Adder’s Tongue
There are three things you should know about witches.
Number one: as long as there have been human beings there have been witch beings.
Number two: witches have always been misunderstood. For most of recorded history they have been persecuted and killed, and this continues today in many parts of the world. Since the majority of those accused and convicted have been female, the hunt for witches is yet another vehicle for the persecution of women of every color by (of course) white men.
When the hateful Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, the men wasted no time launching their bigotry grenades against any women who didn’t fit their image of what a woman should be and how she should behave. This began with—surprise!—a woman of color, a slave named Tituba, but any woman who wasn’t subservient or who exhibited a modicum of individuality and independence was likely to be accused. Several men were also put to death in colonial Salem, so one can only speculate that they, too, failed to behave in a manner expected of the White Puritan Male, America’s first frat guy.
It is no longer a crime in this country to be a witch, but that’s mainly because Americans consider the notion patently absurd. Scientifically minded people look back on the witch trials and cringe at the primitive stupidity, not so much because alleged witches were killed but because the accusers actually believed that witches existed.
Which brings me to number three: witches are real. And witchcraft—the work they do, their craft—is also real.
So what is a witch?
I define a witch as someone—female, male, neither, other, both—who has the innate ability to focus on a desired outcome with such perfect clarity, intensity, and singularity that the desired outcome can materialize, provided it does not violate the natural laws of the universe. This is why a witch cannot turn a man into a goat, but a witch may very well know if a man five thousand miles away is about to be trampled by a goat. Witches may experience what we call “time” and “distance” in such ways that “time” and “distance” collapse or are circumvented. Frequently, they possess information that it does not seem possible one could have, such as knowledge of events that will occur further down the time line.
Witchcraft is not a religion. Wicca is a religion, started by Englishman and occultist Gerald Gardner in the early 1950s. Many Wiccans are witches, too, practicing some form of craft as part of their faith. Druidism is another pagan religion that incorporates witchcraft.
There are many different “styles” or “schools,” from the extremely formalized and ritualized to the improvised and spontaneous. There are those who engage in highly structured rituals, and while these are interesting and kind of cool, they aren’t necessary.
Different witches have different abilities. Some are excellent at creating shields: protecting loved ones from harm, hiding in plain sight, traveling through life without a scratch. Others are adept at causing things to happen or not happen. Which is to say, they are sculptors of matter, exerting influence—and change—over the energy we observe as matter. Still others have amazing powers of perception and reception. They might feel a devastating storm coming long before it arrives, or perhaps they know of events occurring many miles away. Witches can possess any of or all these traits in greater or lesser degrees.
Here’s a partial list of things I don’t believe in:
God
the Devil
heaven
hell
Bigfoot
ancient aliens
past lives
life after death
vampires
zombies
Reiki
homeopathy
Rolfing
reflexology
Note that “witches” and “witchcraft” are absent from this list. The thing is, I wouldn’t believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch.
This is a fact I’ve kept to myself. Even my husband didn’t know for years. Yet witchcraft has been an almost daily part of my life since I was a little boy. It was the strongest bond my mother and I had when I was young: our common power, our shared secret. She was a witch from a long line of witches and I was her second-born son—an accident—and, as she would discover eight years after my birth, also a witch. She schooled me, day after day, story after story, passing her knowledge and wisdom along to me, until her mind was quite abruptly shattered by mental illness just as I entered adolescence.
From that point, I was on my own.
* * *
I had no idea I was a witch until the day I knew something that was simply impossible for me to know—or at least impossible according to mankind’s empirical understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe. I was staring out the school bus window on my way home, the trees a blur. My seat was over the left rear wheel, the one with the hump on the floor. I concentrated on the flow of liquid leaves without a single thought in my mind. At eight, I was already accomplished at gazing into the distance while thinking nothing at all.
The bus bounced as it went over the first wooden bridge, then again as it crossed the second one, and at that moment I saw my grandmother’s forehead and her thinning hairline, and my being was suddenly occupied by the spirit of certainty. Certainty was all that I contained. This was followed by feelings of fear and anxiety.
