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

the whisky down.
    “Them men from the church, I told ’em all how stricken
with grief I was. Stricken! I sat in that little church and bent my head and
told ’em. They told me that things were in mystery and how God’s ways was God’s
ways. They sat there and tried to explain to me the way one world crossed into
another world. You know all that nonsense they start to say when they don’t
know what to say because they don’t know what to say. They start in on telling
you there’s a purpose for this and a purpose for that. Ain’t no purpose! Ain’t
no purpose! There’s just cold, evil death. That’s all! There ain’t no purpose!
Spells and stories! Ain’t no purpose!”
    Simon had not ever heard that come out of Benjamin before,
and a funny look came over his face.
    “How?” Benjamin said and looked down at his empty shot
glass in his hand.
    Simon filled it up for him.
    Benjamin looked around and around. “You tell me. How
does a good God cause a little boy’s papa to be eaten by wolves? You tell me!”
    There was a sudden and small breeze through the place
that they all took notice of. Maybe someone had opened one of the latched windows.
They all looked in different directions, almost expecting to see that someone
had passed by them all sitting there.
    “My heart was sick for my father.” Benjamin looked up
at them.
    They turned back to Benjamin.
    “For a man like my father,” he said, drawing them back
into his memory, “for any man to be eaten by wolves.” He clenched his teeth,
the little glass of brown liquor shook in his fingers, his face twisted and
pinched into an awful grimace. “For a little boy’s papa to be eaten by wolves!”

Chapter 7
    Pretty sure that Bill was looking out his bedroom window and
up at the back house, Jim slid out the same window where the dark shape had gone
through.
    He dropped low on his knees as dusk was coming in over
the yard and cleared his head. It was really cold out now. The winds had earlier
brought in a cold that would turn to frost by morning. Due to the cold, the
feeling of the eyes and the heavy jitters were lifting. Jim’s body and mind were
closing up. The cold had a strange way of covering up those things that lived
in the shadows.
    Seeing that he was about to go hunt, he couldn’t afford
this cold snap lifting away of his sense of the thing.
    Jim crawled around to the backside of the back house
where he was sure he couldn’t be seen by Bill Hill. There he unrolled his satchel
and got out more leaves and chewed them. He remembered again what the old woman
had told him and what his pa had told him. He remembered again what Spencer
Barnhouse had told him—that it was taking longer and longer to make the batches.
He chewed and chewed and swallowed the bitter juice and the spiky strands.
    He looked at the woods and remembered more things about
being at Huck’s the night before. He remembered how he’d caught eyes with May
Marbo, how her brown eyes had glinted with deep greens just as her father’s,
how she’d taken his arm. In his memory, when he looked down at the arm of the
girl, he saw instead his mother’s arm, the hand grasping, grasping.
    Jim shook his head, reached into his pocket, pulled his
flask, and gulped to help him swallow down the chewed leaves. He straightened
his hat and listened and watched the woods. There was nothing now—just a cold
breeze that seemed to bring the darkness from back over the hill, covering the
bent and crackling trees. If Bill came tramping up the back way with his rifle,
Jim would hear that for sure. Then he’d be able to slip right up into the
thicket, the same way the shadow had.
    He saw Violet now in his mind, her hair ruddy as autumn,
crossing and uncrossing her skinny arms, patting her own shoulders, twiddling her
little fingers. Bill said she tore up holes with her toes in the sheets.
Running from the spook in her dreams.
    Her eyes were deeper somehow now in his memory. He worked
them out in his mind so