Authors: Phillip Depoy
The Witch's Grave (4 page)
“I have several versions of
âThe Black-haired Lass'
from you,” I said, hoping to distract her by clicking on and starting without the usual slow build. “Some of them go back ten years. I'd like to get a variant that's more contemporary. For comparison.”
âThe Black-haired Lass'
from you,” I said, hoping to distract her by clicking on and starting without the usual slow build. “Some of them go back ten years. I'd like to get a variant that's more contemporary. For comparison.”
“Uh-huh.”
I looked up.
Her arms were folded and her face was steel. “You think I don't
know this is about the Deveroe girl and Skidmore's brother-in-law?”
know this is about the Deveroe girl and Skidmore's brother-in-law?”
So much for the subtlety of my plan.
“Skid asked me not to be too obvious,” I told her, turning off the tape recorder. “He's worried about his election.”
“No, he ain't.” She took a seat at the table, relaxing with a final glance at the Wollenzak. “Long as you two known each other, you don't see. He's afraid you'll show him up.”
I'd been told before about the so-called competition between us. I'd never noticed it.
“How exactly would I show him up?” I took a seat across the table from her.
The kitchen light came from everywhere, not just the windows. The perfection of June's cleanliness bordered psychosis.
“You running for sheriff? If you find Mr. Carter and that girl, everybody might want you to. Then what'd he do?”
“Nobody in this town is going to want me to run for dogcatcher. I was a strange one when I left, more so now that I'm back.”
“I know it's hard to be a stranger in your own hometown.” She leaned her elbows on the table. “That's a fact. But folks take to you more'n you think they do. Look up to you. They wouldn't say it.”
“Then how am I supposed to know?”
“You a grown man, Fever. You ought to figure things out.” She laughed.
For sixteen years in the mountains I'd heard that kind of laughter, though it was rarely as soft as June's. My parents were traveling performers, my father a magician, his wife the beautiful assistant. They were gone as often as they were around, and I'd fended for myself since I was seven. Skidmore and I had scraped away a world of dirt and pine straw scuttling all over the woods. When I needed comfort, I was fed in June's kitchen. But when I needed explanations, I went hungry. Derision was never in short supply for a huge shy boy from a carnival family. I wasn't comfortable with laughter.
“I'm grown in some ways,” I agreed. All it took was the merest suggestion, and images long dead rose up in my mind. I was a child of seven, shivering on the steps of my abandoned house, watching
dark shapes move in the wood, the creatures that only came out at night.
dark shapes move in the wood, the creatures that only came out at night.
“Comes a point, boy,” she said sternly, “when you got to let the past go, own up to your part in it, be a person to yourself.”
“Could we talk about Able?” I said, shifting in my seat. “Do you have anything to tell me or not?” Even the ghost of subtlety had flown.
“I don't.” She folded her arms and locked her body. “Not that I know for certain myself.”
I knew there was more. She shot a quick glance at the kitchen door, the place where her husband would shortly enter, coming home from his work. She knew something about him he wouldn't want told or something he'd rather tell me himself.
“All right then,” I said, moving the microphone closer to her. “Let's get on with the recording; I know it makes you nervous. We'll get it over with, and I can get on to the next chapter.”
“How's it coming?”
“Slowly,” I said, pretending to adjust the recorder, “but great work takes time. I'm creating a new definition for an entire academic discipline.”
“Okay by me.” She sat back, glaring at the microphone. “Tell me this time before you turn that thing on.”
“Of course. Etta slept through the lunch crowd today. Is she all right?”
“She ain't been to Wednesday meeting in a month.” June shook her head, lowered her voice. “I think she might be drinking again.”
“She's a hundred and seventy years old, June, and she has rheumatoid arthritis.”
“I'll look in on her.”
June's shoulders were slumped back to their normal position; her face was smoother, her breathing less quick, movements more fluid.
“Turning on,” I warned her, and snapped the Wollenzak.
“Lord.” She began to fidget, clicking her fingernails.
“Now, June,” I said absently, making a note in my field log, “your husband is a preacher.”
She'd done this a hundred times with me, and it always started the
same way: she barely spoke, and it seemed we'd get nowhere.
same way: she barely spoke, and it seemed we'd get nowhere.
She nodded in the direction of the microphone.
“He handles snakes in his services,” I coaxed.
“I don't take to it, raised a Methodist.”
“Yes,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “You don't go to his church. But he tells you about it when he comes home.”
“I reckon.”
“Any good stories lately?”
“No.”
“All right.” I moved the mike closer to her, still looking down in my log. “Any stories at all?”
“Nothing but foolishness.”
“You think your husband's religious ideas are foolish.”
“Hezekiah's ways mean something to him, I don't deny that,” she cranked up, “but the Bible is clear. Taking up serpents and drinking lye, it's just a show to me. God don't care for a show. He wants it plain.”
The perennial enmity between June's quiet faith and her husband's flamboyance had done the trick. She was no longer paying attention to the tape recorder or her suspicions and had launched a campaign of education.
“The Bible says,” she explained to me, tapping her index finger into the palm of her other hand, “âThat ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.' Why'd I want to mess with that?”
“Where does it say that?”
“Revelations.” Her favorite book, Hieronymus Bosch meets Clive Barker.
