The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (16 page)

Huck snorted a bit and then fell back into a deep sleep.
May looked out the window of the shop. The sun was coming up. The fog had
cleared outside and the sun was coming up. It lit up the muddy ground and shined
through the trees.

She could see, from the window, the front of the church.
She could see Hattie helping the preacher down the steps. The door looked as if
someone had torn it into pieces and threw it all over the yard.

She was tired, but she didn’t want to wake her pa. She
was glad to see him finally knocked off to sleep.

May sat down on the window seat and watched the sun lighting
up the crooked trees. She put her face against the window and tried to feel the
heat of the sun, but the window was cold as ice. She rolled her eyes along the
frame of the window and jumped. There on the window, on the outside of the
window, two fat, black spiders wiggled in the wind. They both looked the same.
They were frozen dead with the night’s frost. They were facing each other as if
they were looking at each other.

She shuddered and got away from the window and moved
to the other one.

From this one, she could see the side of the church and
the edge of the woods. She sighed and put her forehead up against the glass. A
raccoon, a big one, was pacing back and forth at the tree-line, stopping now
and then to stand up on its back legs and smell the air. It took its time,
pausing and sniffing, figuring it all out. She smiled as its round body wobbled
off into the autumn trees. She could hear the birds.

She was tired. Her pa had been up all night pacing back
and forth just like that raccoon. Pacing back and forth in front of the windows
and looking out into the night. He was sure that it wasn’t safe to go out. He
thought all those folk that had run up to the church had gone crazy.

“So what?” Huck said, looking out the window and up at
the church. “So what? The wolves can’t go in the church? Is that the idea? Wolves
is natural, May. They’re running out of food up on the mountainside. They came
down here. They ate all the chickens and now they’re moved on.”

He patted her on the head. “Now they got talk of all
kinds of things. One thing happens and the next thing you know, the town’s full
of monsters and magicians. So what? I tell you what, the people that believe in
this nonsense about spooks and demons are more dangerous than the wolves.”

Her pa was right. The night passed by. The wind blew.
The fog curled, but no wolves came back, no monsters showed their faces.

Now Huck Marbo was snoring, his face smushed up against
the beam in the middle of the big room.

He smiled a little and said something in his sleep. His
smile was something that May loved to see, and he didn’t do it but quick when
he was awake. Since her ma was gone, if he did smile it usually got followed by
his eyes getting tears in them.

So this was nice. He was there, smiling for a moment,
saying something in his sleep with the sun coming in the windows.

She didn’t know it, but he was dreaming of his
daughter in the water and she sure was having some kind of trouble out there.
She was having a time trying to stay stood up in the creek.

The dream was part memory and part dream. He laughed,
watching her wade out into the middle, slipping here and again with the net in
her one hand. Tumbling forward, almost dipping her tanned face and honey hair
in the water and then somehow bending herself back, flashing her white teeth in
her big smile.

“Lord, watch yourself!” Anna called from the creek bed.

Her voice shone into his mind. He could feel her fingers
laced in his.

May sure was having a problem out there in the water.

Anna jumped in the water after her, laughing now and
then turning toward Huck, scolding him, wagging her finger. “You’ll ruin her yet.”

She turned back to steady her daughter with her one hand
and slipped and fell in up to her shoulders.

“You’re no help!” Huck shouted through barking laughter.
He jumped in now. Wresting them both, one in each arm, carrying them out of the
cold waters, squealing and kicking.

Both of his feet, bare, digging into the mud and rocks
of the banks of Sparrow Creek.

When he woke up, he could still feel her fingers laced
in his and looking down at his hand, he saw that a shaft of sunlight shone through
the icy window right on his hand, warming it. The sensation of it drifted away.

“You’re up,” May said. She was tinkering with the stove,
getting it going, making some hot water.

“You been watchin’ up at the church?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said and yawned and stretched, “and the fog’s
cleared up and the sun’s come up. I saw the preacher leaving the church with
Hattie Jones, and the preacher looked like he was hurt.”

