A Hard Witching (13 page)

The house, of course, is dark. It is the one thing he cannot get used to, even after all these years. Wesley stops the half-ton just inside the caragana shelter and kills the engine. He keeps the lights on a moment, watching rain slice through the beams and disappear. When he’d left the farm that morning, he’d been surprised at the bit of snow, still hard and blue, sloped against the north side of the granaries, as if someone had hidden it there, hopefully, packing it against the lower planks in tight drifts for some long afternoon in August. Everywhere else, the yard was wet with the thaw and the rain that would make seeding tomorrow, the next day, all week maybe, impossible. This rain, he thinks, this damned rain that’s so good to come, we need it, but even so it’s hateful. There’ll be no work now for a while.

He cuts the lights and steps out, planting his feet carefully against the muddy yard. Ahead, the farmhouse seems to tilt at
an absurd angle, a trick of the rain slanting through the yardlight, setting the buildings, the trees, the old windmill frame, at odds with where he knows the flat line of the horizon would lie. Driving in sometimes at night, he can’t believe this is his home at all, that he has ever lived here—that anyone has. It seems unlikely that light has ever shone from those windows, unlikely the screen door has creaked open and clattered shut a dozen times a day, more.

It seems impossible.

By the time he reaches the porch, he is soaked through. He peels off his coat in the entrance and then his shirt, too, and his socks, stiffly, rubs his neck and chest with an old wool sweater of his father’s from a peg by the door, then pulls it on over his head. It is short in the sleeves, and he thinks that maybe it wasn’t his father’s after all, but his mother’s. Was it? For a moment, he feels that fleeting sense of disorientation, like stepping out into a windless snowfall, watching those flakes and thinking they are not falling, it is your own body rising, through them. But the feeling lasts only a moment, and then the unwelcome surprise of cold in the kitchen rouses him. He takes a matchbook from the tobacco tin over the stove and goes barefoot down to the empty cellar. He comes here only rarely now, to relight the furnace or in summer to store food that would quickly turn in the close heat of the rooms above. But once, the walls had been lined with jars, shining neatly by the light of the bare bulb overhead, pickles and beets and rhubarb. Sometimes the soft white flesh of trout from the river, smoked and packed in pint sealers. Jellies, clear amber and purple. Tomatoes. Could there have been so many? All those jars, is it possible? He remembers his mother in the kitchen,
dipping from enormous paper bags with the tin measuring cup he still uses, salt for the pickles, sugar for the fruit. He remembers her scrubbing and blanching and straining pulp through a piece of old window screen, her face red with the steam, her lips moving almost soundlessly to a song he never could figure out, though he held his breath to listen. He remembers helping his father to cut the screen, stretching it taut against his own knees,
Hold on tight there, Wes,
winking and setting the blade against the screen.
You don’t want to lose a limb now, eh? What would your mother say?
And Wesley gripped the edge of the screen so fiercely, it bit into the palms of his hands.

He remembers that. And he should. He should remember it all. He should remember his mother calling from the porch,
Don’t torment the child. You want to give him nightmares?
And his father looking up at him from under his brows.
You won’t go and have nightmares on your mother, will you now? If you swear it, I’ll tell you a tale that’ll curl your nosehairs.
And he’d nodded his head emphatically.
Yes, yes, I promise.
And he meant it. His father’s stories were not frightening, not in that way. They would sit at the kitchen table, the three of them round the yellow lamp, his mother mending, his father fiddling with a harness or a broken axle or a watch. And Wesley quiet, hands under his knees, waiting for his father to begin.

