The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

  Here is a remedy to be applied when anyone is sick. “Let the sick person, without having converse with anyone, put water in a bottle before sunrise, close it up tight, and put it immediately in some box or chest. Lock it up and stop up the keyhole; the key must be carried in one of the pockets for three days, as nobody dare have it except the person who puts the bottle with water in the chest or box.” There are no instructions about what to do at the end of three days. Drink the water? Pour it down the drain? Forget you ever put it in that box in the first place?

  I wonder how clear the water was running or how long it had been left in its dark box when John Blymire went to see Nellie Noll, who everyone called The River Witch. According to the newspaper reports from that terrible summer in 1928, it was the river witch who told him he needed a lock of Nelson Rehmeyer’s hair and a copy of his spell book to burn in order to lift the curse of his hard life. First he scouted out the Rehmeyer place by pretending he was a hungry hobo. Rehmeyer gave him lodging that night and fed him breakfast in the morning. He poured him coffee and passed the syrup. Blymire came back the next night with two teenage accomplices, fourteen-year-old John Curry and eighteen-year-old Wilbert Hess.

  There is a remedy you can use when anyone is falling away, and which, the book swears, has cured many persons. “Let the person in perfect soberness and without having conversed with anyone, catch rain in his pot, before sunrise; boil an egg in this; bore three small holes in this egg with a needle, and carry it to an ant hill made by big ants; and that person will feel relieved as soon as the egg is devoured.”

  Where we lived there was no talk of river witches or Nellie Noll. There was only Mountain Mary and her legendary goodness. With her hands alone, the old-timers said, she could heal you. But all you can find now of Mountain Mary is her name. It’s on a forest here, a wet-weather ditch there. There are the last few logs of this or that abandoned cabin in the way-back woods people say must have once been hers.

  Those who know well the spells in Long Lost Friend say she would have saved you with these words from Ezekiel:

  And when I passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

  They say she was something powerful good in the midst of these terrible hard hills, they say she walks them sometimes still like a sweet wind looking to brush past your hair and make you all right.

  There is a mist every morning that fills up the hollers so thick you can hardly see, and then there comes a moment each day when you crest a high ridge and see the sun all of a sudden fully risen. You can look down the valleys to the barns, some red, most gray with age and neglect, a few very fine ones decorated by a large painted quilt square or one of the many hex signs. A red horse head in silhouette protects animals from disease and the barn from lightning. A maple leaf brings contentment, oak leaves are for strength. Often the two symbols interweave in a sunburst of fortitude and happiness. Raindrops are a call-down promise of fertility for the soil and the family.

  On other days there is that other haze, the one still smoking out of the earth, ever since 1884 when miners in New Straitsville had been striking hard against the poverty, the exploitation, and the dangerous working conditions. When the owners brought in scabs, the miners slipped into the coal seams and started a fire. By the time anyone who might have stopped it realized what was happening, the underground was blazing and a hundred years later it’s still burning, smoke still escaping through sinkholes to the surface every now and again. The mixture of defiance and righteous indignation cutting against the unforeseen consequences of foolhardy violence seems sometimes like the truest story this place knows how to tell about itself.

  That was an old mining disaster, but there keep on being new ones. Every time an old dig collapses, a new fountain of sludgy poison springs out of the ground. The Upper Big Branch Mine disaster was in 2010 and twenty-nine people died digging coal out from beneath a West Virginia mountain. It still hangs heavy on the minds of these Little Cities.

  The spell to prevent conflagration is a long and complicated affair involving a black chicken, a scrap of shirt worn by a chaste virgin and cut off according to her own terms, an egg laid on a Thursday, wax, pots, and various days of burying things beneath the threshold. Another method of stopping fire is to say these words:

  Our dear Sarah journeyed through the land,

  having a fiery hot brand in her hand.

  The fiery brand heats, the fiery brand sweats.

  Fiery brand, stop your beat.

  Fiery brand, stop your sweat.

  Long Lost Friend is the kind of book where “beat” is perhaps a typo and should read “heat” or perhaps is exactly what the author intended. Among the dozen ways to stop bleeding, one is to say these words:

  I walk through a green forest;

  There I find three wells, cool and cold;

  The first is called courage,

  The second is called good,

  And the third is called stop the blood.

  I have gone and will go to many public hearings. I know the spell “To Gain a Lawful Suit.” I know you take large leaves of sage and write the names of the twelve apostles on them, then put these in your shoes before entering the courthouse. Nevertheless, our little town and all of our neighboring towns took “donations” of fresh coal ash the companies were otherwise required by law to dispose of as hazardous waste. To save money they used the flakes instead of salt on the roads in the winter. So with spring thaws new coal ash ran off the sides of roads directly into the creeks and we didn’t even have to wait for some new disaster to turn another spring orange.

