Granny Gertie the Witch
By
Annie Jo Baker
I always believed my granny was a witch. I was wrong, I think. But that’s what everyone always said. She could heal burns. Or used to could.
Used to would.
Because she wouldn’t any more. Not since before I was here. Though every cousin born before the nineties had a story of watching her heal burns. Some even had stories of Great Aunt Naomi, who was Granny Gertie’s age, going up to Granny and saying, “We need to talk about It.” Everyone knew Great Aunt Naomi could charm warts off, so when Naomi said, “It,” Granny knew what she was talking about, and she would not talk to Naomi about It. Ignored the request. Again and again and again. Naomi got the message eventually. Whenever Naomi was mentioned, when I was alive at least, Granny would say that Naomi didn't know nothing.
#
That was about all you heard the family say on the matter. There wasn’t much else to speak of. Granny herself kept her mouth shut on the situation, and by the time she reached the end of her life, there wasn’t much of her left most of the time. Dementia had eaten her brain and its memories, leaving behind a person fresh and new and afraid--you know all about that. Then she became comatose and you were told it would be a matter of days.
#
There weren’t that many of us left in the family. Everyone else who stayed in the eastern end of the state had died, succumbing to the needle or blacklung or pulmonary cancer, and everyone with any sense had fled west to Lexington or north to Cincy. By then, it had been just my cousin Lance and myself, sitting in her hospice room, watching the numbers on her monitor beep along. Lance wasn’t even her grandkid, just her great-nephew some degrees removed, but he showed up anyway.
#
Granny Gertie died without any initial fanfare: the monitor’s beeping turned angry; a nurse and a nurse practitioner appeared. They drew up a death certificate and left Lance and me in our silence, awaiting the preacher and the coroner. Rain started up on the roof above our heads, as loud and atonal and earthshattering as a pipe organ.
Lance looked pale. I felt dizzy, from the rain or Lance’s expression or something.
“I shouldn’t tell you,” he said suddenly.
“What--”
“You won’t believe me.”
“What is it?” I asked, and I truly had no idea what I would hear but it felt like the ring of the phone call you get when someone has died and you don’t know yet but you still know.
And his eyes got all wide and then they closed and he clenched and unclenched his fists. The longest of pauses, as if everything would go back to normal if neither of us said anything, but then he said, like a question, “Your grandmother is hollow on the inside?”
My first thought? When presented with something so absurd as to need to be false? When presented with a piece of information tantamount to seeing my own disembowelment?
“But I felt her heartbeat. Last I held her.”
And I had, moments before. It was like a stuttering butterfly. I’d felt it in the underside of my chin when I’d hugged her and placed my cheek against her ear and breathed in the scent of the ancient baby powder in her hair. Her heart had beat and her ribcage had expanded and contracted under the force of her diaphragm, all under my own hands. She had been alive, yes, of course, but more importantly, solid.
There was no time for much more rationale to take over, as Lance made a noise of desperation, like someone gagged or otherwise, miming to be heard. “No. Not like that. Not literally. Or yes? But--there’s something wrong. I can’t explain it. She’s silent. Completely silent--”
“She’s dead--”
“You don’t believe me--go touch her,” and he was petulant as a child again, daring me to let the crawdads pinch me, daring me to run full-speed down the steepest hill, daring me, daring me, daring me.
“What?”
“I said, go touch her.”
I’d never turned down a dare from Lance. I went over to my granny’s body, still as a doll, in that pale space of time before the preacher would show up--the preacher for the religion I knew she hadn’t believed in for decades. Before the coroner would come and whisk her away to the funeral home to be hollowed out for us all to look at her again, but when I touched her she already was.
My hand sank suddenly through the flesh of her arm; I heard the unexpected sound of the inside of skin meeting another inside of skin. Felt a terrible schlick against my hand and up my arm. But all I could think was, she was so cold so soon.
I turned to look at Lance, and I don’t know how to say this, but I wasn’t even surprised someone had already come for her bones, after it all.
“You’re not gonna believe me but remember Great Aunt Naomi?” he asked, and he sounded like he was in another room, five feet away from me.
“Yes.”
“She was the same. I was here all by myself when she died. I just had to keep going. Because it seemed like the sort of thing you just keep to yourself. A silence like that.”
“Great Aunt Naomi was hollow inside?”
“Yes. She was. She was silent. Like your grandmother is.”
“When they took her body away--”
“Do you think anybody noticed?” And Lance looks angry. Not at me, but at something far, far away.
