A Hard Witching

He was our great-uncle (younger than my grandfather by a number of years, we were surprised to learn at the funeral), though Max and I always called him, simply, Uncle Aloetius. Because we spent long, dull summers with my grandparents, and because Uncle Aloetius was retired from his job at the pottery in Medicine Hat and now lived in the same small town near the hoodoo-like hills of the South Saskatchewan River valley, we saw quite a lot of him, though we never knew him well, never settled into the kind of teasing friendliness we enjoyed with my grandmother’s brothers from distant Gravelbourg. And though Max and I never talked about it, I think we shared the same uneasiness about Uncle Aloetius, a result of more than just his disturbing habit of leaving the top two buttons of his trousers undone to accommodate the gout that had swelled his belly round and hard as a pumpkin—something Max and I might have found funny in someone else, someone other than Uncle Aloetius, with his tobacco voice and the fine purple veins cracking across his nose like
lightning, and the way he would drop a meaty fist onto the table unexpectedly when talking, making the coffee cups jump and rattling us all in our chairs.

Despite his habit of blowing his nose loudly into a hanky at the supper table, despite his German accent (inexplicably heavier than our grandfather’s), despite the tufts of hair on his knuckles and in his ears, Uncle Aloetius occupied a position outside our mockery of grown-ups, our low-grade jokes about smells and scabs and bodily functions. For this alone, this impossibility of caricature, we may have respected him, may even have liked him a little—wanted, in fact, to like him. And he, in turn, may have wanted us to. But there was something about Uncle Aloetius that defied both affection and ridicule. He would try to tease us, try to joke with us the way our grandfather did, easily, the way our other uncles did. But his humour always fell flat, as if he did not quite believe in it himself.

“Bet you a quarter you can’t tear this leaf in half,” he said one morning; not a jest, a demand.
Betchu a kvotteru cant dare dis leefenhuff.

He held the poplar leaf out toward Max, who was sitting on one of the cinder blocks Grandma used to pot her geraniums. Max looked at me, then took the leaf in his palm carefully, as if it were a green heart, still beating. He fingered it briefly, squinted up at Uncle Aloetius and handed it to me.

“Right in half,” Uncle Aloetius stressed. “Right down the middle there.”

I used my thumbnails to edge minutely, painstakingly, down the spine, staying impeccably true to the line of it. Max breathed heavily, nostrils whistling, over my shoulder.

“Oh-oh,” Uncle Aloetius said every few seconds, when it seemed I might falter.

I had to tilt the leaf away from the reflection of the sun to see the spine clearly. My elbows were propped on my knees to
steady me; my hands kept from trembling through sheer force of will. When I was finished, I handed over the two perfect halves.

“That’s good,” Uncle Aloetius said, studying them carefully. “Pretty good.” He held one half up. “That’s a good half.” Then, tearing that half in two, he added, “Here’s a quarter.”

When Uncle Aloetius didn’t joke, when he talked to us seriously, as an adult would, there was something else, not quite cruelty, but something like it.

“Bet you can’t guess what I got here,” he said to us one afternoon, coming into my grandparents’ yard with a small cardboard box under his arm.

It was Thanksgiving weekend, and though it was cold, Max and I sat on the gravel driveway, idly throwing stones onto the roof of the garage.

No, we confessed uneasily, we couldn’t.

“Come on, now,” he barked, “just guess.”

Max looked at me as if he might cry. Uncle Aloetius had played this game with us before. Chances were, whatever was in the box was something alive, or something that had recently been alive or, worse still, only a part of something that had recently been alive: gopher tails
(ten cents apiece ven I vus your aitch, enuff to pie a new pair uff shews);
the grey, pointed head of a sturgeon he’d caught in the river; a rattle from the snake he’d run over on the highway.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, trying not to imagine the terrible options. “Partridge feathers?”

“Partridge feathers,” he scoffed, and shook his head. He settled the box on the gravel and pried the lid off with the tip of his walking stick. “Have a look.”

Max remained stolidly near the garage, but I took a step or two forward, thinking, Please God, let it not be a snake, anything but a snake.

I peeked into the box. It wasn’t a snake, it wasn’t alive, and it hadn’t been alive recently, not by any stretch of the imagination. I wrinkled my nose, leaned away slightly, hoping Uncle Aloetius wouldn’t notice. Made confident by the fact that I had not shrieked or bolted, Max sidled over.

“Ew,” he said simply.

Uncle Aloetius frowned at us, annoyed and disappointed. “A
skull,”
he said, as if we didn’t get it. “Look at those teeth there.”

Reluctantly, we looked. They were blackened and broken and clamped in a vicious grin. I considered, briefly, the awful possibility of a tongue.

“Bobcat,” he said proudly.
Popcat.
“Here.” He held it out to us. Max and I stepped back. “It’s petrified,” he stressed, and tapped his knuckles against his forehead. “Like wood.”

Petrified.

“Like a vossle,” he added.

Max and I blinked.

“A
vossle,”
he shouted. “Don’t they teach you that?”

Max sniffled, grabbed the hem of my shirt. Of course, I knew he meant fossil, but I couldn’t admit this, knowing it would make him even more scornful. In dealing with Uncle Aloetius, we’d learned, there was a measure of safety in ignorance. He was more willing to give up if he thought us merely stupid.

