by William Gay
By the time he had wended his way through the bullbriars and vines that formed the lawn of the cottage, she had reached the yard and dragged the vines onto the porch. She was sitting in a willow rocker catching her breath. A tiny gnomish woman who’d come no higher than his chest, a dried and fragile elf of indeterminate but advanced age who seemed light and delicate as the fluted bones of birds found in the woods. Dressed all in homedyed black like the sole survivor of some obscure sect she’d outlived here in this lost wood, with foxes for lapdogs and whippoorwills nesting in her henhouse. The porch was well corded with heaterwood, you’d think the old woman had had word of an impending winter of profound intensity. Hidy, he said.
How do. Get you a seat there.
Tyler seated himself on the edge of the porch with his back braced against a stanchion. He had not realized how tired he was until he stopped to rest. The porch floor was strewn with soft, curling shavings of hickory.
You been making something?
Handles. You come after one?
He wondered at the degree of emergency that would drive him so far in dire need of a handle. No, he said.
I got em from tack hammer handles all the way up to axe handles.
I don’t reckon I need one.
She had a pile of sticks two feet or so long laid by the rocking chair, and now she took one up. The stick had a fork on its small end, and she looped a length of honeysuckle vine about the fork and commenced winding the vine into a ball.
I guess you come about a potion then.
A potion? What sort of potion?
She shrugged. Whatever kind it is you need. I get calls for all kinds. She studied him acutely. I figure you for a love potion. One to make some little gal look away from the feller she’s with and hook up with you. She cackled dryly, a sound like the rustle of cornhusks. Or look away from you and fix on somebody else. I get calls for both kinds, and I got the herbs and stuff to make em.
Do they work?
Same folks keep comin back.
You got a potion that’ll keep a man from killing you?
Her eyes remarked the gun. Looks to me like you totin around a potion’d do that. I don’t want to kill anybody. I just want to keep from getting killed.
I got hexes that’ll make him hurt so bad he’ll forget he ever saw your face. Tie his guts in a hard knot and draw both ends tight. But you don’t look like you’ve lived long enough to make anybody that mad, though.
I did this fellow.
She looked at whatever it was she was making. She selected a thin brown vine and wrapped the ball then wove the vine through the bottom, then wound the stick and tucked the end under adroitly. She studied it intently as if to see whether it measured up to whatever standard she went by then laid it aside and began another one.
What are you making now?
Cokeberry trees they call em.
Who calls them?
She shrugged. The man I sell em to. He buys all I make for fifteen cents apiece. He sells em somewheres. She gestured vaguely, as to indicate Ackerman’s Field, Nashville, the world at large.
He was studying the thing. If it had a use he couldn’t divine it. What on earth do they do with them?
Now there you got me. Maybe they sets em around to look at. Folks with too much money’ll buy anything. Even hexes. You see all this wood I got? Charlie Peters hauls it to me on a wagon. He thinks I’m a witch put a hex on his wife. She got a cancer. He started bringin me wood to get me to take it off.
Did you?
It’s a little late for that. She died. He keeps on bringin me wood, though, cause he thinks I got one on him.
Why would he think you put a hex on his wife? He shot and killed my dog and she caught a cancer. He seen a connection there I didn’t see. I don’t know, maybe the dog done it. I don’t know the answer to everthing in the world.
Could you do that? Hex somebody?
She glanced at him with her berrybright eyes, then at the wood as if that were answer enough.
All those things made out of cane, hanging from the trees, are they yours?
She nodded. They to confound my enemies. Somebody start in here to do me harm’d never make it through em.
Well, I guess I’m all right then. I made it. He thought about asking her about the doll but then decided not to. What kind of cancer did she have? Charlie Peters’s wife?
Stomach cancer, I heard.
Tell you the truth, I didn’t come after anything. I got turned around in the woods, then I saw the old Perrie place and went up to look at it. I didn’t even know where I was till I saw it.
She laid the cokeberry tree aside and looked at the towering structure. I been here a long while. My other house blowed away. The harrikin picked it up from around me and carried it off somewhere else. Maybe set it down around somebody didn’t have one, I don’t know. The world works in funny ways, I don’t question it. I took that for a sign and found me another one. Comes a harrikin and gets this one, I’ll just find me someplace else. That big house over there they used to have fancy parties. All the high society. Whole yard there growed up in bull nettles used to be a rose garden where the courtin couples’d walk. One night that balcony up yonder was overloaded with folks, and one end of it come out of the brick, and the whole thing swung down like a wheel rollin, and folks was strowed all over like busted dolls with the sawdust leakinout. All them fine parties is done now. I’m still here, though. All them folks in crazyhouses, old folks’ homes, cemeteries.
She sat in a contemplative silence. Summer nights you can still hear them parties. People talkin and laughin far off so faint you can’t make out what they’re sayin. Some warm nights I set out here and listen to their dance music. You believe that?
I didn’t come all this way to call you a liar.
She laid the tree aside and dusted honeysuckle leaves from her dress. Come on in the house, she said. It’s about time for a bite of supper.
