Witches on the Road Tonight

by Sheri Holman

  She urges him on with her bare heels and he matches his breathing to hers, letting her push him faster and faster, over fallen trees, scrambling up stones. She kicks him once, a little hard, and he leaps forward, abandoning the lazy, romantic rhythm they’d found, working now, struggling uphill, his heart slamming against his chest. He lunges higher up this new path, through a tall stand of sourwood, crashing through the underbrush of dying laurel, brown and crisp on the vine. Her body feels like a challenge—are you the man I think you are? Can you keep up? He can taste the slaver in his mouth, the boiled egg of the afternoon, the applejack, the ham soup and biscuit, fresh milk with butterfat. He is lost but cannot slow down, weak with sweat and fear now, for as she goads him, Tucker no longer feels like a partner but like a creature made to serve, the slow ecstasy pushed too far into punishment.

  He still cannot see her but her growingly oppressive weight bears down on him. He must stop or surely he will drop and die, he has lost all strength, his mind a blank but with no peace, no moving toward the light. Pain and humiliation and darkness. They have come to a fell of ghostly cankered trees, stripped of their bark and toppled over, stumps jutting sharp as dragons’ teeth. He feels something slash his side and in the sickly moonlight sees blood on his white linen shirt. They race up the mountain and down into the next hollow, along the lip of a ravine so narrow his back leg slips and he nearly takes them down, falling in dream time with legs peddling the sky.

  But she is too expert a horsewoman to let them fall. She pulls him up sharply at the chasm’s edge and he hears pebbles skitter but not reach bottom. Suddenly, he is relieved of his burden, and he sees the thing he carried. She moves behind him, leans over and marks the ground with an X. Unbraided, her hair falls over her face, but he knows her instantly. It is Cora Alley, a vision of blood and sinew, standing raw against the moon.

  This is not real, thinks Tucker, shutting his eyes. Our car went over a cliff. I died and have gone to hell.

  Hours or maybe seconds later he opens his eyes again. Sprawled on the back porch, he stares up at the tin oilcan roof. The moon has dropped behind the mountain, he has no memory of how he got here, got back, if he ever left. Maybe he fell, had a stroke, maybe he did die and was returned to life. He breathes heavily like an animal stunned by an electric prod, unable to move, only to blink. Nothing stirs around him. No one rolls over in bed, no hen shivers in her straw. What happened? he thinks, and marvels that he can recall human speech. With great effort, Tucker draws himself onto his hands and knees and crawls down the breezeway to her shut bedroom door. He puts his eye against her keyhole.

  There, Cora Alley, freshly dismounted, is wriggling back into the soft folds of empty arms and legs; she, too, returning to her human skin.

  “Tucker, wake up,” Sonia says, opening the shutters. Tangled in a sweatsoaked sheet on the parlor floor, he winces at the sun through the window.

  “What time is it?” he asks.

  “Nearly eight.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  He shakes his head.

  “You don’t remember passing out? Or my waking you up?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Then you were drunker than I thought.”

  The crock of brandy sits in the corner, half full. He doesn’t remember drinking it.

  Sonia is dressed, or undressed rather, having taken off the scarf and his jacket, wearing nothing but the shirt and trousers from yesterday. Her suitcase is neatly packed and standing upright by the door. She wears her Rolleiflex around her neck and looks around the room as if she’s shown up an hour early for a train and is trying to decide what to do with herself.

  Tucker is ravenous and thirsty but when he rises his body gives under its own weight. His legs shake and his head is pounding with the magnitude of his worst hangover. He steps around Sonia and limps down the breezeway to the kitchen. Through the screen door, he sees a plate left for him on the kitchen table: flies lifting from a fried egg, a slab of country ham, fried, curled, and nearly black. If he steps inside, everything in him will come up, so he keeps walking, off the back porch and across the yard to the spring, where he forces himself to drink.

