A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  My grandmother and Bob had stopped mid-conversation, and my mother turned from where she stood at the kitchen sink, scouring a frying pan. Her long, dark red hair had pulled loose in the heat and hung down over her face, but I thought I saw alarm there, as if she was about to say something, then stopped, unsure herself what it might be.

  I sat there dumb, looking from one face to another, sweat springing up all over my body, terrified by the weight of that moment, the expectation. Carl’s sneer still hanging in the air over all of us. Maaay-hew.

  The long blast of the truck horn startled everyone, even Carl. I sprang instantly to my feet, forgetting the sweaty pop bottle wedged between my knees. It hit the edge of the table and bounced to the floor, spinning absurdly on the cracked linoleum like in a party game. I stood there stupidly while the sticky pop foamed out around my feet.

  My mother was the first to move, coming toward me with the dishcloth in hand.

  “She’s a Correy,” Bob said, excusing me, swishing a mouthful of rye down his throat.

  Carl looked at me narrowly, then at my mother, on her knees, mopping at the linoleum. “No,” he said flatly, “she ain’t.”

  It’s strange how you don’t see the most obvious things until someone points them out, like a deer at the edge of the highway at dusk, or those puzzles in children’s books: How many rabbits can you spot in this picture? Then you wonder how you could have missed them. The fact that I was descended from the Mayhews was, of course, no surprise. But the real connection, the blood and flesh and bone connection, had not occurred to me until that day at the farm. In much the same way, it did not occur to me until the following autumn to wonder about my father.

  Until that time, I’d been living under the assumption that I simply didn’t have one. Oddly enough, I don’t remember ever thinking about him much before then. Perhaps on some level I wished to believe that, like Thumbelina, I had been found by my mother in the petals of a tulip. Or perhaps my grandfather’s presence more than adequately filled an obvious void. At school, for instance, I simply made the felt card or clay ashtray or whatever happened to be that year’s Father’s Day art project with my grandfather in mind. And each item was duly brought home and duly received without a sign of awkwardness on the part of any member of the family.

  To the considerable shock of my grandmother, therefore, on a day not long after the unfortunate afternoon at Bob and Carl’s, I turned to her in the car as we drove down Main Street, with all those poplar leaves scattering across the road like sunlight, and said, without preamble, “What happened to my father?”

  As ever, she appeared unruffled. She simply pulled the big old Impala to a stop in front of the post office, retrieved her purse from the floor by her feet, where she always kept it when driving, and said pleasantly, “He ran away.” Then she opened the car door and said, “Coming?”

  I sat there, watching my grandmother swing neatly through the post office door, and pictured, instead, my father, inexplicably in top hat and tails, trudging away across the Sand Hills. Naturally, as he was running away, I pictured him from behind, but I’ve always thought it spoke largely of my creative inadequacies, that, in this only vision I ever had of him, I did not give my father a face.

  When Bob married a widow woman from over near Swift Current, much to the surprise of everyone, he left the farm and Carl for the first time in his life. Everyone wondered what Carl would do without him. What Carl did, after about six months of solitary hard drinking, was load up a flatbed of rye bottles, some still half-full, and drive them out to the nuisance grounds. Then he stopped at the store, purchased five crates of Dr. Pepper, a paper sack of jawbreakers and all the cartons of Number 7s they had in stock, and headed back to the farm, stone cold sober possibly for the first time in more than forty years.

  I had just turned seventeen, both my grandparents had been dead a few years, though not long enough for the crabgrass and sand flowers in the cemetery to completely cover their graves, and my mother was still simply feeling poorly, as she said; the cancer in her throat had not yet developed into the baseball-sized lump she would eventually keep hidden beneath the prettily scalloped edge of my grandmother’s quilt.

