Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “You have been chosen. You are attuned, not just your mind but your body too. You belong to this room. You belong to her.” He groped for her hand, squeezed it too hard. “Together we will accomplish so much!”

  *

  She fled. Szabo hurried after her, at first pleading and then, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to stop, yelling and threatening. He grabbed her by the arm and she shook him off. When he grabbed her again she shoved him, got him sufficiently off balance that she could yank her arm free.

  She rushed to her room—five not nine—and managed to unlock the door, step inside, and shut it again before Szabo could get his foot in.

  “Hekla!” he yelled, pounding on the door. “You owe me this! You owe this to everybody!”

  She shuddered. Rapidly she thrust her things into her bag and zipped it shut. Szabo was still pounding on the door, desperate now, back to pleading again.

  She came close to the door, wondering what to do. Beneath her feet, the floorboards creaked. Szabo stopped shouting, stood silent instead, listening. Hekla listened back.

  “Hekla, are you there?” he finally said.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Come out, Hekla,” he said. “I want to make you famous.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I will make it worth your while,” he said through the door. “I’ll pay. Just to be around you. Later, once you understand, we’ll be partners.”

  “Okay,” said Hekla.

  “Okay?” he said, surprised, and she realized she should have resisted more before giving in. “Then open the door.”

  “I’m going to take a shower,” said Hekla. “I need to gather my thoughts. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  He was saying something else through the door, but she paid no attention. She moved into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, switched it over to the shower. As steam began to fill the bathroom, she walked to the far side of the room, opened the window, dropped her bag out, and clambered out after it.

  *

  The car was where she had left it, though the gate was open now and there was a note under the windshield wiper written on lodge stationery asking her kindly to move it into the lot. She opened the trunk and placed her bag inside. She had just unlocked the front door and was climbing in when she heard a shout and saw Szabo rushing down the drive, his cheeks puffing desperately for air, his entourage scurrying all around him. Quickly she started the car, drove.

  She didn’t stop at all on the way back to the city. The whole trip she kept glancing in the rearview mirror, expecting Szabo’s car. But she didn’t know what sort of car he drove; how would she possibly recognize him?

  She arrived only quite late. It was too late to go to her sister’s house and return her car, so instead she drove back to her apartment. In any case, her sister didn’t expect to see her until the next day. She was exhausted. She left the bag in the trunk; she could get it out in the morning. She climbed the four flights of stairs, opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside, and fell onto the bed. Almost immediately she was asleep.

  *

  Did she dream? Yes, she dreamed. At first it seemed vague and indistinct, but in the dream she warned herself that she should not be fooled by this. And indeed, when everything sprang into focus and she saw herself walking through the paneled entrance hall and past the stag’s head, whose antlers now were so vast and ramified they spread like a tree up the wall and into the rafters, she was braced for what she knew would happen next. There she was, walking down a hall that seemed longer than the hall should be, stopping to open a door, looking into the empty room behind it, continuing down the hall to its very end, then past that end and into a room marked with a blackened number nine, and to the side of a bed in which she saw, sleeping, unaware, herself.

  *

  When she awoke, she knew something was wrong. She could not hear the noises of the city she usually heard and the light through her eyelids was too dim. She could hear, if she listened closely, the distant sound of a man’s voice, excited, triumphant. She felt something brush her arm. Or no, that wasn’t quite right: it brushed through her arm, leaving it tingling.

  Hekla, she heard him say, barely a whisper. Focus. We begin to glimpse you. You are nearly here.

  She stayed, eyelids clenched close, willing the noises of the city to rise up around her. They wouldn’t come. Don’t open your eyes, she told herself. Don’t open your eyes.

  But, eventually, she did.

  Too Lonely, Too Wild

  Kay Chronister

  • • ∞ • •

  “And once she went to break a bough

  Of black alder.

  She strayed so far she scarcely heard

  When he called her—

  And didn’t answer—didn’t speak—

  Or return.”

  - Robert Frost, ‘The Hill Wife’

  For a while, you could go anywhere and find them. Old Mr. Miellon’s movie-star-beautiful wife in her blue plastic halo of curlers, scrubbing her cheeks with lye in the morning and milk at night. Annabelle Leahy flying down the dirt road to meet her steady after school, throat hoarse and knees scraped-up from hurrying. The new Mrs. Donahue, a traveling salesman’s city-born daughter, hammering down fence posts and wading through chicken shit.

  Grammy would yank me along before I could see much, muttering, “Protect her, Lord, from their coins and their nails.” I thought those women must be demons; I didn’t know they were in love.

  At home, she’d crack open the family Bible and read wise-woman prayers over me, consecrating, building walls. “Let my granddaughter never be a wife in this goddamn town,” she’d say, and I was so little that I recognized neither the cursing nor the curse in the words.

  When Grammy died I was twelve. I had no mother and no father but I did have seventeen dollars and my great-grandmother’s stiff husk of a wedding dress and the family Bible, which waited ten years in a carpetbag for the day that Mr. Rishner married me.

