The Cunning Man

by D. J. Butler

  He showed both items to Hiram, and Hiram nodded. “Good thinking.”

  Michael set the revolver and the full moon both on the table. Hiram sat in the chair and closed his eyes, trying not to notice the fading stench of mustard.

  Michael might be right. Maybe he should get a second gun.

  “We could go home in the morning,” he offered.

  Michael unlaced his Redwings and set them by the door. His socks were filthy, black above the ankle with the coal dust of Kimball and red below the ankle with the native soil of Carbon County.

  “We came here to deliver groceries to the Kimball Mine,” Hiram said. “We could get a good night’s sleep and just drive back to Lehi in the morning.”

  “Could we?” Michael stood in front of the wall mirror. He poured water from a jug into the basin and washed his hands and face.

  Michael wasn’t an especially fastidious young man. What was he really washing off his hands?

  What had happened while Hiram had been unconscious? He was afraid to ask, but he had to. “While I was having my fit,” he said slowly. “Did you…shoot anyone?”

  “You mean kill, right, Pap?” In another tone of voice, it would have been one of Michael’s witty barbs. Spoken as it was, flat and with a knife-like edge, the words hurt Hiram.

  “Killing a man is a hard thing,” Hiram said. “Wounding a man is also very hard. If you did either tonight, you did it because you had to, and you should feel nothing but gratitude that you and I are both alive.”

  Michael was quiet for a moment. “I shot at them. I don’t know whether I hit them or not.”

  Hiram nodded. “Many men who came home from the Great War could say exactly the same words. Not knowing whether you actually hit the other fellow is sometimes the best source of comfort.”

  “I’m fine, Pap.” Michael’s voice relaxed slightly. “I don’t need to go home.”

  “I could tell Bishop Wells with a clean conscience that I’ve done was I was asked to do.”

  “What’s that phrase you like so much?” Michael patted his hands dry on a towel and sat on the bed. “The one where I tease you it’s about burning up ants?”

  “Magnifying your calling,” Hiram said.

  Michael nodded. “That’s the one. Remind me what it means.”

  “It means…not just doing the minimum. It means if your responsibility is small, you can still do it well. It means carrying out the spirit of your task to accomplish great things, and not just complying with the letter of an assignment.”

  “Right. So tell me again that we can drive home in the morning.”

  Hiram’s lungs felt squeezed and breathless. “I worry about your safety.”

  “I know you do, Pap. You worry about my safety, and not your own. And you also worry about the safety of all the Kimball miners, don’t you? And the safety of their families? And probably even the safety of the Kimball brothers, even though they don’t give a damn about you. And whether that Greek woman and all her kids are going to eat tomorrow.”

  Hiram thought again of Medea and Basil, their daughter Callista, and their other children. He had injured Basil—in self-defense, but Hiram felt responsible, nonetheless. What kind of man would he be if he just abandoned them?

  Michael cracked a wicked grin and looked sidelong at Hiram. “Oh, and for sure you care about the union lady.”

  “Mary, or Gil, I guess.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I could drive you home in the morning and come back,” Hiram suggested.

  “That would take you all day,” Michael said. “In that time, there could be another shooting up at the mine, Gil might get attacked in prison, all kinds of bad things could happen.”

  Hiram hung his head, burying his face in his palms, elbows planted on his knees.

  “Besides,” Michael added, “you’d be preventing me from magnifying my calling.”

  “You don’t have a calling. You won’t even step inside a church.”

  “I’m your driver,” Michael said. “You’d probably have another fainting spell and crash the car on the drive back here, anyway. Hell, Pap, it would be downright irresponsible of me to let you try.”

  “You could say heck, you know. Other boys say heck.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Two spells in twenty-four hours would be unusual.” In fact, Hiram had felt on the brink of having a spell much more frequently than usual, since coming to Helper and Spring Canyon. Was that from strain? Sleeplessness? Some malign influence?

  Michael just sat on the bed, looking calmly at Hiram.

  “Well,” Hiram continued. “What shall we do, then?”

