Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  It lasted years. Guys would try to trip me in the cafeteria, and girls would snicker behind my back at the lockers. Teachers wouldn’t call on me in class, and I learned to skip gym on the days when they were picking teams for kickball. It was better to hide behind the dugouts with the stoners than to get picked last.

  Something strange happened a year into high school, though. The stoners got to be cool. And, somehow, so did I.

  Just like the stoners, nobody’s parents ever wanted them to have anything to do with me. A lot of folks seemed to think I was like one of the rare flowers we grew in our greenhouse. Exciting and dangerous all at once.

  All I had to do was play up how different I was—not too different, not weird different, just a little bit different—and suddenly, people started talking to me again.

  And then Karen moved down here and sat next to me in English, and all at once I had an actual, real-life best friend for the first time since Joey. As far as Karen knew, I’d always been cool.

  It was different with the others. With Becky and Suze and all the rest, I had to work not to remember what they used to say about me. Steve’s dad, Reverend Boyle, was always after us to “forgive and forget,” but as far as I could figure, forgetting was a lot easier than forgiving.

  I knew I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Joey—I was clear on the other side of town when he got stung, and how was I supposed to know he was allergic anyway?—but even so, I’d been careful since then.

  I liked hanging out with my new friends, but I didn’t get to know anybody too well. I’d already decided I’d never go around with boys the way Mama and Grandma used to do. I didn’t especially want to go around with boys, so that helped, but still, I figured the closer you were to somebody, the easier it was for them to cross you. And what if somebody else wound up dead right after they made me mad? No, thank you.

  So, as much as I wanted to go back to the railroad tracks with Karen that Halloween, it seemed safer to keep my distance.

  Besides, that feeling was thrumming harder than ever in my chest, telling me it was time for me to see Mary. It was way past time, in fact.

  “Nah, I want to go see Stone Mary,” I said as Steve came back with his ice-cream cone and a fresh cigarette.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” Karen said, shifting from one foot to another in her platform sandals.

  “Yeah, I don’t know, y’all.” Becky stood in the bathroom door, a fresh coat of blue shadow shimmering on her eyelids. “Last time we went out there Carl Molloy tried to look down my shirt and said the ghost made him do it.”

  “Stop your bitchin’, Becky.” Steve blew out a stream of smoke, then stubbed his cigarette out in one of the customer ashtrays. “You’ve never been on Halloween. It’s totally different then.”

  “It’s just some statue.” Karen rolled her deep brown eyes. Even exasperated, she still managed to look gorgeous. “A statue’s not gonna be any different on Halloween than any other night. It’s not as if you really believe that dumb story about it coming to life.”

  “Well, maybe I believe the other one.” Steve waggled his tongue at Karen like the guys in KISS. “About how if a girl touches it, she’s guaranteed not to get knocked up that night.”

  “Gross.” Karen shoved Steve in the chest. He laughed and tried to grab her hand. I felt like shoving him too just then.

  “Okay, but look, y’all.” Steve opened the cash register and started counting out the singles. “Mike Delaney called, and he said everybody’s going to the woods tonight. If you girls want to go see a movie instead, go for it, but you’ll be the only ones in the whole drive-in.”

  That did it for Becky. Besides, it wasn’t like she had much else to do that night.

  See, there’s not much in our little podunk town anymore except the railroad station and the bottle plant over by the creek, but during the Civil War, Boyle’s Run was booming. Everybody around here did everything they could to support the Confederate cause, whether it was fighting, or working in the armory, or growing food for the troops.

  Everybody except Mary Keegan. So far as anybody around here knew, she never lifted a finger to help the Confederates through the whole war. Instead she and her little daughter spent the war doing pretty much what they’d always done—keeping to themselves in their little house out in the woods, growing their garden, and acting like they were better than the rest of the townsfolk.

  That’s what they all used to say, anyway. They said other things, too. That Mary’s daughter must be a bastard, since nobody’d ever heard of Mary having herself a husband. That it was awfully peculiar how the crops out by Mary’s house always did so well, even in the years when everybody else’s gardens were suffering from drought or bugs or cold. That she was so quiet, so secretive, she might very well be a Yankee sympathizer.

  The folks of Boyle’s Run suspected Mary was up to all sorts of mischief, but they never once seemed to guess she was a witch.

  As the war went on, things kept getting worse for the South, and the harder things got for everybody, the more the mutterings about Mary and her daughter grew. By 1864, folks were shivering through the harshest winter of the war, and pretty much everybody knew the South was done for. Still, though, soldiers were out in the fields getting shot, and the women and a handful of men were stuck here, trying to cobble together enough food to feed their families.

  And folks started saying to each other that the queer woman out in the woods, that Mary Keegan, must have an awful lot of food stored up. Everybody had seen how her garden had thrived that summer, even when everybody else’s got done in by the blight.

  So one night—the coldest night of the year—folks stormed Mary’s little house out in the woods. When she heard them coming—they were hooting and hollering, the way men like that still do when they’ve had more whiskey than’s good for them—Mary pushed her daughter out the back window and told her to run fast as she could to a friend’s house in the next town over, while Mary stayed behind to face the mob.

