The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  “Why the hun not?” Witchie snapped. She dumped the gown on the bed as if it were so much clean laundry, and waited to take Bobbi’s clothes away for washing. In her bent old hands, Bobbi noted, she held a brand-new, large-size cannister of Epsom salts, brought down from the attic under the nightgown.

  “Jesus!” Bobbi wailed. “I forgot!” She started out of the room, bound downstairs to tend to Shane’s cracked hoof.

  “Get your bath and git to bed!” Aunt Witchie barked. “Crimony, girl, I can heave a bucket of water. I ain’t a cripple yet.”

  After taking her bath in the big, claw-footed tub, after combing her wet hair and carefully French-braiding it and using the toothbrush Witchie had given her, Bobbi put on the long nightgown. The rounded tops of her breasts showed bare over dusky-rose lace. Satin seemed to embrace and caress her belly, buttocks, thighs. She knew without needing a mirror that she was beautiful. She went to bed, warm under the cathedral-window quilt, and placed a hand on her breasts and one on the small mound between her legs before she thought of Witchie. Then she moved her hands away from the places that felt good and waited for sleep, trying not to think any more about the strange old woman who seemed to see into the hidden places of her mind.…

  When she woke up in the morning she found lying across the foot of her bed a pair of slim-cut jeans, a western shirt, buckskin moccasin boots, blue socks and blue nylon briefs, all brand new and all like something out of her dream image of herself, though she had hardly known until that moment that she had one. No bra. How did Witchie know she hated bras? She stared at the clothes a moment, then let them lie and stomped barefoot downstairs in her low-cut satin-and-lace nightgown. Shane was just coming back into the parlor from outside—through the back door, screened by brush, he could go out to relieve himself without much danger of being seen. He lifted his head when he caught sight of Bobbi and looked at her intently, but Bobbi paid no attention. She had forgotten how she looked; she wanted only to confront Witchie.

  In the kitchen she found the old woman mixing batter, just somebody’s gray-haired grandmother, a puttering old woman—Bobbi refused any longer to be fooled.

  “You looked inside my head,” she accused.

  “Huh,” Witchie acknowledged. “Do them things fit?”

  Bobbi stamped her bare foot, hurting it on the linoleum floor, then suddenly stopped being angry. Instead, she felt oddly desolate, and confused. “I give up. I don’t understand you. Where did you get them?”

  “Where I got your nightgown. In the attic.”

  Brand-new size-eleven Jordaches, with the tags still on them, in the attic? Bobbi felt cold and tried to joke. “You have a shopping mall up there, or what?”

  The old woman just looked at her with those strange yellow eyes.

  Bobbi whispered, “You’re a witch.”

  “I’m just an old pow-wow woman, Bobbi.” A healer, she meant. The Pennsylvania Dutch called their old-style healers pow-wows. “I’m the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. I got Indian blood in me, way back. Have some scrapple while you’re waiting for the pancakes.”

  “No,” said Bobbi. Fear made her sound rude, but Witchie seemed more amused than offended.

  “You think I’m trying to fatten you up before I pop you in the oven?” Witchie laughed. Her laugh, low-pitched and pleasantly husky, sounded quite unlike a cartoon witch’s cackle. When she was done laughing she said, “I won’t eat you, Bobbi. If you burn yourself I can draw out the fire, and if you cut yourself I can stop the bleeding. I can pow-wow warts and children’s ailments. Sometimes I help people when the doctors can’t, and sometimes the doctors help them when I can’t. I don’t deceive nobody nor take their money. I don’t hold with burnt chicken feet buried under the eaves and Himmels-brief charms and all that gibberish. I can dowse for water and things people lost, but people don’t always like me. If they ask me, I tell them the truth, not what they want to hear. A witch has to refuse money to be honest. I do curses, but not for pay or nobody’s say-so.” Her tone turned dark but quiet, like a still river under tall trees. “Wunst I am sure, I hex what is evil.”

  Witchie was strong, Bobbi felt sure of it. She heard it in the dark, quiet voice. Witchie had powers she wasn’t telling.

