by Billy Coffey
Cordelia nodded. “It’s the only way, Hays.”
“Then I’m going too.”
Naomi let off to panicking, telling the rest no way was she going to get close to that cabin and no way was she going to stay in the woods alone, not with those dogs around and those crows hanging over their heads, watching with their dead eyes.
“You stay with Naomi,” Cordy said. “We’ll be fast.”
Hays handed the knife over. “Use it,” he said. “I’m not kidding. Something happens, Cordy, don’t even think.”
The two girls left Hays and Naomi there and made a wide arc through the trees, watching for Alvaretta’s dogs and keeping both the cabin and the shed in sight. They met the lane not a hundred yards on, nothing more than a rutted path hidden in the trees. Feathers stuck to the bottoms of their shoes as they swung around and eased out of the woods between two dead crows, one hung upside down and another missing both legs. They saw none of the dogs that roamed the land around the cabin. Cordy unfolded the blade on Hays’s knife, locking it open as she hugged the back of the shed. She peered around the corner, past the open space of dead weeds and dirt that made up the front yard to the trees beyond. Hays and Naomi couldn’t be seen. Scarlett peered through a gap in the boards but saw nothing in the shed’s darkness. Cordelia stepped around the side, motioning for her to follow.
A wisp of gray smoke rose from the cabin’s chimney. Otherwise, the place looked dead and empty. Cordy peeked around to the front of the shed. The bracelet—her momma’s bracelet—still hung on the knob, not ten feet away. Scarlett tapped her on the shoulder. She held up three fingers and pointed to Cordy first, then to the cabin’s door, finally to herself and the shed. Cordelia nodded. A count of three, then. Three, and Scarlett would go. She’d turn the corner quick and snatch that bracelet, and then she and Cordy would run, run for the others and then run all the way home, and they’d never come to Campbell’s Mountain again.
One.
A sound from the porch. Cordy shot her hand back, telling Scarlett to stay. She moved her hand away when she saw it had only been the breeze against the bear traps hanging from the pegs by the door.
Two.
Scarlett’s body tensed. Cordy gripped the edge of the shed, no longer watching the porch but shutting her eyes in prayer.
Three.
Scarlett ran.
I told you it was maybe ten feet to the door and that’s the truth, but I’d wager that distance felt like a mile to that poor girl. You know what it’s like, friend, to be afraid? I’m not talking plain scared, like how Angela had sat all comfortable in her living room watching somebody get killed on the TV. I’m talking about terror. You get as scared as Scarlett Bickford was, your body starts turning against you. Parts don’t move right, leaving you to feel like you’re fighting the very air for purchase. You don’t hear. You can’t see. Time itself melts away. All that’s left is a single moment you know will never end, and what you realize is you’re as close to hell as you ever want to get.
You can bet that’s what Scarlett thought as she ran toward that door on two legs made of jelly. I can picture her fingers now, brushing against that shiny oval bit of gold and glass hanging from the knob, relishing that brief moment when she thought she saw a light at the end of the long dark hole they’d all found themselves in that morning. But just before Scarlett’s hand could close upon the bracelet, the door of the shed flew open and all hope went with it, and all Scarlett could do was scream.
-5-
Scarlett stumbled backward, hand still outstretched, reaching for a bracelet Cordelia would never wear again. The witch charged from the shed’s open door with a cry more animal than human and a rage that burst from the scrawny body that contained her. Her feet scuttled over the dirt, making tiny clouds gather about her black boots and the hem of her worn dress. She gripped a pitchfork in two bony hands, angling the tines upward. Scarlett would’ve fallen at the edge of that clearing (and would’ve died there too—the witch had murder on her mind, friend, I’ll stretch that truth not at all) were it not that she fell against the front of Stu Graves’s old truck. Her back met the edge of the hood, lifting Scarlett’s head to expose her chubby white neck. That’s where Alvaretta now aimed. She let out a final yell and pulled back on the handle, meaning to run the little trespasser through.
