The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  She jerked her arm away from him, surprising herself. She had not known she was so strong. Perhaps because she was very angry, as always when Pap talked about her mother that way—but there was no time for anger. There was the horse to be thought of.

  “I don’t want any halter on him,” she repeated to the wrangler.

  “If you want this horse, I got to put a halter on him,” the man told her. “Rules, miss. Sorry.” He spoke as if to a child or an idiot.

  The odd thing was, she did not want the horse, not really. Everything about the black scared her. She did not want a horse around that made her see things. She did not need a proud problem with hating eyes. But—what might happen to the blue-eyed black if somebody else got it? Somebody who was not crazy enough to understand?

  She went out of the safety room, her grandfather’s hand hard on her arm again. She stood and listened to the loud, angry sounds, Grandpap’s ranting, the crashing of hooves and heavy shoulders against wood as the black mustang fought the indignity being placed on his head. When the men slipped the door at last, he came leaping out like something berserk. He kicked, sending some careless people too close to the safety barrier jumping sharply back. He pounded into the holding pen. On his head was a red nylon halter, and a yellow nylon lead rope trailed for several feet behind him. The clownish things were wrong on him, Bobbi knew it. Her heart stung. She felt an echo, a ghost, of his hatred.

  An hour later, after Grant Yandro had chosen a mustang for himself, signed the papers for both horses and paid the money, he got into his pickup and backed the stock trader up to the loading chute. His own mustang, a rawboned sorrel stud, went on in the usual way; driven into the chute, frantic with fear. No wild horse will go into a confined space without resisting. All its survival instincts are against it. But mustangs are even more afraid of the humans behind them than they are of the trap.

  The men had loaded what they considered would be the easier horse first, while the black watched and Bobbi watched the black. In those weird blue eyes she saw nothing of a horse’s instincts. Instead, she saw scorn.

  The black mustang’s turn came. Three men on foot approached to drive the horse into the chute.

  The black horse charged.

  The wranglers scrambled for the entry. One of them croaked out a scream. To their way of thinking, a nightmare was happening. Only a vicious horse, a killer horse, will attack. But as Bobbi perceived it, a defiant justice was taking place. The black horse had hurt no one, but merely turned the whip of fear against the men. Through the tall wooden barrier she watched quietly, knowing what would happen.

  The black stud walked deliberately into the loading chute and through it onto the trailer.

  When Bobbi got there, her grandfather had closed the trailer door. He gave her a peculiar look and did not speak to her as he got into the truck cab to drive. The sorrel was kicking at the inside of the trailer. The black stood quietly.

  During the entire three-and-a-half-hour drive home, Pap and Bobbi said hardly a word.

  Grant Yandro eased the trailer up the long, rutted lane leading back through the dark fir woods to the stony-hard mountainside farm, pressed small by forest, where the Yandros lived.

  Bobbi got out and opened the gate of the six-foot pipe corral where the mustangs would have to go, built on the small, tilted patch of ground where the old bank barn had once stood, outside the metal barn Grandpap had put up a few years back. Grandpap backed the trailer flush up to the corral gate. Four placid horses, grazing in the steep, electric-fenced pasture, raised their heads in mild interest and watched the mustangs unload.

  The black came out first, calmly, walking to the center of the corral and looking around at hills like sleeping dinosaurs, the cabin squatting in the shadows, the dark firs and gray sugar maples with their blood-red tinge of springtime bud. The sorrel had to be urged to follow. It had lamed itself with kicking at the unyielding metal of the trailer; it stumbled out and floundered to the fence, looking for escape, its long lead trailing. Mustangs wore halters and lead ropes constantly until they were trained.

  Pap and Bobbi watched the mustangs a moment, then closed the corral and the trailer and went wordlessly about their chores.

  It was a silent, unpleasant evening. On toward dark, when her grandfather had settled sourly in front of the old black-and-white TV, Bobbi slipped out of the cabin. Half-log, half-stone, it had been there since sometime before the Civil War. Bits of old tools and junk lay all around it. Bobbi dodged around a rusting compressor and down the cluttered slope to the corral to see her horse—if the black stud could truly be said to be hers.