  *

  Some folks said Mr. Rishner once had a crop yield so rich that he still hid sacks of gold beneath his bed. Others said he was a water witch and he’d dowsed for his fortune in the swamp with a forked stick. You could see his house tucked into the hills all the way from town, a hard-glinting white bead inside a yellow-gray wall of wheat.

  Our courtship was maybe fifteen words long. He said no more to me than he said to anyone else and I said more than enough for us both, which wasn’t much at all. We both knew what we were aiming for. I wanted to climb up into the hills and disappear from the eyes of everyone who knew I didn’t inherit Grammy’s witching power. And he wanted a wife. What did any man want?

  We were as dead silent married as we’d been courting. He left for the fields before sunup. I stayed inside the white house, shucked more beans and salted more pork than we could hope to eat, and when I had done with that, scrubbed everything twice. If he still wasn’t home by then, I’d go out to the porch, and smoke a cigarette and shut my eyes and listen to the longspurs sing so I could hear something besides quiet swelling in my head to noise.

  After he came home, we’d sit on the stoop and watch the sky arrange and rearrange all its layers of smoke-colored fleece while birds fussed in the dying trees. In November, when the dark came before dinner did, the last longspur flew away, and something collapsed inside me.

  “Wish they wouldn’t go,” I said, and that was the closest I’d gotten to wanting or not wanting anything since the ring went on my finger. “Too quiet up here.”

  “They don’t miss you,” he said. “Waste of time, missing them.”

  I nodded.

  “You’d feel better with a baby,” he said.

  We’d been trying for months already by then. I chewed raspberry leaves and slept underneath a quilt I’d sewn out of old clothes because that’s what Grammy used to say a woman should do, but nothing worked
for me.

  “I know,” I said.

  He laced his fingers across my stomach so his arms contained me. I used to think in the middle of nowhere you couldn’t help but spread yourself out, but now I knew that really walls didn’t have to be wood or stone, they could be arms, they could be anything that held the world out and your body in.

  *

  They stared when we went to town, and I felt sick thinking what we looked like to them. Wasted witchery in my blood and muddy water in his. We both needed to account for something. He didn’t see their eyes or didn’t care. At the post office, he shuffled a stack of letters into my lap, then lifted a dappled coon hound into the truck bed and told me its name was Baby.

  I couldn’t figure out if the dog was a cruelty or a kindness, so I said thank you and kept my stinging eyes on the back of his envelopes. I didn’t recognize the names or cities on the return addresses. No one here was accustomed to getting much mail from outside town.

  He’d gotten the feed store to order a dress for me from a catalog, gliding silk colored like blood. I was a fountain inside it. I slipped it down over my underwear in the supply room and stepped out to show him. He smiled without showing his teeth, said, “You have to wear it for me,” and I heard myself say, “Of course.” When I pulled the dress back over my head, I found a broken old Confederate coin sewn into the neckline, stitched so tight I couldn’t yank it loose.

  “You have to wear it for me,” he said again, as we drove home through the nodding foothills darkness. “Make it your every day.”

  “I can’t wash it,” I said.

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  When we came home, the white house felt so small inside the hills that I hated to close myself up inside. We’d been gone so many hours; I had the notion some other woman took up living there while I was away. I was trespassing on her property, resting my hand on her husband’s knee. She was what I was inside the walls, and if I opened the door she would be there waiting to become me. She pulled aside the curtain in the front window and I saw her: big scared eyes, thin hair yanked back from her forehead, everyday calico drab and heavy.

  I knew already that he couldn’t see the woman. Mr. Rishner had only one wife.

  “I don’t wanna go in.”

  He nodded his head. I had a feeling like he didn’t either. He put the key in the lock and turned it fast, getting the worst over with. Then he nudged the door open with the side of his boot. The house shuddered and creaked as the wind passed through. “Sometimes the crows break in,” he said. “We’ll send Baby.”

  “No,” I said. “Let him stay.” I had pictures in my head that I didn’t like of what might happen to the hound if he went inside alone.

  He shrugged. “Dog’s gotta earn his feed sometime.”

  “He doesn’t,” I said.

  The three of us sat on the stoop for a while, Baby’s head resting on his foot.

  “I want to see your dress,” he said.

  “You wanna see it now?” With the door open, I didn’t say, when she could see? I couldn’t see her face in the window anymore. Inside the house was dead dark. We were wasting warmth, holding the door open in the middle of December, but neither of us was going to say so to the other. She was still there; how could we shut the door until she went?

  I dropped my coat first, then my shoes, then the rest into a pile in the snow. He held the dress up against me like he was measuring the size, then I bent my neck and he slipped it over my head. When the coin brushed my back, I shivered.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said, so we did.

  *

  For a couple years after Grammy died, I saw more of them: the wives who shouldn’t have stayed, but did. One was Miss Angie, who received me in Grammy’s will at least partwise because she was the only other granny witch in town. Unlike Grammy, she had a husband who she had to hide everything from, making like all her patients were friends come to quilt or bake. She said he wouldn’t approve of what she did, but she wouldn’t say why. For the years I lived under her roof, she did nothing but ask me to show her our family Bible.

