The Curse of Crow Hollow

by Billy Coffey

  Kayann grit her teeth. “You are a vile creature, Medric Johnston.”

  Bucky said, “Shut up, Kayann.”

  Yessir, that’s exactly what he said. And I guess he figured that since he’d gone on and said it, he might as well go on and say the rest.

  “We can all stand around here laying blame till we’re blue in the face, there’s plenty to go around. Hays or Scarlett or Cordy or Medric, it don’t matter. But wasn’t none a them kids laid those footprints. Didn’t none a them take that bracelet. It was Alvaretta. She made our girls sick. That’s what we need to be talking about, and we need to be talking about how that woman knew your names just from looking on your kids. Wilson? David? Landis. Alvaretta knew your kids. She knew you. How is that?”

  Friend, if you could’ve seen the way the Reverend and the mayor looked at each other just then, you’d have understood there was plenty they knew on how that was. But now wasn’t the time to be getting into the past, not then and not after the two of them had taken such care to keep it all buried. I guess even then, they all thought there was still a way to keep their sins hidden. Fear sure can make you think some crazy things, can’t it?

  “She’s a witch,” Briar said. “That’s how Alvaretta knew.”

  Medric shook his head. “Alvaretta ain’t no witch. Just a lonely old woman is all. Only power she holds sits in her own broken mind.”

  “You say that, Medric?” Chessie asked. “That what you really think? You the one put Stu Graves in the ground all those years ago. You buried that man’s body and you heard Alvaretta herself say a reckoning would come. You remember Wally Cork? How he hooked up Stu’s old truck to his wrecker and took it back to Alvaretta? You remember what he said after?”

  “Said he tried going in her house,” Briar reminded them. “Said something come over him.”

  Chessie nodded. “Was Alvaretta’s grief come over ’im. Alvaretta’s rage. A woman’s heartache can overcome a man. And when Wally tried to force hisself on Alvaretta and she beat him back, what happened? Found Wally dead a week after, that’s what happened. Spread-eagled out in his backyard with the maggots eatin’ what was left of his flesh. Or should we talk on the drought after? Huh? You remember that, Medric? Landis? You remember the fire at the grocery a day after your daddy said he’d give Alvaretta no credit on her supplies cause she didn’t have no money?”

  Landis couldn’t help but shudder at that. He held that memory just as well as he did every other occurrence of the witch. That fire had nearly cost his daddy all he had in the world, and he made sure Alvaretta Graves had all the credit she needed after that, which turned out to be none at all. Alvaretta was seen in town no more, much to the relief of those in the Holler. She remained alone on the mountain, left to fend for herself. There was nothing the grocery could provide that the woods couldn’t provide better, whether food or medicine or clothing. And what the mountain couldn’t give her, the devil certainly could. Everything got quiet again.

  After a while the Reverend said, “This world ain’t all there is, Medric. You need to keep that in mind. There’s a war we can’t see being fought around us every day. There’s light and there’s the dark, and in that dark are things no man could bear knowing.”

  Briar snorted. “That’s good, David. You gonna ask to pass a plate next? Bucky’s right. We can stand here jawing or we can figure out what we gotta do. Ain’t just that Alvaretta knows y’all’s names, ain’t even that the girls are sick. Them kids are being truthful, there’s something loose from the mountain. Scarlett told us a demon’s what leveled the curse, not Alvaretta. And Alvaretta’s got it keeping her comp’ny.”

  Wilson fiddled with his mustache. He’d managed to keep things together in hisself so far—the Reverend too—which was a feat considering all that must’ve been going through his mind. I’m betting Stu Graves was hanging over both their heads like that big old cross hung up on the wall.

  “What Alvaretta is or isn’t giving shelter to ain’t important right now,” Wilson said. “We all been lied to, every single one of us. I don’t even know what those kids say is truth and what’s false. But I know if word gets out Alvaretta did this, we’re gonna have a storm on our hands. We gotta keep this quiet. Let Crow Holler think it’s a sickness what struck them girls. I’ll call Raleigh and let him know it’s a flu bug or something in the water. That’s what you’ll all say to anyone who asks. Nothing of what we know. Y’all understand?”

