Our mother was making her own preparations.
A few of the men stayed behind, sick from too much drink, they thought, but the rest armed themselves and made for the hollow on the island’s west side, where they knew our father had been landing his boat and spending the fall days that he should have been using to haul up late flounder and early cod to be sold to the farmers on the mainland. It was early afternoon by the time they reached the hollow, and the dense tangle of brush and the path beneath them must have warped and twisted as they made their way down. Most of what followed we heard through Church or through the few boys brave enough to sail to our side of the island in the years to come.
She was waiting for them at the fork, which they are filing past now as I tell this tale. Wearing a green dress, she sat and rocked in an oak rocking chair she had hauled all the way from the house where our father lay. In her lap was a pitted blunderbuss that Church claimed he’d stolen from the last ship his captain took as a prize. The men called out to her that they would have Benjamin Horn before they left, but halted upon seeing the gun. The path was still shifting beneath them, and what came next has never been agreed upon entirely. One man saw blue flames burning bright against the October sun in the brush all around her. Others said they heard her singing even before she opened her mouth. She did sing for all of them in time though. She keened in a language that they did not know. And it was when she sang that she began to change. Her entire body stretched broader and taller until she towered above them, two stories high by one estimation, and all out of proportion. Her brow was crowned with a cloud, and her green eyes spread their color out into the air around them. Across the hollow, her singing still echoed, louder still. One man turned and ran, and another followed. When she raised the blunderbuss and pointed it toward them, it was tiny in her hands and the singing came even from its funnel barrel. The rest fled then as well, and she shouted out in English at their backs, “He is under my protection, and will not see your justice today.” Those words followed
Mike Petrik | 35