A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  The clock in the kitchen showed just shy of noon. She washed her face at the sink and rubbed it dry with a dish towel, then drank four mugs of water so fast it trickled from the corners of her mouth. Now, a few minutes on the couch was all she needed.

  But once she lay down, she realized she could not sleep. She kept thinking for some reason about Ray, about his wife, trying to imagine what she looked like. She’d asked Jack once.

  “Christ,” he’d said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She’s blonde.”

  “Pretty?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “I guess so. In a way.”

  Lavinia could not imagine Ray with someone who was pretty. But as soon as she’d thought it, she felt bad.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Christ, Lavinia, I don’t know. What do you keep harping on her for all the time?”

  “Just curious, I guess.” Then she added, “He must miss her, living there all by himself.”

  “He goes to see her,” Jack said. “He visits her. All the time.”

  Lavinia wanted to say, “Would you? If it were me, would you visit all the time?” but instead she said, “They didn’t have kids?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  She was about to ask, “Why not?” when Jack said, “Enough, already. I don’t want to talk about her.”

  At the time, she hadn’t thought it an odd thing to say. But later, she’d wondered about the intimacy of what he’d said. Not “I don’t want to talk about it,” but “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  And she’d felt angry and embarrassed and unreasonably jealous. She knew it was stupid. Still, sometimes she thought about Ray’s wife quite a bit, tried to picture her face, her hair. What shade of blonde? Long hair, or short?

  Later, Lavinia sat wedged between Jack and Ray on the truck seat. Ray spread himself out, knees apart, one arm across the back of the seat behind her. They both reeked of sweat and liquor, but what was worse was that Lavinia could still smell her own rotting odour.

  Jack was driving fast, swerving sometimes in the soft ridge of gravel at the shoulder. Lavinia clutched the edge of the seat, wishing she’d learned how to drive a standard, dizzy and hot, sick with the careening motion, the smell of them all, bumping against each other at every jolt and turn. She wished she had stayed home, but that would not have been possible. Jack was in high spirits when he and Ray returned from Ray’s place that evening, jovial. He would have coaxed, cajoled and, finally, become annoyed with her if she’d refused. Besides, getting out now and then wasn’t so bad. It was just this nausea. And the thirst. She wished she’d brought something to drink. She wished a lot of things.

  Jack fiddled with the radio, found the country station he liked.

  “So,” Ray hollered over the music, leaning in too close to her ear, “ever been to a carnival before?”

  “No,” she said, turning slightly away from the sour yeast smell of his breath.

  “You gonna keep that to yourself, you miser?” Jack eyed the bottle wedged between Ray’s thighs.

  Ray passed it across her, banging his elbow accidentally into her mouth as they hit a pothole. She rubbed her tongue across the inside of her lip, could taste a bit of blood where the skin was ragged.

  “I’ve been to a few,” Ray said, oblivious. “Been to that fair in Saskatoon, too, the big one.”

  Jack took a long drink from the bottle, passed it back to Ray. “You never been out of this county in your life.”

  Lavinia looked at him quickly, thinking, His wife’s in North Battleford. He goes there all the time. You said.

  Ray tried to manoeuvre the bottle to his mouth but kept getting jolted, his arm flailing in mid-air. Rye splashed out on Lavinia’s sleeve. “In sixty-eight,” he hollered. “Before I was married.” He screwed the lid clumsily back onto the bottle. “Was something else.”

  Lavinia shifted her weight on the seat, reached behind to adjust the sharp end of a seat belt clip that was digging into her back. She would have liked to put the belt on, but there was no way to do it without their noticing. She thought, If I have to die, don’t let me die like this. Not in a graceless twist of metal.

  “There was a woman, I swear to God, a woman weighed over nine hundred pounds.”

  Jack laughed and thumped the wheel.

  “And one,” Ray said, encouraged, “half-man, half-woman. She had a beard. And—you know. Everything.”

  Lavinia thought Jack would laugh again, but he just shook his head. “Christ,” he said.

