Under the Skin

by Vicki Lane

  As I moved deeper into the cellar, boxes and barrels gave way to strange machinelike things ranged on either side of this path in the dust. Draped in spiderwebs, they looked like medieval instruments of torture but I suspected they were nothing more than a previous century’s Bowflexes and StairMasters. A clutch of dumbbells heaped to one side confirmed this suspicion.

  A scurrying sound behind me made me whirl around, just in time to see a rat’s bare tail disappearing under a stack of penitential-looking stools, and I shivered involuntarily.

  “Over here!”

  There was a thump and a clatter in the area ahead and I came around a corner just in time to see Joss lift the lid on an odd slant-topped box. The beam of his flashlight jittered on the ceiling and not until I was at his side could I see what was in the box.

  At first it looked like nothing more than a pile of dirty towels but as Joss held the lid open wide, I saw that it was a body, wrapped in one of the thermal blankets, a baglike thing on its head. One limp hand was exposed, its fingers filthy but the elegant French manicure still recognizable.

  Gloria. My sister.

  VIII~Amarantha

  Cripple Tree Holler~May 15, 1887

  Miss Cochrane come, like she had said she would, just after dinnertime on Sunday. She was astride one of the hotel hacks, and no one with her, which let me know that she must be a good rider and a powerful good talker too, as Mr. Jameson who runs the stable mostly don’t let ladies take out his nags on their own.

  I was setting in my loom out at the end of the porch, working at a coverlid, but when I heard the clip-clop of hooves, I stood up and moved to a mule-ear chair and let on to be doing nothing. There’s some folks mightily offended at the notion of weaving or any kind of work of a Sunday—I doubt that Miss Cochrane is like that but still …

  As the long nose of the sorrel mare peeped around the big laurel bush where the trail comes in front of my cabin, I stood and threw up my hand. “Howdy,” says I. “Light and come in the house.”

  When she gets down from the tall mare, I see that she has on a skirt that is divided in two—like britches but so loose that it looks like a skirt when she stands still. And it don’t come down but to the top of her pretty high-polished boots and I think that in a rig like that, a woman could do herself justice atop a horse. I never kept nare horse—just a mule for plowing and cultivating—and when I have rode, it’s been astride and hanging on to the gears. Those fine ladies at the hotel, with their long skirts dragging as they try to stick on to one of them sidesaddles, have a time of it on our steep mountain trails.

  “You see I found you, Amarantha,” Miss Cochrane hollers as she hitches her mount to the post under the big beeches. “Your directions were perfect!”

  “Come up and set,” I say, setting out a chair for her.

  She comes up the steps, them little sparrow eyes taking in everything, from the loom to the mule shoe above the door and the old boot I have nailed up to give the jenny wrens a place to make their nestes.

  “Tell me what you’re weaving here,” she says, putting her head to one side. “And did you spin the wool yourself? I saw some sheep down in the meadow on the way up here.”

  I told her that I had my granny’s old spinning wheel and I liked to spin of a winter. And I do, for spinning is one of those things that frees up your mind to where you can step to the other side and take a look. Oh, I’ve learned many a thing whilst I was a-spinning.

  She leans over the web and studies the half-finished coverlid, then she catches sight of my draft that is embroidered on a piece of homespun and hanging from the crosspiece of the loom.

  “What’s this?” says she, looking more like a little bird than ever, and I tell her it is the rule I follow to make this pattern. “It tells me when to tromp,” says I and then nothing will do but that I sit myself back in the loom and weave a piece to show her the way of it.

  The pattern that I am making is called Wheels of Time and it has a white chain and white and indigo-dyed filling. Miss Cochrane marvels over it for a piece then asks was I making it to sell and I say, no, it’s for my bed.

  I wait to see will she try to buy it offen me like furriners generally does but she just nods and say that was she to make such a pretty thing, she’d not be wanting to part with it neither.

  “What other sorts of things do you weave?” she asks me and I tell her about making jeans cloth and linsey and show her that my dress is of my own weaving.

  I can see her eyes going to the door and I know that she is wishful of seeing the inside of my house. She don’t want to ask but her face shows that she is eat up with wanting to know how I live.

  “Would you like to see some more of my weaving?” I ask her. “There is a red and green coverlid on my bed and I have some other—”

  “Oh, could I, Amarantha?” says she, clasping her hands together at her breast. “I’d love to see it.”

  So we make for the door and she is about to step through when she catches sight of the mule shoe that sets above the doorframe.

  “I’ve seen that done before,” says she. “Is the horseshoe for good luck?”

  “I reckon—it’s been there all my life. The old people always did that—they said the open end must be up, to keep the luck from running out.”

  She studies it some more, them sharp eyes of hern taking it all in. “I wonder,” she asks, “why they didn’t use a shiny new one? This one’s all rusted and worn so thin … wouldn’t a brand-new one be better luck?”

  “No, a new one ain’t no use at all. The shoe’s a charm to keep off mean witches of a night—the old folks used to say that a witch couldn’t pass under the iron shoe unless she first went and traced every step that shoe had taken. And if she couldn’t do it before morning light, it’d be to do all over again the next night. So folks just naturally wanted an old worn-out shoe—one that had taken many a step.”