Back in the days before the homestead rush, when there was still buffalo to be had and the land was yet unbroken, there came a surveyer named Robert John McCallum, an Englishman, not much to look at, but a hell of a shot from the saddle or the soil. He was here on a survey expedition, like I say, and shacked up with the rest of them fellas at Chesterfield House. But something got to him, the wind maybe, or the sun, the way it can here where a man might mistake his shadow stretching a mile long for his own self, if you know what I mean, and this McCallum just took up one day with his horse and pitched a skin-tent over there by that sorry alkali slough they call Ingebrigt Lake. Couple of the men went by one day, thinking
they’d talk some sense into him, bring him on back. But they didn’t get within ten yards before they was staring down the barrel of his Winchester. “Come on now, McCallum,” they called. “We brought you some food is all.” And one of the men patted a haversack he carried slung behind his saddle. But McCallum didn’t move a muscle, just stood there pointing that rifle, his hair wild from the wind and his face brown as his boots. “This country knocked the English right out of you,” one of the men said, thinking to joke with him. But McCallum stood his ground, stood it so long the men finally turned tail and rid back to Chesterfield House, ready to give him up for a goner. But the Mounties here didn’t like to encourage that kind of behaviour, so when they got wind of what McCallum had done, two of them rid over from Montgomery’s Landing. They had their pistols ready, aiming to take McCallum by force if necessary. They rid up, and seeing his horse hobbled a few yards off, called, “Robert John McCallum, by order of the Queen we demand you to come out now with your hands up. We don’t want trouble. We just want you to come on back. There’s savages enough out here without losing one of our own.” Then they sat and waited, their horses snorting and stamping in the dust and the wind rattling the walls of that tent, skimming out over the surface of the lake in ridges. They waited, and when McCallum showed neither hide nor hair, they rushed the tent, fearing any minute to take a bullet from behind those skin walls rattling and snapping away in the wind. But it wasn’t Robert John McCallum of Worcestershire, England, they found sitting in that skin-tent. No, it wasn’t McCallum they found, nor no man, alive or dead. They found nothing but a few empty cans and his Winchester leaned up in the corner. That and McCallum’s horse outside. One of the Mounties looked out over the lake. “Is there enough water in that slough to drown a man?” he asked. “Not likely,” said the other. “Unless you’re trying awful hard.” So they took up McCallum’s horse, rolled up his tent with the rifle inside, then headed back to the landing. “He’ll turn up,” they said, “sooner or later.” Well, it wasn’t long before he did turn up, so to speak. One of W.D. Smith’s boys—he used to run his cattle over there—reported seeing a light on the shore of Ingebrigt Lake, like a campfire or something. When he rid over to
check it out, thinking to scare off some half-breeds, the light disappeared. Sort of flickered slowly out the closer he got. When he reached the shore, there was no sign of a recent fire anywhere. Everybody thought he was crazy, of course. Then other folks started seeing it, too. For years, decades. Sometimes it burned red, like fire, sometimes it just kind of glowed, more of a faint blue, like a lantern. Some said it was the ghost of Robert John McCallum out looking for his horse. Maybe it’s true. I surely don’t know. If it is, he’s been looking for that horse a long time.

If it is,
Wesley’s father said, leaning close to the yellow light,
I’m awful sorry for the poor soul. He’s been looking a mighty long time.

But here in the cellar is this furnace that won’t light. Wesley strikes a third match; the flame catches, burning a small steady blue, and he pulls the length of red yarn attached to the bulb, feeling his way carefully back up the narrow stairs in darkness.

As he reaches the top, he thinks he hears a knock at the screen door. He stops, listens, hears it again. Yes. For a moment, he wonders whether he should pretend he is not home. But he has left the light burning in the kitchen, his truck parked in the yard. He lets the cellar door fall shut, peeks through the kitchen window, through the rain, but can see no vehicle other than his own. And he thinks, Maybe I have imagined it then, made something else of the rain, my own breathing. Maybe owls. They come now sometimes in bad weather.

“Hello?” a voice calls from outside. “Anybody home?”

He does not move to answer right away, afraid that if he opens the door, there will be no one, just the rain and the mud and the yardlight. His truck and the caraganas and beyond them only the night, nothing. He waits, deciding, and the door edges open, a head pokes in.

“Yes?” Wesley says, lurching forward. “What is it?”

He can see by the way the boy falls back into the rain that Wesley has scared him.

“We got—” the boy says. “Sorry to bother you—”

“What is it?” He does not want to frighten the boy. He flicks on the porch light and the boy flinches. He is young, a teenager; water runs in a stream from the peak of his cap.

“I got stuck,” he says, wiping the back of his hand across his nose, “out towards the Sand Hills.” He jerks vaguely with his thumb and Wesley looks past him, as if he might see across those dark fields. “I got stuck,” he says again. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Car?”