  The sorrel scrambled for the far side of the corral when it heard her coming, but the black stood within arm’s reach of the gate, and he stood his ground. The clown-bright nylon halter and lead rope on him glowed like fungi in the dusk.

  “I’ll take those off you, if you like,” Bobbi offered from the other side of the gate.

  The black tossed his head in proud negation. He was not ready to accept an offer of help from her or anyone else, this stud. Bobbi felt certain that he had understood every word she said, an absurd, insane certainty, eerie enough to chill her with creeping fear and lower her voice to a hoarse whisper.

  “What are you?”

  Once again she looked to the horse’s strange eyes for the answer.

  They glowed like blue fire. Within a moment they glazed so bright that to Bobbi they no longer seemed blue, but strobe-white, engulfing her with their flaring light—she could see nothing. Yet, she could see everything. She saw—things so real, in that white-hot light, it was as if she could reach out and touch them. She saw a dragon with gray hair on its nearly-human head. She saw a gypsy wagon drawn by a mule. She saw an old woman with a walking stick alive and moving in her hand. She saw a young beauty with her white breasts showing above the low bodice of her long, full-skirted dress. She saw a young man with broad, black-shirted shoulders and a black hat; his back was turned. Then she must have closed her eyes. The white blaze burned too hot and fierce. When she opened her eyes again, she stood in a dark, springtime night with the peepers chiming in it somewhere, and she was clinging to the cold pipes of the corral. The strange horse still stood nearby, a black shape in the darkness of the night.

  Chapter Three

  Bobbi awoke the next morning to the thud of hooves. Outside her window she saw the black mustang circling his corral at a hard gallop, with his head held high and the yellow lead rope flying. Without waiting to wash she dressed and went out.

  The sorrel stood stiff-legged in the middle of the corral, snatching wisps of the hay that Grant had tossed there and spooking between bites, afraid. The black continued to run without glancing at either the sorrel or the girl who stood at the fence. He ran with speed and control and, Bobbi intuited, purpose. Like a tough-minded prisoner, the black was exercising himself to stay strong.

  Bobbi watched. Since the strange blue eyes were not looking at her, for the first time she saw the black as a horse, saw him the way her Grandpap did, and with a small shock of surprise she realized he was no bigger than most mustangs. She had perceived him from the start as tall, but he was smaller than the sorrel. It was partly the way he moved, she decided, that had made her think he was big. When he walked, she saw a swordfighter walking to a duel; when he ran, she saw a Green Beret charging. He had presence enough for any half-dozen horses or men.

  He was not put together like any horse she had ever seen. No wonder her grandfather disapproved. His shoulders were large enough for a larger horse, then tapered to a slim barrel and hindquarters. His hooves were small, beautiful to look at but really too small to carry the weight of those heavy shoulders, that neck—his neck was a true stallion’s neck, proudly arched. His head was lean, straight, chiseled, slightly Roman of profile under the red halter. Some Barb blood in him, the horsewoman in Bobbi thought, while in a hidden way she knew it was not Barb blood at all, or any sort of horse breeding, that made the black mustang look the wa
y he did, move in the lithe, alert way he always did, and turn on her with coldly blazing blue eyes.

  He ran by her, just inside the fence, almost within her arm’s reach, without glancing at her. She waited until he was well past, then said, not loudly, “Shane.”

  The horse plunged his hocks to the dirt, slid to a stop on his hindquarters, whirled and faced her, all as fast as a striking snake. His head swung low, canted toward her, and the blaze of his blue eyes seemed to burn through her. Dangerous, very dangerous, he was, and Bobbi sensed it surely. Wright Yandro had written the truth. But oddly, Bobbi did not feel afraid. Shane was dangerous, but not to her.

  She said quietly, “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

  Nothing in the eyes answered her. She had to trust her own sureness. The black forelock fell as a strong man’s unruly hair falls over his forehead, ready to be pushed back by the hand of the woman who dared.… She had read her father’s notebooks again before going to bed, and dreamed of the black horse in her sleep, and awakened to the drumming of his hooves with the name in her mind.

