The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel

by Josh Kent

  He had to make it all very natural, gentle, and piecemeal. You can’t ask all the questions to one person, or it gets their blood up. You spread the questions out, take it slowly, and be patient. You be patient and you look and see what their eyes say. You have to watch the light in their eyes. Or the darkness. A lot of times people will say what they want you to say. They’ll also say things without saying things, so that’s why you look in their eyes.

  The other main thing was getting up behind the Hills’ and finishing up to try and memorize the woods. He’d slept already late and had to hurry. In town, he would need to get some oil for his lamp for when the sun goes down. He had some burning oil anyway, but he needed lamp oil too.

  Violet said when she came to pick up the tray, “It’s a little while’s walk to get there, but if you need anything else there’s Huck’s shop as you know on the north side by the main road. You gotta pay for it there, though. But we might not have some stuff as you might need.”

  She left with the tray, walking back down the lumpy hill that led up to the house where she lived. Jim watched her go. She walked sometimes with her head looking as if it was about to turn and look at him.

  Jim stood on the steps to the backhouse. They were sturdy and made of blackwood. Blackwood was hard to find and harder even to build from. Bill Hill must be a good woodman, and a strong one. Jim looked over where the storehouse was going back up; the morning light came down in through the places where the walls weren’t so done yet.

  He looked at the shafts of white light against the black insides of the half-done building. He squinted. Was there a shadow leaning in there?

  Jim wondered at this while some birds chirped and rustled. At times, he was sure that his father was out there watching him. Sometimes he sensed it like a wind or a tone in his soul—that he was watching him. It was the only thing that pushed him forward. To come to a town like this, to follow a dim dream down from the north. Only to hope to see him again, to find him. Jim didn’t know where his father was; all he knew was that his father was not dead.

  He blinked a few times, and some clouds moved to let the light open up in the shed. Jim saw the gray blanket that Bill Hill must have thrown over a nail on the wall. No one leaning, just a tricky shadow.

  Maybe he wouldn’t go into town. Maybe that Straddler fellow and Simon were right. Maybe Violet Hill, with her bright red hair and her cigarettes, maybe she was just another crazy Gray from the Ridges. He reached into his pack and felt the little satchel that held the leaves and looked back into the half-built storehouse. A wind picked up and blew the little blanket like a cloak.

  Barnhouse warned him that he shouldn’t eat them too fast. He squeezed the package and ground his teeth. It was an important day.

  Today was the day to do the two main things.

  Chapter 4

  May Marbo woke up in her bed and curled her toes. She was tired and it was real warm in her bed. She didn’t want to get out. She got out.

  Downstairs, her pa was up and walking around and making breakfast. The smell of hot eggs was rolling around in her room.

  She put on her slippers and went down in the kitchen. There was her pa, Huck Marbo, stumping around on his leg made of wood. His blond hair was thin as a winter fire on his head now, but his muscles were still hard and strong. The look of him made her feel safe. She had seen this man, even with his leg as it was, come galloping through waist-high snow to bring them victuals from the shop. When her ma died, she watched him carry her beautiful body out the front door.

  Now he was making eggs and coffee with his broad back to her.

  “Good morning, May,” he said without turning around. The smell floated about the room and the eggs crackled away in the black skillet on the wood stove.

  She sat down and rubbed her brown hair around and pulled it around her face.

  “There’s eggs,” he said.

  She scooted up her chair.

  He put some eggs on a big plate. “You want eggs? These are straight from Mosely’s chickens, from them chickens that the chicken man brought through here last spring.”

  “Yes, please,” she said. She hated the chicken man.

  “And coffee?”

  “Yes, please, and thank you.”

  He fiddled around, got out the coffee powder, put the kettle on, and lit a fire under with a snap of a match and a whoosh of flame.

  He set the eggs down in front of her and sat down across from her at the long brown table. The morning came in the big window all gray and white with crow sounds.

  May started eating.

