Skin Medicine (20 page)

But what struck James Lee the hardest was not the eyes or the stink or even the feces and filthy straw and tiny animal bones scattered about…it was that she seemed to have
tentacles.
Just like one of them sea monsters in a picture book that ate ships raw. Long, yellow things all curled and coiled like clocksprings.

But then…he realized they were her
fingernails.

And they had to be well over two feet in length…hard, bony growths that came out of her fingertips and laid over her like corkscrewed snakes.

James Lee made a sound…he wasn’t sure what…and she opened those flaking lips, revealing gray decayed teeth that sprouted from pitted gums like grayed fence posts. She made a grunting, squealing sound like a hog. And then she reached out to him, seemed to know him, and those fingernails clattered together like castanets.

That’s when he slammed the door shut.

That’s when he threw the bolt.

And that’s when he ran down through the snow and brambles, ducking past dead oaks and vaulting fallen logs. He ran all the way to the cabin and stumbled and fell into the door. Then Uncle Arlen threw it open, yanking him inside, into that mouth of warmth and security, demanding to know what it was, what it was.

But James Lee could not tell.

***

The Ozarks back then had a fine story-telling tradition. Sometimes a man’s worth was judged on how hard he worked
and
how good of a yarn he could spin. So James Lee was no stranger to tales of ghosts and haunts, child-eating ogres that lived in the depths of the forests or blood-sucking devil clans that peopled secret hollows. For everything scarcely understood or completely misunderstood, there was a story to explain it. It was a region where folktale and myth were an inseparable part of everyday life. There were faith healers and power doctors, water witches and yarb grannies…you name it, it showed sooner or later.

And one thing the Ozarks never had a shortage of were witches.

Some good, some evil, some real and some storied, regardless, they were there. Ask just about anyone in any locality of the hills and they could tell you where to find one…or point you to someone who could.

The kids at school told of an old man named Heller the Witch-Man who lived up in some misty hollow that few dared venture to. He could cast out devils and call them up, cure disease and make hair grow.

James Lee figured it was just another story…then one day he was down in town. Uncle Arlen was picking up some feed. James Lee was standing out on the boardwalk, kicking pebbles into the street. Suddenly…he got the damnedest feeling. He felt dizzy and the birthmark on his back started to burn something awful.

He turned and some grizzled old man was standing there, staring at him.

He looked like some hillbilly from the high ridges, dirty and smelling in an old hide coat. He had a single gold tooth in his lower jaw and it sparkled in the sunlight.

“
Boy…ye got the mark on ye,” he said. “Ye got it on ye and ye cain’t rid yerself of it…”

Then Uncle Arlen came out and dragged James Lee bodily away. And even after he threw him in the wagon and they made their way out of town, James Lee could feel those eyes on him, feel that mark on his back burning like a coal.

Uncle Arlen shouted and raged and warned James Lee about talking to strangers, because one day you meet the wrong one and soon enough, he sneaks up to the farm and slits all our throats.

James Lee just said: “It’s him, ain’t it? The Witch-Man.”

“
Ain’t no such thing, damn ye! Ain’t no such thing!”

But James Lee couldn’t stop. “They say…they say how he can do things. Things no one else can. Maybe, maybe if we brought the…the crazy woman to him, he could cure her—”

James Lee caught the back of Uncle Arlen’s fist in the mouth for that. And when he got home, he got a better taste of it. When Uncle Arlen was done, James Lee was folded up on the ground bleeding.

“
Ye never, ever, never mention that one ‘round me again, hear?” Uncle Arlen told him. “That heathen devil witch-man is nothin’ but pain and trouble! He cain’t cure nothin’ and no one, all he’ll bring ye is seven yards of hell!”

After that, James Lee didn’t mention Heller the Witch-Man again.

Even Auntie Maretta looked on him differently. She wasn’t exactly cold, but gone was the warmth and love he’d once known. Sometimes he got the feeling she was scared of him. And one night he heard Uncle Arlen say:

“
What’d I tell ye, woman? Like calls to like.”

