The Crafters Book Two

by Christopher Stasheff

  As the pair approached the white farmhouse, much like other farmhouses in those parts, the boy took off at a run. He raced up the wood plank stairs to his house, across the wide porch, through the dark wood door with a half-moon window, and was gone.

  In a few minutes he reappeared on the porch, hand in hand with a tall woman. A dress of linsey-woolsey draped her ample figure. A white scarf knotted her smooth red hair at the nape of the neck. She smiled. Her face was lovely, albeit careworn.

  She quickly assessed the stranger, liking what she saw. “Billy says you’re looking for a place.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the man answered. He awkwardly removed his hat, shifting from one foot to the other. “My name is Nat Singer. I can’t pay much. Got to save my money for a horse. But I’ve got two strong hands and a liking for work. I’d be happy to take up the chores and whatever else for my lodging.”

  Well, the money would have been nice, but Emma could use someone to milk the cows, clean out their stalls, and help deliver the butter and cheese into the town proper.

  She nodded. “Looks like you’ve found yourself a room.”

  * * *

  Emma looked Nat Singer over and she mostly liked what she saw. He was a good-looking man, just a couple of years older than her. There was a certain refinement about him, almost a softness which was refreshing after too much exposure to the rawhided, salty, and profane men of the West. There was something else about Nat Singer, something not so nice lurking behind his soft black beard and earnest brown eyes. But no one’s perfect. Emma decided Nat looked fine to do the chores around the place, which had been piling up ever since Lemuel Skelly’s death. He’d been the last hired hand, and the Shoshone had picked him off one time when he’d been riding over toward Devil’s Lake looking for stray steers. Now the Shoshone were mostly gone from the land. People said the Kiowa had displaced them, and the Kiowa had a bad name, especially after the mess they’d caused in Kansas. But they weren’t mostly seen around here and so no one paid them much mind.

  * * *

  And so Nat Singer began work on Emma Hawkins’ farm.

  Emma raised dairy cows, and provided about a quarter of Oak Bluffs’ milk. She also churned some of it into butter. Her vegetable garden grew tomatoes and zucchini and string beans. She raised some of the best strawberries in the state. She had a good-sized pigpen and did her own slaughtering, assisted by one of the drunkards from town. She kept her own counsel.

  Nathaniel Singer was the second oldest son of Martin and Fay Singer. Martin was a descendant of Amer Crafter, who had brought his supernormal talents to the Colonies from England in the early years of the seventeenth century. The Crafters were a family of some distinction: people with exceptional talents in witchcraft.

  All the Crafters did not follow the family tradition of magic.

  Some turned their back on the trade. Others, like Nat, had an ambiguous and uneasy relationship with the occult arts.

  A wild youth, highly intelligent but headstrong, and with a strong inherited talent for witchcraft, Nat had grown up in Salem and witnessed the Puritan excesses of its citizens. Experimentation in witchcraft had brought him great successes at first. And then came the incident when his magic couldn’t help, when he’d lost his wife, Agatha. Nat decided that New England, with its crabbed spirit and intolerant ways, was not for him. He dreamed of going West, toward room and freedom from dogma.

  His feelings about magic were violent and ambivalent. He hated it but was drawn to it. This led him into a series of lucid dreams. His dreaming brought him frequent visions of that mysterious unknown Western country to which he was going. There were great expanses of dun-colored land under an enormous sky that seemed larger, more pellucid, than those that overarched New England. In his visions he saw great prairies and deserts, and cliffs of many colors. He could see the great bend of a river. The place was hot and dry. There was cactus and juniper. The sun was brilliant, merciless, all-seeing, unforgiving. There were Indians in this land and they were different from the Iroquois and Hurons he had known. They did not shave their heads like the northern tribes. Their dark hair was shoulder-length, and they bound it back with colorful headbands. They were horsemen who had been fighting the Spanish for over a century.

