I found a stream, with stones making steps across it. I followed it down to where it made a wide pool. There I got on my knee and washed my face—it looked pale as clabber in the water image—and sat down with my back to a tree and hugged my guitar and had a rest.
I was shaking all over. I must have felt near about as bad for a while as Mr. Onselm had looked to feel, sitting on that rotten log to wait for his Ugly Bird and—what else?
Had he been hungry near to death? Sick? Or maybe had his own evil set back on him? I couldn’t rightly say which.
But after a while I felt some better. I got up and walked back to the trail and along it again, till I came to what must have been the only store thereabouts.
It faced one way on a rough gravelly road that could carry wagon traffic, car traffic too if you didn’t mind your car getting a good shakeup, and the trail joined on there, right across from the doorway. The building wasn’t big but it was good, made of sawed planks, and there was paint on it, well painted on. Its bottom rested on big rocks instead of posts, and it had a roofed open front like a porch, with a bench in there where folks could sit.
Opening the door, I went in. You’ll find many such stores in back country places through the land, where folks haven’t built their towns up too close. Two-three counters. Shelves of cans and packages. Smoked meat hung up in one corner, a glass-fronted icebox for fresh meat in another. Barrels here and there, for beans or meal or potatoes. At the end of one counter, a sign says U.S. POST OFFICE, and there’s a set of maybe half a dozen pigeonholes to put letters in, and a couple of cigar boxes for stamps and money order blanks. That’s the kind of place it was.
The proprietor wasn’t in just then. Only a girl, scared and shaky back of the counter, and Mr. Onselm, there ahead of me, a-telling her what it was he wanted.
He wanted her.
“I don’t care a shuck if Sam Heaver did leave you in charge here,” he said with the music in his voice. “He won’t stop my taking you with me.”
Then he heard me come in, and he swung round and fixed his squint eye and his wide-open eye on me, like two mismatched gun muzzles. “You again,” he said.
He looked right hale and hearty again. I strayed my hands over the guitar’s silver strings, just enough to hear, and he twisted up his face as if it colicked him.
“Winnie,” he told the girl, “wait on this stranger and get him out of here.”
Her round eyes were scared in her scared face. I thought inside myself that seldom I’d seen as sweet a face as hers, or as scared a one. Her hair was dark and thick. It was like the thundercloud before the rain comes down. It made her paleness look paler. She was small and slim, and she cowered there, for fear of Mr. Onselm and what he’d been saying to her.
“Yes, sir?” she said to me, hushed and shaky.
“A box of crackers, please, ma’am,” I decided, pointing to where they were on the shelf behind her. “And a can of those little sardine fish.”
She put them on the counter for me. I dug out the quarter Mr. Bristow had given me up the trail, and slapped it down on the counter top between the scared girl and Mr. Onselm.
“Get away!” he squeaked, shrill and sharp and mean as a bat. When I looked at him, he’d jumped back, almost halfway across the floor from the counter. And for just once, both his eyes were big and wide.
“Why, Mr. Onselm, what’s the matter?” I wondered him, and I purely was wondering. “This is a good quarter.”
I picked it up and held it out for him to take and study.
But he flung himself around, and he ran out of that store like a rabbit. A rabbit with dogs running it down.
The girl he’d called Winnie just leaned against the wall as if she was bone tired. I asked her: “Why did he light out like that?”
I gave her the quarter, and she took it. “That money isn’t a scary thing, is it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t much scare me,” she said, and rang it up on the old cash register. “All that scares me is—Mr. Onselm.”
I picked up the box of crackers and sardines. “Is he courting you?”
She shivered, although it was warm in the store. “I’d sooner be in a hole with a snake than be courted by Mr. Onselm.”
“Then why not just tell him to leave you be?”
“He wouldn’t hark at that,” she said. “He always just does what pleasures him. Nobody dares to stop him.”
“So I’ve heard tell,” I nodded. “About the mules he stopped where they stood, and the poor old lady he struck dumb.” I returned to the other thing we’d been talking. “But what made him squinch away from that money piece? I’d reckon he loved money.”
