Hag

by Kathleen Kaufman

  It was a perfect day. The leaves were a combination of red and gold and they crunched under Alice’s feet. The sky was a perfect, cloudless blue with just the right amount of bite to the air. Alice looked at the pile of money in her hand. Her mother had given her enough for eggs, milk, and even a sweet. Alice carefully placed the bills and coins in the pocket of her jumper and set off down the sidewalk. The corner market was only a block away, but it was a welcome adventure. Mother worried about the cars; she worried Alice and Arthur would wander into the street without looking. She worried that the cars themselves would jump right up onto the sidewalk and run them down. She worried that the cars would burst straight into flames as they drove and Alice would be caught in the chaos. Alice didn’t know much about how cars worked, but she was pretty sure the sidewalk-and-fire bit was something of a worthless worry. As for the street, she was always careful, more so when Arthur walked with her—as they did every morning for school.

  Alice had been right about the sweet. She bought a penny licorice and walked slowly back, the grocery sack under her arm. She played a game where she tried to step on as many leaves as possible. An older woman who reminded her of Miss Kinnear from the lane in Glasgow waved at her from her front porch. The house was painted a frosty pink and reminded Alice of a fluffy cake. The old woman called Alice “Scottish Girl” and liked to pinch her cheeks. Alice was rather glad she was too far away to do it now; the day had been perfect so far and that would have been an unwelcome interruption. She waved back and kept to the course of crushing each red-and-gold leaf under her new Mary Jane school shoes. She was nearly at the corner, where it would be time to pay more attention and stop playing, when she heard the screech of tires and a long, thin scream that made Alice drop both the remaining licorice and the grocery bag. In front of her, a child with a wool cap and matching vest was lying in a growing pool of blood. A bicycle lay twisted in a nearly unrecognizable puzzle a few yards away. A farmer’s truck, older than any of the cars she usually saw in this neighborhood, was turned sideways, blocking the street. An old man lay slumped over the steering wheel, blood leaking from his bald head onto the rusted paint of the truck.

  Alice screamed and stared at the scene. She didn’t know what to do, and the boy was dead; she knew it to be so. Her legs were frozen to the spot, and she didn’t know what the right thing to do was. The boy was dead, and in that moment she saw his whole path as it had been laid out. He was on his way with the daily papers; his job was to throw them onto the porches and steps of all the houses. He was to go home straight after and give his father the money he earned that day straight away. Alice imagined that the boy would do this for many years, and one day he would leave. He would take a train to a city far away that Alice didn’t know, but the towers shot into the sky, and as many cars as she saw here, there were a million more there. The boy wanted to write stories, and he would be successful after a time. His stories would be handed to all the schoolchildren and they would be made to read them. He was to die an old man, alone but happy, surrounded by the things that had given him comfort in his life: an old pipe that had belonged to his father, a stack of books with notes upon notes written in the sides, a pillow his mother had sewn for him as a child, a hand-stitched train as the border. He had an equally old cat who lay on his chest in the end. Alice could feel the grumbling purr fill the man’s chest, and he was glad for his life.

  But that would never happen now. The boy lay in the street, blood already starting to clot in places and his skin taking on a greyish tint. Alice screamed and felt her stomach drop out from under her. When she opened her eyes, the woman from the fluffy pink cake house was looming over her. Others were there too, drawn from their houses by the commotion.

  “Scottish Girl!” the old woman snapped. “What’s all this about? Are you hurt?” She looked around at the others. “Heard her carrying on, and then she just passed clean out. Probably gave herself a good goose egg on the back of her head.”

  Alice looked around wildly. Why were they all staring at her? The boy was dead, the old man in the truck—why wasn’t anyone helping them? She sat up, feeling the blood rush to her head, nearly making her faint again. “The boy! He’s dead! I know he is! The truck, he was hit on his bicycle! I saw it all!”

  “Hush, child.” The old woman said a bit more gently than before. “There’s nothing. You must have thought you saw something, but look, child, there’s nothing.”

