The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (13 page)

“Your grandmother is Matrune?” James, the boy sitting
by the big fire, asked.

“Yes, Matrune, daughter of the black moon,” Old Magic
Woman said. “My mother was called Matishne, daughter of the black river.”

“Your name is Matishne too?” James asked.

“Yes,” Old Magic Woman said and smiled, “but my true
name is Mate’eya’ishne’mate’rune. Which means dark fire, daughter of the river and
daughter of the black moon.” She smiled and her smile was bright.

“Why does my father call you Old Magic Woman?” James
asked.

“Because . . .” Old Magic Woman said and smiled. Her
teeth white and perfectly square glimmered in the firelight, her dark eyes twinkled
and crinkled. “Because, James”—she raised her voice up loud and held her hands
over her head—“I am! I am Old Magic Woman!”

As she shouted, a cool breeze passed across their faces
and flapped the big fire back and forth. She laughed, her eyes locked on James’s
eyes. He laughed loud and big into the pines, looking away from her eyes in
shyness and then back again, laughing bigger, bolder right along with her.

When she left him in the empty home, he was left with
terror. He felt that he might have known the same terror that Matrune felt in
the cave, all alone with terrible monsters eating fear. That is exactly what the
loneliness felt like. His mother gone, his father disappeared, and Old Magic
Woman saying to him, “You will have to pass through the world now alone, little
James Falk. I cannot carry a child who will not listen to his father. I cannot
teach a student who will not learn. You will have to pass through alone.”

She said these things to him in the empty house of his
parents as he cried on the floor beside the stove where his mother had made so
many breakfasts while his pa sat scribbling in papers and trying to teach Jim
to read. Now they would all be gone, they would all be gone.

She said these things to him as tears fell from her own
eyes and she handed him a warrior’s satchel, a woven blanket, and a pack of medicines.
She said this to him and turned and stepped out the door and she did not look
back in the open door, even as he called for her. Even as he screamed her name,
she did not look back. She did not look back because her face was shining with
tears.

Benji Straddler’s father was standing at the door.

The sun was rising behind him over the pines. All around
him, the morning was quietly singing in orange and green, wet and new. The
woods smelled good in the cold breeze.

Benjamin Straddler’s father was dirty. In fact,
that’s what they called him, Dirty Straddler. He never got clean and his skin
was red and black with dirt, and his knuckles too were black with dirt, and in
the cracks of his red face, black. Dirty Straddler was dirty all right, but he
was strong and good, and he smelled like fire.

“Come on, Benji!” his father hollered at him. His teeth
shone like light out from his dark face. They matched his blazing, white eyes
in the morning. He grabbed at his son’s hand and it disappeared in his dirty
grip. The two went galloping together through the high grass, down the bank of
the river, then up the river, the sun breaking through the pines here and there
in sparkling spots, down past the garden full of pumpkins.

They came up to the barn.

“Now, here!” Dirty Straddler said, and whisked Benji
up on his shoulders. “Now here! Are you comfortable up there? Look in here! Look
who’s had a foal!”

Benjamin could see in there. He could see that big, black,
wild horse, Dandy. She’d had a foal for sure. The little thing looked shiny and
it was being licked and licked and licked.

Benjamin said, “Oh, my, Daddy, oh my, look at Dandy’s
baby.”

He woke up saying that now and again. He woke up in the
night, sometimes with tears splotching up his vision, reaching out for the bottle
he kept under the nightstand, fumbling in the dark, trying not to wake up Lane.

Most of the time, though, she heard him.

She would wake up when the sobbing started and listen
only. That was all she could do. Once she had tried to comfort him and he had
reacted violently—obviously in a sleeping state, but violently. So the sobbing
would start and she would lie there listening and then the mumbling and the
words came out; sometimes he said different little sayings, some of which were
nonsense, but she couldn’t remember them all. Always, though, he would get up
at some point, sobbing. Sometimes the sobbing led to all this coughing, but always
then, scrabbling around for the bottle. The drinking and the crying.

Finally, after he’d had enough, he would pause for a
long time and she could feel his eyes on the back of her head. She could hear him
open his mouth. He stretched out his hand and put it on her shoulder. “I love
you, Lane,” he would say, and she would mumble something, as if she half heard
in her sleep.

“I am so sorry,” he would say and then, a few minutes
later, he would pass into such a deep sleep, soundless, that she worried
sometimes he would not wake up.

He did, though. He always did wake up.

This morning, Benjamin woke her up.

Coming in the door, he went straight up to her.

She was sitting in the chair, asleep, with the gun across
her lap, the morning light coming through the shutters, playing in the dust
around her sleeping form.

“Lane,” he said quietly in her ear.

She opened up her eyes and jumped.

“You’re covered in blood!” she yelled.