The bus came to a stop at my house, the second house after the second bridge. I ran up our steep gravel driveway as fast as I could and rang the doorbell once, then again, then again and again until my mother opened the door, the phone pressed tight against her ear, the cord stretched taut from the kitchen wall.
“What happened to Amah?” I asked desperately. “Something very bad happened to Amah!”
My mother’s eyes widened and she lowered the phone from her ear, pressed it against her heart. She bent down. “Why do you say that? How do you know?”
“I was on the bus,” I told her, still out of breath from running. “And after we bumped over the bridges, I just knew. What happened to her?” I was frantic and on the verge of tears.
“I’m on the phone with your uncle Mercer right now. He just this minute, not thirty seconds ago, called to tell me that your grandmother has had a car accident. She’s in the hospital.”
She brought the phone back up to her ear. “Mercer, I had to open the door, I missed whatever you were saying.”
She held her index finger up to me and listened. She nodded and chewed at her thumbnail. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, then. I will. Call me as soon as you know more.”
I followed her into the kitchen, where she hung up the phone and turned around.
“She was in a car accident and her forehead was cut and she broke a rib and has a punctured lung, but they say she’s going to be okay.”
Now I was even more frightened than before. Hesitantly I asked, “Mom? How did I know?”
My mother lowered herself to one knee, wrapped her arms around me, and held me tight. Then she released me and looked into my eyes, tears glittering in the corners of hers. “You are my son. That’s how you knew.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t, either,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “Until today. I had no idea. I just—” Her voice cracked and she dabbed the underside of her wrist beneath each eye to blot the tears. “I watched and waited, but when I never saw anything out of the ordinary, I suppose I assumed you were like your brother. Well, not like your brother, because he’s very odd and distant. What I mean is, normal. Mortal.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said.
She stood and led me into the living room, and then she leaned against the arm of the sofa and patted the spot beside her for me to sit. A True Blue cigarette slid from the pack in her hand and she lit it, waving the flame out before dropping the match into the green glass ashtray on the teak side table. She inhaled and held the smoke in her lungs for a long time before letting it stream out her nose.
“Remember the witch in The Wizard of Oz?”
“The good one or the bad one?”
“Either one of them,” she replied with a dismissive wave of her hand, which caused ash to tumble from her cigarette onto the carpet.
“I like the bad one better,” I said. “She had flying monkeys, and the good one was tacky and seemed kind of dumb.”
My mother said, “Well, that’s entirely beside the point, but yes, the bad witch was actually the interesting witch and the good witch was vain and tedious, but in any case, neither one of those characters represents what witches actually look like or how they behave. A witch doesn’t wear a pointy black hat and have green skin and a long nose with a wart on it. A witch doesn’t fly through the air on a broom. She also doesn’t wear a sparkly polyester gown and float away inside a soap bubble. But that’s what people think witches are, and”—her voice lowered to almost a whisper—“they don’t think witches are real.”
“Are they real?” I asked, my voice quiet, too, like we were suddenly in a library.
My mother nodded. “Yes, they most certainly are.”
“So what do they look like?”
She took a long, deep drag from her cigarette and then blew the smoke through her pursed lips. “They look like your grandmother Amah. They look like me. They look like your uncle Mercer, though he would beg to differ. And they look like you.” She raised her eyebrows like, Get it?
I said, “I’m a witch?”
“You are.”
“Okay.” This was simultaneously the most confusing and most comforting thing anyone had ever said to me.
“And that’s how you knew something that was impossible for you to know.”
“If I’m a witch and you’re a witch and so are Amah and Mercer, where did it come from?”
My mother mashed her cigarette out into the ashtray and immediately lit another. “So, your grandmother Amah’s father—that would be your great-grandfather—was named Mercer Lafayette Ledford. Many of the Ledfords were witches, going all the way back to Lancaster, England. Lancaster was very famous for their witch trials in the early sixteen-hundreds, even earlier than ours in Salem. Of course, none of our relatives were suspected of being witches, naturally, because they were witches and could elude detection. I believe the Ledfords didn’t come to America for almost a century after the witch trials.”
