The air in Spring Garden, Alabama, was a wet, woolen blanket soaked in honeysuckle and decay. It settled in the lungs, this air, heavy with the secrets of the water oak and maple swamps that encircled the village like a possessive lover. From his pulpit, Pastor Ernest Hulsey presided over it all, a tall skeletal silhouette against a stained-glass Jesus, his voice a thunderous instrument that could conjure hellfire or heavenly grace, depending on the Sunday.

He was our pillar. Our scourge. The one who held the line against the creeping sin he swore festered in the damp soil and rotting leaves.

My summer was spent in that subtle limbo between boyhood and whatever came next, in a boredom so profound I took to exploring the forgotten places. There were the choked gullies behind the lumber mill, the sun-bleached ruins of the old McCain place, and the fringes of the swamp where the light fell in broken, green shards.

It was there that I found the first one.

Half-buried in the muck at the base of a lightning-blasted maple was a jar. Not for preserves, either, this jar. It was thick, green glass, stoppered with wax and sealed with a length of rusty wire. Inside, coiled like a malignant snake, was a lock of hair the color of rust, tangled with what looked like chicken bones and a single, terrible rattlesnake vertebra.

A ‘witch bottle’. Old Miss Cora, who sold herbs and tinctures out of her dilapidated shotgun house by the train tracks, had spoken of them in hushed tones. She called them ‘fixes’, meant to bind or to harm. I dropped it, my skin crawling, and ran home, the image of that hair burning in my mind. It was the exact shade of Billy Joe Rhinehart’s, the boy who’d drowned in the swamp the previous autumn.

I didn’t tell a soul. But the seed was planted.

The next Sunday, Preacher Hulsey’s sermon was on the evils of divination and folk magic. “There is no power but the Lord’s!” he boomed, his fist striking the pulpit, making the Bible jump. “Everythin’ else is a parlor trick of the devil, a path leadin’ straight to the burning pits of Hell!” His eyes, always ablaze with righteous fire, seemed to sweep over the congregation with a new, peculiar intensity. A hunting intensity.

My curiosity became an obsession. I began to slip away to the swamp after supper, drawn to its forbidden silence. I found more things. A flat stone hidden in a hollow log, carved with symbols that were not of any kind of church around these parts. A bundle of feathers tied with a black thread, buried at the base of the church’s own back steps. Each discovery felt like a blasphemy, a crack in the foundation of my world.

The final clue was a name, whispered by the swamp itself. I found it carved into the soft, gray bark of an old chalk maple, so old the letters had swollen and distorted: Abigail.

I took the name over to Miss Cora. Her shack smelled of dirt and drying mint and something I didn’t dare to identify. When I said the name, her face, a deeply etched roadmap of wrinkles, went still.

“That name ain’t for speakin’ here, child,” she whispered, her eyes darting to the door. “Abigail Hulsey was the Pastor’s twin sister. Died when they was both sixteen. Took a fever, so they said. A real tragedy.”

But her eyes said otherwise. They said, Don’t ask anything else.

I had to know. The next day, under the pretext of fetching a lost baseball, I ventured into the Hulsey’s old barn, a dusty cathedral of forgotten tools and shadows. In the loft, buried under a mound of mildewed horse blankets, was a rusted metal box.

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Inside the box, there was no childhood diary, no pressed flowers. There was a book, though. It was bound not in leather but in a strange, pebbled hide that made my stomach turn and my flesh crawl. Its pages were filled not with scripture, but with intricate, hand-drawn diagrams of roots and plants, recipes for poultices and poisons, and rituals scrawled in a tight, frantic script. And there, tucked into the center, was a faded photograph of two teenagers: Ernest, with the same piercing eyes, and a girl who was his mirror image, Abigail. They stood before the very same lightning-blasted maple where I’d found the jar.

The truth washed over me, as cold and suffocating as swamp water. The town’s fierce protector against the dark arts wasn’t its vanquisher, but its former student. His fire-and-brimstone was a penance, a desperate wall built to keep out the very thing that lived in his blood. The rituals in the swamp… were they hers? Or were they his?

I heard the barn door creak open below. A shaft of light cut through the dust motes.

“Boy.” The voice was the Pastor’s, but stripped of its holy resonance. It was flat, tired, and ancient. “What you got up there?”

I couldn’t speak. I held up the book. He climbed the ladder slowly, each rung groaning under his slight weight. He didn’t look like a preacher then. He looked like a man who had been running from a ghost for fifty years.

He took the book from my trembling hands. His fingers, long and bony, traced the hide cover with a terrible, familiar tenderness.

“My sister…,” he began, his voice a dry rustle. “She had the sight. Knew things. Could make things grow, or wither. She said the old power wasn’t the devil’s work. She said it was just… power.” He looked at me, and the fire in his eyes was gone, replaced by a bottomless grief. “I was afraid. For her soul. For mine. I tried to make her stop. We argued… by the old cypress. She fell. Hit her head.”

He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t need to. The witch bottles, the buried charms—they weren’t attacks. They were a chain of rituals. A lifetime of attempted atonement, of forbidden magic performed in the dead of night by a holy man trying to lay to rest a soul he feared he had damned twice over—once in life, and once in death.

He didn’t threaten me. He didn’t ask for my silence. He simply looked broken, the façade of the prophet shattered to reveal the terrified boy hiding within.

I left him there in the dusty loft, holding the ghost of his sister. I walked out of the barn and into the blinding sun. Spring Garden looked the same—the white church steeple, the rustling oaks, the folks waving from their porches. But it wasn’t the same. Nothing was ever the same after that.

The line between sinner and saint, between holy water and swamp water, had blurred into nothingness. The truth was not a clean, bright, shiny thing. It was a muddied, tangled root, dug up from a poisoned ground, and it had forever changed the nature of the soil in which my faith was planted. The fear of God was now accompanied by the terror of what a man might do in His name, and the dreadful, whispering knowledge that the swamp held more than just bobcats and ghosts. It held the sins of the righteous, buried in a shallow grave, waiting to be found.

*****

And, you know I mustn’t neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.