A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  I glanced at Carl, but he was busy pulling and dropping and pulling again. It must have been hard on him, I thought, out on this farm all alone. Mayhews weren’t meant to be loners.

  “There were some thought he might have come from the Hutterites over in Estuary,” he went on, “but I never did. He didn’t have that Hutterite look.”

  I grimaced but said nothing.

  “What I think is he wasn’t from around here at all, though he told everybody in town he’d come from the hills and wasn’t nobody questioned him. We all thought he meant Sand Hills, of course, but I guess he could have meant any hills at all.”

  I shifted my nearly full bucket to the other wrist, rubbed at the welt the wire handle had left on my flesh.

  “Here.” Carl handed me an empty bucket from the pile behind him. “He come to town, must’ve been about ‘66 or, no,” he said, thinking, “it was ‘67 because we had the big centennial do that year. Anyway, this John James come to town, and do you know what he was selling?”

  I shook my head in spite of myself.

  “Bibles.” Carl spat a little when he said it and a drop fell on my forearm. I forced myself not to wipe it off on my shorts, not right away, not while he was looking. “Not just any Bibles,” Carl said, beaming at me as if about to deliver a punchline. “Bibles”—he paused for dramatic effect—“he wrote out by hand.”

  I looked at him skeptically and he nodded.

  “Two of them,” he said, shifting the branch to his other arm, “one finished and one still in the works.” He chuckled. “I can see you don’t believe it, and I didn’t believe it neither. Till I saw one for myself.”

  “You saw one?”

  “Yup.” He nodded. “And if you still don’t believe me, you got someone that’ll back me up right there.” He pointed his chin in the direction of the truck and my mother’s head resting in the corner of the open window.

  I stared at him. “She never mentioned anyone named John James.”

  He shrugged. “That’s neither here nor there. But he come to town with them Bibles and made quite a laughingstock of himself. People made fun of him, called him names and such, on the quiet at first, but it wasn’t too long before people started calling him The King to his face, short for King James. And worse. But your grandpa, he got kind of friendly with him, not to put that past a Correy, and took him under his wing, sort of.”

  “Why would Grandpa do that?” I asked doubtfully, for Grandpa was not the kind to take anyone, especially a stranger, under his wing.

  “I can’t speak for them that don’t speak for themselves. All I know is he let him stay in the attic room for a few weeks.” He shook his head. “I knew from the start he was trouble.”

  I’d stopped picking now, but Carl kept raking his fingers through the leaves, so mechanically I wanted to slap his hand.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Oh, the usual kind. He was heading east, he said, looking for work. And you know what that means.”

  I didn’t but nodded anyway.

  “Your grandpa put him up for a while, thinking sooner or later he’d figure out there wasn’t nobody going to buy them Bibles. But John James thought he was on to something, I guess, because he just kept going door to door, peddling. Of course, it didn’t take long before he’d gone to the same doors two, three, sometimes four or five times.”

  Carl let go of the branch, and I jumped back as it thwacked against the sky. He reached up, grunting, to pull down another, and I noticed the sweat stains under his armpits had an unhealthy-looking brownish tinge.

  “Started to make a nuisance of himself, and one day a few of the men from town went over to your grandpa’s and told John James to pack up his Bibles and head on out, keep right on going.”

  “Did he?”

  “Oh yeah.” Carl bent for a new bucket. “He left all right.” He paused again, looking up at me to see if he could draw out the suspense any further.

  “And?” I said impatiently. “That’s it?”

  “No, ma’am.” Carl shook his head. “That is not it. He left town all right … but not before he nailed every one of them Bible pages to the church.”

  “The Catholic church?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am, the Catholic church. I was there the morning we found them and so was your mother, and we stood along with a bunch of others from town and stared at those pages, flapping away like a million wings, like that old church might suddenly go skyward.” He looked up as he spoke, as if he might see it there among the clouds. “I’m surprised your mother never said nothing.”

  I waited for a minute to see if he would laugh, but he just took out a hanky, wiped sweat from his upper lip and said, “Are you going to keep picking or not?”

  I looked back at the truck, at my mother’s dark red head leaned up against the open window, at the fine, pale curve of her chin. It looked as if she’d shifted position, and I wondered whether she was really sleeping or just lying awake, listening to Carl’s story through the hot hum of grasshoppers. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I asked her later, she’d say she never heard a thing.

