Somewhere deep in the Harrikin Tyler began to come upon curious arrangements of sticks strung from trees, lengths of wild cane wired together in designs strange and oblique, some simple and composed of only a few sections, others intricate three-dimensional compositions, and all alike suspended by tiewire and turning slowly in the air like alien windchimes or hieroglyphs from some prior language no one knew anymore. Like messages left by some otherworldly traveler who’d gone before him and left these signs in invitation or warning. They became more frequent, a veritable forest of them, asymmetrical and random and somehow sinister.
A dead fox strung head downward from a tree by wire threaded behind the tendons in its legs. He looked at it curiously, then went on beneath the great lowering trees with wind in their upper branches and doves calling from some lost hollow, past ancient utility poles tilted and wireless that bore witness to a civilization that had come tentatively and long since gone. In a bower formed by the roots of a liveoak and sleeping in a bed of moss was a child’s doll. It lay in a miniature casket and its cheeks were rouged and shadowed by improbable lashes and upon kneeling to examine it closer he saw woven into the
doll’s flaxen locks humanlooking hair of a darker shade and a wood screw had been threaded into the doll’s molded navel. He studied it a time in a kind of wonder without touching it and then he rose and went on.
Some motion drew his eye and he saw a rusted fifty-gallon drum sitting upright beneath a tree and from its concave top a huge great horned owl was watching him. He approached cautiously. The owl watched him with its great liquid eyes and he saw himself twinned and grotesque leaning toward their depths. The owl’s left leg was imprisoned in the clamped jaws of a steel trap and a chain led away over a tree branch where wire secured it. The owl had been trying to escape the trap, for its feathers were bloody, and Tyler could see that the jaws had bitten into the flesh of its leg. The owl closeup looked like some monster from a child’s fever dream but when he reached a tentative hand toward the trap it did not move just watched him blankly and slightly inquisitively and with enormous patience from beneath its great tufted horns.
He tried to open the jaws of the trap with his hands but could not and finally pried them partway with his pocketknife, then inserted a stick and sprung them enough to free the owl. He backed away, expecting it to fly, but it just stood favoring its left leg and watching him back and he went on. He’d gonea few feet when he heard the concussion of its wings and looking up, saw it pass above him with wingspan terrible like some great prehistoric bird that had outlived its time and now was fleeing this one.
He had been following the tracks of an ironrimmed wagon that had in turn been following the spectral roadway along the humped back of a long ridge, then down into bottomland
grown with pinoak and poplar and maple. This bottomland was cleft by some stream nameless to him, and it seemed pasthaunted, vibratory with the traces of past habitation as if all that happened here happened still and concurrent with all other events and just out of his sight and hearing. He passed tiny log cabins mouldering down into the earth that might or might not have been slave quarters long ago or the houses of woodsprites or littlefolk and he passed a stone springhouse. A cooling box for milk and butter had been chiseled out of the solid limestone and old waterpipes gone almost entirely to rust were fed here. Turning in the direction the pipes led he saw a gently rising slope grown with cedar and hemlock and beyond and above them the looming bulk of a ruined mansion.
He went up the slope abstractedly, he’d realized he was turned around, had angled too far southeast and was in Lawrence County. This had to be the old Perrie mansion, and he knew it was not in Ackerman County. There were still miles and miles of wild country to go, and miles to backtrack. He looked upward. The dark bulk towered above him, three stories of handmade brick with four columns in front. The earth had settled under one of the end columns and it canted outward at the top. A ruined balcony dangled precariously from disintegrating masonry. He went inside. The roof was gone, lost in the fury of a long-ago storm, he could see a square of mottled sunlight falling down the curving stairway. He turned in a slow pivot, more impressed by this ruined glory than the foxes and rats and nightbirds that called it home now.
He went cautiously up a wide stair to a landing and a great hall with rooms opening off it and windowless apertures through which he could see encroaching trees.
