The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  “That’s the golden hero. He’s ascendant, too. So’s magic.” Witchie indicated the five-pointed star, located midway up one of the spokes.

  “There’s the distelfink.” Bobbi had spotted the familiar bird.

  “That’s your luck, and it’s low right now.” The bird was located at the base of a spoke near the bottom of the wheel. “The old trickster, the villain, he’s at the rim, and I don’t like that.” Witchie indicated the black heart. “But you’ve put him in opposition to Shane, so maybe that’s all right.”

  The villain. “Grandpap,” said Bobbi darkly.

  “Guess again. Look who you put right at the top. The most important person in the world to you.”

  Bobbi looked, and saw the picture, of a dragon perched on a mountaintop with strong handlike claws, a dragon with gray hair and a face through which a human face looked, form behind the form—she knew that face. She felt a jolt and a rush of fear, anger, hatred, something else, a tangle of emotions so strong that it set her shaking. She started to jump from her chair to run away—Witchie’s bent, bony hand on her shoulder prevented her.

  “Grandpap,” Bobbi whispered. And she saw, plainly drawn on the heavy circle of paper, the form she had seen behind his form so many times, misted with her own fear. The huge thing jagged as the mountains. The dragon.

  “The old man of the mountain,” said Witchie, nodding. “Grant Yandro don’t know himself what he is, or he won’t. The dragon is strong and dickeppich, stubborn. Wrongheaded sometimes. Be glad he is not your enemy, Bobbi.”

  “But he is!” Bobbi shouted. “I hate him!”

  Witchie pointed. Between Bobbi and the old man, ascendant on the spoke, lay the bright red heart of love.

  “It’s a lie! He don’t love me, or he couldn’t have said what he did.” Tears stung Bobbi’s eyes at the thought. Angrily she blinked them back.

  “Huh,” Witchie grumped. “I guess you never said nothing you didn’t mean.”

  “Not like that! Not to hurt somebody.”

  “You’re hurting him a lot worse, and punishing him, by staying away from him, and you know it.”

  “I don’t care! I won’t go back to him. I hate him!” Her own vehemence made Bobbi start to sob, though she hated to cry in front of anyone. Shane put his head through from the parlor and looked at Witchie as if to tell her to ease off. The old woman glared back at him.

  “She’s got to hear the truth!” Witchie declared.

  From the parlor came a low, flat voice. “She needs time. As you said before.”

  Bobbi stiffened and stopped crying instantly at the sound of the eerie voice. But Witchie was outraged. “Kabilde, you just keep out of this!” Mrs. Fenstermacher shouted at her walking stick.

  The same voice said, “Try to make me. And stop trying to tell the girl what to do. She will go back to her grandfather when she is ready.”

  “I couldn’t go back to him even if I wanted to!” Bobbi burst out. “He would geld Shane!”

  A peculiar silence settled over kitchen and parlor. Shane stood without moving. Witchie breathed heavily, but the angry color faded out of her face.

  “What I would like to say,” Witchie said to Bobbi at last, very quietly, meeting the girl’s eyes, “what I thought I could say, is, Shane ain’t your concern. I know the Dark Rider. He’s a loner. He prefers to take care of himself, and he don’t want anybody looking out for him, least of all a slip of a girl. But I can’t say none of that, because of this.”

  Her forefinger, knobby with age, pointed at the card lying between Bobbi’s and Shane’s. Thin ink-strands on it made a convoluted knotwork pattern Bobbi did not understand.

  “What’s that?”

  “Entanglement.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Your life is tangled up with his somehow.”

  I could have told you that, Bobbi thought.

  Leaning over the table, Witchie studied the bright-colored circles of cardboard a while longer, moving her hand slowly from one to another.

  “You got a gift, girl,” she said to Bobbi with a thoughtful look out of hooded, hazel-colored eyes. “More than you know. You’ve put almost all the Twelve of the Hidden Circle on the rim. At the junctures of the spokes, yet. See, here’s the poet. That’s your father.

  The picture was that of a unicorn drawn in the Pennsylvania Dutch style, big-browed, puppy-eyed and winsome. Bobbi studied it silently. It told her no more than any image of Wright Yandro ever had.

