The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  Shane’s image shadowed her mind, black, no matter how she tried to send it away. She ran as if wildcats were after her. Like a deer she crashed through briars and underbrush. When she saw the maroon siding of the barn through the trees and slowed down to be more quiet, her heart would not quit pounding. She felt half panicked. Skipping school to watch something on the sly, a small rebellion, should not have made her feel so scared.… She quelled the thought. She did not dare think.

  The big door at her end of the barn, the end away from the corral, hung open. Bobbi slipped out of the woods, edged along the barn wall, and risked a peek inside. Shane.… The black horse had not yet been touched. Relief washed over her, a feeling as dangerous as a thought; she sent it away, trying merely to see what was happening in front of her. Doc and Pap in the barn, working on the sorrel.

  Take the easiest horse first was the horseman’s rule, whatever needed to be done. The horse that was likely to give trouble always waited until last; otherwise, his struggling would upset the others and cause them to give trouble as well. Since the sorrel was halter-trained, Pap and Doc were gelding him first. In a way hidden even from herself, Bobbi had been counting on that.

  She eased her eye past the door frame and watched. Both men were busy, and neither of them saw her. Grant Yandro was just taking the twitch, a sort of metal clamp, off the sorrel’s nose after using it to make the horse hold still while the vet injected the sedative into the neck. The sorrel’s head sagged; Bobbi could see it through the stall door. Doc had unbundled his instruments. They lay on a white cloth on the stall ledge. Bobbi watched as the vet selected a scalpel and disappeared into the stall. Most vets laid horses on their sides to castrate them, but Doc Boser preferred to do them standing up. Pap steadied the sorrel by the halter—the horse was standing on tottering legs, nearly falling, much too weak and shaky to struggle. Its head drooped nearly to Grand-pap’s knees.

  The sorrel groaned.

  Deep, heaved up from the inmost depths of the horse’s helpless pain, the groan trembled through the stable. Bobbi felt her fists curl. The knot in her chest turned into something that stung like smoke, burned like flame. The sorrel groaned as if it were giving up its soul. Something round and bloody, tossed out of the stall, landed in the dirt of the barn aisle. A cluster of stable cats gathered around it.

  Deliberately Bobbi shifted her stare and looked at Shane in his stall at the other end of the barn, the corral end.

  The door there stood open wide, like the one she stood at, for light. Bobbi could see the black mustang plainly, and she saw how sweat slicked his black hide, how the whites showed around the blue of his eyes, and she knew Shane’s fear was not horse fear, made up of blood smell and strangeness, but man fear, because he comprehended what was happening and knew his turn was next. Shane, the outlaw hero who had hardly ever been afraid of anything … Bobbi saw his head turn as he scanned the stall walls, roof, floor, looking for escape. There was none. She saw him thinking, trying to plan where there was no hope. She saw the thinking and the hopelessness along with the fear in his eyes. She knew that, when they came to castrate him, she would see the form beyond his horse form, the man.

  The second round, bloody morsel landed in the barn aisle for the cats to gnaw and drag about and pat with delicate paws. Doc Boser reached for his emasculators, a shiny, foot-long pair of tongs to crush what was left inside the sorrel.

  And in her mind Bobbi felt an angry, fiery crackling, a snap or click as if something had either broken or slipped into place. She found that she could think again. All right, she thought, I’ll be crazy.

  She slipped away from the door and around the outside of the barn, quickly, quietly. She ducked through the bars of the corral, eased over to the barn door at the corral end and looked. Pap and the vet, still in the stall with the sorrel. Good. In three soft steps she was at the door of Shane’s stall. Blue eyes turned on her and blazed in sudden hope.

  “Run like hell,” she whispered to the horse, and she opened the stall.

  Shane ran. He was a swashbuckler slashing his way across a hostile courtyard; he was a tavern brawler; he was Han Solo against the storm troopers. He moved like a black thunderbolt. Grant Yandro shouted and started out into the aisleway the moment he heard the snick of the stall latch, but the black horse knocked him aside with one mighty shoulder. Before Pap could raise a hand, Shane was past him and gone, out the far door to freedom, and Bobbi was jumping up and down and yelling after him, “Run, Shane! Keep going! Don’t stop till you get to Wyoming!”

