The moon came up. It reflected in the pool, and Sal watched the sundews thrash and dance in a way that they don’t do by daylight. Tiny little things they were, but they moved more like mice than plants, and they leaned toward Elizabeth Gray.
She was still watching the sundews when Elizabeth came up behind her with the big hog-killing knife and slit her throat from ear to ear.
Sal woke up with a scream and a gasp, in a body that wasn’t hers.
She was hung upside down by her heels, and her whole body bucked when she moved and threw her sideways. It turned out to be a blessing, because she’d been hung up with a hook through her legs and she would have been hard pressed to free herself, but the convulsion knocked her right off the hook and onto the floor.
It was a fair bit of luck, witch’s luck, but she was in no position to appreciate it.
It hurt.
It hurt more than anything ever had, more than she thought anything ever could. She’d been dead and now she was alive, and bodies don’t much like that. When you’re dead, all your muscles go limp, even the little ones that hold tense their entire lives. They didn’t take kindly to being told to wake up and work again.
Her heart was the worst. Her heart tried to beat and there was stuff inside it that didn’t want to move. It folded up like a fist around a knife blade and sprang open again.
Sal would have given her hope of heaven to stop that heart from beating, but the magic was in it now and wouldn’t let it rest. It squeezed and opened, squeezed and opened, and inside the clotted heart, the blood broke up like ice on a river and began to flow again.
She had no idea how long she laid on the ground. It could have been hours. It felt like her entire life. But the dead body around her came back to life, slow as slow, and finally she opened her eyes and realized she was in the body of the dead razorback hog.
Ma’am? said a tiny little voice. That you?
If she’d been human, she would have cried, but hogs don’t. She made a little whimpering squealing sound and scraped her trotters along the floorboards.
“Rawhead?” (It wasn’t quite talking aloud, but he got the sense of it.)
Yes, ma’am. What happened?
“Think we’ve been dead, hon.” Sal considered. “Well, you’ve been dead, and my body probably ain’t alive if Elizabeth Gray did proper work with the knife.”
She scrabbled her feet again, trying to get up.
Let me, said Rawhead, and the ungainly body was suddenly graceful, rolling to its feet and shaking all over.
“So that’s the trick of it,” said Sal. “Lord. Not used to being down here on four legs.”
It’s easier than two.
It did seem to be. Her vision wasn’t so good, but things smelled strong, and the smells sort of worked with her eyes in a way she hadn’t expected.
“We’re in a barn, aren’t we?”
Think so, ma’am. Rawhead turned in a circle and then looked up.
There were three dead hogs hanging from hooks overhead, their throats opened up to drain into a gutter in the floor. A fourth hook hung empty.
“Huh!” Sal stared at them. “Surprised there was any blood left in us. Must be the magic. I’ll give her this, Elizabeth Gray’s no slouch with the knife.”
Those three were my friends, said Rawhead. We ran around the mountain together.
“I’m sorry,” said Sal, suddenly shamed. “I didn’t think. I’m sorry for your friends.”
It’s all right. They’ll go on. We all go on. He dropped her—their—head, startling Sal again. I’ll miss them.
There was nothing that a human could add to that eulogy. She didn’t try.
The hog’s body was huge and powerful. Sal tried moving it, walking unsteadily toward the door.
It was exhausting. It moved more or less as she asked—it worked better if she didn’t concentrate too much on how the legs were moving—but the beating of their dead heart did nothing to revive her.
She got them around the corner of the barn. It was dim and noisy with crickets. She could smell turned earth and blood.
Their legs started to shake, and she had to sit down.
This was madness, she thought, trying to keep her thoughts away from Rawhead and not sure if she was succeeding. I’ve trapped us both in this dead body, and for what? Revenge?
A witch should have known better. Now what? Even if I kill that bastard hunter, what then? Lay down and rot until there’s not enough left of the body to hold us here?
It was not a pleasant thought. Even less pleasant was the thought that the hog’s body might rot away and their souls would be left chained to its bones.
Witches generally feel that there’s plenty of work to be done here and now, but I never met one that wasn’t secretly hoping to put their feet up for a while in the afterlife.
Now, though …
Poor sort of friend I am. Silas only killed his body, but I may have made him into a ghost.
You’re a good friend, ma’am, said Rawhead staunchly. Sal realized that he’d been listening to her think the whole time. It would have been embarrassing if he was anybody else. She scuffled their trotters in the dirt.
“Did I hold you back from heaven, Rawhead?”
Doesn’t work like that for us, ma’am. We just go on to the next thing.
“What’s the next thing?” asked Sal. She was exhausted and felt like dying again.
Oh, you know. We go around again. Think I was going to be a bird this time, said Rawhead. All curled up in an egg, with someone tap-tap-tapping on my shell. I like being a bird. It’s good to fly.
Sal wished that she could weep. Their mouth gaped open in distress. “What happened to that bird?”
Won’t hatch, I guess. It happens, ma’am. Don’t worry. It was hard to comfort herself in only one body. Hogs would normally go shoulder to shoulder, lean on one another, but with only one body between them, Rawhead had to settle for leaning against the barn wall and rubbing their jowls against their forelegs. I don’t mind coming back. We’ll die again sooner or later, and I’ll be a different bird.
