The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

“Gypsies,” she breathed.

  “Indians, they’ll call themselves to outsiders,” Witchie answered in a low voice, “but they’re gypsies, right enough.”

  Gypsies did not welcome outsiders. The children swarmed around Witchie and Bobbi, dirty and rude, impudently begging in order to drive them away. The women squatted sullenly by the fires and did not look at the newcomers. The men stood and smoked.

  “Go introduce yourself, girl,” Witchie told Bobbie. “Your real name.”

  She stared at the old woman, wondering what Witchie’s mischief was this time, sensing a dare. Then she rolled her eyes, pushed her way through the children as if through a thicket and walked past the haughty women and up to the group of men, choosing one at random—for none of them looked more important or prosperous than the others; all stood like royalty, and all wore rags.

  “Hello,” she said to the man she had singled out, “I’m Bobbi Yandro.”

  The women who crouched near enough to hear sprang to their feet with excited cries. The men exclaimed among themselves in a language Bobbi did not understand. All in a moment the whole camp was astir, all the women conferring, the children screaming louder than ever, the dogs barking madly. Because I am a runaway, Bobbi thought. They listen to the news, they have heard my name, they want the reward.…

  She was mistaken. “Grant Yandro’s son’s daughter?” a gypsy man asked her, and all the others stood shoulder to shoulder, awaiting her answer. At her nod, one of them took a step forward. A tall, fiercely handsome man in a tattered yellow terrycloth hat, he took the role of their leader.

  “Kinswoman,” he said to Bobbi, “welcome.”

  Then the tall, beautiful women were shouting to each other and tossing chains of gold over her neck, and the children were hanging back shyly, gazing at her with huge, dark eyes, and someone pressed a small silver cup into her hand. She gulped. The liquid seemed to burn its way to her ears and smolder there. After that, all was more than ever confusion.

  Witchie had come up beside her sometime, carrying Kabilde, and the staff’s globe began to glow and swirl. “Cops are coming,” Witchie said crisply as Kabilde showed her the cruiser nosing its way nearer through the woods.

  Confusion to Bobbi, but to the gypsies, simple enough. They were accustomed to magic and used to police. A man swept open the capacious trunk of the nearest car, urging Bobbi inside. Where Witchie went, Bobbi did not know, but as she clambered into her hiding place she saw all the women resume their places by the fires and their sullen silence. The silver cup had disappeared. The men smoked. From the darkness of her refuge Bobbi heard the shrieking, begging voices of the dirty children as they besieged the state trooper. She heard the trooper question a few of the women. They answered him in their own language, shrilly, angrily. When he questioned the men, they spoke English and seemed eager to help, but gave useless, muddleheaded answers. They smiled winningly and scratched themselves as if for lice. The officer soon went away.

  The trunk lid flew open. Many hands helped Bobbi out. “Come,” a voice said, “we feast!”

  There was no resisting the onslaught of the gypsies’ hospitality. It was like an elemental force, a gale. Bobbi moved where the swirling winds took her. Through the dark to a creek, to wash herself. Back again to a seat on somebody’s ice chest, a place of honor. Witchie sat on another one beside her. The men sat on upturned buckets, stumps of firewood, the ground. Some of the young girls started a dance. Their bright-colored skirts swirled out in circles, whirling, shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic. The men and their guests drank more liquor, gave toasts, made speeches. Bobbi secretly poured most of her liquor out onto the ground, but grew groggy on the small amount she sipped. After a seemly interval of talk the women brought the food, huge quantities of food, and the children hung back and watched. The strange, spicy cooked food burned in Bobbi’s ears like the liquor. She could not eat much of it, and the women pressed other kinds of food on her in a near-frenzy, ransacking the campers for candies, Graham crackers, Pop Tarts. Witchie ceremoniously brought forth the contents of her paper sack and offered them to the gypsies. They refused vehemently; Witchie insisted; they accepted and ate with delight. Rather, the men ate. Then one by one they belched loudly and declared themselves replete. Bobbi, dazed and half drunk, failed to do the same until Witchie nudged her and emitted a resounding belch. Then she managed to do the same, and as if at a signal the women and children swarmed over the food, screeching and fighting each other for what remained.

