Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills

by Ardath Mayhar

  There were two of them, this time, both young girls, obviously sisters. The sound of giggling reached the swing before they came into view around the sharp bend in the lane. When they saw Old Woman waiting for them, they hushed instantly, their gray eyes going wide, their tow-heads cocking alertly.

  “You’d run away again, if you dared,” Old Woman said with satisfaction. “But you don’t dare, so come into my yard and sit on the bench. What brings you out here into the woods, so late in the evening? As if I didn’t know!”

  The taller girl, perched nervously on the bench, glanced at the short lively one. “You tell her, Charlotte!”

  The baby face scrunched up with concentration, as she cleared her throat. “At school, they told us you can see the future. Can you?” The question sounded more blunt than she had evidently intended. She looked a bit frightened.

  Old Woman sighed. “Oh, I can, for what it’s worth. Best thing God ever did for our kind was to leave us in ignorance, though. You sure and certain you want to go digging into things better left to time?”

  Charlotte giggled automatically. “We do. Oh, yes, we surely do. Which of us will marry Jim Hollander? Just tell us that, and we won’t ever have to fight about it again!”

  Old Woman sighed. How many such sap-brained questions had been asked of her over the years? How many irrelevant visions had she conjured up to answer them? If her long-term purpose hadn’t held her to her course, she would have given up this nonsense long ago.

  “I don’t do this for free, you know,” she said.

  “What do you charge?” asked the older girl, taking a coin purse from the pocket of her tight jeans. “We brought some money.”

  “I don’t charge money,” said Old Woman. “I live so far away, all alone, and I never get to town. Never see much of anybody. I ask people to run errands for me—nothing much at all. Just little things like giving messages to people.”

  The girl put the purse into her pocket. “Sure. Glad to. Just tell us what you want, and we’ll do it.”

  Old Woman wondered if this wasn’t a waste of time. Her instinct told her that he would come tonight, but she might as well be hanged for a goat as a sheep, she thought. “Tell Amos Harrington that I’m thinking about him,” she said. “Tell him I haven’t forgot, forty years or not, and that I have something for him, if he’ll come down here to see me.”

  The sisters exchanged knowing glances. They knew all about love affairs, old and young, new and ancient. So the old lady had a lover forty years ago, Old Woman could see them thinking.

  She smiled internally and said, “Come into the house. I need to stretch out, when I Vision myself. Even for a simple thing like this.... I’m not young anymore.” She sighed, rose, and led the way into her pine-log cabin that hunkered like a sleeping animal at the back of the clearing. It was already dark inside. She lit a kerosene lamp and showed the sisters where to sit while she conjured up the Vision.

  When she sat up again, she was chuckling silently, though she managed to sober her face before confronting the girls. “I hate to tell you this, young ladies, but neither of you will marry Jim. He’s already got Lennie Miller in the family way, and her Daddy will make him marry her before the year’s out. So there’s no need for you to fuss any more about him—he’s got a date with a shotgun by the end of October.”

  Charlotte jumped to her feet. “That two-timing...Helen, we’ve been wasting our time fussing and scratching and clawing, all for nothing!” She didn’t look directly at Old Woman.

  Helen, too, was on her feet. “Better to know now than to waste any more time.” She turned to Old Woman. “We’ll take your message. Maybe you’ll be luckier than we were.”

  Old Woman returned to the yard and sat in the swing. The new moon was just above the trees, riding the tender turquoise of the evening sky as the last strands of color died from the west. A whip-poor-will was fluttering his plaintive cry from the hickory, and bullfrogs, crickets, and katydids were ratcheting and creaking high and low, in every tone from soprano to bass.

  Rupe, a black shadow among the four o’clocks, raised his head, but only the rustle of the plants told her he had moved. She sat still, hidden by the chinaberry even from the pale light of the moon. To her right was the cover of the dry well, where a tumble of honeysuckle released its scent into the night air. A screech owl’s cry trembled through the wood as footsteps padded in the powdery dust of the path and Rupe growled low in his throat.