  Nevertheless, treatment plans for the worst acid mine drainage sites were proposed. One city council voted the plan down because the acid neutralized the wastewater they dumped directly into the creek, as they had no sewage system. Another reason was that the passive treatment ponds full of water reeds and other plants that would filter the toxins through their roots would not look as sightly as a smooth mowed lawn. Hanging heavy in the air of so many meetings was the conviction you couldn’t trust scientists and you couldn’t trust conservationists and you couldn’t trust people with nothing more to show for themselves than pride in all their degrees and accomplishments come to tell folks what to do.

  During these public hearings mountaintops were removed. The earth began to shake as fracking destabilized the balance of bedrock and shale beneath our water table. We asked ourselves if orange water weren’t the least of our worries and we knew the answer was simply that we had too many worries.

  What happened to Nelson Rehmeyer is that no spell book could be found anywhere in his house or on his property. So the two men and the fourteen-year-old boy bludgeoned him, bound him to a chair, and set him on fire while he was still breathing. Despite being doused in kerosene, the body did not completely burn, which investigators said was one of the truly horrific things they’d ever seen.

  What happened to Nelson Rehmeyer is that he gave food and shelter to the people who would slaughter him, to people who did not know how to know a blessing when the plate was handed to them.

  What happened is this. When an old woman dies, she is dead, her cabin crumbles to the ground, and she’s not around anymore to put her hand on your cheek and tell you it’s going to be all right.

  When you light an old man on fire, whether he be some old witch or the spirit of a mountain or just a kind and generous bachelor, now he is dead too. There is nothing that is going to change that.

  Long Lost Friend is a broken book. A support beam cracked, the roof collapsed, the water poured in or the fire did, the tailings and the ash everywhere. Now no one dares drink from the poison of those pages. It has spells to make divining rods, spells to lift a curse, spells for mending. I wish I believed it could do us any good.

  To Mend Broken Glass: Take common cheese and wash it well, unslaked lime and the white of eggs, rub all these well together until it
becomes one mass, and then use it. If it is made right, it will certainly hold.

  The Eye of the Hagstone

  The Black River burbles up from caves beneath the Ozark Mountains. Standing in its shallows, watching small fry dash and school just beyond the ripples of my steps, I found a rock the size of my palm with a large hole through the center like a stone monocle. My husband, out to his waist in the water, still mud-caked from belly-crawling a way through a spring-formed cave that morning said, “Oh wow, that’s a really good hagstone.” If you look through a hole in a stone, he added, you can see beyond the veil, through a glamour, into a wretched heart.

  I looked, expecting to see nothing, but in fact the light was entirely changed, every sparkle on the water crystallized and magnified, the air itself glowed; even Brian, smiling at arm’s length, seemed to radiate.

  Hagstones are abundant in landscapes with karst topographies where limestone or dolomite or gypsum bedrock is easily honeycombed by natural springs. In some places they are called adderstones or hexstones, Odin stones or chicken gods. They are used to bind evil spirits, bless the water, protect livestock. They can help you see what is real.

  Even though I was the one writing the book on witches, when I held up this strangely shaped rock I had no idea what a hagstone was. It’s often this way with us—I follow him into the cave, he follows me out. We got married too young, we sometimes say when blending in among the upper-class intelligentsia we have tried to become. But as the years pass we’re learning how utterly we belong, if anywhere, to this isolated place where the ground is all secret caverns beneath our feet and the water is delicious because it passes through them on the way down and again on the way back up.

  Out here it’s taken by many as an axiomatic truth that people never change and a grudge is something you take to your grave. Perhaps that’s why Isobel Gowdie, the Scottish witch put on trial in 1662, is the one who has always felt closest to me. Or perhaps because she came from a place some of my ancestors would have called home. Or because she was a flyter, a flinger of insults as a literary art form, which was a common practice among professional storytellers in her time and place, and lately feels like my own most-preferred genre. The court records do not include any examples of her flytes—by the time she had submitted to give her confession she was long past the balance between risk and restraint, the artful attention to sound and syntax that characterize the form. Instead she devoted that public performance almost entirely to asserting a violent and otherworldly power as she threatened, cursed, and hexed the men in the room. You can almost see her spit as you read the dozen and more names of neighbors she says she pierced with fairy arrows as she flew through the sky like a straw in a whirlwind.

  Some of the great flytes that survived from her age into ours and that she might have borrowed from in happier times when performing at the market for a laughing and gasping crowd include:

  In the Book of the Dun Cow, Emer won the Ulster Women’s War-of-Words when she derided her rivals that “Your fine heroes are not worth a stalk of grass … they are like the scum and the leavings.”

  In the Elder Edda Hrimgerdr told Atli “you would neigh if your balls weren’t cut off,” and Atli answered that he was a stallion and if he came ashore she would lower her tail.