  “Get the union lady out of jail,” Michael told him. “Get the mine open. Not get killed by bandits.”

  Also, not get trapped by another one of Gus Dollar’s enchantments, whatever the storekeeper was up to. But Hiram just nodded.

  Michael yawned. “I think, though, that sleep is probably the first thing on the to-do list.”

  “Agreed. You hit the sack, I’ll go bring in the toolbox.”

  “Right.” Michael yawned again and lay down, flat on his back. “I’ve heard many times that Helper’s ladies of the evening are notorious for stealing shovels and water cans.”

  “Before today, you’d never heard of Helper’s ladies of the evening.”

  “True. Utah is much more interesting than I ever imagined.”

  And just like that, Michael was snoring.

  Hiram shifted Michael just enough to get the blanket over his son, then turned off the electric light. He took the revolver with him, tucking it into the bib pocket of his overalls, and headed down to the street.

  Hiram took the long steel tool chest from the back of the Double-A and carried it in both hands up to the hotel room. Once Hiram had locked the door, he lifted the top tray—with its hammer and pliers and screwdrivers and other assorted hardware—out of the chest and set it aside.

  Beneath lay the chest’s true, important contents. Three worn leather notebooks. A dog’s tongue. Several lamens. Small sheets of virgin paper. Stones taken from the Jordan River near his farm that had natural holes in them, holes bored by the river itself, rather than by the hand of man. Two forked rods cut from the stand of witch hazel that Hiram carefully tended at the end of his farmhouse porch, and other paraphernalia.

  Tools to accomplish ends, tools in their essence only very slightly different from the hammer.

  Still, others would have said they were magical.

  He looked up to make certain Michael was still sleeping.

  He selected one of the lamens, an Oremus lamen, made of flattened bronze, six inches wide and eight inches long. A lamen was a written enchantment, and could be made on paper (especially virgin paper, paper of the best quality that had never been used before, and even better would be virgin parchment) or stitched into a quilt, but Hiram had a few made of metal, because he wanted them to be rugged and portable.

  There was such an inscribed metal plate inside the door of the Double-A, on the driver’s side. Hiram had spent an entire day figuring out how to crack that door open and fix the lamen into place, before he had let Michael drive. He’d sent Michael off on an errand first, walking to the telegraph office in town to send a message to the beet processing plant in Payson and then wait for answer. That had given Hiram the time he’d needed. The lamen in the car provided protection.

  The lamen he drew from the chest now was identical to the one in the car. Hiram didn’t know Latin or Hebrew, but during the Great War, he’d been briefly in London. There he’d found a copy of a volume of which Grandma Hettie had spoken highly, Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft. The old Elizabethan squire’s book, to Hiram’s surprise, was a screed that railed against even the possibility of magic. In attempting to expose magic to the ridicule he said it deserved, Scot recorded dozens of charms, making the Discoverie an excellent resource, and the closest thing to a real book of magic Hiram had ever seen complete.


  It was almost as if Scot had himself been a cunning man, attempting to pass down his magical lore in disguise.

  Hiram had copied it out by hand into two leather journals he’d bought on Charing Cross Road, including all the Latin. Mostly, he ignored the Latin and Hebrew and used Scot’s English charms, but he had made these two identical lamens. They read, letters and crosses carefully pressed into the bronze:

  Fons ✝ alpha & omega ✝ figa ✝ figalis ✝ Sabbaoth ✝ Emanuel ✝ Adonai ✝ o ✝ Neray ✝ Elay ✝ Ihe ✝ Rentone ✝ Neger ✝ Sahe ✝ Pangeton ✝ Commen ✝ a ✝ g ✝ l ✝ a ✝ Mattheus ✝ Marcus ✝ Lucas ✝ Johannes ✝✝✝ titulus triumphalis ✝ Jesus Naserenus Rex Judeorum ✝ ecce dominice crucis signum ✝ fugite partes adverse, vicit leo de tribu Jude, radix, David, aleluijah, Kyrie eleeson, Christe eleeson, pater noster, ave Marie, & ne nos, & veniat super nos salutare tuum: Oremus.