  They each nodded one by one. And I think they all really did understand the danger of word getting out. At least for a little while.

  -8-

  Medric was first to leave that day, and he didn’t take no time to do it. Never said a word to nobody, neither. Didn’t tell Scarlett or Cordelia he hoped they’d be fine, didn’t tell Wilson he’d be back in the morning. Now you can just imagine how worked up they all were, not only with what all had happened to the girls but how it had happened and by whose hand it had come. Oh friend, they was all worked up. But Medric? That man looked downright scared. You can bet Hays Foster made a note of it, no matter how much he liked Medric and appreciated all the time the two of them had spent together. That boy never missed much. The quiet ones seldom do.

  The Fosters went home after dark. What with Angela still fuming over Hays and Hays acting like he was a million miles away, both Kayann and Landis felt it was time for them to go. Hays left without kissing either of Cordy’s cheeks, the good one or the bad. She watched him close the door and laid her hands over her belly.

  The Hodges left soon after visiting hours were called. John David went with them, having grown too weary of being so near his daddy. Chessie said there was a delivery out to Stanley. She acted like she felt bad, sending John David out while Naomi was laid up under Alvaretta’s witchery. But business was business. Sooner John David learned that, the better off he’d be.

  A nurse brought in a chair for Bucky. Angela took the one already by the bed. The two of them remained at Cordy’s side until she fell asleep. Angela followed soon after. Bucky sat up for most of the night, staring out the window toward the mountains and wondering if Alvaretta and her demon were watching.

  Belle and Naomi were near settling when David left the room. To pray is what he told them, and maybe the Reverend did do some of that before he called back here to the Holler, I don’t know. Tell no one, the mayor had said, and David Ramsay had nodded along with all the rest. But sitting there watching Naomi struggle to keep her own body under control had changed the preacher’s thinking on that. Wasn’t no sickness, what had struck his child. Wasn’t no flu. Wasn’t anything in the godforsaken water.

  It was the witch. And Alvaretta knew him.

  How that could be—how it was even possible—David did not know. Maybe Briar had been right when he said it was Alvaretta’s powers at work, but hearing Naomi wail in fear as she’d told him and Belle of Alvaretta calling out Ramsay and then spitting (as though the mere taste of that word was unbearable) had frightened David just as much as it had the mayor. Frightened him more, even.

  He fished the phone out of his pocket and dialed a number, turned to see if anyone was watching. The line rang twice before Raleigh Jennings’s voice came through.

  “Naomi any better?”

  “No,” David said. “It’s not good up here, Raleigh. Not good at all.”

  “Wilson called a little bit ago, filled me in.”

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “Told me he thought it’s either the flu or something in the water. I guess that’s all he’s got to go on, but that’s what I’ve been telling the people who’re calling. And plenty are, David. Folks is going nuts down here. You think it really is the water? Lord have mercy, I drink that water. Every—”

  “It ain’t the water, Raleigh.”

  The line went quiet.

  “Raleigh?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. What’s going on, Reverend?”

  “Raleigh, you do something for me? And before you say yes, you better know it cou
ld get us both in trouble. Lord knows I don’t want it this way, but people need to know what’s happening. I need you to make some calls. Start a prayer chain.”

  “Sure. What’m I supposed to say?”

  The Reverend turned to take another look. Through the small oval window, a nurse moved from the rack of desks in the center of the room toward Scarlett’s door. She carried a clipboard in her hand. The door to Cordelia’s room cracked open. Bucky walked out in search of a cup of coffee. I think it was the look on the constable’s face that clinched it for David Ramsay just then, that expression of worry and fear that besets the utterly overwhelmed. That would be everybody soon, if what Naomi said was true.

  “David?” Raleigh asked. “What should I say?”

  He told Raleigh everything.