  Some things had come clear to Bobbi from the conversation, the toasts, the speeches. Sometime, generations before, some of the gypsies had stayed for a few weeks on Canadawa Mountain. Later, a non-gypsy girl of that mountain had found herself pregnant. Not an unusual situation, after gypsies had passed through, for gypsy youths are darkly handsome and charming. But this was a girl of unusual spunk. She went after the father of her child, and found him, and (so the gypsy storytellers said with a sort of awe) seduced him as he had seduced her, making him love her so that he gave up his wanderings and his people and went back to live with her and marry her according to the laws of her kind. The name he gave her was Yandro.

  Since those times the farm on Canadawa mountainside was known to the gypsies as a place of friends in the enemy camp, a place where messages could be telephoned and letters sent, a safe haven, though a gypsy might not come that way more than once in several years. But these gypsies knew the name Yandro. Grant Yandro had helped them circumvent the state’s unnatural and incomprehensible laws regarding death, once, by putting together a coffin for a lost gypsy child.

  “Huh,” Bobbi said. “Nobody ever told me.”

  “Your grandfather would have told you soon.” It was the man in the yellow terrycloth hat. He seemed to be the leader, the one who took the best seat and made the most speeches. “He kept it from you when you were younger to protect you. The authorities, they do not understand gypsies.”

  The gypsy girls still danced, a shifting circle of colors bright as a hex sign. The women had joined them. Some of the men had started a dance of their own. The gypsy men, Bobbi had decided, did not understand their women and children except to use them, to show them off or order them around. No wonder Grandpap treated her that way sometimes. It was a wonder he talked to her as much as he did. She kept silent.

  “We will take you back to your home in the morning,” the gypsy said as if assuming that was what she wanted of him.

  “No!” The words startled Bobbi out of her bleary-eyed slump. She sat up straight. “I must find Shane!”

  “Shane?” the gypsy said softly. “The wanderer in black?”

  “He’s a horse right now. A black mustang.” Because of the liquor, Bobbi said the words before she realized she could not expect them to be believed. But the gypsy showed no surprise. “You know about Shane?” she asked him.

  “Oh, yes. We gypsies know the dark stranger.” The same soft, thinking tone. “What has happened, that you must find him?”

  Witchie helped her explain. By the time they had told the entire tale, most of the gypsy children had fallen asleep in heaps on the ground, like puppies, and Bobbi was falling asleep as she talked, and even the bright-skirted dancers were slowing. It was late. But never, by the glint in the gypsy’s eye, too late for derring-do. Somehow all was settled before Bobbi fully comprehended, and she was stumbling into the back seat of a Mercedes. Witchie took the front seat, next to the driver, with Kabilde in her hand.

  “He’s somewhere down around Crown Stone, last I seen,” Witchie told the gypsy.

  The town name was familiar. “Pap and me go through Crown Stone,” Bobbi said sleepily, “going to see my ma.”

  They both ignored her. “West of there would put him on Bupp’s Knob somewhere,” Witchie said.

  And the gypsy was looking into the glow of Kabilde’s globe. “Ah,” he said softly, “I know that place. We have camped there. If I can only think where it is …”

  And the Mercedes started off through the nig
ht. To Bobbi it seemed to float like a magic carpet. It was taking her to Shane.

  Her body lay down on the back seat, wanting to sleep. Her mind circled and swirled, dancing with thoughts of Shane. She dozed, jolted awake, dozed again but remained aware of the two in the front seat; sometimes she spoke with them. And when that night ride was over she knew Shane’s story, but she never knew whether she had dreamed it or whether the gypsy had told it to her.

  He was a nomad, like the gypsies. A wanderer. But instead of bright colors he wore black, and instead of gold he wore a gun. This was the old west. There was sometimes occasion for a gun.

  He was a gunfighter, the best who ever lived. As a young man he had aimed to be the best, and learned, and worked, and dared, and challenged. He killed his older rivals proudly. Later, young men came to challenge him, and as he wounded or killed them he began to regret his dream. He traveled, he wandered to leave it behind. He still wore black, but he no longer wore a gun. He no longer used his right name.

  He came to a town in Wyoming, Red Bull Basin by name, and stayed there awhile because he liked the country. He gambled for a living and kept to himself.