He paused and added generously, You can come be a bird with me if you like, ma’am. I wouldn’t mind.
Humans are different from hogs in that kindness can break their hearts. Sal moaned through the dead razorback’s throat.
“What the hell is that racket?” yelled a voice from inside the barn.
The boar’s body jerked itself up and made a short bark of surprise before Sal quite realized what she was doing.
It was Paul Silas. Well, who else would it be?
“Damnit,” she muttered, and “Damnit!” said Silas. She heard the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. It was practically under her ear, on the other side of the wall.
Rawhead wisely took over at this point, backing them into the thicket of dog fennel and Queen Anne’s lace that surrounded the barn. A beam of light came out of the barn, jangling crazily as the hunter carried the lantern. Sal saw the green gleam of spider eyes in the grass as the light moved over it, and a red flash from a whippoorwill blinking in the ditch.
“Who’s there?” shouted Silas. “Who’s sneaking around my—ah, goddamn!”
“Found we were gone,” said Sal silently.
Rawhead sank more deeply into the thicket. The light went flashing by, through the cracks between boards, and lit up the pebbles at the dead hog’s feet.
Silas’s footsteps paused by the empty hook, and then he walked to the mouth of the barn. The whippoorwill flew up and away into the trees.
“You a bear?” asked Silas. “You a bear out there, taking my meat? Or you a man?” He turned in a circle, and Sal saw the rifle outlined against the lantern light.
There’s a whole story people tell when they’re telling the story of Rawhead and Sal. It’s a little bit like Little Red Riding Hood—the hunter says, “My, what big eyes you got!” And Rawhead supposedly says, “The better to see your grave.” And the hunter says, “What a bushy tail you got.�
� And Rawhead says, “The better to sweep your grave.”
Well, a talking hog is one thing, but I never heard of a hog with a bushy tail. They say he took it off a dead raccoon, but if you can tell me why a boar would need a rotten raccoon tail to kill someone with, I’d dearly love to hear it.
No, what happened was that Silas stood in the circle of lantern light, holding his gun, looking for a bear or a thief, and Sal looked at him and heard his whining voice, and she remembered why she was mad.
That bastard killed Rawhead. He’d killed Rawhead’s friends. In a roundabout way, he’d killed Sal herself.
And Sal remembered other things—the way Silas had treated a woman living alone, the way he’d come sniffing around like a dog after a bone, offering charity and more than charity, even when she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in the likes of him. She remembered a couple conversations on the porch that she’d rather not have had.
She thought of how those conversations might have gone if she’d been only a woman alone and not a witch. She remembered how they’d almost gone anyway, and a couple of nights spent with the door barred and her own rifle across her lap.
“I believe that man needs killing, Rawhead,” she said.
Yes, ma’am, said Rawhead.
He moved.
The dead heart hammered in their chest, and Sal threw herself on the pain and took it all. When Rawhead charged, he was as quick on his hooves as a living razorback, and that is very quick indeed.
Silas heard the charge and turned. He got the gun halfway to his shoulder and fired.
The impact knocked the dead boar back a step—but only a step. He did not get time for another shot.
Their jaws closed over his thigh. Silas screamed, but not for very long. Humans die easy compared to hogs.
And then there was quiet.
After awhile the crickets started in again. The fireflies spread themselves out under the trees. The lantern guttered and went out.
Sal sighed. She felt ancient. The bullet in the dead boar’s neck burned and she had no way to pick it out.
“Well,” she said. “Well. I guess that’s that.”
Yes, ma’am.
The story that got around was a ghost story, so there’s a proper ghost story end to it. They say Rawhead still rides around on the hunter’s horse, and sometimes his head comes off and he holds it up to scare people with. They say he’s still haunting these hills to this day, one more leftover thing from the old days, like the foundations you find in the woods sometimes, or the bits of barbed wire that turned up rusted in the fields.
But it wasn’t like that, not in the end.
Sal and Rawhead walked. They walked clear back to her house, and that was a long and weary way. Rawhead heaved that dead body up on the porch for the last time and laid it down on the boards.
“Well,” said Sal. She didn’t have any regrets about Silas. She was so tired that regret couldn’t get much foothold. It was more like a list in her head, checking off boxes—die, tick, take revenge, tick, come home, tick.
She felt like she was seeing the world from a long way away. Only Rawhead’s voice was clear in her mind, as if he was standing right at her shoulder. “I … I don’t know what to do now.”
Come with me, suggested Rawhead. We’ll go be birds together.
It sounded good to Sal.
They died again, on the porch. Rawhead knew the way. The dead heart, which had beaten so faithfully for so long, shuddered into stillness.
Madeline found the body the next day, and she knew enough about witches to cry over it. But Sal and Rawhead were long gone.
There’s people who say that witches don’t go to heaven. That sort of person acts like they’re in charge of who goes in and out, though, and I don’t know if God holds with that sort of thing. Maybe Sal did, maybe she didn’t. It’s not for me to say.
