The Hex Witch of Seldom (11 page)

In the dark a cypress-handled hammer lay where he had left it, on the anvil.

Chapter Eight

Bobbi looked around uneasily for the walking stick and saw it in the next room, standing near the front door in a green ceramic urn shaped like an elephant's foot, along with several umbrellas. She turned her eyes away quickly and did not look at the staff again.

“Set down, Bobbi,” the old woman repeated. “Ain't you hungry?” She placed a large bowl of homemade chicken corn soup on the table, then brought saltines.

Bobbi stood where she was, staring because she saw the form moving behind the form. More plainly than ever before, she saw it, and her head fuzzed in confusion; a stumpy old woman in a housedress stood before her, but another woman stood there as well: hunchbacked, in a robe of white calfskin edged with the fine fleece of lambs, in a pointed hat and lappets of white fox fur. A veil covered her face. Her flowing silver hair rippled down her back to below her waist, a thick waist rounded by a belt of silver links; on each link was etched a mystic sign. From the belt hung a gleaming silver knife with no scabbard. On her spraddling feet were tall, white boots, fox-furred and leather-laced. In her white-gloved hand she held the sensate staff.

Though it neither moved nor spoke, Bobbi shook her head hard at the sight of the staff, sending her own hair flying across her eyes. When she blinked and looked again, only an old Pennsylvania Dutch woman stood on the braided rug, holding a box of crackers. But what she had seen—it was like nothing she had ever seen before, or imagined. She could not possibly have dreamed it out of her own mind.

“I know you're hungry,” the old woman insisted, taking Bobbi's gesture for refusal.

Bobbi still didn't move, but for some reason she blurted out, “Shane has a cracked hoof.”

“I know it.” The old woman's eyes, Bobbi noted now that she could see her clearly, were of an odd amber-brown color, almost yellow.

“Epsom salts,” said Bobbi breathlessly. “You have any Epsom salts? He should soak it in a bucket of warm water with Epsom salts in it.”

“I'll take care of it. Stop your fussing.” Rotating her whole thick body, the old woman turned toward the horse. “Go straight on through to the parlor, Shane. The drapes are drawn in there. One of them nosy neighbors of mine might see you in here wunst I turn a light on.”

Shane walked through into the next room.

“This here's Seldom,” added his hostess with rueful amusement, “and folks watches out for each other all day long. Seldom anything better to do.”

Bobbi trailed after Shane. She felt spooked and did not want to be separated from the horse, but what she saw in the parlor spooked her more. Loose hay lay strewn on the camelback sofa. Bales of it stood stacked behind the glass-topped end tables, sweet-smelling and greeny-gold under the glow of ginger lamps in velvet-swagged shades. A metal bucket of water and one of oats stood on the carpet. Shane swung his haunches past a breakfront full of knick-knacks, lowered his head to the oats and started to eat.

Standing there and gawking, Bobbi felt more woozy than ever. She wobbled back to the kitchen, sat down in front of her cooling soup and started to shovel at it with her spoon.

“Here,” said the old woman rather sharply, “let me heat that up for you.”

Bobbi shook her head, then thought of being more polite. Better be very polite to this person. “No, thank you,” she said, gulping soup with an effort. “It's fine.” Her voice came out strained and mumbling.

The old woman scooped the bowl away from in front of her with a motion like that of a bear clawing for grubs. Bobbi held her dripping spoon in one hand, afraid to put it down even on the oilcloth. She caught the drips in the palm of the other hand, and she sat that way without moving as her hostess reheated the soup, tasted it, then finally stumped over to the table and gave it back to her.

Bobbi ate. The old woman ponderously circled the table and turned on a plastic wall lamp with a faded motto on the shade, “Let there be light.” Bobbi watched her the whole time. The old woman was built like a cookstove: not fat, but short, flat-bosomed, thick-waisted and broad, with a capacious belly. Her legs, poking out from under her housedress, were set so far apart that they seemed like cookstove legs, canted, bowed and attached to her corners. She wore nylon stockings rolled brownly down to the tops of cheap, black vinyl slippers with a seam running up the center from the toe. A segment of her sturdy legs showed white and hairy between the nylons and the hem of her cotton housedress. She had three chins arching down her neck; wisps of caked cornstarch lay in the creases. Bobbi noticed that and the safety pin holding the front of the housedress together. She tried not to stare at the safety pin as the old woman sat down across from her and watched her spoon the soup.

