What the Circle Keeps

The third Tuesday of June she arrived at my woods, just as she had been there the year before. Same as the year before that.

I recognized her by her movement--not as a child just experimenting with his or her toy, but as one who wound along the border of an injury.

No ribbon in her hair. No leather backpack. Nothing but a sack of flour tied up with a piece of twine, and shoes that were worn at the ends. She did not look under rocks or hear the wind.

She went to the oak grove where the mushrooms grew in the perfect ring immediately after a downpour and she waited until the light struck just the right way.

I watched from the willow. Always the willow.

She knelt. on the moss unwrapped her bundle. Not cake--day bread, bitter on the edges. Not a knife--a pocketknife and a piece of chip in the handle. And the bone: it was a wing bone of a sparrow, purified by the river. She'd been practicing.

Last year she had used the foot of a rabbit. Last year a strand of her own hair. The circle remained silent every time. Her shoulders were slightly more curved every time.

I'd seen enough.

As she rose to take her departure I followed where the ferns parted. Didn't speak. Just had my hands in my apron pockets, and had the dirt under my nails.

She froze. Not afraid. Calculating.

"You're the witch," she said.

"People say that."

"My aunt says you steal voices."

"I mend fences. Sometimes I brew tea. Voice comes and passes away by itself.

She examined me--the grey of my braid, my scar on the wrist, the stance with which I made the earth and the roots appear to have risen through my boots. Deciding.

My sister is gone, said she flatly. "I'm bringing her back."

"I know."

"How?"

I count days in between your visits. Three hundred and sixty-four. You lose a day in a river in flood. Otherwise, you come."

She looked down. Swallowed hard. It was then that I noticed the true hunger. Not for magic. To find herself looked at by a person at the work she was doing alone in the dark.

"Teach me," she said.

"No."

"Why not?"

Since you believe that magic is about receiving. It's about giving up."

The following Tuesday she returned. And the next. Never knocked. Just was standing on the out-skirts of my herb garden until I looked up as I was weeding. Didn't ask for spells. Didn't beg. Just waited.

It was on the seventh Tuesday that I gave her a basket. "Yarrow. Not the yellow kind. The whiteness growing round the stone.

She learned fast. Not on the ground that she was a smart-looking woman--which she was--but because she listened to what others had overlooked. How sweeter, how sweeter after rain, is the taste of the chickweed. Before a storm how bees hum differ. The silence in the woods is not without purpose, it is listening.

And yet she did not comprehend the circle.

One afternoon I said: You keep trying to make it work, when she sat down and piled up her offerings with excruciating care. "Magic isn't a lock you pick. It is a door, which you stand before until it opens--or not.

"What's the missing piece?" she asked.

It should not be your discovery to know.

Summer tightened its grip. The solstice moon swelled. And yet she practised,--casting circles in the dirty yard, murmuring words that I had taught her, giving bread and bone and breath. Each time, nothing.

On the eve of the ceremony she had sat on my steps peeling peas. Her fingers were fast, mechanical.

I dreamed of her last night, she said to herself. we were weaving grass beside the creek. She kept dropping strands. I got mad. Informed her that she was not doing it right.

Then I awoke up, and remembered--she is left handed. I had been trying to teach her right handed.

She broke a pod too severely. Peas scattered in the dust.

I never once allowed her to do it her way.

That's when I knew.

Not love. Not blood. Not perfect circles. That was the missing component the memory of her being mean to the person she was trying to save.

The following evening she simply strolled into the oak grove. I followed at a distance.

She laid out her offerings. Cast the circle slow. Or known as the elements, but without drama, without the air of silent truth with which someone had at last realized that she was not calling power. She was clearing room to the truth.

Then she knelt in the center.

And she didn't speak a word.

Just sat there. Head bowed. Shoulders trembling once--then still. Letting the memory hold her. The stingingness of her impatience. The burden of that last common afternoon before all was smashed.

The wind shifted.

Not a storm. Not lightning. Nothing but relaxation of the air, as breath out of the room.

And at the middle of the circle--the bread started to steam. Not with heat. With something else. Something which smelled of creek water and of cut grass and the laughter of a child in a jar.

Marie didn't reach for it. Didn't cry out. She had but watched the steam curl once, twice--and disappear.

Her face was clean when she stood. Not happy. Not healed. But present. And like she had finally put an end to chasing a ghost and meeting the real girl, the imperfect, left-handed, grass-braiding sister, who was never really gone.

She turned back to me ungazing at the empty circle behind her.

It did not make her come back, she said.

"No."

"But it felt like her."

"Yes."

She touched my arm--short, definite. Then turned toward home.

I stayed until the moon rose. The circle had already dissolved into moss and mushroom. Nothing dramatic remained. No proof. No trophy.

It is simply the silent knowledge that not all doors open to allow a person to enter.

They open and that you may at last walk out.