around the world twice observing the human condition far and wide.

When she finally came for him in the winter of his twenty-first year he stood tall and said:

" I never sing. Not even in church."

Her laughter filled up the garden: " I don't care. Master Mark can be a mute. He will still succumb."

" I don't succumb," Mark protested. "I am not a victim."

He could feel her touch across his chest, although she was on the other side of the small clearing.

" No one thinks you are a victim. Perhaps I am the victim...a curse placed on me a thousand years ago to haunt this garden and try to escape through the men who walk herein."

He shook his head: " You are not a victim."

" How do you explain it then? My inability to do anything but find you out, you men. I am not a happy witch...you can see by my tree-shape. I am twisted and injured by every passing storm."

Mark suppressed a tendency to laugh.

Her eyes flashed from behind the shower of sun she was wearing: "You don't desire me?"

He said nothing.

"Perhaps Master Mark is still a virgin?"

" No!" came his angry retort before he could stop himself.

" Oh, but you've never done it with..."

" A tree?" He finished the sentence for her. "A tree who is a witch?"

" It's very novel." The golden shower twisted into a tall pillar.

"I'm sure." He thought of his grandmother who told him after an afternoon of too much sherry that all men on the estate gave in eventually. She said it drunkenly without rage or hurt.

"Even your father," she spoke slowly, letting the effect hang in the air. "Your mother did not know of it. How could she? I know only because your grandfather suffered from a bad conscience. I made him take me to meet her. A slippery encounter. She wore a cloak of stars.

Only those eyes showed clear. Terrible eyes like burnished gold..." His grandmother inserted a gentle hiccup. "I asked her why these men and none others. She said she had liked the estate.

Lived here for more than five hundred years. I think she lied.