The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  With tongs and hammer Samuel Bissel shaped the first shoe. Sparks flew, the sound of metal striking hot metal rang through the night, and the hammer shone, flashing in air with every blow; Bobbi had never seen a hammer head shine so, like a mirror. Hazily she watched it dazzle. When the smith put the hammer down and held the hot shoe to Shane’s hoof for fitting, a burning smell went up and smoke poured off, cloaking Bissel like a fluid shadow, turning his face and beard dark with soot. His eyes gleamed through the smoke, and Bobbi took a step back, as if she had seen a devil.

  Bissel lifted the shoe away from the hoof, studied the dark mark it had left, and went back to his forge to further shape the shoe.

  It was all part of hot shoeing, Bobbi knew, though she had never seen it done before. The scorch on the hoof told the shoer what yet needed to be done, and it did not hurt the horse. It was the best way to shoe, the old people said. Yet she found that she was shaking.

  Bissel cooled the first horseshoe in water—it hissed like a hundred snakes and clouded the forge with steam. The Amishman came back to Shane and nailed it on, and as he worked he began to whisper to the mustang.

  Three more shoes he forged, fitted and nailed, taking the most time shoeing the cracked hoof. On that shoe he pulled clips out of the hot metal, one at the toe and two at the sides of the hoof near the heel. They would steady the hoof and keep the crack from lengthening. All the time, as he shaped the shoes, as he fitted them and the stinging smoke poured up, as he tapped them into final form and as he nailed them on, he whispered to Shane.

  Bobbi could not see his face as he bent over his work. His voice came muffled out of his beard, low-pitched, murmurous as wind in the trees, so that at first Bobbi did not notice his whispering. Then, when she grew aware of it, she stood as close as she dared and listened, but could not understand a word of it. Bissel might have been whispering in some foreign language. German, perhaps.

  He thought Shane was a horse after all, Bobbi decided, her mind sluggish from smoke and weariness and the rhythmic coruscation of the hammer. He thought Shane might bolt, and he was trying to gentle him. She had heard about horse tamers who worked that way; people called them “whisperers.” There was once one in England people thought was a wizard. He could go into a stall with a killer, a horse everyone else had given up on, using nothing but his voice to tame it, and come out leading it by the forelock. No matter. Nothing like that could work with Shane—

  Bobbi’s half-lidded eyes snapped open, and she jerked rigid, staring. Shane’s head was nodding at the level of his shoulders. The horse’s lower lip had gone as loose as that of an old plug pulling a junkman’s wagon. The blue fire had faded out of his eyes.

  “Shane!” Bobbi yelled. “Wake up!”

  Shane did not move. Only Samuel Bissel moved, straightening up from pounding the final nail in the last shoe. He loomed tall and terrible in his dull black coveralls and his soot-blackened face and beard, with eyes gleaming red in the ruddy light of the forge and teeth flashing, bared in a grimace or grin. He held his hammer in one hand, and with the other he grasped Shane by the forelock.

  “Stop it!” Bobbi shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The Amishman brushed past her without replying, walking toward the door, and Shane plodded placidly where the man led him. Bobbi stood thinking wildly. What could she do? Knock the man away from Shane? He still had his hammer; he could defend himself from anything she did to him. And the hold he had on Shane was not merely one of the hand.

  Samuel Bissel and Shane were disappearing into the night.

  Bobbi ran after them. “Shane!” she called again. But Shane did not seem to hear her. That Bissel, she would like to—

  Something crackled inside her mind.

  “You Samuel Bissel!” she shouted so fiercely that the Amishman stopped and turned to face her. “Let go that horse! I’m telling you by the Twelve of the Hidden Circle.”