  Huck regarded his daughter for a moment, her nose pointed at her eggs. He placed an empty cup in front of her and said, “May, I want you to stay away from that Falk fella at the shop last night.”

  She didn’t answer. He set another cup down in front of his plate and sat down.

  He picked up some eggs on his fork and put them in his mouth and swallowed. “Ya hear?”

  May wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t know what to say,” she said.

  “I’ll help you.” Huck looked at her straight in the eye and she looked away quick at her eggs. “You say, ‘Yes, Pa’ and that’s the end of it.”

  The kettle whistled, and he got up and tended to it while she moved her eggs around on the plate.

  Huck poured boiling water in the two white cups, “That Falk,” he said. “That Falk is some kind of trouble.”

  He sprinkled now a portion of brown, powdery coffee into each cup, “He’s an outlander. No one knows where he’s from, and he won’t say.” He dropped a spoon in each cup. “But I’ll say for true that nothin’ good’s ever come from outside Sparrow and nothin’ ever will.”

  She looked up at her father. His voice was strong when he said it, but something about his eyes looked worried, soft, tired.

  “What about those church people?” May asked.

  Huck put the mug in front of her. “Now wait on that and don’t sip it up right away, it’ll burn ya.”

  She nodded. “What about them people?” she came again. “The Moselys? They came from up north, right?”

  Huck got quiet and sipped his coffee. In the middle of each of his brown eyes, right near his deep pupils, there was a ring of grass green. This was in each eye and gave him the impression of having a kind of deeper, greener self behind the first one. Sometimes, when he went deep in thought, the green would shift until it was dark as autumn grasses. “Them folk is God’s people. God’s people are never outlanders. God’s people is God’s people. Folks like that Jim Falk, they’re the ones from the outside.”

  May got a little scared of her pa and went back to eating her eggs.

  They sat eating then in a long, speechless breakfast while the crows cawed in the gray sun.

  At last May said, “May I be excused?”

  Huck kept his eyes off her and replied, “When you finish up around here, I want you to come straight into town. You don’t talk to anybody. You don’t stop. Not even at Vernon Mosely’s to see the chickens and rabbits. Don’t stop at the creek bridge either. Not today. You come straight to the shop. Nothin’. No excuses.”

  She said, “Yes, Pa.”

  

  Down the path back to town, there was a house Jim could now see from the road. He couldn’t see it last night in the dark. In fact, he remembered very little about the walk home last night in the dark. That was a mistake—a mistake he couldn’t make again.

  Crows flew up in the air from near where the house was.

  He looked up at the little white house as he was coming around the bend and saw there was a girl running down to the road from the house with a basket on her arm. She wore a plain old tan dress and a long cloak with a hood on it. She looked almost like some little thief.

  It was May Marbo. “Mr. Falk!”

  She ran out of the gate and came up close to him and then took a step back and looked at her basket. She only thought briefly of what her father had said to her.

  Jim was a
little surprised by her rushing up and just tipped his hat and smiled.

  She took a quick look at him, then looked back up to the house and then down the road toward town. “Well, good morning, Mr. Falk. You wouldn’t be heading into town this morning, would you?”

  Jim tipped his hat back a little and said, “Why, yes, I am, and I would be honored to escort you—Miss Marbo, isn’t it? If you will allow it.”

  She smiled again, wide and toothsome, and said quietly, “I will allow it.”

  They started walking.

  The path was barely wide enough for a carriage or a cart drawn by horses, but one might be able to squeeze through. In most places, the trees bent in and darkened the white sky. They were close. The sound of their shoes on the path was muffled.

  They walked in the cold quiet for a while and then May laughed. Even the sound of her laughter stopped short and fell in the road. He looked over at her. Her brown hair was damp and flat and just as she laughed, a breeze blew through the tunnel of trees and whipped here and there strands of hair around her head.

  Jim asked her, “What’s funny?”

  “Oh,” she said, “you remember at my pa’s last night when you showed everybody that magic trick where you broke the glass by staring at it?”

  Jim had forgotten. “Oh, I did?” Then he remembered. “Oh, I did.”