Although he didn’t mention the strange old man, James Lee never stopped thinking about him or what lived in the shack up yonder. Days became weeks that wrapped themselves around months and years. And it was from an old moonshiner named Crazy Martin that James Lee got the answers he wanted. Crazy Martin knew the old man, lived way up in a hollow known as Hell’s Half-Acre and with good reason.

So one summer afternoon, James Lee made the pilgrimage.

It took him hours to navigate the mud roads and pig trails that snaked through the deep forest. But finally, in a hollow where no birds sang and no insects buzzed and the vegetation had a gray, dead look about it, he located the Witch-Man’s shack.

Heller was sitting before a fire. “Come sit yeself down, boy,” he said, without once looking in James Lee’s direction. “I knewed ye’d come, sooner or later, I knewed ye had to. So sit down. Folks say I bite people, but don’t ye believe it none.”

James Lee sat before the fire, refusing to meet the old man’s eyes.

Heller had a fiddle on his lap and he played a slow, melancholy tune while his mouth rambled on and on about his crops and how they were taking and it would be a good year, save fire and frost.

“
Ye said I was marked,” James Lee managed after he realized the old man was no flesh-eating booger like they said. He was just an old man who lived in a weird hollow who worried over his crops.

“
I recall, boy, I recall.” He set the fiddle on his lap. “Yer pa…no sir, yer
uncle,
I think, yes…yer uncle didn’t cotton ye talking to me, did he?”

James Lee was astounded. Here, all these years later, the old man remembered a chance encounter like it was yesterday. And he seemed to know things without being told them. Maybe he wasn’t just some old dirt-farmer after all.

“
I think…I think he’s afraid of ye,” James Lee said honestly. “I think lots of folks are.”

“
Yessum, they is. They certainly is.” The old man thought about it. “Yer uncle…I figure he’s a wise sort. For commerce with me can come at a terrible price. Boy like you…he cain’t afford what I got. Less’n, he don’t value his soul. Ye value yer soul, boy?”

“
Yes…yes, I do.”

“
Good boy. Now state yer business, will ye? I cain’t pull everything outta yer head.”

So James Lee told him. About his mother, the mysteries surrounding their coming to Missouri. He went on and on, telling him the same things and asking him the same questions for these were things he’d never spoken aloud to anyone before, but had always itched to.

“
First off, boy, yer mama…she’s beyond m’ help. M’ power does not extend far enough to fight what holds her. She was cursed, boy, cursed by…yes, by that evil old bitch. Yessum, I see her in my head, that hag. She packs a heap of power, boy…even dead, her medicine is strong.”
“I was hoping…”

“
No, boy. But what has yer mama…yes, it’s weakened some. If’n ye wait…surely, there will be peace for yer mama.” The old man leaned forward, his eyes burning. “But hear me, boy, ye carry the mark…yer life’ll be a dark matter. Ain’t no sunshine comin’ yer way…jus’ darkness.”

James Lee couldn’t fathom any of that business. Heller waxed on about the “Devil’s Mark” and how those who wore it were cursed. But finally, the shadows growing long, Heller let him leave, telling him to follow the trail straight up and out of the hollow. Not to stop, not even to pee. To keep walking, looking straight ahead. That if he saw someone on the trail, to not look upon them, not to listen to what they said. And if he heard voices from the woods…to just ignore them, no matter what they said or what they promised.

“
This holler, boy…it’s full of them what don’t rest easy.”

James Lee ran out of there and up into the sunshine and greenery again. When he got back to the cabin, no one would speak to him as if he carried a stain upon him. A stink of crazy old men and witches. The next day, he packed what he had and left the hills, figuring he was seventeen and a man. That it was time to make his way in the world.

West was where he was going.

And on the way he fell in with the wrong type. He seemed to naturally gravitate to them. And as the weeks and months past, whatever had been waiting in him all these years began to sprout, to take root and bloom. But it was no flower, but a mordant and eating cancer that devoured him an inch at a time.