  They banged on her door and demanded she turn over her food stores. Now, the truth was, Mary didn’t have much stored, but the mob wasn’t about to believe that. They tore her little house apart. And when they couldn’t find the barrels of food they’d come for, they set fire to what was left of it.

  Mary had no choice but to abandon her burning house and run out into the cold. Nobody in all of Boyle’s Run would take her in, of course, and she couldn’t very well run to the same house where she’d sent her daughter—the mob might follow her and kill them both.

  And so that night, Mary Keegan froze to death. One of the men who’d been part of the mob found her a few days later while he was hunting, deep in the woods. It was just as cold as it had been all that winter, and Mary was frozen solid, in the same position she must’ve been in when she died—kneeling on the ground, one hand raised up in the air.

  The men buried her right where they found her. They didn’t bother to mark the grave. They figured nobody’d ever cared enough about Mary Keegan to want to visit her while she was alive, so there was no reason for that to change now that she was dead.

  That’d be the end of the story, if it hadn’t been for what happened once the war was over.

  Remember what I said about Mary being found with one hand lifted up to the sky? Well, folks may not have figured out she was a witch before, but they started to get that idea clear enough once the other men started coming back from the war. ’Cause right about then, things started going real, real badly for Boyle’s Run.

  First came the flood. Now, this was in 1865, when the South was already ruined from losing the war. That summer there were five long days of rain in Boyle’s Run, and on the last day a flood came raging up from the creek, sweeping away everything in its path. Most of the town’s livestock drowned, and plenty of its people, too. Even the armory, which the Yankees had forgotten to burn, was carrie
d off into the water brick by brick.

  Still, the folks of Boyle’s Run were determined. They rebuilt the town, albeit at only half the size it’d been before the war. They told themselves they’d rise up from the waters like Noah.

  The year after that, though, a fire swept through one hot summer night. In the worst of it, one of the men working the bucket line—it happened to be Cormac Boyle, the son of one of the town fathers, and the man who’d led the others out to Mary’s house that cold winter night—looked up and saw a shape rising out of the fire, clear as day. The outline of a woman, kneeling, her hand held over her head.

  As they worked to rebuild the town for the second time, Cormac told everybody what he’d seen. That was when folks started talking about Mary Keegan again. Now they started saying she was a witch, and that her last act before she’d died had been to lay a curse upon the town.

  They kept saying that, too, in the years that came after. Especially when something bad happened.

  And bad things happened an awful lot in Boyle’s Run. Floods and fires. Tornados, and even hurricanes. Outbreaks of measles and typhus and yellow fever.

  If a dog went mad, it was ’cause Mary Keegan’s spirit had gotten into it. If a baby died in the cradle on a chilly night, it was ’cause Mary Keegan had crept into his window and sucked his breath away.

  Well, some of that’s pure rubbish, but Grandma says some of it’s not, either. ’Cause no matter what you believe, there’s no denying that our family—the Keegan family—has been spared the worst of it.

  When Mary’s daughter—she was my great-great-great-grandmother—came back after the war and built herself a house out in the woods, she missed the worst of the floods and the fires. She never took sick, either. In fact, of all the women in our line—’cause Mary’s daughter wound up having a daughter of her own, and her daughter had a daughter too, and so on and so forth—none of us ever got any of the illnesses that’ve always been passed around Boyle’s Run faster than the collection plate at First Methodist.

  When Grandma was a girl, some folks decided enough was enough. They figured it was past time they sought Mary’s forgiveness. Maybe that, they whispered among themselves, would break the curse.

  So they went deep into the woods and found the spot where they believed Mary Keegan had knelt that night. They hired a carver to make a beautiful statue in the shape of a woman kneeling, one hand raised up over her head. They perched the stone carving right on top of Mary’s unmarked grave and put a shiny metal plaque at the bottom in her memory.

  Back then, Grandma and her mama lived in the same house where she and Mama and I live now, only a couple of miles north of that spot in the woods. Grandma’s mama was the one who built the greenhouse out back. Our family still has the gift for plants that Mary did, even if nobody in town will buy from us.

  But Grandma says folks never said one word to them about that statue, or the curse, or forgiveness. Even if they’re trying to apologize to a dead woman, folks in these parts will never speak to the real live Keegans if they can help it. They figure we still throw out curses willy-nilly on anybody who wrongs us.

  I don’t know the first thing about casting curses, and neither does Mama. To tell you the truth, though, I’m not so sure about Grandma. See, my grandfather—he was one of the Fitzpatrick boys—died in a bicycle crash a few months before Mama was born. That was a week after Grandma caught him running around with one of the Callahan sisters. I’ve never thought it wise to ask how his “accident” came about, but either way, the men who get mixed up with Keegan women never stick around, for one reason or another.

  Anyhow, Mary’s statue is still out there, and even though the little metal plaque has rusted so bad nobody can read it anymore, the curse seems to have died down for the most part. Sure, bad stuff still happens in Boyle’s Run from time to time—there was that fire that leveled the new Town Hall when I was ten, and lately, there’ve been more and more tornados—but folks seem to figure that’s just the usual bad luck that happens everyplace. Hardly anybody seems to remember why they put up that big stone carving in the woods to begin with.

