The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  “I had a choice. I could take up the staff and sword, and the staff would speak to me of things beyond knowing, and lead me into dangers fit to make me a hero or a spirit. Or I could sheathe the sword once again in the staff, and place the staff back in the ground where I had found it, and go away, and be happy with my woman.”

  There the story broke off. Bobbi wondered: was her father speaking of himself, really? Was it possible he had really found such a staff? Or was he speaking of an inner self he showed to no one? Or was he telling someone else’s story through his scrawling ball-point pen?

  Bobbi got up and found the old, cloth-covered Webster’s dictionary, and looked up “scrying.” Seeing visions, it meant, in a shiny surface, a mirror or a crystal ball. Then she came back and read again and again the words her father had written, and listened to the way they made her dream.

  She read on. She read of girls Wright Yandro had loved and girls who had scorned him. She read of his feeling alone, different, odd, hidden. Those feelings she understood, but often he wrote of things she did not understand.

  “He goes by many names. I call him Shane.

  “He is the outlaw the people love, the hero dressed in black.

  “He is the desperado who robs banks during the dust-bowl years and gives the money to the dirt farmers. He is the lone gypsy wandering in his wagon across the W.W. II wastelands, who steals from Allies and Nazis alike and crosses borders by night, bringing Jews out of occupied land. He is the river-boat gambler who gets into a fight one night and kills a man, and gives his winnings to an orphanage. He is the master jewel thief who falls in love with a sad-eyed whore and dresses her in diamonds. He is the bandit who is the blood brother of a lawman and goes gunning to avenge his death. He is the gun for hire who gives away his heart to a wisp of a girl and gets himself killed.

  “He is the scoundrel, the daredevil, ‘Wanted’ by the law, loved by those ground under the heel of the law. He is not quite real. Yet he is more real than life. Cold of eye and dark of garb, he joins the Hidden Circle with the others. He is vulnerable, more so than most, because he is great of heart. He is dangerous, more so than most, because he is vulnerable. His enemy is the trickster, who has no heart at all. And the trickster is a gypsy as well, and a thief, and a gambler. But the people, who know, do not love the trickster.

  “They love and protect the dangerous stranger. He goes by many names. I call him Shane.”

  It was as good a name as any. Bobbi shrugged and read on. Her father wrote only once of the staff, only once of scrying, only once of the stranger named Shane. But again and again he wrote of horses, of the mustangs running on the western plains.

  When at last she could not stay awake any longer, she lay back on the bed, still in her shirt and jeans, and went to sleep without even undoing her braid and brushing her dun-colored hair. Images formed behind her closed eyelids, and a snatch of poetry, her dead father’s poetry, hovered in her mind.

  “Horses, galloping horses,

  Bay and gray and blood-black horses,

  Bright and shadowy, canter by,

  Pass before my inward eye.

  They are the horses of a dream.

  They are not what they seem.”

  She dreamed that a druid chanted the words to her as she slept. Then she dreamed that her father sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to her, and instructed her.

  “You never told me my father was a poet,” she said to her grandfather the next morning.

  Grant Yandro looked at her over breakfast scrapple, hearing the blame in her voice. But he said only, “News to me.”

  “He had that poem published in the Clarion!”

  The old man’s granite-colored eyes opened slightly in a remembering look. He said, “I’d forgot.”

  He was more likely to remember when each of his boys had shot his first deer, Bobbi knew, or trained his first colt, than to remember a poem sent in to the newspaper. He wasn’t likely to understand about a poem. But if he’d ever read his dead son’s notebooks, he would have known Wright was a poet. She said, “You never read his papers you just gave me.”

  Grant Yandro said, “He always kept that stuff private.” And then Bobbi understood that even after Wright’s death his father had respected that privacy. But somehow it was all right for Bobbi, his daughter, to read Wright’s secret books. Once she was old enough. Nearly a woman grown. Grandpap hadn’t known Wright was a poet, but he knew some things well enough, Bobbi saw, and she let go of blame and gazed at him in a sort of wonder, ready to comprehend what the form was that she sometimes saw behind the man—but this time she did not see it.

