Devil's Call

by J Danielle Dorn

  Like I did most of my girlhood lessons, I learned to play cards from watching my older cousins and the roadhouse patrons. Liquor has a way of making men act in a way they would never in their right mind. It eats away at the part of them capable of concerning itself with civility. Monsters are not always real, my dear, save the ones that started out as men.

  I am not sure if the drunk who called me a witch the day I met your father started out mean and grew meaner with time. He may well have come out of the womb the way he came into the cantina. Some folks just have meanness in their bones.

  The day was slow and sultry. With the cantina empty as it was, I had taken up a place at the brag table. We were having ourselves a pleasant game with low stakes and more laughter than luck when a soldier with the United States Army swatted open the swinging doors and stepped inside. His belt was heavy with weaponry and his spurs chimed with the cadence of his pace. The owner’s son, Chimalli, was tending bar that day, and though none of us were paying any mind, we all heard the stranger say to the young man, “Oye, varlet! Whiskey, rápido.”

  As I had my back to the door, I had to turn in my chair to see the soldier. I found him even more ugly than his speech hinted he would be.

  The man ordered a beer and a whiskey. We returned to our game, myself and three of the cantina’s regulars, only to find ourselves interrupted by the stranger.

  “Deal me in,” he said, dragging a chair to the table.

  “We are not finished with the hand yet,” said a German prospector. I found him well-spoken and polite, even when he was so inebriated he forgot how to speak either English or Spanish.

  “You are now,” said the stranger.

  The German looked at the freedman to my left, who looked to the mestizo at my right, who looked at me. I shrugged, and the men grumbled a bit as we all laid down our hands and the German collected his winnings.

  Now, your momma was never one for cheating. Your gran would not abide our use of magick to finish chores or avoid studying for our lessons, and we girls had learned early that the elders frowned upon magick that would break natural laws. As far as I was concerned, even my blind great-aunt Jeanne would be able to tell this brute had not had the same schooling. He was accustomed to acting however he wished because of his size. The scar running from his hairline over his eye socket and ending in the hollow of his cheek was testament to the fact someone had once tried to teach him a lesson and failed.

  He sat himself down between the German and the mestizo, and though they made the room for him, it was for their own benefit rather than his.

  Though I cannot recall with sharp detail how the first hand played out, I can recall the freedman won and the brute called him greasy, or else something to that effect. It was an effort for the rest of us not to laugh at the soldier, who grew more inebriated as the game went on but was holding it well enough. The freedman won the second hand as well, for which the rest of us would have rejoiced were it not for the uninvited player at the table.

  “You mangy half-breed,” the brute called him after draining his glass.

  I was drawing a breath to speak when the mestizo and I locked eyes. In his I saw an admonition, and I understood this would run its course. Same as any other storm, all we could do was wait it out. So I held my tongue as the brute stood from the table to fetch another drink.

  The rest of us continued slowly drinking our own beers. As the freedman shuffled the deck and started dealing out the hand, the brute wiped a line of foam from the whiskers on his top lip and sneered.

  “What’s taking you so long?” he asked. “They not teach you how to count on the plantation?”

  Though the freedman paused in his dealing to fix the brute with a hard stare, he held his tongue. Gone was the friendliness of the banter, the lightness with which we teased each other from time to time. This man had no lightness in his heart.

  The freedman won the hand he’d dealt, and the brute slammed a hand the size of a shank onto the tabletop. As I drew a breath the mestizo would have silenced, that hand left the table and shot out to grab the freedman by the forearm. Though he tugged, the freedman was unsuccessful in slipping the brute’s grip. We had all seen the faded rope burns around both wrists, but the sight shocked the soldier.

  “You a runaway?”

  The freedman narrowed his eyes.

  “What is this word?” the German asked.

  “He means,” the freedman said with an edge to his tone, “a runaway slave.”

  “Well, ain’t you?” the soldier asked.

  “No. I ain’t.”