  He splashes his face and runs his finger over his mossy teeth, waiting for his balance to return. What the hell happened to him? He has never dreamed so wildly in his life. From the barn, he sees Cora Alley approaching with the morning’s milk. She wears the same green dress as yesterday and the same ugly men’s work shoes. He is mortified at the sight of her, wincing to remember the lashing he took at her hand.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hayes,” she says. “Sleep well?”

  He searches her face for any sign she is playing with him, but she wears the same weary, slightly embarrassed look of yesterday. Her skin fits tight around her body, no sag or gap. Stop it, he tells himself.

  “I left some breakfast for you in the kitchen,” she says.

  “I saw, thank you,” he gets out.

  “Are you feeling ill?”

  “Just didn’t get much sleep last night,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

  She looks troubled. “I hope the bed was comfortable.”

  “It was perfect,” he reassures her. “I have always been a miserable sleeper.”

  Cora nods to him and starts toward the springhouse where she will leave the milk to cool. He watches her go, the muscles jumping in her strong calves. He can still feel them pressed tight against his flanks, and against his will, finds himself growing hard. She turns and speaks to him over her shoulder.

  “When I finish with chores, I’m going back out to hunt the sang,” she says. “You can come if it’ll help your book.”

  “I would love to,” he says, without hesitation.

  Returning to the kitchen, he takes his place at the table where the flies hunker down possessively on his food. The fork by his plate has been used to stir eggs and the raw, dark orange yolk has dried between the tines, but he digs in anyway, and eats hungrily, feeling strength slowly return. Every bite is more intense than what he eats in the city—the ham gamier, the milk oily and tasting faintly of onions. His appetite rushes back and he eats with the gusto of a dog after a day’s rabbit hunt, as if in six urgent gulps he could replace all the flesh he’d melted in the chase. Truly, he marvels at the properties of sleep that can wire mind to body so that a reflexive jerk upon nodding off might spawn a dream of tripping off a curb, or dreaming of a mountain woman on his back might make a man feel he’s run a marathon. He wipes the last trace of egg from the plate with a biscuit and looks up to see Sonia in the doorway holding an enameled mug. She walks to the stove and fills it with some overpercolated chicory concoction that mountain people substitute for coffee during hard times. She adds a bit of cream and a touch of molasses from a small pitcher on the table.

  “Eddie asked for some coffee,” she says. “He’s in more pain today.”

  “You always feel it worse the next day,” Tucker agrees.

  She sips and frowns, adds another dollop of molasses, stirs it with her finger, sips again. “I think he’ll be fine with a little rest,” she says. Tucker can feel her waiting for him to respond. “I’m all packed,” she prompts. “We can leave whenever you’re ready.”

  “I’d hate to chance anything,” he says at last. “I was thinking we should stay and help out for a day or two.”

  Sonia is surprised. “Yesterday you were in such a hurry to leave.”

  “I was,” he says. “But Eddie—”

  “We have less than a week left before we have to turn in our notes, and you have to—”

  “What’s more important?” he cuts her off. “A person or a book?”

  He speaks more sharply to her than he ever has before. She pauses, stung.

  “Why did you take this job,” Sonia asks quietly, “if you didn’t believe in it?”

  “Same reason as everyone else,” Tucker says. “Less messy than suicide.”

  “You ready?” Cor
a Alley’s voice interrupts them. He hadn’t heard her come back from the springhouse. She has tied the feed sack across her shoulder and carries a small spadelike hoe.

  “Ready for what?” Sonia asks.

  “Mrs. Alley invited me to hunt sang with her today.” Tucker feels the blood rise in his face, and busies himself with his notebook and pencil. A dream is a dream. He hasn’t lied to anyone. There is no reason to feel ashamed. Sonia is speechless, holding Eddie’s mug of coffee.

  “You can come, too, if you’d like,” Cora says.

  Sonia is waiting for him to look up. He stuffs his notebook inside his satchel and drops the bag across his shoulder in imitation of Cora’s feed sack.

  “Of course you can,” he echoes. “If you want.”

  “Someone should stay with Eddie,” Sonia says coldly. “I’d hate to chance anything.”