  She had left the lamp burning in the front room of the cabin, and its light made a ruddy track on the flagged path to the porch. The man passed her, silent in the swing, without knowing she was there. Even after forty years, she knew his step, and something inside her surged, hot and fierce, before it subsided into cold waiting.

  She rose, still silently, and followed as he mounted the porch and tapped on the sagging screen door. “Old Woman! Old Woman! Why do you keep sending word for me to come? Now I have, and you can quit pestering me for something that was done with forty years ago. Something nobody but you faulted me for. Old Woman! Are you there?”

  He opened the screen and stepped inside. “You here? You all right? Old folks got no business living alone, away out at the back of beyond!”

  He moved farther into the room, and she slipped up the porch and into the house. “I’m here, Amos. Right here, where I’ve been for forty years. Alone and without my sister, though that need not have been so.”

  She clicked her fingers softly behind her, and Rupe came to stand in the darkness beside the path of light. “So nobody ever faulted you for Rose, eh? Nobody ever thought about her after she was gone. She was quiet, my sister. Quiet and shy and afraid to say boo to a goose. Afraid to tell you about the baby. I made her tell you, in the end, though it did more harm than good.”

  Her voice took on an edge, and she struggled to control it.

  “I knew you were rotten, the first time you came to take her to a camp meeting.”

  The man jerked around at her first word. He stared at her in the dim red light. “What baby? Don’t think you can trick me, Old Woman. I don’t know anything about no baby or about your precious Rose, either. I took her to preaching a few times, and riding once or twice. Nothing to make a fuss over...what are you doing?”

  Ole Woman had taken a bit of paper from the pocket of her apron. She thrust it at him, taking care not to touch his fingers as he took it from her. “Read that. And then tell me you had nothing to do with Rose’s death!”

  He stared down, squinted hard, stretched his arms and turned to the lamp. As he read the scribbled note, he paled until the stubble of beard stood out dark against his bluish skin.

  “Yes, she killed herself, but if you’d done right by her she would have had no need. You might as well have pushed her into the river yourself, and held her under until she drowned. She’d never have killed herself but for you.”

  He stared at her, his color slowly returning. “So? What can you do about it now? Nothing! Never could and never will. A scandal forty years old is nothing. You should have yelled long before now, if you wanted my hide.”

  She chuckled. “Been working for forty years to fix your comeuppance. Been studying on it and other things as well. Found out a heap of things nobody suspects exist, and fortune-telling’s the least of the bunch. You just watch….”

  She stepped aside, and Rupe came into the house, his ears back, his brown eyes turned green and frightful. A more fearsome looking creature you never could see, she reckoned. Amos moved back, but the dog herded him to the door, onto the porch, and when the man leaped down to run the dog paused as Amos stopped and gasped. A cougar stood in the dim moonlight, looking up the track of lamplight with eyes that glowed green to match the dog’s.

  Old Woman moved past the man to the dry well and heaved the heavy cover aside. The scent of bruised honeysuckle filled the night. “You know how long it takes to make a panther do your will?” she asked, though she never expected an answer. “Here!” she called. “Bring him
here!”

  The dog dropped behind, the cat moved cautiously at one side, as Amos sidled toward her, his face pale in the darkness, his breath coming harsh in his throat. He couldn’t see the well, for all his attention was fixed on the cougar. When he came up beside the swing, he turned to face her.

  Now Old Woman knew that her own eyes glowed green, blazing in the shadow of the tree to match those of her familiars. Amos gasped and glanced about, but he stood at the center of a triangle of stares, which moved forward, forcing him toward a square of deeper blackness, from which came an irritable sound, like corn shucks rustling.

  Or rattlesnakes?

  “What are you doing?” He made a desperate dart, but the cat herded him easily back into place.

  Old Woman grinned, as she crooned, “Oh, what indeed? Been working and working for years, getting a handle on the beasts. Then I worked and worked for months, catching all them rattlers. And now it’s ready, all ready, Amos, and you’re about to pay up for forty years of living high and handsome, while my Rosie rots in her grave.”

