She crossed the yard and half a dozen children surrounded her. They touched her clothes gently, as if she were an angel. They purred like kittens. They smelled like soap and blueberries. She felt her womb clench as if somebody had pulled shut the drawstrings of an empty sack. The children cooed at her. They seemed to float. Maybe this was how you got knocked up. She shut her eyes. They were rubbing her arms and legs and bottom though not lecherously, except perhaps for the oldest boy, who had a knife handle sticking out of his boot.
She woke in a dark room and sat up in bed wearing a clean nightshirt. She felt fresher than she could remember. Her hair wet. Her underarms burned, so she reached and felt them. Shaved. She felt her calves. Shaved too. She put her hand between her legs.
Least ye left me my thatch, she said.
Why was you dressed like a man?
The voice had come from the rocking chair beside the window. Now she could discern the woman’s outline—weak chin, big overbite—as it rocked. She understood that she’d been hearing the creak of the chair for hours. The sound had been her sleep.
Go to bed, William, the woman hissed out the window. Yer disobeying the Bible.
Who you? Evavangeline asked.
An orphan keeper. Do you want to stay here? the woman asked. Our man’s lost. Gone. For days now. His horse come home so we think he’s dead.
I was escaping, Evavangeline said.
From who? Who from?
A evil man.
The woman stopped rocking. Can you tell me the particulars of him?
Evavangeline’s instinct urged her to lie, so she described not the veteran but, instead, the strange man she’d heard about from the dice-playing niggers on the river. They say he killed his momma when he was born. Say he bombed bridges in the War. They say he never sleeps and knows the devil by first name. Say he likes to drank the pee of young girls. They say he has white blood, nigger blood, Indian blood, all three. That he can see in the dark.
The woman left her rocking chair and came to sit beside the girl on the bed. You mean ole Smonk, she said. Minute there I thought you was gone describe me my own husbandman. He wasn’t a good man, not no more. Not since the weather got so contentious. Like the saying goes, if you seek him, check Hell first. But you can stay, we got room. She set her hands on the girl’s thighs, her thumbs nearing Evavangeline’s privates. She leaned in and feathered her lips against the hot skin of her throat.
You exhausted and wounded, the lady whispered. I done tended ye hurt places. I been feeding ye broth and tea. Come dawn you’ll feel like a brand new girl. Things always look better in the light of day. You can stay with us if ye want to. But sleep now, the woman said, thumbing Evavangeline’s magic pea better than any man, her voice like a fiddle bow pulled real slow over the gut. Sleep.
But she couldn’t sleep, even after the dyke had left her in spasms and shut the door. She lay awake tingling, wondering if she was an orphan or not. The earliest thing she could remember in the days before Ned was the gypsy witch named Alice Hanover. Days she rarely let herself think of now. How she would watch the old witchwoman perform her black magic, pantomiming her spells into existence, into beings you could only see in the blackest pitch of night. Rising up out of the ground they would stamp whatever they had for feet and look about with their horrible innocence, their skin blacker than the night around them. When they moved it looked as if darkness were swallowing itself. The old woman would summon these things indiscriminately and for the highest bidder and let them loose on whom her employer told with money her only thought. Sometimes these summoned would execute their sentence upon the intended and then, instead of dishappening back underground, be taken by a wind and remain lost in the world. It happened more the older Alice Hanover got. They were glints now, the girl knew, half here, half someplace else, the shadow of a tree moving when the tree was not, the thing that bumps you in the dark.
Once, she’d gone with Alice Hanover to hex a whole family. Perhaps the witchwoman, who bragged she was a hundred-sixty years old, had sensed her own end drawing near and, despite her hatred of every other person, thought it necessary to bestow her knowledge on a student. Otherwise her spells would be gone forever, a language when its last speaker dies.
In the gal’s memory she and Alice Hanover were shreds of shadow sliding under that night’s halfmoon, figments creeping through the bright-blooming cotton to the edge of the homestead, the pair peering through a log fence so recently cut it still smelled green. The witch clucked her tongue and the dog fell dead on the porch. Evavangeline watched the old woman close her eyes and point her gnarled left trigger finger and begin to spin her right hand, palm cupped and suddenly full of water. In a clear quiet voice Alice Hanover spoke words Evavangeline had never heard uttered before nor since. They were——, ———, —and ——.
For a moment the night hushed, as if it had noticed them.
Then blades of grass began to whisper, cotton bolls nodding on their stems.
Her skirt-tails ajostle, Evavangeline heard leaves rattle in the branches. She heard a horse nicker. A shutter bang open. The chickens started to cluck. Wind picked up and her hair stood on end and the breeze cooled her scalp. A light flickered on inside the shack and somebody screamed and the baby began to squall. Lightning cracked the starless dome of space and showed the powderhorn of black air weaving over the cotton destroying all in its wake, barbed wire whipping and rocking chairs and corn cribs and cows and large snakes raining down, the funnel’s great endhole snorting the face of the land, the grass on the cabin’s roof standing and then the roof still in its shape rose and folded like a letter. And one by one among floating chairs and washpots the flailing enemies of Alice Hanover’s customers rose screaming, even the naked baby and its doll made of corn shucks. Shorn from the baby’s hands, the doll turned a child’s eternity in the air then landed at Evavangeline’s feet like a gift.
For a moment she considered it. She picked it up.
——, said Alice Hanover and unscrolled her smoking fingers.
Thus Evavangeline handed over the only toy she had ever touched.
Alice Hanover held it aloft in her flat palm like someone freeing a dove and let the wind claim it and the girl watched the scrub of doll lift from the gypsy’s fingers into the air and striptease apart a shuck at a time until the lightning stopped and the wind died and the doll lay scattered in places unseen.
Later she lay awake on the ground by the wheel of Alice Hanover’s wagon where she slept each night. She knew the gypsy was above, in the covered buckboard asleep on her ticking with her eyes open, and that she must move quick else the old crone would kill her with a grunt before Evavangeline could draw the blade over that warty throat and unriver its blood. She would never be able to do it, to get in the wagon, sink the knife. The gypsy was too wily. Evavangeline lay like a bruise on the cold skin of the earth, her ear to its dirt, her teeth clenched so tightly she could hear the ocean a hundred miles south, while above her the wagon planks creaked as Alice Hanover endured her slumber.
Evavangeline raised her fingers to the underside of the wagon’s floor but didn’t touch it. She felt the old woman’s heat through the boards. She moved her fingers to the left, to the right. She pointed to a spot and jibbed her knife between the boards and through the old woman’s ticking and her skin. Her onion of a heart. There was a squawk and lightning struck nearby. The knife kicked itself from between the boards and fell to the grass steaming. The wagon pitched and yawed and the night spoke words Evavangeline tried her best not to hear. It rained then snowed. The ground shook. Trees broke in half and fell all around. Worms squirted out of the dirt.