Free One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash Page B

hymns like I always did but those words stirred me no more now than they would a barn rat. He’d given a passel of young ones to every other woman in that church but allowed me never a one, though I’d prayed hard morning and night now for a year. How could He give my momma nine and my sister not yet eighteen two and leave me fallow as a December corn field. If I was being punished for what happened to Matthew, that was wrong. How could something I did at twelve, something that was more accident than meanness, be grudged against me for the rest of my life? Not a sparrow falls from sky without His knowledge, the Bible claimed. Don’t that include children that fall from a loft, I told myself.

    ‘Don’t you go and see that old woman,’ Momma said, but I did go, on a January morning when snow laid on the path that followed the river upstream, the river getting faster and skinny, beech trees and rocks looming on each side of the trail as the gorge got narrower like a giant book that’s slow getting shut. Or maybe more like a steel leg-hold trap, I thought, looking up at the big rocks that jagged out over me like teeth. The land got dark and shadowy because the sun couldn’t get in without it was full noon, clumps of mistletoe the only color in the trees. I’d once heard my granddaddy claim the Cherokees had stayed clear of this place, wouldn’t even hunt here.
    It was easy enough to figure why the few folks who’d lived here called this part of the gorge The Dismal, because you couldn’t help but feel that way as you passed through. I walked by the old Chapman place that was now nothing but a stone chimney. It looked like a tombstone there all by itself with no cabin to surround it.
    Where Wolf Creek poured into the river I saw Luke Murphree’s place. His house still stood but the boards was gray and wormy, the tin roof brown like November leaves. Grandma had told me how Luke’s property had bumped up against Widow Glendower’s land and he’d not bothered to fence his cattle in. They’d been bad to wander onto the old woman’s place and eat her apples and trample her beans.
    Then one May the cattle started getting sick. Daddy allowed it was from eating the leaves of a cherry tree Luke had felled. Others said blackleg. But Luke swore his cattle had been hexed. Whatever it was six cows died that May, and soon enough after Luke and his family followed the Chapmans out of the hollow. No one else moved in.
    Nor likely to, Grandma had said.
    Glendower was up here by herself now, for she had no kin as far as anyone on the river knew. There had been many another story about her I’d heard growing up. How once Lindsey Kilgore saw her rise out of a trout pool he’d been fishing, her body forming itself out of the water. And Janey Suttles saw her in a graveyard, the grave flowers turning brown and wilting like as if frost-bit wherever her shadow fell.
    I’d heard all such tales from Grandma, on a winter night when me and the other young ones huddled up near the fireplace. Wind had been whipping through the gorge and the limbs of the big beech scratching the tin roof like something trying to get in. Grandma had told us the ways of witches and the signs of them, everything of what they could do to you and you to them.
    We kids was so scared we wouldn’t head up the stairs to bed without Daddy going first. Daddy scoffed and told us Granny was just pulling our leg, that there wasn’t no such thing as witches, that Widow Glendower was a harmless old soul who’d learned to doctor with roots and leaves and tree bark back when folks had to tend to their own selves when they got sick.
    ‘That old woman has helped many another person when they wasn’t no one else to doctor them and now some of them same people call her a witch,’ Daddy said as he tucked the quilts around us.
    But after he’d snuffed the lamp and went downstairs I couldn’t help wondering why if he argued there was no such thing as witches he’d nailed a