“What in case he wants to marry me?” Beth said.
“His people stick by theirs.”
“They say he’s hexed. Two wives done died on him.”
“That boy’s had a run of bad,” Nomey said. “But he ain’t full to blame.”
“What is?”
“Hard telling.”
“It still yet scares me.”
Nomey gave Beth a piece of black moly root that she wore on a strip of leather tight above her hips. Two months later Beth announced her wedding. The local preacher refused to marry them, saying that he’d already sent two virgins to the grave and wouldn’t risk another. Casey hired a preacher from Rocksalt.
Both families crowded the church. Two armed men guarded the door, and two more roamed the dusty parking lot. After the ceremony, several women stayed to pray for Beth, while the men escorted the newlyweds to the small house Casey had built. Beth’s brothers carefully searched the house, the chicken house, and the hog pen. She watched them leave at dusk, firing guns into the woods. Casey’s arm circled her waist.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “It’s yours. I got enough put by for a TV set.”
“I got what I want,” Beth said.
“You stay right by me, hear. There’s a shotgun by the door and a pistol at the bed.” He patted the buck knife on his hip. “This don’t ever come off either.”
Beth tipped her head and moved her mouth to his. She stood on her toes until he lifted. Her knees gripped him and he carried her through the living room to the small bed. They rattled it together for a long time.
After Casey was asleep, Beth felt the coarse of his beard stubble. She didn’t know when it had grown. He’d shaved for the wedding, and his face had been smooth when they’d entered the house. She remembered her father’s beard pricking her face when she was a child. She hadn’t known him well before he died. Now she felt as if she knew him better.
She lay on her side admiring the dim outlines of her new house. She couldn’t get used to the idea of being married. Nomey had told her it meant being loyal — to a certain point. If he hit her, he lost his claim. If he didn’t come home once in a while, Beth could do the same, but she had to be careful. That sort of thing was harder for women than men. Nomey chuckled then and said that most things were, and that’s why women were smarter than men. Beth had nodded, not quite understanding.
She rose from bed and looked through the window at the toilet shack above the creek. Come spring she’d lay flat rocks along the path and plant flowers. Beyond the shadowed hulk of a car, its rusted rims on cinder blocks, Beth saw someone scurry into the woods. She left the house and trailed the person to the head of the hollow, where the figure climbed an animal trail slanting up the slope and out the ridge. Beth followed half a mile before crouching behind a poplar to peek over the tree’s lowest crotch. Sweat stung the brier scrapes on her face.
A nighthawk swooped to a halt on the ground. The figure bent, cooing to the bird. It was a small woman with ragged clothes, long hair, and shoulders that crooked forward. She crawled past the bird to a large log lying on the earth. She slipped into its hollow opening and the bird sat in front. The sky behind was empty.
Beth backtracked through the woods to the house. Casey was gone. An hour later the front door crashed open. He stood in the doorway, squinting against the light, his shotgun aimed at Beth, his other hand holding the pistol.
“Beth,” he grunted.
He pointed the shotgun at the ceiling, carefully thumbing the hammers down. He slid the pistol in a jacket pocket.
“I ought to wear you out,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you not to go nowhere.”
“I saw her, Casey. I followed her.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Casey stared through the window, his shotgun poised.
“She’s gone,” Beth said. “Crawled into an old hollow log up on Flatgap Ridge. I thought she was a ghost.”
“She might be.”
“You know her?”
“Hope not.”
“Who is she?”
“Tell me what you seen, Beth.”
She sat in a rocking chair built by her grandfather, the wedding gift from her mother. She pushed the chair back and forth to form the rhythm for her words. When she finished, Casey’s face was white as birch. His arm veins swelled from squeezing the shotgun, trying to stop the tremble of his hands.
“I thought she was dead,” Casey said.
“Who is she?”
Casey leaned the shotgun beside the door and sat on the bed. He rubbed his face.
“The way it was went like this,” he said. “Me and Duck Sparker were playing hide-and-seek twenty years ago. It was my turn to hunt. Duck wasn’t never too hard to find because he hid in bushes, behind a tree, or in a rock hole. One time he’d been hid for a spell out Flatgap. I saw his hand hanging out of a big old log, same one you seen, I guess. It’s been there since my daddy’s time.”
“I had me a ring whittled out of a buckeye with my initials carved on it and I thought to pull a rusty on Duck. I sneaked up to the log and put that ring on his finger. ‘I take you as my wife,’ I said, ‘til death do us part.’ Well Duck didn’t say nothing and I thought he’d fell asleep while hiding. I banged that log and said, ‘Wake up and kiss your husband!’ The hand moved and an arm followed it out and I seen it wasn’t Duck but a little dried-up woman, old as the hills. Her face was awful. She said, ‘I’ll wait on you.’
“I ran like a scalded pup and never told nobody, not even Duck.”
Casey’s voice melted into the stillness of the room. Dawn crawled above the farthest ridge and the outside air was day again. Songbirds filled the woods with sound.
“Only thing ever scared me was snakes,” he said. “And I’ve killed my share. But I’m afraid now, Beth. Bad off afraid.”
“I’ll talk to Nomey this evening. You should sleep.”
Casey nodded. He tucked the pistol beneath his pillow and hid the knife in the blankets. “I’ll lay on the outside, Beth.”
They awoke past noon, pressed tight together, and walked to her mother’s. He split firewood while Beth told Nomey what had happened in the night.
“He wants to burn that log,” Beth said. “Set a punk fire and smoke her out like a varmint.”
Her mother’s face set hard into a frown. A striped engineer’s hat covered her head.
“I’d not do that,” Nomey said. “She might take a notion to do the same to you. Only one woman got the power to be that mean, but I thought the buzzards had her by now.”
“You act like you know her.”
“Honey, I do,” her mother said. “That woman fetched me into this world.”
“Who?”
“The last granny-woman in these parts. She caught three hundred babies on this creek. It got close to your time, she’d be waiting in the woods. You could smell her pipe smoke. When the baby started, she’d walk right in the house with nary a word said. Just go to work. She stopped birthing after that hospital got built in Rocksalt. She got withered up like a blight hit her, and disappeared off creation. But sometimes you could smell that pipe strong, like burning cedar chips.
“People said she left her homeplace and went up Flatgap. Long time back, they quarried rock out of a cave up there and when weather pushed down, her fire smoke hung in the trees. I reckon she’s still living in that cave. That log just hides the cave hole.”