A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  “Mr. Monson,” Edna called, not too loudly, as she neared the trees. Her boots cracked across dead branches. “Mr. Monson?” she repeated, poking through to the other side. But he was nowhere to be seen. The yard stretched out into the edge of the nearby stubble field. Everything had that odd flatness that came with a snow sky, like a picture. All depth sucked out.

  “Hello?” she called softly. But the air settled around her as still as the landscape. She puffed out a long cloud of breath and turned south along the shelter belt. Maybe Monson had gone around back already, by the barn.

  Edna had almost reached the far end of the yard when she noticed the box. She nearly missed it, really, settled as it was there in the trees, the same dull brown as the dirt and leaves, the cord coiled loosely on top of the lid. She stepped toward it across a rotting stump. “Mr. Monson?” she said again. The orange cat minced along ahead of her, sniffing at the edge of the box, then bounding away into the trees as Edna moved closer, hands stuffed into the pockets of her coat. She stopped and looked slowly up and down the shelter belt. There was no sign of Monson anywhere. Maybe I should just take this along with me, Edna thought. He might be needing it wherever he’s got to. Save him the trip back. She looked down the narrow row of trees once more, then bent forward and pushed the cord to one side. The initials A.M. had been carved roughly into the lid. It looked like a homemade job, she thought, probably did it himself. She poked the box with her boot. Really, it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick peek. It was on her property, after all, and if there was something inside she should know about, something that shouldn’t be there … Edna had not really formed any clear notion of what that something might be, only that she wouldn’t abide any ill doings on her property. And with that certainty in mind, she lifted the cord and opened the lid.

  She stood a moment, breathing the cold afternoon air, the cord dangling loosely from her fingertips.

  “Why,” she said finally, “it’s empty.”

  She blinked her eyes a couple of times, just to make sure. Then she straightened, her lips pressed firmly together. Empty. Yes, of course it was. The man was no fool, wouldn’t leave anything lying around. The place she should have looked was his truck. And she’d had the perfect opportunity, too.

  Then, just as she let the lid fall shut and was replacing the cord, Monson appeared through the trees. Before he could speak, she said, “I was just thinking I’d bring you your box.” She guessed that he thought he was pretty clever, leaving it sitting there in the open for her to find, to throw her off her guard.

  She stared him straight in the face. He looked smaller in the trees, as if the very air was slowly shrinking him. He lifted his hands then, and Edna saw he held a long metal rod in each one. She sucked in her breath and stepped quickly back.

  “Brazing rods,” he said, “get pretty cold on the hands. Might have to switch to willow.”

  “Willow?” Edna puffed, eager to hide her momentary start at the appearance of the rods. Now that she saw them clearly, they weren’t threatening at all, rather fine and delicate, like kitchen utensils. Almost pretty, really.

  “Willow’s more accurate anyway,” he said, opening the box and laying the rods gently inside, “in cold weather.”

  Edna stepped forward, “You mean you haven’t found water yet?”

  Monson closed the lid and tied it shut with the cord. “Might take a while. Like I said.” He leaned back on his haunches and looked up at her. Edna was reminded, briefly, of those garden gnomes Mr. Crosie had been fond of.

  “Mr. Monson,” she said, “you can see for yourself this ground’s going to freeze solid any minute now.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “As I’m sure you know,” she snapped, “once the ground freezes, you can’t drill.”

  Monson scowled. “Who told you that?”

  Edna could not remember. Had it been Eulan?

  “Makes no difference,” Monson went on. “They use the same drills to dig oil and gas wells. Up north. In Alaska. Around here, ground freezes maybe six feet, that on a bad year. You can wait till January if you want.”

  Edna felt the blood rush to her temples as Monson spoke. How dare he lie to her that way? Did he think she was stupid? He was a liar, that’s all. A liar and a drinker.

