Ask the Bones (14 page)

When the neighbor saw all the fine food and drink, the crusty bread and tempting sweets, he piled his plate high. But even as he gorged himself, he was not happy. He could not imagine where the poor man had found the money to pay for such a feast.

The neighbor continued eating until everyone else had left. Then he turned on the old man and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Where did you steal the money?” he bellowed.

“Nowhere!” cried the old man. “That would be a sin.” He raced to his cupboard. “I found this pot of gold when I dug my wife's grave.”

The greedy man's face flushed with anger. He could hardly stand the poor man's good fortune. He wanted that pot of gold for himself. He thought about it every day and dreamed about it every night. Finally he thought of a way to get it.

“Wife,” he said, “I'm going to kill our biggest goat and skin it, horns, beard, and all. Then I want you to sew the goat skin around me.”

The greedy man's wife was sure he had gone mad, so she dared not argue with him. When he brought the goatskin into the house, she ran to find her needle and thread. Stitch by stitch she sewed the skin around her husband. And when she finished, it covered every inch of his body.

The greedy man waited until everyone in the village was asleep. Then he trotted directly to the old man's hut. He put his cloven hooves up on the windowsill, and he butted the glass with his horns. “Give me the gold,” he demanded, speaking through the lips of the goat.

The old man shuddered. He thought a demon was peering through his window, an angry demon who had discovered its gold was missing from the graveyard. The old man leaped out of bed. “Take it,” he cried, throwing it out the door.

The goat picked up the pot of gold with his teeth and hurried home. He butted the door open and galloped inside to find his wife.

“Help me out of this goatskin,” he shouted. “It's getting tighter. It's pinching me.”

His wife grabbed a knife and started cutting the stitches, but no matter how carefully she cut, blood flowed.

“Owwwww!”
he screamed. “Stop hurting me.”

She grabbed her sewing scissors and cut the stitches even more carefully than before. But still the blood spurted forth, spattering her dress and dripping on the floor.

“Tug it off!” he wept. “I can't stand being cooped up in this smelly hide.” But even when she pulled and twisted and tore at the goatskin, it stuck to his body like glue.

In desperation, the greedy man galloped to the poor man's hut and flung the pot of gold on his doorstep, but still the goatskin stuck tight. Worse yet, his cries sounded more and more like those of a goat.

He raced home bleating, with a pack of dogs nipping at his heels. “Even dogs think I'm an animal,” he moaned.

He tried to tell his wife, but she could no longer understand him. He shook with terror from head to tail.

The goatskin had grown onto his body. He would have horns and hooves and scraggly goat hair for the rest of his life.

“Serves you right, you greedy old man,” said his wife. She put a rope around his neck and led him to the goat pen behind the barn.

When she went out to feed the goats the next morning, she could not tell one goat from another.

“What will I do?” she wondered, “when the butcher comes?”

 

 

 

L
ong ago there were two sailors who couldn't stand each other. And there they were, mates on the very same sailing ship. One was a feisty old man named Bell, better known as Ding Dong. And the other was a pesky fellow called Liverpool Jorge.

Jorge was not a superstitious man, but Ding Dong was. And that's why Ding Dong suspected the worst when he noticed that one of Jorge's eyes was blue and the other was brown. Jorge didn't tell him that one was made of glass.

Whenever Ding Dong was around, Jorge flaunted his tattoos, because he knew how much they upset the superstitious old sailor.

Ding Dong didn't mind the pictures of sea monsters encircling Jorge's legs, or the great dragon on his chest, or the whales on his arms. But he feared the pictures of a sinking ship on Jorge's back, the cats on his shoulders, and the crowing hens on his wrists. He thought they all foretold disaster, especially the cats, because, he said, “they carry gales in their tails.”

So what did Ding Dong do? He crossed his fingers and spat into his hat to protect himself. He could hardly stand to look at those tattoos. And what did Jorge do? He just grinned and added more. Whenever the ship docked, Jorge rushed ashore to look for tattoo artists. They decorated him with snakes and lightning bolts and more hens and more cats.

Jorge showed them all to Ding Dong. And Ding Dong got so upset he started whittling in his spare time, just to have little pieces of wood he could snap in two, in hope of a lucky break.

But Ding Dong doubted that anything could protect him from Jorge's cat and hen tattoos. “They'll sink us yet,” he muttered. “Mark my words.” And he began watching for a chance to shove Jorge overboard.

Jorge had almost run out of space for new tattoos. He had just one little circle of unmarked skin left, about the size of a silver dollar. And that circle was in the crook of his arm.

Jorge wanted his last tattoo to make Ding Dong's hair stand on end. So he searched in port after port until he found an artist who could tattoo a fearsome evil eye. And when Jorge lowered or raised his forearm, that eye seemed to open and close.

But Jorge wasn't happy. He wept because he could never get another tattoo. But the tattoo artist said, “Don't worry, there are lots more ways to get decorated.” And he sent Jorge downstairs to the glassblower's shop to buy himself a fancy glass eye.