They entered a dark and cloistral gloom. More wood here. A raw odor of its curing. All manner of handles stood about where she’d leant them. As if she were driven to make new all the world’s broken tools. A path wound through the wood like a maze and at its end a shadowed leanto kitchen.
He’d thought himself hungry but not so much as he thought. Supper was some type of cold greens boiled without grease or salt and the bread was unleavened as if she held to some vow of abstinence. She watched him while he chewed this tasteless mess in silence.
How come this feller wantin to kill you?
An undertaker hired him to, I reckon.
I’m a old woman but I never knowed undertakin to be so slow they had to kill folks for the business. Folks dyin all the time, it’s the way of the world. Help yourself to them greens there.
Tyler finished and swallowed with an effort and pushed his plate aside a fraction of an inch with a thumb. He hoped she didn’t try forcing the greens on him and she didn’t. She rose and covered the pan with a cloth and set it atop the cookstove, perhaps for another meal.
You want me to tell your fortune?
I reckon not. I’ll just play them like they fall.
Life ain’t no card game. Be forewarned. I’d not charge you. Usually I get a dollar, but yours I’d do for nothin.
I reckon not.
Let me give you the dollar then.
He laughed nervously. How come you want to tell my fortune?
There’s somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s somethin about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil.
Well. You being a witch and all, looks like you’d know.
I would if you wadn’t blockin it out. You’re hidin somethin.
You can’t read people, skim through them like books and lay them aside. All the fortune I need to know is how to get to a road. Can you not tell me how to find the railroad tracks?
There was more wickedness in the world than you thought and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you,
ain’t ye?
No. This fella that you sell your vines to, does he pick them up? How do you get to the railroad tracks?
I don’t. There’s a wickedness in this world, and I try to stay clear of it, but this time I think it’s come in the door and set down at my table.
I told you I was just lost.
You’re lost, all right. Now I wonder if I ain’t myself.
He had risen and made ready to go. You could tell me where the road goes.
You said you came in on it. If one way come here and it don’t go but two ways, then the other way must be the one you want. Ain’t that right? I never did anything to you that I know of.
There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.
There’s a man going to be looking for me, Tyler said. If he comes here don’t let him in.
My enemies gives me plenty of leeway to pass, she said. I don’t expect yourn to be any different.
He wound his way back through the dusty maze into the wan winter light. She had followed him to the door as if to ensure that he kept going. He took up the rifle. I’ll see you, he said.
She did not reply, and he wound through the nettles past the dark cathedral where the ghosts held sway and back down the slope into the bottomland.
A gaudy Christmas moon candled up out of the pines and watched Sutter above jagged black carvings of scrimshaw trees. His shadow appeared palely beneath his feet like some faint image developing on a photographic plate. He came out of the hollow following his shadow through the slashes of dreaming trees past the ruined mansion with its enormous keep of hoarded silence until he came upon the toy house with its windows blind save the refracted moon and its weathered walls bleached with silver light. Its dark tin roof seemed the very negation of light.
On the porch with fist upraised to pound on the door he thought he heard the furtive pitterpatter of hasty retreatingfootsteps. Some creature of the night perhaps who’d sensed his presence and struck for deeper timber.
He lowered the poised hand and twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open onto a darkness so profound the house seemed to store nothing save the dark itself. He stepped into the room and vanished, the dark simply took him. He stood invisible beside the framed oblong of moonlight. He stood holding his breath, listening. When he breathed again he could smell the room, stale smoke and kerosene and years of old cookery. The odor of curing wood and tinned mackerel and the sour musty female smell of the old witchwoman herself. Nothing of humanity here, the smell was the smell of some old vixen fox’s lair.
Young Tyler, Sutter called. If you’re here come on out. I just need to talk to you.
Silence. He tilted out a kitchen match and struck it on a thumbnail. Orange light filled the room, objects leapt out at him, shadows reared and subsided about the walls as if Sutter had suddenly unleashed into the room dozens of his darker selves.
There was a kerosene lamp atop an old sewing machine cabinet and he unglobed and lit it. Warm yellow light banished the shadows and the first thing he saw was the ricked wood. Goddamned if you wasn’t expectin a cold spell, he said aloud. His voice sounded harsh and unreal in the silence and it seemed to startle him.
With the light held aloft like a smoking torch he searched the house without expecting to find anyone and his expectations were fulfilled. He peered into cabinets and under beds and he prowled through cardboard boxes. The old witchwoman seemed to possess even less of the world’s goodsthan Sutter did and he deemed himself much the better housekeeper. The back door stood ajar to the night and all there was beyond it were the stygian trees. Long gone ain’t she lucky, he sang softly to himself. She’s a long gone mama from Tennessee. He shook his head and grinned ruefully to himself and turned back to the kitchen.
He found two tins of sardines and half a box of soda crackers. He pocketed the flat tins and tucked the crackers under an arm. He found a pone of cornbread so hard it seemed some sort of weird fossil or a flat cylinder of petrified wood and when he hurled it against the wall it rang like stone and spun onto the floor unbroken. I bet a man could drive a nail with that son of a bitch, he said. He found a little coffee in a tin and he took that and then he went out.