Hays and Naomi ran from the trees and across the yard, but they were too far to be of any help. Nor could Scarlett help herself. She was so frozen by Alvaretta’s appearance that she could not even beg for mercy. Had Cordelia not screamed, I doubt none a them kids would’ve made it off the mountain that day. They’d all be dead, buried by Medric Johnston’s hand and mourned over by their parents, or maybe hung up in the trees to rot like them crows, and there’s where my story would end. Yet Cordy found courage enough in that last moment to call out No just as Alvaretta went to run Scarlett through and Stop it as the witch flinched and spun her head.
Cordelia raised her hands—to her eyes at first, not bearing the thought of meeting Alvaretta’s stare, then high and out as if in surrender. No sound came from the witch’s mouth other than a rough panting. Her bottom jaw hung free from the rest of her face, revealing stumps of brown teeth. Gray hair hung free down the middle of her back, held in place by tiny silver barrettes. Scarlett picked herself up as Hays and Naomi stopped in front of the cabin not twenty feet away. Naomi was crying. Alvaretta saw them and the knife at Cordy’s feet and took a step toward the door.
“Get on.” She stabbed the air with the pitchfork. “Go you. Goway.”
Cordelia dared not move. She kept her hands high and said, “We’re sorry, ma’am. We didn’t mean to trespass. We got lost is all.”
The witch stepped inside the doorway. Her fingers had gone pale from gripping the handle so hard. She said again, “GOWAY.”
Scarlett chanced a look over her shoulder. Hays had moved closer in the last seconds, cutting the distance by half. He didn’t see the mongrel dog easing around the corner of the house behind him.
“We were camping,” she said, but the witch did not look. Her eyes were on Hays instead, and now Naomi. Scarlett took a step closer. “Up at the mines? I know we weren’t supposed to and we won’t do it again, but I lost my friend’s bracelet and it’s there on your door. You give us that back, we’ll be on our way, and we’ll never trouble you again. You got our word.”
Alvaretta cackled through a grimace and spat on the ground, letting Scarlett know just how valuable her word was on the mountain. “Mine. I found it, I keep it.”
Scarlett saw Hays’s shadow creep next to her own. He stopped when Alvaretta leveled the pitchfork at him.
“Get on,” she warned. The words came low and smooth, almost like a spell. “Leave us.”
“Us?” Hays asked.
Scarlett eased along the front of the shed, meaning to flank the old woman and catch her by surprise. Her shoe landed on one of the footprints they’d followed from the mines. She cried out as though she’d stepped barefoot on a thistle. Alvaretta smiled as she turned, looking at Scarlett for the first time.
“I see the face behind your eyes, little one,” she said. “I know it well.”
Scarlett held her place. “What’s that mean?”
“I see your pa grinnin out from the sour girl he’s wrought.” And then the witch licked her lips with a tongue that looked gray and dying, like she was savoring the bitterness in her next word. “Bickford.”
Scarlett’s face went slack. “How do you know me?”
That cackle again, low and soft, which only made the blood in Cordelia’s face drain quicker. A brown dog with only one eye moved out of the trees to where Alvaretta stood. It leaned against the witch’s spindly legs and growled.
“Yesss,” she hissed. “Bickford. I see you well.” She turned her head slow, studying Hays. “Foster,” she spoke, and then to where Naomi cowered not a body’s length from the other dog, Alvaretta screamed, “Ramsay,” and spat once more. To Cordelia she said nothing.
>
The dog near Naomi raised its nose, no doubt smelling the fear coming off her. Her body had gone stiff but for her trembling hands. She stared at the witch with eyes that looked somehow brightened. “How do you know our names?”
“You ask me that? I know of you, but you don’t know of me?”
“Give us the bracelet,” Cordy said. “Give it to us and we’ll go.”
“’Twas given me.”
Alvaretta stepped from the doorway and aimed the tines at Cordelia’s stomach, as if she knew what grew there. Hays neither said nor did a thing. You put anybody in that situation, friend—you put yourself there—could you have done any different? I’d tell you no. He tried moving but was stuck in place, and then he heard something move inside the shed. One of the gaps in the boards had opened wide enough to let in a thin bar of sun through to the other side. It glowed and then winked out, like something inside had passed by.
“What’s in there?” he asked.
