by Billy Coffey
“I seen you hit that fire alarm at the grocery. I know it was an accident, and I know you’re too proud to say it. Daddy always said Alvaretta Graves was a danger. He said she holds a power over this town that could ruin us all. You go out there, you better know what you’re getting into.”
Bucky said, “I know exactly what I’m getting into.”
He didn’t.
-3-
In those days you’d be hard-pressed to find any who’d not seen their lives rent by ailing children or talk of demons and curses. There remained none untouched by a fear that Crow Holler had lost its moorings from the world. None but a single person anyways, because life had continued on unshaken for Alvaretta Graves.
That ain’t to say her years spent in the bosom of Campbell’s Mountain had yielded a bounty of peace and joy. Far from it. Is a dark place, that mountain. I know I’ve told you that, but you’d do well to hear it again. It’s no home for a widowed woman to be sure, forced to spend your days defending your land against a wood determined to claim it inch by inch. Alvaretta had done that and more as time snuck away the good bits of her and left behind wearied muscles and arthritic bones. But she’d never lived those years without aid.
The witch had always enjoyed company at the mountain’s edge. Plenty had come in the time since her Stu had been taken, ones Alvaretta knew to define and others beyond her knowledge. The man from town, he came as well. Not often and never nearer than the porch (for that was the warning Alvaretta always gave him—“Step closer, stranger, and you’ll meet your end”) to leave the town’s bounty. FOSTER’S GROCERY was writ on each of those bags, YOUR HOMETOWN VALUE under it. Alvaretta would scoop them up after the man left, hoard them inside the cabin for barren winters or when the garden crop failed. That had sometimes happened back before Stu was taken—hours and days spent with the hoe and scythe, sweat upon the brow of his hat and seeping into the deep creases in his face, only to find the crop ruined by hail or heat. But that had not happened since Alvaretta had found the power.
Her eyes were dimming now. No longer could she stand atop her porch and count the crows that settled on the far hill. Her hip ached with the approach of each harvest, and she found herself accustomed to fevers and a numbness in her toes. Once, on a cold February night the winter past, Alvaretta had woke with a rage in her belly that felt to boil her very blood. The outhouse proved too distant; all she could manage was to reach one of the cast iron pots in her small kitchen. She’d cried out as she squatted and then cursed the blood she voided.
She was dying. That knowledge had come near a surprise, given all she had done and was able to do. Alvaretta Graves may have believed she had power over life and death, but not her own.
Her view from the cabin’s front window was narrow, yet it gave a good enough view of the lane and the crows that swayed in the trees. Alvaretta rubbed the smooth bone that hung from a leather cord around her neck—a gift from the one in the back room. The air was hot from the hardtack baking in the wood oven, though she would not open the front door to let in the air. Not yet.
Because something was near.
That Alvaretta knew this should come as no surprise, given what you’ve heard of her. Campbell’s Mountain may have belonged to no one in the eyes of the world, but to all in Crow Holler it was the witch’s. No twig snapped and no sparrow fell between the cabin and the mines that Alvaretta Graves did not see or hear. There are worlds beyond this world, friend, of that you should have no doubt, but there are worlds inside this one, too, hidden to all but some. Alvaretta Graves could read the stars and clouds. She could feel the soft beating of the trees and the secret breaths on the wind as she could her own heart and lungs, and all of those things now whispered for her to stand ready.
Behind her, a voice spoke. Alvaretta did not understand the words but said, “I feel it.”
She had not felt the trespassers at first. They’d snuck over the far hill and into the trees before Alvaretta had known they were there, trapping her in the shed. She had not felt them, but she had felt the sting of the Bickford whore’s hand against her face. Even now, Alvaretta could taste the blood that oozed from the cut on her mouth. She took it as a warning of how fragile things lay and how easy all she had obtained could be taken from her again. She would not need that warning again.
The car that crested the hill along the lane was one Alvaretta had never seen, as was the man who drove it. He eased to a stop far enough from the cabin that he could turn in a hurry if need be. She smiled at the sight. The thing behind her smiled too.
