Ursula Vernon: Pocosin

Author’s Note: Pocosins are a type of raised peat wetland found almost exclusively in the Carolinas. The name derives from an Eastern Algonquian word meaning “swamp on a hill.” They are a rare and unique ecosystem, today widely threatened by development.

This is the place of the carnivores, the pool ringed with sundews and the fat funnels of the pitcher plants.

This is the place where the ground never dries out and the loblolly pines grow stunted, where the soil is poor and the plants turn to other means of feeding themselves.

This is the place where the hairstreak butterflies flow sleekly through the air and you can hear insect feet drumming inside the bowl of the pitcher plants.

This is the place where the old god came to die.

He came in the shape of the least of all creatures, a possum. Sometimes he was a man with a long rat’s tail, and sometimes he was a possum with too–human hands. On two legs and four, staggering, with his hands full of mud, he came limping through the marsh and crawled up to the witchwoman’s porch.

“Go back,” she said, not looking up. She had a rocking chair on the porch and the runners creaked as she rocked. There was a second chair, but she did not offer it to him. “Go back where you came from.”

The old god laid his head on the lowest step. When he breathed, it hissed through his long possum teeth and sounded like he was dying.

“I’m done with that sort of thing,” she said, still not looking up. She was tying flies, a pleasantly tricky bit of work, binding thread and chicken feathers to the wickedness of the hook. “You go find some other woman with witchblood in her.”

The old god shuddered and then he was mostly a man. He crawled up two steps and sagged onto the porch.

The woman sighed and set her work aside. “Don’t try to tell me you’re dying,” she said grimly. “I won’t believe it. Not from a possum.”

Her name was Maggie Grey. She was not so very old, perhaps, but she had the kind of spirit that is born old and grows cynical. She looked down on the scruffy rat–tailed god with irritation and a growing sense of duty.

His throat rasped as he swallowed. He reached out a hand with long yellow nails and pawed at the boards on the porch.

“Shit,” Maggie said finally, and went inside to get some water.

She poured it down his throat and most of it went down. He came a little bit more alive and looked at her with huge, dark eyes. His face was dirty pale, his hair iron gray.

She knew perfectly well what he was. Witchblood isn’t the same as godblood, but they know each other when they meet in the street. The question was why a god had decided to die on her porch, and that was a lousy sort of question.

“You ain’t been shot,” she said. “There’s not a hunter alive that could shoot the likes of you. What’s got you dragging your sorry ass up on my porch, old god?”

The old god heaved himself farther up on the porch. He smelled rank. His fur was matted with urine when he was a possum and his pants were stained and crusted when he was a man.

His left leg was swollen at the knee, a fat bent sausage, and the foot beneath it was black. There were puncture wounds in his skin. Maggie grunted.

“Cottonmouth, was it?”

The old god nodded.

Maggie sat back down in the rocking chair and looked out over the sundew pool.

There was a dense mat of shrubs all around the house, fetterbush and sheep laurel bound up together with greenbrier. She kept the path open with an axe, when she bothered to keep it open at all. There was no one to see her and the dying man who wasn’t quite a man.

Mosquitos whined in the throats of the pitcher plants and circled the possum god’s head. Maggie could feel her shoulders starting to tense up. It was always her shoulders. On a bad day, they’d get so knotted that pain would shoot down her forearms in bright white lines.

“Would’ve preferred a deer,” she said. “Or a bear, maybe. Got some dignity that way.” Then she laughed. “Should’ve figured I’d get a possum. It’d be a nasty, stinking sort of god that wanted anything to do with me.”

She picked up a pair of scissors from where she’d been tying flies. “Hold still. No, I ain’t gonna cut you. I ain’t so far gone to try and suck the poison out of a god.”

It had likely been another god that poisoned him, she thought—Old Lady Cottonmouth, with her gums as white as wedding veils. She saw them sometimes, big, heavy–bodied snakes, gliding easy through the water. Hadn’t ever seen the Old Lady, but she was out there, and it would be just like a possum to freeze up when those white gums came at him, sprouting up fangs.

Even a witch might hesitate at that.

She waited until he was a man, more or less, and cut his pant leg open with the scissors. The flesh underneath was angry red, scored with purple. He gasped in relief as the tight cloth fell away from the swollen flesh.

“Don’t thank me,” she said grimly. “Probably took a few hours off your life with that. But they wouldn’t be anything worth hanging on for.”

She brought him more water. The first frogs began to screek and squeal in the water.

“You sure you want this?” she asked. “I can put a knife across your throat, make it easy.”

He shook his head.

“You know who’s coming for you?”

He nodded. Then he was a possum again and he gaped his mouth open and hissed in pain.

She hesitated, still holding the scissors. “Ain’t sure I want to deal with ’em myself,” she muttered. “I’m done with all that. I came out here to get away , you hear me?”

The possum closed his eyes, and whispered the only word he’d ever speak.

“… sorry …”

Maggie thrust the scissors into her pocket and scowled.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get you under the porch. You come to me and I’ll stand them off for you, right enough, but you better not be in plain sight.”

She had to carry him down the steps. His bad leg would take no weight and he fell against her, smelling rank. There were long stains on her clothes before they were done.

Under the porch, it was cool. The whole house was raised up, to save it from the spring floods, when the sundew pool reached out hungry arms. There was space enough, in the shadow under the stairs, for a dying god smaller than a man.

She didn’t need to tell him to stay quiet.

She went into the house and poured herself a drink. The alcohol was sharp and raw on her throat. She went down the steps again, to a low green stand of mountain mint, and yanked up a half dozen stems.

They didn’t gentle the alcohol, but at least it gave her something else to taste. The frogs got louder and the shadows under the sheep laurel got thick. Maggie sat back in her rocking chair with her shoulders knotting up under her shirt and went back to tying flies.

Someone cleared his throat.

She glanced up, and there was a man in preacher’s clothes, with the white collar and clean black pants. The crease in them was pressed sharp enough to draw blood.

“Huh,” she said. “Figured the other one’d beat you here.”

He gave her a pained, fatherly smile.

She nodded to the other chair. “Have a seat. I’ve got bad whiskey, but if you cut it with mint and sugar, it ain’t bad.”

“No, thank you,” said the preacher. He sat down on the edge of the chair. His skin was peat colored and there was no mud on his shoes. “You know why I’ve come, Margaret.”

“Maggie,” she said. “My mother’s the only one who calls me Margaret, and she’s dead, as you very well know.”