  She saw darkness swirl in the night, as if Bissel stood cloaked in smoke again, even though there could not have been any. Something flashed like fire or lightning: the terrible bearded man’s eyes, or his bared teeth.… Bissel raised his hammer, its handle blacker than the night, its metal head shining fit to blind her. Sparks flew as if it clanged against hot steel, and though she stood a good ten paces away from the smith, Bobbi fell down as if she had been struck. There was no pain, but the great weakness she felt was as bad as any pain. She could not move, no matter how her heart ached and struggled. The man, the devil, trickster, villain, blast and damn him, he was leading Shane away.…

  She blacked out for a short while, then opened her eyes again and blinked at the blackness of night. Shakily she got up on her hands and knees. Somewhere not far away she heard a rattling sound and the rhythmic clop of hooves. A lantern swayed, hanging from a buggy hood. The black Amish buggy passed Bobbi, a spidery shadow in the night, and between the shafts trotted a horse in full harness and bridle, bit and blinkers, stretching out briskly into a smooth trot—and at the crest of its neck, glimmering in the lantern light, Bobbi saw a white brand.

  By the time Bobbi had wobbled to her feet, trying to stagger a few steps after the buggy, it had disappeared far down the lane. The rattling of its hard, spoked wheels and the ringing of hooves were fading away swiftly, and she knew she would never be able to catch up to them.

  She forced herself into a lurching run, bound back toward Seldom. Even if she could have caught the buggy, there was no way she could deal with Samuel Bissel. She needed Witchie.

  Her heart hurt, but not with running. Her breath rasped in her chest.

  Inside her mind a voice said, “I tried to tell you.”

  Eyes straining straight ahead through the tunnel of the night, she had not noticed the pale, hazy face floating to one side. “Go away!” she screamed at it. “You’re the one who got me into this mess!” Father or not, she hated it. Its presence seemed the utmost insult to her heartache.

  “Bobbi—”

  With a surge of self-will she shut her mind against its voice so that she could no longer hear it. Anger combined with her panic to send her into a strong run, and she did not look back.

  Not bothering to hide any longer, she pounded into Seldom on the main road. She darted straight toward the Fenstermacher house, thudded through the side yard and slammed in at the back door.

  Witchie sat waiting in the hickory rocker, holding the overstuffed brown paper bag, heaving herself up when she heard Bobbi coming. “The police was here,” she said, “right after you left. Going house to house, asking. It’s a good thing I had just cleaned up the parlor. I put some more deer bologna in here, and some apples, and—”

  Between panting breaths Bobbi burst out, “That man took Shane!”

  If she had known how hard it was to dumbfound Witchie, she would have savored the moment more. To the end of her acquaintance with the pow-wow, she was never to see her nearly so taken aback. But at the time the old woman’s floundering amazement made her stamp with impatience.

  “That Bissel!” she shouted. “He put some sort of a spell on Shane! He whispered at him and led him away like an old plow horse! When I told him to stop, he blasted me with his hammer!”

  “There’s got to be some mistake,” Witchie declared, regaining some of her usual forcefulness. “The smith would never go against me. I’m one of the Twelve, you know.”

  “Ha! I told him stop by the Twelve of the Hidden Circle. That’s when he knocked me down. Then he harnessed Shane to a buggy and drove him away.”

  For a moment Witchie’s face turned as pale as her hair. Then she flushed red, her nostrils flared, and she turned and strode strongly to get her walking stick. Or, more properly, her sorceress’s staff.

  “This is all I need,” she snapped at Bobbi. “Heft that bag and let’s go.”

  Witchie did pause long enough to grab her oversize, baggy purse and a white cardigan sweater off a kitchen chair. And she turned off the lights and locked the door after her, fishing the k
ey out of the vast depths of the purse. Ethel next door was peering out of her window over a rank of potted African violets. Mrs. Fenstermacher waved at her, more of a defiant salute than a wave, then led Bobbi across the steep side yard to where the garage squatted half in the woods.

  “Ethel has something to talk about now,” Witchie remarked grimly. “We’ll take the car.”

  She said that last with a certain panache, as if taking the car was an act of reckless daring. She heaved the heavy, wooden garage door open with a rumble, and with flair. Bobbi gawked at the vehicle inside.

  “What is that?”

  “A Kaiser.”

