The Witch's Grave

by Phillip DePoy

  She arrived early, anxious to share the good tidings, but kept silent. Long hours passed; it was nearly midnight. Many had gone home by the time Rud finally came. He carried strange news. As boldly as he ever struck his anvil, he declared it for all to hear:

  “I can only stay a moment. I have a secret to tell.” It was clear he had been drinking. “I’ve come to say to you-all that I’m married.”

  Everyone thought it was odd that he should marry in secret; the room was hushed.

  “Uncle Jackson arranged it; she’s Tessy Brannour, fine woman from Rabun County. Some of you know that big house of theirs on South Stonewall. Her daddy and Jackson arranged for me to work in an office, no more sparks and hammers for me. We’re married these past two months.” He staggered. “Had to wait till she was asleep, slip out of the house.” He gave out with a laugh.

  The crowd gave quiet congratulations.

  All save Truevine.

  They were heard to argue moments later

  “What’s become of the promise you made me when I lay beside you?” she demanded.

  His eyes shone from drink. “Promise?”

  “You promised you’d marry me. We’d live in the fields; I’d work in your smithy.”

  “Don’t be silly, girl. How’d we live in a field? Nobody could.”

  “I could.” She barely spoke up. “With you I could.”

  “Sh, now.” He turned to walk away.

  “You promised.”

  “Who knows that?

  “I do.” She followed after him.

  He looked down at her. “And who’d believe you?”

  “God knows the truth,” she said to him.

  “I’m married, Truevine.”

  “Then you listen to me.” Her words were calm. “I give you the curse of Truvy Deveroe for a wedding present.”

  Only one or two standing close heard her say it.

  Rud laughed, but there was something different in his eyes from that moment on, in his step. She planted a seed of fear in his breast.

  Rud went home without another word, home to his rich wife and his big house. There’s a strange end to the story. Rud grew more and more bent low as the weeks went by, walking lame and slow through the streets of Blue Mountain. Rumors spread about Truevine’s curse, and that began her reputation as a witch.

  It seemed more likely to me that bitter remorse, a knowledge of his own hard heart, had made Rud limp, but perhaps mine is too Freudian an explanation.

  Not long after, a tourist happened to see Rud hobbling in the street and asked Truevine, of all people, “Who is that poor thing?”

  For all to hear she said, “I do not know that man.”

  “It’s been a good while since anyone’s seen Rud anywhere,” I concluded. “The supposition is that he’s left the state for good.”

  My kitchen was quiet. The house contemplated my telling of Truevine’s story. The rain was letting up, only a drizzle from the eaves; the house did its best to resist gloom as it had for a hundred and fifty years.

  “I know you tell me these folktales so I can understand what’s going on up here,” Andrews said softly, “but there are some things about your town I hope I never understand.”

  “Amen to that,” Skid agreed. “This is why I say Rud Pinhurst was no good.”

  “Let me get this right.” Andrews rubbed his eyes, pushing off the kitchen counter and heading for the parlor area. “This poor girl has now lost her parents, survived a horrible love affair, and taken care of three feral brothers.” He took the overstuffed chair that faced the window. “Her reward is to be called a witch. In the twenty-first century.”

  “It’s not all bad.” I finished my espresso and joined him in the parlor.

  “Nobody bothers her much,” Skid agreed, teasing Andrews, “when she’s in town.”

  “I mean,” I told Andrews, staring out the window with him, “those ideas help her through some tough times. Doesn’t matter that it’s nonsense; what matters is that she gets relief. She misses her parents, her mother in particular: she’s told me on several occasions that she can summon her mother any time she cares to. Fingernail clippings were saved from the old funeral parlor when the body was cleaned up.”

  “Fingernail clippings.” He wouldn’t look at me.