  He tried to dash to the right again, but Rupe set his teeth into his calf and brought him to his knees. He struggled toward the left, but the cat lowered its face so close to him that he could smell the rank odor of its breath. He groaned as Old Woman reached down her hard brown arms, grabbed him, and gave a heave.

  The groan turned into a scream, as he landed with a crunch amid a storm of rattles. There came a lot of shrieks, after that, and pleading wails as the cover went back onto the well. The honeysuckle was smoothed over again, leaving no trace that the thing had been opened.

  Old Woman sat in the swing beside the well. The moon was down. The whip-poor-will had moved away into the woods, its cry now faint with distance. The frogs and crickets kept up their music, but a new note joined the song for a time.

  Old Woman sat in the dark as long as that music lasted. When it ended, about midnight, she sighed and went into her cabin to bed.

  Now she had her vengeance. But what would she do tomorrow?

  THE CREEK, IT DONE RIZ

  My Dad was a traveling salesman, back in the days when the roads in East Texas were very long mud holes. Fortunately, he never ran into a problem like this….

  Only the Lord knows why I ever took the old road that day, particularly since the water was out all over the map from the big rains. I could have stuck a dozen times, coming across the bottom lands. It’s a wonder in this world that none of the rickety little bridges were washed out—or that one of them didn’t go out with me halfway across. Still, Pa’s old 1939 Plymouth could mighty nearly swim, and we always took it out when we were going way down into the boondocks.

  The whole thing was a lot of foolishness, anyway. I didn’t get a degree from Texas A&M in order to go paddling around in the river-bottom in the middle of a flood to count hogs. But try telling the boss that. He sits in his air-conditioned office, thinking up dumb schemes, and never knows if it rains or shines. And he can come up with some of the gosh-awfulest ideas. A hog census! Now I ask you, how he thought that knowing where every hog in the county was located would help him sell his damn feed, I don’t know.

  Anyway, there I was in the river bottom in a car twice as old as I was, sloshing down a road that wasn’t much more than a lane, when I could see it, which wasn’t often. The wet sweetgum saplings were bent way down and slapping across the windshield. I was crawling along, cussing some, when I saw something out in the woods.

  I crept on until I could feel gravel under the wheels; then I stopped. I could have sworn I saw an old man sitting on a stump. I stuck my feet into the rubber boots I had learned to take along with me, being as most hog-pens can’t be said to do shoes any good at all. Then I got out and started off into a thicket. And sure enough, there was a grizzly-headed old cuss, soaked to the bone, dripping water off his nose and his eyebrows. He never acted as if he saw me, just muttered to himself as if that’s what he’d been doing for quite a while.

  When I got close enough to hear, I stood there for a minute, admiring his style. You don’t hear cussing like that any more, with real feeling and meaning to it. And he was cussing the weather, which deserved everything he gave it and then some. But it was wet as all get-out, and finally I went up and touched him on the shoulder.

  “Sir, I beg your pardon,” I said, “but would you like a ride someplace? Out of the wet?”

  He gave a jerk and looked up at me for a minute, sizing me up. Then he gave me a couple of cusses too.

  I shook my head admiringly. “It’s a privilege to listen to a man who can handle the language the way you do,” I said. “Even my Pa, and he’s no slouch, can’t touch you. But it does look like you’re set to catch your death of cold, if you sit out here much longer.”

  Then he squinched up his eyes and looked me over, real carefully. “You look to be a Jenkins,” he said, when he had gone from top to bottom. “Got that Jenkins jaw. Any kin to Ralph Jenkins?”

  “That’s my Pa,” I said. It’s the darndest thing—anyplace I go, people spot me for Pa’s son right off. Even if they never laid eyes on me before.

  He grunted and shifted on the stump. “Tell you, Son,” he said, “I ain’t got no place to go that you can take me to in no car. But bein’ as you’re Ralph’s boy, why, you might help me out a little bit.”

