The Line

TWO

“Mercy!” Sam’s gravelly whisper carried across the field like the call of a cicada. Even at this distance and in the dark, I recognized the old man. The moon reinforced the silver in his hair and his pronounced limp as he hurried toward me. “Mercy, you know you should not be here. Not even during the day, but specially not at night,” he said as he reached me.

“It’s okay, Sam…” I tried to protest, but he interrupted me.

“No, it is not okay. There are men out here—hell, even women—who’d rape you or kill you just for the fun of it.”

“Sam, I’m just a couple of miles from home,” I said.

“And you are a world away. Normandy Street ain’t your Savannah. Trust me on this,” he said, reaching out in an attempt to place a wrinkled hand on my shoulder. “I know you think you safe ’cause you a Taylor, but they some people out here, they no better than animals. They might decide killing you a smart way to make they mark.” He paused. “Let me accompany you home. I’ve known you since you were a tiny little thing. It’d kill this old man to let him think he let something happen to you.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was already dead, that his body had been turned over to the medical school three months ago. Now Sam was just another spirit caught in Savannah’s web.

“I’m here on business, Sam,” I told him, easily moving through his grip. The smell of sweat and booze nearly brought tears to my eyes. Even in the afterlife, the homeless man was best loved from upwind.

“Now what kind of business could you possibly have out here?” he asked. “Just who do you need to see here at this time of night?”

“I’m here to see Mother Jilo,” I replied.

His bright eyes bulged out of his thin face. His mouth fell open to reveal gums that were pocked here and there with a few remaining teeth. “Girl, you ain’t got no kind of business with Jilo. Your Aunt Ginny would skin you alive if she knew you out here in the middle of the night to talk with a juju doctor.”

My great-aunt Ginny Taylor was the true seat of the family power in more ways than one, and an insufferable tyrant to boot. “It was Ginny who sent me.” I hated lying to Sam, but if I didn’t, he might take it into his head to inform Ginny, which would be disastrous. If there was one person Ginny held more deeply in contempt than me, it was Jilo. I couldn’t risk that he would take it upon himself to look after what he thought were my best interests by going to Ginny.

“You telling me the truth now?” he asked, eyes narrowed. I nodded my head yes, and he let out a deep sigh. Who knew that a ghost could sigh? “Your Aunt Ginny, she gotta understand. It’s a different world than it used to be. When I was young, your people were respected. Everybody knew not to lay a finger on one of y’all. The young ones these days, they don’t respect nothing and they don’t fear much.”

“They fear Jilo,” I said.

“That’s because Jilo deals with them on their own terms. A gangbanger cross her and a gangbanger gets killed—or worse. Frankly, it has been a long time since y’all have given them anything to fear. Everybody think your family is toothless.”

“Well, they are soon to find out otherwise,” I bluffed. “That’s the reason Ginny sent me here to talk in secret with Jilo.” I paused for a moment then added. “She’d be angry if she knew how much I’ve told you.”

“You swear to me that Ginny know you here, and you under her protection?”

“I swear,” I assured him.

“Then I’ll let you get on with your business, but you mind yourself,” he said. He turned and headed back the way I’d just come. I watched as he moved noiselessly across the empty field then dissipated beneath one of the street lights on Randolph. I settled my bike down into the tall grass, praying that it wouldn’t catch the attention of anyone who might have a mind to steal it.

Before me lay the beginning of Normandy Street, which wasn’t really a street at all, at least not anymore. Time had taken its toll, and now it was more like the memory of a street. Choked in parts with barbed greenery, it intersected the old railroad tracks but not much else.

Sam had tried to warn me off with good reason. It was one of Savannah’s well-known secrets that there was a homeless encampment not far from here, north of the cemetery and west of the golf course. But that wasn’t where I was headed. A little way down, Normandy Street was intersected by a narrow lane that had long ago lost its name, assuming it had ever had one. Jilo ran the commercial end of her practice out of Colonial Park Cemetery, but it was at this crossroads where she performed her art.

I took a deep breath and dove into the thickets that formed the gateway between the Baptist church’s parking lot and no-man’s-land. It felt like every living green thing was clawing at my ankles and begging me to have the good sense to turn back. If they were, I ignored them, heading farther down the path instead. I stumbled over a beer bottle and thought about turning on the flashlight I had brought in my backpack. But then I remembered that anything that made it easier for me to see would make it easier for me to be seen. The moonlight would have to be enough of a guide.