Through a window opening he saw a brick outbuilding and a tiny wooden shanty like a witch’s house in a fable. The shanty was impaled with a length of stovepipe like a stake driven through its heart and a column of blue woodsmoke rose and dissipated. The house was surrounded by an enormous amount of ricked firewood and there was a blackened washpot sitting on its three legs over a smouldering fire. Even as he watched a woman came into view. She was laboring up a deeply washed gully dragging what appeared to be a great bundle of honeysuckle vines.
By the time he had wended his way through the bullbriars and vines that formed the lawn of the cottage, she had reached the yard and dragged the vines onto the porch. She was sitting in a willow rocker catching her breath. A tiny gnomish woman who’d come no higher than his chest, a dried and fragile elf of indeterminate but advanced age who seemed light and delicate as the fluted bones of birds found in the woods. Dressed all in homedyed black like the sole survivor of some obscure sect she’d outlived here in this lost wood, with foxes for lapdogs and whippoorwills nesting in her henhouse. The porch was well corded with heaterwood, you’d think the old woman had had word of an impending winter of profound intensity. Hidy, he said.
How do. Get you a seat there.
Tyler seated himself on the edge of the porch with his back braced against a stanchion. He had not realized how tired he was until he stopped to rest. The porch floor was strewn with soft, curling shavings of hickory.
You been making something?
Handles. You come after one?
He wondered at the degree of emergency that would drive him so far in dire need of a handle. No, he said.
I got em from tack hammer handles all the way up to axe handles.
I don’t reckon I need one.
She had a pile of sticks two feet or so long laid by the rocking chair, and now she took one up. The stick had a fork on its small end, and she looped a length of honeysuckle vine about the fork and commenced winding the vine into a ball.
I guess you come about a potion then.
A potion? What sort of potion?
She shrugged. Whatever kind it is you need. I get calls for all kinds. She studied him acutely. I figure you for a love potion. One to make some little gal look away from the feller she’s with and hook up with you. She cackled dryly, a sound like the rustle of cornhusks. Or look away from you and fix on somebody else. I get calls for both kinds, and I got the herbs and stuff to make em.
Do they work?
Same folks keep comin back.
You got a potion that’ll keep a man from killing you?
Her eyes remarked the gun. Looks to me like you totin around a potion’d do that. I don’t want to kill anybody. I just want to keep from getting killed.
I got hexes that’ll make him hurt so bad he’ll forget he ever saw your face. Tie his guts in a hard knot and draw both ends tight. But you don’t look like you’ve lived long enough to make anybody that mad, though.
I did this fellow.
She looked at whatever it was she was making. She
selected a thin brown vine and wrapped the ball then wove the vine through the bottom, then wound the stick and tucked the end under adroitly. She studied it intently as if to see whether it measured up to whatever standard she went by then laid it aside and began another one.
What are you making now?
Cokeberry trees they call em.
Who calls them?
She shrugged. The man I sell em to. He buys all I make for fifteen cents apiece. He sells em somewheres. She gestured vaguely, as to indicate Ackerman’s Field, Nashville, the world at large.
He was studying the thing. If it had a use he couldn’t divine it. What on earth do they do with them?
Now there you got me. Maybe they sets em around to look at. Folks with too much money’ll buy anything. Even hexes. You see all this wood I got? Charlie Peters hauls it to me on a wagon. He thinks I’m a witch put a hex on his wife. She got a cancer. He started bringin me wood to get me to take it off.
Did you?
It’s a little late for that. She died. He keeps on bringin me wood, though, cause he thinks I got one on him.
Why would he think you put a hex on his wife? He shot and killed my dog and she caught a cancer. He seen a connection there I didn’t see. I don’t know, maybe the dog done it. I don’t know the answer to everthing in the world.
Could you do that? Hex somebody?
She glanced at him with her berrybright eyes, then at the wood as if that were answer enough.
All those things made out of cane, hanging from the trees,
are they yours?
She nodded. They to confound my enemies. Somebody start in here to do me harm’d never make it through em.