  I never did ask her later. Not later that day at the Sand Hills nor on the long, silent drive home, nor in the following months, when I spent most of my free time at her side, reading stories or just sitting, pretending not to notice as she gradually grew smaller and smaller under that quilt until finally she just disappeared—though not in the way I imagined it that afternoon as I stood mesmerized by golden bits of light. Her death was a darker thing, in the end. A sadder thing. There wasn’t much beauty in it after all.

  And I never did ask her about John James. Instead, I harboured for many years the firm belief that Carl was trying to tell me something that day under the chokecherry trees, that he was trying, either with or without my mother’s consent, to tell me something about my father. And for many years, I believed my father to be that mysterious John James, the drifter, the zealot, the man from the hills of nowhere. I was wrong, of course. John James wasn’t my father. I heard the whole story, years later, from an aunt I’d got friendly with, my grandfather’s youngest sister. It wasn’t very interesting. He was just a farm boy from across the line in Alberta. They were both kids. They made a mistake: Life went on. End of story.

  • • •

  I have an image of my mother in a lavender dress, her body awkwardly canted against the white rails of a farmhouse porch, shoulders erect, one foot arched neatly outward to lend the illusion of confidence. It is late afternoon and the spindled shadows of rails stretch away from her, casting slats over clumps of crabgrass sprouting slow and painfully from the dirt. She is young, younger than I am now. Her hair, long and a brighter red than I remember it, is held back in a tight, unflattering fashion by bobby pins at her temples. I can’t say whether or not she is smiling, or what she is doing with her hands, whether they are propped graceless and freckled against the railing or fall lost and anonymous in the folds of her skirt. I don’t know where the image comes from. Likely, it’s one of my own fabrication—like that image of my father running away across the Sand Hills. And there are others, of my grandmother, my grandfather, even of myself. I have carried them around with me since childhood like malleable photographs I can add detail to over the years, if I choose, or do not choose, to expand the narrative. At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand it. This image I have of my mother could be her lie or my own. I know only that behind the porch rails, behind the house, there is a red barn with the loft door hanging slightly off one hinge, flapping and creaking in even the slightest wind. There is a rusted-out halfton behind it, and three granaries weathered to the same grey as the dirt, and just a few yards farther, sunk oddly almost below the level of the horizon, a sparse row of cottonwood and caragana someone once intended for a shelter belt. Beyond the trees, so far in the distance they can hardly be seen, the smooth, pale Sand Hills shoulder up from the prairie.

  • • •

  After my mother died, I s
aw it as a kind of duty to stop by the farm every so often, just to see how Carl was getting along, if he needed anything. Sometimes I cleaned a little, washed the dishes, swept the floor. Carl would sit at the kitchen table and watch me.

  Almost always he said, “I guess it’s just me and you now.”

  “There’s Bob,” I’d say each time. And he’d mutter, “Bob,” and flick his hand dismissively. It became a sort of routine for us.

  “You don’t look much like your mother,” he said one day. I kept sweeping, my back turned toward him.

  “No,” I said, bending to reach the dustpan, “I guess I don’t.”

  “No,” he said again, as if to reinforce it. And then, “You ever ask her about that John James I told you about?”

  I tipped the dustpan into the garbage bag.

  “No,” I said, propping the broom in its place behind the fridge.

  “Hmm,” he said, a short, sharp sound. He leaned back in the chair, propped his feet awkwardly on the edge of the table, trying for the old easiness in his bones.

  “You need a wash done?” I asked, tying the top of the garbage bag shut.

  “That’s funny you never asked her,” he said. “Seems like maybe you would’ve.”

  I lugged the bag to the front door, set it outside. The sun was just beginning to dip below the bluing hills and the air had turned cold. I stood watching for a moment before I returned to the kitchen.

  “I’ll run this garbage to the burning barrel on my way out,” I said, taking my coat from a hook by the door.

  “I guess I never told you I read one of them Bibles.” He nodded, his eyes shining in the fading light. I wondered whether he’d started drinking again. “That John James,” he said, “he had nice handwriting. Must’ve took him a long time to write it because it sure took me a hell of a long time to read it.” He tipped forward, the chair hitting the linoleum with a thud that seemed too loud for the moment. “I read it all,” he said. “Ask me anything.”

  I sighed and pulled my coat on.

  “Go on,” he said, “anything.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to be funny, “how does it end?”

  Carl frowned. “That’s the thing,” he said. “It’s a good story, but it don’t end well.”

