The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (20 page)

Ruth said, “Hattie Jones found him up at the church”—she
said it quietly—“said he was curled up at the pulpit just like this.”

The doctor eyed the preacher. The preacher was still
breathing. In his left eye, the only open one, there was a glimmer of fear. The
doctor could see that the intelligence in the preacher’s eye was trapped, trapped
in the frozen and paralyzed face.

“Can he speak?” the doctor asked John; and seeing that
John was occupied only with looking out into the front area, the doctor called
out to the preacher, “Can you speak?”

A noise like a wheeze came from the preacher, and John
turned and looked at his brother.

When the big snow had passed through Sparrow and it got
so awful cold, John’s brother had stayed out too long in the snow and got so
cold that most of his ears had come off and they had turned a permanent grayish-black.
Along the side of his head, they looked like an animal’s ears now, pointed and
curled. Vernon’s face was pinched on the right side, a black and purple bruise
ebbing out from his right eye, which was swelled completely shut now.

His left arm was the worst thing that John Mosely had
ever seen happen to a human being. It was black and crisp and the fingers looked
as though they would flake away like a husk; and yet, they somehow looked
molded together too. The arm had lost its human qualities. It looked like
something that, long dead, began to resemble earth and roots.

Doc Pritham pushed past them both and out into the main
area. “Falk!” the doctor cried.

And then they both appeared in the room and the four
of them were in the room together with the preacher lying there on the bed between
them. On one side of the bed were the doctor and the outlander. On the other
side of the bed were Ruth and John. In the middle, on the bed, was the preacher.

Ruth said, “Oh!”

John Mosely said, “Ah!”

Jim Falk said, “What’s happened here?” His keen eyes
went over the preacher’s body fast, and when he saw the curled and twisted arm and
the eye that was slowly sinking into the preacher’s head, he looked at the doctor.
He looked at the preacher’s brother and the preacher’s brother’s wife, who were
both looking at him with wide eyes.

Jim said, “These good people should go.”

The doctor nodded in agreement.

John said, “What do you mean? This is my brother. I’m
not going anywhere.”

Doc Pritham said, “We have to move fast. We can’t argue.
His life is at stake. If we do not move fast, he will die.”

The doctor moved fast and bent over the preacher and
soon the preacher’s coat and shirt were removed exposing his old, gray-haired chest
and the rolls of fat of the preacher’s soft belly. A blackness was running
along the side of the preacher like little streamlets underneath his pale skin.

Ruth looked at this and said, “What is happening to him?”

The doctor sped out of the room.

Jim looked at the two frightened people and said, “I
know special ways of medicine, and so does the good doctor. We can save him, but
we have to move fast. You must let us do this. You may go into the other room
and pray if you wish. But you should go into the other room. It’s going to be
gruesome.” As he was saying this, the doctor came back in the room with a book
with old pages and strange writing in it and a bag.

“We’re not leaving,” Ruth said. “Prayers! If it’s God’s
will that he die, he’ll die; if it’s God’s will that he live, he’ll live! Prayers!
This man was bit by a snake, he needs the anti-venom! Not prayers! Prayers and
miracles and false hopes, do you see what you’ve taught the people?”

John Mosely said to the doctor, “And this man cannot
be in here! This man probably called the snakes up out of the Pit to bite my brother!”
John pointed at Jim Falk, wagging his finger at the end of his thin arm.

The doctor looked at John Mosely. “There’s not time for
all this!” the doctor shouted suddenly, his face becoming red behind his bushy
white brows. “There’s not time for this!”

The doctor pulled from his black bag a long and silvery
blade.

The preacher groaned loudly.

“Vernon!” John shouted.

“Stand back!” the doctor yelled at the two frightened
onlookers.

Jim Falk moved around to the other side of the bed, using
his glare to try and move John and Ruth out of the way and into the corner of
the little room.

“We’re not moving!” Ruth shouted in his face. “We’re
protecting this man of God from your evil, from your spells and your”—she almost
spit when she said it—“prayers!”

