A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  “I am.”

  “At someone’s house?”

  “She has a diploma,” I said, just in case Cora Mae imagined some grandma hacking at my hair around the edge of a soup bowl. “From Medicine Hat.”

  “Why doesn’t she have a salon, then?”

  I shrugged. Cora Mae looked skeptical as the three of us filed into the backyard, where we found Elise reclined in a lawn chair, flipping the pages of a haircutting magazine. She wore a tight yellow tank top with spaghetti straps and cut-off shorts rolled as high as they would go. Cora Mae brightened at the sight of her.

  “Wow,” Elise said, “you’re early. Your mom said three-thirty, right?”

  I nodded, aware that Cora Mae had come up beside me and was beaming at Elise. Much to my surprise, she took my hand. I couldn’t see Boyd, but I sensed his movements somewhere behind us.

  “I guess that’s okay,” Elise said, closing her magazine. She squinted at us. “Are your friends staying?”

  Cora Mae piped up, “I’m going to take hairdressing when I graduate. It’s the neatest.”

  “Well,” Elise said modestly, “I’m still pretty new at it.” She looked at Boyd, who was pacing up and down the sidewalk.

  “That’s just Boyd,” Cora Mae said. “He’ll wait outside.”

  “Okay.” Elise said. “Whatever.” She led us to the back door. Cora Mae had dropped my hand and was at Elise’s heels in a flash. I hesitated, looking back at Boyd. “If you leave the bird out here,” I said, “you can probably come in, too.”

  Boyd glanced at me briefly. “What for?”

  I couldn’t really say, so I left him under Mrs. Halson’s gooseberry bushes and followed Elise and Cora Mae inside.

  “Down here,” Elise called as I closed the door behind me. The house had a faint sweet odour, like overripe fruit, and all the blinds were drawn against the afternoon sun. I slipped off my thongs, imagining it was expected, and went downstairs.

  Though the basement had no windows to speak of, it was brighter, lit by two bare overhead bulbs. Cora Mae was already posed primly on an old vinyl chesterfield next to a sink and an odd contraption on cinder blocks that looked as if it might once have been a tractor seat. The rest of the basement consisted of a concrete floor and fibreglass insulation running up the unfinished walls. Behind the chesterfield and the sink, Elise had hung old blankets and sheets and had rolled out a section of purple shag carpet across the floor. “For ambience,” she said. A battered dresser with jars, combs, scissors and sprays, two large hand-held mirrors and a vase of silk flowers stood in front of the chair. In one corner was a stereo, where Elise stood flipping through albums. Above it hung a poster of horses running across a misty field.

  “I like to play a little music when I work,” she explained. “It relaxes the customers.”

  I sat on the chesterfield next to Cora Mae.

  Elise slipped a record from its sheath. “Have you heard this one?” She dropped the needle and swayed her hips with the opening notes. “It’s Barbra Streisand.”

  “Oh,” Cora Mae said, “I love this one.”

  “Yeah,” Elise said. “Me, too. I love it.”

  “Don’t you just love it?” Cora Mae said to me.

  “Did you see the movie?” Elise asked. “I loved it.”

  I shifted away from a spring that was digging into the back of my leg and watched with unease as Elise sang, “Ev-er-greeeen.”

  “This is the song I’ll have played at my wedding,” she said. “Here, listen to this.” And she turned the volume up. “This is the best part.”

  I felt hot and embarrassed, unable to look at Elise sliding her feet across the purple carpet. Instead, I stared at the poster of the horses. It read in elaborate script across the bottom: If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was meant to be. The backs of my thighs stuck wetly to the vinyl chesterfield, and my skin pinched each time I shifted. I was beginning to feel as if something would be required of me.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” I blurted.

  Elise stopped swaying and opened her eyes. She turned the volume down a little. “What?”

  “Can I use your bathroom?” I repeated. This time I was careful to suppress the panic in my voice.

  “Yeah,” Elise said, motioning vaguely. “Upstairs, through the kitchen.” She took the record off and slid a new one on the turntable. “How about this?”

  “Ooh,” Cora Mae said. “I love this one.”

