Beatrix Makes a Mistake
Chapter 1 of The Good Witch
Beatrix sat on a tilted granite oblong in the park. The oblong leaned at an angle intended to keep homeless people from parking their asses on it, for which reason Beatrix had spread her black-skirt-clad nethers on the hot stone, legs akimbo, long petticoats brushing the greensward, black boots and candy-striped stockings joyfully absorbing the sun.
She watched people going about their day in Black Bend, city where she had lived for 50 years. It was April, but hot. The air smelled like apple blossom and fish.
Beside the post office, a cop was ticketing the driver of a black SUV. Across the plaza, a gathering of folks with backpacks and grocery bags and wheelchairs sat under the shade of the big public stage. A tall man with gray-gold hair and big cross on a leather thong joined the group, handing out water bottles and sandwiches. Beatrix watched as he answered one request for laying-on of hands, then greeted a puppy living in a canvas bag an old woman had suspended from her walker. Her name was Anice. Beatrix had known her for years.
After a while the preacher gave away the last water bottle. He sat on the grass and wiped his brow. He looked like David Bowie in his late years, Beatrix noticed, and he was wearing a t-shirt with a motto that might have been Latin but wasn’t.
While Beatrix puzzled at the insular script — it seemed to be reversed — a woman about her own age in white seersucker slacks, a matching blouse and an apple-green tee shirt bustled across the park toward the post office. Beatrix caught the flash of white just as the seersucker woman noticed Beatrix. The woman looked away as their eyes met, then looked back because Beatrix caught the eye like Captain Hook, like Winnie the Witch, like the statue of a Roman goddess come to life and staring at you out of wide black eyes.
Beatrix’s iron-gray hair, woven with feathers and a Hello Kitty barrette, tumbled to her hips. She had an aquiline nose, a wide forehead, bushy eyebrows like Gandalf’s, and full lips that seemed to be closed over a smile. She wore a black T-shirt with a picture of Johnny Rotten and layers of skirts and petticoats.
Caught staring, the seersucker woman picked up her pace. She was so agitated she collided with Anice, who was pushing her walker along from the opposite diagonal.
Anice’s walker jounced against the seersucker woman’s hip.
“Mellie just like a dollar for an ice pop,” apologized Anice. She seemed to have everything in that walker. Animals. Dog poop neatly twisted up in Family Dollar bags (she was storing it to dump in the garbage can at the corner; she was a tidy woman). Food. She half-lifted the pup out of the walker satchel. One of Anice’s eyes watched the seersucker woman and one blinked at her puppy. “Mellie likes you, I think.”
The seersucker woman froze. She dipped her hand into her bag and pulled out her change purse, hesitated, and wafted her fingers at the policeman who was just finishing up with the SUV.
She was summoning help because, up close, Anice looked exactly like what she was — an 80-year-old woman with dementia and a walker full of dogshit. The seersucker woman was thinking something like: police > social worker > nice clean assisted living facility for poor old woman.
Beatrix saw the summoning gesture and thought: police > more police > people rousted out of park + Anice tied down and drugged out of her head at the county nursing home.
Also, Anice was a fairy, and if you tie fairies down, they die.
Ponderously, because she had a bad hip, and because the tilted slab had been designed for maximum inconvenience, Beatrix stood up.
She began walking toward the seersucker woman. The woman lowered her hand long enough to stare at Beatrix and say clearly: “Get a job.”
This isn’t a White Wolf game, but it would be a fair description to say Beatrix popped presence; she grew taller, her petticoats rustled — the seersucker woman thought she heard birds somewhere — and her shadow rushed forward under the noon sky until it fell across the seersucker woman, who toppled to the ground, dropping her change purse.
Anice laughed.
The seersucker woman tried to scuttle backwards on her bum.
Forty years ago, Beatrix had been a little girl who had tea parties with squirrels and robins, entertaining them with poems she’d memorized out of a beaten-up 1920s reader. And she had once, only a couple of decades ago, cast her shadow over a man so he lay unable to move while she pulled out his teeth, one at a time, with a pair of pliers, breaking some, leaving the spikes in his gums.
Today, though she didn’t say a word, the landscape turned eclipse-dark for a second and everyone who lived in and around the park knew what was up and in another moment, they all forgot about it again.
But it was enough.
On the ground, the seersucker woman trembled. Beatrix forgave her. She held out a big beautiful hand that might have been sculpted by Daud Akhriev, but the woman whimpered away and managed to clamber to all fours, then to her feet, on her own.
Beatrix squatted down, picked up the change purse, and stood up again, using a hand on her knee to lever herself. She handed the purse to the woman.
The woman took the purse and turned around, forgetting her errand to the post office. She tottered through the sunshine. She had pissed herself, but she didn’t notice until she got back to her car, and then she didn’t know why it happened.
Beatrix felt very happy. She picked up her canvas satchel filled with books and apples and other things. She gave Anice a kiss and four quarters out of her bus fare pocket, then strode off down Market Street. After a while the sun filled her so brimful of light that she began chanting:
We were very tired, we were very merry
We had been back and forth all night on the ferry