Tall, sprucey-pine grew on either side of the trail, sharing the steep slopes of the hollow with yellow birch, oak and beech. Under them was a thick shrub layer of rhododendrons and mountain laurel. Higher up, tuliptrees and more sprucey-pine rose on either side with a thick understory of redbud, magnolia and dogwood. Even with her yellow hound Root at her side, Sarah Jane had seen deer, fox, hares, raccoons and possum, not to mention the endless chorus of birds and squirrels scolding all intruders from the safety of the trees—when they weren’t occupied with their own business, that is.
The walk through these woods, with the conversation of the creek as constant company, was something Sarah Jane quickly grew to love. It didn’t matter if she was just ambling along with Root, or pulling Aunt Lillian’s cart—fetching the supplies that were dropped off for Aunt Lillian at the Welchs’ farm, or bringing them back to her old house up in the hills.
Sarah Jane’s own family lived next door to the Welchs on what everybody still called the old Shaffer farm. Though they’d been living there for the better part of ten years now, and her grandparents for five years before that, she’d become resigned to knowing that it would probably never be called the Dillard farm.
They’d moved here from Hazard after her father died—she, her mother and her six sisters—to live with Granny Burrell, her maternal grandmother. The Burrells had bought the farm from the Shaffers a few years before Sarah Jane’s family arrived and hadn’t had any more luck losing the Shaffer name than they did. When Granny Burrell died, she left the farm to Sarah Jane’s mother and now it was home to their little clan of red-haired, independent-thinking women.
“If you weren’t so bullish,” Granny Burrell would say, “you’d have better luck getting another father for those wayward girls of yours.”
“Maybe they don’t want another father,” Sherry Dillard would tell her mother. “And I sure plan to be choosy about the next man I have in my life. I’d just as soon have none, than get me one that won’t match up to my Jimmy.”
“You’re going to ruin your life.”
“Least it’s my life,” their mother would say, an unspoken reference to her brother Ulysses, who’d so badly mismanaged the investment company he’d opened that its failure left a trail of bankruptcies from one end of the county to the other.
But if their mother had a mind of her own, her daughters gave a whole new meaning to independent thinking.
Adie, named after their paternal grandmother Ada, was the eldest at nineteen. From the time she could walk, she’d always been in one kind of trouble or another, from sassing the teachers in grade school to eloping at sixteen with Johnny Garland, the two of them hightailing it out of the county on Johnny’s motorcycle. She came back seven months later, unrepentant, but done with boyfriends for the time being. Her celibacy had lasted about a month, but so far she hadn’t taken off again.
The twins, Laurel and Bess, were born the year after her. They were also mad about boys, but their first love was music—making it, dancing to it, anything there might be that had to do with it. They both sang, making those sweet harmonies that only sisters can. Laurel played the fiddle, Bess the banjo, and the two could be found at any barn dance or hooley within a few miles radius of the farm, kicking up their heels on the dance floor with an ever-rotating cast of partners, or playing their instruments on the stage, keeping up with the best of them. When they were home, just the two of them, they’d amuse themselves arranging pop music from the seventies and eighties into old-timey and bluegrass settings.
Sarah Jane was born two years after the twins. She was the middle child, double-named because this time her mother meant to be ready if she had another set of twins. They’d be Sarah or Jane if they were girls, Robert or William if they were boys. When she got just the one girl, she couldn’t decide which of the two girl’s names to pick, so she used them both.
As the middle child, Sarah Jane bridged her sisters not only in years but also in temperament. Like her older sisters, she loved to dance and run a little wild. But she also loved reading and drawing and could sit quietly with her younger sister Elsie for hours, watching the light change on the underwater stones as the creek streamed above them, or contemplating the possibility that what the crows rasped and cawed at each other might actually be some ancient hidden language that people had forgotten.
Elsie was different from her sisters in other ways. While the Dil-lard women before her had grown early into their women’s bodies, at fifteen she still had a boyish figure. She was lean and wiry, the quietest of the girls, more so since they’d moved here. Now she spent all her time in the surrounding woods and hills, stalking anything and everything, from bugs and birds to fox and deer.
Their mother jokingly referred to Elsie as her feral daughter and that wasn’t far off the mark. Elsie was always happiest out in the woods, day or night and no matter what the season. She could run as fast as a deer, but she could be almost preternaturally still, too.Sarah Jane had never known anyone who could sit so quietly for so long. “I’m just watching the grass grow,” Elsie would say when she was found in a meadow, gazing off across the wildflowers and weeds.
And finally there were Ruth and Grace, also twins. Thirteen now, they’d belied the Biblical ring of their names from the moment they came home from the hospital, working like a tag team as they insured that if they couldn’t get a full night’s sleep for their first two years in the world, then no one else in the household would either. No sooner would one drop off, than the other would start in crying, and there would be two fussing infants to be dealt with once more.
The older they grew, the more of a handful they became. They could never simply do a thing without first knowing the how and why of its needing to be done, and that knowing had to be explained, in great and painstaking detail. But it was better to take the time to explain else they could take a thing apart, just to see how it worked, and it might never get put back together again.