Maybe if my mother were my teacher, chain-smoking her way through lectures, I wouldn’t hate history so much, I thought.
“This Gift has been passed on and on and on throughout the years,” she continued. “Of course, not everybody on that side of the family had the Gift. There’s really no telling why one sister might inherit it but her brother might not, or the only son in a family with four daughters. I imagine some did have it but didn’t even know it. Your grandmother Amah has the Gift, though she has always been somewhat troubled by it. Amah could sometimes see things that were hidden to other people or hadn’t even occurred yet. When I was a little girl, she would become so upset because of something she knew was about to happen. I think it was not what it was that upset her so much as her knowing in advance. Amah’s father had the Gift. And so did his father. Uncle Mercer is like us but it frightens him, so he pushes it away. He tries very hard not to believe something he knows perfectly well is true.”
She balanced her cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. “I knew your brother didn’t have it. There is something very different about your brother, but it’s not this. It’s not like what you have and I have, which is spread throughout my mother’s side of the family, the Ledfords. Mother always believed the Richter side had it as well. Those are my daddy’s people, and Mother always said Daddy’s daddy was a witch. But you know, even in this day and age it’s still all very hush-hush,” she said, reaching for her cigarette. “Amah’s sister, your great-aunt Curtis, is a witch, too. And she’s always been much more comfortable with who she is, and more open to talking about the history of it running through the family. Even so, it’s impossible to know for sure who was a witch and who wasn’t.”
“Is it a bad thing to be a witch?”
“Oh, no, absolutely not,” she said, blowing smoke above my head. “It’s a wondrous thing. But it’s a private thing. Sometimes when you have a special talent, you put it on display—like that girl Ji-hoon from school, and how she is such a talented violin player that she plays for people? Or if you’re a painter, maybe a gallery hangs your work up on their walls. But there are other kinds of gifts that confuse people because they are uncommon. It’s very strange and disconcerting to be able to see things that happened miles and miles away. So if you were to tell your teachers at school or a friend that you knew something happened to your grandmother before anybody told you, they would ask you how you knew.”
“And if I said ‘because I’m a witch,’ they’d think I was crazy.”
“That’s exactly right,” she confirmed.
“Because everybody knows witches aren’t real.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Except they really are real.”
She continued nodding. “Mm-hmm.”
“But you also told me Santa and the tooth fairy were real.”
“Those were lies,” she said. “But they’re lies every parent tells their children. So they’re not really lies so much as a script.”
“I slept with teeth under my pillow, so it seems like a lie to me.”
“I’m telling you the truest thing there is to tell you in the world right now.”
“Okay, I believe you.”
* * *
My mother’s tutoring set me free. Every new thing I learned seemed like I’d already known it but didn’t know I knew. Like, Oh, of course I don’t need a phone to call Charlie. My mother did this with her friends all the time, but now I understood how. I could simply visualize him standing at the wall phone in his green-and-red-plaid wallpapered kitchen, reaching his hand up, placing his index finger in the rotary dial and turning it, and then the phone on our own kitchen wall would actually ring and it would be Charlie. It happened with my friend Colleen, too, but it never worked with Bryan. My mother explained: “Nothing works on everyone one hundred percent of the time. Magick itself never works one hundred percent of the time, and some people are highly resistant to outside influence. Either they are so fully preoccupied with the ongoing static of their own thoughts and worries and to-do lists that there’s no entry point, or they’re dim-witted and their neurological system simply isn’t equipped to receive our high-energy signals and instructions.”
My mother always thought Bryan was an idiot. He kind of was, but I liked him anyway because he was brave. If I wanted to loop a rope over a thick tree branch so we could swing like apes, he was all for it, never mind the possibility of breaking our necks.
It was good to know that witchcraft wasn’t something that could ever be perfect. When a spell didn’t work, it might not be because I messed up but because the spell just didn’t work that time. Maybe it would next time or maybe it wouldn’t.