“You want a glass of milk?”

“No, thank you.” In fact, at the mention of milk she felt weak with longing, but the sharp, yellow-eyed gaze on her frightened Bobbi, making her feel as if that old-woman stare could see everything about her. Maybe it was the effect of food after extreme hunger, but she felt half sick. She set down her spoon in her bowl and demanded, “Who are you?”

“Hazel Fenstermacher's my name.”

“Mrs. Fenstermacher—”

“Just call me Aunt Witchie. Everybody else does.”

Bobbi stared, her breath taken away, as if someone had hit her in the stomach. After a moment the old woman understood and laughed, a quiet laugh, not unkind. “It ain't like that, Bobbi. They called me Witchie from little on up, because my name is Hazel, see? Witch hazel.” Witchie got up and brought her the glass of milk anyway, even though Bobbi had said she didn't want it. Aunt Witchie's arms swung outward when she moved. She carried things with her elbows pointing sideways.

“Thank you,” Bobbi mumbled. She drank the milk and finished her soup. Witchie sat on the rocker near the cookstove.

“You can stop worrying about that motorcycle rider Shane killed,” the old woman said after a while. “Them kind ain't going to the police. They buried that body deep, and good riddance.”

Bobbi set down her spoon, on the oilcloth this time. “If you're not a witch,” she burst out, “how do you know so much about me and Shane? How come you were expecting us?”

“I never said nothing about what I was or wasn't,” Witchie replied. Her voice was low and filled with phlegm, as gruff as her manners. “But for the matter of knowing things, how did you know Shane's name?”

The abrupt question and the hazel-eyed stare that came with it made Bobbi sweat and start to stammer. “It—it's just—what I called him.”

The old woman looked back at her out of a softly folded face with shrewd eyes that knew better. “It's what he is,” she said. “Or part of him. It's his name. Or one of them.”

“But—what—”

What is he? she was going to blurt out. But Shane appeared at the doorway between the kitchen and the parlor, his blue eyes on Witchie, ears at a troubled sideward angle.

“He don't want us to talk about that right now,” Witchie told Bobbi. “You want something else to
fress
?” Eat, she meant. “I got some sweet bologna here, and red-beet eggs.”

Bobbi shook her head.

“What's the matter, girl? Your tongue need scraped?”

It was hard to think of a reply to that. Bobbi said nothing. She really did not want anything more to eat. Her stomach, long deprived, was making an uproar over what she had already put in it.

“I guess you're tired. Better have a bath before you go to bed. Give me them filthy clothes, I'll wash them. What you want to sleep in?”

Bobbi said, “Anything.” She ruefully expected that her hostess would loan her an old woman's nightie, frumpy and several sizes too large. At home—but it wasn't her home any longer, she remembered, her gut twisting; too much food, she told herself—when she had a bed to sleep in, she usually slept in a man's teeshirt in the summer, boys' flannel pajamas in the winter. The pajama legs always twisted up around her crotch, and she hated them.

Witchie was looking at her. Almost defiantly, Bobbi looked back.

Abruptly, and without another word, Witchie swung into action. She heaved herself out of the rocker and beckoned Bobbi to follow her upstairs. While Bobbi waited uncertainly in the cluttered spare bedroom, she stumped up another steep flight of stairs to the attic and came down a moment later carrying a gown that took Bobbi's breath.

“I can't wear that!” she exclaimed, though in fact the gown called to something unacknowledged inside her and her body sent up a warm flush, a tingle of excitement, in answer. A long spill of rose-colored satin …

“Why the hun not?” Witchie snapped. She dumped the gown on the bed as if it were so much clean laundry, and waited to take Bobbi's clothes away for washing. In her bent old hands, Bobbi noted, she held a brand-new, large-size cannister of Epsom salts, brought down from the attic under the nightgown.

“Jesus!” Bobbi wailed. “I forgot!” She started out of the room, bound downstairs to tend to Shane's cracked hoof.

“Get your bath and git to bed!” Aunt Witchie barked. “Crimony, girl, I can heave a bucket of water. I ain't a cripple yet.”

