She was dark-skinned, but you couldn’t tell if she was a black or got herself burned brown in the sun, setting out on that porch of hers, day after day like she done. She had dark hair—not a speck of gray in it—hanging down either side of her face in a pair of braids and was wearing a gingham dress, smoking a pipe, and just a-staring at us when we come outta the trees and stumbled on her place. Her eyes were so dark you’d’ve thought they was all pupil.
I remember a wind come up and shook them bottles on her tree against each other, making this strange hollow clinking sound. Supposed to chase the bad spirits away, is how I heard it. The wind fell off and the bottles stopped moving. We wasn’t moving neither, just a-looking at her looking at us. Then she raised her hand and that wind come up again, rattling the bottles. I don’t know about spirits, but it sure enough chased us off that day.
“We don’t want to go messin’ ’round with the likes of Miss Lucinda,” Pinky says.
That’s what everybody called her. I don’t know if anyone ever knew her family name, or if she’d ever had one. I ’spect every small town’s got itself some peculiar old woman, people think she’s a witch. The difference being in this case, I think Miss Lucinda most likely was.
“You know the kind of stories they tell about her,” Pinky tells me. “They don’t call her a juju woman for nothin’.”
“That’s exactly why we need to talk to her.”
“Ray. The reason Orry Prescott had that gimpy leg of his was on account of his trying to steal a bottle off’n that tree of hers.”
I’d heard that story, too, but I didn’t set me much store by it. The Prescotts was as inbred as the Morgans and I’m pretty sure Orry grew up with that gimpy leg of his, though I didn’t know for certain. I never saw him ’round until junior high and he already had that leg of his then, walking with a wooden crutch. You never seen shoulders like he had. Most of him was built like some football player, ’cept for that one leg all shriveled and wasted away.
But that didn’t mean Miss Lucinda hadn’t put some juju on him.
“We ain’t going there to steal nothin’,” I tell Pinky. “You got my promise on that.”
“And if she don’t want to talk?”
“Then we say a polite ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ and we take ourselves away from there.”
“I don’t know,” Pinky says.
“Then how about you just drive me there and let me off and you can wait for me at the bridge. I’ll walk back to meet you.”
We had some more discussion on the matter, but in the end we made the drive up to Tyson together. It’s a beautiful day, the skies clear and blue above us, but not so warm that we have the top down on the Caddy. Once we get outta Tyson, we take the back roads until we find ourselves on Early Road.
Here nothing’s changed, ’cept maybe the woods are deeper, trees growing closer to the road. We leave that long pink car of ours where the bridge goes over the crick and follow the path to Miss Lucinda’s cabin, the two of us making our way between the trees, Pinky nervous, me feeling a kind of eagerness I ain’t known in a long whiles, which is a surprise on a lotta counts, considering how I feel about this kinda thing, hoodoo and magic and all.
Truth is, I’m not even sure the old woman’s still going to be alive after all these years. But when we step outta the trees, there she is, still a-setting on her porch like she ain’t moved in the thirty or so years since we was last here. That bottle tree of hers is still there, too. Only difference is it’s grown somewhat bigger and it’s got more bottles on it.
We stop within hailing distance of the cabin. Pinky’s eyeing that tree, waiting for the wind to come up and rattle the bottles. But me, I give that old woman a wave.
“Howdy, ma’am,” I call over to her. “I was wondering if we could have us a word or two.”
A couple of the bottles on the tree clink against each other, but I don’t feel no wind. I can tell Pinky’s about to bolt so I grab ahold of her arm.
“You mind if we come up there on the porch with you?” I ask. “We brung you something.”
There’s a long moment of silence and I’m almost beginning to wonder if maybe the old woman’s up and died and is just a-setting there, waiting for the undertaker to come and cart her away. But then I make note of them eyes of hers, glittering and dark and alive.
“What do you have?” she asks.