  Now that’s where I should’ve said goodbye and been off to count hogs. But Pa raised us all to be polite and helpful to old folks, and I can’t seem to break the habit. When an old geezer looks at you kind of slant-eyed, with his head cocked on one side like he’s figuring out how far he can con you, it’s time to take off. Not me, though. No brains, that’s me.

  So pretty soon I found myself slogging down a pig-trail through the woods, looking sharp for cotton-mouth moccasins and stump-holes. He kept talking all the time, as if he was scared I’d change my mind and leave him. Nothing he said made me anxious to keep on.

  “I’ve got a kind of boat a little piece further on, tied up along Eel Creek. If it’s still there, we can take it and get up to my house. The house ain’t washed away; it’s just the damn creek’s done riz so I can’t get to the yard. With a strong young fellow like you to help me with the boat, I kin make it.” He paused and panted a while. I could see that he wasn’t in too good shape.

  I turned around and said, “Why, Pa could put you up until the water goes down. He’d be glad to. Why don’t you just go back to the car with me, and I’ll take you straight on in and have you dry in no time at all.”

  He started shaking his head before I was done. Then he looked all around, really careful, as if anybody but a couple of fools would have been out in the woods with the river out of its banks.

  “I guess I ought to tell you, Son, seein’ as how you’re helpin’ me and all. I’ve got my life’s savings buried in that yard. If the river backs the creek up too high, it’ll likely wash it right away. It’s all I’ve got to stand me through my old age. I just got to get back there and get it out before the water comes up any more.”

  Well, he did sound pitiful. I couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t dig up his money before he left, but I guessed that you might be forgetful at his age. So we went on, and the water was mighty near the tops of my boots before we came to his boat. Then I saw why he called it a kind of a boat. The baling bucket was the only thing that didn’t have a hole in it. A good, sound log would have been a lot safer to try to travel on.

  “You sure you want to risk that thing?” I asked him.

  “It’s a sight better than it looks,” he answered. “I been fishing in that boat for twenty years and never drowned yet.” I never was one to believe in miracles, but maybe such things happen, or else he was an uncommonly solid ghost. But I was pledged to help him, so I bailed out the water that was sloshing around in the bottom of the thing and heaved it out into the creek. I stood there and watched the little wiggles of water come through the holes and start moving down the sides.

  He got right in and started baili
ng. “Reason I had to have help,” he said, “is somebody has to bail while the other one rows. I always borrow one of Rupe Miller’s kids to do the bailing, when I go fishing, but they left when the water got high. Get in, Boy. Let’s get moving. That water’s not going to wait on us.”

  So I said a prayer, which would have pleased Ma, and got in. Then I didn’t have time to pray. That water was wild as a yearling colt. It took everything I could do to keep the boat from taking off in ten directions at once.

  I fought with the paddle to fend us off floating logs and brush-piles. I guess I came nearer to poling it along than paddling. In the middle of all that, it came to me...I didn’t know his name. I twisted my head round and yelled, “Hey, Mister, what’s your name?”

  He looked up from his bucket, kind of startled. “Why, I’m Abe Willitts. I thought everybody in the county knowed of old Abe.”

  Then I really started to sweat. Everybody knew about Abe Willitts, sure enough. When I was little, Ma’d hush me up with, “Crazy Abe’ll get you, if you don’t be good.” When his wife died, all the women looked at each other and said, “He finally killed her. I knew he would one day.” And nobody could prove them wrong, because she was buried by the time he got around to letting anybody know she was dead.

  Even Pa, who wouldn’t hear a bad word about anyone, had to be still when that hunter disappeared. He’d told his wife that he was going to bird-hunt down in the bottoms, and he’d intended to get Abe and his setter to help him find the birds. Nobody ever saw nor heard from him again. They looked too. All over the place, with dogs and men. Abe claimed he never got there at all, and nobody could prove different.

  So here I was in a leaky boat in the middle of a flood with a crazy man. A hog census looked mighty calm and peaceful, when I thought about it. Still, I hadn’t time to worry overmuch just then. Working that crazy piece of junk around the bends in the creek took all my energy. By the time we came in sight of the house, I was done in, sure enough.