  I could not abide the brute’s insults. This rotten-mouthed drunkard was allowed his malice because he was not sat at a table with men of violence, and I thought of a boy I had once known who terrorized a schoolyard for the same reason. He could get away with it, and so he had kept at it.

  To snip a lock of his hair or infuse one of his personal effects with perfume would be too obvious, and so I had to improvise. I drew not on a practiced spell but rather one I had been concocting since he first insulted the German. In my mind, I had unleashed it after he insulted the mestizo, and that crack at the freedman was the spark I needed. I needed no spark to cheat at cards, but this was not about cheating, or cards.

  As if summoned, another United States Army soldier stepped in out of the dust and the cloudless afternoon and stood a moment in the doorway. Your father would later attest to knowing I was the one he was looking for before he even stepped in from outside. Still, he spoke to the owner’s son behind the bar before he did anything else. Though I was aware of him, I paid him no mind. Not even after Chimalli picked me out of a crowd of dusty, weathered men and said, “Yep, that’d be her over there.”

  It must have been then that the commanding officer entered. My attention was on the brute refusing to release the freedman’s wrist. The freedman had himself braced against the table with his opposite hand, just as the brute had used his unoccupied one to slip from his boot a knife. Its edge glinted in the dusty light, and I began to murmur under my breath.

  Helios, ire

  Burn like fire

  Five times I spoke the incantation below my breath. The handle grew too warm for the brute to hold, whereupon he buried the blade in the tabletop and stood with a roar. While the others had missed it, he had heard my chant. His eyes moved between his hand and my face.

  “You’re a goddamned WITCH,” he said.

  Where we were, the law was no good. The men at the table were grimy, their nails black from gunpowder and dirt and blood, their mouths kept clean by corn whiskey, and I had been listening to them tell stories for months by the time the army sent a couple of their men out to collect me. All three were on their feet and reaching for their own weapons in the time it took the newcomer to confirm he had found me. While the brute would come back to his senses, his pounding headache and blank memory offering him penance and absolution both, I would not be there to witness the reunion.

  The newly arrived soldier was tall and young, with hair the color of copper and an earnest face I could tell was used to smiling, though there was no call for smiling at the moment we met. He walked right up to the brute, called him Mitchell, said he ought to put the knife away before he hurt himself.

  “Lieutenant’s on his way,” he added. “If you’re gonna be a drunk, do it at the bar.”

  To all of our surprise, the brute did as he was told and stalked off.

  Once he had gone, the red-haired soldier turned to me and asked, “Miss, is your name Lilian MacPherson?”

  I asked, “¿Estoy detenida?”

  He laughed like I had told a joke and said, “You ain’t under arrest. You are coming with us, though.”

  I told him I had to finish my hand first.

  “Looks like you oughta fold that hand anyway,” he said.

  “She’s cheating!” the brute yelled from the bar.

  The freedman and the mestizo both groaned and began grousing to each other, while the German took off his
hat and downed his beer.

  Now that we were interrupted, I saw no point in doing anything other than what I did, which was roll my eyes and fold my hand and leave the cantina with the soldiers. Behind me, the brute continued to holler about witchery. I do not know what happened to him after I left, but I have no doubt the three gamblers and the bartender were able to dispatch him.

  “I can take care of myself, you know,” I said.

  “No, actually,” said the red-haired soldier’s commanding officer, a taller and sturdier man who looked as if he had just stepped out of whatever academy produces men like him. “You can’t. Matter of fact, we ought to have you arrested for assaulting a soldier.”

  The soldiers marched me not to the county jail but straight to the stagecoach station. Once we were aboard, they sat across from me talking and telling each other jokes, and I passed the early leg of the journey staring out the window and ignoring the both of them.

  “You got good timing,” the red-haired soldier said when dusk fell. I looked away from the landscape to find his fellow asleep beside him. I did not ask him what he meant, but he told me anyway. “A year or two earlier, Bird’s Fort would’ve been abandoned. There’d be nothing out here but Comanche braves.”

