I look up from my book, startled by the clomping of boots on the porch of the hideaway to which I was brought last night to fulfill a promise. Situated on a dirt road, miles from the main highway that snakes through this range of the Appalachian Mountains, so remote are we that the electrical grid barely stretches here and cable TV and cell phone service are but dreams to the few inhabitants of the county. Breathless, Evan throws open the screen door and pokes his bald pate inside. His blue eyes alight on me as I greet him with apprehension.
Comfortably positioned for the last hour in a rocker next to a window through which shines the morning sun, enveloped by a blanket to keep the chill of the morning mountain air from giving me goose bumps, a half finished cup of tea sitting next to me on a coffee table, I have been able to enjoy a quiet interlude before becoming Evan's fantasy girl. His voice trembling with excitement, he announces to his special guest, "I need your help."
After taking a few seconds to finish the last paragraph of the chapter, I mark the page with a scrap of paper before closing the detective novel in which I have become ensconced since cozying up in the chair. The man to whom I made the promise and with whom I am falling in love has been quite busy.
Evan is in the midst of creating a scene in which I have agreed to play the starring role. When he was desperately ill one year ago today, I promised him I would do something special today if he was still here to appreciate it.
Through the picture window that looks out on a grand vista of rugged mountains and mist shrouded valleys, I gaze at a wooden stake anchored deeply into ground of the clearing in front of our dwelling. Surrounding the wooden pillar rest four layers of logs stacked perpendicularly one atop the other. Ropes at each end secure the logs in each layer together, lest the pile collapse. Against the pile stands a wooden ladder.
His labor has created a perch on which for me to stand a yard above the ground in the midst of a pyre. Sweat glistens from his brow and muscular shoulders as he takes a break from toiling in the summer sun. In his hands is a shiny metal chain. The links are a quarter inch thick; strong enough to secure me to the wooden pillar as flames lick my feet, having been condemned in his fantasy to be burned alive for the crime of witchcraft.
"You look like you need a beer," I observe. I take off my reading glasses, lay them on the coffee table and then emerge from my cocoon, rising from the rocker in which I have spent a lazy morning to saunter over to the refrigerator and retrieve two bottles of Corona.
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The morning light awakened me quite early on this June day, and soon butterflies were swarming in the pit of my stomach when the realization hit me that the day to fulfill my promise had arrived. Evan lay in bed next to me, sound asleep, his innocent expression showing none of the malevolence one would expect on the countenance of someone who has tasked himself with burning a witch.
Wide awake with nothing to distract me from contemplating everything that could go wrong during the scene, I arose and began puttering about the kitchen. The banging of pots and pans and utensils awakened my host, who was pleasantly surprised by the aroma of bacon as he strode into the kitchen. My lover sat at the kitchen table as I prepared our morning repas, but with our heads still heavy with sleep, we exchanged few words.
Evan wolfed down the omelet and bacon I had whipped up for him as the sun came over the horizon, but I had little appetite for breakfast. A half glass of orange juice and a bowl of cereal quieted my grinding tummy. After my host helped me gather the dishes from the table, he entered the bathroom. A few minutes later, the toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened, and he passed me by on the way out of the house without saying a word.
As the self appointed lady of the manor I tidied up the dining area and began washing the breakfast dishes. My hands immersed in dishwater scrubbing off the detruitus of our breakfast from the dishes, pots, pans, and utensils we had dirtied, through the window above the kitchen sink I could see my executioner completing the grisly preparations for the scene that will reward him for enduring a year of pain and loss.
After completing my domestic duties, I paced across the kitchen and the living room, strangely craving a cigarette despite never once desiring one for over a year. I didn't join Evan outside, sensing that while my presence in character will be required for the culmination of what is about to take place, involvement in the preparations by the real me could only be detrimental to the atmosphere and décor he was toiling to create in the clearing in front of our hideaway..
Feeling like a domestic beast transforming from pet to meat, I turned my eyes away from the window. No tobacco available to calm my nerves, I hunted down a teapot and filled it with water. As I waited for the contents to come to a boil on the stove, the misgivings I had set aside before making the journey here raced through my mind. When the steam rose from the spout and condensed on the kitchen window, the clearing beyond grew blurry, as if I were looking through a portal to another time and place.
I imagined that it was Evan's mind into which I was peering as he was enveloped by his fantasy. On the outside of the portal lived the man whose growing love for me had aided him as he struggled for life. On the inside existed a being whose carnal desires sustained his existence in a desperate time, now craving the reward he had been promised. I then dared to consider that it may be my fantasy to be rescued by my lover and his to watch a woman burn to death.
.
I filled a ball with green tea, dropped it in the teapot, found a cup, and made a beeline to the rocker. My heart pounded as I vacillated between wanting to get what I must do over with quickly or hoping some glitch in my host's preparations would provide me with a reprieve. Finally, I spied the novel on the coffee table where it had been lying perhaps for months, dog eared with cracks in the binding.
My apprehension growing as the minutes ticked away toward the moment of my debut as an actress, I opened 'Secret Nostrums' to chapter one and was introduced to the character of Nicky Zornes. The story of a petite female detective following the trail of an industrial spy through backwaters of the former Soviet Union provided a respite from the fear gnawing at me as the moment approached to fulfill the promise I made one year ago today.
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I never thought I'd do the witch thing. My mother fell into the New Age counterculture during her sojourn in California in the 1970's and was practicing Wicca when I was born twenty-six years ago.
Instead of being filled with the usual play dates and sleepovers and dance classes that are de rigeur for white suburban little girls, my childhood was spent attending coven meetings during which my mother would expound on the virtues of all-inclusive paganism, contrasting it with the oppressiveness of her evil triumvirate-Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, hoping to convert some of the curious souls who dropped by to observe the rituals of real witches. Wicca, she claimed, allowed women to channel the power of nature into human life, which would make our planet peaceful and prosperous.
But I was a geek and a tomboy who early on realized that utilizing our species' intelligence and capacity for rational thought were more likely to assure a bright future for humanity than chanting to supernatural powers for good fortune. An elder in the coven thought that I would become an exceptionally powerful practitioner of the Dark Arts and even become personally acquainted with The Great Lord, the supernatural entity that controlled Nature and to which the coven prayed, but to me at that time, such blather was risible.