Huck was tired for sure and after squinting out the window
for a few and bobbing his head up and down, he sat right down in a chair and
May came and sat with him at the little table by the post. They sat there together
in silence for a while and Huck looked at his daughter.

The reason for the way that his daughter could find a
way to be happy and smile even in the midst of all this strangeness was because
of her mother and the fact that she was like her mother. Her mother had shown
May ways to be strong, but May had a streak in her that was no good. Not no
good in a vile, awful way, but no good in a mischievous way where she just wouldn’t
listen and she had to go and find things out herself. To her father, she was
lovely—a square face and straight, big teeth with deep, round eyes that had
that same green tone as his. She was short but strong-shouldered, and now, though
he still did not believe it, she was a woman.

And yes, even with all this strangeness about, she smiled
in the sunshine. That was her mother’s way too. Why are you smiling, Anna? Just
because.

Now they were both up and drinking coffee together.

Huck looked across the little table at his daughter.

“May?” he asked and took a little sip, not looking in
her eye, “let me ask you a question. What do you think is going on here?”

May looked at her coffee swirling around in the white
cup. She looked out the window toward the church and squinted. She remembered
Jim’s words that she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what she had seen.

“Pa, I walked into town with Jim Falk the other morning,”
she said in a cool manner, still looking out the window.

Huck didn’t make a sound and he didn’t move his eyes
from off his cup.

There was some quiet at the table.

May breathed.

Huck scratched the back of his neck and thought of Violet
and what she said about the look in his eyes.

“When I was coming out of the house,” she went on, “Mr.
Falk happened to be coming down the road and he asked if he could escort me
into town. I know you told me to stay away from him, Pa, but there didn’t seem
to be anything else that I could do at the time except for accept and go with
him. Besides, with the strange things that the Hills were saying, they had me
kinda scared.”

Huck didn’t say anything. He took a drink of coffee,
then he said, “May . . .”

“Something about the way he asked me, Pa, the way he
asked me is what made me think that it would be okay and safer to go into town with
him. So he walked with me a while and it was strange out. It was strange and
quiet out and things seemed muffled around us. Then we got to a point in the
road and he started squinting and looking on ahead and he grabbed hold of me
and told me to be quiet and we crouched down together.”

Huck looked up at his daughter now. His eyes had gone
into a deep green and were moving quickly back and forth. He was searching out
her face to try and see if she was scared. She wasn’t. He didn’t think of it
often, but sometimes he wondered what would happen about this. Since the bad winter,
so many had died. So many of the young kids, they hadn’t made it. It wasn’t
right. There was no one in Sparrow May’s age except for Vernon’s daughter,
there were no boys for her to go chasing after or to be shy and coy around. The
closest man to her age in town was that damned Simon, and he was still her
senior. He shuddered at the thought of her wandering up to the Ridges to court.

So he listened. His blood boiled, but he listened.

“Pa,” she said, “I could see something. I couldn’t see
exactly what it was, but it didn’t look right. It looked like something dark
and like a thing, not a person and not an animal. It gave me chills just looking
at it. It was far away too, so I couldn’t really make it out exactly except for
the fact that it gave me these chills to look at it. Then it was off into the
woods.”

Huck sat up straight in his chair and calmly took a sip
of his coffee. “What did the outlander do?”

“He brought me all the way into town and protected me
from whatever it was. He said that it was a spook and that it was possible that
the devil sent it.”

Huck sipped again at his coffee. He said, “The Evil One.”

“Pa, that’s what Jim said.”

Huck said, “That’s what the outlander said. What do you
think?”

“I don’t know, Pa,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know, May. I just want you to be careful, May.
That’s all I want you to do. Be as careful as you possibly can.”

He looked out the window. The sun was playing in the
frost and in the wet pools of frozen mud. The birds were chirping.