  Carl called one Saturday morning to say he’d been out in the Sand Hills after a yearling—the same damn one as last week, if we could believe that, she must have some jackrabbit in her, or antelope more likely, something wild anyway, that was for sure—and saw the chokecherries were ripe for picking and hanging as thick and heavy as grapes on the vine.

  “I wouldn’t mind putting some jam up this year,” my mother said afterwards.

  “Jam?” Just that morning I’d seen her sit down wearily on the back steps for ten minutes after taking only a few towels from the clothesline. I was catching her in these moments of exhaustion more frequently, and they were making me feel anxious and irritable. “You must be kidding.”

  She lifted the long red coil of hair from over her shoulder, then twisted it into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, the way she always wore it in hot weather—a motion that reminded me how young she still was. “We haven’t had a good year for chokecherries like this since you were a little girl.” She smiled and I turned away. “I remember because it was the same year Uncle Bob killed that rattler in the stable. Ten feet long if it was a foot. He kept the skin. It was the same year …”

  She trailed off, as she had begun to do lately, looked instead down at her hands spread out on the kitchen table, fingers splayed.

  I was seated across from her, folding a washload of socks and underwear, not much now, just hers and mine. I stopped, staring at her across the table, at her thin wrists, so white they were almost blue, and for a moment, I thought I hated her, hated them all and their stupid lies. Why couldn’t they ever just tell the truth? And before I could stop myself, I said, “Where is it?”

  “What?” she said, looking surprised.

  I held a pair of socks balled up in my lap. “The ten-foot skin. Where is it?”

  A funny kind of half-smile skittered across my mother’s lips.

  “I’ve never seen it,” I went on, hating myself. “You’d think I would have seen it. All these years.”

  We stared at each other that way across the table, shame already worming its awful way up from my belly. Finally she said quietly, “Maybe you have. Maybe you don’t remember.”

  “I’d remember,” I said, though thinking now that maybe, in fact, I had seen it.

  It was a trick all the Mayhews could do well: convince you that you’d seen things, done things, you never had. It reminded me of that card trick where the magician makes you think you’ve selected a card, though he has really just slipped it ever so gently into your palm.

  “You’d have to ask Uncle Carl,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what happened to it.”

  She had me. She knew I’d never ask Carl. Though he had become a different man since he’d stopped drinking, I still harboured a certain distrust of him bordering on fear.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I think I’ll go. I sure would like to see Uncle Carl.” She turned away, took two plates from the cupboard, two forks and knives, two glasses, and began to set the table. “Who knows how much longer he’s got.”

  After dinner, we loaded the car with empty ice cream buckets, filled a jug with ice water and headed north toward the Sand Hills. My mother was quiet, and I looked over more than once to see if she’d fallen asleep, her head rocking on that thin neck as if every bump in the narrow road would snap it. I was hot and tired and filled with a terrible shame that lapsed every few moments into anger. Of course, it wasn’t anger at all I was feeling then, in those days before and during her sickness, it was simply fear.

  “Should’ve gone this morning,” I said irritably. “It’ll be hot.”

  Her head bumped against the side window as the car lurched from the grid road onto the prairie trail that led out through the hills. “Sorry,” I said.

  I flicked the radio on, fiddled briefly with the
one station we sometimes picked up out of Medicine Hat, flicked it off again. We both rolled the windows down, now that we were driving more slowly, listened to the pitched whirr of grasshoppers in the brush and across the sandy trail. It was high summer by then, and the wild roses had dried into their bright pink hips like crabapples, and the hot stench of sagebrush and ground cedar and the reeking hides of cattle baked in the sun blasted across the hills, seemed to shimmer in the very air with its awful weight. The sun off the hood of the car was like a blade. I watched as my mother shaded her eyes with one hand, then turned in her seat and looked backward out the rear window, watching the southern edge of hills slide past us.

  “You know,” she said after a while, “those hills are moving all the time. Every day. I never knew that. To think I’ve lived here my whole life and didn’t know something like that. Did you know they were moving?”