  There was a young woman whose name has been forgotten, though she was very beautiful and the mayor’s daughter. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and people said she had a gypsy’s soul, though the gypsies know better. A gypsy knows the meaning of loyalty. But what people meant was that this young beauty was wild at heart. She loved dangerous horses, and she rode them to race the wind. She loved the man in black the first time she saw him on the board sidewalk in front of the saloon.

  She knew wild things. She knew that at the first scent of the trap he would be away and running. So she dressed like the lady her parents wanted her to be before she walked by. Out from under her ruffled parasol and her dark eyelashes she raised her eyes to him, and then, although he did not yet know it, her noose was around his neck. She had only to dally him in, like a wrangler dallying a bronc.

  It took a while. And with every day it took her to win him, she loved him more. She meant to be true to him forever, once he was hers. And the night came at last, the night of her dreams, under a starry sky, when he declared his devotion to her. This strong, dangerous man kneeled beside her and reached for her hands, and laid his head in her lap.

  Later, she mounted him.

  He was hers, heart and soul. He dealt that way with life. What he did, he did heart and soul or not at all. If she had said to him, Die, he would have done it. If she had said to him, Kill, he might have done that as well.

  Such being the case, she lost interest in him.

  She loved to tame wild horses and teach them to eat from her hand. But she ceased to love them once they were tame. And once she had tested her powers, and proved them, once the gunfighter had kneeled before her, she ceased to love him.

  For a while she was kind to him, out of compunction. Then the sight of him began to annoy her. A gypsy caravan had camped outside of town. She had gone with the other young women to have her fortune told, and the brightly painted, high-wheeled wagons seemed to call to her. A dark, proud-standing man with a kerchief knotted around his neck had caught her eye. She felt herself being dallied in, like a bronc on a lasso, and she did not resist. Being swept away was different, exciting.

  But the man in black looked at her with troubled blue eyes. He would follow her when she went away with her lover. He would be a nuisance to her.

  The gypsy was clever. It was he, the trickster, who suggested to her what to do about her cast-off lover.

  She went to the sheriff, a friend of her father’s. With curvetings and a few tears she told him the man in black was a killer, wanted by the law. She named names. The gunfighter himself had told her some of them. The trickster had told her others. The sheriff did not want to go up against the gunslinger himself, but he wasted no time in gathering a posse.

  So it was that, when the gypsy wagons rolled away with the mayor’s daughter hidden under a red quilt in one of them, the gunfighter was running like a hunted deer across the tableland with the black gunbelt, the pearl-handled pistol, once again riding on his hip.

  And as he rode his big roan horse, running it hard, it came plain to him what had happened, and how his fate was to be always betrayed by the woman he loved, and his passion seemed to burn his body away into smoke.

  He stopped his horse, unsaddled and unbridled it as it stood puffing in exhaustion. He sent it away with a yell. He laid the gun and gunbelt on the saddle. When the posse came, they found those things. They found odd footprints leading away. They never found their man.

  That night as she flirted with her gypsy lover, who would so soon discard her, under the stars, the mayor’s daughter saw a black mustang stallion standing at a small distance, watching. Glorying in wild things as she did, she walked toward him with her hand outstretched, coaxing. She knew he would run away before he let her touch him, but she had to try to touch him, even so.

  But the black mustang did not run away at once. He reared with an angry scream and struck at her with his forefeet, almost killing her where she stood—almost. The stallion swerved just before his deadly hooves struck her head, her breast. Then he turned his back on her and thundered away.

  That was a hundred years ago. And the mayor’s daughter had long since died, her name forgotten except, perhaps, by one living being. But the black mustang had run on the tablelands and mesas since. He was of the Twelve. He would not die, only take different forms.

  So the tale ran, or the dream—except it sometimes seemed to Bobbi that she had it wrong, that the man in black was a Spanish gentleman in old Mexico, or a riverboat gambler, or a British earl, though his fate remained the same—

  But that was absurd. How would a British earl have come to Wyoming?

  Bobbi jolted fully awake because Witchie reached back and prodded her with Kabilde. She sat up, peering into darkness. It was still night, the darkest, most eerie time of night, the time when all sane people are asleep. Without needing a clock she could feel that.