  Those savage horsemen were still far away. Nat thought about them, and so the quiet days passed, and Oak Bluffs seemed a peaceable place. But it was soon after this that he began to pick up the scent of something wrong. At first he didn’t want to acknowledge it. If his sense was right, there could be trouble, spiritual trouble of the sort he was trying to move away from. He’d left the difficult problems of innocence and evil behind him. He was going to a new place, a place that did not know the demons and dangers of the Old World. Agatha and he had dabbled once too often in that. Now he had to move fast. He didn’t want to stay in this place. Something smelled bad here. There was an almost palpable sense of evil in this place. Bad things were going to happen here. But he wouldn’t be here when they happened. That was certain.

  Nat was supposed to make himself useful. It was evident that he didn’t know beans about farm life. It was plain that he was a city man. But he was willing to turn his hand to whatever came up, and he was quick to learn. The first task was rail-splitting, and then fence-mending. Some of the cows had been escaping from the southern pasture. This fence had to be built up at once. The rail-splitting was tough work for a man who wasn’t born and bred to it, but Nat quickly picked it up. He was inexperienced, but clever with his hands. Things had a way of coming together nicely under his long, blunt fingers. Billy, who followed him around and watched him, marvelled at how quickly the city man was able to accustom himself to farm life.

  Nat found the work pleasant and not too onerous. He had long wanted a practical introduction to what he had encountered before, only theoretically, in books studied at Harvard.

  Although most forms of farm work seemed pleasant to him, one chore was somewhat irksome. The widow had decided just weeks before he’d come that a new cesspool had to be dug below and to the right of the existing one. The old one was filled to overflowing, and had been further flooded by recent rains. The new one, marked out in somewhat firmer soil, would be a long-term job, taking one man most of the summer.

  After a few hours of backbreaking work, wrenching out the granite lumps that this land seemed to be composed of, Nat mopped his brow and sat back to consider if there might not be a better way to go about this.

  It was a fine afternoon. The sun was already halfway down the sky. Billy wasn’t with him today. The widow had been sending the boy to the new school started by an itinerant preacher. Nat surveyed the land, then took out his billfold. He sat down on a little bluff, made himself comfortable, and began searching through it. At last he found what he was looking for. It was a scrap of parchment he’d gotten from the Boston Common Copying Room. On it was a list of names, none of them likely to be familiar to most people.

  He read it. Endymore. That was the one he wanted.

  He paused and looked around. He was alone. He didn’t like what he was about to do. He reminded himself that he’d sworn not to go back to the old ways. He was going to a new country, and was giving up the old ways. But the pit was very difficult to dig. And there was no one around. So ...

  It took but a moment to trace the pentagram in the dirt.

  Several twigs, cleverly bent and joined, served as the focus figures. He was harder pressed to find the pinch of manna dust. It wasn’t the sort of thing one carried around every day. At last, searching around the floor of the meadow, he found a mole’s lair, and within it, some fine powdering dust left by the female from her recent heat. He sprinkled this around the pentagram, and then began the chant. His words rose, thin and without timbre, in the bright June air. He felt the familiar sensation of queasiness in the pit of his stomach. The chant proceeded from his mouth, haltingly at first, for it had been a long time since he’d last in
voked an earth spirit, but then with more celerity as the familiar pattern reasserted itself. After a little while he noticed a whirring in the air, like a tiny dust storm. It seemed to spin just out of his peripheral vision, tantalizingly close, yet refusing to be looked at. He didn’t try to focus on it. He knew from considerable experience how some spirits resist firm definition.

  “Well, and who are you?” a voice said, somewhat crossly.

  “My name is Nat Singer,” Nat said. “I stand under the protection of the seal.”

  “Glad to hear it. Otherwise I would have blasted you. Why do you rouse me from my sleep? I was just having the most remarkable dream. In it I had been elected king of the Hindu pantheon of gods, and I was just deciding—”

  “Excuse me,” Nat said. “I’d like to hear the story some other time. Right now I need to ask a favor.”

  “Of course. Why else would you have called me up? All right, what is it?”

  “You are a demon of the earth,” Nat said. “I would like you to move some earth for me.”

  “One of those mountains, I suppose?” the spirit said.

