Witches on the Road Tonight

  “Can we watch the movie again?” Eddie asks.

  “It’s Tucker’s, not mine. I wouldn’t feel comfortable,” she finds the strength to answer.

  “But when you’re married, you share everything, right?” Eddie asks, and Sonia remembers, of course, they’re married.

  “I suppose,” she says. “But it works better if you keep some things separate.”

  Eddie sits quietly in the dark.

  “Do you ever get scared of things?” Eddie asks.

  “Not too much,” she says, swallowing the saliva that fills her mouth. She will not throw up, not here in front of this kid. “I sometimes get scared of the things I’ll miss.”

  “Will you miss us?” Eddie asks.

  “I meant the things I’ll miss out on. Miss doing,” Sonia clarifies.

  “Oh,” he says.

  After the print is set, it will need to be washed for half an hour in running water and then she will be done and they can leave. “Let’s check it,” she says.

  She carefully peels the salt paper from the negative, exposing the contact print. A sepia Cora and Eddie peer back, their pale tan skin etched into the paper, the shadows of their clothes and the porch deep chocolate.

  “This is how they made pictures a hundred years ago,” Sonia says, studying them. She almost got Eddie. The big ears and the wide, shaminnocent eyes. He’s trying too hard, but he looks like a boy who tries too hard, and so it’s right. But Cora is wrong. She must have moved at the last minute. Her eyes, instead of challenging, are downcast and glancing sideways, giving her a criminally secretive look. Sonia is disappointed. She won’t be able to leave this portrait. Cora would never hang it on her wall.

  “This is why I have to take so many pictures,” Sonia tells Eddie. “Between what I want and what you’re willing to give, it ends up a law of averages. I almost got you, but I missed with your mother.”

  Eddie is staring at the portrait. “No, you got her,” he says.

  Sonia drops the paper into the stop bath and moves it around with a pair of tongs she fashioned from two sticks. The soft motion of the print in the tray sounds like water dripping in a cave.

  “You like taking pictures,” he says.

  “It’s impossible to see everything,” she says. “Trying is how God tricks us into staying alive.”

  “You don’t sound like Mr. Hayes,” Eddie says, grinning. “You sound different.”

  “Really?” Sonia asks.

  “He sounds like he comes from here. Not right here, but nearby. No ladies around here talk Yankee like you do.”

  “I was born in New York,” she says. “I’ve lived there all my life except when I’ve been on the road.”

  “How long’ve you been on the road?” he asks.

  “Most of my life,” she says, grinning back.

  “If I lived in New York City,” Eddie says, “I’d never leave it.”

  “You’d be surprised what you’d leave,” Sonia says.

  She lifts the print from the fixer, letting the last drips roll back into the tray. Eddie leans against the cow’s stall, absently petting her bony back. She twitches her tail to shoo him away.

  “We need to rinse off the chemicals. Take this to the spring—” Sonia begins, but breaks off. Cora Alley’s face is too close to her own and her eyes are slyly observing Sonia’s knotted belly. In the yard the hens can feel her distress. They set up squawking, their wings beating the dirt. The cow turns around awkwardly in her pen. Sonia swallows but it is too late—she makes the door of the barn just as the morning’s grits and coffee come back up. It’s humiliating to feel this wretched and weak. She hates him for putting this inside her, and her hatred must have summoned him for his shoes are there on the blasted grass before her, thick-soled and caked with mud. Why is he back so soon? Does he see what he’s done to her? Looking up, the sun is behind him and his face is all in shadow.

  “Daddy!”

  From her hands and knees, Sonia looks up to see Eddie in the door of the barn, holding the wet print that has begun to curl at the edges. A slight but muscular man in a khaki uniform stands before them, a rucksack slung over his shoulder. He steps forward and now Sonia sees his eyes are the same color as his clothes, which are the same as the ground, and what she’s just thrown up. Only his face is red with barely checked anger. Sonia starts to rise, to explain, but before she can move, Eddie has pushed past her, knocking her almost into her own puddle, before tearing off across the yard and down the path into the woods.