Jorge had never seen the kinds of eyes this glassblower made. He was a real artist. The eyes came in all colors—red, yellow, purple, green, and blue. And not one had a regular iris in its center. One had a silver star, another had a sickle moon, and yet another had a coiled snake, white with red fangs. That's the one Jorge liked best—the coiled snake in the middle of an eye of navy blue. He handed his money to the glassblower, put in his fancy new eye, and hurried back to the ship.

Ding Dong was standing on the deck, coiling a rope, so Jorge crept up from behind and put his arm in front of Ding Dong's face. Then Jorge flexed his elbow, making the tattooed eye open and close.

Ding Dong spun around and found himself staring right into Jorge's new glass eye. For a moment Ding Dong froze, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. Then he raced below to grab a lucky horseshoe from his sea chest to nail to the ship's mast.

Ding Dong was sure that Jorge was trying to bewitch him. So late that night when Jorge was sleeping, Ding Dong tried to scoop that glass eye right out of Jorge's head. And when Jorge woke up bellowing, Ding Dong threatened to hit him with a belaying pin. “There isn't room on this ship for the two of us,” he shouted.

That was too much even for a prankster like Jorge. He vowed that if anyone were to jump ship, it would be Ding Dong. Jorge knew that neither his tattoos nor the snake in his new glass eye had driven Ding Dong away.

So Jorge went ashore at the very next port to look for something more powerful. And that was where he found an artist who was a magician with molten glass.

This glassblower had made ghost ships with sails like cobwebs. He'd made glass islands that looked like monsters' hands ready to drag sailors into the depths of the sea. But most astounding of all were his glass eyes.

They sat on the shelf, side by side, looking at Jorge as intently as he looked at them. But Jorge didn't want any of the ready-made ones with ravens and rats in their centers. So he told the glassblower what he needed and sat down to wait.

The glassblower lit a flame, heated the glass and blew, creating the evilest of evil eyes, layer by layer. Rings of green and purple and black encircled a little red spot in the middle. And that red spot seemed to stick out, making even the glassblower shudder. He cooled the eye and handed it to Jorge. “Never take it out and stare at it,” he said. “Just wear it all the time.”

Jorge paid him and rushed back to the ship. He saw Ding Dong aloft, splicing a ratline, so he climbed up the rigging himself. Then he stared at him, face to face, eye to eye.

Ding Dong nearly went mad, but he couldn't turn away. The evil eye seemed to hold him in its spell. He stared back, horrified, and then fell silently to the deck below.

Now either that evil eye scared Ding Dong into falling and he died from the fall, or that evil eye killed him outright. Jorge needed to know which. He hadn't planned to kill him.

The captain and the crew thought it was an accident, and Jorge didn't change their minds, but he couldn't sleep and he couldn't eat. He had to know if his glass eye really had that much power.

So he went down to the galley to ask the cook if he could borrow his mirror. Then he climbed up into the crow's nest at the top of the mast, the only place on the ship where he could be alone.

He held the mirror in front of his face and stared directly into his evil eye.

Some say that a monster wave hit the ship just then and that's why Jorge fell onto the deck and died. The glassblower said that it wasn't the fault of the wave at all. But there's only one person who can tell you for sure. And that's the man who bought poor Jorge's eye, years later, from the secondhand shop where his mates sold it.

And that man with the evil eye is walking around here somewhere—right now!

Beware!

THE HAUNTED FOREST

From
Folk Tales of Central Asia,
by Amina Shah (London: The Octagon Press, 1970), pp. 109-17.

 

THE MURKY SECRET

From
The Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends and Folk Tales of Old Charleston,
by John Bennett (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1946), pp. 223-31.

 

NEXT-OF-KIN

From
Spanish Legendary Tales,
by S. G. C. Middlemore (1885), reprinted in
Folk Tales of All Nations,
edited by F. H. Lee (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1930), pp. 895-902.

 

THE BLOODY FANGS

From
Japanese Fairy Tales,
by Lafcadio Hearn and others (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), pp. 29-35.

 

ASK THE BONES

From
A Mountain of Gems: Fairy Tales of the Peoples of the Soviet Land,
translated by Irina Zheleznova (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1962), pp. 184-87.

 

THE FOUR-FOOTED HORROR

From
Ghosts Along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky Foothills,
by William Lynwood Montell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), pp. 166-67.

 

BEGINNING WITH THE EARS

From the Israel Folktale Archives, no. 8335, collected by Moshe Rabi from Hannah Hadad. A variant is IFA 3380, collected by Yakov Zemertov from his mother, Juliet, of Iraq. Previously unpublished.

 

FIDDLING WITH FIRE

From A
Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People,
edited by B. A. Botkin (New York: Crown Publishers, 1944), pp. 727-31. A variant is found in A
Treasury of Southern Folklore: Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People of the South
edited by B. A. Botkin. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), pp. 538-40.

 

THE LAPLANDER'S DRUM

From
Demonologia; or, Natural Knowledge Revealed; Being an Expos
é
of Ancient and Modern Superstitions,
by I. S. F. (London: John Bumpus, 1827), pp. 338-55, 381.