  The gypsy turned off the engine. Silent, the Mercedes drifted to a stop. Without speaking, without slamming the car doors, the three of them got out. Bobbi stretched and looked around her. Trees. Steep ridges going up to either side of the road. Overhead, night sky.

  “The new moon holds the old moon in her arms,” the gypsy muttered, very low.

  Bobbi also was looking at the sliver of crescent moon overhead, the gray-black form of the full circle visible in its embrace.

  “It is a bad omen,” the gypsy said, real fear in his voice, though he still kept it low. “Come, let us go back. We feast you again.”

  “We can’t go back,” said Witchie, just as softly.

  “What can you do against the trickster under the dark circle?” the man pleaded. “Hazel lady, come away.”

  Bobbi had made out the dim line of a rutted lane leading into the woods. “Is Shane up there?” she whispered to Witchie.

  “Yes.”

  “Then come on! Let’s go find him!”

  But the gypsy would not go. No matter how much he wanted to atone for the misdeed of one purported to be his ancestor, he could not make himself go. In the end it was just Witchie and Bobbi who walked up the shadowy lane where Samuel Bissel had taken Shane.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They walked up the rutted lane under the ominous moon.

  “Is this the Hub where we’re going?” Bobbi asked Witchie.

  “My golly days, no, girl.”

  “Well, where—”

  “Hush. Quiet from now on. Chances are better if we catch him by surprise.”

  The old woman walked on, slowly, taking her time, as quietly as an Indian, a cat. Bobbi felt big-boned and clumsy behind her, following her up the steep lane through woods.

  It ended in a clearing of sorts, an abandoned, half-overgrown hilltop farm. Moonlight and shadow made a crazy quilt of the former pasture: a jumble of cedars, blackberry, sumac, and the boulders piled where l
ong-ago glaciers had carelessly left them. In the middle of the pasture stood a black, boxy shape: the buggy.

  Bobbi and Witchie drifted close—no easy matter, on the terrain—then crouched behind rocks to reconnoiter.

  “Bissel’s sleeping underneath the buggy,” Witchie breathed, very low.

  Bobbi did not answer or look. She was staring at the horse the Amishman had tethered out to graze. Though food grew within reach all around, the animal stood without eating, motionless in the gray moonlight, head drooping almost to the ground. And even to Bobbi’s eyes the mustang seemed nothing more than a small horse, almost runty, underfed and dead tired. Nothing more. No hint of the black sheen, the stubborn pride, the blaze of blue eyes.

  Fiercely she whispered to Witchie, “That man must have trotted him all night and all day and half the night again. He’s exhausted!”

  Witchie nodded, putting a dry old hand to Bobbi’s mouth to shush her. “I know,” she whispered much more quietly. “I can’t expect any help from him.”

  Witchie’s braided hair shimmered silver in the moonlight, making a sort of halo on her head, almost as if she were someone holy. Her faded cotton house-dress no longer seemed dowdy, but merely soft, like the shadows, and old, like the hills. Crouched behind her concealing boulder, she sighed and laid her forehead against the globe of her cane for a moment, gathering herself. Then she lifted her head and laid her purse aside. She buttoned up her thin white cardigan sweater, a lacy old-woman’s sweater, as if adjusting armor. She took up her walking stick in both hands and whispered to Bobbi, “Stay here.”

  Witch Hazel Fenstermacher stood up and strode forward to combat the trickster. “Renegade!” she challenged. Her old voice resounded in the night like a throaty trumpet call.

  Bissel slithered out from under the buggy and loomed to his feet, like a drab black shadow growing out of shadow.

  “Apostate,” Witchie charged. “Traitor. Judas. You have broken faith with the Twelve, and grasped for power.”

  Something shot red sparks, and Witchie cried out. Her cane flared, and in the white burst of light Bobbi saw the smith’s upraised hammer. It might have been moving, but to her it looked motionless, towering, awesome. And the white fire of the pow-wow staff wavered, for Witchie was staggering. Then Witchie shouted, “Kabilde!” The staff’s light blazed so brightly that even behind her rock Bobbi cowered, and in that white flame she saw—the snake, the serpent’s head, cat-tawny and growing, growing, and darting and reaching toward Bissel, looming up in the light, and it was the trickster’s turn to stagger back.