Free Wolfwraith by John Bushore Page A

they began to suspect she might have something to do with it—hateful old woman anyways, and she lived with a man who was half Indian, which was a pretty bold thing to do back then. She pretty much told them to go to hell and that maybe she had been up to something but it was none of their business. That was enough for the townsfolk; they locked her up in a sturdy shed and sent for the circuit preacher, so he could pray over the ducking party. But before he could get to the cape, a hurricane came up—people say ‘you know who’ called it.”
    “People believed someone could call a storm?”
    Jonesy laughed again. It was obvious he enjoyed telling the story. “Hell—oh, maybe I shouldn’t use that word, considering the subject. Heck, people will believe most anything. There’s a local televangelist who says he prayed away a hurricane and his followers believe him—even though we got hit with a monstrous hurricane a couple of years later and he’d tried to pray that one away, too. Anyway, everyone forgot about the suspected witch locked in the barn, until after the hurricane. There was an enormous storm surge and most people only survived by climbing trees, them that hadn’t fled to the mainland when the storm started to brew—remember they didn’t have weathermen to warn them back then. Anyway, when the storm had passed, that shed had been ripped to smithereens and there was no sign of ‘you know who’. Everyone figured she’d drowned in the hurricane.”
    “Which meant she wasn’t a witch, right?”
    “Yeah, if that had been the end of it. Hey, you mind if I have one of those candy bars?”
    “Since when did you have to ask? Get me another one, too.”
    Jonesy got them both a bar, then continued. “Bad things kept happening—seemed like Wash Woods had become cursed. People began saying they’d seen her wandering around the area at night. And there was another strange thing.”
    “Yeah?”
    “You remember you said ‘black cats’ when you described witches? Well, that part was true back then, too. Near every witch had a ‘familiar’ so it goes—some kind of animal, usually a cat. I’m not sure what they did, maybe only kept the witch company but not ‘you know who’. Her familiar weren’t no cat.” He took another bite of candy and chewed for a moment, obviously drawing out his story for effect. “It was a wolf.”
    “Oh, come on!”
    Jonesy glanced over with a hurt expression. “Seriously. I’m telling you precisely what my granddad told me. She was seen in the woods, runnin’ with a wolf, and anybody that saw her—or the wolf—was in for bad luck of some sort.”
    Shadow was skeptical. “Are you sure you’re not putting me on? Because I saw old Frank at Mamie’s—oops, sorry, that old headstone.”
    That brought him a reproachful look from Jonesy, who asked, “You notice that particular headstone was off by itself?”
    “Yeah, so what?” Shadow tried not to grin.
    “They wouldn’t allow her grave in the churchyard, because of being a witch.”
    Shadow laughed. “Gotcha! You said they didn’t find her body. So how could she be buried there?” He took a bite of candy.
    “Damn Shadow, you sure are a skeptical cuss. I didn’t say she was buried there!”
    “It’s her grave, isn’t it?”
    “Yes and no. It’s said her old man, her husband, I guess, put up a headstone for her—in her memory. The townsfolk would have knocked it down but they were afraid to touch it. And if you’d done let me finish my damn story, I’d have told you that.”
    “Okay, okay, sorry.” Shadow still wasn’t sure if the older man had been putting him on.
    Jonesy finished his candy bar, tossed the wrapper to the floorboard and wiped his hands on his pants. He stared out the window for a couple of minutes, then said, “After a few years, the sightings of ‘you know who’ died out. Folks still saw the wolf now and then, even in daylight. Plenty of men took shots at it—and there were some