One thing was for sure: This was a place for those who had nothing left to lose. Remembering how very much I had to lose, I walked slowly and carefully, listening for movement. As I drew nearer to the spot where I hoped to find Mother Jilo, I sensed, more than heard, a presence. It moved with me, stopping when I stopped. It seemed both intelligent and feral. Suddenly an empty glass bottle was thrown out of nowhere, splintering into shards at my feet. It took everything I had not to scream like a little girl and run, but I held my ground.

“Everybody know this here crossroad belong to Mother Jilo.” A voice spoke from the darkness. “A precious little white girl like you should think twice before she go digging around here. She might not like what she turn up.”

I scanned the bushes, sensing menace but seeing nothing. “Is that you, Mother? I’ve come to see you,” I called out in the direction of the voice. “I need your help.”

Her brittle laughter preceded her footfalls. “Jilo thought her help was beneath you Taylors. That right,” she said stepping out from the trees and onto the moonlit road. “Jilo recognize you. She know who you are. You Mercy Taylor.”

Mother Jilo herself stood there before me, dressed mostly in black now, with a scarf of a dark but indeterminate color tied around her head. An aged leather satchel, kind of like an old doctor’s bag, was clutched in one gnarled hand, and the other held a squirming burlap sack. She sat the satchel on the ground, but held tight to the sack. “Jus’ what kind of ‘help’ you wantin’ from Jilo?” she asked, circling me counterclockwise, keeping her eyes tightly on me. “ ’Cause, girl, only thing Jilo inclined to help a Taylor to is an early grave.”

I turned in time with her movements, determined to keep her in front of me. “I need you to work a spell for me, Mother. I can pay,” I said, but she started shaking and waving her free hand at me.

Laughter tore through her, and her chest started to heave and rattle until she coughed up phlegm. “A high and mighty Taylor witch wanting to hire Mother Jilo to work juju?” She gasped out the words, punctuating them with more mucus. She coughed again then caught her wind. “So tell Jilo now,” she said, her eyes burning bright with the desire to do harm, “who is you wanting to curse?”

“I-I,” I stammered, “I’m not wanting to curse anyone.”

“Well what is it you-you-you is wanting to do then?” She mocked me. She looked up at the sky. “The moon be headin’ to dark. You got your red head here nosin’ around lookin’ for Jilo. And it after midnight. If you ain’t come for cursin’, you must not know what the hell you doin’.” She paused. “So you tell Jilo. What you doin’ here at her crossroad?”

“I came to see you. I want you to work a spell for me. I can pay,” I repeated myself. Here, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, standing before Savannah’s busiest root doctor, I felt my cheeks heat with embarrassment. I couldn’t look the woman in her eyes. Instead, my focus fell to the grimy ground near her feet. “There’s a boy,” I began.

“Of course they a boy,” she said. “They always a boy when a girl your age come to Jilo. I seen him. That pretty young man your sister been leading around by the nose lately. You in love with him, ain’t you? You want Mother to help you steal him from your sister. You want Mother to work you a love spell,” she said, stretching the word “love” out until it was something dirty. “Little miss got an itch she need scratched.” With her free hand, Jilo rubbed her crotch and laughed again, the croaking sound scaring an owl from a nearby limb.

The old woman was right. I loved Jackson, my sister’s boyfriend, more than I could find the words to say…and had since the moment she’d brought him home six months ago. A mere glance from him made my pulse race and fire rush through me, and I envied my sister his touch. God, how I envied her. But I loved her too.

“No. Yes. I mean,” I stammered, but she interrupted me before I could explain.

“Now Jilo ask herself, why don’t pretty little miss just work it for herself? Just don’t want to get those dainty little hands dirty? Or don’t you want the magic to be trailed back to you? But then again,” Jilo continued, “you ain’t like the rest of your people, are you? That sister of yours. What her name?” she asked.

“Maisie,” I responded.

She acknowledged the name with a slight nod of her head. “Between you two, she got all the power, ain’t she? That mean you gotta do the work just like Mother herself.”

It was true, Maisie, my fraternal twin, was capable of performing just about any miracle she set her mind to. I couldn’t even move a pen without using my fingers. Between the two of us, Maisie had won the genetic lottery, there was no use denying it. Along with her blond hair and bottomless blue eyes, she had gotten all of the power. “It’s true,” I said. “I don’t have any power. I’m not a natural born witch.”