Sometimes my mother would be in the middle of something, vacuuming or painting, when she’d suddenly stop and use her toe to shut off the vacuum cleaner, or dunk her brush into the jelly glass of turpentine and wipe it on her cotton rag. “I need to get the phone,” she’d say, an instant before it rang.
“Hearing the phone ring before it actually rings is a different skill than causing it to ring,” she explained. “To trigger somebody to call you, you must visualize them so thoroughly that the visualization quite literally becomes them, or rather they move through physical time and space until they occupy your visualized image, almost like you were projecting a photograph of them against the wall and they step into position so that they line up with it perfectly. But to hear a phone ring that hasn’t yet physically rung requires the opposite of visualization: complete openness. It is a state of mind lacking any and all desire for control or even thought. A perfectly clear mind. I expect this is what you experienced when you were on the school bus and saw what happened to your grandmother. That clear, white, blank state of mind is the receptive mind. Meaning we are able to receive information—the ringing of a phone, for example—perhaps a bit earlier than an ordinary person. Having this ability to completely vacate the mind is what allows for divination, or seeing what’s just ahead. Your grandmother was particularly gifted in this area, and I expect you are as well. There isn’t only one future, you see. There are many. But as that future point in time gets closer, it’s like it begins to solidify. We try to see things while it is still possible to change them, but sometimes that’s not possible and we see things in time only to sound a warning. Not every witch is gifted in this particular area. Most people, even most witches, have a stream of thoughts running through their mind all the time. It’s very rare to possess a silent mind.”
In that moment I understood that something I had been bullied over (Hey, zombie, anybody home in there?) was in fact an essential part of me. It was not a flaw but a unique ability. It was part of the Gift.
* * *
I loved my uncle Mercer. He had loopy blonde hair and green eyes, like me, except his face was round and full, like my mother’s, while mine was pointy, like my father’s. Mercer was gentle and quiet, but something about him always made me sad, too. I guess it was a deep loneliness that I sensed and could relate to.
My bond with Uncle Mercer was special, and not solely because he sent me a folded-up twenty-dollar bill each year on my birthday. My mother told me, “He was the first person to hold you after you were born, even before I did. In fact, it was your uncle Mercer who placed you in my arms.”
Mercer lived down south in Cairo, Georgia, with Amah, in the same bedroom he had when he was a kid. He was old now, at least thirty, and he didn’t have any kind of job, though he had been in the navy, living aboard a submarine. Then something happened, and he left the navy. My mother said he had a “nervous breakdown,” so they sent him home, but they still gave him money, because he always drove a brand-new Corvette.
One year when I was little he came up for Christmas. My parents had briefly separated, and I was living in Amherst, Massachusetts, with my mother in a small apartment on the third floor of an old white multifamily house. I figured Mercer decided to visit us because he felt bad that we were on our own.
He brought me a present, and I sat on the living room rug to unwrap it. When I tore away the last piece of wrapping paper and saw the box, I was thrilled and also astonished to the bone. My mother glanced down from her position on the sofa at the photo on the box, then looked at me like, See? Finally she fixed her gaze on her brother.
I asked her, “Did you tell him?”
My mother shook her head. “I most certainly did not. He came up with this gift entirely on his own.”
“Well, that’s interesting, don’t you think?” I said to my mother.
She smiled. “Oh, very interesting indeed.”
Mercer was looking back and forth between me and my mother. He was smiling, but he looked a little worried, too, the way his eyes became kind of squinty and his pale eyebrows inched together into one. Also, he quickly bit his thumbnail, something my mother did and I also did when I was nervous. “So is it okay? Do you like it?” he asked. He plucked a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it.
“I love it,” I told him.
He looked relieved. “Well, good, good, I’m so happy. I didn’t know what to get you, and then all of a sudden I saw this at the store and thought, Well, now, there it is.”
“It’s exactly the thing I wanted,” I said.