She shook her head, and the thundercloud hair stirred. “Mr. Onselm never needs any money. He takes what he wants, without paying for it.”
“Including you?” I asked.
“Not including me yet.” She shuddered again. “He reckons to do that later on.”
I put down my dime I had left from what Mr. Bristow had gifted me. “Let’s have a coke drink together, you and me.”
She rang up the dime, too. There was a sort of dried-out chuckle at the door, like a stone flung rattling down a deep dark well. I looked quick, and I saw two long, dark wings flop away outside. The Ugly Bird had come to spy what we were doing.
But the girl Winnie hadn’t seen, and she smiled over her coke drink. I asked her permission to open my fish and crackers on the bench outside. She said I could. Out there, I worried open the can with that little key that comes with it, and had my meal. When I’d finished I put the empty can and cracker box in a garbage barrel and tuned my guitar.
Hearing that, Winnie came out. She told me how to make my way to the pass and on beyond to Hark Mountain. Of the Bottomless Pool she’d heard some talk, though she’d never been to it. Then she harked while I picked the music and sang the song about the girl whose hair was like the thundercloud before the rain comes down. Harking, Winnie blushed till she was pale no more.
Then we talked about Mr. Onselm and the Ugly Bird, and how they had been seen in two different places at once. “But,” said Winnie, “nobody’s ever seen the two of them together.”
“I have,” I told her. “And not an hour back.”
And I related about how Mr. Onselm had sat, all sick and miserable, on that rotten log, and how the Ugly Bird had lighted beside him and crowded up to him.
She was quiet to hear all about it, with her eyes staring off, the way she might be looking for something far away. When I was done, she said: “John, you tell me it crowded right up to him.”
“It did that thing,” I said again. “You’d think it was studying how to crawl right inside him.”
“Inside him!”
“That’s the true fact.”
She kept staring off, and thinking.
“Makes me recollect something I heard somebody say once about hoodoo folks,” she said after a time. “How there’s hoodoo folks can sometimes put a sort of stuff out, mostly in a dark room. And the stuff is part of them, but it can take the shape and mind of some other person—and once in a while, the shape and mind of an animal.”
“Shoo,” I said, “now you mention it, I’ve heard some talk of the same thing. And somebody reckoned it might could explain those Louisiana stories about the werewolves.”
“The shape and mind of an animal,” she repeated herself. “Maybe the shape and mind of a bird. And that stuff, they call it echo—no, ecto—ecto—”
“Ectoplasm.” I remembered the word. “That’s it. I’ve even seen a book with pictures in it, they say were taken of such stuff. And it seems to be alive. It’ll yell if you grab it or hit it or stab at it or like that.”
“Couldn’t maybe—” Winnie began, but a musical voice interrupted.
“I say he’s been around here long enough,” Mr. Onselm was telling somebody.
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Back he came. Behind him were three men, Mr. Bristow was one, and there was likewise a tall, gawky man with wide shoulders and a black-stubbly chin, and behind him a soft, smooth-grizzled old man with an old fancy vest over his white shirt.
Mr. Onselm was like the leader of a posse. “Sam Heaver,” he crooned at the soft grizzled one, “do you favor having tramps come and loaf around your store?”
The soft old storekeeper looked at me, dead and gloomy. “You better get going, son,” he said, as if he’d memorized it.
I laid my guitar on the bench beside me, very careful of it. “You men ail my stomach,” I said, looking at them, from one to the next to the next. “You come at the whistle of this half-born, half-bred witch-man. You let him sic you on me like dogs, when I’m hurting nobody and nothing.”
“Better go,” said the old storekeeper again.
I stood up and faced Mr. Onselm, ready to fight him. He just laughed at me, like a sweetly played horn.
“You,” he said, “without a dime in your pocket! What are you a-feathering up about? You can’t do anything to anybody.”
Without a dime…
But I had a dime. I’d spent it for the coke drinks for Winnie and me. And the Ugly Bird had spied in to see me spend it, my silver money, the silver money that scared and ailed Mr. Onselm…
“Take his guitar, Hobe.” Mr. Onselm said an order, and the gawky man moved, clumsy but quick and grabbed my guitar off the bench and backed away to the inner door.
