by Ninie Hammon
Then he stalks back to his carriage with his white handkerchief up around his nose. He always keeps it there, every time Lily has ever seen him. Ma says he thinks the miners smell like pole cats.
The arguments start then, soon’s Mr. Milliken is out of earshot, standing by his carriage talking to Mr. Tackett.
“I don’t care what he says, I ain’t going back in there.”
“We need to bury them bones, put up a cross!” Those words hit the crowd like a drop of water in hot grease.
“Wasn’t you listening? It was Shakers as laid out their dead in that cave – wasn't Christians. You can’t put a cross on the grave of heathens.”
One of the Irish speaks up. “I’ll not be puttin’ the likes of these in holy ground!” All the Irish are Catholic.
“We need to throw them bones away like Mr. Milliken said.”
“They deserve a decent burial!”
“Jitter-dancers don’t deserve nothin'.”
Then Oran Smalley says in his squeaky voice, “They ain’t people, but even if they was, takes more’n just one bone from a person for a proper haunting.” Oran is a know-it-all who couldn’t pour dirt out of a shoe if the instructions was on the heel. “The bones from a whole body got to be all together in one spot or there ain't enough … well, whatever it takes to make a ghost.”
The others grab hold of the idea and run with it.
“Yeah, all we got to do is scatter them bones out, so ain’t no full skeletons. Throw them bones around in the woods, toss them all over the place.”
A couple of miners – Pa is the loudest of them -- argue with the idea. Pa says it ain't right and proper for good Christian people to dishonor folks as had passed on like that. But they are outnumbered.
“Hey, it ain’t like they was human. They was just Shakers.”
Lily doesn’t know what Shakers are, but whatever they are, she feels a kinship of sorts with them because Mr. Tackett and Mr. Milliken act like the miners and their families ain’t human, neither.
As she turns to go back home, Mr. O’Malley calls out, “Go get yourself a gunny sack to carry 'em." He points to the small stand of thick trees that stretches from Troublesome Creek to the rocky base of Buzzard Knob. "Throw 'em in them woods, scatter 'em out.”
While Rose’d reeled out the story of her mother going to the Carthage Oak that day to hear what the man from the coal company had to say, Rose had been watching Cotton, the husband of Thelma Jackson who’d come to ask her questions years ago.
She’d told Thelma all about the “Jabberwock,” ‘cause that was the fanciest word Rose’d ever heard and she hardly ever got a chance to use it. But she hadn’t said nothing at all about the bones. Oh, no, not that part. The most important part. Rose hadn’t been altogether sure she could trust Thelma, hadn’t been as good as she was now at reading people.
When you sat day after day, month after month for years waiting to die, just watching people and not participating in conversations, after a while you learned how to read what was in people’s heads and hearts even when it wasn’t the same thing at all as what come out their mouths.
Rose could see through the sugar-sweet acts of them social workers who come to visit every now and then, pretending they cared what was happening to you and how you felt about it when they didn’t give a fig if you dropped dead in front of them.
They phony smiles hung on they faces like them masks surgeons wore when they cut into you. She could spot phony ten miles out.
This Cotton fella, though. Wasn’t nothing phony about him. Might be he wasn’t telling her everything there was to tell, but she was convinced everything he did tell her was true.
Chapter Thirteen
The Witch of Gideon!
There was no way in the world Thelma Jackson had talked to the Witch of Gideon! Well … maybe it was possible, but not likely. Sam had figured out the timing on Friday morning after Charlie brought in the picture of the three of them as first-graders on a field trip to the ghost town.
The old woman in the woods they’d encountered that day had said she’d been ten years old when the town vanished. That would have made her eighty-five years old when she rescued the three friends lost in the mist. And she’d be 110 years old now.
“I thought that’d get your attention!” Thelma said and smiled. “I didn’t actually talk to the Witch of Gideon — whose name was Lily Topple, by the way. I talked to her daughter, Rose. It was about fifteen years ago and Rose was in a nursing home in Carlisle. She was seventy-five at the time, and her mind was still sharp.”
As Sam listened, she felt a little like she was back in high school history class learning about the “shot heard ‘round the world” or the Civil War or the invention of the cotton gin. Sam had developed a lifelong love of history because Mrs. Jackson — Thelma, her name was Thelma — had a gift for bringing stuffy facts to life. Sam remembered the day she’d held the class spellbound with the story of how the richest men in America, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, had met in secret and joined their fortunes to silence the anti-trust crusade of New York Governor Teddy Roosevelt — by getting him nominated to the do-nothing job of vice president on the William McKinley ticket. “When McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president … I bet it ruined their whole day,” Mrs. Jackson had said.
Sam smiled at the memory
“I actually did talk to the Witch of Gideon, the real Witch of Gideon,” Malachi said — which definitely got Thelma’s attention. “It was a pretty harrowing experience for a little boy.”