  “Eddie?” his father shouts after him. Sonia watches him disappear, crashing through branches like a flushed rabbit. She is as surprised as his father at the boy’s reaction and feels a swift pang of panic at being left alone with a man he would run from. Slowly, she reaches out for the portrait he dropped and picks off a stray chicken feather clinging to Cora’s cheek. Mr. Alley stretches out his hand to help her to her feet. Sonia is not used to being off balance, especially in front of men.

  “Beg pardon, ma’am, I don’t know what got into that boy—” Eddie’s father begins. He has the same flat accent as his son, only his voice is deeper and tightly leashed.

  “I think you startled him. We weren’t expecting—”

  Mr. Alley shakes his head, staring into the woods. She doesn’t know where to begin.

  “I’m Sonia Blakeman,” she says. “There was an accident and we wanted to make sure your son wasn’t injured.”

  “Who is we?” asks Mr. Alley in some confusion. “Where’s Cora?”

  Sonia wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Tucker,” she says. “My husband. He’s driven your wife to the store.”

  Mr. Alley takes this in. “And my son was here with you?”

  “We have a car,” Sonia tells him, and hears how weak it sounds. He looks her up and down, this woman who lets her husband go off with another woman while she is home vomiting in the barn. Sonia is suddenly as offended at being left behind as Mr. Alley is at arriving home to find them gone. He must be on leave, she thinks, studying his uniform. Not military but Civilian Conservation Corps. On his shirt sleeve, he wears a red and green chevron above two crossed hammers.

  “Mechanic?” she asks, nodding at his badge.

  “Assistant leader,” he answers. “Been with the boys these last seven years. Here and there.”

  “I shot photos of Camp Nira in ’33,” Sonia tells him, “when the president came through. They staged a funeral for Old Man Depression, burned him in effigy. Some bugler started in with ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’”

  “I was at Nira in ’33,” says Mr. Alley. “Old gimp FDR was shouting like a crazy kid, That’s right boys, burn him up!”

  “Maybe I took a picture of you,” she says.

  “Sister, you took a picture of me, you wouldn’t forget it.”

  Sonia smiles and things are easier between them now. Mr. Alley drops his rucksack and turns to study the house.

  “We thought we’d wake up and everything’d be different,” he says.

  “It was for a night,” she says. “My camera’s still set up.”

  Mr. Alley grins but hesitates. She sees his eyes go to her belly. “Starting a family of your own?” he asks.

  “The water here doesn’t agree,” she answers.

  He nods and loosens the top button of his heavy cotton work shirt to show a clean white crescent of T-shirt beneath. “Where do you want me?” he asks.

  “On the porch,” she says, handing him the picture of his wife and son. “Will you set this under the spring? I’ll just be a second.”

  Fit and tan from working outside and eating three government meals a day, Mr. Alley saunters across his yard to the bathing hole. He sets the photograph under the gushing water, anchoring it with a stone. Sonia feels more like herself now that breakfast is gone. Maybe it is just the water. She steps back into the barn; with a yank, her drop cloth comes away from the nails with a dozen small tears. How stupid of Eddie to run away. He’ll have to come
home sometime, she thinks, and then it will be that much worse for him. Returning to the porch, she finds Mr. Alley waiting, his legs crossed at the ankle, his arms crossed across his chest.

  “Mr. Alley, you’re a natural,” she says.

  “Everyone calls me Bud,” he answers. “Lady from the department store in town asked me to model once but I told her sorry, sister, that’s for faggots.”

  “Okay, Bud,” she says, throwing the cloth over her camera and ducking beneath. “Freeze.”

  Bud Alley shows two rows of sharp, white teeth and holds the smile like a stuffed cougar baring its fangs.

  She opens the shutter and counts. One, two, three … Before she can count five, his eyes have shifted to the woods and she knows the picture is ruined. Eddie, she thinks, surfacing from under the cloth, but it is not Eddie. Tucker and Cora stand at the edge of the yard, each carrying an armload of bought goods. Sonia flushes, feeling caught at something, but then she sees by the way they are standing that they feel caught, too, and she knows something has passed between them.