#
My family never used the word “magic.” Witchcraft was a sin. Using a divining rod, which people did, was definitely not a sin. Finding water was useful. It was a God-given talent. Like charming off warts, or healing burns. Some said finding water was science, but my family knew it was magic, and whenever wells were to be dug, spoke only in hushed tones about calling for Jon the waterwitch down the holler.
But Granny Gertie didn’t think they were God-given talents. At least not hers.
Because she didn’t believe in God. She’d gone to church every Sunday for the first few decades of her life, and then she stopped and never told anyone why. (Mother whispered to us once, “I don’t think it ever gave her any absolution.”)
Nor did she say where her talent came from. According to my mother, she didn’t know what she’d done to earn it or be cursed with it. And her references to it were only ever oblique, re-derived by her audiences through infernal geometries.
It was useful. For instance, she never burned. Couldn’t get a suntan either, though, but she could pull hot pans out of the oven with her bare hands. It was useful and it didn’t hurt anyone. You’d have thought, surely that made it a gift?
But something always felt wrong about it to her. Again, that’s what my mother said. Granny wouldn’t talk about things like that with me.
My mother always told you how all the women in the family could hear things. When something bad was gonna happen, they could hear it. Everything would sound wrong. Like, how when someone dies, the ring of that phone call is gonna sound different to you than any other phone call. They all called it the screaming. Like locusts in the summertime, except it didn’t sound like locusts.
#
One time, my mother visited a Catholic church and she almost fainted when she heard the pipe organ. She said it came the closest of anything she’d ever heard to replicating that screaming.
Well, I’d never heard anything, or at least never noticed it, but I guess I’ve never been much of a woman.
But Granny had heard the screaming all the time.
“When does it stop?” my mother had asked her once, back when she still healed.
“It only ever gets a little quieter,” Granny had said.
Granny’s mother had heard the screaming too, some time ago, she said, so it’s not like it started with her. It was as if it had always been.
#
This is all you know of the not-magic. Our side of the family never talked much about it. But you decided to ask Lance a question that had been on your mind the whole time you’d been aware, a question that had always felt forbidden and profane.
“What do the men hear? The men have to hear something.” You assumed he knew about the women and the screaming.
Lance paused. Frowned. “Nothing. That’s our curse. Silence.”
“I’m not much of either. Wonder what that means for me.”
“I don’t know, Lynn. I don’t know,” but he looked like he knew something.
What you did know was that Great Aunt Naomi was his immediate great aunt. He knew more about her than you would. “What about Naomi?”
He shook a little. “Just the same. And I know silence’s supposed to be either it is or it isn’t, but the silence I felt then was more than any I’d felt before.”
No time to process the idea of a silence that was more. I had questions to ask. “I mean. When did she stop charming warts off?”
Something died inside Lance's face. “Five years before she passed away.”
“Why?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Felt like a sin.”
“That’s what Granny Gertie said. But she stopped decades ago.”
#
That wasn’t strictly the truth.
One time, toward the end of her stay with my mother, before she finally moved to a care home, I burned my hand on the stove. I was visiting and cooking dinner for the both of them and I misplaced my hand--you know how it is--and then the hand was red and white, blistering beneath the surface. She walked over, a look on her face I hadn’t seen in a while. Something sharp. And she grabbed my hand and brushed her fingers over the burgeoning blisters and it was like she drew out the heat. Like, I said, I had never seen her do it before. She winked, and off she went. The burn had never been.
That was when I realized I had never truly believed she could heal burns, but the world felt like it made more sense after that. There was magic, yes, but it was restricted to healing burns and charming off warts and divining for water. The existence of that kind of magic made sense. And it still does.
If magic that simple and kind was ever real.
Because at the time, as my sharp-eyed grandmother healed my hand, I was forgetting important instances. Important facts.
One time when I was little, I showed her my older brother’s pressed fairies book. She said, “This is silly. You shouldn’t joke about things like this.” I laughed, but the look in her eyes stopped me. I was afraid to look in the pressed fairies book ever again.
When I inevitably asked her if monsters were real, she paused for a very long time and then said, “No. There are only friends.”
There are huge and pale chunks of time of which I have little memory. Like life being lived in third person, or second.
That should have been the real clue. But it wasn’t.
#
Because I’ve always felt like a changeling. Your whole life. You felt like the wrong thing in the wrong place. Our mother even joked about it. One time our granny hit her for it.
#
“When did she start to get sick?” Lance asked, the cogs turning in his head.