  “Nothing so grand. Right here on the ground I have marked it out. It is an area about fifteen feet on a side by twenty feet deep.”

  “You would disturb me for a task as minuscule as that?” the spirit said.

  “I’m afraid so. Although it’s a minor matter for you, for me it would involve considerable effort.”

  “I suppose it would,” the spirit said. “What will you give me if I do this?”

  “I am not bound to give you anything,” Nat said. “You are one of the spirits bound by King Solomon himself, bound to do the work which an initiated person such as myself requires of you, as long as it pertains to your realm of magic, the earth.”

  “True enough,” the spirit said. “But it is not a bad idea to do me a little favor anyhow. Who knows how long the Seal of Solomon will bind me in place? And, the seal once broken, who knows how terribly I might wreak vengeance on those who made light of me?”

  “What is it you want?”

  “Just make a little prayer to me, sometime just before you’re going to bed.”

  “A prayer to you? But you have no real power. You can’t grant wishes in the general sense. What would be the point of directing a prayer to you?”

  “It would make me feel good, that’s what good it would do,” the spirit said. “But if it’s too much to ask ...”

  “No, not at all. I’ll get around to it. But for now, the dirt, if you please.”

  “Oh, very well. Stand back.”

  Singer stood well back from the outlined area. For a few moments nothing happened. Then he saw what looked like a sword of glass appear in the air. It plunged down into the ground, and brilliance coruscated from the blade. Deeper and deeper it slid, glowing silver-hot and throwing off fiery red sparks, penetrating the hardened earth like an ice pick sliding into butter. Tendrils of smoke arose from where the fire burned in the earth, and there was a crackling, groaning sound as rocks were cleaved asunder by the blade’s glassy brilliance. Soon a glowing line surrounded the outlined portion of earth. Then, as Singer watched, the earth began to rise in a solid block, coming up out of the ground as though propelled on a huge hydraulic screw. Higher and higher it rose, a solid chunk of earth bound together with tree vines and filled with pebbles and larger stones. Earthworms and tiny insects fell from the mass of earth as it rose, higher, higher. Then it came entirely free of the surrounding earth and was poised for a moment, suspended ten feet above the ground.

  “Where you want it, boss?” the earth demon asked. “What if I drop it over there?” He indicated a direction several miles away with a wisp of smoke.

  “Not there!” Nat said. “That’s where they just put up the new warehouse. They’d have my hide if I buried it under a mound of dirt.”

  “Well, where am I to put it?” the demon demanded. “You can’t expect me to go on holding it here forever. Although I’m certainly capable of it.”

  “Take it up to space,” Nat told him.

  “What part of space? Space is a pretty big place, you know.”

  “Put it on the moon,” Nat said. “On the dark side so it won’t show in telescopes.”

  “Got it, boss,” the earth spirit said. “Check with you later.”

  The big cube of dirt trembled for a moment, then shot straight up into the air. In two seconds it had dwindled to a speck, and in one second more it was gone entirely.

  It was only then, after the thing was gone and the deed was not to be undone that Nat realized he had left himself a problem.

  How was he to explain the manner in which this hole had appeared without invoking the forbidden subject of witchcraft? Surprisingly, no one asked, at first.

  Work went on. Then there came a day when Nat and the widow had to go into town for supplies. This simple trip had some unexpected consequences.

  Emma Hawkins looked over her list. Feed for the chickens, sugar, cornmeal, and some strong lye soap.

  Nat and Billy brought the carriage around to the front of the house for this trip into town. Billy held the reins while Nat helped Emma aboard.

  Billy liked to drive, giving it all his attention, while Nat and Emma softly talked about the work of the day ahead. And about the square dance in town that night.

  “Seems like everyone’s going,” Nat said offhandedly. He wanted to ask Emma but didn’t know if it would be proper.

  “Seems so,” Emma answered. She looked away. Was it two, three years ago she and the late Mr. Hawkins attended their last dance? Wasn’t a dance they missed, except those when she was heavy with Billy. And then Lem had to go get himself killed by that drunken Shoshone Indian.