  “I think there’s something your grammy wanted me to see,” Miss Angie would say, and I’d say maybe so, but I never let her see the Bible, because that book wasn’t supposed to leave our household even if that household was only made up of me.

  Still she held me back from school, sat me down at her table while she mended sickness like I was a special charm that helped the healing. I watched what she did, when the TV wasn’t on something good. Folks came for snakebites and nightmares and something called female troubles but most often they came to get a love potion. Miss Angie sold glass vials with ash and oxblood inside and no one ever came back complaining, but when we were alone she told me that no bottle of dirt ever made anyone fall in love.

  “Do you know how to really do it?” I said once, doubtless thinking on my prospects at some junior high school dance.

  “I wouldn’t do it if I could,” she said, looking insulted. “I wouldn’t wish that curse on anybody, and I hope you wouldn’t neither.”

  I was fourteen and had no notion of why anybody wouldn’t want to fall in love, except I knew Mrs. Miellon was getting so thin and so pale she looked like death with a smile on, and Annabelle Leahy never could come and cheer at football games anymore, and everyone whispered about Mrs. Donahue having some sort of nervous breakdown at the feed store, screaming that she wanted to go home and she did not mean to Mr. Donahue’s house.

  “Your grammy,” Miss Angie said, “she knew a way to undo it.”

  I had stubborn, unreasonable feelings about that Bible, and all Miss Angie’s asking only made those feelings stronger. I didn’t care what she was looking for and I didn’t care what Grammy’s witchery could have done for her, because thinking on the things Grammy had done just reminded me of all I couldn’t do. “Sorry,” I’d say, sure and even, like I didn’t know the word was crushing her slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  Around the time I turned fifteen, Miss Angie lost patience with me and said I shouldn’t come home anymore if I wasn’t going to help her out. I remember she was bruise-faced that day, and I felt sorry and I felt furious but mostly I felt a confused sort of uncomfortable, like I didn’t want to see so much of her. I got to feeling glad that Grammy had hid me from so much, and missing the days when anyone thought about what I should or shouldn’t see.

  *

  The baby sat inside of me for three months, and then died. I didn’t tell Mr. Rishner, but I told the other woman sometimes, catching her eye in the ice-covered pond or the dirty window to whisper what I couldn’t say at the dinner table. She had such mean eyes, and she never felt sorry for me, but she soaked up my words without argument. When he shut the front door and went off with Baby at his heels, she stayed to scrape clean the breakfast plates and mop the floor, her movements tracing mine until we didn’t know the ends of each other.

  When we got dressed, she fought me tooth and limb to wear the dingy calico. Sometimes I won and we wore the red silk; sometimes I didn’t. Fact is, there wasn’t room for both of us to get what we wanted. There was hardly room for one. The white house was shrinking, squeezing tight until I was pulp and dead broken seeds. I felt my head bumping the ceiling sometimes, my feet pushing through the floorboards into the foundation. The hallway was a crawlspace; the bedroom was a snake hole. Deep in the folds of my quilt, I wished to hibernate the winter through. I scarcely slept at all.

  There was a dream that came whenever my eyes shut too long: her dream, not mine, but I dreamt it still because we shared everything. The bedroom walls were tree trunks, the sheets were wet black earth, my body was a thorn bush. Mr. Rishner would roll across the bed so he was far from me and then a cold damp arm would curl round my neck. If I turned my head I found the window open, a tree reaching inside with its trunk hunched over to wrap needle-covered branches around my shoulders, my waist, my thighs. Shame woke me quicker than fear and kept me awake, still and too hot beneath the
covers, until she ran from me laughing and I dropped back into the dream again.

  I covered the window with curtains, then a couple of two-by-fours when the curtains started showing up in the dream. Mr. Rishner came home with the dog, traced the boards with his fingertips admiringly, said, “Nothing gets in or out here, does it?” I thought I believed him.

  I found a sprig of alder under my pillow one night and snuck out after he fell asleep to bury it beneath the porch. The night after, I found a whole branch dropping needles in the bedsheets. I said to myself: you can let your head get crowded and you can let your house cramp up, but you can’t lose control of your marriage bed. So I dug Grammy’s carpetbag out of the closet and set the family Bible on the table. Dust flumed out, cigarette smoke, years-old kitchen smells. Grammy wrote the rules of her world in tiny tight-packed cursive across the title pages of the Biblical books. Exodus said that if you break a coin and sew one half into your beloved’s clothes, they will have to love you back. Ezekiel said to kill a witch, carve a heart in a tree and hammer a nail in a little further each day for a week.

  *

  She fought me when I put on my boots and opened the front door. We both knew the black alder leaning sideways into the bedroom window. For six days I carved her heart in the bark and hammered my nail inside, then went to the outhouse and emptied my guts. The sicker I got, the less I saw of her and the happier Mr. Rishner was with me. He came home at night whistling, kissed my cheek when I met him at the door. He’d open a Farmer’s Almanac on the table and tell me how the stars aligned, and I’d simmer a pot of something I couldn’t keep down.