“Yeah.” He nods, and adds, “My mom’s.”

“Who’s your mom?”

“Koskey,” he says, “Theresa. Jim and Theresa Koskey.” And he shrugs the rain off his shoulders, shaking his whole body, like a dog.

“Come in,” Wesley says finally, and steps back a bit so the boy can wedge himself through the door.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. I sure do appreciate it.”

The boy is panting a little, as if he had run part of the way. Wesley stares at him, trying to place him from around town, and the boy looks down, notices Wesley’s bare feet, looks away, up at the coloured squares of carpet Wesley has used to insulate the entrance, at the stacks of newspaper piled neatly to the ceiling, the mousetraps baited and ready. The boy shifts his feet, wipes his nose again.

“That Theresa Venner?” Wesley asks. “Is that her?”

“Yeah,” he says, running a hand across his wet chin. “That’s her.” The boy clears his throat.

He is scared, Wesley thinks, he is scared of me. He pulls on his wet boots while the boy stands there not looking at him, then takes a halogen flashlight off the shelf. “I got some chains,” he says, and coughs. “In the barn.”

And the boy, Koskey, nods without looking up. “That’d be great,” he says, and stamps his muddy boots against the floor. “I surely would appreciate it,” he says.

The car, one of those small foreign ones, has slid sideways down the ditch and now sits at a strange angle, the headlights pointing up into the still leafless branches of the few trees and willow scrub that line this end of the road like bones. Those lights shooting up through the trees, and Wesley thinks for a moment of that other night, when he and his father were coming back late from the lease land across the 41, slow with weariness, Wesley half-asleep against the window. Suddenly his father said,
Oh Jesus,
a whisper almost, or a choke. And Wesley sat up to see all that metal—a car maybe, was it?—bent around the front of a semi turned on its side in the ditch.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus,
and Wesley followed his father out into that impossible silence, only the sound of that one wheel spinning,
sh-sh-sh.
His father’s face as he crossed the crazy bend of a headlight, that headlight across the—
Stay in the truck, Wes—
though he was in high school then, a man almost—
Stay in the truck, Wesley, for Christ’s sake.

“There she is,” Koskey says now, pointing unnecessarily through the rain and the wipers.

Wesley gears down. “Should’ve cut the lights.”

“Engine’s running,” Koskey says, then adds, “I got some friends with me. They should’ve turned the lights off. When they couldn’t see me anymore. I guess they should’ve turned them off then. I don’t know why they didn’t.”

Wesley backs the truck up as near as he can get to the car, grabs the chains from the box and follows the boy, sliding more than walking down the slope. When the boy opens the door
and leans inside, he sees three others. A girl wearing big gold hoops in her ears hunches against a red-haired boy in the back seat. The other one, a blonde girl, sits shivering in the front, arms wrapped around her waist, long bangs looping down over her eyes. He stares a moment, wondering why she looks so strange, before he realizes that she, too, is wet. He is not stupid; he doesn’t need to ask what they were doing here, out this close to the hills. But he wants to know, Why is the girl wet, did she walk, too? Did she walk part of the way and turn back?

“What’s he doing here?” he hears the red-haired boy say. “Didn’t you call no one?”

“He offered to pull us out.” The three kids, all except the blonde one, exchange a look Wesley pretends not to notice. The girl with the earrings giggles, ducks her head so the hoops jiggle against her face.

Wesley hooks the chains to the front axle, walks back to the truck for the straw bale. Koskey follows. “I can take that for you, sir,” he calls, and Wesley lets him. Pulls his jackknife out to cut the twine.

“That’s a good knife,” the boy says loudly, over the rain and the two engines, “that’s a beauty.”

Wesley snaps through the twine, folds the knife into his pants pocket, pulls away an end of the bale. “Front-wheel?” he asks.

“What?” The boy’s breath puffs out in the air.

“Front-wheel drive?”

“Yeah,” the boy says, “I think so. I’m pretty sure.”

Wesley kneels to jam straw under the front tires, looks through the windshield, past the wipers, at the blonde girl, the suggestion of her pale face, the rain now running in a cold stream down his neck.

“Shouldn’t o’ spun your tires,” he says to the boy. “Dug yourself deep.”