  The thought frightened her into a cold sweat. Even her own strange visions had never frightened her as much. She turned away, not knowing where to go, and found that her bare feet were carrying her into the other room, where Shane was. She hurried up to him and laid her hand on his hard, black shoulder for protection, like a chased child in a game no longer fun, as if touching her base would make her safe. “Shane,” she appealed to him, and his head came up from his hay, his vivid eyes met hers, but there was nothing in them to still her fears.

  Witchie followed her into the parlor, wiping her hands on her flour-sack apron. She said, “It ain’t easy for him to talk to you. Takes a lot out of him. Just wait a minute.” Elbows out and swinging purposefully, legs taking wide strides, Witchie crossed the room to the umbrella urn and reached for her walking stick.

  Bobbi felt her legs turn weak, and clutched at Shane’s mane for support. “No!” she gasped—and then her fear was lost in astonishment, for Shane had turned his handsome black head and gently nuzzled her. Telling her not to be afraid, that did not surprise her, but … there was something of affection.…

  And then Witchie was holding the walking stick up in front of her, though not too fearsomely close. Above its silver ferrule the small, round, smoky-clear handle seemed to glow and swirl. Roundness disappeared; Bobbi saw something like a soft gray mist swirling and glowing in a quiet sunrise. And then she saw the man dressed in black.

  That was all she was to remember about his clothing afterward: that it was black and fitted his broad shoulders and slim legs beautifully. The broad-brimmed black hat, was it the hat of a Spanish rider, a western gunslinger, a riverboat gambler, a gentleman from the deep south? Did he wear a cloak, or some sort of elegant jacket? She couldn’t remember. She did recall a glint of white at his throat. But for the most part her gaze was caught on his face, the face she had seen only once before, and on his ice-blue, fiery eyes.

  “Bobbi,” he said.

  It was as if he stood before her at a small distance, in a misty place she could not name, an anyplace. Walking stick, horse, hay-cluttered parlor and Aunt Witchie had all disappeared, and though Bobbi still felt mane and hard muscle under her hand, she was not conscious of them.

  “Bobbi,” the man in black said, “you were never afraid of me, and I’ve killed more men than Mrs. Fenstermacher.”

  She swallowed. What was he saying, now that they could finally, truly talk? “Shane?” she faltered. “Is that your real name?”

  “As real as any of them.”

  “But—who are you?”

  “I never tell anyone that. Not even you, Bobbi.”

  “He’s Shane.” Aunt Witchie’s voice sounded plainly to Bobbi, though she either couldn’t or didn’t see her standing nearby. “He’s the gunfighter who gave away his heart. Besides that, he’s Zorro. And Rhett Butler. And Paladin, the black knight, and Hal, the tavern prince, and a hundred more.”

  Stories. Misty legends, tales told around hearthfires, forms in the flames, no more. Insubstantial forms seen beyond what was real. Yet Shane was as real as the hard, supporting withers under her hand. And Witchie—what was Witchie?

  “Even in movies.” The old woman’s voice sounded dry and disapproving. “Han Solo and them. Copies.”

  “They’re entitled,” said Shane, or said the man with the blue eyes blazing under the black hat.

  “They’re miserable shadows.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Shane’s eyes held steady on Bobbi, like blue flames with no wind blowing, and in a crazy moment she knew that he was even stronger than Witchie, yet more vulnerable. She knew that she could hurt him—no. Fear clawed her at the thought. But she knew that someone had hurt him, sometime.

  “Why are you a mustang?” she whis
pered.

  “How else can a man roam free any more?”

  She knew that there was more to it than that, much more to drive him to the harsh life of a wild horse running on the upland plains of Wyoming. In an eerie, wordless way, yet as clearly as she knew anything about him, she understood that his being a wild, black stallion had something to do with women, or a woman. She knew it because she stood beside him in a low-cut, rose-colored gown. She was not a woman yet, not really, but a virginal girl still, horse-crazy; she had never wanted anything to do with men. But the way she loved wild horses … intuitively she knew the truth: it was the same way women loved a certain sort of man.

  Wanting to touch him and tame him and make him their own, heart and soul, and no one else’s.…

  She pressed one hand to her head as she clung to black mane with the other, pressed her palm against her forehead and eyes as if trying to force down what she was seeing and thinking.