They grew up to be practical jokers, though never mean-spirited ones. And stubborn? A mule was a pushover compared to trying to shift them once they had their minds set on a thing.
Sarah Jane had known for years that some old woman lived at the end of the trail that began in the Welchs’ pasture. She’d even seen her a few times, if only from a distance, which suited Sarah Jane just fine. Adie and the older twins were forever scaring the younger girls, telling them that if they weren’t good, the old witch woman who lived in the hills would come and get them. She’d take them away and no one would ever see them again. She had this oven, see, big enough to hold a child trussed up like a roasting chicken …
For ages Sarah Jane and her younger sisters had lived in fear of her. But one summer, three years ago, when Sarah Jane was thirteen and Elsie was twelve, they dared each other to follow the trail to see where the old woman lived.
They took Root with them.
That yellow, short-haired hound of Sarah Jane’s was a couple of years old at the time and full of beans, forever digging in the garden or wherever else he thought he might find a bone or a rabbit burrow, though Mama swore that he didn’t need an excuse. Root was just a dog that was happy digging.
“It’s your own fault,” she’d tell Sarah Jane. “Giving him such a name.”
How she got that dog was a whole other story, in and of itself.
She was lying abed one night the fall before, watching the shadow branches of the beech tree outside her window slowly make their way across the ceiling of her room, cast by the moon as it made its own journey across the night sky. She hadn’t been able to sleep, but she didn’t know why. Her head was filled with everything and nothing—a fairly common occurrence, really.
She heard the dog start to cry an hour or so after midnight—a distant whining that occasionally broke into louder barking. At first she thought that one of the neighbors had gotten a new pet and had either left it home alone, or put it out on a chain for its first night out. There was that desperation in its voice that dogs do so well
and sometimes made her believe the theory that they live entirely in the present with no recollection of the past, no hopes for the future. This dog had been put out and so far as it could see, that was where it had to be for the rest of its life.
But as she lay there, alternately dozing and waking up when the cries got louder, she got to thinking about what if the dog was really in trouble. It might have broken loose from somewhere and gotten its chain wrapped around a tree or something. It had happened before and not so far from here. She’d overheard George Welch telling her mother about finding the bones of a dog one spring, how it had still been wearing a collar, its lead entangled in the roots of a tree.
“That was a hard death,” she remembered him saying. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, man or critter.”
Sighing, she threw back the comforter and sat up. The floor was icy on her bare feet as she padded across the room to where she’d left her clothes on a chair. Elsie began to stir as Sarah Jane was getting dressed.
“Whatcha … doing … ?” Elsie asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“Nothing,” Sarah Jane told her. “I’m just going to get a little air.”
“But… it’s the middle of the night…” Elsie murmured.
Like she herself hadn’t been out and about in the woods in the middle of the night a hundred times before, looking for owls and bats and who knew what.
“Go to sleep,” Sarah Jane said.
She thought Elsie might protest—after all, this was a midnight excursion into her beloved woods—but she’d already fallen back to sleep before Sarah Jane finished dressing and left the room.
Downstairs she put some biscuits in her pocket, got a length of rope from the shed, and went out into the fall night with a lantern that she didn’t bother to light. The moonlight was enough. Once she’d closed the door behind her, she stood quietly for a long moment and tilted her face up to the sky, drinking in the stars, the dark, the wind.
Then she heard the dog again.
It took her a moment to decide where the sound was coming from—it was always tricky with a wind—then she started across the back fields and into the woods, going right up the mountain.
It didn’t take her long to find the dog, trapped as it was. He had a rope around his neck, the loose end of which had gotten caught in some old barbed wire. By the time she reached him, he was so entangled that his head was pressed right against the old fence post. A barb from the wire was pricking him just above his eye and there was blood on his fur.
She approached quietly, speaking in a low and comforting voice. When she was close enough, she put out her hand so that he could smell her. She wasn’t exactly nervous, but you never could tell. When he gave her hand a little lick, she gave up all pretense at caution.
He lay still while she worked the rope loose, wishing she’d brought a knife. Before she had him completely free, she made a noose with the rope she’d brought and slipped it over his neck. When she got the last of the old rope untangled, the dog stood up on trembling legs and leaned against her. He looked up at her, his eyes big in the moonlight.
“Now who do you belong to?” she asked ruffling the short hair between his ears.
He bumped his head against her. She smiled and brought him home, taking him right up into her room. After the night he’d had, she couldn’t bear the idea of tying him up outside or locking him in a shed. He lay down on the floor beside her bed. As soon as she got under the covers, he was up on the bed with her, stretched out along her side.
Mama was going to kill her, she remembered thinking before she fell asleep with her hand on his chest.
When she woke, he was lying on the floor, and that was how Mama found them. She always felt that he’d done that on purpose, just to get on Mama’s good side. And it had worked, once Sarah Jane told her story.
“You can keep him till we find who he belongs to,” Mama said.
“Maybe we never will,” Elsie said, her face hopeful.
All her sisters had immediately fallen in love with him.