  “And there was this thing,” Ray said. “Hell, I don’t remember what they called it. It was, well, it was human, I guess—part, anyway—but they kept it in this cage, and they warned everybody, ‘Keep your hands away from the bars!’ Didn’t have to tell me twice. Bit the heads off live chickens.”

  “No shit,” Jack said.

  “No,” Ray answered, settling back against the seat. “No shit.”

  Lavinia looked at him quickly. Something about his voice had made her think, with a start, He’s faking. He’s not drunk at all. And she wondered, Is he so lonely, then? Is he that desperate?

  Jack suddenly pulled the truck to the side of the road. “Gotta see a man about a horse,” he said.

  When they were alone, Lavinia, on impulse, turned to Ray. “What’s her name, anyway, your wife?”

  “Linda,” he said, his voice sounding startled in the dark of the cab.

  “You must miss her,” she said.

  But before he could answer, Jack swung the door open and slid in beside her, singing, “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.”

  When neither she nor Ray joined in, he whistled the song to himself, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. The three of them shoulder to shoulder, Jack hurtling them through the darkness, toward the lights of town.

  The carnival wasn’t as big as Lavinia expected. They’d set up in the empty lot by the railroad tracks across from the bar. Cars lined both sides of the street for blocks—farmers and people who’d come from other places where the carnival wasn’t stopping—but most of the town people just walked down. They strolled every street, ghostly and bristling with excitement.

  Jack took one last swig of rye and led them to where two torches marked the entrance. Lavinia and Ray trailed slightly behind. She glanced over at him once, at the heavy set of his shoulders, and thought he wanted her to say something to him. Something, maybe, about his wife. But Jack turned to wait for them, so she hitched her purse strap up and kept walking.

  “What’s the matter?” Jack said, thumping Ray on the shoulder. “Somebody can’t hold their liquor?”

  Ray laughed a little and nodded. “I’ll get it,” he said, as they reached the gate. He paid for all three tickets and handed them their stubs. Then they stood there a moment, looking around.

  “Hey,” Jack said to Ray, “there’s your girlfriend.” He pointed at a garishly painted sign depicting a bearded lady. “Let’s see if she still remembers you.”

  Ray nodded and jingled some change loosely in his pocket. “I need to take a leak,” he said abruptly.

  “Suit yourself,” Jack said as Ray disappeared into the crowd. “Guess you’re not interested,” he said to Lavinia.

  She shook her head, but he had already wandered off across the field, bumping into people as he went. Lavinia looked past the booths to where a lighted Ferris wheel turned slowly against the sky. She walked toward it through the bright alley made by the food vendors, realizing for the first time that she hadn’t eaten yet that day. She positioned herself in line at the first vendor and ordered a Coke and two hotdogs, eating the first immediately in three huge bites while standing at the booth, then downing half the Coke. It was possible, she realized, that she hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she wasn’t sick at all. She took the second hotdog and her Coke and strolled back toward the Ferris wheel. It was darker there, away from the food. And cooler. She felt better than she had in we
eks.

  “Ma’am,” someone said, close to her. Lavinia started, almost dropped the half-eaten hotdog she held. She realized she’d been expecting Ray, but the man at her elbow was young, a teenager probably. A boy. His hair combed back slick from his scarred face.

  “Ma’am,” he said, smiling, “you have not seen nothing till you have seen the eighth wonder of the world, and we have it right here.” He waved toward a small trailer at his back, lit by a single yellow bulb. “Right on up those stairs, ma’am, is a sight to behold straight from the Amazon jungles, the only one of its kind in captivity.”

  “What is it?” she asked, unable to look away from the fine fuzz of hair that darkened his upper lip. He had an accent. American.

  “What is it, ma’am?” the boy repeated and then leaned in confidentially. “It is the giant anaconda of the Amazon jungle, measuring thirty-two feet long. That’s right, thirty-two feet.”

  Lavinia looked over her shoulder toward the bearded lady tent. She couldn’t see Jack or Ray anywhere, but it was difficult in this crowd. “How much?” she asked the boy, wiping a spot of mustard from the corner of her mouth.

