A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  The next morning I got up, and, instead of driving to town, I took a shower and put on a white shirt and dress pants. I took a cup of coffee out under the apple trees. Instead of writing, I sat there, smoking and wondering into the heart of the cornfield what the hell a word doll was. At 10:30, I got in the car and drove toward town. The sun was strong and the sky was clear blue. The corn had begun to brown, it being summer’s end. At the bend in the road, without hesitating, I pulled into the driveway of the Victorian. The chickens were in a clutch over by the corner of the house. The place was still. I didn’t hear any television or radio playing. I walked slowly to the porch door, scuffing the gravel in the drive in order to let anybody listening know I was there. The screen door on the porch was unlatched. I opened it and called in, “Hello?”

  There was no reply, so I entered, the screen door banging shut behind me, and walked to the main door of the house. I knuckle-rapped the glass three times and then folded my arms and waited. The lilacs bordering the porch gave off a strong scent, and a wind chime in the corner over an old rocker pinged in the breeze sifting through the screen. I was about to give up and leave, when the door pulled back. There was a thin old woman, a little bent, with a cloud of white hair and big glasses. She wore a loose, button-up dress, yellow with white flowers.

  “What do ya want?” she asked.

  “I’m here for the Word Doll Museum,” I said.

  My pronouncement seemed to momentarily stun her. She reached up and gently grabbed the door jamb. “Are you kidding?” she asked and smiled.

  “Should I be?” I said.

  Her demeanor instantly changed. I could see her relax. “Hold on,” she said, “I have to get the keys. Meet me over by the barn.”

  I left the porch, and the chickens followed me. The entire gray structure of the barn, like some weary pachyderm, was actually listing more than a few degrees to the south, something I’d not noticed from the road. The door was hanging on by only the top hinge. The lady came out the back of the house and walked with the help of a three-pronged cane over the lumpy ground of the yard. As she drew closer, she said, “Where you from?”

  “Not far. I pass your place on the way to town every morning, and I saw the sign the other day.”

  “My name is Beverly Gearing,” she said and held out her hand.

  I took it in mine and we shook. “I’m Jeff Ford,” I told her.

  As she passed by me toward the ramshackle barn, she said, “So, Mr. Ford, what’s your interest in word dolls?”

  “I don’t know anything about them.”

  “Well, that’s OK,” she said, and opened the broken door.

  I followed her inside. She shuffled over the hay-strewn floor. Swifts flew back and forth in the rafters, and the holes in the roof allowed sunbeams to cut the shadows. On one side of the barn were animal stalls, all empty, and on the other there was a wall of implements and tools and a small room built within the greater structure. Over the door to it was a wooden sign with the words Word Doll Museum burned in script and shellacked. She fished in the pocket of her dress and eventually came out with the key. Opening the door, she flipped on a light switch, and then stepped aside, allowing me to enter first. The room was painted a light blue. There was a window on each wall that looked out at nothing but bare plywood, and inside, window boxes fixed up with plastic flowers.

  “Have a seat,” she said, and I sat in a chair at the card table at the center of the room. She worked her way to the other chair at the table and half-sat/ half-fell backward into it. Once she was settled, she took a pack of Marlboros out of her pocket and a black lighter. She leaned forward on the table with one arm. “Word dolls,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re the first person to ask about the museum in about twenty years.” She laughed, and I saw she was missing a tooth on the upper right side.

  “You can hardly see your sign from the road,” I said.

  “The sign’s a last resort,” she said. “I have a permanent spot in the What’s Happening section of three of the local papers. In January, I send them enough to run the ads for a year. Still, no one pays attention.”

  “I’m guessing most people don’t know what a word doll is.”

  “I know,” she said and lit the cigarette she held. She took a drag and then pointed with it at the left wall, where there were three beige file cabinets. The middle one had a golden laughing Buddha statue on it. “What’s in those nine drawers over there is all that remains of the history of word dolls. This is the largest repository of material evidence of the existence of the tradition. When I’m gone, knowledge of it will have been pretty much erased from history. You live long enough, Mr. Ford, you might be the last person on earth to ever think of word dolls.”

  “I might be,” I said, “but I don’t know what they are.”

  Beverly put her cig out in a half cup of coffee that looked like it had been on the table for a week. “I want you to know something before I start,” she said. “This is serious to me. I have a doctorate in anthropology from OSU, class of ’63.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I seriously want to know.”

  She sat quiet for a moment, eyes half shut, before taking a deep breath. “A ‘word doll’ is the same thing as a ‘field friend,’ they’re interchangeable. Their existence is very brief measured in anthropological time and also very localized. Only in the area that’s now roughly defined by our county border was this ritual observed. It sprang up in the mid-19th century and for the time in which it ran its course affected no more than fifty or sixty families at the most. No one’s certain of its origin. Some women I interviewed back when I was in graduate school, they were all in their 80s and 90s then, swore the phenomenon was something brought over from Europe. So I asked, where in Europe? But none could say. Others told me it originated with a woman named Mary Elder, back in the 1830s. She was also known as The Widow, and I have a picture of her in the cabinet, but her candidacy for the creation of the tradition is called into question by a number of factors.

