Rosie Couver was a witch. I was quite sure of it. She never, ever, as far back as I can remember, left her house. She stood in those pointy glasses, her gray hair a nest, in faded house dresses, and peeked through her curtains watching us, studying us, planning, plotting. She watched our games of T.V. and cigarette tag, our dads leaving for work each morning, our moms coming and going from the market, hair appointments, and P.T.O. meetings. She watched in the early morning mist as the milkman delivered his bottles into those aluminum boxes on our doorsteps. She watched as the postman delivered our mail at noon. She watched our dusk dartings of hide and seek. But she never ventured outside. Because she was busy casting spells, concocting potions, crafting charms.
My imagination being as potent as Rosie’s witch’s brew, I figured she remained inside, locked away from the world, to conceal her dark arts in that spooky house with its cobwebs and weeds. I speculated that she’d murdered someone and iced them in her chest freezer in the garage. Maybe she tied up her three unruly sons each night to control them, although this made no sense because they were a trio of terror, skipping school, smoking cigarettes, evading the men from juvenile hall, running amok all over the neighborhood during the day. I entertained the idea that she’d poisoned her husband, Fred, except that he raised their garage door each morning with a tiresome grunt, pulled his car down their driveway, and drove off to work, I guessed, and returned each evening, never once waving, smiling, or communicating with anyone because Rosie had placed him in a trance. Each evening, he again raised their garage door, his blue workman’s shirt smeared with grease, and their garage swallowed up his car, the door descending like a stiff curtain. Witchcraft was the only logical explanation for their strangeness.
Rosie mystified and terrified me and everyone else in the neighborhood except for my mom, who worried about the woman she called, “that poor thing”. Was she a hostage, blinking secret messages through her window like on Mission Impossible? Was she some kind of carnival freak afraid to show herself in public, perhaps a retired Fat Lady or the Tattoo Woman or maybe she was a Russian spy? How, I wondered, did groceries find their way into the Couver house? What about doctors’ appointments, clothes shopping, banking, and other everyday household duties? Why, if the old battleax was a victim, did I feel a cold sensation when I passed that dreary house, an invisible force attempting to suck me into Rosie’s sinister web?
We kids even had a saying, “Rubbed out by Rosie” that explained any unusual occurrences in the neighborhood: a missing cat, an overturned garbage can, a dead bird on the sidewalk. All of it, no doubt, Rosie’s necromancy. She stood in that window, behind those curtains, every day, watching us, marking our every move. Sometimes she would shout out, “Get off that!” or “Stop that!” or “Mind your own business!” and we would run for our lives. It was as if our neighborhood was under surveillance, marked for infiltration by an ancient coven, making us all at least a little bit paranoid.
“Leave that poor woman alone,” my mother would tell me. “I’m sure she has more important things to worry about than you pesky kids.”
Then one lingering warm October day an ambulance screeched down Greenbriar Drive, lights flashing, siren blaring, past our house, and backed up the Couver’s driveway. A police car followed, pulling up and parking in the wrong direction before their somber gray house, then another official-looking vehicle appeared. My fellow neighborhood kids and I gathered on the sidewalk, humming like hornets, curious to the nth. Our moms filtered onto our front porches, aprons tied around their waists, dish towels on their shoulders, hands at their foreheads against the bright autumnal sun. Soon a second ambulance arrived, then an unmarked but official-looking car, black and somber. We waited, squirming with anticipation, like game show contestants. Finally, a stretcher sprung through the front door, men on each side, one at the foot of the gurney guiding them. We drifted closer as if a magnet was pulling us, moths to a proverbial flame. Upon the stretcher rose a sizable mound, a body, its head covered with a white sheet, and my greatest suspicions, my wild imagination proved true. Someone in that house had mysteriously died.
The corpse was loaded into the ambulance, the emergency squad dashed around completing their morbid task, and the neighborhood held its breath, processing the horror that had befallen us: murder on Greenbriar Drive. Then my miasma was broken when one of the EMTs nudged me, “Hey, kid, I forgot my flashlight inside. Be a pal and fetch it for me, will ya?”