By the time he fought in the Mexican-American War, James Lee had already killed six men…with his hands, his pistols, knife and hatchet.

4

The dry winds were born of blast furnaces and ovens. They scoured the desolate countryside, howling through dry ravines and whistling along the peaks of rocky precipices. Dense stands of chaparral and wiry brush trembled. Sand blew and snakes hid amongst the crags. Buzzards circled in the yellow hazy sky above. Flies lit on the faces of the living and the dead and the wind tasted of salt, heat, and misery.

All in all, Northern Mexico was a parched, godless country just this side of hell.

James Lee Cobb, a Missouri Volunteer, watched as two buckskin-clad irregulars dragged another Mexican corpse from the dirty scrub.

“
That’s six now, boss,” one of them named Jones said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the Spanish face of a corpse that had taken a load of grapeshot in the belly. He was just one big, wide opening between sternum and crotch now…you could’ve passed a medicine ball through him without brushing meat. “Six of them stinking, mother-raping sonsofbitches.”

“
Every time I see a dead greaser,” Cobb said, “I think this land is one inch closer to civilization.”

Jones nodded, kicking at a spider in the dirt. “Yep, I would agree with that, James. I surely would.” He spit at the corpses again. “You know? Some of this country down here…it ain’t too bad. If it weren’t were for the Mesicans dirtying it up, might be fit for a white man. You think?”

Cobb narrowed his eyes, watching for trouble, always watching for trouble. “Could be. Hotter than the Devil’s own asshole, but maybe.”

“
Worth thinking on.”

Cobb listened to the wind talk and it spoke in the voices of demons, telling him there would be a lot more killing, a lot more ugly dying before this little party was wound up. Licking his leathery lips, this made Cobb smile.

***

Whatever Cobb had been as a boy, he was not as a man. He could never honestly mark the point when he had gone from being wide-eyed and naïve…to what he was now, a blooded killer.

Maybe it had been his first killing.

That drifter he’d knifed in Kansas after his run from Missouri, the one that seemed eager to teach him the ways of sodomy. Maybe when he’d pulled that hunting knife and sank it clear into the stinking pervert’s belly and felt all that hot blood come bubbling out like lava through a sharp slit in the earth…maybe that had done it. For once he got that first killing over and done with, it all came real easy and natural-like. A predestined thing.

Just like Heller the Witch-Man told him, his life had become “a dark matter.”

Cobb didn’t think much of Missouri or Heller or Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta much after he left. Not even the horror that was his mother. Staying alive, staying whole, keeping his belly full and his scalp intact—these things tended to occupy his thoughts. He stole horses and rustled cattle. Trapped beaver in the Rockies and Wyoming’s Green River country. He bootlegged whiskey to injuns and supplied them with U.S. issue carbines for their fights against squatters and the Army. All in all, there was a lot of murdering and violence involved and this on a daily basis. All the good things in him withered like green vines in a drought and something else, something shadowed and nameless rose up to fill the void.

Something that had been there from the start…just waiting.

Waiting its turn.

When Texas decided to annex to the United States, he’d joined a group of hellraising Missouri volunteers to fight for its independence from Mexico.

War, any war, was a hard business, but something in Cobb liked it.

His first taste of it was at the steaming holding camps at Matamoros where everyone was anxious to fight and there was nothing to do but take it out on each other. The Missouri volunteers went at it tooth-and-nail with volunteers from Georgia and Indiana and particularly with the regular army, which looked down on all volunteers as trash. At best, they decided, they were mercenaries, at worst, just cut-throats and freebooters. So the volunteers gave them hell at every quarter. And when they weren’t using their fists, they were popping off their muskets at passing game, shadows, anything that moved and some things that didn’t.

Matamoros was one unruly hive of confusion and insubordination. The regular army was incensed over these brigands, these hell-for-leather volunteers.