  Witchie added, “And here’s your mother, with the lightning bolt linked to her. That means either madness or inspiration. And here you are, the virgin. At least I expect you’re a virgin. You’ve put yourself in the same spoke as the golden hero.”

  “I thought I was the innocent,” Bobbi objected.

  “Can’t you be more than one thing? One time or another, you’ll be most of them, won’t you? Here’s the king and the jester down at the bottom. But this puzzles me.” Witchie fingered a circle of bright, featureless red. “It mean anything to you?”

  Bobbi shook her head. The red circle lay at the juncture of a spoke with the rim, the next such juncture down from the image of the hero in black.

  “It should be linked with something, but it’s not. It’s off by itself. And it’s important. Think, youngster.”

  Bobbi said, “All it makes me think of is blood.”

  “Death is not in the ascendant.”

  “Thank God,” said Bobbi sourly. She felt bone tired, though it was still morning. Her mind was so full she couldn’t think. Witch Hazel looked at her for a moment, then said, “Huh. I guess that’s the best we’re going to do, and it’s not as much help as I had hoped. Blow out the candles.” Carefully the old woman gathered up the cards and tidied them into a cylindrical deck.

  “I wish I could do for Shane, too,” she muttered, “but he can’t mix the cards. And I doubt he would let me even if he could.”

  The middle of the day passed in an odd, becalmed silence. Shane stood motionless in the parlor, resting his cracked hoof but not dozing. The walking stick named Kabilde stood in its urn. An old, wooden, mission-style clock ticked on the wall. In counter-rhythm to it, mouse-colored rockers creaked under Witchie’s weight. Bobbi went upstairs and lay on her bed for a while, then came down and helped Mrs. Fenstermacher make macaroni salad for lunch. She and Witchie ate it along with brick-red honey bologna and beet-red pickled eggs and applesauce brown with cinnamon, all in near-silence. Afterward, Bobbi did the dishes and Witchie sat in the kitchen rocker again, rocking some more.

  Bobbi went and got the bucket Shane soaked his foot in off its towel on the parlor carpet, dumped the water that had cooled in it, refilled it with very warm water and put in a generous sifting of Epsom salts. She lugged it back to the parlor and remained crouching by it as Shane came toward her to soak his foot. The black mustang was scarcely hobbling.

  She said to him, “Let me see.”

  Another time, maybe, he would have argued the matter with her in his way. But there had been enough tumult in the day. Without demur, he placed his cracked forehoof on her knee for her to look at, and she reached up and turned on a table lamp so that she could see it better.

  The day before, she knew, the crack had been oozing pus and blood. And even considering the drawing action of repeated Epsom salts soakings, she knew it had no business looking so clean, so soon. She had seen hoof injuries before. They took days to treat.

  “Aunt Witchie!” she called toward the kitchen. “Did you pow-wow this hoof?”

  Shane took his foot off her knee and placed it carefully in its bath.

  “Course I did.” The old woman’s voice floated back crankily, as if Witchie had been awakened from a doze. “Might help, and can’t possibly harm. What of it?”

  Bobbi’s Yandro upbringing told her that fair was fair, and credit belonged where credit was due. She got up, went to the doorway where she could look at the old woman and said, “I’ve never seen a hoof dry up so fast.”

/>   “Huh,” said Witchie, gratified and grumpy. “For all the good it’ll do. He can’t walk far on it, can he?”

  Bobbi shook her head. If he was going to be a horse, Shane needed the attention of a good farrier. Even if he could stay in one place and rest until his hoof had grown out, he would need trimming. If he could not stay in one place, he needed to be shod. But that was impossible. Any farrier who watched TV would turn them both over to the police. Bobbi shook her head again and turned her attention to what was possible.

  “You got a brush and comb I could use on Shane? If he’ll let me.”

  “Look up in the attic.”

  The attic. A glint in the old witch’s eye. Bobbi sensed a test, turned without a word and went. She felt edgy, climbing the steep stairs. It was dim up there in the attic. Why old people insisted on using 25-watt bulbs in ceiling fixtures, she would never understand. In the jaundiced light, Bobbi saw cardboard boxes, a hideous old lamp, a cane chair with the bottom broken through, a few more pieces of furniture. Nothing that looked like brush or comb, and certainly nothing that looked like brand-new clothing her size. She groped at the top of an old dresser. No comb. She opened the dresser’s top drawer.