  Bud Alley doesn’t move to help his wife, but waits for her to come to the porch and greet him. Cora crosses the yard to set down her things and lets herself be gathered into his arms. He kisses her so long and deep Sonia has to look away. When he lets her go, Bud picks up the pair of boy’s black boots.

  “What’re these?” he asks.

  “Mr. Hayes thought Eddie could use a few new things,” Cora explains. Bud slides his eyes to Tucker, whose arms are full of more provisions.

  “That’s mighty generous of Mr. Hayes,” says Bud, slowly.

  Cora isn’t listening. She has noticed the portrait of herself and Eddie Bud left to be rinsed by the pounding spring. She stoops to retrieve it before they are washed away forever.

  * * *

  His daddy is home.

  When he pushed past Mrs. Hayes, he could almost feel his daddy’s fist on his collar yanking him back—What’s wrong with you, boy? Eddie’s been asked that question so many times but he’s still got no answer. He raced down the path to the road, then took the shortcut across the next ridge without stopping to rest. He has to reach them before they come home alone together.

  Eddie, you ran all this way? Mr. Hayes will say. With that hurt shoulder of yours? And Eddie will say, It’s nothing, I didn’t want you to be surprised.

  Bud always comes home with no warning. He was at Camp Nira for two years and when he came back the house felt stuffed like a large piece of furniture had been rolled in. A few months later, a thickwaisted woman showed up at their cabin, Mama got quiet, and he was gone again. Now he’s on the Skyline Drive and comes home when it suits him. Eddie knows then to drag his own blanket off Cora’s bed and onto the porch. When his father is away, Eddie pictures him astride a mountaintop, holding in his hands the slicing rays of the sun. When he is home, he imagines taking up a gun and pointing it at his chest.

  Keep moving, he tells himself, though his shoulder aches from breathing hard. From the rise, he has a clear view down to the next switchback and a speck of road below it that leads to the store. He has run a long way and, looking back, feels he’s seeing this mountain now as he might see it in the rearview of Mr. Hayes’s shiny black ’35 Ford—reclining, twisting the ashtray, enjoying the Centerpoise. What are the chances, he wonders, that out of all the boys in the entire world, their car should have struck him? Mr. Hayes believes he is destined for great things and Mr. Hayes has seen enough of the world to know. Eddie turns back to the road, letting all those other boys grow smaller in the rearview.

  There is only the gully still to cross, the shortcut he always skirted as a younger boy, filled as it was with bright green fern his mother calls “rattlesnake.” He runs alongside it now, remembering how he always imagined it thick with twined and slithering bodies. But no, fool, Cora told him. That fern’s only called rattlesnake because its stems jut up tall and pointed in the heat of summer. It’s autumn now, and all the rattles have died back, leaving a sea of skeletal fronds.

  Cora taught him his colors by these woods. Red for bloodroot, blue for cohosh, green for just about anything else. But yellow was the color of money. And rattlesnake fern, he remembers now, like the crimson bird, is a ginseng pointer. Does he dare? Eddie glances over—not hunting sang, he tells himself, helping Tucker Hayes. But is there a difference? Is there ever a minute in a day he is not hunting sang? His eyes are always open for it, searching even under the pale blue crust of snow. Eddie looks up at the sun, which tells him it’s getting late, then makes a swift decision. Veering off the path, he slips down into the hollow. Maybe he has a long-buried memory of his mama showing him where the plants were growing, maybe he is pulled along by instinct. Last time he came back empty-handed. But not again. Now Eddie has something he wants.

  The golden leaves glow in the shade of a hemlock, exactly where he knew he’d find them. The plants are young, none bigger than a two-prong. Eddie watches the hill above him, as alert to unexpected company as he is when squatting to take a shit. His mother marked these plants for later—will she know her own son has poached? He doesn’t want to see what his fingers are doing. The wind is in the waving fern when the first root goes in his pocket, small and underdone, still caked with dirt. Barely glancing down, he quickly digs the rest, each one a little easier to get out of the ground. How many make a ticket to New York? He searches the hill above him; there must be more.