  “Or hair from a brush works equally well.” I sat on the sofa. “Any part of the person you hope to affect with your spell, you have to take something, a part of the sympathetic magic. Truevine burns spices, mostly sage, breathes in the smoke, drawing the dead fingernails, tied in one of her mother’s old handkerchiefs, toward her face. She won’t tell me the spell, but she says it brings her mother near. They talk. When all the smoke is gone, so is the spirit.”

  “She’s never done this for you.” Andrews shifted to face me.

  “No, of course not, and it doesn’t matter what the truth is; she finds comfort in talking to her mother, real or imagined. That’s the power of magic.”

  “So if she’s angry with someone,” Andrews grumbled, “she can stick pins in a doll and the victim gets a headache; she feels triumph. Passive aggression, I call it. How long were she and Rud together?”

  “Not more than a year.”

  “And then she took up with Able,” Andrews said roundly, partly to goad Skidmore, who would surely not care to have his brother-in-law date a witch. Not in an election year.

  “They didn’t start up right away,” I told Andrews. “And their relationship was a secret for the first year of so, but they’ve been together nearly—is it three years now?”

  I turned to Skidmore for an answer. His eyes were far away.

  “DNA evidence,” he said slowly, “that’s some amazing stuff, you know it? Did it ever occur to Dr. Devilin, I wonder, about the similarities between a bit of witchcraft hair or fingernails and the science of fiber evidence.”

  “Interesting,” Andrews allowed.

  “What are you thinking?” I wanted to know.

  Skidmore chewed on his lower lip. “I have to get me something out of Ms. Deveroe’s closet, check and see is there anything from her stuck on the person of the deceased.”

  “Is that the scientific term?” Andrews said. “Stuck on?”

  “Didn’t occur to me she might be involved.”

  “Skid,” I demanded, “what are you thinking?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Tell us what’s going on in your head,” I said, leaning forward. “Or am I going to have to get Andrews to beat it out of you?”

  They both grinned.

  “I know you’re reticent,” I went on, “because you have to do this yourself, or at least Tommy said you had to. But what’s the harm in talking to us in the privacy of my home?”

  He sighed, leaned on the beam by the kitchen counter.

  “Okay, I had it figured that the argument everybody heard Thursday night was about Harding. Able was carrying on some secret investigation about something and he said to Truvy, ‘I don’t care if he is your cousin,’ which, I know we just said there’s a lots of cousins in the Pinhurst brood, but I think Harding and Able had words.”

  “You think they fought and Able killed him accidentally,” I said slowly, “and now it occurs to you that Truevine might have been present.”

  “That would account for their disappearance better than some lovers’ quarrel gone bad.” Andrews sat up.

  “She left church; Able went after her. Harding followed because he heard the argument like the rest of us did.”

  “Harding wasn’t at the services,” I said.

  “Hang on; doesn’t it bother people in that church,” Andrews digressed, “to think one of their members is a witch? They let her come to services and all?”

  Skidmore lifted a shoulder. “Don’t see why not.”

  “The two are separate,” I explained. “Doesn’t matter what you think of a person around here; you’d never dream of keeping them out of worship.”

  “Church is for everybody,” Skid agreed. �
��But what I’m saying is Harding Pinhurst was outside, heard, followed them to get Able to leave off his investigation; words were spoke.”

  “And the town’s only mortician ended up dead,” Andrews concluded. “What did you do with his body, by the way? You were worried about that.”

  “Ain’t done nothing yet, still at the hospital.” Skid sniffed. “Good thing, too. I got more lab work to do. Damn. I might get the sheriffing business right if I keep at it.”

  “How long have you been a deputy?” Andrews asked.

  “Eleven years.”

  “Can’t say I was sorry to hear about Sheriff Maddox.” Andrews laughed a little like a boy.

  We’d both had uncomfortable business with the town’s foremost officer of the law before his untimely and—try as I might to think otherwise—amusing demise.

  “Well, you ought to know the ropes by now,” Andrews said, calming.

  “Wish I could take more of your help, Dev,” he said hoarsely. “I got to go.”