  “Just fifty cents,” he said, “and worth every penny.”

  She handed the boy her Coke while she rummaged in her purse for some change.

  “That’s right,” the boy called to people passing them, “straight from the Amazon jungles.”

  She slipped two quarters in his palm, took her Coke and headed up the steps.

  “Whoops,” the boy said to her, tapping the hotdog, “you can’t take that in there.”

  Lavinia considered throwing it away, but instead she hungrily stuffed the whole thing in her mouth. As she turned to drop the wrapper into the garbage, she saw someone moving far on the other side of the trailer, past the lights, near the chain-link fence at the tracks. It looked like Ray. And she thought, Is it possible she’s really never coming home, his wife? And then something else occurred to her, something she’d never thought to ask Jack, about Ray’s wife going back to the hospital, maybe forever: Who decided?

  The man at the fence—was it Ray?—looked over then and Lavinia waved. She was about to call out to him when the boy ushered her inside along with a couple she didn’t recognize. The woman held a little girl by the hand. “Excuse me,” she said politely as they squeezed by Lavinia in the doorway.

  Inside, the trailer was smaller than it had appeared and completely dark except for a flat lighted cage in the centre of the room. The man held the little girl up so that she could see inside.

  “That doesn’t look like thirty-two feet, does it, Harv?” said the woman.

  “Say,” the man said to the boy who had followed them in, “this snake isn’t thirty-two feet.”

  “That’s the thing,” the boy said, “it’s hard to tell when they’re all balled up like that. But see down there, that’s the tail. Imagine, now, if it was all stretched out.”

  The woman looked skeptical. “Still,” she said, “thirty-two feet.”

  Lavinia moved closer, looked in at the snake. The woman was right, it didn’t really look that big. It lay motionless, a dull grey colour.

  “Daddy,” the little girl said, “doesn’t it do anything?”

  “Well?” the man demanded of the boy who leaned in behind Lavinia, pressing against her, smelling of peppermint candy. “Doesn’t it do anything?”

  “A snake this size,” he said, “they don’t move around much.”

  The woman made a tsk sound with her tongue against her teeth. “Well,” she said, “that’s not very interesting.”

  “No,” the boy agreed, “no, you’re absolutely right. But I’ll show you something that is.”

  “What’s he going to do, Daddy?” the little girl asked as the boy returned with a small cardboard box.

  “I’ll tell you what,” the boy said to her, “would you like to help me give this old snake her supper?”

  The little girl nodded and the mother said, “Oh, aren’t you lucky now.”

  “I don’t know.” The man hesitated, looking from his wife to his daughter. “Is this such a good idea?”

  “Why, sure.” The boy grinned. “It’s nature.”

  He removed the lid from the cardboard box.

  “Okay,” the boy said, “I don’t do this for just anybody.”

  The little girl looked up at Lavinia from across the lighted cage, her eyes glittering with anticipation. Lavinia could not look away. She thought, It’s nature.

  “Ma’am,” the boy said to Lavinia, “would you mind opening that hatch there?”

  Lavinia paused on the trailer steps, willing herself not to be sick, one hand against the wall for balance, dizzy with nausea and the slow dawning of something awful—could it be?—one hand pressed to her stomach, knowing now what was there. Certain of it. She tried to make some quick calculations in her head, but she was too irregular, it was hard to remember for sure. No, she thought, no, not possible. We were careful. But it was possible, of course it was. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She sat down on the metal steps with her purse on her lap, drank her Coke in huge gulps, wishing she had another.

  “Lavinia?”

  Ray walked toward her out of the shadows. “Okay?” he asked, stopping in front of her.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “I think so. I don’t know.” But she was fine, of course she was. She had to be. It could be a lot worse. Couldn’t it? She could be dying.

  He sat down next to her on the steps and lit a cigarette.

  “Guess you know the wife’s up in Battleford,” he said after a few moments. “At the hospital there.”