  For a moment, a fear gripped Jim Falk. What had he done? A damned fool he had been to go getting so drunk, so drunk that he put the whole of it in danger, as he had in Batesville. Maybe when he got down into this little Sparrow town, the men of Batesville would be waiting for him, following him all the way down here, and ready as ever to string him up and burn him. That was the kind of trouble he was always pulling behind him. Barnhouse well knew it. He wondered what would happen now. Someone in this town might soon get the same kind of ideas the men of Batesville had.

  “I don’t know how you did that trick,” May said, her cheerful voice breaking his thoughts, “but even Simon Starkey’s mouth was wide open and,”—her voice got quiet—“it’s known that he’s some kind of magician.”

  It came back to him then.

  He’d been drunk on Huck’s whisky, and Simon was in his face with more card tricks, and then he made that mouse appear right out of a handkerchief. Jim was filled up with the sad whisky energy.

  “You hear me, Simon, Son of the Starkeys, you are nothing but a fraud . . .”

  Simon laughed and grinned, and his face looked darker and his smile looked sharper. “A fraud? A fraud? You should be more careful, outlander, coming into town and casting about accusations!”

  Jim spun up out of his chair and then swayed around to keep from falling and slumped back into his chair at the little table. He said something that none of them could hear and began to trace something with his finger on the table top.

  “See here!” Simon shouted and waved his arms and walked over to Jim’s table. Simon grabbed the mouse that he had just pulled from the red handkerchief. He placed it on the table right in front of Jim. Under the handkerchief, everybody could see it scrambling under the cloth. Then, his other hand came down hard and smashed the mouse under the red cloth.

  He looked around at everyone smiling. “I lift up my hand . . .”

  He lifted up his hand and there was a completely flat handkerchief. When he lifted that up, out of the handkerchief fell, red as rubies, rose petals. The little crowd in the bar made a gasp and men looked around at one another to see if the other men had seen what they’d seen. May was looking at her pa, but then she looked over at the outlander and then back at Simon. Everyone else looked back at Simon.

  Then, as if the little thing knew just the right moment, clambering onto Simon’s head came the mouse sniffing the air, its tiny eyes sparkling. There was a boom of laughter and clapping from the crowd.

  Jim got hot at all the applause, and from his slouched position in his chair he pounded the table and shouted, “Tricks, only tricks!”

  Jim’s face was red and sad, and he took a very deep breath which everyone could hear him take. The people all looked at him. He looked around the room, pulling each person in with his eyes, and then he fixed those sunken, whisky-drunk eyes on his beer mug. His blue eyes widened up their pupils.

  Nothing happened.

  Everybody standing around thought this outlander might be frozen, maybe even dead. Then the room got so quiet that the outside noises of the wind seemed to stop. Everybody watching felt a kind of pressure in their heads that made them squint a bit, and then there was this whine, high and quick, but barely audible.

  They looked at the mug that Jim Falk was glaring at. There was a dull pop. The mug cracked up its side and beer flowed out. It cracked right up the middle like split wood.

  Nobody talked while the beer ran on the table.

  Jim looked around at everyone. Everyone was amazed and stunned. May was smiling with her mouth open.

  Jim about stunned himself. He staggered out of his chair while the beer began to drip on the floor. He tipped his hat. “Good evening,” he said and left out the front, left them all standing dumb.

  It all came back to him now, mostly. May was stepping along beside him, stealing quick glances at his face here and there, but looking forward mostly.

  “I forgot,” Jim said to May as they turned a slight bend. “I forgot I did that trick.”

  “How did you do it?” May asked.

  “It’s just a trick, May, that’s all,” Jim said and began scanning the close woods again. “Just a trick, like Simon turning the mouse into rose petals.”

  “It seemed different,” she said. She was bashful around Jim, but outside of the Hills, Bill and Violet, she had been the friendliest one so far.

  They walked a way without talk. The trees in places grew out into the path. “It doesn’t look like a lot of horses come up this path,” Jim said.

