Free The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

Triumphatus

The Witch
    T HE COACH was so nearly empty that the little boy had a seat all to himself, and his mother sat across the aisle on the seat next to the little boy’s sister, a baby with a piece of toast in one hand and a rattle in the other. She was strapped securely to the seat so she could sit up and look around, and whenever she began to slip slowly sideways the strap caught her and held her halfway until her mother turned around and straightened her again. The little boy was looking out the window and eating a cookie, and the mother was reading quietly, answering the little boy’s questions without looking up.
    “We’re on a river,” the little boy said. “This is a river and we’re on it.”
    “Fine,” his mother said.
    “We’re on a bridge over a river,” the little boy said to himself.
    The few other people in the coach were sitting at the other end of the car; if any of them had occasion to come down the aisle the little boy would look around and say, “Hi,” and the stranger would usually say, “Hi,” back and sometimes ask the little boy if he were enjoying the train ride, or even tell him he was a fine big fellow. These comments annoyed the little boy and he would turn irritably back to the window.
    “There’s a cow,” he would say, or, sighing, “How far do we have to go?”
    “Not much longer now,” his mother said, each time.
    Once the baby, who was very quiet and busy with her rattle and her toast, which the mother would renew constantly, fell over too far sideways and banged her head. She began to cry, and for a minute there was noise and movement around the mother’s seat. The little boy slid down from his own seat and ran across the aisle to pet his sister’s feet and beg her not to cry, and finally the baby laughed and went back to her toast, and the little boy received a lollipop from his mother and went back to the window.
    “I saw a witch,” he said to his mother after a minute. “There was a big old ugly old bad old witch outside.”
    “Fine,” his mother said.
    “A big old ugly witch and I told her to go away and she went away,” the little boy went on, in a quiet narrative to himself, “she came and said, ‘I’m going to eat you up,’ and I said, ‘no, you’re not,’ and I chased her away, the bad old mean witch.”
    He stopped talking and looked up as the outside door of the coach opened and a man came in. He was an elderly man, with a pleasant face under white hair; his blue suit was only faintly touched by the disarray that comes from a long train trip. He was carrying a cigar, and when the little boy said, “Hi,” the man gestured at him with the cigar and said, “Hello yourself, son.” He stopped just beside the little boy’s seat, and leaned against the back, looking down at the little boy, who craned his neck to look upward. “What you looking for out that window?” the man asked.
    “Witches,” the little boy said promptly. “Bad old mean witches.”
    “I see,” the man said. “Find many?”
    “My father smokes cigars,” the little boy said.
    “All men smoke cigars,” the man said. “Someday you’ll smoke a cigar, too.”
    “I’m a man already,” the little boy said.
    “How old are you?” the man asked.
    The little boy, at the eternal question, looked at the man suspiciously for a minute and then said, “Twenty-six. Eight hunnerd and forty eighty.”
    His mother lifted her head from the book. “Four,” she said, smiling fondly at the little boy.
    “Is that so?” the man said politely to the little boy. “Twenty-six.” He nodded his head at the mother across the aisle. “Is that your mother?”
    The little boy leaned forward to look and then said, “Yes, that’s her.”
    “What’s your name?” the man asked.
    The little boy looked suspicious again. “Mr. Jesus,” he said.
    “ Johnny ,” the little boy’s mother said. She caught the little boy’s eye and frowned deeply.
    “That’s my sister over there,”