  “Anyway, back in the day, I’m talking the mid-1800s on, in rural areas like this, kids, when they reached a certain age were sent out to participate in the fall harvest. By about age six or seven, they were initiated into the hard work of the fields during that season of long hours well into the night. It was a difficult adjustment for them. There are a lot of writings from the time where farmers or their wives complain about the wayward nature of their children, their inability to focus through the hours of toil. Training a kid to endure a harvest season with no real prior experience appears to have been a common problem. So, to offset that, someone came up with the idea of the word dolls. The idea in a nutshell is to allow the child to escape into her imagination while her physical body stays on the task at hand.

  “Whoever came up with it really could have been a psychologist. They attached a ritual to it, which was a smart way to embed the thing into the local culture. So, in September, usually around the equinox, if you were one of those kids who was to be sent out in the fields for the first time come harvest, you could expect a visit from the doll maker. The doll maker came at night, right after everyone was in bed, carrying a lantern and wearing a mask. As far as I can tell, the doll makers were usually women in disguise. There’d be a knock at the door, three times and then three times again. The parents would get up and answer the call. When the child was finally ushered into the dark room and seated next to the fireplace, the doll maker was already there in her own seat that faced his. Her hands were reportedly blue, and bejeweled with chains and a large ring, its carnelian etched to show an angel in flight. She was wrapped in black velvet with a hood sewn into it to cover her head. And the mask, the mask was a story unto itself.

  “By all accounts that mask was dug up on one of the local farms. It had deep-set eyes, a crooked nose, and a large oval mouth opening bor
dered by sharp teeth. It was an old Iroquois False Face mask, and could have been in the ground a hundred years before it was plowed up. It was made of basswood and had rotted at the edges. One of the farmers painted it white. I suppose you’re starting to see that the whole community was in on this?”

  “Everybody but the kids,” I said.

  “Oh, the tenacity with which the secrets of the doll maker were kept from the young ones then far exceeds what’s now done in the name of Santa Claus.”

  “So they wanted to scare the kids?”

  “Not so much scare them as put them in a state of awe. Remember, the promise was that the doll maker was coming to them with a gift. The competing qualities of her aspect and her purpose no doubt caused a heightened sense of tension.”

  “Do you know anything about the False Face mask?”

  “The False Face was a society of the Iroquois tribes. Their rituals dealt with healing. There were two ways to join the society—if you were cured by them or if you dreamed you should join them. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the word-doll tradition. Just an artifact that was appropriated by another culture and put to another purpose.”

  “OK, the kid is sitting there next to the fireplace with the doll maker . . .”

  “Well, the parents leave the room. Then, as I was told by those surviving members of the ritual back in my graduate days, the doll maker tells the child not to be afraid. She’s going to make the child a doll to take into the fields with him or her, a companion to play with in the imagination while the hard work goes on. The doll maker cups her hands in front of her like this.” Beverly demonstrated. “And then leans over so the mouth of the mask is right over her palms. You see?” she said and showed me.

  “The voice was a kind of harsh whisper that none of my interview subjects could hear well or follow completely. The words poured out of the doll maker’s mouth into the cupped hands. One woman told me a string of words she remembered her whole long life that came from behind the mask. Hold on, let me see if I can get this right.”

  While Beverly thought, I took out my cigarettes and held them up for her to see. “OK?” I asked. She nodded. I lit up and drew the coffee cup closer to use as an ashtray. She held her hands up and snapped her fingers. “Oh, yes. I used to have this memorized so good. It’s like a poem. My mind is scattered by age,” she said and smiled.

  She was still for a second. Her eyes shifted and she stared hard at me. “The green sea, the deep down below the sweep of rolling waves, whales and long eight-legged pudding heads with eye over which the great ship glides, and Captain Moss spinning the wheel . . . That’s the part she remembered, but she said the whole, what was called, ‘talking out of the doll,’ went on for some time. The average I got was about fifteen minutes. When the doll maker spoke the last word, she rubbed her hands together vigorously and then reached over and covered the child’s ears with them.”

  “You mean as if the words were going inside the kid’s head?” I asked.

  “I suppose, but from that night on, the child had, in his or her imagination, this word doll that had a name and a form and a little bit of history. The more the child played with it during work, the clearer it became till it had the same detail as dreams or memories. Word dolls all had a one-syllable name attached to whatever its profession was. So you had like, Captain Moss, Hunter Brot, Milker May, Teacher Poll. The woman who was given the Captain told me she’d never seen the ocean but had only heard about it from elders and travelers passing through the area. She said the Captain turned out to be a man of high adventure. She followed him on his voyages through her childhood into adulthood and then old age. Another interviewee said he’d been gifted Clerk Fick, but that as he followed the days of Clerk Fick while toiling in the fields, the doll slowly became a glamorous woman, Dancer Hence. He hadn’t thought of her in years, he said. ‘She’s still with me, but I put her away when I left the farm.’”