  “You think,” she began, “you can come out here and have one over on me. Because I’m a widow. A farm widow.” Here she paused, as if the significance of this had only just sunk in. And in that second, everything changed. “If Mr. Crosie were here,” she said, “if Mr. Crosie were here …”

  But she didn’t know how to finish, and for some reason that she did not understand, tears sprang hotly to her eyes. Mortified, she turned slightly away, looking upward at that grey sheet of sky to keep the tears, oh hateful, from edging down her face. Of all the ridiculous things, she thought, both angry and surprised at herself. And what would this Monson think now?

  After a moment, she heard him say quietly, “I’m sorry. Alf Crosie was a good man.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said without turning around. “Did you say you knew my husband?”

  “Why, sure,” he said, sounding surprised.

  Of all the lowdown, disgusting things, Edna thought. To lie about this, to pretend he’d ever known Mr. Crosie.

  “How?” she demanded, turning slowly to face him. “How did you know him? From where? Tell me.”

  “I’ve known Alf for years,” he said, “since … I guess since that summer he took me and Eulan over to check out an old test well site, out at the Sand Hills there. That’s the first time I met him, anyways. Through Eulan.”

  Edna blinked.

  “Alf had a notion there might be more to it. That hole, I mean. Exactly what, he wouldn’t ever say. Geez, that was years ago.”

  But Edna was no longer looking at him. She’d turned away again when she felt the tears come.

  “I’m sorry,” Monson said quietly behind her. “I’ll just go hunt down some willow.” And he turned and headed back up the shelter belt, toward the house.

  When he disappeared through the trees, Edna wiped her eyes and let out an enormous puff of breath. The man was a liar. A liar and a cheat. And a drinker. And Heddy Kretsch had been right after all. “That’s three,” she said, “and it won’t get the best of me.” She’d catch up to him, pay him his money and send him on his way. She imagined what Heddy’s reaction would be when she told the story. Oh, trouble comes in threes all right, Edna would say generously, but it’s the weak who let it stay. And then she would tell how she’d sent this shyster packing. Good riddance to bad rubbish, she’d say. And she wiped her eyes and congratulated herself again as she looked toward the spot in the trees where Monson had disappeared. And then, thinking of that, thinking of Monson disappearing into the trees, Edna had a terrible thought. She’d left the house unlocked. And everything, her jewellery, her wallet, the new television, oh, it was all there. How could I have been so stupid, she thought as she started to run along the shelter belt, her body heaving against its own weight. How could I have been so stupid? Already she was huffing to catch her breath in the cold. She’d never make it back to the house in time. He’d take it all, he’d take everything, her wedding ring sitting where she always left it by the sink.

  Edna ran faster, rubber boots clomping loosely over rocks and twigs. She thought for a moment that she might make it after all, but just as she was nearing the break in the trees, something small and fast darted between her legs. Edna shrieked and stumbled, one boot pulling free as she twisted an ankle across a fallen branch. She hit the ground hard, harder than she thought possible, her hip catching the sharp end of a stone. She lay dazed as the orange cat bounded back toward her, stopping to sniff wetly at her ear. She pushed it away and rolled over, struggling to pull into a sitting position, but she felt a tremendous weight on her chest. And a hard, shooting pain ran from her hip to her ankle. She looked down at her feet, noticing that one of her socks had pulled off with the rubber
boot. How white and foolish her foot looked sticking up that way against the dark line of trees. She began to laugh, in short, painful gasps.

  Good riddance, Edna thought again as she laid her head back, still puffing to catch her breath. But this time there was no satisfaction in the phrase, no sense of justice. “Good riddance,” she said out loud, testing the words on her tongue. They were flimsy, could have been any words at all. She stared up at the sky, now the dull, hard colour of iron, and noticed the snow had started, just barely, the flakes so fine they could have been dust. So fine they could have passed over someone else unnoticed, someone who didn’t happen to be looking up. And much to her dismay, Edna felt the tears start again. She opened her eyes wide as the cold, still air settled around her. “What is it, Alf?” she whispered, snowflakes dissolving in the palms of her hands. “What is it?”