  Memories of a dream whispered in her mind. Her father had told her what he wanted her to do, and her daytime mind saw no reason not to obey him.

  “Grandpap,” she said, “I know now what I want for my birthday.”

  He nodded as if promising the gift before it had been spoken. Grandpap Yandro, king of the mountain.

  She said, “I want a mustang. Is there a shipment coming in soon?”

  He said, “I’ll find out,” and though he did not smile she could tell by the mellowing of his face that he was pleased she had asked for a horse. Yandros were part gypsy, way back, he claimed. Always messing with horses. He had kept horses all his life, even when Mam had argued with him about it at night, even when he had to take a job off the farm, working on the county roads to feed his family. He had taught Bobbi to ride before she could read, just as he had taught all his children to ride, in a big Western saddle. English-style riding was for aristocrats, and Yandros scorned aristocrats. Western riding, trail riding on the mountains, was for common people, country people, Yandros. So it seemed right and natural to Grant Yandro that his granddaughter had asked for a mustang. Once or twice before he had brought one home himself from the government center at Lewis-berry, a few hours away.

  Grandpap said, “I’ll get one for myself, too.”

  He was pleased, but he would not be nearly so pleased, Bobbi knew, if he had known her reasons. If he had known even half of the strange things happening in her mind.

  Chapter Two

  The Regional Wild Horse and Burro Distribution Center smelled of mud and manure. Behind six-foot steel-pipe fences the mustangs milled, some huddling together, some kicking at each other, all of them bolting away from any human who came near; only three days before, most of them had been running wild on the sagelands of Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon. Their bellies round and their ribs staring from worms and poor winter forage, their manes and tails matted with mud and burs, the rags of their winter fur hanging from their bloated bellies like gypsy tatters, they did not look much like the shining wild horses of Wright Yandro’s poetry and Bobbi’s dreams. She saw one with a clubfoot, several with overgrown, misshapen hooves, a few with terrible scars from barbed wire. And though they were of many colors, the mud coating made them all look dull brown. Like prisoners, puny and defeated beneath a gray and drizzling sky, they stood with their overlarge heads down and the long identification codes showing stark white, freeze-branded, on their necks.

  “Now,” Grandpap said, “look for one that has long legs and a nice slope to the pasterns. A lot of them are narrow in the chest or back in the knee or cow-hocked. You don’t want that. Look for one with good hooves and legs.”

  She nodded, but in fact she was looking for the one that her dead father had sent her here to find. Though she wasn’t admitting it, not even to herself. Dreams were just dreams—

  In the fourth pen she saw him.

  The black mustang stood looking at her with quiet blue eyes, his brand an angry white beneath the wild tangle of his mane, and behind him, yet part of him, Bobbi saw the—what? A form, not at all like the form her grandfather sometimes wore like a garment of air, but still—there. Form of what, she couldn’t tell, and everything seemed strange, and Grandpap was talking at her.

  “You don’t want that one. He’s wall-eyed.”

  Next to impossible, those blue eyes in a black ho
rse. A wall-eyed horse was usually washed out in color or else had a white face. Yet there they were, blue as swamp flags. Although the half-seen—whatever it was, essence of something black mustang yet not wild horse at all—although the watery form beyond the form had vanished, Bobbi’s spine still tingled because of the strangeness of the black mustang’s eyes: not their unlikely color but the way they looked at her. A horse’s gaze is blank, shallow. Bobbi had known enough horses to be sure. Yet this blue-eyed horse stood watching her with a thinking look: unafraid, aloof, reckoning, like a gambler judging the deal of the cards.

  Bobbi suddenly found that the palms of her hands were sweaty. She rubbed them on her faded jeans.

