Jawaban:

Hazel held a forked stick out in front of her. Molly trailed her aunt across the field, their steps swishing in yellowing knee high grass. The stick quivered, then twisted like a cat. In him mind, this is for show.

Hazel said. “Folk like to saw something happening. But you don’t need the stick, understand?”.

Molly nodded, looked Aunt Hazel’s face. Wisps of fair hair from Hazel’s braid and catch the light of the full harvest moon in the dark sky. If Molly stood in just the right place, she could make the moon into a halo around her aunt’s head. The moonlight was dazzling, bright enough to cast shadows.

“What really happen?”

Hazel said, “happen inside you. You got to feel the earth.

She is got warm places and wet places, soft and hard places. She can felt the water in her, felt it in herself. Her feet felt damp and cool, even in her shoes, and she have got the right place. The water her feet felt, the closer the water. Molly nodded again, Hazel led her away a few paces in the field.

“Close your eyes,”

she said and spun Molly around. She steadied Molly with a hand on her shoulder.

“hold Light now. That’s right.”

She set the ends of the stick in Molly’s hands.

“Now open your eyes, but don’t look at anything. Just walk forward and feel the earth.”

Wherever she walked and she tried, but nothing happened. If Aunt Hazel took the stick, it bent almost break to reach the ground, but in Molly’s hands it was dead as her mama’s broom.

“Never mind.”

Aunt Hazel kissed Molly’s cheek and her sleek brown hair.

“We’ll try again in other day. There is always a water witch in this family.”

But they not tried again. Two days later Aunt Hazel cut herself canning. The wound sickened and spread her arm in red streaks. Nothing helped her. She died at the dark of the moon when life go out of things and death come easy. They buried her in the graveyard, on the rise at the back of the farm, where her grandparents and parents lay, and her brother who died a baby.

Molly took the forked stick, drying though it was, and walked in the field every day, trying to find the spot where Hazel had held the cut willow while it arched and twisted towards water. She knew it was foolish. A real water witch didn’t need a stick, and no stick would help if you weren’t one.

When the full moon rose again, Molly climbed to the graveyard in the evening. The air was blue and chill with fall. Leaves made a bright rustling carpet for the little graveyard. Molly laid the stick down on Aunt Hazel’s grave.

“I couldn’t do it,” she said,

“I tried and tried. I’m sorry, Aunt Hazel! I’m sorry we don’t have a water witch in the family now.”

She cried for her failure as she had for her aunt’s death.

When her tears were gone, she turned and started the hill. The moon floated before her, and she wondered where she would have to stand to make it into a halo for herself.

When she was halfway back to the house, with most of a field to go, the wind came up, a little breeze that brushed over her cheek and crept through her hair to the back of her neck. She shivered and began to hurry back to the warmth of the house.

Then, just for a moment, the breeze was a warm breath.

“Aunt Hazel?” Molly said.

Foolishly, she felt as though her aunt was standing behind her, smiling down at her. She paused, longing to turn, afraid it wouldn’t be true.

Then she felt the smallest touch of cold on her left foot, through the woollen sock. The cold spread rapidly across her sole, over her toes.Bending, she quickly undid the laces of her shoe and pulled it off.

Her sock sagged away from her foot, dripping cold, clear water.