He paused by the ruined mansion and sat on the stone doorstep and popped the key on a tin of the sardines and opened them. He laid sardines side by side on one cracker and topped them with another making dainty little sandwiches. He ate until he’d finished one tin and then he lit a cigarette and sat smoking. Grinning to himself he imagined the old woman fleeing soundless out the back door and running sylphlike and blind into the bowering trees. Up and gone at just the imminence of his footstep, gone before his upraised foot touched the plank floor.
There may be something to this old fortunetellin business after all, he told the night.
After a while he dozed and he dreamed music and distant revelry and the rising and falling cadences of voices and he came instantly awake but he could still hear them. He’d long known this place for haunted but it did not bother him. All those lost voices, those lost shades drifting from room toroom like smoke. He felt he could have entered their conversation without interrupting it, could have fallen easily into their number and gone unnoticed.
When Phelan pushed against the funeral home door it did not open as he’d expected it to and for a moment he just looked at it in perplexity. He pushed again but the door was locked. The few times he’d been here before for the funerals of colleagues and family the door opening onto Walnut Street had always been unlocked during business hours. This permitted public access to the viewing rooms and chapel.
Phelan was wearing his Sunday clothes. Sport coat in a somber plaid and a blue tie loose at the throat and his shoes were shined. He knocked on the door and looked about. Quiet Sunday morning, cold in the air. Down the street a few late worshipers climbed the steps to the Presbyterian church, he caught scraps of subdued children’s laughter the wind brought. Phelan noticed that Breece hadn’t had the leaves raked lately and they lay about the lawn and in a loose windrow against the house. A garbage can had been overturned and the wind had kited papers into the box-elder hedge.
Yes?
The door had opened no more than three inches. Phelan could see a narrow section of Breece’s face and a necktie knotted tight beneath his ponderous chins. Below that a white smock.
My name is Phelan. I want to make an inquiry about Corrie Tyler. The door didn’t open. Perhaps it closed a fraction. What about her?
Phelan didn’t know what to make of this. Well, she’s dead, he said. I assumed there’d be a funeral.
Of course there’ll be a funeral, he said. Arrangements haven’t been finalized.
This time the door definitely moved toward the jamb, the slice of Breece narrowed, just one eye and a section of florid nose with its roadmap tracery of burst capillaries.
Phelan was a respectable schoolteacher who paid his bills and was well-thought-of in the community and was accustomed to being welcomed wherever he went but he wasn’t welcome here. In fact he’d never felt so unwelcome.
Hold on here a minute, he said. I want to talk about these arrangements.
No response. The eye Phelan could see looked distracted, and Phelan felt for a crazy moment that maybe he’d already left and Breece was just impatiently standing there watching where Phelan had been.
I know both of the Tylers and know the young man rather well, a student of mine. Perhaps it’s none of my business, but I’m aware of their financial situation and I doubt there’s any insurance. I’d like to help them in some way. I’d like to know what sort of financial arrangements have been made. I thought I’d pay part of them myself and perhaps take up a collection in the community.
It’s been taken care of.
Taken care of how?
Just don’t worry about it, Mr Phelan. As I said, it’s taken care of, nothing for anyone to pay. Nothing for yo
u to be concerned about. As you said yourself, it’s really none of yourbusiness.
When are the services? I’d like to view the body.
I don’t mean to be indelicate, but the body was badly damaged in the accident. Face crushed and so on. Of course it will be a closed casket ceremony.
Something’s not right here, Phelan said. I’ve spoken with people in the sheriff’s department and been informed that she was unmarked. In fact, a deputy told me that the broken neck was her only injury and that when they arrived on the scene she looked as serene as a child who’d fallen asleep in that field.
I’m a professional, Mr Phelan. Who do you choose to believe? Don’t you think I’d know the condition of a body I’m preparing? At any rate it’s a moot point. The body has been claimed. The body is being transported. By an aunt, I believe. Perhaps there’ll be some sort of memorial service. You could attend that, of course.
I told you I know this family. Known both of them all their lives, I’ve taken an interest in their lives, had both of them as students. There’s no aunt.
Of course there is. From Michigan or somewhere, one of those upnorth states. Good day, Mr Phelan.
This can’t be, Phelan began, but the door had closed with the finality of a coffin lid and he heard the lock tumblers click into place and he was talking to a panel of polished oak.
He knocked and waited but there was only silence from within. After a long while he turned and went down the concrete steps into the wind, hand sliding on the polished steel railing, his face abstracted and uncertain.
He walked on past the cluster of churches. There was singing from within, one hymn segued into another, they wereleaning, leaning on the everlasting arm in the sweet by and by. He went on past Kittrel’s car lot with its plastic pennants snapping in the stiff wind and turned the corner and went on up the street toward the courthouse. He thought he ought to talk to someone in the sheriff’s office but he didn’t know who and he didn’t know what he’d say if he did.