  Just for a moment, I caught that image of my mother, not the one where she’s standing against the porch rails in the sunlight, but the other one, her small body under the blue wedding quilt barely making a rise in the fabric, and all that yellow dust turning slowly in the air, as if I could touch it.

  Carl leaned across the table.

  “If it’d been me,” he said, “I’d of told a different ending. But not John James.” He gaped at me, wide-mouthed and toothless across the gathering darkness. “He stuck to that story word for word. Didn’t change nothing.”

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to offer thanks to the following:

  Tim Birch, Steve Price, Greg Hollingshead, & Esi Edugyan; the Alberta Foundation for the Arts; UVic’s creative writing department, & Jack Hodgins in particular; Anne McDermid; Phyllis Bruce & everyone at HarperCollins; Dennis & Rita Thorburn; John Baker; & most of all, my mother, Lorraine Bitz, generous always.

  “Small Comfort” first appeared in The Malahat Review; “Lillie” appeared in The Antigonish Review; “Bloodwood” appeared in Prairie Fire. Thanks to the editors of those journals.

  About the Author

  JACQUELINE BAKER was raised in Saskatchewan, studied creative writing at the University of Victoria, and is a recent MA graduate of the University of Alberta. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Grain, Prism, The Antigonish Review and The Malahat Review. She lives with her family in Edmonton, Alberta, where she is at work on her first novel.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise for

  A HARD WITCHING

  AND OTHER STORIES

  “Baker shows in this debut collection an impressive precision and control…. A writer to watch.”

  —Quill &Quire

  “Masterful and thoroughly enjoyable…. A book to reread, twice as good the second time. Jacqueline Baker, with an honest and skillful debut, surpasses the crowd by miles.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “After spending time with the memorable characters in the eight superbly crafted stories in this collection, readers will be left with an admiration for their will to survive. They deal not only with the unforgiving geography and climate, but the heartaches that life inevitably brings.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “It would be too easy to characterize Baker as a western Canadian writer; she evokes more than that. Baker is strongly reminiscent of Annie Proulx in her depictions of the wide-open west, and the places and spaces in the hearts of those there…. [A Hard Witching] is highly charged and tighter than taut.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “Jacqueline Baker is one of the most talented writers I have ever read. Imagine sipping a fine wine filled with character and flavour.”

  —The Lethbridge Herald

  “[Baker’s] stories are steeped in a rich sense of rural familiarity. This book compares favourably to two other recent Prairie collections, Sharon Butala’s Real Life and Gloria Sawai’s A Song for Nettie Johnson.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Prose like this proves both Baker’s talent and potential.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Reading A Hard Witching is like looking at an album of photographs taken in a rural setting and somehow being able to settle into each one, gain an understanding of the emotions of the people featured in it and then quietly move out and on to the next image.”

  —FFWD (Calgary)

  “Baker’s stories and characters are influenced by landscape, and there’s no doubt Baker knows this terrain. She shows how the natural world both compels and repels the people who live in it.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Insightful…. An indefinable humanness manifests itself when her characters reach out, but don’t quite make the connections they want. As in real life, the answers are left hanging.”

  —The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

  “What Alistair MacLeod has done for the Maritimes, Jacqueline Baker has done for the Sand Hills region of southwestern Saskatchewan. It is insightful and accurate in its depiction of the beauty and menace of the landscape and of the brutality and tenderness of its inhabitants.”

  —Diane Schoemperlen

  “Jacqueline Baker must be very wise to articulate human nature as she does. Her stories are plump and filling, each paragraph packed with detail and psychological complexity.”

  —Pearl Luke

  “Jacqueline Baker writes with subtlety and grace. Her evocative portraits of western lives ring with a quiet and truthful loneliness that lingers well beyond the turn of the final page.”

  —Camilla Gibb

  Copyright

  A Hard Witching and Other Stories

  © 2003 by Jacqueline Baker.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40172-2

  A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperPerennialCanada, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  First published in hardcover by Phyllis Bruce B
ooks and HarperFlamingoCanada, imprints of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2003. This paperback edition 2004.

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  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Baker, Jacqueline

  A hard witching and other stories / Jacqueline Baker.

  “A Phyllis Bruce book”.

  ISBN 0-00-639245-8

  I. Title.

  Ps8553-A3793H37 2004 c813’.6

  C2003-905662-7

  RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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