  I did. We’d studied erosion in science the year before, had taken a class trip to the Sand Hills to see it first-hand, but no one had listened to much the teacher said, unimpressed by something at once so familiar and so disdained. “Not all of them, though. Less than one per cent.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mr. Starkey.”

  “Hmm,” she said shortly. “He’s not from around here, is he.”

  I knew she didn’t expect an answer.

  “Lloyd Stolley was saying the other day that in a hundred years they could be to Maple Creek,” she said.

  “What,” I scoffed, “the Sand Hills?” I shook my head in scorn. My mother caught my look. “Probably not all the way to Maple Creek,” I added, part apologetic. “They don’t move that fast.”

  “Lloyd’d know,” she said definitely, facing forward again. “He’s got a nephew in engineering in Saskatoon. Or a cousin.” She frowned. “Anyway,” she went on, as if we’d been talking about this all along, “this is where Uncle Carl had his accident, somewhere around where this break in the hills falls.”

  This was news to me. “What accident?”

  “His pelvis was crushed,” she said with an air of surprise, as though I should have known.

  “How did that happen?”

  She sighed. “There was a party.” In stories involving Uncle Carl, there was often a party. “He was standing between two cars parked along the side of the road. One of the Rawling boys pulled up behind. He was drinking, of course, and ran into the rear car. Not hard, just enough to pin him.”

  That explained Carl’s limp, but something still puzzled me about the story. “The Rawling boys?” I said. “But they’re young, aren’t they? They’re younger than you. What was Carl doing at a party with them?”

  My mother smiled briefly. “Looking for me.”

  I wanted to ask more, but I felt baited and uncertain—was this just another story? I looked out the side window, watched juniper and snowberry blur smoothly together for a moment, then jolt as I hit another gully in the road. My mother sighed, shifted on the seat. My arms felt heavy and sluggish, as if I carried weights on my wrists, as if the blood was not quite reaching my fingers. I took an arm off the wheel and shook it.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tired?”

  A gopher skidded across the road and I winced at the small, soft thump it made under the tire.

  “No.” I felt her eyes on me and I turned toward the side window again. “No,” I said, a bit sharply, “I’m not anything.”

  She sighed again and looked past me, up ahead a few yards.

  “There’s the boots,” she said. She said it every time we passed them. I took my foot from the gas and let the car roll itself slowly by, knowing she wanted to look. “There,” she said, “those three are mine.” She pointed to two small cowboy boots and a rubber boot, all worn to shreds, turned upside down and jammed on top of the fence posts. But I already knew each one that had belonged to a Mayhew.

  “Most are the boys’,” she said, meaning my grandmother’s brothers. “I guess they wore out the most boots.”

  I studied the long line of boots turned absurdly upside down. There was something disturbing about the way they stuck up into the air, all those heels pointing skyward.

  “Those aren’t all Mayhew,” I said, knowing I’d said it before, possibly more than once.

  “No,” she said, “there’s others.”

  “Who?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “Oh,” she said, “other hill families. Fidders have some, I guess, and Wallers. I don’t really know. Everybody.”

  “I don’t have any,” I said after a moment.

  “No,” she said, watching the last few posts slide past us, “you don’t.”

  I didn’t know what I was waiting for her to say that day. I knew I was fishing, but I couldn’t say why or for what. Maybe for one of her stories—not a lie-story, just a story. Already I missed the sound of her voice, the lulling rhythm of her words. Those boots have been there as long as you and as long as me and as long as your grandmother, as long as people have lived and died on this land, and the first boot belonged to a boy, a small yellow-haired boy who was the first child born out here in these hills one autumn, just around harvest time, on a still evening when the moon rose fat and red from the dust of the men threshing hot, endless rows in the fields back of the hills. The first child, Henry was his name, and he was a beautiful child with yellow hair and the bluest eyes, blue like flowers you hear of in stories. Yes, he was the first child born here and the first child to die, poor Henry. To die in the winter here is a terrible thing… Maybe that was the story I wanted, one of the first stories I remember her telling me, of yellow-haired Henry and that one terrible winter—or maybe something more. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. By then, she had already begun to change the endings. Soon the stories would stop altogether.