She’s got her a strange voice, creaky and hoarse, like she’s not used to using it much. But I’m not fooled into thinking it means she’s some senile old thing, not no way.
“Whiskey and tobacca,” I tell her.
That dark face cracks a smile, white teeth flashing.
“You come on up, girls,” she says. “Set with me a spell.”
I’m not shy. With a “Thank you, ma’am,” I go right on up to that porch, but Pinky’s lagging behind.
Miss Lucinda just keeps on grinning. “Don’t you be feared now, girl,” she tells Pinky. “I ain’t a-gonna hurt you.”
Pinky gives her a quick nod. “No, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you go on inside,” the old woman says. “You’ll find a plate of biscuits on the stove and a pot of tea. Bring ’em on out to us.”
There’s only one other chair. I leave it for Pinky and set up on the banister, swinging my feet.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” I say.
“Well, it’s private.”
“Downright off the map.”
She laughs. “I don’t need for much.”
Pinky comes back carrying a tray with the biscuits and tea.
“Help yourself, girls,” Miss Lucinda says.
When Pinky sets the tray down on the floor of the porch, I jump down and pour a tea for the old woman, add in a dollop of whiskey from the flask I take out of my jacket pocket. I leave the whiskey flask by the foot of her chair, along with the pouch of pipe tobacco I brought along with me, and hand her the mug. The pattern’s pretty much wore away and the china’s cracked some, but it still holds up fine.
“I like a considerate girl,” Miss Lucinda says.
“My name’s Raylene,” I tell her, “and this here’s my best friend Pinky.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” I say.
Pinky manages a quick smile.
I pour myself a tea, black and steaming, and help myself to one of the biscuits. It just melts in my mouth. I haven’t tasted biscuits like this since my sister run off and the cooking in the Carter household became a more haphazard affair ’cause no one else’d take it on, regularlike. But then I find myself thinking about these biscuits and the tea, all waiting and ready for us.
“Were you expecting company?” I ask.
“I’m always expecting something,” Miss Lucinda says. “You don’t get to be my age without being ready for pretty much anything the world’s gonna throw at you. The one thing I’m not overly fond of is a surprise.”
I consider how we come here, outta the blue, my bringing the whiskey and tobacco. I woulda thought that was a surprise. But all I say is, “I’m not so partial to surprises my own self. Take last night.”
I start in talking then about the dreamlands and us being wolves there and the dog boys we met last night. I leave out the part about the unicorns.
Miss Lucinda she sets there, smoking her pipe and sipping at her spiked tea. But I can tell she’s listening. She’s listening and she’s not disbelieving, neither. She can be as cool and collected as she likes, but I can tell. Just like I can tell she’s intrigued about what all this’s got to do with us being here. But I don’t get into that none. I just finish off my story, then compliment her again on her biscuits.
“A story like that,” she finally says. “A body’d have to take you two for a pair of crazy women. On drugs, probably.”
Pinky shoots her a look from where she’s sitting in the other chair, chain-smoking, carefully putting out each butt in the lid of her cigarette package and storing ’em in a little pile by the leg of her chair
. As Miss Lucinda starts to look in her direction, Pinky’s gaze quickly slides away from the old woman’s face and settles on mine.
“I suppose a body would,” I say. I let a long breath of time hang between us all afore I add, “Unless she knew about that kind a thing her own self.”
Miss Lucinda focuses her attention back on me.
“You’re not one bit shy, are you, girl?”
“No, ma’am. Not about some things.”
“So what brings you to my cabin? I doubt it was the simple charity of a good heart, though I do appreciate the whiskey and the tobacca.”
I shrug. “I just found them dog boys to be a real curiosity and then I got to thinking, who might be able to explain ’em to me?”
“What makes you think I can?”
I figure it’s time to be bold.
“Are you saying you can’t?” I ask. “’Cause if’n you can, I’d be beholden to you, no question. That’s a plain fact.”