“She...always has been,” I said, because she had been. As far as I can remember. “The whole time I’ve been alive. Naomi--?”
“Five years before she died.”
“Goddammit,” I said, only the precipice of an understanding, but aware that that was a missing piece.
“You know our great great great grandad made a pact with the devil?” said Lance, blasé as ever.
My breath left me.
“When he came here from Ireland. Can you feel your liver?”
My hands went to my abdomen, pressing up under my ribs. There it was. Hard and stately. My relief must’ve registered on my face because he visibly calmed.
“Can you feel yours?” I asked but my hands were already under his ribs and against his liver. I felt for his pulse and found it quick but strong, and most importantly, there. This was real. We were alive and awake and if we cut ourselves, we would bleed. “What about the pact?”
“Your side of the family doesn’t talk about it?”
“What? No?”
“With the devil and his fairies,” he said, as blandly as you can.
“You’re joking.” I did not know, and still do not, where these words came from. Why I didn’t want to believe.
“You know I’m not. Like you’d be that surprised. Why the men hear silence and the women hear screaming and you hear both and neither and we aren’t real.”
I sputtered. “We’re real. I’m real.”
“It’s okay. I’m one too,” but his voice had little comfort in it.
“One what?”
“We were called changelings. Back in the day. My mom told me once. Part of the old pact. Naomi was. So was Gertie.”
“Did my Granny know?” I demanded.
“Of course. She knew she’d go back to Hell when she died. Her and her bones both. That’s why she and Naomi tried to stop healing. Didn’t work, of course. Hell’s where we all go eventually. Everyone like us,” and he continued, “My mom misses him, she says. But she loves me too, just as much even, and she never heard the screaming ever again once I arrived. Except...”
“What?”
“...for when he watches.”
“He?”
“The one who was here before.”
You only distantly remember being in the Catholic church with our mother, hearing the pipes, watching her slide down the pew. There are so many other times and places that are bleached almost white to your memory. I don’t remember them much either.
Because we are the same, you and I. This is the only fact you will ever know.
Previously published in the anthology Broken Olive Branches, January 2024
Anj Baker was raised in rural Appalachia and now lives in suburban Illinois. They're a 2024 graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop and a submissions reader for Fusion Fragment.
By
Annie Jo Baker
I always believed my granny was a witch. I was wrong, I think. But that’s what everyone always said. She could heal burns. Or used to could.
Used to would.
Because she wouldn’t any more. Not since before I was here. Though every cousin born before the nineties had a story of watching her heal burns. Some even had stories of Great Aunt Naomi, who was Granny Gertie’s age, going up to Granny and saying, “We need to talk about It.” Everyone knew Great Aunt Naomi could charm warts off, so when Naomi said, “It,” Granny knew what she was talking about, and she would not talk to Naomi about It. Ignored the request. Again and again and again. Naomi got the message eventually. Whenever Naomi was mentioned, when I was alive at least, Granny would say that Naomi didn't know nothing.
#
That was about all you heard the family say on the matter. There wasn’t much else to speak of. Granny herself kept her mouth shut on the situation, and by the time she reached the end of her life, there wasn’t much of her left most of the time. Dementia had eaten her brain and its memories, leaving behind a person fresh and new and afraid--you know all about that. Then she became comatose and you were told it would be a matter of days.
#
There weren’t that many of us left in the family. Everyone else who stayed in the eastern end of the state had died, succumbing to the needle or blacklung or pulmonary cancer, and everyone with any sense had fled west to Lexington or north to Cincy. By then, it had been just my cousin Lance and myself, sitting in her hospice room, watching the numbers on her monitor beep along. Lance wasn’t even her grandkid, just her great-nephew some degrees removed, but he showed up anyway.
#
Granny Gertie died without any initial fanfare: the monitor’s beeping turned angry; a nurse and a nurse practitioner appeared. They drew up a death certificate and left Lance and me in our silence, awaiting the preacher and the coroner. Rain started up on the roof above our heads, as loud and atonal and earthshattering as a pipe organ.
Lance looked pale. I felt dizzy, from the rain or Lance’s expression or something.
“I shouldn’t tell you,” he said suddenly.
“What--”
“You won’t believe me.”
“What is it?” I asked, and I truly had no idea what I would hear but it felt like the ring of the phone call you get when someone has died and you don’t know yet but you still know.
And his eyes got all wide and then they closed and he clenched and unclenched his fists. The longest of pauses, as if everything would go back to normal if neither of us said anything, but then he said, like a question, “Your grandmother is hollow on the inside?”