  Alice looked at the street where the blood and twisted metal had just been. It was empty of cars or boys. Red and gold leaves swirled in the breeze. The neighbors who had come out to look slowly returned to their houses. The old woman helped Alice to her feet and handed her the grocery bag.

  “Oh, look there, you’ve gone and smashed all your eggs. Your mother will have your head. Come with me, I’ll give you a few of mine. Better than going home empty-handed.” With that, the old woman took Alice’s hand and pulled her back down the sidewalk to the fluffy pink cake house.

  Afterward, Alice walked more somberly, a half dozen of the old woman’s eggs in her grocery bag. She played out what she had seen. It was so real, but it couldn’t have been, could it? The boy was still on that corner, and every act was a reminder of what was supposed to happen. Alice didn’t understand why what was supposed to happen wasn’t what really happened, or how she knew the difference.

  Later that evening, the meringue cake eaten and a new pair of woolen socks and matching sweater unwrapped, she lay in her bed. She wondered where the boy was now. She hadn’t spoken of the incident to Mum or Aunt Polly. She had hugged Arthur extra hard before he went to bed, and Mum had looked at her oddly but not commented on it. Where did you go when your path was interrupted? Were you destined to play out the error for all eternity? At church, they spoke of the eternity of the spirit. Alice shivered with horror at the thought of reliving such an ill-gotten death for all time.

  THE LOST VILLAGE MIGHT have slipped from view altogether had it not been for a very small boy with dishwater-dull hair. On the solstice night, when the grown ones were toasting the turning of the season and the night was as long as it ever would be, the little boy took off toward the lost village on a dare. The other boys had mocked him; he hadn’t seen a candle, they all said, he was a liar and he made up stories. The little boy, in a mixture of bravery and stifled tears, had stared them all down and set off in the summer twilight. The other boys hooted and called and eventually followed. A peeping courage overtaking them, they followed the wee boy through the brush and across the prickly field grass, all the way to the dirt path that led into the village. Once there they held back, watching and waiting with their torments and insults. He hadn’t seen anything, they cried after him; he was a baby, they jeered, as the little boy with the dishwater-dull hair continued on, determined to prove them wrong.

  But the very little boy with the dishwater hair didn’t stop at the path on that solstice night. The little boy stepped onto the walkway and marched into town on shaking legs. He looked back as he entered the arch that signaled the start of the main stretch of what had been shops and merchants. The boys would later say he said a word to them, or maybe a phrase. But the wind had picked up and they couldn’t hear. In their memory he mouthed a name, but not any name they knew—a curse.

  Cailleach.

  It hadn’t made sense, but when they told the grown ones back home in a fit of panic and fear, the grown ones’ faces had turned pale. That was the end of the game, until, of course, it began again as memories faded.

  ALICE IS IN QUITE a lot of trouble. The new flannel pajamas that Mum gave her for Christmas are not in the drawer where she had placed them so carefully just a few hours earlier. She received two presents that year: a small glass jar of bath beads that smelled like vanilla and honey, and the red-and-green flannel pajamas. She knew Mum was in no position to give her anything that year and hadn’t expected the gift, but there it had been anyhow, wrapped in cheerful green tissue paper with curling ribbons falling off the side. A
lice had squealed and hugged them to her chest.

  The winter nights were cold and the new house was drafty. Mum said it would get better as they worked on the nooks and crannies, but for now the wind whistled in through the window frames and under the crooked doors. Alice and Arthur had one room, Mum another, and Aunt Polly the third. There was a long kitchen with two counters and electric plugs and a brand-new electric stove. A dark wood table flanked the kitchen, big enough for everyone to sit at and look out over the never-ending woods that served as a backyard. If you hiked far enough back, there was a valley where wild raspberry bushes grew. Mum said Alice was liable to get eaten alive by the bears if she insisted on going back there alone. Alice wasn’t worried, though; bears were skittish creatures, and she made sure not to linger when she saw their prints.