Well, I guess I’m all right then. I made it. He thought about asking her about the doll but then decided not to. What kind of cancer did she have? Charlie Peters’s wife?
Stomach cancer, I heard.
Tell you the truth, I didn’t come after anything. I got turned around in the woods, then I saw the old Perrie place and went up to look at it. I didn’t even know where I was till I saw it.
She laid the cokeberry tree aside and looked at the towering structure. I been here a long while. My other house blowed away. The harrikin picked it up from around me and carried it off somewhere else. Maybe set it down around somebody didn’t have one, I don’t know. The world works in funny ways, I don’t question it. I took that for a sign and found me another one. Comes a harrikin and gets this one, I’ll just find me someplace else. That big house over there they used to have fancy parties. All the high society. Whole yard there growed up in bull nettles used to be a rose garden where the courtin couples’d walk. One night that balcony up yonder was overloaded with folks, and one end of it come out of the brick, and the whole thing swung down like a wheel rollin, and folks was strowed all over like busted dolls with the sawdust leakinout. All them fine parties is done now. I’m still here, though. All them folks in crazyhouses, old folks’ homes, cemeteries.
She sat in a contemplative silence. Summer nights you can still hear them parties. People talkin and laughin far off so faint you can’t make out what they’re sayin. Some warm nights I set out here and listen to their dance music. You believe that?
I didn’t come all this way to call you a liar.
She laid the tree aside and dusted honeysuckle leaves from her dress. Come on in the house, she said. It’s about time for a bite of supper.
They entered a dark and cloistral gloom. More wood here. A raw odor of its curing. All manner of handles stood about where she’d leant them. As if she were driven to make new all the world’s broken tools. A path wound through the wood like a maze and at its end a shadowed leanto kitchen.
He’d thought himself hungry but not so much as he thought. Supper was some type of cold greens boiled without grease or salt and the bread was unleavened as if she held to some vow of abstinence. She watched him while he chewed this tasteless mess in silence.
How come this feller wantin to kill you?
An undertaker hired him to, I reckon.
I’m a old woman but I never knowed undertakin to be so slow they had to kill folks for the business. Folks dyin all the time, it’s the way of the world. Help yourself to them greens there.
Tyler finished and swallowed with an effort and pushed his plate aside a fraction of an inch with a thumb. He hoped she didn’t try forcing the greens on him and she didn’t. She rose and covered the pan with a cloth and set it atop the cookstove, perhaps for another meal.
You want me to tell your fortune?
I reckon not. I’ll just play them like they fall.
Life ain’t no card game. Be forewarned. I’d not charge you. Usually I get a dollar, but yours I’d do for nothin.
I reckon not.
Let me give you the dollar then.
He laughed nervously. How come you want to tell my fortune?
There’s somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s somethin about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil.
Well. You being a witch and all, looks like you’d know.
I would if you wadn’t blockin it out. You’re hidin somethin.
You can’t read people, skim through them like books and lay them aside. All the fortune I need to know is how to get to a road. Can you not tell me how to find the railroad tracks?
There was more wickedness in the world than you thought and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you, ain’t ye?
No. This fella that you sell your vines to, does he pick them up? How do you get to the railroad tracks?
I don’t. There’s a wickedness in this world, and I try to stay clear of it, but this time I think it’s come in the door and set down at my table.
I told you I was just lost.
You’re lost, all right. Now I wonder if I ain’t myself.
He had risen and made ready to go. You could tell me where the road goes.
You said you came in on it. If one way come here and it don’t go but two ways, then the other way must be the one you want. Ain’t that right? I never did anything to you that I know of.
There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.
There’s a man going to be looking for me, Tyler said. If he comes here don’t let him in.
My enemies gives me plenty of leeway to pass, she said. I don’t expect yourn to be any different.
He wound his way back through the dusty maze into the wan winter light. She had followed him to the door as if to ensure that he kept going. He took up the rifle. I’ll see you, he said.