  She looks at me like she wants to ask another question. But instead she nods and steps into the house.

  It ain’t but the one big room and a loft upstairs. My bedstead is over in the corner and she makes for it at once.

  “Oh, how perfectly lovely! Did you make this coverlet too?”

  “It was my granny wove this one. She was a powerful weaver—it was her learned me how and it’s her drafts I follow. Them drafts was writ on paper and all faded and nigh falling to pieces, which is when I decided to embroider them onto homespun so’s they’d last my time.”

  “Does this pattern have a name?” she asks and I see that she is taking everything in and storing each word away.

  “Granny called this one Bonaparte’s March—he was some king or such over the water, who lost a war.”

  She wants to know about the dyes I use and how long it takes to spin the wool for a coverlid and all manner of things. Then she begins to look about the room.

  There ain’t much to see. No fine furniture, just what could be made by a man with an ax and a drawknife. A table and a pair of benches, three mule-ear chairs, and a stool. There’s a big wooden chest where I keep my blankets and such, a corner cupboard for my few plates and bowls, and a dry sink. I figure that it must appear mean and low to her, after all the fancy fixings at the hotel, but she is looking all round and smiling as though she likes what she is seeing.

  “I’ve never been inside a real log cabin,” she says, wondering like. “How old is your house?”

  I study on that for a time. “I couldn’t rightly say,” I tell her at last. “My people come into this country a good while back—not so long after the War for Independence. At one time, they owned a right smart of land but most of it went, one way or t’other. I have the heart of it though. They’s been a house on this piece of land as long as anyone can remember, though the first several burned down. The chimbley is the same though—you see there on that flat rock where the old people marked the date.”

  She steps up close to the fireplace and runs a finger over the numbers. “1787!” says she, just a-marveling.
“Your people have been here a hundred years—that’s astonishing! Nowadays people move around so much—why, even my own family—”

  And she falls silent and I can feel the dark unhappiness in her heart as she looks back to those times. Then she gives a little shake.

  “And you live here all by yourself and you’re not afraid?” she asks.

  “Not a bit of it,” I tell her. “I’m on good terms with all my neighbors—two- and four-legged alike.”

  She stands there staring into the cold ashes of the fireplace. There is something more she wants to say but she is having trouble getting it out so I ask will she take a sup of buttermilk or water. She asks for water and I step out to the springhouse to get some with the chill yet on it. When I come back in, she is looking at my charm papers that are tacked there on the log wall above the fireboard.

  “I was just noticing all these names and dates,” she begins and her face goes pink. “I’m terribly nosy—it seems I was born so.”

  It kindly tickles me to see her so bashful and I think to fun her a bit.

  “Read ’em off,” says I, “and tell me what you make of it.”

  She stands on tiptoe to peer at them and reads off, “Lovie Whiteside, August 4, ’86, February 21, ’87; Belle

  Johnston, July 26, ’86, April 3, ’87; Omie May Gentry, August 9, ’86, May 3, ’87; Harce Clyborn, September 5, ’86, April 17, ’87; Benjamin Franklin Freeman, August 18, ’86—”

  She breaks off. “I don’t see … Are these babies who died … or …”

  I take pity on her and, instead of the made-up story I was fixing to tell, I say, “Them’s all babies what are cutting their first teeth. Folks around here set a powerful store on me charming away the toothache. They bring their little uns round everwhen the first tooth breaks the gum. And I write down its name and the day it was borned and the day the first tooth showed. Then I pin up the paper above the fireboard for a charm. When all the teeth are in, I burn the paper—that’s all they is to it.”

  Her head goes on its side again and she grins at me. “So you are a witch, like they said at the hotel. But if that’s so, how do you get past the horseshoe?”

  We go back out and set on the front porch and I explain that it’s there just for bad witches, ones that tries to harm folks—the kind the Injuns called Raven Mocker. Of course, they must have had them over the water too, in England and Scotland and Ireland where most of the old people’s folks come from for it was them knowed about the horseshoe.

  Miss Cochrane is a quizzy somebody, sure enough, but with such a winning way to her that I find myself telling her all manner of things that I usual don’t speak of. I tell her that most folks are like to call me a witchy-woman not a witch. And that there is water witches, who can find water with a forky stick; that my charms and such were passed down from my grandpap—who was a seventh son just as I am a seventh daughter.

  “It weren’t till I first begun to bleed that I got the powers,” I told her, amazed to find myself speaking so free, but this Miss Cochrane has such a way to her that I believe she is something of a witchy-woman herself.

  We talk along like we was old friends and I find myself thinking that had my little girl lived, she’d be nigh the age of Miss Cochrane and the old wound tears open yet again. My mind wanders off in the land of might-have-been and I lose track of what Miss Cochrane is saying. Something about a woman at the hotel grieving for a lost child but that only turns my thoughts inward all the more until I hear the words, “… They are preying on these poor grieving mothers and it’s not right. I need your help, Amarantha! Will you help me to show them for what they are?”