  I held to my silence. We looked each other in the eye for a moment, I with my jaw set and he seeming far older than the nineteen or so years he was truly, and then he shook his head. Some time would pass before I would ask him what he had been thinking, then. At the time I just looked away, watching the wilds disappear and the next city bleed into its space.

  “I never heard anyone called a witch before,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Mighty powerful word to name a woman in public.”

  I shrugged again.

  “Folks name what they don’t understand as the work of the devil,” I said. “Imagine the same goes for people that don’t look like what they’re used to.” I paused and added, “Or maybe he just didn’t like losing to a girl.”

  “I saw the three you were holding,” he said. “If his were worse than that, I can see why he’d be sore.”

  We were ten days overland, at the time the longest ten days of my life, before we arrived at the roadhouse. What conversation passed during that time was often between the two soldiers, the older of the two inclined to speak of me as if I were not present and I to ignore him. Though the red-haired soldier attempted to make conversation between stageline stops, he abandoned the effort by the third day.

  On the tenth day, the soldiers confirmed the address with the stagecoach driver and delivered me direct to the front porch. I felt a stab of guilt when your gran came into sight, for she was not your gran then but only my momma, and my momma was standing out on the porch like she was expecting us.

  My momma, whose skirt I had held tight to when I was still learning how to walk, who stood straight and unflinching with her aunts and her sisters in a circle formed of salt and sweat and whispered incantations when they thought the children were in bed. Whose words I would never interrupt, whose circle I would never break, because I thought I knew what it was to respect her. Whose corner of the Grand Library lay beneath a fine layer of dust, not because she was untidy but because it allowed her to track which books my heedless fingers had eased from the shelves. She wore a shawl around her thin shoulders, only the wind moving the hem on her dress and the ends of her hair. I would have preferred a cold reception to the pain I saw in her eyes.

  I did not think she would embrace me in front of those soldiers, those men she did not know, but she did. She took me by the elbows and looked me up and down and then she wrapped me up in her arms like I was a child she had thought lost at the market. Nothing else in the world but me and her now that I was back.

  Of course I squirmed against her. Not only were the soldiers standing right there looking but the door opened and out came my cousins Eva and Charlotte. They were not giggling at my embarrassment. They were giggling at the two men brung me home. Ma did thank them for returning me, and they did tip their hats when she invited them in for supper. They had to be getting back, though goat’s head stew did sound lovely.

  When my mother released me, I turned towards the soldiers and, though I drew a breath to speak, could think of nothing I wanted to say to either of them. The red-haired soldier met my gaze, and he gave me a lopsided smile I had no way of knowing would become familiar to me as the years went on.

  And once they were nothing more than memory for the wind to take away, I told my mother I was sorry.

  It was not a word any of us girls ever used much. My eldest cousin, Agnes, said it more than the rest of us combined, but she never meant it. I’m not sure I meant it, myself. This was my home and this was where my kin were, and though my momma loved me something fierce, I would not have left if my sense of belonging had been strong enough to overcome my sense of longing.

  “Don’t you dare apologize,” my momma said. “The next time you go, you won’t return. No sense saying you’re sorry if you’re going to do it again anyway.”

  The war in Mexico began in the spring of 1846, and so soon as it began, it took to chewing up soldiers fast as the army could send them, spitting them back out again. We saw it in the ones who returned, the permanent sunburns on their faces and hands, the faraway fixation in their eyes, on some unending horizon we girls could not see ourselves as we wiped down the tables and fetched them their beers. Ours was not a house of ill repute, as the God-fearing folks call them. My cousins and I did not sell our bodies to the men who passed through, though Agnes was fond of romancing men she fancied if they planned on staying in town for a spell.

  I was not adventurous in the way Agnes was, at least not as far as my body was concerned. While she worked spells to make herself more attractive to a certain kind of man, I crushed aloe leaves and coated my hands and skin with their juice to protect me from just that kind of man.