  “Me, too,” I heard Elise say as I headed up the stairs. “I really love it.”

  Boyd had gone down to the pond. I could just make out his blue T-shirt among the cattail reeds. I stepped into my thongs and slipped out the door.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked, my feet sinking in the wet bank.

  “Tadpoles,” he said, without turning around. “There’s a lot of them.” The orange crate sat open at his feet and I peered inside.

  “Hey,” I said, alarmed. “The bird’s gone.”

  Boyd picked up a stick and poked it into the water, swishing it back and forth.

  “Boyd,” I said, lifting the crate and looking quickly around, “your bird’s gone.”

  “I know.” He stood up and walked farther down the bank toward a cluster of ducks.

  I followed, feet squelching, the cardboard orange crate bumping against my legs, and stopped next to where he stood watching the ducks bob their slick heads and resurface, bodies quivering.

  “Those ones over there”—Boyd pointed—“those are mallards. That’s a drake. See the green?”

  “What about the purple ones?” I asked, though I didn’t really care. I wanted to know what had happened to the meadowlark.

  “Those are drakes, too,” he said. “Teals, I think. Females don’t have those colours. They’re the brown ones. It’s like that with most bird species.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Mating mostly,” he said. “The males use their colour to attract a mate. And the females are brownish so they blend in with the ground and the grass and stuff. For nesting.”

  I sat on a rock and settled the orange crate at my feet. Boyd paced the bank of the pond, pointing at various things with his stick. After a while he stopped talking and stood quietly again, just staring over the water. I’d never seen him still before. But I didn’t get a sense of peace from his stillness. It made me uneasy.

  “I didn’t get a haircut,” I ventured. “I guess my mom’ll be pretty mad.”

  “You were supposed to get a haircut?”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “It was my mom’s idea. She’ll be pretty mad, I guess.”

  He turned around and squinted at me. “I can cut it for you.”

  I was doubtful. “You can?”

  “Sure,” he said, pulling a folding knife from his pants pocket. “I cut my own all the time. It’s easy.”

  I squirmed a little at the sight of the fine blade glinting in the sun. “Does that work?”

  “I just said so, didn’t I?” He pointed the blade at me. “Here. Feel how sharp it is.”

  When I didn’t move, he poked it closer. I touched a finger against the edge of the blade, just barely. It was sharp, all right.

  “See?” he said, twisting a chunk of his hair. “You just take it like this and saw at it like so.” He made a sawing motion in the air. “Easy.”

  I looked at the knife again, then at Boyd’s hair. It didn’t look any different from any other boy’s. “Well …” I hesitated.

  “We can start at the back, where it’s longest,” he said sensibly. “That way, if anything goes wrong, the rest of your hair will hide it.”

  I looked over my shoulder toward the house, wondered if Elise and Cora Mae had even noticed I’d gone. “Okay,” I said, taking a big breath and dipping my head as though going underwater.

  He started, as he’d said, at the back. I’d expected it to hurt a little, but the sensation was more like a persistent tugging at my scalp. I thought
uneasily of that blade so close to my body. After all, I hardly knew this boy. Didn’t know him at all. But Boyd worked silently, efficiently, directing me with single-word commands, tilt, lift, and I soon relaxed into the pleasurable feel of his hands in my hair, as if I were being stroked peacefully into sleep.

  He finished in no time. I ran my hands across my head, felt a strange sort of dizzy elatedness.

  “There,” Boyd said, stepping back to admire his work. “I cut it really short. That way you don’t have to do it again for a while.”

  I kept running my hands over my head, loving the feel of it. Like the fur of some small animal.

  “Does it look like yours?” I asked.

  He cocked his head to one side. “Yeah,” he said, flipping the blade shut, “pretty much.”

  I was pleased. Boyd bent to gather the long hanks of hair in the mud around the rock. “Want this?” he asked.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “To make things. Hair’s good for nests, especially. Or whatever. It’s not just dead cells. Not really.”

  “What is it?”

  He spoke slowly, thinking. “It’s … I don’t know. But there’s something in it. Something like your soul. That’s why there’s so many myths about it. Samson. Rapunzel. Medusa, even.”