Without a thought I sprinted to the front door, steeling myself to enter the inner sanctum, the witch’s lair, the scene of the crime. I lurched inside and found myself engulfed in the horror of their home. Except that it was perfectly lovely. The furniture looked much the same as in my house, a chintz sofa and matching side chair, a lounger, a console television with bifurcated antenna poking out of the top. The walls were lined with family portraits, inexpensive paintings of rustic landscapes, and a clock with metalwork radiating out like rays of sunshine. The room was dusted, decluttered, vacuumed, and charming, not a covenstead at all. I spotted the errant flashlight on an end table next to a copy of National Geographic magazine and a bible andpalmed it. Then I heard a muffled noise. I somehow knew it wasn’t Mr. Couver or the boys because the sound was too soft, too feathery, and none of them were home during the day. The sound floated from behind the first bedroom door, and I found myself pushing it open. I blinked to clear my mind as I stood before a large contraption, a crib, maybe, but far bigger than any I had ever seen, more like a small jail cell than a bed. From inside the chamber something stared back at me, a creature, a being, no, a human, but a distorted human, like a Picasso painting our art teacher displayed at school. The body parts were there, I thought, most of them, but they were in the wrong place as if someone had dismantled a very large, adult-sized doll and reassembled it incorrectly. The being wore a whale spout of dishwater blond hair atop its head. It was tied in pink yarn that matched its girlish pajamas. She, at least it seemed like a she, stared at me with silver dollar-sized eyes, terror in their pulsing. Then she spoke to me, but I couldn’t begin to make out her muffled, foreign language. She lurched forward, startling me, and grabbed the bars of the crib. In the space between the wooden bars, the wrinkly face of this old crone, a character in a fairy tale, seemed to implore me to free her as she rattled the slats like a maniac. I retreated and felt the doorjamb at my back. Her eyes bore through me like Buck Roger’s ray gun. She seemed to want something, but I couldn’t decipher what. I understood somehow that someone was behind those eyes, that she understood that she didn’t understand what was happening around her, the sirens, the flashing lights, the ambient voices. She pointed, grunted, shook her head, and suddenly I felt a desire to help her.
“What’re you doing in here?” a deep voice startled me from behind, and a hand pressed on my shoulder. I thought I might wet myself. A man in a white coat stepped around me and toward the girl-woman-human-creature. I held up the flashlight and darted back outside, crossing a nurse and maybe a doctor as they entered this room from The Twilight Zone. I sprinted as fast as my legs would churn, dropping the flashlight in the yard, racing home, and closed my bedroom door behind me. What I had seen, I told myself, was something no one should see, something of another dimension, something unnatural, something evil. I crawled to the far side of my bed and pressed my back to the wall under the window, huffing, gasping, my heart thumping for escape from my scrawny little chest. Then the world morphed dark. The lights flickered and died. Storm clouds seemed to envelope me even though the sun shone brilliantly outside. The walls of my room transmuted black, or I thought they did. I seemed to be in a cave or an underground tunnel. Fog began to billow from under my bed. The fish in my little aquarium went belly up. I felt cold, like I was locked in a freezer. I pulled my knees up to my chest, my arms wound around them hugging me. My teeth began to chatter, and I heard howling or chanting or the wind whistling or all of it and none of it at the same time. Thunder grumbled from my closet. Flashes of lightning streaked across the ceiling and in that instant pulse I saw Rosie’s dead arm fall from the gurney, swinging with its gold Timex watch still ticking. In another flash I saw soldiers with semi-severed arms and raw hamburger legs. Another streak flicked with a man, a pistol at his temple, then a still-developing baby hanging from a bloody coat hanger. Emaciated children, their bones poking against their skin, begging for gruel, tore through one crack of light. Another blaze showed me a cluster of protesters falling to the ground like bowling pins, police officers with battering rams and Billy clubs. A hypodermic needle slid into a constricted vein, the fist relaxing. A little black girl walked down a sidewalk, people spitting at her, denigrating her with hateful slurs. I felt a warmth spread throughout my body as these nightmares slashed across my mind, and I knew I was about to die.