  “No,” May said, “ain’t a lotta folk keep horses here. In fact, nobody does anymore. They come into town sometimes on horses from other places to bring stuff through.”

  The path then came to an upward slope that rose for about ten feet. On the other side, it went clear down, about a half-mile, all the way to the end where Jim could see the tiniest boxes of the houses in town.

  “Why not?” Jim was looking way down on the path now. Ahead of them, he saw a figure in the road standing near to the woods.

  “Don’t know,” May said.

  Jim set his eyes way ahead on the figure and felt a tremor that started in his gut and raised his hairs and still, something more than that. He felt the jitters. Then he saw the figure move, and Jim’s breath quit. It was a dark, crooked thing with long, curly spines. It was still quite far off.

  He stopped walking and said, “May, stop, May.”

  She wasn’t scared until she looked at him and saw how serious and faraway his eyes were.

  “What . . .” she started.

  “Shhh,” he whispered, “don’t talk. There’s a spook up there on the road.”

  May got closer to him and started shaking. The jitters were heavy and rolling along the path now. It was feeling around for them.

  “Stay close and don’t budge,” Jim said. “They can’t see so good, but they can hear and feel things that men can’t.”

  Jim saw it cross back and forth, back and forth across the road. It flickered at the left edge of the path and then disappeared into the trees.

  “May,” Jim said, “I want you to stay close by me now. We’re going to pass on into town, and once we get there I don’t want you to tell anybody what we saw. I just want you to say that we walked into town together and that I went off and you went about your business.”

  “Okay, Mr. Falk,” she said, but she never did see anything.

  They passed in silence along the road. May stuck close by. Now he could feel the jitters constant. The jitters he’d first felt left a permanent signature in his mind, a pulse. He could feel the spook now, but it had moved far up into the hillside somewhere. I
t seemed unconcerned with them.

  May whispered. Her eyes were darting from side to side, and she would turn once in a while in great fear to look back up the path. “What kind of a thing is a spook?”

  Jim said, “May, it all depends. I don’t know for sure, but none of them are good.”

  “Mr. Falk,” she said as she looked up at him. The fear was bright in her brown eyes. “Does the Evil One send them?”

  Jim Falk looked at her long, square face and saw softness in her features. He wanted to comfort her, but instead he told the truth. “Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes the Evil One does send them.”

  He felt her shudder with her whole body when he said it. Then he said, “Let’s get you into town and then I’ll come back out here and maybe, after that, we won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  “What will you do?” May asked.

  “My job,” Jim said and meant it.

  Jim got May into town.

  She squeezed his arm pretty hard and ran off toward her pa’s shop without looking back at him.

  Jim unrolled his gear bag and got out his gear and checked it. He laid down his coat. Then he geared up.

  His hatchet he slung over his left shoulder on a long, tightly braided leather strap. This hatchet had been his pa’s, and his pa had executed many evil things with it. He adjusted the strap around his waist so that it wouldn’t drag along as he ran.

  Then he fed the Dracon pepperbox pistol with six shots of silver-lode and holstered it. This was the weapon and ammo Barnhouse had secured for him. He wished he had packed better ordnance; he wished Barnhouse was along with him; but this was it, and it was time.

  Finally, he put on his leather shirt and collar. This protected his neck and chest from claws and spines and raggedy teeth.

  He hefted his hatchet a moment in his right hand, straightened his hat, and plunged into the woods.

  He moved fast.

  Outlined in his memory, punched like a stamp, Ithacus Falk stood. This was his pa. “When you’re trained in on the jitters, the jitters is trained in on you. That’s the thing, boy.”

  These woods were thick, and it wasn’t long until all he could hear was the noise of his breath and his boots crunching on the dead leaves. Once he got in a ways, he stopped again and unraveled his pack. From inside a small pocket deep in, he pulled out a leather pouch. Out of this, he got two green as grass leaves. He put them in his mouth and chewed them. Then he swallowed them with his eyes closed.