“A dog that good-natured has to have someone who loves him,” Mama replied.
“He does,” Sarah Jane said. “He has us.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sarah Jane nodded.
But no one knew whose he was. No one came to claim him. And by the time the snows came, he and Sarah Jane were inseparable. He couldn’t come to school with her, but wherever else she went, he was usually somewhere nearby. And best of all, he made Mama feel safer about when she or Elsie went wandering in the woods like they were doing now.
So with Root ranging ahead of them on the trail, or crashing through the underbrush on one side or the other, the two girls followed the well-worn path into the hills, walking arm in arm.
Sarah Jane felt brave enough with the company. But then Root took off and halfway to the old woman’s cabin Elsie got intrigued by a hornet nest and insisted on studying it for a time. Sarah Jane was scared of bees and hornets, ever since a classmate of hers got stung to death last summer. It was an allergic reaction, she’d heard at the funeral, but she couldn’t shake the thought that it could happen to anybody—like getting bit by a snake. So the last thing she wanted to do was stand around looking at that great big papery gray nest hanging from the branch of a small laurel. And that was the thing—how could such a slender branch support such a big nest anyway? There was just something not right about it.
“Come on, Elsie,” she said. “What happened to our adventure?”
“I need to see this,” Elsie said.
Her voice was distracted and Sarah Jane could tell that she was already in what Adie called full Indian scout mode. When she got like this, you could set off a firecracker under her feet and she wouldn’t notice.
“You go on ahead,” Elsie added.
Go on by herself?
Sarah Jane looked up the trail. The sun was breaking through the trees in cathedraling beams and it was pretty as all get out, but looks could be deceiving. Especially when you knew the trail ended at a witch’s house. Except she didn’t have to actually talk to the witch, she reminded herself. She could just go close enough to have a look at her house and then come back. That wouldn’t be so hard. And it sure beat staring at that gray paper wasp’s nest, waiting to get stung.
So on she went, but more slowly now, because nothing felt quite the same anymore. It might only be her imagination, but the shafts of sunlight didn’t seem to penetrate the canopy as brightly as they had before and the woods felt darker. The sound of the squirrels as they rustled through the leaves was magnified so that she thought she heard much larger shapes moving about, just out of sight. Bears. Panthers. Wolves.
Her heart beat far too quickly.
Stop it, she thought. You’re just scaring yourself.
She looked back and saw Elsie scrunched up in the small space between a bush and a hemlock, happily contemplating the wasp’s nest, oblivious to any danger, either from wasps or whatever else might be in the woods, hungry to have itself a bite of a teenaged girl.
I’m not scared of these woods, she thought, trying to convince herself that she actually believed it. There was nothing here that was going to hurt her so long as she kept out of its way, and that included witches. She could go and spy on her just like Elsie was spying on those wasps. It was a time to be cautious, yes. But not scared.
So she squared her shoulders and set off again, whistling for Root. She wasn’t ready to admit it just then, having already convinced herself that she could be brave all on her own, but she felt a great sense of relief when the dog came bounding down the hillside and skidded to a stop beside her. He mooshed his head against her leg, tongue lolling, gaze turned up to her face and plainly asking, “Where are my pats?”
“Yes, yes,” she told him as she ruffled his short fur with both her hands. “You’re my good boy.”
Dog at her heel, she proceeded along the path, giving Root a soft call back every time he looked to go off exploring. And that was
how she finally crept up on Aunt Lillian’s homestead, back in the hills.
Aunt Lillian wasn’t doing any sort of witchy things when Sarah Jane finally left the path and crept through the bushes to spy on her. Not unless tending garden had some witchy significance that Sarah Jane didn’t know anything about. In fact, nothing about the old woman’s homestead seemed to have anything to do with the grisly business of being a witch—or at least Sarah Jane’s imagining of what a witch would be like and where she’d live.
There was no aura of evil and dread. No children’s bones dangling from the trees. No strange and noxious liquids bubbling in cauldrons—unless those were hidden in the house. No capering goblins or familiars or other unholy consorts.
With a warning hand on Root’s head to keep him quiet, she settled down in the bushes and studied the old woman’s homestead. Closest to her was the garden where Aunt Lillian was weeding her vegetables, using a hoe that was no different from the one Sarah Jane used on their own garden back home. To the right, rising up the slope, was an apple orchard and several beehives. A clapboard house with a tin roof, corn crib and front porch stood on the far side of the garden, surrounded by a gaggle of hangers-on: a wood pile, a chicken house, a smoking shed, a springhouse, and various storage sheds. On the far side of the house and a little to the left, she could make out the roof of a small barn and what looked to be a cornfield, the young stalks no more than a foot high at the moment. The woods pressed close on the far side of the barn and along the edges of the orchard.
It all looked so normal. Just as the old woman did, hoeing her garden.
Sarah Jane was so caught up on trying to find some hidden, shadowy meaning to Aunt Lillian’s work, that when the old woman suddenly started to speak, she thought her heart would simply stop in her chest. The old woman didn’t look directly at her, but it soon became obvious that she knew Sarah Jane was there.