  “You are so good,” Tucker whispers, stepping up to plant a kiss beneath her ear. “Our kids will be lucky to have you.”

  Following Cora down the breezeway, he peeks into the open bedroom door where Eddie lies huddled under the covers.

  “Take care of my lady, chum,” he says. “I expect to find her as I left her.”

  Cora has her hoe and Tucker has fashioned himself a walking stick from a branch. Together they hike the steeper slopes of the western face, clambering over rocks slick with gray-green lichen. Light filters through the canopy of scarlet black gums, staining their hands and faces until they are absolved by an open field and blue sky above them. She reads the signposts of the mountain as he would the city streets. Indian Branch with its iron-brown water, Mad Sheep Branch where a flock of rabid animals came to drown themselves, Blowing Rock, Snakekill Rock. She doesn’t talk much but takes him quickly through this harvested part of the woods, knowing she’ll find little or nothing of value so close to home. He hadn’t noticed yesterday, but Cora Alley walks with a limp. What caused it? Polio as a child? A nail in her hoof?

  Is it his imagination that Cora looks rounder and softer and a little more satisfied than she did at dinner last night? Yes, it is his imagination. Yet, after walking only a mile or so, he is winded and sore as if something vital had been stolen from him. When he slammed on the brakes to avoid killing Eddie, his body hit the steering wheel. A mild case of whiplash? Perhaps that explains the muscle ache.

  “What am I looking for?” Tucker asks.

  “Palest gold,” she says. “Look for five leaves in sets of three or four. If you find a two- or three-prong, look up. Seeds roll downhill so there’s like to be even bigger plants up above.”

  “I’ve only ever seen ginseng hanging in the windows of Chinatown. Never knew what it was for.”

  “Sang’s the cure for everything,” Cora says. “It’ll bring down your high blood pressure or pick up your low. It cures sugar diabetes, and some men say, well—” she trails off.

  Tucker helps her. “It picks up other things, too?” Cora looks down and doesn’t answer.

  “The man I sell it to sells it to a Chinaman in New York who takes it all the way back to China,” she says. “Over there, he says they call it Essence of Man in the Earth.”

  Tucker likes the sound of that. He likes the sound of Cora Alley talking. He feels an intimacy between them, as if the dream did change something. He has surprised himself coming to the woods with her. He doesn’t usually let himself be alone with women, aware of what alone can bring. But he’s in love with Sonia, so he is safe. Maybe that’s why he takes the risk.

  As they walk, he’s conscious of trees fallen across their path, and he finds himself climbing their trunks like stair steps, planting a foot and pushing up, pausing at the rise for the brief, slightly higher vantage, before dropping lightly down to the other side. Up ahead, Cora balances on a stump; beyond her is an unnatural horizon of leafless and fallen trees, as though the forest has been blown over by a giant.

  “What happened?” he asks. “Was there a fire?”

  “We’re coming into the chestnut graveyard,” she says. “Blight’s taken them all since I was just a girl.”

  He knows he’s never been here but the devastation looks familiar, stretching as far as he can see, broken only by patches of opportunistic understory. He scales another splintered trunk as he walks through the dry tatters of last year’s litter. Amid the ash-gray and brown, he spies a stand of yellow leaves. At least a dozen hidden plants.

  “I found something!” Tucker cries, flushing at the excitement in his voice. He waits for Cora to come over and together they squat down before it, their shoulders just touching. She reaches out and teases the soil around the root. It comes out of the ground long and fingerlike.

  “Sorry, Mr. Hayes,” she says, “but you found yourself some Fool’s Sang. This is just plain old sarsaparilla. Makes a nice root beer.”

  “You’re sure?” he asks. “It looks right.”

  “Looking’s not being,” she says, and rises, wiping the root on the hem of her dress and handing it down to him. He takes the stiff, skinny root and sticks it between his teeth like FDR’s cigarette holder, tilts his chin, and squints up at her.

  “We have nothing to feeeeear,” he drawls, “but feeeeeear itself.”

  It was worth the embarrassment to make Cora Alley smile.