Something in the way I emphasized that word, exactly, seemed to trigger a mild internal alarm within Uncle Mercer, and his voice became somewhat detached, almost robotic. “I’m so glad,” he said. “I’ll help you put it together.”
The large, shallow box contained a cardboard rocket that looked just like a real one, with plastic for the windows and a cockpit loaded with printed controls.
“Mom, it’s so much better!” I said excitedly.
“Well, yours has a great deal of character,” she said, “but, yes, this looks much more like the real thing.”
Now Mercer looked openly worried. “What are all y’all goin’ on about? Better than what?”
“Little brother, why don’t you come into the kitchen.”
He rested his cigarette in the ashtray and followed her.
I stayed behind to open the lid of the box, but I could hear them. “Well, what the—?” Mercer cried out.
No doubt he was looking at the crude cardboard rocket I had assembled myself out of three boxes my mother got from the trash bin behind the liquor store.
“It really is exactly what he wanted,” my mother said.
“Sister, this … it’s not normal. It’s gotta be some kind of coincidence.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mercer, you know damn well it’s not.” Her voice dropped to a deep whisper that I could hear perfectly. “He’s connected to things, too. He’s like me and Mama—and like you, if you’d only stop trying to run away from it.”
“Sister, that’s plain nonsense. You’re stirring things up the same way you always have because real, ordinary life is just too damn boring for you.”
“That may be true about ordinary life,” I heard my mother say, “which is probably why I became an artist. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that strokes, madness, genius, and witchcraft have all run through our bloodline for generations. Insisting that the earth is flat does not make it flat.”
When they returned to the living room, I already had all the cardboard pieces taken out of the box and placed on the floor. “It has a real door, Uncle Mercer. I had to lift my whole rocket up and climb in from the bottom. Plus, my rocket is square, and this one is rocket-shaped. It’s so much better, like a real one.”
Uncle Mercer grabbed his pack and lit a cigarette, ignoring the one burning down to the filter in the ashtray. “Hand me those there directions,” he said, pointing to the sheet of paper on the floor. His index and middle fingers were stained yellow from the nicotine.
I didn’t really have to do anything; Uncle Mercer set the rocket up all on his own, and fast, too. He stayed overnight but left abruptly early the next morning, the day before Christmas. “I really just wanted to pop up real quick and wish y’all a happy holiday; I best get back home.” He never came north again.
I would see him only a few more times in my childhood, when I flew to Georgia to visit both sets of grandparents for the summer. Even then, it seemed like Mercer was always out somewhere, driving around, not returning home until after I was already in bed.
A month after I turned twenty-one and could finally legally drink, my grandmother died. Mercer continued to live in the house they had shared, remaining in his childhood room and leaving my grandmother’s bedroom exactly as it was the day she died.
That’s when we became close.
I would drunk-dial Mercer when I got home from the bars and we would spend hours on the phone. “You know there are people who would call you insane for keeping the house like that?” I said. “I mean, have you even washed Amah’s sheets?”
“Hell, no,” he replied. “You can still see an indentation on the bed where she sat to put on her stockings.”
Mercer never spoke of ladies—or men, for that matter. I asked him where he went at night, and he replied, “Just around. Always have had trouble sleeping, so I drive until I finally get tired, and then I come home.”
“Why’d you get discharged from the navy?”
“My head wasn’t right.”
I loved that I could ask him anything and he would always give me some kind of answer.
“Do you miss it?”
“Hell, no, it was being inside that tiny, sealed-up sardine can underwater that drove me half out of my mind in the first place. I much preferred being on the ships. I miss a couple of the fellas, and I miss seeing the sky at night. You have no idea how filled with stars the sky really is until you are out at sea far, far away from any land. The word universe doesn’t really mean anything until you can see it with your own eyes.”
Mercer had a sixth sense about my life’s daily events. In 1990 I was a writer for an ad agency in New York. I was on a big shoot for American Express, one that took me from the Grand Canyon to the Redwoods to the Caribbean to Hawaii, where, at the end of a long day, I decided to wade into the water. Instead of sand under my feet, though, there were rocks, or that’s what I thought at first. I looked closely and saw it was coral, which is when my foot slipped into a crevice and got stuck.