“Lane, something is happening!” he yelled.

“Are you all right?” she yelled.

“I’m covered in blood,” he said.

“But are you all right?” she said, and set the gun aside
and stood up. Her hair was kind of messy and her eyes were puffy, but she was
beautiful to her husband just then.

“I’m all right,” Benjamin said, “I’m all right, but something
is happening. Something’s happened in the night.”

He looked odd to her. There was a weird light in his
eyes. Something that she hadn’t seen before at all, ever.

“What is that in your eyes, Benjamin Straddler?” she
asked.

Benjamin didn’t know either, but he could feel it, and
had an idea. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but we need to keep this between us. We
need to keep this between you and me. This is something for us Straddlers only,
and we need to keep it just between you and me.”

“Well, my goodness,” she said.

“Make some coffee and some breakfast, Lane. I need to
wash all this blood off of me and then when I come back. I’ll be clean and I’ll
tell you what’s happened.”

“Well, my goodness,” she said and started the coffee
right away.



“This thing you saw, this thing in the night, what did
it look like?” John Mosely asked Hattie Jones. John had been out in the fog looking
with the men. Now they were all out in front of the church.

“It wasn’t in the night, John Mosely, it was just now!”
Hattie said and looked at his son, Samuel, who was looking around and twirling
a feather. “I didn’t get really such a good look. I was only able to see it
from the corner of my eye. I don’t know if I saw anything.”

Some of the other men of the town had heard Hattie hollering
and started to gather around the three of them standing there in the fog. The
fog was going around them in gray ways.

“It was something, though. I don’t know,” Hattie said,
and John Mosely saw Hattie’s eyes darting back and forth, as if he was searching
frantically for something in his memory. Hattie took notice that the shadowy
shapes of the men were starting to gather around him. He wasn’t sure what he
had seen at all. Maybe he had just been scared because of the bones and the way
the wolves being around made him feel, which was scared and uneasy. Maybe when
he’d used the special call with his fiddle; maybe someone just called back at
him that way to make him scared and run off. Maybe it was just a tree that he’d
seen in the fog and that had been blowing in the wind—just the crooked black
limb of a tree sticking out there in the fog. Or was it a long, reaching,
wicked arm?

“I don’t know,” he said again, “but more than the look
of whatever that thing was, there was this feel of it. The feeling that comes
. . .” The men pushed in closer to listen to his words as he said,
“The feeling that comes when you’re around something like that.”

The men froze. John Mosely froze too, and in his mind
a mist was forming into shapes. Pieces of a strange puzzle were coming together
in the mist in his mind. The fog opened up just enough to see the front of the
church. The steps were empty, the little windows were closed. He thought of
Ruth and the things she had told him, all the things she had told him about
what would start to happen if Sparrow let outlanders in.

“The feeling,” Hattie continued, looking the men in each
of their eyes, one at a time so that he could see for sure that each of the men
was looking at him. He moved backward toward the steps. “The feeling that you
get when something wants to kill you and drag you down into Hell.”

The men mumbled.

Someone whispered, “‘Into Hell,’ he said.”

At this, something happened in John Mosely’s head. He
caught a flash, a picture, a vision in his mind of a man—the man that Benjamin
Straddler had described to Ruth, whatever he said his name was, Jim Falk, the
outlander. The one who’d been doing the tricks at Huck’s with Simon—he stood
there in John’s mind against the dark night sky. John’s mind blurred the memory
of Falk with imagination. A tall, pointed hat like a witch’s with its wide,
black brim. In John’s mind, Jim had a moldy armor laid upon him, fearsome with
shining spikes and strange symbols etched in red on its mottled surface. In one
hand he hefted a heavy double-ax for executing the victims, in the other a
leather-woven lead for the Thing in the Night, a knife-mouthed monster, a
lizard and a wolf at the same time, breathing its poison-hot breath, ready to
swallow him up. Ready to drag.

John Mosely grabbed Hattie by the shoulders. “The outlander!”
he whispered, but very loud, right in Hattie’s face.

John’s eyes popped wide open and he looked over Hattie’s
shoulder at the mumbling men. “The outlander’s brought the beast! Benjamin
Straddler knew it! My wife knew it. He told us, Benjamin told us! He came and
warned my wife last night!”

John’s skinny frame was tittering around, still holding
Hattie by the shoulders. “The outlander’s brought this beast and it means to
kill us all! I told you, I told you those from outside would bring nothing but
evil! We’ve got to keep these people out of our town and out of the church!”

He stopped yelling and looked at Hattie Jones. He swallowed
hard with this new fear and conviction he had found. “And it’s like you said,
Hattie, they’ve come to kill us all and to drag us into Hell.”