  Rapunzel, at least, I knew. He handed me the hair he’d collected, but I shook my head. “You can have it,” I offered, “if you want.” I didn’t believe that stuff about soul.

  “Really?” he said. “I never get this much of my own.” He picked up the orange crate and stuffed my hair inside. It was strange to know he would take it with him somewhere.

  “Boyd,” I said quietly, “what happened to the bird?”

  He kept his head bent, as if he hadn’t heard me, and fiddled with the lid of the box. Out on the pond there was a quick flapping and splashing of wings, and I imagined, without looking, a duck landing.

  “Did you let her go?” I asked. “Was she better?”

  I didn’t meet either Boyd or Cora Mae the rest of that week, half to my disappointment and half not. It was Boyd I wanted to see, of course, but Cora Mae filled me with near dread. I spent my afternoons concocting impossible plans for getting to Boyd without Cora Mae. I kept thinking I’d run into him somewhere around town, but I never did. In fact, I saw him only once, from a distance, as my mother and I were driving out of town. He was down by the pond behind the Halsons’, pacing the bank in quick steps, arms raised, swinging a stick across the water in broad strokes, like a wizard. “That boy is so strange,” my mother said, though I hadn’t even told her about the haircut, had taken the blame entirely upon myself for that. “I don’t want you playing with him.”

  I made a point of walking by the pond several times that week, but either Boyd had not come back or my timing was off, for I did not see him again. I thought I’d seen the last of Cora Mae, too, but on the Sunday they were supposed to leave, she stopped by my house. Her blonde hair was twisted back in two French braids that made her look old—not older, just old. I came out on the steps to greet her.

  “Hi,” she said, beaming as though we’d seen each other every day that week, “I came to say au revoir.” I half expected some comment on my haircut or my disappearance that day at the Halsons’, but she said nothing.

  “You probably want this back,” I said, holding out her mood ring. It no longer smelled like lard, not as much anyway.

  She looked surprised. “No,” she said, shaking her braids, “I gave it to you. So you have something to remember me by.”

  “Oh,” I said, wondering if that meant I was supposed to give her something in return. All I could think of was the butterfly barrette in my pocket.

  Cora Mae shifted her feet on the steps, and we both stood there uncomfortably. I looked across the yard to the two younger neighbour girls running through the sprinkler.

  “Kids.” Cora Mae shook her head again.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess I should go. Why don’t you give me your address? We can be pen pals or something.”

  “Okay.” I went inside to get a pen and paper.

  When I returned, Cora Mae was seated on the bottom step, knees together, staring at the neighbour kids with something that looked almost like wonder—almost, but not quite. And I felt sorry, then, in the safety of her leaving, that I had not made more of an effort to befriend her.

  “Here.” I handed her the paper. And then, casually, “Where’s Boyd?”

  For a moment, she looked hurt, just as she had that day by the schoolyard. But then she shrugged and said, too gaily, “You know Boyd!” I stood there, scratching stupidly at a mosquito bite that had scabbed over on my elbow, wondering why he had not come to say goodbye, but knowing the answer: What for?

  “Well,” Cora Mae said, rising with that unmistakable poise, “I guess I’ll be going. I’ll write. But you have to write back.” I nodded as she swished off down the street, her sandals clicking against the hot concrete. At the corner, she turned briefly and waved. “Au revoir!” she shouted. And then she was gone.

  It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I really thought of Cora Mae and Boyd again. Cora Mae had written twice after she’d left town that summer, but I felt I couldn’t live up to the stylish, looping writing, the purple ink, the i’s dotted with circles instead of points. I never wrote back. I didn’t really have anything to say anyway. And Boyd, well, I thought of him, of course. Quite a bit the first few months after they left. I couldn’t shake the feel of his hands, so detached and efficient, moving through my hair. Once, I caught myself writing his name in the back of my math scribbler. I got a strange kind of comfort knowing he was somewhere in the world. I was curious about what he had done with my hair, if he still had it. But as the months passed, I thought of him less and wondered just briefly the following summer whether they would return. They didn’t, and I soon forgot them almost entirely. By then, I’d found other friends, other interests. I say almost entirely because I could not forget that glimpse of Boyd down by the pond, his thin, nervous arms stretched wide across the water.