  “Bobbi. What’s the matter?”

  “Shane … Nothing.”

  He said, “Tell me. It’s my fault you’re in this mess.”

  “It—it’s not that. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  Witchie’s throaty old voice came through to her again, like the voice of an offstage narrator. “A person has to have madness or poetry in them to see in my walking stick. You got both, Bobbi. Your father was a poet, did you know that?”

  “No,” Bobbi mumbled, though she did know, if only lately, though in fact it was her dead father and his poetry who had gotten her in “this mess.” No, she said, because at that moment she wanted nothing to do with madness or magic or any of what was happening to her. She had closed her eyes, leaning against the horse, and everything looked as black as the black shoulder under her head.

  Shane the man-legend said, “You were the only one who could see me, Bobbi. Who could see what I am.”

  Witchie said to Shane, “She needs time, Dark Stranger.”

  Bobbi heard the old woman’s slippers shuffling as she crossed the room to return the walking stick to its urn. Opening her eyes, Bobbi saw hay-strewn parlor again, and a black horse, and found that she was clinging to the mustang’s neck with both arms. Abashed, she turned away and went up to her room to put on her new clothes.

  They fit perfectly. She went back down to the kitchen, where she and Witchie ate scrapple and pancakes with maple syrup Witchie had made herself, boiling the sap from the huge sugar-trees that nodded over her roof. Bobbi changed the soak for Shane’s foot, and watched for a moment as the black mustang set his hoof in the bucket of fresh warm water and Epsom salts, carefully, so as not to upset it on Mrs. Fenstermacher’s parlor carpet. Then she went and offered to do the dishes. Witchie turned on a huge, old TV in the parlor and settled into a front-room rocker, a cane-and-ladderback one, to watch the late morning news.

  Time, Bobbi was thinking. Sloshing around with her hands in warm dishwater soothed her, and so did her full stomach. Her aches from too much bareback riding were disappearing. Time was a heal-all. It took care of things no pow-wow woman could.

  “… Bobbi Yandro,” the TV said, startling Bobbi so badly that she squeaked. At first she thought the television was—bewitched, though she hated even to think the word. Peculiar, as some other things in this house seemed to be. Talking to her. But then, peering through the door to the parlor, she saw her school-picture face flashed on the screen as the familiar Pittsburgh announcer went on with the news story about her.

  “… no recent developments in the disappearance of the Canadawa County girl. State police have expanded their search to include the Scubber’s Creek and Parsimony areas following a report by an area man that he saw a girl on a dark-colored horse crossing I-72 on the Bell School Road overpass in Blessing Township early yesterday morning. The massive search effort in the Canadawa and Mandawa Mountain area has been called off, since it is now believed that the girl is not in fact lost, but ran away following a dispute with her grandfather. Anyone who has seen Bobbi Yandro, or who may have information concerning her whereabouts, is urged to contact …”

  Bobbi found that her feet had carried her into the parlor as she listened. Shane had gone rigid, his head lifted high. Witchie turned the set off. “They’ll be putting your picture on milk cartons next,” she remarked to Bobbi. “And grocery sacks.”

  Bobbi asked, “How far from here are those places? Scubber’s Creek? Parsimony?”

  “Not far.”

  With a dry mouth Bobbi said, “We don’t have time, then. For Shane’s foot to heal. For whatever it is that I need time for.”

  Chapter Nine

  Witchie did a peculiar thing. She heaved herself up out of the rocker, whisked the oilcloth off the kitchen table and plopped it in a corner, then got four new, white candles out of the drawer of a huge, carved, claw-footed, great-bellied, oval-mirrored, dark-veneered, monstrously imposing piece of furniture called a buffet. She put the candles in star-shaped glass holders, the kind sold at McCrory’s, and set them at the corners of the square slab of oak, the tabletop.

  “Girl’s right,” she remarked to the house at large, perhaps to her walking stick or to Shane. “There ain’t much time. By tomorrow old Ethel Schroyer next door will be on the phone wanting to know why don’t I pull the parlor blinds, am I sick. And when I tell her I got the grippe, she’ll be over here with some fool thing to eat, in a bowl I got to wash and return. And she don’t miss much, so she ain’t likely to miss noticing a horse in the parlor. Bobbi, come here. Set there.”