“I am not here to do evil, woman!” Jim suddenly found
himself shouting. “I am here to rid it out!” Jim had not noticed it, but his
left hand had pulled the hatchet.

Ruth and John moved out of the way.

“That’s my brother!” John shouted.

Jim reached out with his left hand and grabbed the broken
preacher’s twisted arm. He tried to remember what Old Magic Woman had shown him
about clearing up the demon rot. He knelt down beside the preacher. He looked
at the doctor. He started to remember. He quietly started to say the things
that he remembered to himself, and where his hand was touching the preacher’s
arm, it looked as though the air around it began to get smoky.

“What are you doing? He’s saying a spell! He’s calling
the devil!” John shrieked. His eyes were flashing around at the scene.

Ruth had closed her eyes. No one could see that she was
not afraid. She was hoping. She was hoping that what she saw in her brother-in-law
was a sign. A sign that he had been found. A sign that her time was coming and
that she would receive her reward. She just kept closed her eyes, though,
hoping. She had been doing her own kind a praying, a practical kind, a kind
that she knew one day would bring results.

Doc Pritham positioned the long, flat blade just at the
crux of Vernon Mosely’s shoulder. He inserted it with a thrust. No blood came from
the wound, but the blade’s color appeared to turn from a silver to dull yellow.

“You’re killing him!” John shouted and rushed forward.

Jim Falk yanked sudden and fierce at the preacher’s arm
and a moist popping sound came from the blade. The preacher’s arm came off in
Jim’s hand and the preacher sat up in bed, suddenly fully awake and squirming.
John Mosely crashed into Jim Falk, but Falk was a stone and John tumbled into
the corner.

The preacher’s face lightened and turned its usual pink
and the swelling eye and right side of his face deflated and settled to a gray
and yellow bruise. He opened his eyes and a light came into his eyes and he looked
around the room blinking.

“Thank God,” Vernon said and he looked at the outlander
who held the twisted arm in his hand.

Tears came from both the preacher’s eyes, and John Mosely
got up and pushed past the outlander. Jim looked at Ruth and caught a strange
look in her eye, a flutter that she was disappointed at her brother-in-law’s
recovery. She looked at Falk and scowled.

Jim shrank quietly out of the room with the thing that
used to be a preacher’s arm.

The doctor was at the other side of Vernon with a cool
cloth dabbing his face.

Ruth was still in the corner, still scowling.

John Mosely grabbed his brother’s head and kissed it.

“He’ll need rest,” the doctor said. “He will live, but
he will need rest.”

“How did you?” John asked.

The doctor looked at John and then at Ruth. “Prayer and
medicine.”

“Ruth,” Vernon said and looked up at her grimacing face,
“Ruth, my arm. My arm. My arm.” He began to sob now.

The doctor laid him back, and the preacher almost at
once stopped sobbing and fell into a sound sleep.

After a few moments of looking at his brother sleep,
John said to the doctor in a whisper, “What is that witch-man doing here?”

He motioned toward the main area where he had seen the
outlander go.

The doctor did nothing to answer. Doc Pritham grabbed
the long blade that he had and took it into the other room. The door was closed
and the outlander was not around.

Ruth came out into the main area. The doctor and her
husband followed close behind her.

The doctor was wiping the long blade with a cloth he
had dipped in something clear and pungent. Ruth stood there. John stood there too,
watching the doctor and looking around the room to see if the outlander was
hiding anywhere in the room. Maybe he was hiding in the corner. Maybe he knew a
trick where he could hide in plain sight. There were many things that a man in
league with the Evil One would be able to know how to do. What all they were,
who knew?

The doctor lit a match and touched it to the dripping
blade. A bright flash of blue fire shot up the side of the long blade, and a
flame jumped from its tip and hung in the air above the blade, twisted and
vanished.

“What is that you’re doing?” Ruth asked the doctor slowly,
her eyes narrowed now, her courage had come back to her.

John Mosely said, “The outlander. Where’s he gone? What
was he doing here?”