  He leaned toward the door; I stood; Andrews returned his eyes to the woods outside the window.

  “I am helping,” I said, coming to see him out the door. “It’s more roundabout than usual.”

  “I guess.”

  The rain had completely stopped, but the sky was still covered. Midafternoon seemed twilight.

  “I hope you’re wrong about Able,” I said as we stepped off the porch.

  “Me, too.” He tapped the top of his car, thinking. “You might go up and talk to the Deveroe boys, see if they tell you anything they won’t say to me.”

  “I was going to check out the cemetery anyway,” I agreed, “see what there is to Hek’s story. Their house isn’t that much farther.”

  “Don’t go up the boys’ place at night, you hear?” He swung into his car. “They might shoot you.”

  “You look tired.”

  “I am. Worried.”

  “Do you want me to talk to Tommy?” I asked. “He might let me help more if he knew how unobtrusive I can be.”

  Skid started the car. “You’re near seven feet tall, your hair’s white as snow, you’re loud, you’re a know-it-all, and your name is Fever. You’re as ‘inconspicuous as a tarantula on an angel food cake,’ or however that goes.”

  “Isn’t it a wedding cake?”

  He backed out slowly.

  A rattle of stones and a spray of mud, the squad car was gone.

  “Andrews?” I called, heading back into the house. “How would you like to go sit in a graveyard tonight?”

  “There’s a Raymond Chandler on cable,” he whined.

  “When I was two,” I began, settling into the sofa, “my father thought he was teaching me to speak by pointing at things and saying what they were. ‘Chair.’ Point. ‘Cow.’ Point. A hundred things. He never bothered to look at me. I was staring at his index finger the whole time, not at the thing he wanted me to look at.”

  “I hate these little memory digressions of yours, you know,” Andrews sighed.

  “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how that finger could have so many names.”

  “What’s your point?” he said, slumping in the chair. He knew there was one.

  “The nature of observation.”

  “I am not getting into the phenomenological vortex with you again.” He started out of his chair.

  “I’m saying we have to consider that our perceptions can always be misdirected.”

  “You think too much about misdirection,” he began in his best university professor’s voice, “because your father was a magician. You really could benefit from serious analysis.”

  “It always helps to turn things around, try to see them from another perspective. That’s what Skidmore was doing just now. He realized that he had focused so much on his brother-in-law that he didn’t see the bigger picture.”

  “He was overcompensating.” Andrews continued his intellectual pretension. “He didn’t want people to think he was going easy on Carter, so he went double hard.”

  “The bigger picture,” I continued, “includes all sorts of things we can’t even imagine, completely unlikely, random scenarios.”

  “Chaos.”

  “Not exactly, but nature certainly isn’t required to follow human order.”

  “We’re not dealing with nature,” he insisted. “‘Murder most foul, strange, and unnatural.’”

  “Hamlet,” I guessed. Even away from university, our Shakespeare scholar’s mind was rarely far from his obsession.

  “Correct. Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, Act I, scene v.” He stretched. “I don’t want to sit in a graveyard with you tonight. I know you’re going to try and convince me that it’ll be all weird and Hallow-eeny, but in fact it will be primarily boring, with a side of soggy cold.”

  “I’ll bring some of my apple brandy.”

  “See,” he said, sitting up, “that should have been your lead sentence. That catches the attention. And PS: Why haven’t you dragged it out before now?”

  “Because I know your fondness for it,” I answered, “and I was saving it to bribe you, in a situation like this one.”

  “Good answer.” He stood. “It worked.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Take a long hot shower, get the bones warm.” He grabbed the stair rail. “Prep work for the brandy and tombstones. I’ll be having a bottle all to myself, you realize.”

  “Should we go over to the Deveroe cabin before?”

  “We’re not going afterward.” He started up the stairs. “Didn’t you just hear Skidmore say not to go there after dark?”

  “I mean should we try to get that visit in today before we go out to the cemetery or should we wait until tomorrow?”