My first thought? When presented with something so absurd as to need to be false? When presented with a piece of information tantamount to seeing my own disembowelment?
“But I felt her heartbeat. Last I held her.”
And I had, moments before. It was like a stuttering butterfly. I’d felt it in the underside of my chin when I’d hugged her and placed my cheek against her ear and breathed in the scent of the ancient baby powder in her hair. Her heart had beat and her ribcage had expanded and contracted under the force of her diaphragm, all under my own hands. She had been alive, yes, of course, but more importantly, solid.
There was no time for much more rationale to take over, as Lance made a noise of desperation, like someone gagged or otherwise, miming to be heard. “No. Not like that. Not literally. Or yes? But--there’s something wrong. I can’t explain it. She’s silent. Completely silent--”
“She’s dead--”
“You don’t believe me--go touch her,” and he was petulant as a child again, daring me to let the crawdads pinch me, daring me to run full-speed down the steepest hill, daring me, daring me, daring me.
“What?”
“I said, go touch her.”
I’d never turned down a dare from Lance. I went over to my granny’s body, still as a doll, in that pale space of time before the preacher would show up--the preacher for the religion I knew she hadn’t believed in for decades. Before the coroner would come and whisk her away to the funeral home to be hollowed out for us all to look at her again, but when I touched her she already was.
My hand sank suddenly through the flesh of her arm; I heard the unexpected sound of the inside of skin meeting another inside of skin. Felt a terrible schlick against my hand and up my arm. But all I could think was, she was so cold so soon.
I turned to look at Lance, and I don’t know how to say this, but I wasn’t even surprised someone had already come for her bones, after it all.
“You’re not gonna believe me but remember Great Aunt Naomi?” he asked, and he sounded like he was in another room, five feet away from me.
“Yes.”
“She was the same. I was here all by myself when she died. I just had to keep going. Because it seemed like the sort of thing you just keep to yourself. A silence like that.”
“Great Aunt Naomi was hollow inside?”
“Yes. She was. She was silent. Like your grandmother is.”
“When they took her body away--”
“Do you think anybody noticed?” And Lance looks angry. Not at me, but at something far, far away.
#
My family never used the word “magic.” Witchcraft was a sin. Using a divining rod, which people did, was definitely not a sin. Finding water was useful. It was a God-given talent. Like charming off warts, or healing burns. Some said finding water was science, but my family knew it was magic, and whenever wells were to be dug, spoke only in hushed tones about calling for Jon the waterwitch down the holler.
But Granny Gertie didn’t think they were God-given talents. At least not hers.
Because she didn’t believe in God. She’d gone to church every Sunday for the first few decades of her life, and then she stopped and never told anyone why. (Mother whispered to us once, “I don’t think it ever gave her any absolution.”)
Nor did she say where her talent came from. According to my mother, she didn’t know what she’d done to earn it or be cursed with it. And her references to it were only ever oblique, re-derived by her audiences through infernal geometries.
It was useful. For instance, she never burned. Couldn’t get a suntan either, though, but she could pull hot pans out of the oven with her bare hands. It was useful and it didn’t hurt anyone. You’d have thought, surely that made it a gift?
But something always felt wrong about it to her. Again, that’s what my mother said. Granny wouldn’t talk about things like that with me.
My mother always told you how all the women in the family could hear things. When something bad was gonna happen, they could hear it. Everything would sound wrong. Like, how when someone dies, the ring of that phone call is gonna sound different to you than any other phone call. They all called it the screaming. Like locusts in the summertime, except it didn’t sound like locusts.
#
One time, my mother visited a Catholic church and she almost fainted when she heard the pipe organ. She said it came the closest of anything she’d ever heard to replicating that screaming.
Well, I’d never heard anything, or at least never noticed it, but I guess I’ve never been much of a woman.
But Granny had heard the screaming all the time.
“When does it stop?” my mother had asked her once, back when she still healed.
“It only ever gets a little quieter,” Granny had said.
Granny’s mother had heard the screaming too, some time ago, she said, so it’s not like it started with her. It was as if it had always been.
#
This is all you know of the not-magic. Our side of the family never talked much about it. But you decided to ask Lance a question that had been on your mind the whole time you’d been aware, a question that had always felt forbidden and profane.
“What do the men hear? The men have to hear something.” You assumed he knew about the women and the screaming.
Lance paused. Frowned. “Nothing. That’s our curse. Silence.”