“There,” said Mr. Onselm, sort of purring, “that takes care of him.”
He fairly jumped, too, and grabbed Winnie by her wrist. He pulled her along out of the porch toward the trail, and I heard her whimper.
“Stop him!” I yelled out, but the three of them stood and looked, scared to move or say a word. Mr. Onselm, still holding Winnie with one hand, faced me. He lifted his other hand and stuck out the pink forefinger at me, like the barrel of a pistol.
Just the look his two eyes, squint and wide, gave me made me weary and dizzy to my bones. He was gong to witch me, as he’d done the mules, as he’d done the woman who’d tried to hide her cake from him. I turned away from his gaze, sick and—sure, I was afraid. And I heard him giggle, thinking he’d won already. I took a step, and I was next to that gawky fellow named Hobe, who held my guitar.
I made a quick long jump and started to wrestle it away from him.
“Hang onto that thing, Hobe!” I heard Mr. Onselm sort of choke out, and, from Mr. Bristow:
“Take care, there’s the Ugly Bird!”
Its big dark wings flapped like a storm in the air just behind me. But I’d shoved my elbow into Hobe’s belly-pit and I’d torn my guitar from his hands, and I turned on my heel to face what was being brought upon me.
A little way off in the open, Mr. Onselm stood stiff and straight as a stone figure in front of an old court house. He still held Winnie by the wrist. Right betwixt them came a-swooping the Ugly Bird at me, the ugliest ugly of all, its long sharp beak pointing for me like a sticky knife.
I dug my toes and smashed my guitar at it. I swung the way a player swings a ball bat at a pitched ball. Full-slam I struck its bulgy head, right above that sharp beak and across its two eyes, and I heard the loud noise as the polished wood of my music-maker crashed to splinters.
Oh, gentlemen, and down went that Ugly Bird!
Down it went, falling just short of the porch.
Quiet it lay.
Its great big feathered wings stretched out either side, without any flutter to them. Its beak was driven into the ground like a nail. It didn’t kick or flop or stir once.
But Mr. Onselm, where he stood holding Winnie, screamed out the way he might scream if something had clawed out his all insides with one single tearing dig and grab.
He didn’t move. I don’t even know if his mouth came rightly open to make that scream. Winnie gave a pull with all the strength she had, and tottered back, loose from him. Then, as if only his hold on her had kept him standing, Mr. Onselm slapped right over and dropped down on his face, his arms flung out like the Ugly Bird’s wings, his face in the dirt like the Ugly Bird’s face.
Still holding onto my broken guitar by the neck, like a club, I walked quick over to him and stooped. “Get up,” I bade him, and took hold of what hair he had and lifted up his face to look at it.
One look was a plenty. From the war, I know a dead man when I see one. I let go Mr. Onselm’s hair, and his face went back into the dirt the way you’d know it belonged there.
The other men moved at last, slow and tottery like old men. And they didn’t act like my enemies now, for Mr. Onselm who’d made them act thataway was down and dead.
Then Hobe gave a sort of shaky scared shout, and we looked where he was looking.
The Ugly Bird looked all of a sudden rotten and mushy, and while we saw that, it was soaking into the ground. To me, anyhow, its body had seemed to turn shadowy and misty, and I could see through it, to pebbles on the ground beneath. I moved close, though I didn’t relish moving. The Ugly Bird was melting away, like dirty snow on top of a hot stove; only no wetness left behind.
It was gone, while we watched and wondered and felt bad all over, and at the same time glad to see it go. Nothing left but the hole punched in the dirt by its beak. I stepped closer yet, and with my shoe I stamped the hole shut.
Then Mr. Bristow kneeled on his knee and turned Mr. Onselm over. On the dead face ran lines across, thin and purple, as though he’d been struck down by a blow from a toaster or a gridiron.
“Why,” said Mr. Bristow. “Why, John, them’s the marks of your guitar strings.” He looked up at me. “Your silver guitar strings.”
“Silver?” said the storekeeper. “Is them strings silver? Why, friends, silver finishes a hoodoo man.”
