Free The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel by Josh Kent

said.
    “Huck, where’s May?”
    Huck placed both his hands on the bar and leaned into
Benjamin Straddler. “There’s no need to bring her name into this conversation.”
Huck looked at the chicken man. The chicken man’s eyes were pink too. Huck
looked back at Benjamin. “And if you ask me one more question tonight about
her, I will make sure you never come in here again without walking like I do.”
    Huck was dead serious and hinting at his leaning shotgun.
Benjamin leaned back and the chicken man looked around stupidly.
    “Well, chicken man,” Benjamin Straddler said and smiled
but wiped it away quick with his thumb, “when I was a youngun, and I was workin’
for my pa, we was horse raisers and had us some horses.” Benjamin blinked and
looked up. “All them horses is gone now, but we raised ’em. Ponies too. Folks
are superstitious about raisin’ and keepin’ horses around here these days, but
this was back in the early days, when Sparrow wasn’t much of anything except a
place to stop between here and there.”
    Huck Marbo went back to being far way and standing by
his gun.
    Benjamin leaned into the chicken man. “But see, my pa
had to go out and get wood for us in the woods. See, they used to have a thing
in this town that you had to go out and get wood for a preacher. And it come up
his turn, so he goes out.” Benjamin squeezed his eyes for a few seconds as if
he saw something far away. “Then he didn’t come back for a long time.”
    He squeezed again and took a little more whisky from
his glass. The chicken man, who was sucking on the core of the apple now, locked
his pink eyes in on Benjamin Straddler’s eyes.
    Benjamin kept on. “A few days passed and then we started
looking. It was a group of men from the church that first headed it up. Old
Marley Upton, Bannings Driver, Wise Moore, and Donny Trim and his boys. Huck,
you remember some of them, don’t ya? They’ve all passed now. Trim’s boys moved
up to the Ridges. But they looked six days for my pa up there in them woods and
never found him. Strangest thing. I thought he liked t’fell in the river, or
been killed by a man from over there on the other side of the mountainside,
maybe even by a bear out from the country. Sometimes, too, there were certain
men would come down and they were killers and they killed a lot of folk in the
early days when us Straddlers first got here. Weren’t none of them first people
either, so I thought maybe one of them killers killed him. Maybe too, I thought
a native coulda killed him, like one of the River People from the other side of
Make River.”
    Benjamin Straddler’s eyes got a little wetter. His one
bad eye was especially red and twinkling. “I thought a new thing about my pa
about every time I blinked. I saw a new way for my pa to get killed. I even thought
about him killing himself with his buck knife”—he was whispering now—“but
couldn’t think of a reason why.”
    The chicken man was squinting hard trying to figure out
what Benjamin was trying to tell him.
    Simon’s teeth were white, smiling there over Benjamin’s
shoulder.
    Benjamin took a pause and got a smoke. He lit it with
a match and started smoking it. “So, a young boy as I was, I hated all the waiting.
I waited for three days, and I went to the men in the church and asked them why
my father wasn’t looked for, and they said that he was found. ‘He is dead,’
they said, ‘he got killed by wolves.’”
    Simon waved a hand at Huck. “Give us all some shots,
on me. Whisky.”
    Huck was quick for Simon, and the chicken man noticed
how much they smiled as the money went back from Simon to Huck, even though
Huck looked as if he didn’t like smiling right now. Somehow that Simon had a
lot of money. Since no one was really sure exactly what it was that Dan and
Elsie Starkey had left behind or how they came into it, there was always a kind
of rumor that the walls of Simon’s house were stuffed with treasures.
    They all shot