  “I think my shower is going to take well on toward sunset. Answer your question?” He disappeared upstairs.

  One of the many reasons I enjoyed Andrews’s visits was not having to sit in my house alone. Like Truevine’s craft, it didn’t matter to me that I had no genuine belief in ghosts; they came to me nevertheless. My mother sat on the stairs, head in hands, straggled hair brushing the hem of her black dress at the knee. My father banged pots in the kitchen, answering her snarling questions with vague, hollow repetition. Mother’s infidelities, father’s mental absence, money problems all haunted the cabin, hung in the rafters like smoke, waiting for a quiet moment to seep into my skin.

  I turned on the lamp beside the sofa, went to the stereo. Sometimes music dispels the spirits. I put on an older record, Hazel Dickens and Mike Seeger’s Strange Creek Singers. I’d first heard of them at Antioch College in Ohio, where I’d taken a summer semester before starting at Burrison University. There I had the odd fortune of meeting a woman called Mama Jaambo. No sooner had her name come into my mind than I realized music had not dispelled but called forth other spirits.

  Mama Jaambo was from New Jersey. Her gift was reading auras; her session began the second night I was there, at moonrise, in a room with big windows on all sides and two dirty skylights.

  “Leave the lights off,” Mama intoned. “It’s easier to see auras by the moon.”

  Her assistant, a slender young woman in a floor-length dress, said, “Now when you want your aura read, just say, ‘Here, Mama,’ and she’ll look.”

  Mama was a large woman in a soft blue dress. Her voice was like an iris petal. Students would sing out, she would turn in her chair. “Your aura is light blue. You are a musician of great tenacity; you are kind, have loving friends.”

  That was the evening for nearly two hours. All were amazed at Mama’s power of insight. I felt above the proceedings, given my knowledge of carnival tricks, but at last other students prevailed upon me to speak the magic words: “Over here, Mama.”

  She turned as she had done every other time, settled her eyes on me, smiled, and said, “Your aura is oh my God!”

  The assistant rushed to Mama’s side. After a flurry of whispering, an ascendancy of larks, the assistant turned to the assembled.


  “You’ll all need to leave now, except that boy. He will to come talk with Mama. Thank you for having us; it’s been a wonderful night.” She instantly began ushering people out.

  Obviously I’d done something wrong. Maybe Mama knew I held her tricks in contempt. I stood, looking down, while everyone else filed out, glaring at me.

  Mama beckoned; I approached.

  “Have a seat. You got an aura could knock down a horse.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s not good or bad, just the way it is.”

  “Are you mad at me?” I wondered.

  “No. I got news. Sometime between now and Christmas you’ll most likely die. Ice or cold water is what I see. That’s it.”

  She stood. The assistant rushed to her and was helping her to the door before I found my voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I tell you this as a warning; maybe it’ll help.” She didn’t turn around. “If not, they won’t find your body till next spring.”

  I left Antioch at the end of August, forgot most of what I learned there.

  That winter a group of friends was crossing Clear Lake, near my house, and it cracked underneath us. Seven drowned. I survived because at the last minute I hesitated closer to the bank than the others, yelled at Skid to stay behind me, a premonition or a memory. I still fell through the ice, submerged. Skid pulled me out, pushed the water out of my lungs. I started breathing seven minutes later—a minute for every dead friend—and stayed in the hospital for a week. My mother didn’t visit once, but the seven who drowned stood around me every day, close to my bed. Sometimes they told me to get better; sometimes they invited me to come away. It was a difficult decision.

  Voices on the stereo mixed with childhood memories, ancient deceptions, nameless guilts, waking nightmares, old words that ought to have been buried but would not die. I turned up the volume.

  A half an hour later Andrews called down, “Kind of loud, isn’t it?”

  The record was blasting; bass made books next to the speakers jump and twitch.

  “Andrews,” I answered, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Oh God.” His voice was muffled from his room, but I could hear the tone.