  -9-

  By the time David Ramsay was doing exactly what he shouldn’t, Naomi sat in bed ready to do the same. She’d gone near twelve hours by then without talking to Cordy or Scarlett, having to rely on Hays for news of how they fared. Being cut off from her best friends like that was a source of anguish just as awful as the tremors and the memory of Alvaretta’s demon shouting the language of hell. She had only feigned rest, knowing it would be the only way her momma and daddy would entertain the same. With no witnesses in the room, Naomi reached under her covers and pulled out her phone.

  Belle had snuck it to her after supper, but made Naomi promise not to take it out around the nurses (and certainly not around her father). She knew it would be the one thing that might make her daughter feel better. Naomi brought it out now, scrolling through the dozens of texts from young folk wanting to know what had happened. She ignored them all and pressed the little picture that said MeTime. Her face twitched on the screen and wobbled in her shaky hands. She propped the phone against her knees and hit Record.

  “Hey, y’all,” she whispered. Belle rustled in the chair beside her. When she settled again, Naomi saw her momma’s hands still clasped in prayer. “I’m so sorry. Scarlett wanted to go to the mines for her birthday. We shouldn’t have done that. The witch got us, that’s all I have time to say. I can’t stop shaking. Scarlett can’t talk. And Cordy . . .” She swallowed a sob. Lordy, it’s hard to imagine a body could hold so many tears. “We’re all sick. I think a lot more people are gonna get sick too. I’m so scared. Please pray for us. Pray for everybody.”

  Naomi wasn’t awake to see her video sent out into that MeTime air. She began to drift soon after and barely summoned the energy to place her phone beneath the pillow. By the time the Reverend got back, his daughter was full asleep. Not five minutes more passed before thirty of the town’s young gave her shout-outs. That number climbed north of a hundred within the hour.

  Children they were, children all, from the lowliest eighth grader to the lowliest high school senior, all the ones who’d sat in church that morning and seen the whole thing. They may have thought themselves grown and mature in the calm and tedious days that was life in Crow Holler, where the world’s always felt in shadow, but at least shrunken and predictable. But not a one knew the danger that lurked just beyond their sight. They knew not Reverend Ramsay’s war between light and dark that raged unseen and unfelt around them.

  They watched Naomi’s message on their little phones and watched it again. Their parents paced worn living room floors or sat at chipped kitchen tables and felt a heavy silence of dread press in. Fathers stared from windows and ran calloused hands through hair that felt thinner and looked grayer than it had that morning. Mothers held their telephones tight against their ears, taking information and giving it back, sifting every word and speculation through the fearful notion that everything may well turn out all right but likely would not.

  “Went to the mines, they did. Got the key from Medric.”

  “The Bickford one and the Vest one and even the Reverend’s daughter.”

  “I heard they summoned a demon from the mountain.”

  “Footprints.”

  “The cloven hooves.”

  “Wild dogs, dozens of them, all in a rage.”

  “Spellbound.”

  “She knows our names.”

  “Demon.”

  “The witch cursed them girls.”

  “Cursed us all.”

  “Them girls’ fault.”

  “The girls.”

  Ain’t a much more reliable service to get out bad news than a prayer chain. This person calls that one, that one calls two more, and pretty soon what you got is a long set of fragile links made up of what-I-thinks and what-I-heards. By morning there wasn’t a single person in town, young or old, who hadn’t heard that something evil had befallen Naomi and her friends. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t know that evil was coming for us all.

  -10-

  She spent that whole day cleaning up, first herself and then the shed, patching the boards that had gotten kicked away as best she could with scraps from the pile in back. Weren’t easy, carrying those boards in arms that had gone stiff and sore from being thrown to the ground. From being molested. Fastening the nails with hands swollen and arthritic. Feeling the beat of her heart in the cut on her lip. And yet now that chore was done, fueled by a rage that had long simmered in the black places of the witch’s heart, wailing her curses as the hammer rained down, driving those nails more by the sheer force of her will than her own strength. Screaming at the body next to her, cursing that only a fool would do something so ill-considered as refuse to remain unseen and unheard by the four trespassers from town. And now they knew. She had let them leave and now they knew, now everyone would know, and what would become of Alvaretta Graves now? What would become of the thing she kept hidden?