She touches the whiskey bottle with her foot. “You think these little offerings of yours can cover the debt?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t. I brought them along for politeness sake and nothing else.”
“That’s a good answer.”
“How’s that, ma’am?”
She smiles. “Well, there’s an old story that the spirits don’t like to be tricked into nothing. But a gift, freely given, that’s a whole other matter. Makes ’em feel beholden themselves.”
As she’s talking I get this wave of vertigo, a little dizzy spell that comes snaking along my spine and up into my head and to keep my balance I’ve got to clutch one of them old wood support poles holding up the roof of the porch. I’m looking at Miss Lucinda and for a moment I don’t see no old woman’s face looking at me. I see the face of an animal, a muskrat, maybe, or an otter. I can’t tell. I hear Pinky gasp, but then the animal face is gone and it’s just Miss Lucinda, setting there in her chair, looking at me with them dark eyes of hers.
“Let me tell you a little bit about who you mighta met in them dreamwoods of yours,” she says.
My dizzy spell’s gone like it never was, but I still hold on to that support pole when she starts in a-talking.
“I can tell the neither of you is much for learning,” she says, “least-ways not book learning, but this ain’t the sort of thing you’ll find accounted for in no book anyways.
“We got us an old world here, girls, and it weren’t made in no seven days like the Bible-thumpers and such’d have us believe. How do I know that? ’Cause we got us people still walking around today who been here since the world began. Hell, you believe all the stories, some of ’em was sitting around in the dark, just a-waiting on it to start up and get interesting.
“Now back in them early days, none of the People—that’s what they called themselves, just the People. None of ’em was locked in to the one shape they was born to—that is, those that was born. Like I said, if you believe what some’d say, there’s a big handful that’ve just always been. Was here right from the start and’ll probably be here when the lights get turned off and everybody else goes on home.
“But I was talking about shapes—what you look like, how the world sees you. In those days, everything kind a flowed. A crow becomes a little black-haired gal, then sprouts her feather wings again and flies away. Or maybe an otter steps up from a mud slide and sheds his skin, walks outta the water like a man. It was a wonderful magical place, by all accounts, everything’s like soft rubber, changing its shape depending on the pressure of the world around it, not to mention the world inside it.
“Trouble is, somewhere along the line, folks got to putting names to things. Cataloguing and defining. And once you start in on defining what things is—saying a wolf’s a wolf, for instance, and that’s all it is—they start getting locked in to that shape. They set like a pudding and the only way you can shift ’em is you got to stir ’em up. You following me so far?”
We both nod, though I’m thinking it might make a little more sense to me than Pinky. She never was the one for any kind of philosophical thinking.
“Anyways,” Miss Lucinda says, “as time moves on, everything gets more and more set into what everybody agrees it is. Only the People stay outside of all this fixing of limits and the reason they can is ’cause they’re only half living in this world. They got their other foot in that place you girls are visiting in your dreams.
“Now you might call it a dreamworld, and there’s others do that, too. Hell, they got all kinds of names for it. Spiritworld. Otherworld. Over on the rez, the Indians call it manidò-akì. Everybody visits it some—when they’re sleeping—but most of ’em don’t really remember much about it when they wake up. And they sure don’t know it’s as real as this world you girls and me are sitting in right at this moment.
“But those ones that call themselves the People that I’m telling you about, reason they’re still shapechangers is that they’re walking in both worlds. That old blood of theirs is what lets ’em cross back and forth when they’re awake, and it’s something in the air of the dreamworld that allows them to have them more’n the one shape.”
“So that’s who them dog boys were?” I ask.
Miss Lucinda shrugs. “Maybe. But if they’re not of the People, then they’re closely related to ’em. The thicker the spill of old blood running in you, the less tied you are to the rules that say this is this and that’s impossible. So those dog boys, could be they’re first People, could be they’re just close kin. Either way, they’re something a bit more special than anything you’re gonna meet on a normal kind of day.”