It was night. Most of the people in town were still inside
the little church. Some of them had gone home, but a lot had stayed up at the
church because of the goings-on. They stayed around to talk it out. The doctor
had got Bill Hill all comfortable with whatever he’d got in those little bottles,
and then he left. Some of the folk were frowning and talking fast and quiet
about the doctor being allowed to bring such things into a place of worship.
Others were standing near Bill saying prayers. There were plenty of folk about,
but not Violet. Violet was not there; she had gone home to rest.

Doc Pritham wondered about that. But he had to get on
with things and leave these people to take care of Bill Hill. With the outlander
being attacked and the chicken man disappearing and now Bill Hill, the preacher
had gone to look for answers and the doctor needed some too. Doc Pritham was
not sure that he wanted to know the answers because he was afraid that he
already knew the answers.

Now, Doc Pritham was sitting in his office drinking some
liquor with Jim Falk. There was a big bunch of candles on the table in the middle
of them. Their faces were tired and serious in the flickering light. Falk had
gone from Huck’s when May had given him the last of the medicine. He wanted
more medicine. He was healing fast.

The doc looked at Jim’s eyes and felt his pulse. “It’s
fast, the medicine is fast, but you’re healing very fast.”

Then he sat down and started fooling around with his
pipe stem. He was rolling around the events of the past few days in his mind. It
was coming together pretty well, but he didn’t like what was shaping up. What
was shaping up was dark and like a bad prophecy coming into being.

“Most of the people are staying up at the church right
now, waiting for the preacher to come back with some kind of answers,” the
doctor said.

Jim had his right hand on the table near the candles.
It was completely wrapped up in a bandage. There was no blood seeping through.
Underneath the bandage, he could feel his hand. It felt as if it was humming.
It seemed as though the doctor’s medicine was working. His body felt warm and
supple, too. He was looking at his bandaged hand and then back up at the
doctor. He was thinking about the church and thinking about the medicine that
the doctor had given him. “It might help, being in the church might help,” he
said and took a drink from his cloudy tumbler. “It might not.” Jim fiddled a bit
with the bandage. “Where’s the preacher gone off to?”

Doc Pritham said, “He’s gone off somewhere. He has an
idea about a way to find the truth.”

“The truth?” Jim asked.

The doctor made a grunting noise and banged the bowl
of his pipe on the table.

Jim Falk said, “Doc, we’re going to have to help each
other.”

The doctor said, “I know.” He turned up his pipe and
got some good tobacco and started putting it in. “These people—these people here
in Sparrow. They have good hearts and some of them have good minds to go with
the hearts. More than this, though, the people have fear. Too much fear. Even
among themselves.”

Jim took another drink. He watched the doctor for a while.
The doctor had white hair and big eyebrows. His face was wide and strong, and
his mind was strong and his eyes were clear. Jim said, “That cure I took. The
medicine. It was a special from the Old Way. Can I have some more?”

The doctor puffed his pipe and frowned.

“Doc, my father and my old grandmother, they taught me
the Old Ways, the Waycraft, the Path. . . . I can take more medicine. I can handle
it. I’ve been taking these medicines since I was a boy. It won’t harm me the
way it might someone else.”

The doctor took a long pull on his pipe and for a little
while he sat with his face in a rectangle cloud of blue smoke. The candle fire
did some licking away of the smoke, and from behind the cloud Jim could see the
doctor’s eyes twinkle a bit. The doctor took a little drink then and put it
down again and smiled. He was looking at Jim right in the eye now.

A little smile grew on the doctor’s face underneath his
fat nose. “Jim Falk, what exactly is the thing that has brought you here?” he
asked him.

Jim Falk looked across the table at the doctor and
said directly, “It wasn’t a certain anything as such. It was something,
though.” He took a sigh and his hand lifted up and waved in a dismissing way.
“I was called to come here in dreams by the woman Violet Hill. She called me
here by vision.”

The doctor puffed again. “Well, Falk, you are right,
of course. About the cure that I gave you, the medicine—and there is something else
that I know.” He set down his pipe. “I know that a man such as you, such as you
are, does not come along a certain way for the simple reason of a vision. If
you have visions, you must have them all the time and you can’t follow each and
every one to its thread’s end.”

The doctor raised his left hand and made a motion with
it. “Perhaps you do. Perhaps a man such as you are does such a thing. Wanders
around, this way and that, following every breeze, chasing every notion.
Perhaps.” The doctor paused a moment and put his long-fingered hands together
as if in prayer and brought them to his lips under his nose. “But I know. In
your mind, in the way that your mind likely works, I know that there are many
such visions that come to you and how you use a way of finding the path to
take. You should, at least, know a way to find the right path among the paths.
But I see you, Mr. Jim Falk, and I see into your eyes and I see that your paths
are twisted by the darkness.”