  Beverly got her cane under her and slowly stood. She walked to the files, bent over, and opened the second drawer down on the left hand. Reaching in, she drew out an armful of stuff. I asked her if she needed help. “Please,” she said. I went to her side, and the first thing she handed me was the white False Face mask. After that she gave me a rusted sickle with a wooden handle. “OK,” she said, closed the drawer with her cane, and we started back.

  “I can’t believe you’ve got the mask,” I said, laying it down. I put the sickle next to it.

  She sat and shoved her pile onto the table. “The mask came easy. A lot of this stuff I really had to dig for.” Pulling an old book out of the pile, she opened it, turned a few pages, and took out a large rectangle of cardboard. She turned it over and laid it in front of me. It was the picture of a woman in a high-collar black dress. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled severely back. Her glasses were circular. She wore a righteous expression.

  “The Widow?” I asked.

  Beverly nodded and said, “That’s a daguerreotype, not a photograph. From the 1850s. She looks like a pill, doesn’t she? I used to have it in plastic, but I’ve slacked off over the years as far as preserving all this. I resigned myself to its eventual demise when I did my own.”

  “It’s a remarkable story and archive,” I said.

  “My husband built me this place to house it. He was very supportive, and as long as he lived that kept me going with it. His family farmed all this acreage around here at one point.”

  “You got a PhD in Anthropology at OSU and then married a farmer?”

  “I know,” she said and laughed wistfully. “It was true love, but I still had it in my mind to be the next Margaret Meade. I knew I wasn’t going to make it to Samoa any time soon, so I looked closer to home and found this.” She moved her shaking hands over the things on the table.

  We passed an hour with her reading me parts of her interviews, journal entries from dirty old leather-bound diaries, all of which attested to the strength of the image of the word doll, a doll that grew as you did, could speak to you in your mind, lead you to places you’d never been. The strangest particulars surfaced. One woman, thirty years old at the time, wrote in her diary that in all the years she’d played with Cook Gray, she’d never seen him naked, but she knew without looking that he only had one testicle. His best dish was roasted possum with cabbage, and she often used his recipes in cooking for her family. One interviewee said that her word doll was Deacon Tru, and that her husband’s had begun as Builder Cy but somehow transformed into Barkeep Jon and was subsequently the ruination of their love. Among the papers was a letter detailing a farmer’s thirty-year argument with his field friend. After he retired, he said he realized that fight had been the one thing that kept him going through thick and thin.

  Eventually Beverly ran out of steam. She lit a cigarette and eased back in her chair. “It’s completely mad,” she said, flicked her ash on the floor, and smiled.

  “What about this?” I said and lifted the sickle off the table.

  She blinked, pursed her lips, and said, “Mower Manc. That was the end of the whole shebang.”

  “The end of the ritual?”

  She nodded. “In the early 1880s, word dolls were still part of the local culture. Who knows how much longer they would have carried on with the 20th century coming full speed ahead. But in that last year, somewhere around mid-summer, a fire started in the minister’s barn one night. The place burned to the ground and the minister’s wife’s buggy horse died in the flames. Every one suspected this boy, Evron Simms, who’d been caught lighting fires before. The minister, knowing the boy’s parents well, decided not to pursue punishment for the crime. Come the equinox, only a week later, Evron was due a visit from the doll maker, and the doll maker came.

  “Some of the folks I interviewed in the ’60s knew this boy, grew up with him. He’d told more than one of them that his field friend was Mower Manc,
a straw hat brim covering his eyes, a laborer’s shirt and suspenders, calloused hands, and a large sickle. In other words, the doll maker made Evron a word doll whose very job was to toil in the fields. That doll maker, I discovered, was none other than the minister’s wife. You can’t be sure that her choice for him was malicious or that he didn’t change the aspect of what was initially given to him, but if she did knowingly make his only plaything in the fields work itself, that would be hard-hearted.”

  I looked down at the sickle and said, “This doesn’t sound like it’s gonna end well.”

  “Hold on,” she said and put her hand out like a traffic cop to stop me. “Harvest starts, and Evron’s sent out into the fields with that sickle you see there and is given a huge plot of hay to cut. By many accounts he immediately set to work and worked with a kind of ferocity that made him seem possessed. By sunset the field was mown, and the boy had a violet pallor, froth at the corners of his mouth. Even his father, a severe man, worried about what he’d witnessed. He wrote, ‘I never thought I’d see an instance where a boy could work too hard, but today I seen it. My own Evron. I should be proud, but the sight of it wasn’t a prideful thing. I’d describe it more as frightful.’ ”

  “People passed by the farm frequently after that first harvest to catch a glimpse of the boy mowing hay. They noticed that he had taken to wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat to block the sun. When the minister passed away, among his papers was a sermon he’d written about the boy’s mowing. It’s a very elegant document for what’s there, predictably linking Evron’s sickle with the scythe of Death, but half way down the page the minister runs out of words. There are marks on the paper then, circles and crosses and a simple sun. At the bottom he writes—Elegast.”