“Angel wants Okehole.” Annabel put her head down. “All of it.” She looked up between strands of perfect blonde hair. “Its souls.”
Swamp witch rolled her eyes. Everything was about souls to the Reverend. Flesh to him was an inconvenience — a conveyance at best and lately, a broken down Oldsmobile. The tea-drinking man wasn’t an angel and he didn’t want souls. But she nodded for the Reverend to keep going.
“He’s aiming for you,” said Annabel, “because you got all the souls.”
Which was another thing that Reverend believed. This time swamp witch would not keep quiet. “I do not have all the souls, Reverend. You know what I done here and it’s not soul stealing.”
“Ain’t it?” said Annabel. “Puttin’ us all in a jar here — just like your bug! Comin’ to visit each Saturday and otherwise just keepin’ us here? Ain’t that soul stealin’?”
Swamp witch sighed. “Tell me what you know about your soul-stealin’ angel.”
The Reverend sighed and coughed and his head twitched up to look at her.
“He came by here this afternoon,” said Annabel. “Annabel — that’s me — brought him some iced tea made like he asked. He talked about the Garden — about the day that Eve bit that apple and brung it to Adam. He asked me, ‘What if Adam had said to Eve: I don’t want your awful food; I am faithful to Jehovah, for He has said to me: “Eat not that fruit.” What if Adam had turned his face upward to Jehovah, and said: I am content in this garden with Your love, and want not this woman’s lies of knowledge and truth. She has betrayed you, O Lord, not I. Not I. If that happened, would you sustain on serpent venom? Would she be the keeper of your town’s souls?’” Annabel nodded and looked right at swamp witch. “By ‘she’ I took him to mean you. That’s what Papa says.”
“So what did you say to that, I wonder?” said swamp witch.
The Reverend’s lips twitched, and Annabel hollered:
“Begone!” The Reverend’s eyes lit up then as his little girl spoke his word. “I am not some shallow parishioner, some Sunday-school dropout, some holiday churchgoer — oh no, the venom as you call it is holy, the blood of the prickly one and I am His vessel! Begone! Git now!”
“Your faith saved you,” said swamp witch drily.
“Papa ain’t finished,” scolded Annabel. “He says the tea-drinking man got all huffy then. He was calm up ’til then and suddenly his face got all red. The rims of his eyes got darker red, like they was bleedin’, and the lines of his gums got the same colour as that. And his teeth seemed to go all long and snaggly with broke ends. And he said to my Papa:
“‘You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t tell me nothin’. This town will weep for me, like it wept for her.’”
“Her being me,” said swamp witch.
“Ex-actly,” said Annabel.
“So how’d you best him?” asked swamp witch.
“Didn’t,” said Annabel. And the Reverend grinned then. “Just agreed to keep you occupied. ’Til the tea-drinkin’ angel were ready to finish you off.”
The Reverend’s hand rose up then, and fell upon the jar. His fingers covered the two air-holes in the lid. Dragonfly fluttered at that, then calmed down — no sense in wasting oxygen.
Swamp witch reached for the jar. But the Reverend found the rattler’s quickness in his elbow and snatched it away so fast dragonfly banged his head on the side and fell unconscious.
“Why, you lyin’ deceitful parson!” hollered swamp witch. With her other hand she reached for her pebbles, intending to enunciate peroxide or some other disinfectant canticle. But the pebbles were gone — of course. Annabel and perhaps her brother Tommy had leaned down from the top of stilts and pulled them from her pocket while she slept in the Reverend’s church. “You’re in league with him!”
Annabel leaned forward now, and when she spoke her Papa’s lips moved with hers: “You ought never have been, swamp witch. You ought never have come here and shut the world from this place. You say you are protecting people but you are keeping them as your human toys, like a she-devil in a corner of Hell. The angel will drive you from here, madame! Drive you clear away.”
“Take your fingers off’n my dragonfly’s air holes,” she said. She was most worried right now about her dragonfly. For blinking and recollecting conclusions, she saw that she would not be spending long now in the Reverend’s company. But her dragonfly wasn’t with her either, and that caused her to suspect that the poor creature would soon suffocate if she didn’t do something.
The Reverend, to her mild surprise, moved his finger up. Or perhaps it slid. No, she thought, looking up, he meant to. His face twitched and his lips opened.
“You should never have come,” he said. In his own voice — which swamp witch had not heard in many years now. And behind her, the breeze died and slivers of moonlight dissolved in the shadow of the tea-drinking man.
The Reverend stood up then, and Annabel cried: “A miracle!” and the Reverend took a step toward the edge of the porch, where the yellow-suited tea-drinking man stood, smile as large as his eyes were sad.
“O Angel,” Reverend said, his eyes a-jittering with upset snake venom, “I have delivered her!”
“You fool,” said swamp witch. And she stepped behind the Reverend, took hold of the jar that held her dragonfly, and said to him: “Carry me to Albert.”
That was when the tea-drinking man bellowed. At first, she thought he was angry that she was getting away — trying to sneak behind the Reverend, climb upon her still-groggy dragonfly and sneak out through a hole in the porch screen. If that were the case — well, she’d be in for it and she braced herself, holding tight on dragonfly’s back-hair.
But as she swirled up to the rafters of the porch, she saw this was not the case. The tea-drinking man was distracted not by her, but by Reverend Balchy’s sharp, venomous incisors, that had planted themselves in his yellow-wrapped forearm.
Reverend Balchy stopped hollering then, on account of his mouth being full, and Annabel took it up.
“Gotchya, you lyin’ sinner. Think you can use me? Think it? When swamp witch come to town she took away most of me — you’ll just take away the rest! Well fuck yuh! Fuck yuh!”
Dragonfly swung down, close past tea-drinking man’s nose, and swamp witch could see the anger and pain of the Reverend’s ugly mix of rattler venom and mouth bacteria slipping into his veins. There’d be twitching and screaming in a minute — at least there would be if tea-drinking man had normal blood.
Tea-drinking man didn’t seem to, though. He opened his own mouth and looked straight at Annabeclass="underline"
“What,” he said, “if you spoke up for yourself? What if you walked the world your own girl, flipped—” he grimaced “—flipped your old Papa the bird, and just made your way on your own-some.”
Annabel looked at him. Then she looked up at swamp witch, who was heading for a rip in the screen where last summer there’d been a fist-sized wasp nest.
“I’d never be on my own-some,” Annabel said. “Not so long as she protects me.”
And then swamp witch was gone from there, escaped into the keening night and thanking her stars for the Reverend’s poison-mad inconstancy. The tea-drinking man bellowed once more, and then he was a distant smear of yellow and the stars spun in swamp witch’s eye.
Was it cowardice that drove swamp witch across the rooftops of her town, then up so high she touched the very limits of her realm? Was she just scared of that tea-drinking man? What kind of protector was she for little Annabel, the Reverend, all the rest of them? Maybe when the Reverend was faking out the tea-drinking man, when he said “you should never have come,” he was right. For when she’d come hadn’t she stolen away the Reverend’s faith and the comfort of self-determination from her people and hadn’t she just kept them like she wanted them? Had she ever thought through what it would be if it come to this?