As I breathed by last, hoping God would forgive me my sins, that my family would remember me fondly and pray for my soul, my mother emerged from the hallway, the ceiling light illuminating her, her serene smile sweeping away the darkness, the cold, the heat, the fog, the thunder and lightning, all of it, vanished. She patted my bed and encouraged me to join her.
“That was some pretty scary stuff, huh, Mr.?” she hugged me like she had a thousand times before, as if it was her sole reason for being. I shook my head and nuzzled under her shelter.
“Listen, Mrs. Couver passed away today. These things happen. It happens to everyone eventually, and today was her day to be called home to heaven.”
“Was she murdered?” I asked tentatively.
“Oh, heavens, no! What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. That family is so strange,” I reasoned.
“They aren’t necessarily strange, just different from us. Mysterious, yes, but no one was murdered,” she smelled like fresh bread, brushing stray hairs from her face. “It was probably a heart attack. She was apparently under a lot of stress. What none of us knew was that her sister lives with them and is very ill, apparently feebleminded, deformed, severely crippled, and quite helpless. Mrs. Couver was trying to take care of her.” My mother took me by the shoulders and looked at me with her tender green eyes, what my grandfather called her “Irish eyes”. “You saw her sister, didn’t you?” I nodded yes and felt tears welling in my eyes. “And it frightened you. Look, the world is full of ugliness, disease, hatred, war, and violence. It’s a cruel place sometimes. Your father and I try to keep it from you as much as we can, but we know that’s impossible. Our hope is that you see only slivers of the ugliness at one time, just enough that you can process it, make sense of it, learn to manage it, but not be ruined by it. If we saw all of the ugliness in the world at once, well, we wouldn’t be able to handle it. I fear we would all go mad. Does that make sense?”
I wasn’t sure, but I nodded yes because it seemed the best way to please her. She looked at me with such compassion, such concern, that I felt compelled to offer her a portion of comfort in exchange.
“Do you want to talk about what you saw?”
I did not. I wanted to forget what I had seen, this discordant person, her desperation, her confusion, the sheer terror on her mashed-up face, her horror far greater than my own. I wanted to sympathize, but I didn’t understand her plight enough. I was unable to comprehend her situation, to fathom her predicament. How could I commiserate with something I did not understand?
“What will happen to her?” I finally asked.
“I’m not sure, but apparently Mr. Couver isn’t able or willing to care for her. She will probably go to a special home, like a hospital but where people like her stay permanently. It’s so sad.”
“So, Mrs. Couver wasn’t a witch after all?” I felt my burden finally lifting.
“Oh no, silly! Quite the opposite. She seems to have devoted her life to caring for her special sister. Maybe that’s why her boys run wild, why she never came outside, why she seemed so mean. She was overwhelmed and couldn’t manage it all. And with no help…” her voice trailed off in melancholy.
“I wish we could have helped her somehow” I muttered. The scope of the situation began to settle in my brain.
“I think that’s why this is so hard on you,” she kissed my forehead as she had so many times before, like a religious ritual, “because you want to help people. That’s where being a good neighbor starts, with a kind heart.”
We sat on my bed for a few moments in silence. I could hear the house finches outside my window tweeting at each other. Ice cream truck music played in the distance. The heat of the day began to abate, the sun slanting over our house, the trees casting shadows. My mother hummed a few bars of a lovely Dionne Warwick song about the world needing love. She comingled our fingers, hers long and lean, her simple gold wedding ring pressed into my flesh. It hurt in the best possible way.
“Are you okay, now?” she smiled at me as though the universe depended upon my well-being. “Butterscotch pudding for dessert tonight, Champ.”
The next morning, I rose to a sundrenched day, dressed, and followed my nose to cinnamon French toast and sausage links. My father was at the table, the newspaper in his hand as he sipped his coffee. I looked up at the front-page headline, “Vietnam Casualties Reach New High Amidst National Unrest”. I shook my head and asked if he would pass me the comics so I could catch up with Denise the Menace before I biked to Eagle Creek Park or maybe over to Blanton’s Market for some bubble gum and baseball cards.
Excellent imagery! 👏🏻 I really enjoyed it! 🧡
Thanks so much for reading!