“Yes,” Ruth Mosely asked. “What was he doing here?”

John added in with a shaking voice, “And what about my
brother? What about my brother’s arm?”

The doctor slipped the long, weird knife into a black
pouch. He then turned toward them and looked them both in the face.

Ruth was getting angrier every time the doctor didn’t
answer a question. Her arms came up and crossed, her shoulders came up closer
to her long ears, and her chin came forward more and more. She took a slow step
toward the doctor and her voice came out in a low pitch. “I am sure the people
of Sparrow would be very interested to know that somehow you are involved with
this Jim Falk. Prayers and medicine? Prayers and medicine? That would be a very
interesting thing for them to hear about. They also might be interested to know
that you have an old book on your person, an old book with strange writing in
it. Don’t you? Don’t you have something like that around here? Wouldn’t that be
an interesting thing for them to know?”

The doctor’s back was to her. His eyes went wide, but
then he turned, smiled at her, and reached into his pocket and got his pipe. He
turned around and pulled out a chair from the table. He turned around and
looked at them both and smiled. He turned back around toward the table and pulled
another chair away from the table and turned it a little bit toward John. Then
he went around to the far side of the table and pulled out a chair for himself
and sat down and began packing his pipe with tobacco.

“Please,” he said, “please, won’t you sit down. We have
a lot of things to talk about, I think. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll talk
about this?”

The two made glances at each other.

“Please,” the doctor said in a very calm voice, and his
match came to his bowl and he puffed blue clouds of smoke, “please, won’t you
sit down and we’ll have a talk about prayers and medicine and old books.”

The two moved forward slowly and each, in their own time,
sat down, never taking their eyes for a moment off the doctor’s wrinkled, mysterious
face.



The farther up she went, the uglier the trees got, thorn-covered,
twisted, and cracked. Violet was thirsty; her mouth was completely parched.
Time and again she would drop beside one of the gray trees and pick up a batch
of wet leaves and suck on them, getting any moisture she could. Then she would
spit the leaves out and wipe her mouth. Her eyes were tired and she couldn’t
focus on much.

The sun was going down in the west. The trees made long
shadows. Where was the stranger? The stranger that had given her the powder.

The morning had been beautiful. The sun’s light had melted
some of the ice and warmed the little streams that ran in the back of her home
on the hill, but she found no comfort in that. She had to keep going.

She couldn’t return to her home now because he was there.
Whatever it was that he was, he was there now. If she could just find the
stranger, again. She fingered the necklace with the tiny vial inside.

Bill had come home in the middle of the night.

At first, she thought that maybe she’d taken too
much of the powder she’d been taking and that she was having a dream of some
sort that was mixing with the wind that had been swirling around her home in
the dark. She couldn’t keep the fire lit because the force of the wind had
somehow forced itself right down the chimney, and each time she would start up
the fire it was almost as if a giant person were standing over her home and
blowing cold breath down into the chimney to put out her fire.

She was cold and the wind was blowing and there was nothing
for her to do but mix an extra portion of her powder over the stove fire and
drink it down and crawl into her bed. She had the covers pulled all around her
as the wind banged and clapped around the house. She could hear too that the
door of the back house where the outlander had been staying had blown open and
was now banging and banging in the night.

She wrapped the covers around her even tighter as she
began to drift off. She could see Huck’s round face close to hers—feel his warm
breath on her cheek. She could feel his strong hand take a hold of her shoulder.
Her mind reeled backward to the days following the big blizzard. It had been
such a terrible time, but had also been the time for them.

During those quiet and frozen days, no one knew if anyone
was alive at all and they had been so frightened. They had all been so frightened.
So many had died, and so many were yet to be found, some of them frozen and
clinging to one another, their eyes shut, the lashes black crystals, the blue
children, the gray dogs. The wind was almost the same then, too. It was as if
it would never stop blowing. It was as if the wind itself was a thing, an angry
thing that wanted to destroy everything else. The winds kindled the fires and
froze the town.