  “I’d be proud to take you,” Nat said, surprising himself with his boldness. He blushed a hard red. Emma looked at him, amused by his embarrassment.

  “And I’d be proud,” she said, “to go with you.”

  They were both silent the rest of the way to town. Billy tied up the horses while Emma and Nat went into the general store.

  The store smelled of flowers, fresh flowers in a tin bucket for sale at a nickel a bunch. Barrels filled with flour, sugar, molasses, and meal neatly lined one wall. Blue glass bottles filled with ointments and tinctures shone in the sun which came through gingham curtains at the front window.

  Emma gathered the items on her list while Nat passed the time of day with the proprietor.

  “Needing a horse, are you?” the grocer asked. “Heard about a shipment from Kansas coming to town soon. Good horses, I hear.”

  “How much a head?” Nat asked, feeling the ten-dollar bill he kept in his right pocket.

  “Five, ten dollars, I’d guess ...”

  The grocer’s voice trailed off as Red Swenson burst in the store’s rattly door.

  The first thing anyone noticed about Red Swenson was his size—Red was tall and round as a grizzly—and the shock of orange hair that drooped from his forehead in long, loose curls.

  Today, Red’s blue-denim-colored eyes were streaked with blood from last night’s bout with the bottle. Clearly, the bottle had won.

  “Seems you cheated me,” Red hollered, barely focusing on the grocer. “Bought three sacks of cornmeal from you, and when I got them home I found ’em full of worms.”

  “I checked all that cornmeal myself,” the grocer said.

  “Maggots, I tell you,” Red shouted, shifting his gaze to take in Nat as well.

  The grocer looked around nervously. Wasn’t but a week ago that Red had asked for a refund on food he’d bought here. And before that, yes, he’d been here about a week before. Same complaint. The grocer had given him back his money and Red had headed straight for the saloon.

  “If you’d bring in the meal I could have a look at it,” the grocer offered meekly.

  “You doubtin’
my word, Sam? You mean you don’t believe,” Red asked, his voice rising to a shriek, “that Red Swenson, son of Han Swenson, who was a pioneer in these parts, is telling the truth?”

  Swenson balled his meaty fists and advanced on the grocer, who backed away toward the cash register. Better lose a little money than get cracked, he figured.

  Red would have had his money, all right, if Nat hadn’t suddenly stepped between him and Sam. “Now just a minute here,” Nat said, putting a strong hand on Red’s shoulder. “Seems you ought to bring in the bad meal so Sam here can have a look at it. No worms in this bin here, far as I can see.”

  Suddenly Red’s eyes focused on this stranger. He was built strong, but was a good bit smaller than Red, and lean, like a man who hasn’t eaten so well for a while.

  “You talking to me?” he asked. “You’re the one from back East, aren’t you? Came here to Missouri and got yourself a woman master. And you’re talking to me?”

  Nat tried to step away, but Red put his hands on both his shoulders and held him in place. The big man’s face came down toward Nat’s, his mouth hard and foul with the smell of whiskey. “Seems we should talk about this outside,” Red said in mock friendliness. “Seems like you got a lesson to teach me in manners, so let’s have it.”

  Nat felt a furious heat rise to his temples. With a shiver, he felt his dormant powers spread through his body like a net of subtle electricity. He could throw this braggart halfway into the next county ... .

  No, he thought, not here, not now. Maybe another time he’d meet up with this big, foul-breathed man again and show him how much brawn was worth when it was matched up against witchcraft. But not now.

  Nat glared at Red but backed away. Again Red thrust his huge head toward Nat, but the whiskey went bad in the big man’s stomach. He grabbed at his belly and staggered toward the door. He just made it to the other side to retch.

  And that should have been the end of it. But there is a perversity that rules these things, because after that, the way Red Swenson told it, Nat put the evil eye on him, making him sick with a peculiar gesture that sure looked like witch-stuff. This, combined with the rumors about the miraculous cesspool, was enough to decide the Reverend Harrelson to pay Nat a visit.