  AN APPALACHIAN WITCH

  By Nellie Bly

  They call her a “witchy-woman” but their hushed tones hold more of respect than of fear. This is no hunched, black-clad, broomstick-riding beldam of myth nor yet the Bard’s cauldron-stirring hag. Potions she may brew, but rather than “eye of newt and tongue of dog,” these healing brews are composed from wholesome wild herbs, gathered in careful observance of ancient practice by herself from the meadows and woodlands about her cabin.

  I found her at her loom, weaving a web of beauty in indigo and white, and her first words were a welcoming “Come in the house!”

  This house, her ancestral home, built of mighty chestnut logs, is a Phoenix raised on the ashes of its predecessors; only the carefully laid stone chimney remains from previous incarnations. And on the face of one of the largest stones in that chimney, graven by some rough tool, the date “1787” gives notice of the witchy-woman’s century-old heritage in these verdant mountains.

  The mountain folk are kindly to strangers, but wary of sharing their secrets—and none more than the witch. Yet when, after some conversation, I proved harmless, this good creature consented to answer my importunate questions and to tell me something of her craft.

  This witchy-woman is the local healer—able to charm away a wart or a boil, to soothe a toothache or an aching heart. She has cures for colicky babies and is held in high repute as a “thrash doctor,” able to cure an infant of thrush by blowing in its mouth.

  She speaks of the “little people” and relates how she leaves out a saucer of milk for them every evening—or a crust of cornbread if the cow should happen to be dry. But whether these are the little people—the fairies, brownies, pookas, or leprechauns—of the Old Country or the little people (Yunwi Tsunsdi) of Cherokee lore, she could not say.

  The witchy-woman is an adept of the Old World practice of divination through examination of the surface of a bowl of liquid—“scrying” is the learned term but our Appalachian witch is ignorant of the word. She will “take a look” or “git a knowin’ ”—and in that look, she has been known to see past and future.

  “Simpleminded superstition!” the city-bred, college-educated will exclaim. But when one speaks with this woman, her native dignity and wise, far-seeing gaze are such that … (cont. on page 12)

  Chapter 24

  Six Impossible Things

  Saturday, May 26

  “There is no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  —LEWIS CARROLL

  Glory!”

  I shoved my gun back into the holster and, pushing past Joss, I reached into the box where the shrouded form slumped against the side. Still, so terribly still. The bag or pillowcase or whatever it was covering the head came off with one tug, revealing my sister’s pale face and half-closed eyes. She lolled forward.

  “Glory!” I put my hand to her cheek. Warm—and then there was a fluttering of her eyelashes and a ragged indrawn breath. “Joss, help me lift her out of here.”

  “You take this.” He thrust his flashlight at me and leaned over the box. “I’ll get her.”

  Reaching into the cramped box, he scooped her limp body up gently into his arms and arranged the thermal blanket around her.

  “Still breathing, thank god! Do you suppose she’s been drugged? Maybe chloroform or something on the bag that was on her head?”

  I sniffed at the bag that was still in my hand. “I don’t think so. The bag is damp but all it smells like is laundry detergent. In books they always talk about a sickly sweet odor.”

  “Maybe it’s something else then. I’m going to get her upstairs—you’ll have to shine the light ahead of me.” He turned, ready to retrace our steps.

  Casting a hurried glance into the odd box, I looked to see if there was anything in it that would give a clue to Gloria’s abductor. But, except for a stray leg wrapping, the odd little chamber was empty now.

  What was that box anyway? I wondered, as I followed just behind and a little to the side of Joss so that I could keep my headlamp focused on the way ahead and the other light on the floor in front of him. The strange box had loo
ked specifically designed for one person to sit in—high at one end with a low board as a seat, and about knee height at the other end. Puzzling. But not so puzzling as how my sister had gotten there.

  We inched our way through the underground maze of pillars and boxes and shrouded shapes. Gloria, who had been so still, began to stir.

  “Hang in there, Glory!” I reached out and squeezed her twitching foot. “We’re almost out of here!”

  As the foot of the stairs came in sight, I could hear Joss whispering to Gloria. “It’s okay,” he crooned, “everything’s okay. I have you now, my little mother.”

  My little mother … Was this really happening? A psychic hairstylist had managed to get a son looking for a mother and a mother looking for a child to the same place … with this result. And this same psychic hairstylist had “seen” that Gloria was in a box in a basement. And she had somehow gotten there without anyone in this facility noticing anything amiss.

  Who was it that talked about believing six impossible things before breakfast? Oh, yes, Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen—I was going to have to work at this.

  “Watch out for the—”

  My warning was interrupted by the clatter of the tray falling down the stairs. The same tray I’d put there to protect at least one clear footprint of whoever had carried Gloria down the steps. Joss had stumbled momentarily and put out a hand to catch himself. A hand which was now, I could see, covered with the dust of that fine footprint. Had that stumble been intentional? Another thing to ponder.

  As we emerged into the light of the storage room, Gloria spoke.

  “Joss? How did you …” She put out a wondering hand and laid it on his cheek. “Never mind—she said that someone would come. But how … how perfect that it was you …”

  She was gazing up at him with a look of such complete confidence and pure happiness that I hesitated before breaking into this communion. But I had to know what had happened.