He paused then, just for a beat, and Sam knew where his mind had gone: not as harrowing as watching somebody shoot your father dead to keep him from killing you! Charlie was likely thinking about Toby Witherspoon, too. It was hard for Sam to pull her thoughts away from the pitiful little boy Malachi’d brought to her house last night. They’d said nothing about him to Thelma, of course. Why get her tangled up in that drama? They hadn’t wanted to drag Sarah Throckmorton into it, either, but they’d had to hide Toby somewhere and the old woman who looked like Tweety Bird’s grandmother was so good with children.
“And for little girls,” Charlie amended, and then they told Thelma about their adventure on a first-grade field trip. Thelma listened, asked a couple of questions but mostly just listened.
“It was hard to tell sometimes if the stories Rose told me were real or just what she wished had happened,” Thelma said. “Her mother, Lily, always came off as the hero in Rose’s descriptions, sort of Tarzan meets Rambo with a side order of the Terminator. Lily was only ten years old when Gideon vanished, and she survived, lived off the land, all by herself. There was a smoke house where the town had stored its meat, and that didn’t vanish. And she said there were fruit trees all around — which aren’t indigenous to the area, but maybe the Quakers planted them. I don’t think there are any there now. Berries — blackberries, blueberries and raspberry bushes. Mushrooms. There was food to be had … but still, I can’t imagine how a ten-year-old did it.”
“The witch — Lily Topple — told us that day that she’d run away because she got blamed when her little brother broke a pot,” Charlie said.
“That’s what Rose told me, too.”
Thelma said the old woman had been very articulate about what’d happened to her mother, said she’d heard the stories so many times it felt like the memories were her own.
“I asked if Lily was afraid that whatever had taken all the other people would come for her, too, and Rose said no. If she had been afraid of that, she’d have left.”
“Remember what she said?” Charlie said to Sam and Malachi. Then Charlie quoted the witch’s words, even managed the dialect reasonably well. “It lets me and mine be ‘cause we done right by it.”
“Done right by it … I wonder what that means,” Thelma said.
“Remember what else she said — that it had ‘marked us,’” Sam said.
“And she was right about that part!” Malachi said.
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Then they told Thelma what they’d figured out about why the Jabberwock had imprisoned the county — to capture the three of them. Thelma was surprised, but not disbelieving.
“Given what we know, I guess that makes sense,” Thelma mused, “as much sense as any of this makes. There’s a recurring theme here — little kids who run away.”
“Little kids.” Charlie said the words thoughtfully. “The words on my mother’s blackboard — ‘stay and play with me.’ Almost like a little kid …”
“The witch gave each of us a rock so we wouldn’t forget her warning,” Sam said and held hers up for Thelma to see. She had taken the rock out of the bowl of shells this morning, and Rusty had asked about it after they dropped Toby at Sarah Throckmorton’s on Elkhorn Road.
For a moment, her son’s face flashed bright in Sam’s mind, and her gut yanked into a knot because he wasn’t here where she could see and touch him. She didn’t like having him out of her sight … people were vanishing. But she was determined to shield him from the worst of the terror around him so she’d suggested he spend the day with his friend Douglas Taylor — just being a little boy. Dangling his toes in a creek. Playing in the woods.
Stay and play with me. She shook it off.
“It’s a broken-off piece of a geode,” Sam said and Thelma looked at it in wonder when Sam handed it to her.
“Lily gave the rocks to the three of you?” Thelma shook her head. “Then it must really have mattered to her that you remember. Those rocks had to be her most prized possessions. They were all she had left of her parents.”
Chapter Fourteen
The nurse came to Rose’s door and looked in. Stink Bug was nosey, wanted to know what Rose’s only visitor in more than a decade had come to talk about.
Rose stopped talking when she saw Stink Bug there. Just looked at her.
Cotton didn’t get why she’d shut up, looked from the nurse to Rose and back to the nurse.
“Is there something wrong?” he asked.
“No, I was just making sure Miss Rosie is okay. Sometimes the residents get upset or overtired when they have visitors. I want to make sure she doesn’t wear herself out—”
“Horse hockey,” Rose said. “You wouldn’t let yore dog lift his leg and pee on me if I’s on fire.”
That got a rise out of her. Stink Bug’s face flooded with color, but she said nothing, just turned on her heel and stalked away. When Rose looked back at Cotton Jackson, he was smiling.
She liked him for that.
“Now … where was I?”
“You were telling me about the day your mother ran away.”
Rose took up the story with what had happened to her mother when she got home from the meeting at the Carthage Oak.
Lily is so mad she wants to cry and throw things and kick and scream. It isn’t fair.
It was Willie broke that pot. But Ma always loved him best, him being the youngest and all. And when Lily told on him he commenced to crying and carrying on, said he didn’t do it. Said Lily done it and was just blaming it on him.
And Ma believed Willie! Him only four years old and Ma took his word over Lily’s. She was the oldest girl, the one who took care of the twins and Willie. Ma’d believed him.
Lily had come into the kitchen and caught Willie playing with Ma’s favorite bowl. She’d told Willie to put down the bowl. It was a clay pot Ma’d got from that woman who made things out of clay. It was right pretty, this one was, cause the lady’d drawed flowers and butterflies on it, painted them with bright colors. It was Ma’s favorite and Willie hadn’t ought to be playing with it and she told him so, told him to put it back where he got it.