  And then her grandfather was standing in front of her, and the way he looked at her stopped her shouting. She could almost hear the storm wind rising in his mind, could almost see the bruise-black cloud growing, a thunderhead swelling atop a mountain of pure jagged granite. Bobbi had just sent Grant Yandro beyond mere anger into a state more like what the preachers called wrath.

  He did not roar out any of the usual things: what the hun did Bobbi think she was doing, why wasn’t she at school, what sort of idiot was she. He did not roar at all. Maybe because Doc Boser was there he did not feel he could shout. So what happened was worse. He spoke in a low voice, stone-cold and hard and hateful.

  “Bobbi Lee Yandro,” he said, “you had no right to do that.”

  She tried to argue. “He’s my horse! I guess I can set him free if I want to.” Though her voice choked on the words.

  “I’m the one who signed the papers for him. The federal government says he’s their horse for a year yet, and I have to let them know if he gets killed or gets away. I’m the one the Bureau of Land Management is going to come after.”

  Bobbi stood stricken. She couldn’t speak. What had seemed right was crazy, which made it dead wrong, every other way you looked at it.

  Her grandfather said in the same cold rage, “Now you get out of this barn. You go find that black son of a bitch and I don’t want to see your face until you bring him back here.”

  Bobbi stared at him, feeling the loveless words sear their way into her brain as if they were branded there.

  Pap said, “You don’t find him, don’t bother coming back.”

  She turned and walked out of the barn, off the farm and away from the place she called home.

  Chapter Five

  “Well, then,” Bobbi muttered, because she was a Yandro and had a Yandro’s pride, “I won’t be back.”

  Since her head and heart were out of their whirling confusion and working together again, she knew several things very clearly. She knew gut-deep that Shane must not be castrated, and therefore she knew that she could not take him back to Pap. Her grandfather had no more give in him than a rock, experience told her. Shane had to get away. If someone took him back to Pap again, he would be gelded, sure as a dog gets fleas.

  Her grandpap had told her not to come back without the horse. Well, then, she wouldn’t come back.

  Cleanly, calmly, as she ran, her mind started working on her own survival. She would need food. She would need a means of traveling, and she would need someplace to go.

  First, though, there was one last matter to be attended to, if Shane was to get away for good. She had to find the black horse and speak to him once more, just the once, asking him to let her take the halter and lead rope off him. There had been no time, back in the barn. But the dangling lead would make Shane vulnerable to anyone who got near him. What was worse, the lead and halter could catch in the trees or rocks of the rough mountain terrain. Shane could starve to death.

  She wouldn’t let the thought panic her, not yet. But it had sent her running for all she was worth up the lane, upmountain, because Shane had gone that way.

  The lane rounded a curve, and the shanty where Travis Dodd lived with his parents came into view. Bobbi slowed to a jog. The horse might still be within earshot. “Shane!” she shouted to the woods. “Shane!”

  She stopped in front of the shanty, scanning the encircling woods, listening. Nothing happened except that Travis appeared at the shanty door
in his ragged pajamas, looking surprised. Bobbi jumped back from him like a spooking colt. She had forgotten he would be home, sick, while both his parents worked. But there was no time to spare thought for Travis.

  “Have you seen Shane?” she demanded.

  Travis looked puzzled for a moment, until he tore his mind off Bobbi’s presence and remembered who Shane was. “The black horse?” His face lighted up. “I thought I heard something! Must have been him. Went by here a minute ago.”

  “Shane!” Bobbi called to the woods. “Come here, please!”

  “He get loose?” Travis asked. It was not the first time he had asked Bobbi a stupid question, though he didn’t seem to have that problem with other people. He flushed, but, preoccupied, Bobbi did not notice.

  “I set him free,” she said softly, still watching the woods. Then, before Travis could gawk, she wheeled on him. “Travis, get me something to eat, please. Quick.”

