The Witch Hunter

Lyrics

“Your Grandaddy is either a ghost or a god,” the old timer said,
“and maybe both.”
I didn’t laugh. Not because I believed him—at first—but because some things you don’t laugh at, even when they sound like madness. There was something behind the man’s eyes, something that had seen.

And more than that, there was a flicker in my own blood, a shiver, like a whisper from a place far behind my ribs that said,
He’s not wrong.

I had always known my Grandaddy was different.
He was the County Agent, after all.
He wore khaki uniforms and was called out to pastures and peach orchards, to ponds where fish floated belly-up, to fields turned brittle, to cows with bloated sides and eyes too wide. He knew the soil like some men know scripture. He knew when to speak and when to kneel down, dig a finger in the dirt, and just listen.

I once saw him diagnose a dying orchard without a single test. He walked through the trees, touched the bark, sniffed the air, squatted by a root, and said, “Too much salt in the runoff. You been burning plastic or pouring out bleach?”
The farmer turned white.
My Grandaddy said nothing else. Just looked at him, then walked back to the truck.

But this old man—this broken-toothed oracle at the gas station just off Highway 80—he didn’t talk about runoff or potassium levels.
He spoke of something deeper.

He told me of Bouncing Betty, that land mine that was meant to bounce into the air and shred the living into silence. Said she rose up in my Grandaddy’s path and then, unnaturally, fell dead before she could speak her fire.

“Betty was called to him,” the man said,
“but then she was called off. He walked past her. Not untouched, mind you. Just unclaimed.”
He said the land must’ve spoken to Betty. Or Betty and the land had made an arrangement.
That she was never meant to take him.
Not yet.
Because he was a Witch Hunter. And the land protects its blades.

My Grandaddy never said a word about hunting witches.
But I remember how he would look at certain people.
Quietly. Long.
Not in judgment.
But like he could see something in them that others couldn’t.

He never said anything harsh, but sometimes after we left someone’s place, he’d say something odd, like,

“That boy don’t whistle right.”
Or,
“She don’t cast no shadow when she talks.”
At the time I thought he was just Southern.
Now I know he was watching for signs.
Reading signs.
And witches?
In the old tongue, “witch” wasn’t about gender or broomsticks. It was about imbalance. The ones who poison the land. The ones who speak rot into the roots and lie to the wind. The ones who use knowledge without wisdom.

A witch hunter isn’t someone who hates magic.
He’s someone who keeps it honest.

And now the land whispers to me.
It says: “Pick up the blade.”

Not to kill, but to cut through the lies.
To find truth. To bring balance.
To tend the field, and purge what poisons.

Whether he was ghost or god or something between,
I know this now:
He walks with me.

And I walk with him.