The River Witch by Kimberly Brock

Author:Kimberly Brock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2015-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Roslyn

JB came the next morning and started my training in the art of cast fishing. He brought a carefully knotted net he’d made himself when he was younger, and I spent hours doggedly attempting to get the swing of the net while he visited with Damascus, who bloomed under his attention. The clench she’d been living in eased almost immediately with JB’s cornball jokes and the way his big hand ruffled her hair.

I stood ankle deep in the cool river and watched her giggle and blush and felt proud as a peacock at having devised this plan to get the young man out to the farm. By evening, I was exhausted and sore, and still lacked any grace in my casting, but I felt my catch was bountiful. I was feeling less haunted, knowing it was Damascus I’d been hearing on the riverbank, and not some vestige of my guilt. I was further surprised to hear JB join the blessing just after dusk. I’d gone to the house when I heard the two voices rise on the evening breeze.

But when JB didn’t show the second day, Damascus was worse than her prickly self. She pouted and growled, and I knew Ivy had gone. I braced myself for a hail of Trezevant fury and waited. But when Ivy Cain had been gone four days, and I hadn’t heard a peep, I began to venture back out, daring to resume my routines beyond the house and yard and Damascus’ patch.

Dawn hadn’t even lifted her skirt when I crept out of the house and made my way past the pumpkins to the river, following the water until the path veered inland. I’d discovered a clear way leading from the house to the shell ring, which was not a quarter of a mile away if my guess was right. I’d gone there several times to stand on the lip of the shell ring and look down over the open water of the Atlantic and a shallow, flat beach that began at the base of the ledge some four or five feet below. Standing there, I felt unbound, like the air was charged up. I wanted to see that place at daybreak.

Granny’s tunes were swelling in my ears, and I stretched out in all kinds of ways. My chest opened. My hips and spine vibrated. That sun came up, glinting and proud, and it was a joy. I hummed with the song in my memory, singing the words I knew. The sight of all that blue and the warm, smooth air, reminded me of that day long ago, the last time we’d gone to Glenmary. I was twelve when I danced for the congregation, and it seemed there was a light like this one in my belly. That day, it lifted me outside myself.

The crowded sanctuary immediately came to mind, the earnest faces of the congregation as they endured the close quarters, Granny Byrne beside me, fanning determinedly with her bulletin the day the anthropologists from the University of Indiana came to see The Sacred Harp for themselves.

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