  Mum and Aunt Polly talked about getting a television set, and Alice thought it would be marvelously exciting. So far, though, they were stuck with the radio, but at the local library sale Mum had acquired a set of tapes of a radio show about the Shadow. “Only the Shadow knows,” it would start, and Alice would giggle madly and pull Arthur closer when he hid his eyes.

  At night, they would sit on the back porch with its sturdy pine rail and look up at the stars. Alice wondered if there were a bigger place on the entire earth than this, and certainly none as lucky. At times, she would feel herself lost in the million specks of light, her soul spread out among the night sky. A bit away in the woods, a neighbor man with an accent that reminded Alice of Glasgow had rolled a sizeable boulder and two tree stumps together, forming a tea table of sorts. Alice had laughed when she saw it and spent many afternoons sitting on the smooth tree stump, her favorite stuffed bear, Angus, sitting across from her. She was too old for such nonsense, she knew, soon to be a teenager, but here in the shade of the pine trees no one could see and no one cared.

  She could hear Mum playing the piano from the tree-trunk tea table. Mum tutored the neighborhood children and was planting a garden like the one she had had in Glasgow. The idea was that she could make her lotions and oils and sell them the same way she’d done back in Scotland. Aunt Polly taught the children at the primary school and kept the books at the church.

  Alice kept careful track of such things. This house was a marvel, a shell of a cabin when Mum and Aunt Polly had bought it. It had sat empty for so long that it was in dire need of repairs, but a crew of men from the neighborhood were soon sawing and hammering away, and eventually the cracks in the walls were sealed and the floor was smooth and even. Alice and Arthur’s room had two small windows and room for two twin beds. Alice understood what this meant to her Mum and aunt. It was a place that no one could ever take from them. There was no landlord, no one to turn them out or tell them they couldn’t have a dog. It was a chance to rebuild what they had left behind in Glasgow. Although she and Arthur were, of course, left out of this discussion, Alice understood that it had taken everything they had to buy this bit of land in the mountains outside Colorado Springs, nestled at the base of Pike’s Peak. The house was a work in progress; for a time, the water hadn’t been running properly, so she and Arthur had been responsible for dragging up buckets of water from the well at the base of the hill out back so the toilet would flush properly. That issue fixed, the electric power continued to be problematic, and they frequently sat in the light of lanterns and candles and ate cold beef and apples for dinner.

  Everything considered, Alice had not expected to receive the pajamas, and now they were gone. She knew exactly where she had put them, and it was no use to question Arthur: he was long asleep, his face pale and his breathing raspy. Mum had been too worried about him to ask Alice why she was wearing her old tattered nightdress. Alice lay still in her bed, listening to his wheezing breath. She could see his path and pushed it back, back, back to the bottom-most part of her head. Knowing things was terrible. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to hear the spirits. It didn’t take too terribly long before she heard soft giggling in the hallway and a conversation just out of range to articulate the words. Alice winced as footsteps ran up and down the hall, knuckles rapping the wall as it went, the sound so loud she was sure it would wake up the entire house. It never did, though; she seemed to be the only one who could hear such things. Mum told her the spirits chose with whom they wanted to speak, and she shouldn’t trust everything they said. Alice knew that well enough, but they rarely ever spoke to her directly: most of the time they danced in and out of the sides of her vision, reminding her of things and moving odds and ends around.

  Usually it was harmless, like the time Mum’s car keys had ended up in the shower stall back in Aunt Polly’s tiny bathroom. The adults had all shot fire at Alice and Arthur over the missing keys, and Arthur had cried. But Alice knew better. It wasn’t they who moved things around, and Arthur wasn’t quite so good at not caring if he got blamed.

  The pajamas were a legitimate problem, though; car keys were one thing, but her brand-new Christmas pajamas were another. Mum had spent the sum of two weeks’ science tutoring on them. Alice knew because she had heard her and Aunt Polly talking at the kitchen table when they thought everyone was asleep. Mum felt guilty that Alice had taken on so much, especially with Arthur. He needed his medicine at certain times, and it was Alice’s job to make sure that he took it and then had a good nap. He needed to eat a bit when he woke up, and Alice took care that he had a bit of toast or an apple if there were any to have. Alice wouldn’t allow herself to look too closely at his path, even though it glowed bright as the stars at night. Some things don’t need to be acknowledged to be true.