  According to Scot, Joseph of Arimathea had found these words engraved on Christ’s side by the finger of God Himself, and anyone protected by the words would fear no evil death, or any danger at all.

  Hiram tied a leather thong through a hole punched into one end of the Oremus lamen, and he slipped the thin plate beneath the mirror hanging from the door. A close observer might see the top of the thong and investigate, but the lamen was hidden from casual view.

  He wished he had one to hang in the window, too, but he didn’t have enough time to take apart the door of the Double-A. And Michael had taken his boots off.

  Hiram removed the chi-rho talisman from around his neck and hung it in the window.

  The last word of the Scot lamen, Oremus, meant “let us pray.” The lamen required a prayer to activate it, so on the floor of the hotel room, the only illumination coming in through the window from the marquee of the movie theater next door, Hiram Woolley knelt and prayed. He prayed for Michael’s safety and the peace of Michael’s soul.

  While he was at it, he prayed, stomach growling, to end his fast.

  Then he shut the curtain.

  Thinking of Reginald Scot reminded Hiram that Scot had a charm for rest. Standing, he spoke it over Michael’s sleeping form. “In the name of the Father, up and down, the Son and the Spirit upon your crown, the cross of Christ upon your breast, sweetest lady send you rest.”

  Michael’s body sank deeper into the depths of the hotel mattress and his breathing became slow and regular.

  Hiram looked at the bed and briefly considered going to sleep himself. His bones felt like lead, and he knew that if he could get even three or four hours of sleep, he’d feel much refreshed.

  But he didn’t lie down. Working with his own written enchantments had made him think of Gus Dollar’s store. Specifically, he thought of the curious glyphs built into the store windows. He knew that for each planet, there was a written glyph that worked like a secret name; his Saturn ring was engraved with the sign of Saturn, for instance, in addition to bearing a signet he’d had made by a jeweler in Salt Lake City. Hiram knew the signs of the planets.

  He also knew that angels and devils were said to have similar signs, and he didn’t know those. But if the images in Gus’s windows drew and focused the power of an angel…or worse, a demon of some kind…that might explain how Gus had so handily overcome Hiram’s ordinary defensive charms, both to draw Hiram into the shop and also to loosen his tongue about his past and his secrets.

  He had to find out more about the signs in those windows. And out here in Helper, with no library anywhere nearby, the only likely source of knowledge was the store itself.

  Hiram removed his Harvesters. Like Michael’s, his socks were stained by alternating layers of red and black dust. He set his boots together beside Michael’s, and then took his son’s footwear. From the toolbox, he took a triangular bit of leather and placed it in inside the right boot. He then put both of Michael’s boots on.

  Michael’s feet were bigger than Hiram’s. The boots were a loose fit, but Hiram could walk.

  Almost as an afterthought, Hiram opened the third leather notebook, which was his dream dictionary. It wasn’t really a dictionary, in that it had been written by Hiram himself, and wasn’t in alphabetical order, but it collected what he knew about the symbols that could occur in his dreams. He looked up images that had dogged his recent dreams:

  flies—you have many enemies.

  voice, unseen—denotes you will be deluded by feigned pretenders.

  pit—you face sudden surprise or danger.

  running—if you dream you run swiftly, you will receive a letter.

  Did it add up an interpretation of his dreams, of driving and looking for Michael, of a voice in a pit? Not that he could puzzle out. He sighed and put the dream dictionary away in the toolbox.

  Hiram put the gun and the loader into the tool chest and took the chest with him. He locked Michael into the warded hotel room and headed for the Double-A.

  Chapter Fourteen

  All the way up Spring Canyon, Hiram chanted a charm against the falling sickness, an old name for epilepsy. Epilepsy was close enough to what ailed him. “I conjure me by the sun and the moon, and by the gospel of this day delivered to Rupert, Giles, Cornelius, and John, that I rise and fall no more.”

  He had no idea who Rupert, Giles, and Cornelius might be, but this was the charm Grandma Hettie had taught him. He gripped the wheel of the Double-A until his knuckles turned white and said the words over and over again.