  There in the drawer lay three kinds of expensive, leather-and-natural-bristle horse brushes, and two sorts of metal horse combs. And nothing else. In the very first drawer she had opened. It was uncanny. What would Hazel Fenstermacher be doing with horse brushes, anyway?

  She took the things out of the drawer, closed it, and stood thinking. After a moment she opened the same drawer again. It was empty, but what had she expected? She opened another. It was empty.

  If I had any sense I’d get out of here, Bobbi thought. But she did not leave. She felt nettled, as if someone were daring her.

  Hoof treatment, she decided. She opened the top drawer again. A small, unopened can of hoof oil awaited her.

  “Yah!” Bobbi exclaimed involuntarily. She left the petroleum-based hoof dressing, took the other things and hurried downstairs. But before she came within sight of Witchie again, she took care to regain her poise.

  “Shane,” she asked urbanely, entering the parlor with brush in hand, “may I?”

  He turned his head toward her, and his eyes gave assent.

  She spent most of the afternoon and part of the evening grooming him. Though it took hours, she combed all the tangles out of his mane and tail. She went back to the attic for a currycomb, curried all the rough and ragged places off his shoulders and sides, then brushed him smooth. She borrowed Witchie’s smallest scissors and trimmed his fetlocks and whiskers. She made him shine like silk, then used the hoof dressing and oiled his hooves, even the cracked one, until they shone as well. She made a dandy out of him. Shane held his head low, his neck flexed toward her, and Bobbi hummed as she worked, feeling the sweet touch of intimacy.

  There was nothing new on the evening report about the missing Bobbi Yandro and her horse. Going to bed that night in the rosy satin nightgown, Bobbi slipped its long skirt up around her hips and lay with her hand between her legs, her other hand at her breasts under their flimsy covering of dusky lace, no longer caring what Witchie knew. She fell asleep that way and dreamed of Shane. Not the mustang. The stranger dressed in black.

  Chapter Ten

  On the morning news, also, there was no new development regarding the missing Canadawa County girl. Bobbi felt an odd, floating sensation, a suspension, an abeyance, as if she might not have to run any farther, she could stay hidden in Witchie’s house forever, finding food and whatever she needed in the dresser drawer in the attic—and all the time knowing the feeling was false, she was becalmed in the eye of a storm, something could happen at any moment to hurl her back into the cyclone outside. Moreover, hiding was not what she wanted of her life. She knew that, though she had no idea what she did want. Her future seemed less real than her trickster hope of being let alone.

  She ate hot sticky buns with Witchie for breakfast. Then the old woman sat on the hickory rocker while Bobbi cleared the few dishes off the table and rinsed the syrupy plates.

  Witchie said suddenly, “Bobbi.” She waited until Bobbi turned and looked at her, wet plate in hand, before she went on. “Leave them dishes,” she said. “It’s been a long time since anybody’s helped me with my hair. I wonder if you would. Comb and brush are up on my vanity.”

  Bobbi said, “Sure,” dried her hands and went. The comb and brush sat just where Witchie had said they would be, on the rosewood hand mirror atop the dressing table in her room. The comb was carved out of real tortoiseshell. The brush was marked “pure bristle.” Both were perfectly clean. Bobbi looked at them a moment and at the bedroom with its wedding ring quilt and dust ruffle and hand-embroidered dresser scarves, remembering her own messy room in the Yandro cabin, her plastic comb always gray-brown with hair crud, the purple brush she had bought at a discount store. Then, feeling as if she should light candles, she took brush and comb downstairs along with the rosewood mirror.

  Black metal hairpins gathered into a pile on the kitchen counter. Witchie’s gray hair, when she and Bobbi let it down over the back of the rocker, reached nearly to the floor and shaded from silver-white near the scalp to a dark ashy gray at the trailing ends. With gentle, quiet motions of her hands, Bobbi combed and brushed Witchie’s hair while the old woman sat with her own knobby hands lying like sleeping kittens in her lap. The hair smelled faintly of Witchie, just as a horse smells of itself; it was not an unpleasant or unnatural smell. Bobbi brushed it for a long time, until it lay smooth and took on a pewtery sheen. Finally she parted it to braid it.

  Witchie said, “I wonder could you start the braids up top, the way you do yours. I’m curious how you do that.”