“I’m not much of either. Wonder what that means for me.”
“I don’t know, Lynn. I don’t know,” but he looked like he knew something.
What you did know was that Great Aunt Naomi was his immediate great aunt. He knew more about her than you would. “What about Naomi?”
He shook a little. “Just the same. And I know silence’s supposed to be either it is or it isn’t, but the silence I felt then was more than any I’d felt before.”
No time to process the idea of a silence that was more. I had questions to ask. “I mean. When did she stop charming warts off?”
Something died inside Lance's face. “Five years before she passed away.”
“Why?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Felt like a sin.”
“That’s what Granny Gertie said. But she stopped decades ago.”
#
That wasn’t strictly the truth.
One time, toward the end of her stay with my mother, before she finally moved to a care home, I burned my hand on the stove. I was visiting and cooking dinner for the both of them and I misplaced my hand--you know how it is--and then the hand was red and white, blistering beneath the surface. She walked over, a look on her face I hadn’t seen in a while. Something sharp. And she grabbed my hand and brushed her fingers over the burgeoning blisters and it was like she drew out the heat. Like, I said, I had never seen her do it before. She winked, and off she went. The burn had never been.
That was when I realized I had never truly believed she could heal burns, but the world felt like it made more sense after that. There was magic, yes, but it was restricted to healing burns and charming off warts and divining for water. The existence of that kind of magic made sense. And it still does.
If magic that simple and kind was ever real.
Because at the time, as my sharp-eyed grandmother healed my hand, I was forgetting important instances. Important facts.
One time when I was little, I showed her my older brother’s pressed fairies book. She said, “This is silly. You shouldn’t joke about things like this.” I laughed, but the look in her eyes stopped me. I was afraid to look in the pressed fairies book ever again.
When I inevitably asked her if monsters were real, she paused for a very long time and then said, “No. There are only friends.”
There are huge and pale chunks of time of which I have little memory. Like life being lived in third person, or second.
That should have been the real clue. But it wasn’t.
#
Because I’ve always felt like a changeling. Your whole life. You felt like the wrong thing in the wrong place. Our mother even joked about it. One time our granny hit her for it.
#
“When did she start to get sick?” Lance asked, the cogs turning in his head.
“She...always has been,” I said, because she had been. As far as I can remember. “The whole time I’ve been alive. Naomi--?”
“Five years before she died.”
“Goddammit,” I said, only the precipice of an understanding, but aware that that was a missing piece.
“You know our great great great grandad made a pact with the devil?” said Lance, blasé as ever.
My breath left me.
“When he came here from Ireland. Can you feel your liver?”
My hands went to my abdomen, pressing up under my ribs. There it was. Hard and stately. My relief must’ve registered on my face because he visibly calmed.
“Can you feel yours?” I asked but my hands were already under his ribs and against his liver. I felt for his pulse and found it quick but strong, and most importantly, there. This was real. We were alive and awake and if we cut ourselves, we would bleed. “What about the pact?”
“Your side of the family doesn’t talk about it?”
“What? No?”
“With the devil and his fairies,” he said, as blandly as you can.
“You’re joking.” I did not know, and still do not, where these words came from. Why I didn’t want to believe.
“You know I’m not. Like you’d be that surprised. Why the men hear silence and the women hear screaming and you hear both and neither and we aren’t real.”
I sputtered. “We’re real. I’m real.”
“It’s okay. I’m one too,” but his voice had little comfort in it.
“One what?”
“We were called changelings. Back in the day. My mom told me once. Part of the old pact. Naomi was. So was Gertie.”
“Did my Granny know?” I demanded.
“Of course. She knew she’d go back to Hell when she died. Her and her bones both. That’s why she and Naomi tried to stop healing. Didn’t work, of course. Hell’s where we all go eventually. Everyone like us,” and he continued, “My mom misses him, she says. But she loves me too, just as much even, and she never heard the screaming ever again once I arrived. Except...”
“What?”
“...for when he watches.”
“He?”
“The one who was here before.”
You only distantly remember being in the Catholic church with our mother, hearing the pipes, watching her slide down the pew. There are so many other times and places that are bleached almost white to your memory. I don’t remember them much either.
Because we are the same, you and I. This is the only fact you will ever know.
Previously published in the anthology Broken Olive Branches, January 2024
Anj Baker was raised in rural Appalachia and now lives in suburban Illinois. They're a 2024 graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop and a submissions reader for Fusion Fragment.
