Witch Clan: Matriarchs by John Stormm (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📖

ranch style, with an attached garage and had three bedrooms. One was being set up as a nursery for the new baby, and the extra one was going to be Johnny’s. They would be sending for him after the school year. Emma, Willard and Johnny would take two weeks at the end of June to take a Greyhound Bus and visit. At the end of that visit, Emma and Willard would return back alone. She would have Leona to herself for the summer, but after that, she didn’t like to think about how empty the house would be.

On February 18th, Johnny’s seven pound baby sister, Linda, was born, every bit as pretty as their mother. He was thrilled to hear the news and excited to be going to see them after school let out. He still wasn’t fully aware that she and Willard wouldn’t be staying long with him there. She had the house here and deep roots in this part of the country. She couldn’t just up and sell everything and move out west. Maybe Lorry could be persuaded to send him to visit during the summer months to foster. The boy was undoubtedly going to need those peculiar disciplines that Lorry didn’t have. Lorry didn’t even like discussing the craft with her or her own sisters. If anything, Lorry wanted to forget anything that brought what happened with Lee to mind. It was understandable, but though Johnny looked like Lorry and not at all like Lee, he was a constant reminder that the human race was not the top of the food chain they liked to think they were. How was Lorry going to cope with that?

Johnny was half human, but all witch, and he would need a master witch to train him. Hollywood had some silly notions about such things. They would have to find a way to work this out for the boy’s own good. Willard had tried to console her that Johnny would be happier with his own mother in the long run, but he didn't fully understand. Lorry had very little experience with someone like Johnny, and none of it good, and Dave had none at all. It would have been different had they stayed close so she could help them cope and understand. She tried to convince herself that she was just experiencing a little difficulty in cutting the proverbial apron strings, but she just couldn’t picture circumstances working out for him as they stood.

She had to wonder what kind of strain Johnny might represent to Lorry and Dave’s marriage. True, Dave went into the marriage without any misgivings about a ready-made family. But Dave came from a completely different culture. All he saw was a fatherless little boy. She had had a good idea of what to expect from Johnny, and what she had learned raising him, surprised and surpassed her wildest dreams. As he got older, his life and his problems would become far more complicated. Who would there be? Who would not fear him, but love him and help him understand himself?

Yes, she loved him and didn’t want to let him go. But nobody understood as well as she why it wouldn’t work. She had to allow them to learn from their own mistakes and leave her door open to receive him back and help repair any damage. It was like trying to hold still for something she knew was going to hurt. She prepared herself for it, quietly.

* * *

The bags were all packed to go to the bus terminal. Old Ian had promised to stop by the house regularly for the mail and to check on things. Johnny was excited at the prospect of a new adventure traveling across the entire country. Emma took a moment to make an impression on him.

There had long been a bardic discipline in the craft, a technique of vocal inflection that had an almost hypnotic quality to those who heard it. The voice was pitched low, so that listeners had to strain to hear it, and so unusual that it stuck in their memory whether they fully understood what was meant or not. It could happen that many years down the line, the listeners would experience something that correlated with this audio post-it note attached to their memory. The light of recognition came on and the message served its purpose. Emma knelt beside her grandson and pitched her voice low and sibilant to accomplish this very task.

"Do you know who's room this is?" she said, indicating his bedroom.

"It's, it's mine. Isn't it?" Johnny asked, looking puzzled.

"Do you see where it is now?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied. "It's right here." He spread his arms wide to indicate the house.

"Don't you sleep here?" she asked.

"All the time," he said. "That's my bed, there." He pointed.

"Then, of course, you understand that your room will always be right here," she said. "And no matter where you are, when you are tired and you want to rest, you will always have your room, right here, with us."

"Always?" he asked, looking into her eyes uncertainly.

"Witches' honor," she replied, making their sign. Satisfied that her grandson would always have this knowledge, they left the house and began the four day bus ride to California. Two round trip tickets for her and Willard and a child’s one way ticket for Johnny.

Dreams Of Sunny California

The trip was as close to uneventful as Emma could expect. A hyperactive Johnny, who had tried to take in every mile of America he could, by watching it all race past him out the window of the Greyhound Scenicruiser, got motion sickness the second day out and threw up on a sailor. The young man, so christened to the journey, took it all in good stride, rinsing out his navy jumper in the men's room at the next rest stop and bought some gum for him and Johnny to keep their stomachs settled for the remainder of the trip. Having made a new friend, Johnny sat back and was entertained by tales of mighty warships and stealthy submarines to break up his incessant sightseeing.

Johnny’s new Auntie Ginna, Dave’s sister, met them at the bus terminal and drove them to the house in Riverside. The house was in a sunny, sleepy little housing development on the east side of the city. Blocks upon blocks of similar looking tracts in whites and pastels continued to Lorry’s new home on Randolph Street. Across the street was a wide field giving an unrestricted view of a line of mountains that rose to the east with patches of snow still capping their peaks. Down the block and around the corner was the elementary school where Johnny would be enrolled by the following September. The skies were clear and bright and it looked like a fine start for a reunited family.

Lorry and little Linda Marie were waiting for them inside the house. Emma held her new granddaughter and had Johnny sit down on the couch to hold his new baby sister. He was very careful and overjoyed about his beautiful sibling. When he touched his forehead to hers, she let out a jolly giggle and grabbed his ears and held him there until their mother could pry her loose.

“She likes me,” he said with a blush.

“Of course, she does,” Lorry said. “She’s your baby sister and you are her big brother.”

It was comic to watch the range of emotions pass across his youthful face as he worked to assimilate that information. Awe, pride, puzzlement, infatuation, care, responsibility all took their turns rearranging his features. Willard, all too self conscious of the frailty of infants, stepped outside to look at the patio out back. Lorry and Emma introduced Johnny to his new room with a western theme of bedspreads and curtains with cowboys and chuck wagons in colorful disarray. Together, they situated his belongings into his dresser drawers and closet. A tour of the house came next as her daughter breathlessly described all the benefits of their new home. Linda’s nursery was next to Johnny’s room and the master bedroom was right across the hall. The walls seemed to shiver and the dishes rattled in the cupboards. Emma looked around, wide eyed, but Lorry seemed to take it all in stride.

“Tremors,” Lorry said, in lieu of an explanation. “We get them all the time. You get used to them after a while.”

“I’m not sure I ever could,” she said. “There’s something very grounding about having firm earth beneath my feet, and not moving about as all that.”

“We’ve been here a while now, Mom,” Lorry assured her. “They never seem to get much worse than this, and most of them you never even notice.”

Dave came home from work a little after five o’clock and all the hugging and chatter picked up all over again before everyone sat down to supper. Emma found all the dishes spiced with citrus fruits and pineapple interesting, but a little too sweet for her taste. Willard, however, let his sweet tooth enjoy the holiday. After dinner, she helped her daughter with the dishes and clean up. She didn’t know how she would say things, in a manner that Lorry was likely to accept, but she was determined to try.

“Mom, look around you,” Lorry said in exasperation. “This is sunny California, in modern America. This is not the Dark Ages that Grandma spoke of. Things are different now. There’s a wonderful Mexican family that lives across the street and kids all over the block.