Alvaretta whipped her head his way. Hays couldn’t meet that awful stare and so dropped his eyes to the ground, where the long track of horseshoe marks led past the spot where Alvaretta stood.
“What’s in there?” he asked again. “Let me see.”
What came next happened quicker than you can blink. Mayhap it was a shadow of the rage that had burned in Scarlett Bickford ever since she was old enough to know her own name, a fury that had rumbled and built and finally blew right there in that dead part of Campbell’s Mountain. Or it could have been plain fear. She shot forward in a spot where neither the witch nor her beast could see. Alvaretta saw the look of horror on Cordelia’s face. She spun back, but not in time. Scarlett’s fist slammed into the side of the witch’s mouth with a wet, hollow sound that would haunt those kids forever.
The pitchfork went flying. Alvaretta staggered backward into the dog, which reared up and knocked her forward at Scarlett’s feet. Cordelia screamed as Hays and Naomi called out, and from inside the shed came a shriek that shook the very boards themselves. Dogs barked and howled, a chorus of them, calling out from either side of the cabin and behind. The one that had closed on Naomi and the one that had guarded the witch barreled away for the safety of the forest. Run was all those kids must’ve thought, Run and Run far, and yet as Scarlett lifted her foot, Alvaretta took hold of it like a vise. The Thing in the shed yowled in a language none of them had ever heard, guttural and olden. One of the boards broke free, like what was inside had kicked it. A hunk of it struck Hays in the knee, doubling him over. Scarlett struggled to free herself, but Alvaretta would not yield. The witch’s hands went from Scarlett’s feet to her legs and then her hips, her thick body like steps to lift Alvaretta off the ground. Hays had gone numb. His shoulders had moved inward, caving his chest, and he began shaking his head as what had lain hidden inside the shed now tried to emerge. Cordy tried moving away and tripped, nearly touching one of the hoofprints burned into the dirt. The knife lay beside her. Friend, I don’t think she even saw it.
Scarlett tried tilting her head away. She felt the witch’s arm squeezing her tighter and saw Alvaretta stand, so close that she could smell the stink on the old woman’s breath. A trail of blood poured from the gash on the side of her lip. Scarlett shook her head No as the demon in the shed spoke again. Alvaretta shook her own head Yes, yes. With one arm she squeezed Scarlett tighter. The other came around front and produced a gnarled and swollen finger that gathered the blood from her own lip like a dark harvest. Alvaretta reached out and touched Scarlett’s forehead, then made a straight line of crimson down the bridge of Scarlett’s nose.
“Yesss,” she whispered. “Curse ye.”
Scarlett cried out. She wrenched herself from the witch’s grasp and took off, they all took off, not minding the crows watching them from their nooses nor the dogs chasing them nor the long hill to the top of the ridge, minding only the raging wail of what the witch had been hiding and the witch herself screaming Curse ye over and over, Curse ye all for ye sins. Oh yes, friend, they scampered. And know you would have scampered as well. You would have hastened to the ends of the world to be away from there, and what you’d find after your hastening was done would be just what those poor kids found: you could run from Alvaretta Graves, but you could not run from her words.
IV
The curse takes hold. At the hospital. The prayer chain. Naomi makes a video.
-1-
I’d put it about seven that morning when Scarlett struck Alvaretta Graves and so sealed the fates of us all. Let’s call it an hour later when the kids neared the mines again. Those are guesses, a course. By then, Cordelia and the rest were too scared and tired to worry about the time. Naomi never even bothered to check her phone. But time was about the only thing on the minds of everybody else back in the Holler. It was the Sabbath, and that meant gathering down to the church.
Friend, I don’t know where you come from or how the people there handle matters of the soul, but round here religion is king. All the proof you need’s to look yonder at that sign. FIRST CROW HOLLOW CHURCH OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ON FIRE, REVEREND DAVID RAMSAY PRESIDING. Mouthful, ain’t it? Church looks about as run-down now as everything else. But you have to remember I’m talking about how things was then, and back then, everybody come down to the Holy Fire. Every Sunday morning and evening, then again for Wednesday Bible study. And if you weren’t there and Doc Sullivan ain’t provided you a reasonable enough excuse, you can bet people wondered. They wondered plenty.