  She placed Bobbi in a chair at the table, facing the window. She lit the candles and turned on the lamp that said “Let There Be Light.”

  “This is to tell you what you ought to do,” she explained to Bobbi, “or to help you make up your mind what to do, however you want to look at it.” Out of the buffet drawer Witchie pulled a deck of cards.

  They were the oddest cards Bobbi had ever seen. They were circular. And as Witchie fumbled through them, looking for something, Bobbi glimpsed pictures on them, and the bright-colored, symmetrical hex designs she had sometimes seen on old barns.

  Witchie found the circle she was looking for and handed it to Bobbi. It was a perfectly plain, empty white circle of rich-feeling, heavy rag paper. A white nothing. A naught.

  “That’s the innocent,” Witchie told her. “The petitioner. That’s you. Put it in the middle of the table. Smack dab in the middle, now.”

  Bobbi turned the white circle over and around in her fingers, feeling serious in spite of herself. “Does it matter which side is up?” she asked Witchie.

  “That one, no, it don’t matter which side or how you turn it, long as it’s right in the middle.”

  Bobbi placed the card. It lay like a white zero against the dark wood, and Witchie handed Bobbi the rest of the cards.

  “Don’t look at ’em. Look at the light while you shuffle ’em.”

  Bobbi mixed up the cards as best she could. It was hard to handle them. Their circular shape made them seem to have minds of their own. “Is that enough?” she asked after a while.

  “I can’t say,” Witchie replied. “You say.”

  Bobbi glanced at her. The old woman’s face was set in quiet folds, and her braided hair lay calm and sleek in loops around her head, but her yellow eyes glinted bright as sunlight. Bobbi handed the cards back to her, and Witchie laid them out.

  She laid them with care in a certain pattern and order. When she was finished, they made a large wheel with twelve spokes, and Bobbi’s white card formed the hub.

  “Tell me what you see,” Witchie said to Bobbi.

  There were faces on some of the cards, or stylized drawings of people, animals or birds. Some of the cards were simple discs of a solid, bright color. Others were painted with vivid hex designs or the primitive, exuberant flower-forms called fraktur lilies. Also, Bobbi saw later, there were pictures of a crown, a six-pointed star, a sun, a moon, a water cup, a five-pointed star and a black heart. But at the time she noticed none of those. Her glance
was caught on one circle which showed a man in black clothing riding a black horse. Even in the tiny ink drawing she seemed to see the fire of blue eyes.

  “Shane!” she exclaimed to Witchie, pointing.

  The old woman nodded. “The hero in black. He’s at the juncture of a spoke. He’s important, but you’ve put him off to one side. What else do you see?”

  Bobbi scanned the dazzle of bright colors and designs, searching for something familiar. Then her finger shot to the image of a veiled, hunchbacked woman with some sort of stick or staff in her hand. “That’s you,” she said.

  “Huh,” said Witchie, taken aback but not caring to show it much. “That’s the sorceress, all right. How’d you know?”

  “I saw her! Or you. Right when I first came in.” Bobbi felt cold, telling Witchie what she had always hidden from everyone else, but she could not seem to stop herself. “In a white robe with fleece on it, and pointed hat and veil like that, and a silver belt with, like, hieroglyphics.”

  “Runes.” Witchie was giving her a sharp look. “My stars, girl. You have the sight. That’s how you knowed Shane, ain’t it, by seeing him in his true form. What else ain’t you telling me?”

  Bobbi jerked her gaze away from Witchie’s and looked down at her hands, not speaking.

  “You see things like that often?”

  Bobbi didn’t say anything. Witchie peered at her. “You saw yourself, I’m the white witch,” she complained. “I ain’t going to hurt you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” Bobbi flared.

  “Whatever.” Without reacting to Bobbi’s tone, Witchie turned back to the cards. “Where were we. You found me, and I’m ascendant. That means I’m not real important to you right now, though I could be. Pay attention, Bobbi. What else do you see?”

  Bobbi blinked and looked at the cards again, pointing to the first one that caught her eye. “Who’s that?” Her hand hovered over the picture of a straight-browed, golden-haired young man.