A fat man got out. He was alone but for the big gun in the big holster slung under his big belly. Looking at the dead crows hanging from the trees, looking at the shed, the edge of the garden, the truck. Backing off as Alvaretta’s children crept out from the woods, barking and growling as they gathered. The man’s hand went low to his pistol.
The witch smiled again. “You’ll stay,” she said. “Don’t you dare come out and don’t you be heard. I’ll not have you disobeying me again.”
She walked past the one with her and past the shotgun propped against the crude kitchen table. The fat man jerked at the sound of the cabin door opening. Alvaretta held on to the knob, pulling until the door disappeared back on its hinges before stepping from the darkness. The wind gathered about the bottom of her plain dress and played at the fringes of her long, graying hair. She licked the blood that stained the corner of her mouth and moved onto the porch. Looking down at Bucky. Eyeing him like prey.
-4-
Within the comfortable bounds of the town’s streets Bucky could talk about duty all he wanted to with the likes of John David Ramsay, but all notion of obligation fell away the moment he saw the witch step onto the porch. One look at that old and leaning cabin had been enough to fill his face with dread, and one glance at that old broken truck was enough to make him question the idiocy of his errand. It was Medric who’d told Bucky and the rest that Alvaretta was more story than fact, but I’m telling you all it’d take was seeing the swaying bones of all them dead crows and the dogs circling Bucky now—dogs with missing ears and mangled eyes but who seemed to think and move as of one mind—for anybody to know how wrong our undertaker had been. That whole stretch of land, not just the cabin but the open space that held the garden and the shed, too, looked dimmer somehow than everything else. It was like Bucky had left Crow Holler in one world and had somehow slipped into another.
“Who you?” the witch asked.
One of the dogs slunk close enough to lash out a paw that grazed the leg of Bucky’s pants. He kicked the animal away by instinct, making it yelp.
“Alvaretta,” he said. “Missus Graves. Ma’am. I’d be obliged if you’d corral your animals.”
“Children,” she said. “Not animals. I tend to them as they to me, stranger, and I’ll have your leg if you try an kick another.”
Bucky cleared his throat. “My apologies.”
“Who you?” she asked again.
“Name’s Bucky Vest.” He leaned the left side of his chest out, showing the star above his uniform pocket. “I’m sheriff in Crow Holler.”
“Ain’t no law to Crow Holler but my own.”
“Oh yes’m, there is. Just came on the job. Used to work the dozer down to the dump?” Bucky chuckled like that was funny and clenched his hands, hoping that would calm the tremble in his fingers. “Probably buried plenty of your trash over the years.”
“Burn my own waste,” Alvaretta said. “Do my own buryin’, too, so you best get on.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am. I’m here on law business.” She studied him. Alvaretta may have been weak in body but she was strong in mind, and her stare was such that it caused pain.
“I don’t see the face behind your eyes, Bucky Vest. Who’s your pa?”
Bucky said quiet, “Don’t have one. My daddy died in service when I was a boy.”
“I have no quarrel with you then.”
“Well, I appreciate that.”
He might’ve smiled again, Bucky was always grinning whenever the nerves and fears in him got stirred. But then his ears caught the sound of movement behind the cracked door of the cabin, the rustling of a foot.
“You got anybody in there with you, Ms. Graves?”
Alvaretta eased the door shut and took the first step off the porch. She was eighty pounds of leathered skin and sagging bones, yet woman enough to back Bucky away.
“Din’t hear nothing,” she said.
“You armed?”
“Why? I need iron here, Sheriff?”
“No, but you can stay up on the porch if you don’t mind. I only got questions. There was some trouble up here few days back.”
She pointed a bony finger at the ground near Bucky’s feet. Singed into the dirt and patches of crabgrass were the odd horseshoe prints Cordelia and the rest had followed. They led to the front of the cabin, then on past the truck to the shed. And there was another thing as well, something those kids had missed. Tire tracks, not more than days old. Not from Stu’s truck, neither. The looks of that rusted hulk, it hadn’t run since the night he’d died.