  “Come on,” urged her grandfather. Grandpap had patience when he needed it, when training horses, but he seldom bothered with it the rest of the time. He saw that swarms of people surrounded the corrals. The good horses would soon be spoken for, and if Bobbi hadn’t found anything she wanted in this pen of young studs, she should have a look at the fillies and mares.

  Bobbi pointed at the blue-eyed stallion. “I’ll settle on him,” she said. At her movement, all the nearby mustangs spooked, swirling away with a drum-riff of hooves, the whites of their rolling eyes flashing. The black stud did not spook. He stood his ground, legs spread and planted like those of a gunfighter, head high, unmoving even when other horses careened against him. “Number 6022,” Bobbi added, reading the number on the tag hung around his neck by a cord and dangling under his chin, for it was hard to tell which horse she meant in the confusion.

  Grant Yandro snorted in disgust. “Cripes, girl, what you want with a wall-eyed horse?”

  Hiding the strange thing about her that she was accustomed to hiding, she said, “They’re not white like most walleyes. They’re blue. And I’ve always wanted a black horse.” True, pure blacks were rare. And it was only partly a lie, that Bobbi wanted one. She had often dreamed of proud horses of many kinds and colors.

  “You’re as bad as a kid. Don’t just look for color!”

  Longtime training made Bobbi hesitate to go against her grandfather. She kicked at the dirt with the toe of one old work boot, and the end of her braid found its way around to her face, where her hand pressed it against her cheek. But her eyes never left the black mustang. Her thoughts were crazy, yet—looking at the other horses she had smelled only dirt, and looking at the black she seemed to catch the scent of big sky, as if he had brought it with him all the way from Wyoming. The horse stood apart from the rest of the mustangs. (A loner, Bobbi thought, like me. No running with the herd for him.) He was still watching her with his oddly sensate blue gaze, and she didn’t know what sort of legs and shoulders and back and head he had, and she didn’t care. Her dreams were caught by his eyes.

  She raised her hand and signaled the wrangler, careful not to look at her grandfather, feeling rather than seeing his hard stare as the wrangler came over to her.

  “Number 6022,” she told the man.

  A tall, transplanted cowboy in a plastic hat, he hesitated, looking at her. He had been reared to protect children and womenfolk. “You don’t want him, sis,” he blurted out. “He’s been here three months. Don’t nobody want him.”

  “Why not?”

  The wrangler grew flustered, looked away from her. “Something wrong with him.”

  “That’s for us to judge,” Grant Yandro stated with granite in his voice. He would not put up with impertinence from children, horses, or outsiders, and no outsider had better try to tell Bobbi want to do. He was the only one who could disapprove of her.

  The wrangler shrugged, closed the safety barriers and stepped into the corral to bring in #6022.

  The black stood his ground, as no wild horse should, even though every other horse in the pen stampeded to the end. At a cautious distance the wrangler circled behind #6022 and tried to move him forward, rattling a plastic bag tied to the end of a long longe whip. This was enough to send the broncs at the end of the corral into a panic, but it did not affect the black. He lashed his tail angrily and stood where he was. The wrangler edged forward and tapped his rump with the tip of the whip—

  With fighting-cock speed the black whirled and struck at the wrangler with his forefeet. The deadly hooves came nowhere near the man. Clearly, to Bobbi’s eyes at least, the feint was meant as a warning. The black horse stood facing the human, neck arched and head up but nothing friendly about the cant of his ears. Then slowly, with deliberate pride, the horse turned and walked through the gate where the man had been trying to drive him.

  “That’s no proper horse,” Pap muttered. Hearing something unaccustomed in his voice, Bobbi risked a glance at his face. The tough old man looked taken aback. Close to seventy years Grant Yandro had been around horses, and he had never known one to act with such thinking defiance.

  Surely, as if to say that he knew his way and would not be driven, the stallion traversed the aisleway to the haltering chute. He walked through the narrow approach, stepped into the boxlike end, the trap, and waited for a man to hurry up and slam the sliding door closed behind his hindquarters. All the men who worked at the wild horse facility had gathered around, sending somber looks to one another.

