9
The next house down the way was Wanda Sepperly’s.
She was something of a legend in the neighborhood, Mitch knew. A cauldron stirring witch to the kids and a reader of palms and diviner of futures to many adults. Mitch didn’t go in for any of that business himself, but he knew for a fact that quite a few on Kneale Street did and many more from other parts of the city. He did not put much stock in fortune-tellers. He did not doubt that Wanda Sepperly practiced some form of folk medicine and was believed clairvoyant, because he had heard the stories just like anyone else. She could cure acne and impotency, she could touch your head with a switch of cherrywood and make your hair grow back and, it was also rumored, she could stop bleeding, both internal and external, by laying her hands upon the afflicted member. Fertility, it seemed, was something of a specialty of hers. She could examine a spider’s dewy web and tell you when to plant and by studying the phases of the moon, she could tell a woman the best nights to lay with her husband to bring forth seed.
Depending on who you listened to, these gifts, if they indeed existed, were either faith-healing or witchcraft.
Mitch didn’t put much into any of it, but he knew that Lily had been over there a few times…even if she would not admit as much.
All Mitch knew for sure about Wanda Sepperly was that she had lived on Kneale Street for the past twenty years in that trim yellow two story house with the gingerbread at the eaves and the sharp pitched roof with the serpent weather vane on top. That there was a tall white picket fence around her property that guarded her apple trees and pumpkin patch. That her vegetable and flower gardens grew lush and green and inexplicably verdant even in the driest and coldest years. And that her petunias and hollyhocks, bleeding hearts and wild roses were exceptionally healthy and vibrant and her tomatoes and carrots, sweet peas and snap beans produced a yield that was far out of proportion to the size of their plots. And all of this, it seemed, with no tending by Wanda herself. She had the green thumb, they said, but you would never see her putting it to use unless it was done by the light of the moon.
This is what Mitch knew.
He did not know about fortune-telling or any of that business. Only that Wanda was very old and that she had operated a farm in northern Price County for fifty-odd years and had managed to outlive a string of husbands. That when the last one was buried, Wanda had come to live in Witcham and nobody honestly knew why.
Tommy followed Mitch through the gate and up the walk. He went up the steps onto the porch and noticed that there were bundles of dried flowers suspended from the overhang. They gave off a sharp, unpleasant odor like a spice cupboard closed up for too long.
He knocked and the door swung in. It hadn’t even been latched.
“Mrs. Sepperly?” Mitch called out. “It’s just me, Mitch Barron, from down the block. Just wanted a quick word with you…Mrs. Sepperly?”
“Well, come on in then, don’t just stand there pissing water into my fine old carpet,” a voice said that was unnaturally hearty for the age of its owner. “I knew someone would come calling, Mitch, and it might as well be you.”
They found her in the living room, though it might have been called a sitting room as in years gone by, because there was not a TV, radio, or electric appliance to be had. Incense was burning in a clay pot and Wanda Sepperly sat in a recliner covered in flowery fabric. There were some old books on a shelf, some curios beneath those, a menagerie of framed black and white photos on the wall. Not much else but an ugly lime-green sofa that had seen better days. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting, maybe a crystal ball or a few skulls or a stuffed monkey, but the room was simply comfortable and cozy with a few tapestries on the wall and thick plum-colored velour curtains.
Nice.
Wanda was dressed in a plain brown dress with a white ruffled collar that looked almost like something the Puritan ladies wore in Thanksgiving prints. She wore no jewelry and her white hair was very sparse, pink scalp showing through. Her eyes were bright, a vivid blue. She looked nothing like the senile old lady that whiled away afternoons on the porch rocker or collected dandelions in a basket…or, it was rumored, wandered her yard by moonlight tapping a stick on the ground.
“You’ve come to warn me of the terrible fix this town is in…but haven’t I smelled it coming for weeks?” she said to them. “There are things you can know and things you can only guess and then there are those which your heart and spirit tell you which cannot be denied. Am I right? Right as rain! I saw it coming, young Mister Barron, indeed I did! Long before Hillside Cemetery gave up its dead, I saw it coming, a nasty surprise all trimmed out in black satin! It was a black ice winter with an early thaw followed by a hot locust summer asprout with devil grass! Such things always bring about a darkmoon autumn bleeding with rain and an angry sky veined with lightening. And what do we have out there? We have a town-more yours than mine-that’s going under like a brick in a bog! Surely, going under and a mind gets to wondering if it will ever, ever come up for air again! Now…are we on the same page here, Mitch Barron, neighbor of mine who can never can be troubled to stop by and while away the time with a crazy old lady?”
Mitch just nodded, couldn’t seem to find his voice.
He had never heard her talk so much. It was as if tragedy was the oil that freed her jaw. Here he thought old Mother Sepperly was just an old bag wrinkled and deflated by the years, but truth be told, that bag was filled with gas so hot it might burn you if you strayed too near. Yes, her face was old lady sallow and thin-skinned, her knuckles liver-spotted and she was more dry-wood than woman, but she was certainly alive. There was a vitality in those twinkling eyes you could not deny and a spirit haunting those bones that no oblong box could hope to contain. Those arthritic, knobby hands of hers had spanked naughty children to bed and pinched apple-pie crusts, they had harvested corn and slopped hogs, read tea leaves and whittled love charms. They were skeleton and skin worn smooth and thin as wax paper, but there was still a snap and a punch in them that ninety-six summers had not been able to steal away completely.
Standing there with his mouth open and Wanda Sepperly’s spicy tongue weaving a rich and heady spell over him, he could do nothing but compare her to some fine old wine stored in dust and cobweb and flaking time in a hidden cellar. A bottle that had now been uncorked and, damn, if it didn’t smell sweet and have enough kick left to put you on your ass.
“Well, Mitch Barron, are you going to speak or am I going to have to root around in yer head like my Finnish grandmother and expose all your dirty secrets as those of my bloodline always can?”
Mitch sighed, found his voice. “We just came to tell you that-”
“Yes, yes, yes, boy, I know, to lock my doors and bolt my shutters,” Wanda said as if it was all too apparent. “I saw it coming for weeks, did I tell you that? I felt it in my bones like the shivers and the rheumatism. Something’s coming, I said to myself many weeks gone. Oh be sure of that, old woman, there’s a big black pot being stirred and what crawls out will not be that you’d want to meet this side of the grave. I told myself these things, felt them, saw them, knew them. From that bad winter to that awful summer, oh, the signs were right and the planets aligned and the stars trembling in heaven. Oh yes, boy, oh yes, old Mother Sepperly was aware as I’m always aware. And when those storms started a-brewing, I knew as much. Back in farm country, yes, we would look for the signs and find them. It would have been no surprise to my kin if calves were stillborn and their placentas an electric blue. And if one placenta held a two-headed birth? Yes, yes, and yes! Such things always follow a pattern. The wind comes before the storm and the seed pops long before the harrow. Ain’t it the truth?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Tommy was looking at Mitch as if he was wondering what in the Christ he had gotten him into and where the exit might be located. But Mitch could only shrug. They’d come here to do a neighborly duty, more or less, to warn old Mother Sepperly of what was and what could be, but she seemed to know all that.
“You,” she said to Tommy, narrowing her eyes, “I can guess your name and all that sideshow bullshit, but I’d rather you confessed. Simpler that way.”
“Tommy Kastle,” he said.
“As I thought. Now reach in your front shirt pocket and share your tobacco with me. Go ahead, go ahead, and wipe those silly thoughts from your head, Mitch Barron. Smoking can’t hurt something as old as me. The cancer