“What the Christ
do
they teach you?”

Max always cracked under the pressure.

“Pictures,” he bawled, “with macaroni.”

Uncle Aloetius, still holding the skull forward, scowled at the two of us, stared at my hands fixed firmly in my pockets, at the snot pooling above Max’s quivering lip. Then he packed up the
skull and hobbled off toward home, stabbing the air with his walking stick every few steps, as if still making his point.

Uncle Aloetius lived across town in a small grey stuccoed house flanked by several overgrown lilac bushes and filled with his collections, things he’d found while walking the Sand Hills or down by the river or in the fields blown smooth in spring. Pieces of things: skulls, bones and skins. They ranged across shelves and counters and window ledges, were nailed to walls, rested unexpectedly in kitchen drawers and closets and dressers. Not that Max or I ever ventured far during our visits to Uncle Aloetius’ house, choosing to remain quietly perched on either side of our grandfather like bookends. But we were occasionally sent to fetch some small item—more mix from the back bedroom, the calendar from the kitchen cupboard, a deck of cards, or a knife, or a glass—a task that would most often end in an unhappy discovery of some sort.

It was always me, not Max, who made these discoveries. Being older, I didn’t mind so much that I was the one appointed to run the errands. Foraging in dark bedrooms and closets would have been easier, though, if Max had come with me. At first I bullied him into it, staring fiercely at him until he slid from his seat and followed me from the room.

“Just reach in there and find the bottle opener,” I said one time, pointing to the kitchen drawer, which we’d been able to wedge open only a few inches before it stuck.

“Why don’t you?”

“Your hand’s smaller.” I lifted my hand, spreading the fingers wide. “See?”

Max stared.

“Hold up your hand, Max.”

Max stuck both hands firmly down the front of his pants.

I knew not to force the issue. If he cried, things would go worse for us with Uncle Aloetius and with my grandfather, too, who suffered our squeamishness only in small and sporadic doses.

I slipped my hand into the drawer, shuddering as I felt around, recognizing objects by touch—scissors, a pen, rubber bands, nothing worse than that. When I found what I thought was the bottle opener, I slid my hand out quickly, relieved. But it wasn’t a bottle opener. I had grabbed instead the handle of a small hairbrush, a soft blue enamel one rimmed with a border of white vines. A woman’s brush. And I thought immediately of Uncle Aloetius’ wife, Cherry, whom I knew only through photographs. At any other time, I would have been thrilled to find the brush, fascinated as I was by her, by her long absence and, because of it, her perpetual youth. But on that day I was too dismayed at the thought of having to slide my hand back into that drawer to pay much attention to a hairbrush. That day, it was merely another strange item in an already strange house.

When I finally found the opener, I puffed out a great sigh of relief.

Max pulled his hands from his pants and said, “See, they’re not smaller.”

“Next time,” I said firmly, as we returned to the living room, “it’s your turn.”

From then on, Max gazed stubbornly back at me whenever I was called on to fetch something, and I ended up going miserably alone.

There was one place in Uncle Aloetius’ house even I would not go, upon pain of death.

“You know what’s down there?” Uncle Aloetius would say each visit without fail, nodding toward the door—latched shut with hooks at both the top and bottom—leading from his kitchen to the root cellar.

Max and I shook our heads, though of course we knew. How could we forget?

“Do you?” he’d demand.

“Children,” Max would say, chin trembling. “Lots of them.”

What kind of children?”

“Bad ones.”

“And were you good this week?”

God, yes, we hoped so.

Naturally, we had questions about these children—
How many? Where did they come from? How old were they?
and the one that gripped Max:
Where did they go to the bathroom?
—questions we broached in bed at night with the blankets pulled up over us like a tent and Max’s feet pressed against my belly, or, more often, safely by daylight. But they were questions we would never ask Uncle Aloetius.

We did, after much deliberation, ask my grandmother one morning while she mended clothes in front of the TV.

“It’s those Germans,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Just look,” she added, “at their fairy tales.” She bit a thread between her broad front teeth, teeth we always thought looked like Chiclets. “Russian Germans,” she said, meaning Grandpa and Uncle Aloetius, “they’re the worst.”

“Are we Germans?” Max asked after a moment. “Russian Germans?”

“Part,” she said. “A quarter.”

Max started to cry then. Grandma put down the work sock she was darning, pulled out the damp wad of Kleenex she always kept balled up in her sleeve (the
same
Kleenex? we often wondered) and wiped at Max’s face.

“Oh, now,” she said, “that’s just foolish.”

For a long time, though, we weren’t sure whether she meant the possibility of children kept chained for years in Uncle Aloetius’ cellar or simply Max’s tears.

But Max was like that. There was always a certain element of desperation to his fear that made me sorry for him on those visits to Uncle Aloetius’ house, sorrier than I was for myself. I could, for instance, almost feel the trembling of poor Max’s limbs through the plaid chesterfield when Uncle Aloetius addressed either of us. Uncle Aloetius must have sensed it, too, smelled the fear coming off Max like the panic off a trapped rabbit. And he must have despised it.