But me, I like to think that they found themselves curled up warm in an egg together, to sleep and dream of flying.
THE DRYAD'S SHOE
Author’s Note: Tufted titmice are exclusively North American birds. The geography of Hannah’s country is of questionable archetype.
Once upon a time, in a land near and far away, there was a girl whose mother died when she was young.
Her mother had been merry and loving and devoted, but these things were no proof against fever. She died and was buried in a grave at the edge of the forest, past the garden gate.
In the way of young children, the girl (who was named Hannah) mourned for her mother and then forgot her. She visited the grave dutifully with her father, but her attention strayed more and more often to the garden fence, to the tall poles of beans and the thin green tentacles of the onions.
She loved the garden, which her mother had tended, and which was now under the care of an old man from the village. He showed her how to chit out fat nasturtium seeds and the importance of soaking peas before planting, how to prepare a bed with well-rotted leaves and break up the soil so that the plants could slip their slender roots inside it. He showed her how to keep a hive of bees without being stung too often—for a beehive was, in that time, considered a vital part of any garden—and when she did get stung, the gardener put dock leaves on it and patted her shoulder until the sniffles went away.
It was perhaps not a normal occupation for a young lady of moderate birth, but Hannah’s father had little to say about it. He had little to say about anything since his wife had died. Hannah was ten years old before she realized that her friend’s name was not simply ”the Gardener,” because her father never spoke to him.
The garden kept them well fed and Hannah was very proud on the days when the cook used her beets and her beans and her cucumbers to feed the household.
On her eleventh birthday, a bird flew down and landed atop a beanpole in front of her. The bird was gray above and white below, with a fine dark eye, no different than the other birds that flocked to the garden in the morning.
“Woe!” cried the bird. “Woe, child, what a state you’ve come to!”
Your mother’s dead,
Your hands are dirty,
Your father’s away—
Hannah picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it underhand at the bird, who dove out of the way.
It eyed her balefully, then settled back atop the beanpole, smoothing down its feathers.
“That wasn’t very nice,” said the bird.
“You started it,” said Hannah. “It’s not very polite to go around reminding people that their mothers are dead. And my hands are dirty because I’ve been thinning carrots, thank you very much.”
The bird had the grace to look ashamed of itself. “It’s the magic,” it said. “It, um, comes over you. No offense was intended.”
Hannah dusted off her hands. “I thought you might be magic,” she said, “because you’re talking, and birds don’t, generally. But then I thought maybe you were a parrot, and I’ve heard that parrots can talk.”
“I’m not a parrot,” sighed the bird. “Don’t I wish! Parrots are gloriously colored and they live halfway to forever. No, I’m only an enchanted titmouse, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sure you’re as good as any parrot,” said Hannah, who was basically tender hearted toward animals when they weren’t insulting her.
The titmouse preened a little. “Well,” he said (Hannah was nearly sure that it was a he) “I have been enchanted. It’s a great honor, if you’re a bird.”
“Who enchanted you?”
The titmouse stood on one foot and waved his other one toward the garden gate. “A mother’s love,” he said. “Also the tree just behind the grave, which is inhabited by a particularly sentimental dryad.”
“Can you get seeds from a dryad tree?” asked Hannah, with professional interest.
“No,” said the titmouse shortly. “They get annoyed if you ask. It’s very personal for them.”
“Oh, well.” Hannah sat down on the edge of one of the beds. “What’s it like to be enchanted?�
�
“It’s marvelous,” said the titmouse. “You’re very focused all the time when you’re a bird, you know. Here’s a seed, there’s a seed, this is my seed, give me back my seed.” He fluffed up his feathers. “But when you’re enchanted, all of a sudden you can see everything. Hello, independent cognition! It’s a transcendent experience. Pity it doesn’t last long.”
Hannah had understood perhaps one word in three of that, but said politely, “It doesn’t last?”
“No,” said the bird sadly. “Only until my message is delivered. Would you mind? It’s very important to the dryad.”
“All right,” said Hannah. “But no more making fun of my hands or talking about my mother.”
“Mmm,” said the bird.
“And no poetry!”
The bird lowered his crest a little. “Fine…fine…”
He gazed at the sky. Hannah went back to thinning carrots.
“All right,” said the bird finally. “How’s this? Your father’s about to bring home a new wife.”
“Yes?”
The titmouse paused, nonplussed. “You don’t seem bothered.”
“Well, it’s not like I have to marry her. And the cook says it’s about time he remarried and it does nobody good to keep moping about.”
“Mmm,” said the bird again. “You may find, I expect, that it’s a little more tricky than that. Humans stay in the nest an awfully long time. But anyway. New wife, woe is you—she’ll be unkind and treat you poorly.”
Hannah scowled. “I’ll put nettles in her bed.”
“I can see,” said the bird gravely, “that you are not without defenses. But should she treat you too abominably, you must go to the tree that grows behind your mother’s grave and shed three tears and say—oh, this bit’s poetry.”
Hannah sighed. “All right, if you must.”
The titmouse fluffed out his breast and sang:
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 10