“So it’s not something you can learn,” I say.
“No,” Miss Lucinda says. “But it’s a trick a body can acquire.”
I lean away from the banister, a little closer to her.
“Could we learn that trick?” I ask. “Cross over between these worlds looking the way we want, ’steada dreaming we’re wolves?”
“Everybody’s got the potential,” Miss Lucinda tells us. “It’s locked in to what they call the junk DNA, all them genetic strands that don’t seem to have them no practical use. I ain’t saying everybody’s got the animal blood in ’em, but everybody’s got their own mess of juju inside ’em, just a-waiting to be woke up.”
Listening to her, I realize that she’s playing up the backwoods in her, same as me. You don’t get no hillbilly grandma talking ’bout DNA and genetics without her having got some learning you won’t be finding in these hills. I give a look to Pinky, but she’s just looking confused.
“Why do you live out here like this?” I ask Miss Lucinda.
I want to know more about this shapechanging trick’n all, but she’s got me distracted now with this learning I wasn’t expecting she’d have.
She just smiles. “Listen, girls. You live long enough like I done and you start to appreciate how the simple life’s got it over everything else.”
“Yeah,” Pinky says, speaking up for the first time. “Folks’re always sayin’ that. I guess it makes ’em feel a whole lot better ’bout just being ignorant and poor.”
I shoot Pinky a dirty look.
“Don’t mind her,” I tell Miss Lucinda. “She ain’t talking ’bout you.”
“Oh, I know that,” Miss Lucinda says. “I know all about wanting what it don’t seem you can have.”
“And speaking of that,” I say, “any chance you’d share this trick you were talking about?”
Miss Lucinda doesn’t say anything for a long moment and I’m getting feared that Pinky up and pissed her off. That she’s not going to talk to us no more and we might end up walking outta here with gimpy legs our own selves. She’s looking off into the forest, a thin trail a smoke rising up from her pipe to the rafters of the porch. But finally she brings her gaze back to me.
“There’s two ways you can wake up that junk DNA in you,” she says. “The first is you catch yourself one of the People, or one of their close kin, and you drink their blood.”
> I think about a lot of movies I seen—at the drive-in and on the late-night movie.
“That where all them vampire stories come from?” I ask.
“Could be. Drinking the blood’s mighty effective, but somewhat frowned upon among the People—as you might expect. And don’t go kidding yourself. They know when someone’s been feeding on one of them.”
“You said there’s another way?”
Miss Lucinda nods. “You got to make you up a potion and drink it down. It takes a little longer to work, but it’s got the benefit of not making you any enemies among the cousins.”
Before I can ask what the potion’s made of, she starts in a rhyming off the ingredients, one by one, emphasizing that you got to collect ’em all your own self:
Dried ’sang root flakes, gathered from a patch that’s only ever been harvested during the full of the autumn moon.
A toad skin, smoked over a hickory fire, then dried and powdered.
Corn pollen, brushed from the plant onto a red oak leaf with the shredded end of a sycamore twig.
Rattlesnake venom, milked at high noon.
A mescal button, chopped in four, each piece dried in the sun on a separate day.
A tincture made from boiling down pinecones till all you got left is a kind of sticky sap jelly.
Baked dog bones, powdered.
Shredded bits of fresh morning glory vine.
The chopped-up tail feather of an owl.
And lastly, a pinch of the top of the Mexican mushroom from which you make you your psilocybin.
“That’s a mess of hard-to-find items,” I say.
“But they ain’t impossible.”
“No, I guess they ain’t. Though a body’d be traveling all over hell and creation tracking some of it down.”
“I guess a body’s really gotta want to do it,” she says.
She finishes up, explaining how you got to mix it all together in a measure of corn whiskey and let it set for four days. Then stop it in a vial with a rowan berry and the blood red resin collected from the inner bark of a nutmeg tree, and finally bury it in an unhallowed graveyard for thirteen nights starting on the dark of the moon.