After taking her bath in the big, claw-footed tub, after combing her wet hair and carefully French-braiding it and using the toothbrush Witchie had given her, Bobbi put on the long nightgown. The rounded tops of her breasts showed bare over dusky-rose lace. Satin seemed to embrace and caress her belly, buttocks, thighs. She knew without needing a mirror that she was beautiful. She went to bed, warm under the cathedral-window quilt, and placed a hand on her breasts and one on the small mound between her legs before she thought of Witchie. Then she moved her hands away from the places that felt good and waited for sleep, trying not to think any more about the strange old woman who seemed to see into the hidden places of her mind.…

When she woke up in the morning she found lying across the foot of her bed a pair of slim-cut jeans, a western shirt, buckskin moccasin boots, blue socks and blue nylon briefs, all brand new and all like something out of her dream image of herself, though she had hardly known until that moment that she had one. No bra. How did Witchie know she hated bras? She stared at the clothes a moment, then let them lie and stomped barefoot downstairs in her low-cut satin-and-lace nightgown. Shane was just coming back into the parlor from outside—through the back door, screened by brush, he could go out to relieve himself without much danger of being seen. He lifted his head when he caught sight of Bobbi and looked at her intently, but Bobbi paid no attention. She had forgotten how she looked; she wanted only to confront Witchie.

In the kitchen she found the old woman mixing batter, just somebody's gray-haired grandmother, a puttering old woman—Bobbi refused any longer to be fooled.

“You looked inside my head,” she accused.

“Huh,” Witchie acknowledged. “Do them things fit?”

Bobbi stamped her bare foot, hurting it on the linoleum floor, then suddenly stopped being angry. Instead, she felt oddly desolate, and confused. “I give up. I don't understand you. Where did you get them?”

“Where I got your nightgown. In the attic.”

Brand-new size-eleven Jordaches, with the tags still on them, in the attic? Bobbi felt cold and tried to joke. “You have a shopping mall up there, or what?”

The old woman just looked at her with those strange yellow eyes.

Bobbi whispered, “You're a witch.”

“I'm just an old pow-wow woman, Bobbi.” A healer, she meant. The Pennsylvania Dutch called their old-style healers pow-wows. “I'm the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. I got Indian blood in me, way back. Have some scrapple while you're waiting for the pancakes.”

“No,” said Bobbi. Fear made her sound rude, but Witchie seemed more amused than offended.

“You think I'm trying to fatten you up before I pop you in the oven?” Witchie laughed. Her laugh, low-pitched and pleasantly husky, sounded quite unlike a cartoon witch's cackle. When she was done laughing she said, “I won't eat you, Bobbi. If you burn yourself I can draw out the fire, and if you cut yourself I can stop the bleeding. I can pow-wow warts and children's ailments. Sometimes I help people when the doctors can't, and sometimes the doctors help them when I can't. I don't deceive nobody nor take their money. I don't hold with burnt chicken feet buried under the eaves and
Himmels-brief
charms and all that gibberish. I can dowse for water and things people lost, but people don't always like me. If they ask me, I tell them the truth, not what they want to hear. A witch has to refuse money to be honest. I do curses, but not for pay or nobody's say-so.” Her tone turned dark but quiet, like a still river under tall trees. “Wunst I am sure, I hex what is evil.”

Witchie was strong, Bobbi felt sure of it. She heard it in the dark, quiet voice. Witchie had powers she wasn't telling.

The thought frightened her into a cold sweat. Even her own strange visions had never frightened her as much. She turned away, not knowing where to go, and found that her bare feet were carrying her into the other room, where Shane was. She hurried up to him and laid her hand on his hard, black shoulder for protection, like a chased child in a game no longer fun, as if touching her base would make her safe. “Shane,” she appealed to him, and his head came up from his hay, his vivid eyes met hers, but there was nothing in them to still her fears.

Witchie followed her into the parlor, wiping her hands on her flour-sack apron. She said, “It ain't easy for him to talk to you. Takes a lot out of him. Just wait a minute.” Elbows out and swinging purposefully, legs taking wide strides, Witchie crossed the room to the umbrella urn and reached for her walking stick.

Bobbi felt her legs turn weak, and clutched at Shane's mane for support. “No!” she gasped—and then her fear was lost in astonishment, for Shane had turned his handsome black head and gently nuzzled her. Telling her not to be afraid, that did not surprise her, but … there was something of affection.…