  Massive, monumental, blimp-like, the color and somewhat the shape of a huge June bug, the Kaiser left scarcely space in the garage for Bobbi and Mrs. Fenstermacher to scrape through and embark. Once inside its capacious cabin, perched on the plump rondure of the front seat, Bobbi felt disoriented, dwindled, as if time had somehow turned backward and she was a little leg-dangling girl again. Witchie placed her sweater, bag and stick on the seat beside her with seemingly yards to spare. She unlocked the steering wheel, and her right foot stretched toward the starter pedal on the floor. She got the monster running, sent it bumbling backwards out of the garage and down the steep, rutted driveway to the road. Then her right foot clawed again to reach the accelerator and her cornstarched neck accordioned to its fullest stubby length as she tried to see over the steering wheel. She gave it up, peering through the narrow segment of glass available to her under the top of the wheel and over the swelling dash. Majestic, the Kaiser progressed out of Seldom and cruised through the woods, taking up the entirety of the narrow road.

  “Now,” Witchie commanded as she drove, “you take that there pow-wow cane in both your hands and tell me what you see.”

  The wooden snake on Kabilde’s shaft turned its head to look at Bobbi.

  She felt cold with fear of the weird thing. But she was so miserably afraid for Shane that she did not hesitate. Softly, so as not to anger the snake, she picked up the staff—the wood felt warm and muscular to her touch. She held Kabilde vertically in front of her, between both her hands.

  The small globe of the handle began to glow pearl gray, then swirl. Then it cleared, and in it she saw the black buggy passing through the lighted streets of a town with the black mustang trotting between the shafts. It was so wrenching, unthinkable, to see Shane tamely in harness that for a wild-minded moment she believed it was not him, that she was mistaken, Bissel owned another black horse and had driven it off on some errand, they would find Shane safely in a stall in his barn. But the walking stick, seeing or sensing her doubt, showed her Shane’s head, the white brand at the crest of his neck just behind the bridle’s crown-piece, the blue eyes, vacant and staring, behind blinkers.

  “That there is Parsimony,” Witchie said, glancing over to see the town going by behind him, and where the dirt road ended on a paved one she turned right. “You can lay that stick down awhile.”

  Bobbi did, and the light from its handle faded. For some time Witchie drove in silence down a mountainside beneath dark trees. The crowned Pinchot road sent the Kaiser listing sideward as if in heavy seas. Bobbi hung on, feeling half sick.

  “That ain’t no smith,” Witchie spoke up suddenly, grimly. “That’s the old villain, the trickster. And I should’ve knowed it long since.”

  Bobbi had closed her eyes, and behind the lids she seemed to see a wheel-shape of bright-colored circular cards laid out on the darkness. But they would not stay still so that she could comprehend the pattern. They shuffled and swirled, changing like a kaleidoscope. And she, herself, was more than one thing at once—

  “What fooled me,” Witchie went on, “that Amish business. A person gets so used to thinking of the Amish as the people of peace. Hard to think of anything in Amish form as evil.”

  The word chilled Bobbi. She opened her eyes and shook her head in the darkness as if Shane and Bissel and all that had happened were a dream she could shake away, she would wake up in her Grandpap’s cabin. But she could not wake up. She was still blundering through darkness in a huge old car with a witch at the wheel.

  “I wish I knowed what Bissel thought he was doing,” the old woman said. She did not sound grim any longer; her tone had turned shrewd, scheming, contemplative. “The way he’s heading, looks like he’s going to the Hub. Must be he means to use Shane somehow to give himself power in the Twelve.”

  Bobbi asked, “Where’s the Hub?”

  Witchie seemed suddenly to realize that she was thinking aloud. “Never mind,” she snapped.

  Bobbi was not put off. She had been raised by a Yandro, and Witchie’s curtness no longer impressed her. “Use Shane how?” she asked.

  There was a considerable silence. “As a hostage, maybe,” Witchie said at last, thoughtfully, “or maybe … I hate to say. The trickster’s got even more power than I thought, if he could take control of Shane.”

  “It wasn’t fair! Shane was off his guard. He wasn’t expecting an enemy.”

  “I know that,” said Witchie.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Kaiser bumbled through Parsimony, and Bobbi held the walking stick again. This time it showed Shane pulling the buggy through darkened, featureless woodland. Shane was still trotting, but his black sides were slick and white-lathered with sweat. His cracked hoof had to hurt him still, Bobbi knew, though the shoe would keep the injury from worsening.… The buggy whip snaked out and flicked the horse, and then Bobbi understood “villain.” To the bottom of her heart she loathed and hated Samuel Bissel. The trickster, the bar, the black heart. The man was evil.