She moved in close to me, so close I could smell her sour breath. “Jilo ain’t no natural born witch, but you think she ain’t got no power?” she asked, her eyes fixing on me. They were black, I noticed now—the irises and pupils merged together into bottomless, burning pits. “You need her to show you what she can do?”

“No,” I responded quickly. The fear in my voice placated her, and she smiled. “It’s just that you know how to tap into the power. I don’t.”

“Girl, ain’t your family never taught you nothing?”

“They taught me that the power isn’t something you can simply draw into yourself. It’s the other way around. A true witch springs from the power. The people who borrow the power, they aren’t real witches. They can steal it from time to time, but the power escapes quickly when it’s clenched in a fist.”

“Oh, that is old Ginny Taylor talkin’ there. No doubt about it,” she said. Her gnarled hand clenched and released as if it were aching to strike out.

“You saying it isn’t true?” I asked, taking a step back.

“No, no. It true enough. That old auntie of yours, she ain’t been lyin’ to you. But it ain’t the whole picture. Just ’cause you don’t own something, don’t mean you gotta steal it. Nothin’ stopping you from borrowing it from time to time. And ’sides, Jilo ain’t never claimed to be any kind of witch.”

“But you can work magic…” I started.

“Of course Mother know how to work the magic. You ain’t gotta be no witch to work the magic. It just take a bit longer. And you gotta be willing to make a few sacrifices.” She shook the burlap sack at me and laughed again as the creature inside began to gyrate frantically. “For a girl like you, it simple enough to learn a trick or two, so why then your family not teach you like Jilo done taught herself?” She didn’t wait for a response. “Jilo tell you why. They look down on Jilo ’cause she has to borrow the power. They’d rather you be ignorant than you be like Jilo.”

I said nothing, as I knew she was right. My family, especially my great-aunt Ginny, did look down on the old woman of the crossroads. Jilo stayed silent too, coiled up as if she were waiting for me to argue with her.

The silence grew too much for me. “Ginny says your kind of magic is dangerous. That it weakens the line.”

“Oh, Jilo heard your Ginny going on about her precious line,” she said, her tension fading. “How it’s what keeps the monsters from crawling up out from under Jilo’s bed and eating her.” She chuckled. “But Jilo ain’t no little girl to scare with talk of demons.”

“They’re real—you know that, right?” I asked, modulating my voice so that she wouldn’t think I was talking down to her.

“Course they real,” Jilo shot back at me. “Jilo know that. But keeping them out of our world, that yo’ people’s problem, not Jilo’s.”

I wondered how much the old woman knew about what the line was, or how it was created. Probably not a whole lot more than I did. The details about the creation of the line were a tightly kept secret from those of us who weren’t born of the power. We only got the story in broad strokes, if we ever learned about it at all. All I knew was that it was the witches, people like my family, who saved our reality from the monsters who had once ruled it. Religion calls these beings “demons”; science might call them “interdimensional entities.” But whatever you call them, they came to our world. They made us their slaves. They fed on us like cattle. They meddled in the evolution of humans, and even more so in the evolution of witches. But they underestimated their own creations. Eventually we rebelled.

Witches used their magic to change the frequency we live on. Kind of like when you switch the station on the radio to tune out a song you don’t want to hear, they swung our world just out of the demons’ reach. They modulated the energy of our world just enough so that the scary things don’t get picked up. Of course the witches who moved us out of harm’s way couldn’t pick and choose which magical beings to allow into our reality. In order to get rid of the demons, we lost the unicorn. Most magical creatures didn’t make it through the great energy shift with us. Given the demons’ taste for human newborns, though, I figured it was a fair trade-off.

Once our world was out of harm’s way, the witches raised the line, a safety net of energy that prevented our former masters from burrowing their way back in. The witches who maintained the line were called anchors, and only these anchors know how the line was created or how it might be destroyed. Originally there were thirteen anchors at a time, one from each of the witch families, but three of the families came to regret their part in the rebellion. Now the line was maintained by anchors from the remaining ten united families.

Ginny was the only anchor I had ever met. I didn’t really know what being an anchor entailed, but I knew that it had left Ginny bitter and alone, even though she was surrounded by family.

“The world lost a lot of its magic when they shifted us,” Jilo said. “The witches, like yo’ family. They try and act like they did some noble thing for the rest of us. But all they did was take every last bit of the magic left in this world for themselves. They built a kingdom where they the kings, and they can do whatever the hell they want with the rest of us. And Jilo s’posed to act like they doin’ her a favor.”