  The Ghost of Ingebrigt Lake

  The house, of course, is dark. It is the one thing he cannot get used to, even after all these years. Wesley stops the half-ton just inside the caragana shelter and kills the engine. He keeps the lights on a moment, watching rain slice through the beams and disappear. When he’d left the farm that morning, he’d been surprised at the bit of snow, still hard and blue, sloped against the north side of the granaries, as if someone had hidden it there, hopefully, packing it against the lower planks in tight drifts for some long afternoon in August. Everywhere else, the yard was wet with the thaw and the rain that would make seeding tomorrow, the next day, all week maybe, impossible. This rain, he thinks, this damned rain that’s so good to come, we need it, but even so it’s hateful. There’ll be no work now for a while.

  He cuts the lights and steps out, planting his feet carefully against the muddy yard. Ahead, the farmhouse seems to tilt at an absurd angle, a trick of the rain slanting through the yardlight, setting the buildings, the trees, the old windmill frame, at odds with where he knows the flat line of the horizon would lie. Driving in sometimes at night, he can’t believe this is his home at all, that he has ever lived here—that anyone has. It seems unlikely that light has ever shone from those windows, unlikely the screen door has creaked open and clattered shut a dozen times a day, more.

  It seems impossible.

  By the time he reaches the porch, he is soaked through. He peels off his coat in the entrance and then his shirt, too, and his socks, stiffly, rubs his neck and chest with an old wool sweater of his father’s from a peg by the door, then pulls it on over his head. It is short in the sleeves, and he thinks that maybe it wasn’t his father’s after all, but his mother’s. Was it? For a moment, he feels that fleeting sense of disorientation, like stepping out into a windless snowfall, watching those flakes and thinking they are not falling, it is your own body rising, through them. But the feeling lasts only a moment, and then the unwelcome surprise of cold in the kitchen rouses him. He takes a matchbook from the tobacco tin over the stove and goes barefoot down to the empty cellar. He comes here only rarely now, to relight the furnace or in summer to store food that would quickly turn in the close heat of the rooms above. But once, the walls had been lined with jars, shining neatly by the light of the bare bulb overhead, pickles and beets and rhubarb. Sometimes the soft white flesh of trout from the river, smoked and packed in pint sealers. Jellies, clear amber and purple. Tomatoes. Could there have been so many? All those jars, is it possible? He remembers his mother in the kitchen, dipping from enormous paper bags with the tin measuring cup he still uses, salt for the pickles, sugar for the fruit. He remembers her scrubbing and blanching and straining pulp through a piece of old window screen, her face red with the steam, her lips moving almost soundlessly to a song he never could figure out, though he held his breath to listen. He remembers helping his father to cut the screen, stretching it taut against his own knees, Hold on tight there, Wes, winking and setting the blade against the screen. You don’t want to lose a limb now, eh? What would your mother say? And Wesley gripped the edge of the screen so fiercely, it bit into the palms of his hands.

  He remembers that. And he should. He should remember it all. He should remember his mother calling from the porch, Don’t torment the child. You want to give him nightmares? And his father looking up at him from under his brows. You won’t go and have nightmares on your mother, will you now? If you swear it, I’ll tell you a tale that’ll curl your nosehairs. And he’d nodded his head emphatically. Yes, yes, I promise. And he meant it. His father’s stories were not frightening, not in that way. They would sit at the kitchen table, the three of them round the yellow lamp, his mother mending, his father fiddling with a harness or a broken axle or a watch. And Wesley quiet, hands under his knees, waiting for his father to begin.