“Had a demon come by,” Alvaretta said. “Weren’t the first. Won’t be the last.”
“You had words with this demon? You give it aid?”
The witch didn’t say. “Othern’s came after. Trespassers.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know. One of them was my little girl. Friends and her was up to the mines. She had a bracelet? Says you’re in possession of it now.”
“It’s mine by rights. Payment for what they did.”
“Trespassin’ ain’t cause enough to keep it, ma’am.” Bucky looked at the tire marks again. “Anybody been up here to see you, Alvaretta?”
“No one dares the mountain,” she said. “And the bauble’s payment enough for beatin’ on me.”
Alvaretta turned her face, showing the dried blood and gash on her lip. Bucky gaped at the sight. Cordelia hadn’t said anything about laying hands on the witch. None of them had.
“They do that to you?”
“Bickford’s whore.”
The boards inside the cabin creaked again.
“How you know the mayor’s name, Alvaretta?”
“I know them all and I know what they hide, Bucky Vest. You’ll not do well to think otherwise. I got eyes,” she said. “They see far.”
“What you got inside there, Alvaretta?”
“None but the spirits. Now you get on afore you rile them.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am. My girl and her friends’ve taken sick. Much of the town too. They say the demon you succor levied a curse.”
Alvaretta’s mouth widened to a slow smile. It was an awful thing, like a snake readying to taste the air. The dogs—her children—crept close once more.
“We’d ask you to lift it,” Bucky said. “Don’t none of us want trouble.”
“Then you shoulda stayed ’way from here.”
She turned for the door. Bucky stepped forward and thumbed the snap on his holster. When he spoke, there was a tremor to his words: “Can’t let you do that, ma’am. We demand satisfaction.”
“Satisfaction?”
Her back was to him. The wind gathered in the witch’s hair once more, fluttering it to the side like a line of thin gray clouds. It had gone cold on the mountain all of a sudden. Cold and dark.
“You speak to me of satisfaction, Bucky-Vest-with-no-pa? I who have been denied the very thing you now seek? Let your children suffer, they will not suffer as me. Not until they’re laid in the ground will you suffer as me.”
“I know where you lay the blame for your man’s death,” Bucky said, “but none of us had a hand in it. He was drinkin’ and you know he was.” He spoke fast, the words coming so slick that Bucky couldn’t stop them, and not once did he look to remember the Reverend’s plea not to mention the very thing he just had. “Blame Stu for his weakness or blame the Lord for His ways, but you cain’t blame us.”
“Get out.”
“I won’t do that.”
“Get out.”
Alvaretta turned. The blood on her face, once dried and crusted, now flowed in a slender streak that fell in tiny drops from her narrow chin. She stretched out her hands from her sides and lifted her head to the breeze. Dogs scattered as the witch’s voice rose in a language Bucky could not comprehend. He fumbled for his gun as Alvaretta leveled her eyes to his.
“Get out get out and curse ye Bucky Vest, curse ye and all of Crow Holler. Curse ye by the hands of darkness and death.”
Bucky pulled his pistol and squeezed the trigger, squeezed it again, and yet the barrel was silent, itself damned by Alvaretta’s words. She took the steps down, slurring English with devil-speak in a voice deeper than her old lungs could make, and through the crack in the cabin’s door came three fingers of a soiled hand. Bucky saw them, saw the witch stepping off the porch and into the yard, and all his ruptured mind could think to say was, “Momma, the bad man’s here.”
He squeezed the pistol as hard as he could. Still the bullets would not fly. Bucky tilted the gun to the side and saw the safety was switched on. He thumbed it to fire and aimed at Alvaretta’s chest. She did not waver and strode for him, looking taller now, stronger, looking like something Other with a wide grin of one who smelled his fear, and then Bucky let his pistol fall when the door in front of him began to open.
“Get out,” she yelled again.
Bucky ran. He took the lane as fast as the car would let him, caring neither for the four bald tires nor the one wheezing engine, wanting only to get away. Alvaretta kept shouting, cursing him and cursing them all, calling down heaven and summoning up hell. Bucky looked into the mirror and screamed as the cabin’s door swung open and what was inside began to step out.