  No strange smells troubled him, and he reached Dollar’s.

  His stomach growled audibly the entire time.

  What was it he had smelled when the camp had been attacked? The garlic and mustard smells of his fainting spell had taken him eventually, but first there had been something else, a sweeter smell that reminded him of Christmas.

  He stopped the car when he was still around the bend and prepared himself. He stuffed his pockets with bay leaves. He put the revolver into the bib pocket of his overalls. He tucked the leather notebooks containing his transcription of Reginald Scot into the deep pockets of his wool coat. He took a disk of wax the size of a silver dollar, imprinted with a large cross and rimmed by a ring of flowers, and held it in his hand to avoid spoiling the impressions in the wax. He made sure he had the flashlight in one pocket and his clasp knife in another, along with his Zippo and his bloodstone.

  He took the bolt-cutters.

  Should he make a witch bottle, or burn the shingle he’d taken? He didn’t think the time had come yet for either countercharm, so he placed the two empty Coke bottles into the lower compartment of his tool chest alongside the bit of Gus Dollar’s shingle, and then shut the chest into the cab of the Double-A.

  He walked quietly toward Gus Dollar’s shop.

  The lights were out. Gus was asleep, likely. To be sure, Hiram stood on the path at the edge of the porch and recited again the charm for rest he had used on Michael. He visualized Gus, he visualized the tow-headed children, he visualized unseen and unnamed other members of the household, and he repeated it three times.

  He didn’t worry about the Rottweilers.

  He took time to consider what he was doing. He was about to commit a burglary. He was doing it, though, because he believed Gus knew something about the closing of the mine. The bloodstone had told him as much. And since Gus had denied that knowledge, and also hexed Hiram twice, then Gus was a man of ill will.

  Peace on earth to men of good will, had been the angels’ song, the way Grandma Hettie had taught it to Hiram.

  Also, Gus might have a connection with whoever had attacked his camp earlier that night.

  “If I am sinning against an innocent man,” he prayed softly, “then stop me, Lord Divine, and keep him from harm. Amen.”

  On the porch, he knelt and held the wax disk up to the door. On the other side, he heard the padding feet of the dogs. He spoke his charm: “I open this door in thy name that I am forced to break, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.” Then he blew three times across the disk and into
the lock.

  He stood, putting the wax back into a coat pocket. When he tried the doorknob, it turned.

  So Gus Dollar was not an innocent man.

  Within stood the two Rottweilers. Their jaws worked vigorously, mouths opening and closing, but no sound came out. The triangular bit of leather in Hiram’s shoe was the tongue of a dog, with no special words written on it and no prayer spoken; it was old and true lore that in the presence of a dried dog’s tongue, a dog could not bark.

  The warm air rushing from inside the store was welcome, especially as it carried with it hints of the tins of sugar and cinnamon that Gus had sitting his shelves. The sudden stab of hunger in Hiram’s belly nearly knocked him down.

  He knelt again and reached out to pet the animals. Puzzled, surprised, and maybe frightened, the dogs retreated, disappearing into the back end of the shop.

  Hiram stood still for a minute, until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the general outline of things in the shop: the counter, the tools, the mannequins, the washing machine.

  Now for the key action, the thing Hiram most needed to do in order to stay undetected. If his guess was correct that the signs in the windows were angelic or demonic, and made Gus’s magic more powerful than Hiram’s, then Hiram had to destroy those signs before they undid his charms.

  He cautiously moved a three-stepped stool beneath the windows and then climbed it.

  For good measure, standing in Gus Dollar’s window, Hiram took the peppermint leaves and stuffed them all into a pocket. Then he pushed the nose of the bolt cutters as snugly against the windowpane as he dared. Too hard, and he’d shatter the window, and he doubted the rest charm would keep Gus Dollar sleeping through a noise like that. Not firmly enough, and he’d have no effect.

  He pressed as much as he dared, working the bolt cutter blades around the lead where it protruded most on this side of the glass and then snipped it. With a satisfying chunk sound, the bolt cutters bit through the soft metal.