  Something about the anger in my bones, the lack of interest or attraction in my eyes when I looked straight into theirs, seemed to some men a challenge. It was not meant as such. The ones with half a brain in their skull flinched away from me when our eyes met, and that was just the way I preferred it.

  “For not liking men, you sure spend enough time with them,” said Eva from her place at the dressing table, where she brushed her hair. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, working the aloe juice into my cuticles.

  “It ain’t that I don’t like men,” I said. “I don’t like drunks, or fools.”

  “That why you’re always playing cards with them?”

  “If they ain’t got enough sense not to play cards with a teenaged girl, who am I to tell them to go somewhere else? Train tickets are expensive.”

  “Cousin,” she said with a laugh, “you are incorrigible.”

  “Besides,” I said, “I like tall men, who are kind, and have eyes blue like soldiers’ uniforms.”

  “Oh,” said Eva, “you mean that man brought you home that time you ran away.”

  “No!” I said, which only made her laugh harder.

  As retribution, I twirled my pointer finger in the air one, two, three times and then flexed all my fingers, as I would to toss powder at her. Her hairbrush caught in her mane, and her yelp of surprise followed me out of the room.

  “Tangling my hair don’t mean I’m wrong!”

  Later that night I came in from a late venture hoping I could creep uninterrupted past the saloon to the second floor. From my room I had a view of the courtyard garden we tended throughout the day. On nights I felt my wanderlust too strong for sleep, I would sit up on the window seat staring out at the flowers planted among the milk thistle and ginger and aconite, and think of their petals soaking up the moonlight, and I would feel a kinship with them. If they pulled up their roots, they would die.

  My thoughts were on my view of the garden as I climbed the stairs, but even so, Agnes’s voice stopped my feet before I had time to process the words, protests against a man with a rough voice
and rougher hands. I stopped halfway up the stairwell, then turned and hurried back into the corridor, lit by oil lamps and moonlight.

  The man, who I had never seen before, had my older cousin against the wall, unable to move and unwilling to invoke magick to free herself. I was not. I was then several years on from the age I was when I first hexed Danny Chesterfield in the schoolyard, and I was twice as strong both in body and in spirit. When I grabbed the man by the shoulders and pushed him away from Agnes, I did so not with my hands but with the power of my mind. Fire is the element with which I have always felt a certain sort of kinship, but Fire would choke and die without Air, and it was Air that allowed me to knock the man back several steps. His shoulders hit the wall, hard, and gave me his attention. Whiskey had soured his breath and I could not tell whether the distance in his eyes was the fault of drink or the war. They widened, once, when he realized but for my cousin and I he was alone in the corridor. He did not notice when I plucked his wallet from his belt. He did notice when I snarled at him to get off of Agnes and get the hell out of the inn.

  In spite of Agnes imploring me to let him be since he was going without any more fuss, I returned to the room I shared with her sister to retrieve a book of matches and a bottle of perfume. Luck or some other trickster must have been on my side, for Eva was not in our room at the time. Shushing Agnes on my way out the door, I followed the brute into the street. There I sprayed the wallet with the scent and intoned a spell whose words I will not record here, as it is one you will have to learn yourself. I ought to have done so indoors, or at least in the shadow where none would see me, but I did not. There are far too many oughts and shoulds in this story. They have no business in your spells. Look forward, my dear, not behind.

  I was able to follow along after the brute and, cloaked by the spell whose intonation I have not recorded, walk right up to his door without alerting anyone to my presence. Or so I thought.

  I left the wallet in front of his door and returned home to the inn, and the spell worked its way with him. Overnight his hips grew wide and his breasts full, his hair long and his skin soft. He walked with a lightness in his step he could not control, and his voice was soft, his moods given to sea changes. I skipped breakfast the next morning to crowd the window in childless Aunt Griselda’s room, and was laughing into the palm of my hand when a shadow cut across the floor behind me.