He was to the main road before he discovered he’d left his gun behind, and halfway to Crow Holler when he realized he was sitting in his own urine.
-5-
Say what you will of Bucky’s success in stating the town’s demands to the Crow Holler witch, at least he’d gone prepared. He’d been smart enough to bring along an extra change of clothes just in case he’d have to go crawling and sneaking about in Alvaretta’s woods. The pair of old jeans he’d snuck out that morning were wrinkled plenty, but wrinkled beat pee-stained any old day. He pulled off the road at a spot about five miles from town and slipped into the woods to change. You’d pity that man if you’d seen him, trying to unbuckle his belt and pry off his boots, unrolling those clean pants as the breeze fell against his naked legs like a cold finger. His head turned at every rustle of the leaves, thinking Alvaretta was there.
He didn’t know where to go or who to tell first about the terrible things he’d learned at the Graves homeplace, so he ended up calling everybody to come down to the church and bring the kids with them. That’s all Bucky said, and not a word more. He left his pair of soiled pants underneath a dead tree in the woods. Far as I know, they lie there still.
It took all of five seconds for everybody to get down to the Holy Fire. David and Belle were there already, along with Naomi. Wilson left the council building to fetch Scarlett. On the way, he picked up Angela, Cordy, and Hays. The Fosters were up to the grocery, trying to salvage what life they could. Wilson called to Chessie’s. Raleigh, he showed up at the church too. I’ve no idea how he found out about Bucky’s call. Bout the only one wasn’t there was John David, though I’ll tell you he was close.
Poor Cordelia had no clue what was going on and pitched a fit when Naomi told her where Bucky had gone. For all her faults, Angela looked the most worried of all. She put an arm around Cordy and said not to worry. Bucky’d called, that meant he’d gotten away. I don’t know if that made anybody feel better about things.
So they all sat in the sanctuary, worrying and praying for the next twenty minutes when only fifteen were needed, because by then Bucky was standing outside the door trying to figure out how to tell them what he must. Every head spun when those front doors
opened. Cordelia jumped from her seat beside Angela and wrapped her daddy in a hug. Fear and rage and worry swirled in the part of her face that still carried feeling.
“What happened, Buck?” Wilson asked. “You see her?”
Bucky kept walking. He led Cordy back to her seat and took the stage, though not behind the pulpit.
“You see her, Bucky?” Landis asked. “Alvaretta gonna make things right again?”
Looking out at them, the kids especially. Seeing Cordelia’s ashen face and Scarlett’s silent one. Seeing Naomi twitch. Seeing Hays, who hadn’t been able to stand against Alvaretta either. Bucky didn’t blame that boy anymore. He no longer condemned Hays Foster at all.
“I saw her,” he said, and they all leaned forward.
“You spoke with her?” Belle asked.
“I did. She won’t break the curse.”
Chessie, who was always one to read her Bible but never one to read it well, let loose a single word from her foul mouth, making the Reverend cringe.
“What’d she say?” Wilson asked. “You tell us everything, Bucky.”
Bucky looked at his feet and nodded, then took a slow breath.
“It’s awful up there. Like . . . I don’t know. Like everything got trapped in time. I saw Stu’s truck. Can you believe that, Wilson? Wally Cork dropped that truck off twenty years ago and it ain’t moved since, and then Wally died. Everybody says Alvaretta willed him dead. I’ll say I never really believed that, not deep down. But I do now. I could feel Wally there, Reverend. Like he’d been trapped too.”
The preacher’s face went a sickly green.
“There’s crows strung up in her trees. Dead ones. And all kinds of wild dogs Alvaretta calls her children.”
Naomi nodded slow, either remembering or suffering under her curse. Cordy hugged herself like she’d gone cold. Hays put an arm around her, though I don’t think he much cared to.
“It’s all true, what the kids told us,” Bucky said. “Every word of it and more, and I’m so sorry y’all got stuck there over some stupid piece of jewelry.”
Cordelia sniffed back a tear.