  French braiding. Bobbi smiled, pleased to be able to show Witchie something the old woman didn’t know. She did her own hair in a single, thick French braid starting near her forehead, but she would do Witchie’s with a braid on each side. She straightened the center part and started the first braid. The silent working of her own fingers put her in a sort of trance, and she found, without much thinking about it, that she wanted to ask the questions that had seemed too fearsome the day before.

  She asked, “Aunt Witchie, who are the Twelve of the Hidden Circle?”

  Witchie said, “Them’s the dark hero and the golden hero and the king, the virgin, the madonna, and the old sorceress, the villain, the fool, the poet, the old man of the mountain, the jester, and Lady Death.”

  “But—Shane’s the dark hero, and he’s real. You’re the old sorceress. I’m the virgin, you said, and Grandpap’s the old man of the mountain, and we’re all real.”

  “What else would we be?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “There’s lots of us right around here,” Witchie admitted. “Something about these mountains. Old bone in them. Goes deep. People remember, the dead haunt.”

  “Is Shane from around here?”

  “The Dark Rider is one who went away from wherever he was born, so long ago nobody knows where he’s from. Far away. He’s a wanderer by nature, the Stranger. Schooslich. Restless. Wherever he comes, he don’t stay for long.”

  Bobbi plaited silver-gray hair in silence.

  “But there’s more to the Hidden Circle than the Twelve,” Witchie added. “And we’re everywhere. We’re in all the people who dream, all over the world.”

  Bobbi finished the braids, crossed them and coiled them, pinned them in place, and handed Witchie the mirror. “They make a sort of crown,” she said.

  Witchie looked and nodded with a wordless grunt of satisfaction. She said, “Makes it a little easier to believe I used to be pretty when I was young.”

  Bobbi was feeling somehow better than she had in days. She said, “Tell me about my father.”

  “I didn’t know your father, Bobbi.”

  Bobbi stared. Something had made her think Witchie did.

  The old woman said, “I knew of him, was all. I read his poem in the newspape
r, and I knew he understood, he was one of the special ones. Then I read a couple of years later where he died.”

  Bobbi thought. “He didn’t write about you,” she admitted, “but he wrote about your—stick.”

  “He understood, is all. You got to keep in mind, Kabilde is as—as various as Shane. Its name means, ‘Cunning Man.’ It’s been a necromancer, a doctor, a con artist, a—”

  Interrupting, Bobbi blurted in horror, “You mean, it has a—a human form, too?”

  “Of course. We all do.”

  Wild thoughts swooped through Bobbi’s mind. If she was looking at Witchie’s human form, then what—no. She didn’t want to know.

  With a soft clop of unshod hooves, Shane came from the parlor through the kitchen and nosed his way out the back door. Bobbi watched after him until the black horse, flanks shining since she had groomed him, disappeared in the woods. Turning her head with difficulty on her stumpy body, Witchie looked after him too.

  Witchie said, “The form Shane’s in right now, it belongs to him, same as you belong to you. But there’s a problem. He’s—well, he’s stuck.”

  “How’d that happen?” Though she had just seen Shane go out, Bobbi kept her voice low, as if the mustang-man still stood in the next room, his foot soaking in a bucket. “How come he’s stuck being a horse?”

  “I can’t tell you. Bobbi, I can tell you my story, or your story, but you’ll have to ask Shane to tell you his.”

  Bobbi said, “Tell me yours, then. How did you come to be a—a—” Something Yandro in her choked on saying “witch.”

  “A pow-wow?” Witchie smiled a dry old smile, wrinkling her face into soft folds. Then the folds smoothed as she eyed Bobbi soberly. “It come to me late in life,” she said. “I think a person has to go through a sort of choice. I was married to Abe Fenstermacher near to forty years, and never had no children, and never did nothing but do for him, and when the black lung took him I figured I might just as well die myself.”

  Bobbi was still holding the tortoiseshell comb and oak-backed brush, staring at the old woman, who looked gravely back at her. Witchie nodded. “Them was bad times,” she said. “I near to done something foolish. But I had a choice, you see, and it come to me that I might better live and be myself, my whole self, since I couldn’t be the better half of Abe Fenstermacher no more. And then I begun to feel the power.”