  “Croyle’s Summit,” said Witchie after a look at Kabilde’s globe.

  “How can you tell?”

  “My glory days, girl. How can you tell a friend’s face, when you see it? That there’s Croyle’s Summit, all right. Next left and then a two-mile hill.”

  And Bissel was making Shane take it at a trot. Grandpap would never have done that. Bobbi had thought she hated her grandfather, but in the darkness of that night she knew that her feeling toward Grant Yandro was totally different from the horror and wrath she felt toward Samuel Bissel. How could she have called Grandpap a villain? He was no villain.

  “We’ll soon catch up to them,” said Witchie, the grim note back in her voice.

  Straining mightily to reach the clutch, the old woman downshifted and turned off Parsimony Road onto the wider road up Croyle’s Summit. Then with her right leg stretched to its fullest stumpy length she pressed the accelerator, pushing the Kaiser as fast as it would go on the hill, which was not much faster than a fast horse’s trot. And every moment Shane suffered longer.

  Bobbi demanded, “Do we have to catch them? Can’t you just hex Bissel or something?”

  The Kaiser’s throaty roar hit top volume, faltered, coughed and died away into a silence that screamed. There was no chugging sound when Witchie pushed the starter. The big car drifted along a few yards further, noiseless as a floating shipwreck, then stopped.

  “Looks like he put the hex on us instead,” Witchie said. She picked up her sweater, purse and stick and clambered out of the car into the late-night darkness. Bobbi took the paper grocery sack and did likewise. The screaming sound in the silence, she realized, was inside her mind. She let go with a yell.

  “Jesus!” she burst out at Witchie or the world.

  “Just one of his humble servants,” said the old woman mildly.

  “SHIT! Can’t you do anything?”

  Witchie stood patting the Kaiser just above its left headlamp, like a cavalryman patting a fallen steed. “Curse Bissel, you mean? Not if you want Shane ever to be the same.”

  Bobbi felt the yelling drain out of her. “You mean—if Bissel goes, he’ll take Shane with him?”

  “Smart girl,” said Witchie acidly. She turned her back on the Kaiser and started at her spraddle-legged walk upmountain, up the berm of the road, holding her walking stick like a long flashlight in front of her
. Kabilde’s globular handle glowed softly, giving her light. Bobbi jogged to catch up, then strode along beside her. The old woman moved surprisingly quickly, considering her cookstove-like build. Bobbi had to push herself to keep up.

  “What now?” she asked after a while.

  “You got an idea?” Witchie sounded annoyed, as well she might, after losing her Kaiser.

  “No.”

  “Then just walk and hush up.”

  There was really no choice but to follow Shane, even afoot. Bobbi walked and kept quiet.

  “We got to catch up to him somehow,” the old witch added curtly after a while, “and we ain’t going to do it this way.”

  Bobbi kept her mouth shut.

  “And if we can’t do nothing else, we got to get to the Hub when he does. The others are likely to catch wind of this and come, or we can summon them, or he might.”

  “The Twelve?”

  “Of course.” Crabbily.

  “They’ll help?”

  Witchie didn’t answer, and Bobbi realized the old woman wasn’t sure what might happen.

  The two of them walked out the rest of that night in silence, leaving the road from time to time to hide from the headlights of cars. They topped Croyle’s Summit and toiled their way through a convolution of ridges beyond, and made the long downgrade before daybreak. By sunrise they had come to the turn in the road where they could see the little town of Veto sulking in the valley below.

  “Time to rest,” Witchie said, the first words she had spoken in hours.

  Bobbi thought so too. And she was desperately thirsty, though her Yandro pride kept her from admitting it.

  Witchie huffed up a steep slope into the woods, and Bobbi followed. Once the two of them had gone well out of sight of the road, Witchie stopped at a halfway-level place behind an outcropping of rock. Bobbi helped her heave away a few fallen limbs, and the old woman seated herself amid the twigs and dead leaves. She settled her faded, frumpy cotton skirt and her belongings with an air, as if making the place her home. “There,” she said.