  Startled, he didn’t move for a moment.

  “An apple, a couple slices of bread,” Bobbi expanded impatiently. “Hurry up. I gotta catch him before he gets too far away.”

  Travis opened the refrigerator—it stood beside him on the shanty porch—and handed her his school lunch, packed the night before just in case he felt well enough to go. “Thanks,” Bobbi told him. She ran on, and he watched after her as she disappeared into hemlock and mountain laurel. He thought the sandwiches were for the day, until she went home at nightfall. But she knew that this was her food for the foreseeable future, and Lord and the black horse only knew where darkness would find her.

  She was a hunter. She knew how to look for sign. Skirting the Dodd clearing, she found the place where Shane had entered the forest, displacing the dead leaves and pine duff on the ground with his hooves. A horse leaves a plain trail in the woods, especially in the soft, moist ground of springtime. Bobbi followed as fast as she could, through grapevine tangles, down damp ravines where the hoofprints showed plainly, along the mountainside on slopes so steep that her feet slithered and she supported herself with her hands. From time to time she thought she heard a crashing noise in the brush ahead. But when she stopped and called, the black mustang did not come to her. Probably it was deer she was hearing. Shane must have been out of earshot. He could move far faster than she could. She had no chance of catching up with him.

  But she continued to follow the trail, feeling fear swell in her and dampen her palms. A day, two days, three, and the trail would grow too faint to lead her. Sooner, if rain fell. After that, if Shane caught himself by the halter—

  Damn double-thickness nylon halters wouldn’t break for anything.

  Years later, somebody might find the skeleton strewn at the base of the tree, the bones pulled apart by wild dogs or Pennsylvania coyotes, but the skull still hanging in the bright red halter.

  Her mind shied away from the scene and started wandering as her feet carried her onward. She wondered what sort of a ghost a starved or savaged horse that was not a horse would leave. The ghost of a desperado stalking the mountains in his broad-brimmed black hat? She knew people who claimed to have seen ghosts in these hills: the ghosts of the lost children of the Alleghenies, two little boys, brothers, seven and five years old, who had died of starvation and exposure back in 1856. The bodies had been found after two weeks by a man who had seen them in a dream. People still heard the children crying on the hills at night. And there were the ghosts of a murdered hex witch, a man, and his murderer, his jealous wife, who poisoned his food then died shortly after him of his final curse on her name. Her ghost was supposed to haunt the woods in the form of a china cupboard, of all things. A cupboard full of fancy plates, dancing under the moon. What a thing to run into in the dark. Some people were crazier than she was, Bobbi decided, to think of such things.

  The murdered man was the hex witch of Ness Hollow, Bobbi recalled from the stories. He had the evil eye and could seduce women without effort. She didn’t want to run into his ghost. But there were other hex witches who were worse, and some who were far better. Old Nell the Hill Witch had lived for a hundred years and was reputed to have saved the lives of more than a hundred babies. Bobbi had heard of other witches still living in the mountains: the Buppsville Witch, the Hollis Corners Witch, the hex witch of Seldom—

  Where the hun was Seldom, Bobbi wondered. She knew of many towns in Canadawa County with peculiar names: Good Intentions, Cold Bottom, Salamander. She knew where they were, and she had been to some of them. But she had never seen a road sign for Seldom, or known anyone who went there, or seen it on any map. Maybe it was a ghost town. The thought amused her. A ghost town. She could be in the middle of a ghost town right now, walking through the woods, and not know it. The way people talked, there could be a city’s worth of ghosts all around her.

  She didn’t like to believe the stories. Horses that spooked at nothing, she joked, were seeing ghosts. Yet in a way the ghosts were as real to her as the dead butts of giant chestnut trees lying on the mountainsides, trees killed off sixty or eighty years before. Life was different in these parts. Old, like the hills. Deep, like the taproot of a pine. People remembered back a long time in Canadawa County.

  Well, maybe they’ll remember me when I’m gone, Bobbi thought darkly. Maybe they’ll tell stories of how I was never seen again. Bewitched away by a black horse.

