Free Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer SSC by John the Balladeer (v1.1) Page A

drawn picture. It wasn't hurt a bit.
                 I
put that picture inside the door on the quilt where I'd lain. Maybe the Millens
would keep it to remember me by, after they found I was gone and Mr. Loden
didn't come around any more to court Vandy.
                 I
started away, carrying my guitar. I meant to be out of the valley by noontime.
As I went, pots started to rattle—somebody was awake in the cabin. And it was
hard not to turn back when Vandy sang to herself, not thinking what she sang:
                 Wake up, wake up! The dawn is breaking,
                 Wake up, wake up! It's almost day. Open up
your doors and your divers windows,
                 See my true love march away. . . .
     

           One Other
     
                 Up
on Hark Mountain I climbed all alone, by a trail like a
ladder. Under my old brogans was sometimes mud, sometimes rock, sometimes
rolling gravel. I laid hold on laurel and oak scrub and sour-wood and dogwood
to help me up the steepest places. Sweat soaked the back of my hickory shirt
and under the band of my old hat. Even my silver-strung guitar, bouncing behind
me, felt weighty as an anvil. Hark Mountain's not the highest in the South, but
it's one of the sleepiest.
                 I
reckoned I was close to the top, for I heard a murmuring voice up there, a
young-sounding woman's voice. All at once she like to yelled out a name, and it
was my name.
                 "John!"
she said, and murmured again, and then, "John. . . ."
                 Gentlemen,
you can wager I sailed up the last stretch, on hands and knees, to the very
top.
                 On
top of Hark Mountain 's tipmost top was a pool.
                 Hush,
gentlemen, without a stream or a draw or a branch to feed it, where no pool
could by nature be expected, was a clear blue pool, bright but not exactly
sweet-looking. That highest point of Hark Mountain wasn't bigger, much, than a
well-sized farmyard, and it had room for hardly the pool and its rim of tight
rocks. And the trees that grew between those tight rocks at its rim looked
leafless and gnarled, but alive. Their branch-twigs crooked like claw nails.
                 Almost
in reach of me, by the pool's edge, burned a fire, and tending it knelt a girl.
                 She
was tall, but not strong-built like a country girl. She was slim-built, like a
town girl, and she wore town clothes—a white blouse-shirt, and blue jeans
fold-rolled high up on her long legs, and soft slipper-shoes on her feet. Her
arms and legs and neck were brown as nutmeat, the way fashiony girls seek to be
brown. She put a tweak of stuff in the fire, and I saw her long, sharp, red
fingernails. My name rose in her speech as she sang, almost:
                 ".
. . it is the bones of JOHN that I trouble. I for JOHN burn his laurel."
                 She
put in some laurel leaves. "Even as it crackles and burns, even thus may
the flesh of JOHN burn for me."
                 In
went something else. "Even as I melt this wax, with ONE OTHER to aid, so
speedily may JOHN for love of me be melted."
                 From
a little clay pot she dripped something. Drip, the fire danced. Drip, it danced
again, jumping up. Drip, a third
jumpup dance.
                 "Thrice
I pour libation. Thrice, by ONE OTHER, I say the spell. Be it with a friend he
tarries, a woman he lingers, may JOHN utterly forget them."
                 Standing
up, she held out something red and wavy that I knew.
                 "This
from JOHN I took, and now I cast it into—"
                 But
quietly I was beside her, and snatched the red scarf away.
                 "I've
been wondering where I lost that," I said, and she turned and faced me.
                 Slightly
I knew her from somewhere. She was yellow-haired,