  Up ahead, we could see the farm wavering like a mirage in the afternoon heat, a trick of the atmosphere making it appear closer than it was. Making it appear larger than the great yellow dunes that surrounded it.

  My mother’s voice came so softly and unexpectedly, I started.

  “Where will they be in a hundred years, then?”

  I turned onto the long road that led into the farmyard.

  “Delly,” she said after a moment, as if I hadn’t heard, “where will they be?”

  Carl had already loaded buckets into the back of the half-ton and sat waiting on the steps drinking a Dr. Pepper when we pulled up to the house. He looked much smaller than the last time I’d seen him, as if all the flesh had simply dissolved on his bones. I glanced over at my mother to see if she’d noticed, too. But she was already hoisting herself out of the seat, and as I watched her, I thought, Her, too. How thin they are, how terribly small. I followed her up to the house where Carl was saying, “We picked ourselves a hot one.” He cracked open another Dr. Pepper that had been waiting in the shade against the steps and handed it to me. I didn’t want it but took it anyway. “Get you a coffee?” he said to my mother, who shook her head and looked up at the sun glaring against the house.

  She shaded her eyes. “Should’ve brought some hats.”

  I looked over at her, puzzled.

  “Plenty inside,” Carl said, as if it had been rehearsed, “straw ones back of the kitchen door.” Then he added, “Your mother’s.” As if we needed an explanation. As if we hadn’t known all along the hats were there.

  “I’ll get them,” I offered when no one moved, setting my bottle on the narrow step and squeezing past Carl, who leaned to allow me room.

  “Back of the kitchen door,” he said again.

  We all knew they were there, of course. We’d used them plenty of times before. My grandmother had kept them specifically for the annual berry-picking. I grabbed two wide-brimmed ones off their hooks and then stopped, realizing I had never before been alone in that kitchen, and listened to the rhythmic ticking of the stove clock. The blinds were all drawn, curled and yellowing at the edges, and the linoleu
m had pulled up at the corners like tongues stiff with disuse, exposing the dirty wood beneath. Otherwise, the room looked much the same as I remembered it. The crate of pop still stood by the fridge and the table still swayed beneath stacks of newspaper, tobacco tins and stained coffee mugs. Over the back of the nearest chair hung what looked to be an old rag. I hooked it with my finger, held it up. It was an undershirt, worn and washed and worn again to a yellowy-grey, so thin I could see the pink tips of my fingers through the fabric. The initials C.M. still showed faintly in blue ink on the tag. I quickly dropped it back on the chair and left the room, embarrassed at having held something at once so intimate and so sad.

  “You ever heard of a fella name of John James?”

  Carl and I were under the chokecherry trees, and my mother had gone back to the truck to rest in the shade. I slapped at a mosquito on my thigh.

  “John James,” he repeated. “Said he come from around here, but I never heard of no Jameses.”

  I squinted up at him briefly from where I knelt in the hot, soft sand, but he had his back to me, stretching his thin arms high up into the branches.

  “Best ones always at the top,” he said, bending a long branch toward me, pinning it beneath his arm. I noticed that he picked by closing his thumb and index finger over a bunch of berries and then pulling straight down so they fell into his palm. Both his hands were stained a bluish purple. I hooked my bucket over my wrist and continued plucking neatly, berry by berry.

  “Anyway, this John James,” he continued, “I thought maybe your mother might’ve said something about him one time.”

  I plunked two berries into my bucket, slapped at another mosquito. It left a smear of blood on my calf. “No,” I said, licking my thumb and rubbing it away, wondering with distaste, as I always did, whose blood it was. “Never heard of him.”