  “Yeah,” she said, not really listening, “yeah, Jack said.” But she felt like saying, Listen, I don’t care. I don’t care about your wife. I don’t. I have bigger problems.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” he went on. He shrugged. “What was I supposed to do? I can’t watch her all the time.”

  Lavinia looked at him then. “What do you mean? Why would you need to?”

  “Oh,” he said, taking a long drag on his cigarette, “she’d wander off. Evening, usually. Or at night. I was afraid she’d get hurt. That something would happen. She’d be barefoot sometimes. In her nightgown.”

  Lavinia shook her head. “To where? Where would she go?”

  He shrugged again. “Around. Toward the hills mostly.” He paused and flicked his cigarette out into the night. “She made it clear to the lake that last time. Not that she ever knew where she was.”

  Lake? she wondered, and thought of the pictures that had plastered her bedroom. What lake? One of mine? Redberry? Ministikwan? Buffalo Pound? But before she could ask, Ray said, “When Jack found her.”

  “Jack?” She was about to add, “My Jack?” but realized how stupid it would sound.

  “He took her back, that last time,” Ray said. “I couldn’t. It was better that way anyhow. She preferred it.”

  “Jack took her?” Lavinia asked, thinking Ray must be mistaken, thinking she wasn’t hearing right, that she was confused. It was too much, all this at once. It didn’t make sense. Besides, she and Jack would have been seeing each other by then, engaged maybe; he would have said something. She shook her head. “Were they friends or something?”

  “Yeah,” Ray said after a minute. “They were friends.”

  Lavinia felt another rush of nausea, took a deep breath to quell it. They were friends? Jack and—what did he call her? A schizo? She lifted her Coke bottle, forgetting it was empty. She was so thirsty. She looked around for a drinking fountain. A spigot. A hose, anything. Her stomach was lurching. Her tongue swollen. She didn’t need to hear this right now. Didn’t need to hear about Ray’s wife. She needed to sort out her thoughts. She wished Ray would leave. If he wouldn’t, she would have to. Or she would have to tell him, Please, I need a minute. I need to be alone here.

  Just then she saw Jack, standing beneath the Ferris wheel, awkward in that weird, coloured night air, turning a slow circle as if looking for th
em. For her. She rose, steadying herself against the trailer.

  “Where you going?” Ray asked.

  But she didn’t answer.

  A Hard Witching

  Every night last month, Mr. Crosie had come to Edna in what must have been dreams, his hair smoothed back unnaturally from his temples, the dull wool of his good blue suit brightly silvered in the moonlight. Alf? she would say softly, though she would be thinking Mr. Crosie, just as she had done all through their married life. Alf? But Mr. Crosie would just stand there in the space between the tall bureau and the window, his long arms dangling loose at his sides, palms turned strangely away from her. And each time he came, she thought with a certain wonder, How clean his hands are, right down to the fingernails. And she would try hard to think back: Had they been that way for the funeral? And thinking of that, thinking they might not have been, she felt guilty, as if some urgent and possibly distasteful task had been left undone. What is it, Alf? she would ask, edging herself up against the pillows and tugging the blanket higher over her chest, her breath pluming out in the air from the open window at Mr. Crosie’s elbow. What is it?

  It happened that way each night for nearly the entire month of October, while the fields lay fallow and newly damp with frost and the leaves of the shelter belt slowly yellowed and thinned, and the hens in the yard chortled and shivered and plumped their fat white bodies against the growing cold. But then, the last Saturday of the month, Mr. Crosie did not come. Edna woke late in the morning with the sun already laid out heavily across the bed and, realizing he had not come, dropped to her knees and said out loud, half-relieved, half-alarmed, “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, do not let the flood sweep over me, Lord, or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me.” She did not know why she said it, only that it felt like a thing that should be said. And feeling somehow better for having said it—and being a practical woman, a point upon which she took pride—she rose and fried herself a breakfast of eggs and sausages, which she ate in huge heavily peppered bites straight from the pan, slick with grease and still smoking.