I disagreed with her interpretation, but Jilo didn’t give me the chance to respond. She had already shifted gears anyway. “Jilo sure love to see that Ginny’s face right now. The look she get when she see you standing here before Mother Jilo asking her for help to steal yo’ sister’s man.” She cackled and spat on the ground.

“You don’t understand. I don’t want to take Jackson from Maisie,” I said. “There’s another boy. His name is Peter. He’s my…I’m not sure what he is. Outside of Maisie he’s the best friend I ever had. He’s wonderful. He’s perfect. He should be my boyfriend. He loves me, and I want you to make me fall in love with him.”

Jilo tore the night apart with her amused screech. The night birds stopped their calls, and even the insects fell silent in wonder. Although we stood in the moon’s low light, I could still see the tears streaming from her eyes. It took some moments for her to pull herself back together. I felt the blood rush to my face, the heat of embarrassment changing into anger. “You want Mother to work a love spell on you?” She shook her head incredulously. “You ain’t got no idea how magic work, do you?” she asked, but the sharpness in her tone had given way to something like sympathy.

Her softness got to me in a way her derision had not. “I’m sorry,” I said backing away hastily. “I shouldn’t have wasted your time. I didn’t realize you couldn’t work the spell.”

“Not so fast, missy. Jilo never said she couldn’t work this spell you wantin’. She just say you don’t understand what it would take.”

“I said I can pay you,” I replied tersely.

“Lord help, girl. Jilo ain’t talkin’ about money. She talking about mojo.” She looked at me as if she were being asked to explain green to grass. “When people come to Jilo for a love spell, they come with a fire inside them. They burnin’ for the person they want, and Jilo use they fire to work the spell. You come to Jilo lovin’ the one man and wanting her to make you love another. They nothing but guilt in you. Guilt for lovin’ the one. Guilt for not lovin’ t’other. Jilo, she can use guilt for laying down revenge, but she sure can’t use it for love.”

“Then what would it take for you to work the spell for me?”

“Blood,” she spat at me. “It take blood!”

“I couldn’t let you hurt an animal for me,” I eyed the burlap guiltily.

“It take a lot more blood than the hen Jilo got in this croaker sack,” she responded.

“You could use my blood.” I just couldn’t carry on feeling the way I felt for Jackson, knowing how much Maisie loved him, and how devoted Peter was to me. Even if my feelings weren’t wrong, they were dangerous and destructive, and they were burning me up inside. I had to find a way to control them, not let them control me. If I could have found the strength in myself to do so, I wouldn’t be standing here offering my blood to Jilo, but I had no strength when it came to Jackson.

She shook her head again. “It take all the blood you got. And then the spell do you no good anyway.”

“I can’t hurt anyone,” I said, realizing my case was hopeless.

“Mercy. Folk like us, like you and Jilo. We want power, we got to be willing to sacrifice for it. You love your sister, right?”

“Yes, of course I do. That’s why I’m here,” I responded.

“Well Jilo loved her sister too. Jilo loved her more than anything in the whole wide world. And this crossroad where we standin’. This here where Jilo done buried her. Jilo cut her and buried her right here, right beneath your pretty little feet. Jilo buried her while she still breathing, so that her blood and spirit would spill into the ground. That why this crossroad and the power in it belong to Jilo.”

“I can’t do this. I can’t be here,” I said, my head starting to spin. My stomach lurched at the thought of being near this woman for even a moment longer.

“People like us, we gotta make a wound to draw from. If you ain’t willing to sacrifice, you ain’t never gonna know the power. Jilo get this much mojo from her sister, imagine what you could do with yo’ Maisie in the ground beneath yo’ feet.” She stopped and leered at me, licking the spittle from around her lips. “My sister, she about dry now. But that Maisie. You could draw off her forever.”

“I’m leaving now,” I said, more for my own benefit than hers. I was not like her, and I never would be. I started to walk away.

“Jilo gonna work that spell for you.”

I stopped and turned back toward her. “I changed my mind. I don’t want your help. Forget I came.”

“Too late,” she replied. “You done asked.”

“I won’t give you anything. I won’t pay you.”

“Jilo don’ care, little girl. She gonna do it, just ’cause she lookin’ forward to see how it gonna play out.”

I started walking again, forcing myself not to run. I prayed to God and all my ancestors that she was bluffing. Getting what I wanted, what I came to this crossroads for, would be a curse now, knowing now its source was rooted in murder.

“You give my best to Ginny,” she called out behind me, squawks of laughter mixing again with hacks of phlegm.