  Stop. He pictures Mr. Hayes helping his mother into the car and knows he has taken too much time already. Eddie jumps up and runs again, crashing through the gully, down through the woods until at last he reaches the terrace above the general store. He has come the back way to the clearing that serves as a parking lot, but even as he arrives, he sees the lot is empty, there are only tracks in the dirt where they had parked. He is too late.

  Eddie rests his hands on his trembling knees and tries to catch his breath. Inside that magical building are cold bottles of Coke and RC, but he has no money to buy one. Then, from the hills behind the store, he hears a familiar chant go up. Oh no, he thinks. Friends. They come here to play, he’s come often enough with them, but he doesn’t want to see them now. In their dirty end-of-the-week clothes they race around the corner of the building to form two ragged lines, faced off against each other. The witches on one side and the travelers on the other. Jim and Calamus and Lou and DumbDon are traveling. Rosaleen and little Ferris, the other Jim and Monty are witches. There are half a dozen more—cousins and second cousins, barefoot and flushed. The parking lot is the divide between them.

  “How many miles from here to Gal-il-ee?” the travelers start the chant, shouting across the gap.

  “Threescore and ten,” the witches shout back.

  “Can I get there by candlelight?”

  “Yes, if your legs are long as light.”

  Then they all yell in unison while everyone runs, swapping places to no real purpose Eddie has ever been able to figure.

  “Watch out!”

  “Mighty bad witches on the road tonight.”

  Rosaleen, a witch, spies him first and elbows Big Jim in the ribs. Big Jim gestures for his travelers to stay put and they do, falling into each other with the effort to stop. Eddie could try to run but Jim would catch him. He stands his ground. The older boy strolls over to Eddie and DumbDon breaks rank to follow, because DumbDon is so dumb he gets to do whatever he wants.

  “Your mama was just here,” Jim says.

  “With a man who weren’t your daddy,” DumbDon adds in his gargling voice.

  “Another one,” says Jim.

  The blood rushes to Eddie’s face and he can hardly see for his fury. He wants to tuck his head and ram straight into the big boy’s chest, but he knows Jim is just looking for an excuse to flatten him. He could take Don but he’s protected by all that water on the brain. That’s his hit-by-a-car luck. The bastard.

  Rosaleen steps up, the knees of her jeans are grass-stained and her shirt is unbuttoned one lower than she we
ars it at school. She is only a year older than Eddie but she already feels far out of reach. DumbDon and Jim are watching. Lou, Calamus, Monty, all the boys held back and their random kin.

  “Wanna play?” she asks.

  Eddie doesn’t want to play, but a beating’s waiting at home and to save the beating here, he figures he probably should. He looks back into the woods and sighs.

  “Which side am I on?” he asks.

  Cora sets pigeon peas baked with pork and molasses on the table. With the flour she bought at the store, she rolled a dozen biscuits. She roasted and ground the coffee beans. They are drinking the strong brew with store-bought sugar and fresh cream. When she holds out her hands to say grace, she grips Tucker’s as if to hold on forever.

  He hadn’t wanted to stay for supper. He took their suitcase and Sonia’s cameras to the car but when he returned Cora was waiting for him. You can’t leave, she’d said. Not before Eddie’s back. I have to, Tucker insisted. They were speaking low in the kitchen while Bud milked the cow. Your husband is home. It’s getting too dark to drive, she’d replied. Her eyes said, Don’t leave me here alone.

  At the dinner table, Sonia and Bud Alley are swapping latrine stories. What’s the worst hole you’ve ever had to pee into?

  “It was at the Hotel Metro in Leningrad,” Sonia is saying. “Outdoors is fine, but a hotel invites certain expectations. The filth around that porcelain hole was five different shades of brownish green, and the smell—”

  “Shiiiiiiiiit,” says Bud appreciatively.

  “Exactly.”