  “I know it is, and I will call you by it,” she said.

  Now that the black had stopped running, the sorrel bolted to the far side of the corral from Bobbi. Shane gave it a scornful look, then walked to the strewn hay and began methodically to eat. Bobbi leaned her arms on a fence rail and watched. Not because she wanted to touch him—or so she told herself, for Bobbi scorned to feel desire for boys or men—but because she wanted to be a friend to him, Bobbi said, “If you would care to come here, I’ll take that stupid halter off.”

  Without raising his head from the hay, Shane narrowed his eyes and gave her a chilling look.

  “Well, just remember I offered,” Bobbi complained. She laid her chin down on her folded arms and watched the black stud eat while the sorrel cowered against the opposite fence. After a while she said, very softly, so softly that probably Shane didn’t hear, “I’d like to groom that mud and fur off you, too, and make you shine. Maybe being dirty is what’s making you so sour. Seems to me you would have been a dandy. Gold rings, silk cravats—”

  “Who you talking to?”

  Bobbi jumped, then sighed with exasperation. Travis Dodd, the neighbor boy from up the mountain, had come up beside her without her hearing him. She hated that. She hated the way his eyelids jumped. She hoped he hadn’t heard too much. If he had, he didn’t show it; nervous as always, he blundered on without waiting for an answer.

  “Them the mustangs? Which one’s yours?”

  “Black,” Bobbi replied curtly.

  “Oh.” Travis stared intently at the horse. Travis had hair the off-color of homemade soap and a twitchy grin, and he didn’t know a thing about horses. “He’s nice, I guess,” he said lamely of the black.

  Bobbi wished he would go away and let her alone with the horse that was no horse and with her crazy thoughts. She didn’t understand why Travis hung around her the way he did, when she wasn’t interested in boys the way most girls her age were. They all seemed so—so futile, compared to her dreams. How could she ever love any pimply boy the way she loved the images in her own mind?

  Moreover, she was not the sort of girl boys were supposed to hang around. Something in her rebelled against making herself attractive, or what other people called attractive. She didn’t bother with makeup, and she got her clothes off the boys’ rack at the Goodwill store. Her excuse was that Pap didn’t have much money, but in fact it was all part of her Yandro orneriness. Yandros were independent, Grandpap said, and didn’t care about fashion or what people thought, and Bobbi was a Yandro.

  “Ain’t you coming to school today?” Travis pestered. “Don’t you think one unexcused absence is enough for this week?”

  “Crud,” Bobbi muttered. She had forgotten all about school. The day felt like weekend to her since she had taken off school to go to the mustang place, but it was just Friday.

  “Get your stuff,” said Travis. “I’ll wait.”

  He would walk with her down the long lane to the school bus stop, he meant. Bobbi found his attentions annoying and faintly embarrassing. She went back into the cabin and, after brushing her teeth, slipped out the back door and walked to the bus stop through the woods to avoid Travis with his puke-blond hair and shy, staring eyes.

  She was glad to avoid Pap too. Her grandfather had gone off somewhere, and she did not see him at all that morning.

  When she got home in the late afternoon, Grandpap was in the corral with the mustangs. By the look of his reddened face, for once he had lost his patience while working with a horse.

  “Bobbi!” he roared as soon as she came in view up the lane. “This black devil has got to go!”

  Bobbi dropped her books and came running, but grew angry as she ran. “He’s my horse,” she said as she pounded up to the fence. “You don’t have to mess with him.”

  “I’m just trying to get to my own horse!”

  The sorrel stood huddled against the fence, completely lathered with sweat, as frightened of the black stud as he was of the humans. The black faced Grandpap at a small distance, alert and ready to move in any direction, but unheated. His ears were pricked forward. He was enjoying himself. All afternoon, every time Grant Yandro had tried to approach his own mustang to get hold of the lead rope that trailed on the ground, the black had cut between, spooking the sorrel horse and endangering the man.

  Pap told Bobbi, “Get in here. I’ll keep the black son of a bitch busy. You get hold of the sorrel’s lead.”