Don’t have to, he’d sneered and stuck out his tongue at her. She didn’t get mad — at least not then. She just told him he did too have to do what she told him, and he turned to run off with the bowl, but he tripped and dropped it on the floor and it broke into nothing but sharp pieces of pottery.
Lily went after Willie, was gonna whoop his butt with a switch off a tree, but he run out the door into the backyard where Ma was hanging clothes on the line and told her Lily was trying to hurt him, that she’d broke the bowl and was trying to blame it on him.
Ma b’lieved Willie! She grabbed the broom off the porch and commenced to whopping Lily, her jumping out of the way of the blows, hollering and carrying on.
Ma chases Lily around the backyard with the broom and then Lily runs off down the trail, Ma hollering for her to come back here this minute or she’d get a whipping with Pa’s belt.
Lily doesn’t go back, though. She is too mad to go back, her anger like some wild horse in her chest, making her legs pump hard down the trail.
After a while she can’t hear Ma yelling anymore but she keeps running, out past the men with their sacks in the woods, driven forward by anger and by a sadness and emptiness she’d never felt before.
It really was true. Ma really did love Willie more’n she loved the other five children. Certainly more’n she loved Lily. She was ten, the oldest girl. With Emma sickly all the time, Ma was always doin’ for her and left Lily in charge of the others — and she told them what to do. Of course she did! But then Willie’d go crying to Ma telling her that Lily had been bossing them around, that they hadn’t ought to have to do what Lily said.
How could Ma take Willie’s side against her?
Just thinking the thought made her run faster. Through the trees, up the hillside with the rocks sliding out from under her feet, down into a creek and up the other side, over rocks and downed trees and through oleander bushes … On and on. She runs until the pain in her side is more than she can stand and she collapses in the dirt, heaving, sweat running down her forehead and into her eyes.
She sits there, trying to get her breath back. And it isn’t until that moment that she realizes she doesn’t know where she is. She has run off the trail and out into the woods … farther than she’s ever gone before.
Lost.
The word is so scary she backs up from it. Scoots on her butt up against a tree and uses it to push herself back to her feet. She looks around frantically. Nothing looks familiar.
In fact, she can’t even recall which direction she’d come from. She whirls around in a circle, trying to see some trace of how she’d gotten here. Nothing.
Think. What should she do?
When she spots a scuffed place in the dirt a few feet away, she knows she did it, and she races to the spot and looks beyond it for another scuff in the dirt. She finds one and she’s off, running back the way she came, calling out to Ma and Pa.
She is really scared now.
Rose paused in the telling of the story, looked at the man who was listening so close he was leaning toward her out of the chair. And for the first time it occurred to her to wonder why he wanted to know the story of the Witch of Gideon after all these years. When she asked, he didn’t answer right away.
“You tell me why you want to know so bad you’re about to wet yourself or I ain’t gonna say another word.”
He looked at her, right in the eye, like he was searching for something. Like maybe if he looked hard enough he could tell whether she was as crazy as she was sure the staff had told him she was.
“I want to know because … it’s happened again.”
“What’s happened again?”
“Gideon vanished, all the people. When your mother finally found her way home the next morning they were all gone — every single person in town. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, though they’s people now says that ain’t true. That them people all moved away or went somewhere ‘thout telling anybody. One fella told Ma when she was in her twenties that she’d made it all up, that her family had moved away and left her behind because she was so ugly.”
He was one of them. The four men who caught Ma. They’d a’kept her and used her ‘til they killed her if she hadn’t cut the leader, cut him bad and then run.
“Your mother’s story is true. Every w
ord of it. I know that because other people have vanished, the same way.”
Rose was so surprised she just looked at him.
“In fact … everybody in Nower County. They’re all gone. I came home from work in Lexington and the whole county was empty.”
“You’re making that up! Ain’t no way that’s true. If it was, I’d a’heard about it. They’s news shows on the television in the craft room, stuff on there about wars and the like … that building in Oklahoma City that was blowed up last month. If Nower County — the whole place disappeared … It’d a been on the news.”
“Nobody believed me.”
That stopped her cold. Not just that he said it, but the way he said it, with the same mixture of emotions that’d been in her mother’s voice when she’d described telling Mr. Tackett when he come to pick up the miners for their shift — they’s gone, everybody’s gone! Terror and anger and confusion and outrage and … all tangled up together.
“You told …?”
“The state police, the sheriff’s departments in every surrounding county. I even went to the FBI.”
“And wouldn’t none of those people go see for theirselves?”
“They all did. And they saw what I told them they’d see — that everybody was gone. They saw that every word I’d told them was true.”
“Then what …?”
“As soon as they crossed the Nower County line to leave … they forgot what they’d seen.”
That set Rose’s mind spinning and that wasn’t a good thing since the machinery in her head wasn’t in very good repair.
“When did they … how long ago?”
“Two weeks.”
“Some of them people’s still there, then. Maybe not all of ‘em, but some.”
“Still there?” Cotton’s voice was tight.
“Like my family and all them other folks was still there in Gideon … for a little while. Mama’s daddy was still there for three days. She knew ‘cause he left rocks for her to find.”