  “You want us to halter him now, miss?” the wrangler asked Bobbi.

  “Let me talk to him first, see if I can make friends with him.” This was the thing she was expected to say.

  She stood in the safety room next to the chute, looking through a foot-square opening at the horse’s head. Here a person could touch a wild horse’s face and it would not be able to kick or get away. It would be forced to tolerate a wheedling voice, a hand rubbing mane and forehead. But Bobbi did not do any of those things to the black.

  The blue eyes fixed on her were full of bitter hatred.

  Not fear. She knew fear in horses. There was no fear in this one, not even a memory of fear. But there was a bold, angry hatred of what was being done to him, and what had been done. He had been run to near-exhaustion, harried into a trap by airplanes and helicopters. He had been tied down and violated by vetting. At the proud crest of his neck, the white hieroglyphics of the government brand showed starkly against the black hide. Did freeze-branding hurt? Bobbi wasn’t sure, but she guessed it could not have been pleasant. Horses are adaptable, forgiving, but this one had not forgotten and would not forgive. She saw the hatred of a proud, a mindfully proud creature brought low.

  But more … Dimly she saw the form behind the form. Let herself see it for one prickling moment, let herself know that this mustang’s hatred was for what had been done to him—before he was a mustang …

  “What are you?” Bobbi whispered to the black horse. “Who are you?”

  There might have been a sort of answer, she thought, in a moment. But Pap strode over to give her his own answer.

  “That horse is loco,” he stated.

  Bobbi shook her head. She saw no madness in the mustang’s actions or his eyes, unless madness is being something you’re not supposed to. And by that definition she was crazy, too. As loco as her loco mother in the home for the mentally ill. She felt a shiver of fear at the thought and pushed it away, and pushed away what she had been seeing along with it.

  “Send him back out,” her grandfather ordered, glaring at the black horse. “Get another one.”

  “No,” Bobbi said. “I’ll go with this one.”

  It had been a long time since she had said no to him. Grant Yandro stood in stunned silence for a moment before his brows drew together and he roared.

  “For crying out loud, girl! I thought you had more sense! That horse has got a screw loose for sure. It ain’t got no respect for humans, and it ain’t never going to give you nothing but trouble. You seen the way it went at that fellow! You want to get yourself killed?”

  “He won’t hurt me,” Bobbi said. The words sounded like a child’s backtalk, even to her ears, but she didn’t mean them that way. They were true. She could see the pride in the black horse, a dignity that would not le
t the proud, strong one harm women or children or anything less strong. It was a pride that belonged to another time, so much so that she could not for a moment remember the name of it.

  Honor. That was the name.

  And her own hidden honor would not let her lay a hand on the black mustang’s head to prove her point. She would never do that until she was invited.

  “What makes you think he won’t hurt you?” Grandpap demanded.

  “I just know.”

  “Bobbi Lee—”

  “This is the horse I want. It’s my choice.”

  She felt sure of her ground. Pap had promised her the horse of her choice, and Pap was fair. But his fairness would not prevent him from making her life miserable in little ways because he considered that she had chosen the wrong horse.

  The wrangler came over. “Halter him for you, miss?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s her funeral,” Grant growled.

  Bobbi spoke carefully. She wanted the man to understand. “I want the horse. But there’s no need to halter him. He’ll go in whatever holding pen you want on his own. When it’s time, he’ll go on the trailer the same way.”

  The man was dumbfounded, then covered it by laughing and appearing to try not to laugh. Grant Yandro was furious. His granddaughter was talking nonsense, mortifying him in front of horsemen. He swore, and for the first time in years he laid hands on Bobbi.

  “Jesus Christ, girl!” He grabbed her by the arm, hard, sending her toward the door. “You talk as crazy as your screwball mother!”