About the time Cordelia was getting her first eyeful of dead crows at the edge of Alvaretta’s wood, her folks was pulling out of the gravel drive a dozen miles off. Bucky had on his best Sunday suit, having kept it hanging off the shower curtain in the bathroom since paying respects at Henrietta Slaybaugh’s funeral two days before. Angela wore a pretty red dress and her hair down, which she thought made her face look less fat. They were late, having first waited for Cordelia and then given the roses a good watering. By the time they figured Scarlett could just as well drive Cordy and Naomi straight to church from Harper’s Field, Bucky barely had time to grab his King James.
Angela asked him to keep the window down, it stunk in the car. Bucky turned the crank and promised he’d rode all the way home like that the day before, after his shift at the dump, which was true. Bucky was always conscious of the way his vocation made him smell. Still, Angela rode most the way to town with her fingers pinched against her nose. She tried prying the two kitchen sponges out from between the frame and window of her door. Bucky asked her to stop, telling her if that window fell there’d be no prying it up, and then what would they do?
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll get down to Mattingly,” he said. “Get one of those fresheners that hang off the mirror? Smell like pine trees.”
“That’d be good.”
Bucky moved his hand across the seat of the family’s little car, an ’88 Chevy Celebrity he’d bought off Raleigh Jennings two weeks after high school graduation and a week after Homer Pruitt had hired him on at the dump. He gave Angela’s leg a squeeze that didn’t look to improve her mood. She’d been sullen since Bucky got home from work the day before. The funeral, he’d thought at first, but then Angela had told him later that night about poor Nikki on her stories. From the car’s only working speaker, Johnny Cash sang of a burning ring of fire. Bucky hummed a little and then told Angela everything would be okay, death must come to us all and even people like this girl Nikki, and who knew, maybe she’d come back. Anything’s possible on the TV.
The wind fluttered the stack of flyers in the backseat—Bucky looking stern in a constable’s jacket that had gone a few sizes too small over the years and a turtleneck that seemed to swell his face to the point of bursting, LET’S KEEP THE LAW IN ORDER— ELECT BUCKY VEST CONSTABLE printed across the top. The whole family had been hanging them up all over town in the last weeks, but I’ll be honest and say Bucky never really had to bother. He’d been elected constable near as many times as Wilson Bickford had been named mayor, and for good
reason. Everybody liked Bucky, even if he came off a little simple on occasion. Even Chessie and Briar Hodge would always get out near election time and drum up support, so long as the mayor agreed to make sure Bucky never got the notion to go after their moonshining.
The morning dawned a chilly one for April. Bucky flipped the heater switch to High and shivered at the cold air that rushed from the vents. Angela asked (not for the first time, but as nice as usual) if he’d take the Celebrity down to the Hodge farm one day the coming week, get Briar to look at it. Everybody took their stuff there, Angela said, and it was a whole lot cheaper than taking the car all the way to a real mechanic in Mattingly. Bucky drove with the wind in his face, reminding Angela (not for the first time, but as nice as usual) that he could not in good conscience ever set foot upon Hodge land unless it was in an official capacity, and it didn’t matter how often Briar and Chessie sat in church or how much they helped the wanting in town, that family was villainous.
“Criminal or not,” Angela said, “at least Chessie’s got respect. That counts for something.”
“She ain’t got respect,” Bucky told her. “She’s feared.”
“But she’s known. Chessie’s somebody. I’d rather be feared than just be another face.”
“Whole world’s full of other faces, Angela. Can’t everybody be somebody, or else there’d be no common folk like us. We’re the ones keep the world going.”
“That’s your laziness talking.”
And so it happened that just as Cordelia was screaming her way back to the campsite, Bucky and Angela had their first fight of the morning. There were no voices raised or hard words exchanged, just the clipped sentences and sideways glances that had come to define their marriage these last hard years. Both of them shivering, his hand no longer on her leg. The two of them likely wishing it was all because their car didn’t blow heat on a cold morning and knowing it was not.