“You sound angry, June.” No angrier than usual on the subject, but goading always worked. “Has something happened recently?”
“That old man,” she plowed on, “thinks he can scare me with his talk, and I won't have it.” Another flirt with the kitchen door. “I shall fear no evil.”
“I see; he's trying to scare you?”
“Come home last night and would not keep shut about that graveyard.”
“Let's clarify,” I said to the microphone, my voice steady despite my anticipation, “that your husband goes to his church up on Blue Mountain every evening, close to the public cemetery.”
“That's right,” she said, elbows on the table, “and every night there's fools up in the church house with him, listening to what he says.”
“When he came home last night ⦔ I circled my hand.
“Come busting in the house,” she went on, “going on about that boneyard, top of the mountain.”
“On about what?”
“Oh, usual mess.” She dismissed it all with the flick of a hand, sitting back in her chair. “Scary noise, moving shadows. Ain't even a story.”
“Maybe he's revving up for Halloween.”
“You know better'n that, Fever.”
June and her husband, as did many older people in town, eschewed Halloween as a celebration of the demonic.
“You prefer to stick to the truth about revenants,” I teased her.
“I do,” she answered without a hint of irony.
“Didn't you have some story about your Uncle Hiram?”
“Woke up one night.” she confirmed, “shortly after he moved into his new house in Blairsville. Every lamp in the parlor was lit. Come in and found a bouquet of dried flowers on his rug. Doors were bolted from the inside, all the windows locked. Found out an old widow woman died in the house. She was buried with that bouquet, they said, because she had no man to give it to. Hiram reckoned she give it to him because he took such good care of the house and garden. She didn't have a husband in this world but found one in the next.”
“And that's a true story.”
“People leave behind all sorts of things when they die, son. Some leave furniture, some letters. Once in a while, a body forgets part of the soul. They leave it behind, and it's got to wander for a time.”
“But that's different from what Hek's talking about.”
“He's trying to scare me.” Arms folded. “Thinks it's funny.”
“Why would he try to scare you?”
“I got a burial plot up there, belongs to my granddaddy's family. Hek says he can hear me calling him from time to time when he passes by the graveyard.” She gnawed on her upper lip a second. “Says he's worried about me. But he wants me to get buried over in the little garden by his church, is all. With him. For some reason he don't like our public cemetery.”
She wore no wedding ring. Her belief was that it showed ownership and she was not her husband's possession. But she rubbed the ring on her little finger, one Hek had given her the first Christmas of their marriage, a ruby rose in peach gold.
“âThe golden bowl is broken,'” she sighed, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, the spirit returns to God Who gave it.'”
“Revelation.”
She shook her head. “Ecclesiastes Twelve Six and Seven. Everything ends.”
Her face betrayed a true fear. Dying wouldn't be bad; missing her husband, unendurable.
The silence that followed her quote was snapped in half, a sudden snarl of the doorknob and Hezekiah's step. He was panting.
“Lord, it's a chill out there.” Slam. “Hey there, Fever.”
“Hek.” I smiled at him, but he made no eye contact.
He went immediately to the percolator, took a mug from the cabinet above it, and poured. He was in a black suit, white shirt buttoned at the collar, no tie. His hair was a tangle of wires; he'd been running.
He gulped the coffee, both hands around the mug, then stared down at the table.
“You recording?”
“We can stop.” I reached across and shut off the tape player.
“Sorry. Keep a'going if you want.”
“What's the matter with you?” June said, looking him up and down. “It ain't near enough cold out for you to carry on. Where's your glasses?” To me: “Left in church again.”
He looked at me, shook his head. “You know what's wrong,” he said to June quietly.
She rose up out of the chair. “That's enough of that.”
“Junie.”
“I told Fever about your little story.” She went to the oven; it creaked open. “He agrees with me: you're out y'mind.”
“We never really discussed my opinion,” I said to Hek.
He took a seat a the table, I cleared the Wollenzak and microphone out of the way. June set a warm plate in front of Hek, holding on to it with a blue dish towel. He sat and watched the plate until she brought him a fork and a paper napkin from the drawer beside the sink. His fingers were shaking very slightly, his face flushed, his pupils dilated.
“Ain't nothing wrong with me,” he mumbled.
“There's everything wrong with you,” she said, taking her seat, chin in hand, watching him eat. “Has been since the day we met.”
“If that's true,” he said looking up at me, “then what'd she marry me for? Ask her that.” The whisper of a smile touched his face.
“Shoot fire.” She swatted his shoulder, hard, and blushed, covered her mouth with her hand.
“What did you see in the cemetery, Hek?” I itched to turn the recorder back on.
“I saw what I saw.” He lifted a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth; it hovered. “Ain't the first time, neither.” In went the fork.
“She told me,” I said, “you saw or heard something last night.”
“I don't mean that,” he shot back, irritated. “Happen every so often, you see things up there.”
“But this is different.”
He stopped eating, eyes blank. “It surely is.” He blinked, turned my way. “She called my name. And more.”
“Who did?”
“Woman, from across the way. Over the graves and brambles.” His shoulders shook a second; then he returned to his plate.
“You saw a woman standing in the graveyard?”
He bobbed his head once.
“Someone you knew?” There was more; I had to wait for it to come out slowly.
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