  So when my mother returned from the coffee shop one afternoon just before graduation to tell me Cora Mae was in town, it was Boyd I thought of first.

  “Oh, Audrey,” my mother said in that dramatic way she had, “you should see her. To think she could let herself go like that. All that makeup, and her skin such a mess. She bleaches her hair now. It looks terrible, of course. And I always thought so highly of her. I told Alec and Marion so. I was sorry she never came back to stay with them. I always thought she would have made a good companion for you. But to look at her now …” She shook her head.

  I was stretched out on my bed, doodling in my biology textbook. “Who?” I asked.

  “Why, Cora Mae. That’s what I’ve been saying. You remember Cora Mae.”

  For a few seconds, I didn’t, but then the name clicked. “What about her?” I asked.

  “Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” my mother said, plumping my pillows. “She’s come to stay with Alec and Marion. Problems at home, I think. And to look at her, I can believe it. But they’ve had a hard time, that family. Alcohol and drugs and God knows what all. It’s no wonder.” She sighed. “Such a shame. She was a delightful little girl. You should just see her now.”

  Try as I might, I could not imagine Cora Mae looking any different from what I remembered, could not picture her as an adult. To me, she’d seemed an adult back then.

  “What about her brother?” I finally asked. “Boyd.”

  My mother stared at me blankly, as if she’d never heard of him. “Boyd?”

  “Yes,” I said, annoyed, “the one with the bird. Skinny kid, always moving.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know who you mean.” She began shifting perfume bottles into alignment on my dresser.

  “Well,” I said, flipping my textbook shut, “is he here, too?”

  “Audrey,” she said, as if
I’d suddenly gone stupid, “he died. That was ages ago.”

  Her words did not immediately register. I stared at her.

  “Lord,” she said, brushing dust from the dresser with the palm of her hand, “that was years ago. I’m sure I told you.”

  I looked down at the cover of the book before me, tried to make sense of the words, but they seemed foreign and obscure. An unexpected stillness seemed to descend over the room, my own body.

  “Audrey,” my mother was saying, “I’m sure I told you. There was all that hush-hush about it, of course. An accident, they said, but I told you long ago that boy was strange. He always was. I could have told you back then he’d come to no good. Cora Mae, now, that’s a real how-do-you-do. But I always say, it comes down to the parents.” And she shook her head. “I know I told you,” she said again, moving toward the door. “Anyway,” I heard her call from the hallway, “I need you to run downtown. I forgot milk.”

  Bloodwood

  At age seventy-one, Perpetua Resch could honestly say she had loved only four people: her mother, her father, her brother Martin and her sister Magda. At one time she had hoped to include Joe, but she had long since recognized this idea as the romantic illusion of a teenaged bride and the expectation attached to a young and promising marriage. This was not to say she felt no affection for her husband. On the contrary, she was very fond of him. Over the years, there had been almost nothing to complain of about Joe. The worst she could think to say was that he tended toward complacency. But even this characteristic was a minor flaw given his easy nature, his generosity and, of course, his patient and seemingly unwavering capacity for love. But to speak in terms of loving him in return … no, she had none of that fierce blood-rush of feeling that could thrum music from the rib cage and swell one’s throat to bursting, as though it contained some beautiful, terrible balloon. Though she knew she would rather not do without Joe, she suspected that she could certainly make the adjustment with little emotional strain. Once, long ago, in a tender moment (there was a moon, she remembers), Joe had said to her, “Don’t you ever die on me first. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” And she’d looked into his shining eyes, so pleasantly dark, and thought, Well, all right, even though she knew her heart should have wrenched at the thought of living without him. Oddly, she had not felt dismayed to discover, early on in marriage, the truth about her feelings for Joe. After all, it was not particularly rare in those days to be married to someone you did not love. Not unusual at all. So she had waited, instead, for the arrival of children to kindle the sort of love she knew she could expect with some degree of certainty from motherhood. When it became clear that the long-awaited arrival was not to come, Perpetua suspected that the number of those she could say she had truly loved would remain limited to four. And she briefly grieved.