  At first, that night at Hardee’s seemed just like any other Halloween. We finished breaking down the registers and cleaning out the grills, then changed out of our uniforms. We stuffed half a dozen paper bags with leftover fries, and Steve locked the doors behind us just as a crack of thunder sounded in the thick clouds overhead.

  We all piled into Karen’s car. Karen kept giving me these strange looks while she drove, like she was mad at me for not wanting to go to the railroad tracks with her, but there was nothing I could say with Steve and Becky there.

  And when we were halfway to the woods, I started to feel really funny. At first I thought it was just ’cause I was worried about Karen being mad, and ’cause the stories Steve and Becky kept telling from the back seat were so weird. They didn’t know the first thing about Mary Keegan, that was obvious, but it seemed they’d heard plenty about Stone Mary.

  “I bet we’ll see some action tonight,” Steve said as Karen pulled her Dodge Dart onto the highway. It was fifteen minutes to midnight. “They say when the weather’s all spooky like this, Stoned Mary wakes up. And when there’s something serious coming, like a tornado, its eyes open and glow red.”

  “That’s a load of bull.” Karen blew smoke out the window and glanced at me again. She didn’t look as mad this time. She looked...kind of worried, actually. “There are tornados two, three times a year lately, but have you ever met anybody who’s seriously seen that thing’s eyes turn colors?”

  I tried to listen, but the closer we got to Mary’s corner of the woods, the funnier I was starting to feel. Almost like I could hear another voice in my head.

  This one didn’t belong to any of my friends, though. It was weird and whispery, and it was saying something I couldn’t understand. The same word, over and over.

  “Yeah, I know.” Now Steve was acting like he didn’t believe the stories any more than Karen did. “It’s like how they say if you climb on the statue at night, the ghost will haunt you for the rest of your life. But I know at least three guys who’ve climbed up on that thing, and nobody’s gotten haunted yet.”

  Now I could make out the word that kept repeating in my head.

  Stop.

  “Besides,” Becky added from the seat behind mine, “the story about its eyes glowing red doesn’t have anything to do with the weather. What I heard is that Stone Mary used to be a real lady, and folks in town hated her so much she turned to stone, and the only time its eyes glow is when one of the lady’s descendants comes in front of the statue at midnight. That makes it remember it used to be alive, and then it gets mad at the town all over again and starts shooting death rays out its eyes or something. It’s a shit story, if you ask me.”

  Karen stubbed out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray and glanced over at me again.

  Stop. Stop. Stop.

  Karen was right. The stories about Stone Mary were bullshit.

  Except...that last thing Becky had said...

  I wanted to look at Karen again, but I couldn’t force myself to meet her eyes.

  The voice was practically shouting now. It was coming from up ahead of us. From the woods.

  Stop! Stop! Stop!

  Maybe this trip wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  “Mike said no grass grows in Stone Mary’s shadow,” Steve said as Karen passed a cigarette back to him. “It’s all just dirt.”

  “Yeah, because people are always going out and trampling it.” Karen rolled her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Have you ever been out here in the daytime? It’s gross. Beer bottles and cigarette butts and burger wrappers all over. One time somebody spray-painted Stay High all the way down the statue’s back in purple.”

  “You’ve come out here in the daytime?” I practically had to shout to hear myself over the noise i
n my head.

  “Yeah. Actually, maybe we should wait and come back tomorrow when it’s light out. You can see better then.”

  “No.” I was still talking too loud, but I couldn’t help it. “I need to go see Mary now. Right now.”

  The voice in my head wasn’t saying Stop anymore. It had faded into something harder to understand. It didn’t sound angry anymore, either.

  Karen pulled over behind a line of parked cars at the side of the road. Station wagons and pickup trucks and more Dodge Darts. People from school were climbing out of them, wading into the mess of empty bottles and trash that lined the side of the highway.

  The woods loomed high on either side of us. Above us, the clouds were thicker than ever and moving fast. There were no stars. A few pairs of headlights were all we could see by.

  My knees were bouncing on the bucket seat. I had to get out of this car. I needed to get to Mary.

  “Hey, y’all!” Ricky Fitzpatrick shouted as Karen shut off the engine. He was leaning against the side of a wood-paneled station wagon, lighting up a joint. “You just closed up Hardee’s, right? Didja bring any fries?”

  “Yeah, man. Trade you for another one of those.” Steve jogged up to join him, Becky trailing behind.

  I checked my watch. Five minutes to midnight.

  Everybody seemed to be hanging out by the cars or drifting toward the trees. I could see the beginning of a path there. It wasn’t a trail, the kind hunters or hikers used. It had been trampled over the years by kids trooping in.

  It was the path I’d seen from the greenhouse roof that night. The path that led to Mary.

  I moved toward it so fast I nearly tripped over a broken bottle. I scrambled up, ignoring the offered hand of some guy who asked if I wanted a beer, and took off again. By the time the first bolt of lightning cracked across the sky, I was almost running.