  From longtime habit of obedience to her grandfather, Bobbi opened the gate and slipped into the corral. Then she stopped where she was. Often she had seen Grandpap working with the horses, patient, consistent, unyielding, firm; seldom kind, but always fair and firm. He shaped the behavior of the horses, taking his time but always pushing, pressing, little by little, the way forest pressed on the farm. Bobbi knew that he had trained her the same way, and she loved him, but she did not like being shaped.

  She looked at the black. Blue eyes met hers, and she saw in them what she expected to see: an outlaw’s defiance of the oppressor for her grandfather, and a grudging sense of honor for her.

  “I’ll put my horse in a stall for you,” she told her grandfather.

  “And how you expect to do that?” retorted Pap, not in query but in scorn. Mustangs were afraid of enclosed spaces. They had to be halter-trained before they could be taken into a stall.

  “Just open the door. He’ll go in by himself.”

  This should have been good news to Grant Yandro, but he was in no mood to hear his granddaughter say that all he had to do was open a stall door and ask the black mustang to go in. He had spent an exasperating afternoon. He had tried for an hour to get hold of the black stud’s lead rope, so he could tie it to a rail and get it out of the way. The black had comprehended what no ordinary horse should comprehend, the connection between himself and the rope, and he had refused to let the old man anywhere near the trailing length of nylon. Longe whip in hand, Grant had tried to corner the black. It was as useless as spitting into the wind. The black horse was fast and fearless. Finally, though he knew Bobbi would have a right to be angry at him if she ever found out, he had tried to rope the mustang. But the black was more rope-wise than any horse he had ever seen. Shane had made a monkey of him, all afternoon, and when Bobbi said she would put him in a stall, Pap opened his mouth and roared.

  “You’re going soft in the head!”

  “I’ve been right about him so far,” she challenged, “haven’t I?”

  But Grant Yandro was too bullheaded to admit that. And he didn’t just want the black horse in a stall. He wanted to conquer him. He handed Bobbi the whip.

  “You get over there on the right. Come at him that way while I grab that lead.”

  It was an order, given in the heat of action. Bobbi had never gone against such an order of her grandfather’s in her life.

  “No,” she said, though her voice sounded far less than firm. But she foll
owed the word by dropping the whip in the dirt.

  Grandpap glared, then shouted, “Jesus shit! Goddamn it, girl! Why not?”

  She would not admit, even to herself, that she did not want the black mustang to hate her. Though she knew she could have walked up and taken him by the halter, and he would not have resisted her by even so much as turning his head away.

  “He’s my horse,” she said. It came out sounding bratty. Inwardly she groaned, for she could see Pap was boiling mad.

  Rather than face him any longer, she turned away and jogged across the corral to where the big sliding door to the barn stood open, offering the mustangs shelter should they choose to accept it, though no escape. At the other end of it another door, closed and latched, blocked the way and the light. Stepping inside the shadowy aisle, Bobbi opened the door to the first stall. She did not have to look to see if the black horse was watching her; she felt sure that Shane was always aware of everything taking place around him, both because he was a wild stallion and because he was—himself. Without turning around and without raising her voice, she requested, “Shane, would you come and get into this stall, please?”

  She could hear the black stud walking toward her across the corral. Without looking she could envision his catlike alertness, his desperado grace. She heard his steps steadily approach, then the slightest of hesitations; Shane was put off by her nearness. He thought perhaps she would try to touch him as he went past her into the stall. “Don’t worry,” she said sourly to the wall. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  He speeded his walk slightly, brushed past her, entered the stall and turned around so that he faced her as she closed the door. Bobbi felt a slight shock as her eyes met the eerie blue ones in the horse’s strong, black face. Almost, she had expected a man’s handsome, headstrong face, dark brows, straight nose.… Shane stood watching her intently.

  “I won’t latch it,” she told him quietly. “You can just push it open if you want. But please stay in until Grandpap is done. He’s not a bad man. Even the temper you’ve got him in, you’ll see he doesn’t hurt the horse.”