I was waist-high in the water. At first I thought, Well, this is ridiculous. Very quickly the surf got increasingly aggressive as the tide came in, and I started to panic. I could actually die here, I realized, with my foot caught in coral.
On a fucking commercial shoot.
No.
In one swift motion, I yanked my foot free, losing the skin along the top in the process. That night, back in my luxurious beachfront suite, bleeding from room to room and completely over Hawaii and missing New York, I called my answering machine. Mercer had left me a message.
“Hey, there, I was sitting around watching the tube when I drifted off and had a dream about you, that you were stuck somewhere and needed help. I woke up and you know how dreams are, I couldn’t remember if you were out of gas or if you were in a car that got stuck in the mud or what it was. Give me a holler when you can so I know all is well.”
When I called him and told him about getting my foot trapped in the coral, Mercer was unaccountably distraught. “It’s okay, Uncle Mercer, I’m fine. I just have to make sure the scrape doesn’t get infected, that’s all.”
“I’m glad you’re safe but I don’t like this business,” he said. “I know your mama is all gung-ho for it and says it’s a special gift, but I think there’s something not right about it.”
Several years later, I decided I needed a pickup truck because of course I did, living in Manhattan and never leaving the island. I absolutely required a pickup truck to park in the garage next door to my apartment. I was at the Chevrolet dealer on Eleventh Avenue, sitting in a midnight-blue Silverado, when my snazzy Motorola flip phone trilled in my pocket. I took it out and saw that the call was from Uncle Mercer.
“Hey,” I said, my hand caressing the steering wheel.
“Hey,” he replied. “You must be at work, and I don’t want to take up any of your time, but I just wanted you to know something: if I were to die, I want you to have my pickup truck.”
When there was no reply from me, he said, “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
“I didn’t know you had a pickup,” I said.
“I just got it. It’s a Chevy Silverado, but I had a Corvette engine put in it.”
I knew if I told him where I was at that exact moment, Mercer would be beside himself with anxiety. “Well, don’t die,” I told him, “because what would I do with a pickup truck in Manhattan?”
“I’d still want you to have it,” he said.
When Mercer died a few years later, he was only fifty-four. My mother said he had a lung infection, but I suspect he killed himself. Mental illness, as well as witchcraft, ran rampant in the family. His early nervous breakdown, his Norman Bates existence, the fear of his own ability, the endless driving—that never sounded like a lung infection to me, no matter how much he smoked. After he died, the house and everything in it, along with the pickup truck, was absorbed by Mercer’s older brother, my other uncle, Wynman. I’d met Wynman only a few times, when I was very young. My mother was estranged from Wynman, so I was estranged from him, too.
* * *
My mother sat on a tall metal stool that was splattered with every imaginable color of paint. Her easel was before her, positioned at a right angle to the sliding glass door that led to the black wooden deck. Late afternoon sunlight, filtered through the pine trees that surrounded the house, cast the room in a soft, greenish glow. She was painting a portrait of her grandmother.
I sat to the side of and slightly behind the easel.
At school we were learning about the Salem witch trials of 1692.
My mother’s eyes traveled between the palette she had hooked through her left thumb and the canvas, but she didn’t look at me. “So what are they teaching you?”
“Well, we learned that the whole thing basically started because of two horrible little girls who started acting all crazy and saying weird things and told everyone they were possessed by the Devil, and then they accused a slave plus a bunch of women of being witches. And then it all spread from there and eventually one-third of the whole town was accused of witchcraft and twenty witches were executed.”
My mother scratched at the canvas with her brush. “Is that what they taught you, that the twenty people put to death were, in fact, witches?”
“Well.” I thought about it. “They didn’t exactly say they were witches, but they were convicted of being witches.”
“I would imagine,” my mother said, tilting her head from side to side, inspecting her work, “that not a single person executed was, in fact, a witch.”
I watched her load her brush with blue pigment, then tip it into the white. She smeared the paints together on her palette. “A witch knows how to deflect attention. A witch knows how to hide in plain sight.”