  Suddenly, she puts her hand on his shoulder and points to a snag ahead. “Look there,” she says.

  “What? Is that it?”

  “Not the plant, the bird.”

  Perched upon briar, a bird about the size of a chickadee preens its feathers. Its wings are crimson and its belly white. Cora stands motionless a long time, until Tucker speaks. He is still down on his haunches and his knees are beginning to ache.

  “What are we waiting for?” he whispers.

  “To see which way it’ll go.”

  He waits another few minutes as the bird zips its tail through its beak, shakes itself, looks around with a bright, black eye. “Why?”

  “It’s a ginseng bird. It’ll lead us to the sang.”

  “How does it know?”

  “Its wings are the color of berries,” she explains, as if it should be obvious to him. “Don’t scare it, or the way won’t be true.”

  Tucker is growing impatient. Cora strains to remain still, her narrow green eyes fixed on the bird. She does look different this morning, he decides. Unlike him, she got a good night’s rest. Her plait is not so tight and her face is scrubbed clean and rosy. He’d put her a few years over thirty, but now he’s guessing she might be a few before. Closer to him.

  “How long’ve you been married?” she whispers.

  “Not long,” he replies, surprised and a little thrilled at the question.

  “If you don’t mind my saying, you don’t seem suited.”

  “How so?” he asks, keeping his voice low.

  “She’s coiled up like a snake and you’re a plump little mouse ready to be swallowed whole.”

  “I’m glad you think so highly of me on such short acquaintance,” he says, not bothering to whisper any longer. The bird on the twig takes notice.

  “Don’t move,” she commands.

  “And what of Mr. Alley,” Tucker asks. “Is he a man or a mouse?”

  “It’s not proper to ask a lady about an absent husband,” she says.

  “Of course it isn’t, which is why I’m asking,” he says, but the bird chooses that moment to take off. It is gone before he can tell which way it went.

  “It headed toward Panther Gap,” Cora says, moving forward, all business now. Tucker rises and tosses away the root.

  “Panther Gap? Sounds like a story behind that.”

  “There’s one if I choose to tell it.”

  “Mrs. Alley. You mustn’t lead a man to woods just to tease him.”

  Cora shakes her head. “This way,” she says. “We can’t lose the bird.”

  Tucker is stubborn. “Tell me as we go,” he says. “I’ll put it in my book.”

  Cora frowns at him and keeps walking, faster now, headed far
ther west. Tucker leaps the fallen chestnut trunks to catch up, and together they walk briskly, Cora searching the sky for the crimson bird. Her voice is so low it takes him a moment to realize she’s begun her story, and then he has to strain to hear.

  “Once there was a girl in our family who had the bad luck of falling for a boy from the valley,” Cora says.

  “This is a story about your family?” Tucker asks in surprise.

  “This story is our burden, Mr. Hayes,” Cora says, somber and selfimportantly. She is still shy of talking at length, and they walk a little ways in silence before she begins again.

  “The boy of her desire was fine-looking but vain. His mama spoilt him with fancy clothes she sewed out of magazines, and put it in his head he was destined for great things.”

  “I know quite a few boys such as he,” Tucker says.

  “I’m sure you do,” says Cora, fixing him with the sort of look his mother gave when he was especially impertinent. “Well, this boy had been paying attention to this girl of our family for months, walking her home from church, taking her to parties. You see, she was expecting a proposal, and so one afternoon, when her parents had gone into town for Court Day, she gave into his whisperings. It didn’t make her bad; preachers came by so seldom that a man’s word was his bond. And yet, stupid girl, she should have known better, ’cause everyone knows any country boy in a suit spells trouble, and he, stupid boy, should have known better, ’cause it was understood by all within a hundred miles that this girl was a witch.”

  “A witch?” asks Tucker. “In your family?”

  “Once witches slip in,” Cora replies, “they’re hard to get rid of.”

  Tucker laughs delightedly, but she looks injured. This is more than Cora Alley has spoken since he met her; he never would have guessed so many words were trapped inside. “Please,” he says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”