May turned her head and looked out the window with her
pa. Some of the sparkling of the outside came in through the window and gave
her big, round eyes a twinkle.

Her pa looked at her face, glowing in the light.

“May,” he said, “I think the sunshine was made just for
you.”



The doctor unwrapped Jim’s bandages very slowly.

“You’re healing so quickly,” Doc Pritham said as Jim
winced.

“How does it look?”

“Better. Your wounds are already closed.”

The doctor did some wiping and smearing on of some other
kind of stinking paste.

“I can still feel them,” Jim said and stretched his thumb
out a little. He stretched his index out and his middle.

The doctor half smiled and looked at Jim, who was looking
away and out the window. The sun was coming up.

“When I move them,” Jim said, “I can still feel the other
two. How can that be?”

The doctor looked at Jim’s hand, but said nothing. A
wolf had taken away Jim’s pinky and ring finger along with part of the hand. There
was no getting it back.

Jim’s face was fresh-shaven and the doc’s medicine burned
at the back of his throat. He didn’t feel bad at all. He felt an energy inside
him and maybe it came only from the medicine, but he had in him a certain hope
as he watched the sun lighting up the little town outside of the doctor’s
place.

His eyes glinted as the doctor started slowly wrapping
his hand.

The sun coming in the window lit up Jim’s face, revealing
the healing scars on his right cheek and the two long slashes below his left
eye.

Jim sensed the doc looking at him.

“Lucky even that I have my eyes,” Jim said and put his
left hand on the fleshy marks there under his eye.

“You are right,” Doc Pritham said, “you are right. If
you believe in this thing called luck, then you are lucky.” The doctor laughed
a little, but Jim wasn’t in the mood for laughing. Whenever he drank the
doctor’s medicine, it seemed like after the initial rush of feeling better, there
came a time when memories kicked up in his mind. The medicine dragged his mind
off to somewhere else.

Something was bothering him now about these things that
were happening in the town of Sparrow. His mind reeled back in his memory, seeking
for connections. His father, his mother, Old Magic Woman. His mind opened into
a place he did not like, a place that had been sealed. It was the medicine, but
he couldn’t help himself.

Jim put the cup of medicine to his lips and took another
drink. “There was an old witch that killed my ma, Doc.”

The doctor finished up and sat back in his chair, looking
at Jim, his eyes suddenly kind and deep. “Yes?”

Jim stared into the sunshine drinking the medicine. “Came
right down from somewhere in the woods one night, dark and slippery. All the
chickens had died just the day before, Doc, and we didn’t know why. But I think
my pa knew why. They were all dead and just rotted, like they’d been dead a
long time. It put the fear in my ma something awful. That old witch. She’d been
comin’ around lookin’ for me, like they often do children. Turns out, my pa had
been keepin’ her away with his craft and special barriers for years, which he
knew how to make against her. But see, her power was growing somehow. Somehow
the barriers weren’t taking like they once did. My pa started lookin’ to kill
her. And to kill her, he knew he needed a special image of her. But she always
kept her features and body in the darkness. One night, though, my pa tricked
her by having me there in the barn like I was asleep. Had my ma out callin’ for
me like I was lost.”

The outlander swallowed and his eyes danced around the
edges of the window. He went on. “This was his plan to kill her. Kill that witch.
My ma was out there hollerin’ around for me like she couldn’t find me.” Jim
stopped talking for a moment and lifted the cup to his lips. He tilted the cup
back and it was empty. He stared into the empty cup and a desperate look came
onto his face. He remembered.

His father, Ithacus, stopped screaming her name and fell
down on both his knees in the wet grass. It must have rained, because water
dripped from his coat and his shirt and his hat were drenched with cold water.
He was just now starting to feel his skin burn with the cold. The next thought
was of his little boy. Was he still in the barn? His voice was rough as he
tried to call out to James. The rain wasn’t in the sky any more and the October
dawn came through the dark clouds in orange and blue over the grassy field. The
barn was still in the shadows.