What did that even mean? “How can you hide in plain sight?”
“Well,” she said, brushing quick, light strokes against the canvas, “if you were funny, for example. Being very funny can be very distracting. Or you could silence your mind and listen. What does somebody else need to hear or see to believe you are not a witch? And then you can give that to them. It could be everyday small talk or a quote from the Bible.
“Witches terrify people. We anger people because they don’t understand what we really are. Most people believe that a witch makes a pact or a deal with the Devil. But we don’t believe in the Devil; that’s a Christian invention. Witchcraft was a threat to early Christianity, so they had to crush it. That’s the reason why there aren’t ancient texts on magick; so much of our written early culture was destroyed. So it has always been the Way for one witch to verbally pass the knowledge on to another. As my mother did with me. As I am doing with you, as you will do someday.”
I told her something was troubling me. “I had a dream where I was able to rise up above everybody in the room and I could float and glide along. I tried to do it when I was awake, but it didn’t work.”
“And why do you think that is?” my mother asked, cocking an eyebrow and staring at the corner of her canvas.
“My intent for it must be too weak.”
“No,” she said. “It didn’t work because hovering above a roomful of people and then gliding along over their heads is not something we can do when we are awake. Just as, no matter how much I might like to, I can’t turn that irritating Lucy Halburton into a fruit fly.”
Lucy Halburton was one of my mother’s on-again, off-again poet friends. My mother held weekly poetry workshops in the living room, and Lucy was so cloyingly upbeat that you wanted something bad to happen to her, but not something terrible. Like you wanted a seagull to shit on her sandwich next time she went to the beach, and maybe you also wanted her cat to claw her favorite silk top. The worst was if a single word of her poetry was questioned, you could see the Herculean effort it required for her to maintain her smile as she said, “Thank you, that’s very helpful,” while her eyes were all box cutters and vats of boiling oil. Nobody likes a repressed emotional cripple, but my mother loathed such people even more than an ordinary person. Her poetry workshops were fascinating to me, and I eavesdropped on every one of them outside the door.
My mother dipped her brush into a deep blue and used one hand to support the other as she painted the canvas with surgical precision. “A witch can’t turn a person into an owl. Or fly on a broom. Or defy the laws of physics. We can’t do anything that’s impossible. But we can do many things that people believe are impossible.
“When something is hanging in the balance, as they say, we can add more … sort of molecular weight on the side of the outcome we desire. There are certain things we can prevent, other things we cannot. We are deeply connected to nature and have a great deal of influence here. Nobody grows better tomatoes than a witch, for example. But we can’t vanish in a cloud of blue smoke.”
“So I couldn’t rise up off the floor and hover over everybody, because that’s not a thing that can be done.”
“Exactly,” she said, and now she looked at me.
“Someday will you paint me?” I asked.
“I would love to paint you.”
(She never did.)
“You know what coincidence is, right?” my mother asked.
“Yeah, that’s like when you find a skeleton key on the ground so you pick it up and put it in your pocket and then at school, there’s a brand-new skeleton for science class and then when you get home, it turns out the skeleton key opens the lock to the treasure chest in your bedroom.”
My mother said, “That’s a better example of what Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, calls ‘synchronicity,’ because the skeleton key opens the treasure chest and is therefore deeply meaningful. Coincidence is a set of unrelated events that we perceive as having meaning but which are, in fact, to be mathematically expected. Synchronicity says there is meaning in coincidence.”
I was flunking out of elementary school, but this I got. “Okay, so then coincidence would be when there are three red cars waiting for the traffic light. But synchronicity, that’s like the other week when I Love Lucy was on and you said it made you think of Lucille, the black lady who worked for your mother but who really raised you. And you talked about how it had been more than ten years since you spoke to her and you missed her and then she called after dinner and said you had been on her mind.”
“That wasn’t synchronicity,” my mother said with a sly smile. “That was witchcraft.”
Copyright © 2019 by Augusten Burroughs.