  Scottish court records include a transcription of the flyte between Marion Ray and Henry Anderson not so many years apart or towns away from Gowdie. “Slobbering Henry,” Marion Ray said, “if you were worthy to fuck your wife yourself, you wouldn’t let others fuck her.” Henry’s wife Agnes Anderson jumped into the fray to assert that Marion was a homewrecker and a whore.

  Isobel Gowdie was likely a real witch, if by “witch” you mean a shamanic specialist operating at the social margins and employing syncretized folk traditions that incorporated elements of an ancient agrarian cult with the medieval Catholicism that had been forced on her people by English colonization. This was the definition I learned from the eminent historian Emma Wilby in The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, but a simpler way to say it is “cunning woman.” To heal a sick child, she said in her confession, she diverted the sickness into a dog by “shakis the belt abow the fyre, [damaged—words missing] down to the ground, till a dowg or a catt goe ower it.” A common charm among Scottish cunning women, found as often in poems and letters that alluded to these widespread folk healers as it is in the transcripted words of tortured women on trial for witchcraft. Isobel’s trial for such acts was likely a consequence of the landed gentry’s hardening commitment to a rigid Calvinism, which provided the lairds with theological justifications for maintaining strong personal holds over the estates to which families like Isobel’s were tied as tenant farmers.

  This transition in customs was abrupt—before, women were allowed to flyte in the streets for the delight and amusement of their neighbors; suddenly, this became cursing, an act of malfeasance. Before, a trial in such a small, rural community was just one more occasion to tell one of your very good stories with only the risk of a modest fine for such sorcery; now a trial was the place where diplomatic displays of fealty to a colonial order were enacted with nooses and fire. Before, you could gather with friends and family and complain about how the landlord just raised the rent again so how are you supposed to live. After, you were a dangerous coven who wished to see him and all his heirs dead.

  To think about witches is to think about shifting perspectives. A spell or an amulet or a talisman is sometimes helpful in letting a person imagine a different world is possible. Though I personally do not believe the spells, hexes, fairies, or transmogrification of people into animals that Gowdie describes in her confessions are possible, I am committed to believing women.

  Phenomenologists use the term “homeworld” to describe the kind of lived experiences and epistemological assumptions that shape a person into knowing what they know and knowing it in the way they know. My homeworld, for example, bears many features of the oppressive Catholicism I was raised in and many other landmarks shaped by how I said no to that faith and to the elders pushing it on me. It is a world perched on pillars of defiance and guilt, martyrs and monsters. When I meet a witch I try to find a passage from the world I understand into the one they do. Sometimes, when I’m looking through these hagstones, I get caught between.

  How different is it for Isobel Gowdie to have believed, as she confessed she did, that “I wes in the downie hillis, and got meat ther from the qwein of the fearrie” than for my relations to pray a queen of saints will lead me home from the pagan path I seem to be on? When she described the exhilaration of flying over the countryside to the sea and back in the company of the devil and her coven, saying they were “thes strawes in whirlewind”—well, haven’t I known well how erotic it can be to float and spin and fling myself beyond the limits of all reason?

  For years I thought I was just a dumb girl who didn’t get it—“it” being The Critique of Pure Reason, the collected poems of John Donne, the whistle from across the street, why a man would shout “bitch” from the window of his car into the ear of a passing stranger, the blood pouring down my legs as I clung to my seizing belly. How careful I once was to remain polite and respectful when the doctor answered my question about what he’d just asked a nurse to inject me with by muttering, “You read too much,” before he went back to yanking my placenta out by the umbilical cord. Even now it feels as perilous as a flyte to suggest the scientific method is just one more socially constructed epistemological system of communal faith in a particular kind of truth, no more valid than a spell. Such a risk to dare assert the lead tailings oozing through the soil where we lay our picnic blankets, the crop-dusting biplane overhead, the keening I feel for the nearly extinct tinytim earthfruits and pondberries and grotto sculpins and yellow mud turtle, all this is predicated on that moment when René Descartes imagined he could, like a god, invent a whole world out of nothing but the thought “I think, therefore I am.”

  Am I starting to believe Gowdie when she says “all the witches
yet that are untaken haw their owin poweris and our poweris which we haid”? I asked the critical theorists, who cast the rune stones I know how to read, and Zaid Ahmad answered that he too wants to find ways for all of us to know each other. In his essay comparing homeworlds, he recounts how it was in roughly the same period, but on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, that Ibn-Khaldūn, like Descartes, tried to figure out what would allow a person to believe their own senses. He concluded you are alive when you can wonder how it feels to some other being to feel alive. Ibn-Khaldūn’s homeworld is based on fikr, unlike Descartes’s, which is built on the cogito. Fikr: by asking the stones how it feels to be them, Ibn-Khaldūn heard in his question the very nature of his own being.