  She followed the horse’s trail through the day as fast as her body would let her, walking along the steepest slopes, jogging when the terrain allowed and the trail was plain. She stopped to drink at every clear-running spring, but she didn’t stop to eat. She did not even look into the bag Travis had given her. A few times she crossed a dirt road or a snowmobile path, and a few times she saw the back of somebody’s cabin or bungalow, but she never came out of the woods, and that didn’t surprise her. A person could go for miles and days in these hills and still be in forest. The valleys between the mountains were mostly cleared for farms and towns, but the mountains didn’t lie in neat ridges any more, not once you got west of Canadawa. They lumped and rumpled like a thousand wallowing pigs across the rest of the state, and except for right around Pittsburgh all their backs grew thick with woods.

  Shane was heading that way. West, toward Wyoming.

  Bobbi followed until it became too dark to see the trail and she was afraid she might lose it. In that last dark ravine, she had barely been able to make out the sign at all. Off to one side she had thought she saw oval prints, dark and moist, as if the black horse had just come down to the stream to drink. But she must have been mistaken, must have been seeing shadowed deer tracks in the dusk. She felt sure the black horse was far ahead. Once out of the ravine, on the dryer ground atop the bank, she sat down on the dirt. She could pick up the trail again at first light.

  She thought of the bag of food in her hand, and for some reason her stomach turned. Just as well she wasn’t hungry, she decided. Likely she would be ravenous by the next day. She would save the food until then.

  She sat, too tired to sleep, and tried to think instead. Where was she going, once she and the black horse had parted paths for good? She had relations scattered all over the map, her father’s brothers and sisters, her mother’s brothers and their wives, Aunt This and Uncle That. Half of them, she forgot exactly where they lived. There were none of them she felt anything special for or trusted not to send her back to Pap. Then there was her mother, in her ward with the other crazies. And her mother’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Buige, who she sometimes saw when they came to visit her mother on Chantilly’s birthday and Bobbi was there too. They lived in Louisiana somewhere, and always sent Bobbi Christmas presents that showed they didn’t understand her at all. She had never been friendly with them, because she had sometimes felt that they might like to take her away from Pap. Huh. A good thing, now, if they did.

  The night had gotten very dark, and chilly. In her unlined windbreaker and cotton shirt, Bobbi started to shiver. The ground under her was damp. Somewhere spring frogs were chorusing: a sound
that Bobbi loved, usually, but this time it felt cold and wet to her. In the cabin, Pap would be lighting a fire in the woodstove to take the chill off the air—

  She should not have thought of Pap in that way. All in a moment the full extent of her anger and hurting broke through, like a fire breaking through a thin wall, and Bobbi could have screamed with the sting of it.

  I-DON’T-WANT-TO-SEE-YOUR-FACE-DON’T-BOTHER-COMING-BACK.…

  The words might as well have been branded on her mind, and still smoking. She cursed aloud with pain. “Jesus Christ!” she blurted at the night. “How could he have said that! He might just as well have said—have told me—”

  That he didn’t care about her. Go away, Bobbi. You Have Done Wrong. I don’t love you any more.

  She put her head on her knees and cried. Crying made her feel angry at herself as well as at Pap, but she couldn’t help it. She hurt all over, inside and out, as if she had taken a licking. Pap had never done that to her, but this was as bad or worse.

  “Hell,” she muttered to her knees when she was mostly done crying.

  Something howled in the woods, not unlike the way she had been howling, but with an animal voice. Her head jerked up. Pennsylvania coyotes had interbred with Canadian wolves on their way east, and they were big.

  It howled again, farther away. This time Bobbi paid no attention, for beyond the wash of tears in her eyes she saw a whitish blur in the air. She dug at her eyes with her knuckles. Her vision cleared, but the blur was still there: a dim, floating face. Something like Pap’s, yet—not like Pap’s exactly. Hazy. She did not want it to become any clearer.

  “I’m tired of seeing things,” she said fiercely, aloud, yet more to herself than to the face. The voice, when it answered her, seemed to sound inside her head.