That was it. All of us remembered that at once.
“Sure enough,” put in Hobe. “Ain’t it a silver bullet that it takes to kill a witch, or hanging or burning? And a silver knife to kill a witch’s cat?”
“And a silver key locks out ghosts, doesn’t it?” said Mr. Bristow, getting up to stand among us again.
I looked at my broken guitar and the dangling strings of silver.
“What was the word you said?” Winnie whispered to me.
“Ectoplasm,” I replied her. “Like his soul coming out of him—and getting itself struck dead outside his body.”
Then there was talk, more important, about what to do now. The men did the deciding. They allowed to report to the county seat that Mr. Onselm’s heart had stopped on him, which was what it had done, after all. They went over the tale three-four times, to make sure they’d all tell it the same. They cheered up while they talked it. You couldn’t ever call for a bunch of gladder folks to get shed of a neighbor.
Then they tried to say their thanks to me.
“John,” said Mr. Bristow, “we’d all of us sure enough be proud and happy if you’d stay here. You took his curse off us, and we can’t never thank you enough.”
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “I was fighting for my life.”
Hobe said he wanted me to come live on his farm and help him work it on half shares. Sam Heaver offered me all the money he had in his old cash register. I thanked them. To each I said, no, sir, thank you kindly, I’d better not. If they wanted their tale to sound true to the sheriff and the coroner, they’d better help it along by forgetting that I’d ever been around when Mr. Onselm’s heart stopped. Anyhow, I meant to go look at that Bottomless Pool. All I was truly sorry about was my guitar had got broken.
But while I was saying all that, Mr. Bristow had gone running off. Now he came back, with a guitar he’d had at his place, and he said he’d be honored if I’d take it instead of mine. It was a good guitar, had a fine tone. So I put my silver strings on it and tightened and tuned them, and tried a chord or
two.
Winnie swore by all that was pure and holy she’d pray for me by name each night of her life, and I told her that that would sure enough see me safe from any assault of the devil.
“Assault of the devil, John!” she said, almost shrill in the voice, she meant it so truly. “It’s been you who drove the devil from out this valley.”
And the others all said they agreed her on that.
“It was foretold about you in the Bible,” said Winnie, her voice soft again. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John—”
But that was far too much for her to say, and she dropped her sweet dark head down, and I saw her mouth tremble and two tears sneak down her cheeks. And I was that abashed, I said good-bye all around in a hurry.
Off I walked toward where the pass would be, strumming my new guitar as I walked. Back into my mind I got an old, old song. I’ve heard tell that the song’s written down in an old-timey book called Percy’s Frolics, or Relics, or some such name:
“Lady, I never loved witchcraft,
Never dealt in privy wile,
But evermore held the high way
Of love and honor, free from guile….”
And though I couldn’t bring myself to look back yonder to the place I was leaving forever, I knew that Winnie was a-watching me, and that she listened, listened, till she had to strain her ears to catch the last, faintest end of my song.
Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010) was born in what is now Belarus. In 1915, his family fled to Siberia to escape the violence of World War I. Before the outbreak of World War II, Sutzkever lived in Vilnius, Lithuania, becoming part of a group of Yiddish-language poets and writers that included Chaim Grade and Leyzer Volf. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, Sutzkever was one of the sixty thousand Jews imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto, where he joined the resistance to help smuggle arms and to preserve valuable manuscripts, books, and artwork. During this time, Sutzkever continued to write, often in harrowing conditions. “If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t live,” he said in a 1985 New York Times interview. “When I was in the Vilna Ghetto, I believed, as an observant Jew believes in the Messiah, that as long as I was writing, was able to be a poet, I would have a weapon against death.” After the war, he testified at the Nuremberg trials. Later, living in Israel, he founded a leading Yiddish-language literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain). Among his works translated to English are Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever (1981) and A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). “The Gopherwood Box” was written as part of a series of prose poems collectively titled Green Aquarium (written in Israel in 1953 and 1954, first published in Di Goldene Keyt in Yiddish), which draw on Sutzkever’s experience of the Vilna Ghetto and the destruction of the city and people he so loved.
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