  Those questions had preyed upon her all that day, so much that Alvaretta had kept what she’d hidden even further from sight. She could hear the wailing even now, booming out from both the barred wooden door inside and the heavier one that led out onto the porch, where she stood staring at the flowering moon rising over the woods. Somewhere close, her children barked and bayed and stood guard should the trespassers return.

  No matter. The curse would fell them, mayhap had felled them already. Alvaretta had seen the fear in the children’s eyes, the chubby blond one especially. Bickford. Had nearly felt the very life drain from the little whore as she’d screamed at the bloodstained finger riding down the bridge of her plump little nose. Power. That was her weapon, and one Alvaretta wielded whether she herself was present or not. Her specter hung over all of Crow Holler, not just Campbell’s Mountain. If the curse did not silence them, the fear would.

  V

  Chessie sells. At the doc’s. The girls come home. Trouble in town.

  -1-

  Wasn’t nobody at Mitchell’s Exxon when Raleigh Jennings came by the next morning. He eased his wheezing Cadillac off the dirt road and crossed the two strips in front of the pumps, setting off the bell somewhere inside, then stepped out and lifted his head to the blood-red sun.

  There’s a magic to spring in the Blue Ridge. Every other season will melt from one to the next, easing in and out so slow that you hardly even notice. But spring, friend? That one explodes. One day everything looks dead and gone. The next, all those bare branches and brown grass get colored in a green so deep you think it can’t be real. The sky turns blue like the mountains. Flowers rise from the frozen ground like miracles, sprouting reds and yellows and violets, and with them come scents that take you to better times long past, back when the world held promise. You want to run a finger over it all, touch it like frosting on a cake. And all of that change, every bit, happens in the turn of a single day. I swear it’s so.

  Raleigh looked to be trying to feel that same magic then, his face all bent up toward that sun, trying to draw on its strength. In the end, all he looked to get was hot. He’d made the decision to rededicate both his work and his faith the night before. Like springtime in Appalachia, the change in Raleigh had come in an instant. Faster than that, even—I’d say just as long as it took the Reverend to sa
y good-bye the night before and the line to go dead. Raleigh knelt beside his battered sofa and prayed maybe the hardest he’d ever done in his life, harder even than when Eugenia left. Because he understood what was coming to Crow Holler, now and finally. Ruin. He could see it galloping toward them all like the black rider of death, and that rider had come as a hate-filled and frightful old woman. Alvaretta Graves.

  No one stirred from inside the small gas station, though someone had propped open the wood screen door with a case of Mountain Dew. Raleigh looked toward the back, where the Exxon’s big propane tank sat. Nobody there either. He reached back into the car and laid on the horn twice.

  “Joe?” he hollered. “You here?”

  A voice echoed through the door—“Hang on.” Raleigh waved no hurry to the air even though he didn’t mean it. Hurry would be the order of the day.

  The road through town lay quiet that morning. The grocery was open. (Raleigh had seen Landis out front when he’d drove by, sweeping the lot.) No buses, as both the Holler’s schools had been closed by order of the mayor. Not for the proper reason, though. That’s what brought Raleigh out to the Exxon.

  Joe Mitchell walked into the morning light and wiped the sweat from his face with a red bandanna he pulled from the back pocket of his jeans and tried to smile. He rubbed a patchy beard that held more boy than man.

  “Sorry you had to wait, Raleigh. Ruth was on the phone.”

  He paused here, like he was testing the words in his head first to make sure saying them wouldn’t crack his voice. Raleigh held in a grin. Family trouble, I bet he thought. Well, that’s what Joe Mitchell got for letting his wife stray as she had.

  But his grin got swallowed when Joe said, “Chelsea’s got the sickness, Raleigh. Woke us up last night with it. Thought it was just her muscles jumping at first. But we can’t stop it, no matter what we do. Ruth’s getting her to Doc’s. I’m fixing to close up and meet’m there.”