  Back in the days before the homestead rush, when there was still buffalo to be had and the land was yet unbroken, there came a surveyer named Robert John McCallum, an Englishman, not much to look at, but a hell of a shot from the saddle or the soil. He was here on a survey expedition, like I say, and shacked up with the rest of them fellas at Chesterfield House. But something got to him, the wind maybe, or the sun, the way it can here where a man might mistake his shadow stretching a mile long for his own self, if you know what I mean, and this McCallum just took up one day with his horse and pitched a skin-tent over there by that sorry alkali slough they call Ingebrigt Lake. Couple of the men went by one day, thinking they’d talk some sense into him, bring him on back. But they didn’t get within ten yards before they was staring down the barrel of his Winchester. “Come on now, McCallum,” they called. “We brought you some food is all.” And one of the men patted a haversack he carried slung behind his saddle. But McCallum didn’t move a muscle, just stood there pointing that rifle, his hair wild from the wind and his face brown as his boots. “This country knocked the English right out of you,” one of the men said, thinking to joke with him. But McCallum stood his ground, stood it so long the men finally turned tail and rid back to Chesterfield House, ready to give him up for a goner. But the Mounties here didn’t like to encourage that kind of behaviour, so when they got wind of what McCallum had done, two of them rid over from Montgomery’s Landing. They had their pistols ready, aiming to take McCallum by force if necessary. They rid up, and seeing his horse hobbled a few yards off, called, “Robert John McCallum, by order of the Queen we demand you to come out now with your hands up. We don’t want trouble. We just want you to come on back. There’s savages enough out here without losing one of our own.” Then they sat and waited, their horses snorting and stamping in the dust and the wind rattling the walls of that tent, skimming out over the surface of the lake in ridges. They waited, and when McCallum showed neither hide nor hair, they rushed the tent, fearing any minute to take a bullet from behind those skin walls rattling and snapping away in the wind. But it wasn’t Robert John McCallum of Worcestershire, England, they found sitting in that skin-tent. No, it wasn’t McCallum they found, nor no man, alive or dead. They found nothing but a few empty cans and his Winchester leaned up in the corner. That and McCallum’s horse outside. One of the Mounties looked out over the lake. “Is there enough water in that slough to drown a man?” he asked. “Not likely,” said the other. “Unless you’re trying awful hard.” So they took up McCallum’s horse, rolled up his tent with the rifle inside, then headed back to the landing. “He’ll turn up,” they said, “sooner or later.” Well, it wasn’t long before he did turn up, so to speak. One of W.D. Smith’s boys—he used to run his cattle over there—reported seeing a light on the shore of Ingebrigt Lake, like a campfire or something. When he rid over to check it out, thinking to scare off some half-breeds, the light disappeared. Sort of flickered slowly out the closer he got. When he reached the shore, there was no sign of a recent fire anywhere. Everybody thought he was crazy, of course. Then other folks started seeing it, too. For years, decades. Sometimes it burned red, like fire, sometimes it just kind of glowed, more of a faint blue, like a lantern. Some said it was the ghost of Robert John McCallum out looking for his horse. Maybe it’s true. I
surely don’t know. If it is, he’s been looking for that horse a long time.

  If it is, Wesley’s father said, leaning close to the yellow light, I’m awful sorry for the poor soul. He’s been looking a mighty long time.

  But here in the cellar is this furnace that won’t light. Wesley strikes a third match; the flame catches, burning a small steady blue, and he pulls the length of red yarn attached to the bulb, feeling his way carefully back up the narrow stairs in darkness.

  As he reaches the top, he thinks he hears a knock at the screen door. He stops, listens, hears it again. Yes. For a moment, he wonders whether he should pretend he is not home. But he has left the light burning in the kitchen, his truck parked in the yard. He lets the cellar door fall shut, peeks through the kitchen window, through the rain, but can see no vehicle other than his own. And he thinks, Maybe I have imagined it then, made something else of the rain, my own breathing. Maybe owls. They come now sometimes in bad weather.

  “Hello?” a voice calls from outside. “Anybody home?”

  He does not move to answer right away, afraid that if he opens the door, there will be no one, just the rain and the mud and the yardlight. His truck and the caraganas and beyond them only the night, nothing. He waits, deciding, and the door edges open, a head pokes in.

  “Yes?” Wesley says, lurching forward. “What is it?”

  He can see by the way the boy falls back into the rain that Wesley has scared him.

  “We got—” the boy says. “Sorry to bother you—”