  THERE’S A PRICE FOR the seeing: that was what the grown ones told the boys. It was an expression that meant nothing and eventually made a strange sort of sense. They had long forgotten about the wee boy with the dishwater-dull hair, who would be a grown one himself by now. No one remembered the boy, and if they did, they did not speak of it. A nightmare was all it was. But all the same, those who had a memory to lose warned the children against exploring so far from home. Nothing good will come of it, and for a time the children believed them. The stink of disease and death hung over the countryside. No one spoke of the towns, stricken by cholera or the plague, that had crumbled to the ground from neglect, the stone houses chipping away from disuse, the wood rotting in the damp. No one spoke of the little village, deep on the end of the lowland heath that stood untouched and utterly alone.

  At night, they whispered stories to the children about the Cailleach who lived in the crags and rocks. When the winds whipped the sea to the shore and the rain fell so hard that it was liable to knock a man off his feet, they muttered about the storm hag and left tiny dishes of salt on the window frames. When it came time to harvest the fall crops, the children giggled at the rough corn dollies made from sheaves of grain and left in the field at the end of the last day of the fall harvest. The grown ones shuddered to be the last finished, as that unfortunate soul took on the care of the Cailleach for the winter. It would be their duty to leave a bit of grain or salt, a bit of broth or dried meat. They would move the carved rune stones away from the entrance to the cave overlooking the glen and move them back into place on the first day of summer. They would not forget, or else the crops would die and spring lambs would be stillborn. Children would wander into the mist and get lost among the wood folk; newborns would shrivel and die in their mother’s arms. So while the children laughed and played at twisting the rough stalks of grain into grotesque figures, the grown ones watched the sun’s position in the sky and hoped they were not the last one left in the field.

  ALICE IS GETTING MARRIED. What had started as a punch line to an argument had turned into a call to the community chapel to see about open dates and an appointment with the woman down the street who made the flower arrangements for the baptisms and funerals. Alice felt her whole body turning steadily to ice with each plan made and each phone call placed. Mum stormed about the house as though the very walls were to blame. Aunt Polly had a bottle of whiskey
hidden in her room, which made it one of many she’d had in the past year. She’d met a man a bit over a year ago, and there had been talk of a wedding, but just before they were to start the planning and the flowers and all the whatnot, he’d run off with a woman he’d met in town. The woman was fifteen years younger than Aunt Polly and most certainly a whore to hear Mum and Aunt Polly talk.

  “They’ll have to wear pink; it’s all we have. The old choir dresses can be mended but I don’t have time to dye them, so pink it will be,” Mum said into the phone, arranging the flower girls who would serve in Alice’s soon-to-be ill-gotten wedding.

  “Fine then, looks like we have the chapel for a week from Sunday. Yes, right after the service, no need to make everyone come back. We’ll arrange a potluck, it’ll save us the trouble of sending invitations out, don’t know who’d come anyhow.” Mum cast Alice a spiteful look as she said the last bit.

  The whole thing had started a week before, when Alice had been caught kissing a handsome but dim-witted blond boy behind the baseball diamond at the high school. The school principal had dragged her to the office and called Mum, who had driven surprisingly fast and picked her up. Far into the argument about what everyone would think of her, Alice had declared that it didn’t matter, she and the boy were getting married, they loved each other and no one could say otherwise. It wasn’t entirely a lie, he had proposed to her; however, Alice had laughed him off. They were still in school, and besides, this wasn’t her path, and while he was handsome, he was exceedingly dumb. As Aunt Polly was prone to say: “sharp as a bag of hammers.” Which in itself didn’t make much sense, as hammers did, indeed, have sharp bits, but Alice understood the futility of questioning idioms.