a low malevolent howling from the dry ravine. These things worked a dark alchemy on the soul and, soon enough, gathered in bunkhouses and at firesides, tales were told of things that lived that should have been buried and things that walked that should have crept. Yarns would be swapped of deserted farmhouses and the pale loathsome things that crawled in their dank cellars or stared out from the rotting hay of crumbling barns with peeled, yellow eyes.
And sometimes, you just might hear about Missy Crow, the straw-witch, and the things she could do and those she would never attempt, which were few. Such stories might get you to thinking impure thoughts and particularly if you’d just buried your mother two days before.
*
That’s how it was with Strand.
At the Broken Arrow Saloon, well into his cups, grief punching a hole in his belly like an awl, he listened to a skinner name of Lester Koats and heard all he needed about the old straw-witch and her wicked ways.
“Missy Crow were born of straw-devil and witch-wife,” Lester said, his boozy breath hot and sour. “She can call the dead up out of their graves with a song and whistle demons to her hearthside like a hound brought to heel. She talks with ghosts and commands vile spirits and has herself rode through the holes between the stars themselves with evil shadows that feed on men’s souls.”
Lester kept on with the tale-spinning until Sheriff Bolan came over and broke the whole thing up, letting Lester see the hard gleam in his eye and the nickel-plated Army. 44’s that rode his hips. Lester took the hint and disappeared out the batwings like a bad stink.
Bolan put one callused, thick-fingered hand on Strand’s arm, said, “You don’t want to be listening to that fool nonsense, son. Stump-water hag like Missy Crow can only bring you six inches closer to hell. So do yourself a favor, just go on home and mourn your mama proper.”
Strand told Bolan that he would do just that, yes sir, straight away.
But he had no intention. Grief can be an immense and stark machine. And once caught in the terrible grinding of its gears, your sense of perspective can be worn smooth as those teeth bite into you and empty you.
When he got home, he told Eileen his intentions.
“But that’s…that’s blasphemy, Luke,” she said. “It’s unholy, it’s witchcraft! You can’t be a party to that! The dead have to stay dead…it’s not natural to bring them back.”
But Strand did not listen. He could not explain what fever burned in his brain or how since his mother’s death there was no shine left in his soul, only a terrible dark graininess.
So he went up to the Oak Grove Burial Ground with a shovel and exhumed Mama Lucille with that big old harvest moon grinning high above like something hungry.
And maybe that was an omen.
*
It took three days of hard riding to find the straw-witch.
Three days in which a hot wind of crematoriums blew across those range grasses and buzzards circled in a sky the color of dead bone. Scarecrows creaked in rustling corn patches, smiling and pointing the way, always pointing the way. Strand rode alone through that lonesome far country, swatting at flies and mopping sweat from his sunburned brow. He searched every dusty corner of Boone County. And in the wagon, Mama Lucille was still stitched in her linen shroud, resting silently in the crate which had brought her grandfather clock some years before, packed in dry ice so she would not turn.
“Don’t you be worrying none, Mama,” Strand would tell that soundless box at the evening’s fire as the wind walked and talked. “I’ll get you fixed up proper, see if I don’t. We gonna find that straw-witch. Maybe tomorrow.”
But it was a long pull and a lonely one, just Strand and Mama Lucille’s crate, and those gloss-black geldings that were none too happy about what they were carrying in the wagon.
Along the way, Strand asked farmers and range hands about Missy Crow and he heard high tales of the sick being cured and storms being raised and fevers being conjured. But when he inquired of the dead being raised up, he was met with a stony silence as if he were mad. And maybe he was. He did not linger any one place long, for once he started asking questions, folks seemed to be sizing up his neck for a swing from the sour apple tree.
Three days into it with a little advice bought with trade whiskey, he found the straw-witch’s cabin on a distant fork of the Loup River, just sitting there all by its lonesome in a wild hayfield like a headstone in the heather. There was no road going in and none coming out, just a bumpy ride across the hay meadow that smelled hot and yellow and crisping. And maybe another smell, too, one that made the geldings whinny and splutter, but Strand was gladly ignorant of.
The witch’s cabin was a simple affair with log walls and a sod roof, plank shutters banging in the wind, the whole thing congested in chokecherry and bracken, knapweed and wild sumac so that it looked not like something built, but something grown. It was shaded by a single spidery and dead scarlet oak whose branches were strung with what seemed hundreds of bones and bottles. When the wind kicked up, the bones rattled and the bottles moaned.
That’s a witch-tree, Strand told himself when he saw it, something inside him running hot and acidic. That’s a conjure-oak.
And maybe it was at that.
For as that warm-dry Nebraska wind exhaled across those empty miles, those bones rattled like they wished to walk again and the breeze blew across the mouths of those bottles in a lonely, hollow dirge.
As Strand dismounted before a low, sloping porch, he noticed that there were a half dozen scarecrows woven from cane straw nailed to uprights twisting from side to side in the breeze. Lots of other things dangled from the porch overhang, like sculptures of twine, straw, and sticks. An old woman sat beneath them in a wicker chair, rocking back and forth. She wore a patchwork calico dress and a denim scarf at her head, a clay pipe locked tight in her seamed lips.
“Well, well, well,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke that stank like burning pine, “so ye’ve come, have ye, Luke Strand? Just as I knewed ye would.”
Strand stood there in his rumpled suit and dusty bowler, his throat dry as fireplace soot. “You heard? You heard I was coming?”
The old lady spat off the porch. “I did not and I did not need to, son. I know things as I’ve always knowed things. I knewed you was coming just as I knewed what you would bring in that wagon. How? Mayhap I divined it in the bowels of hog or from the bones of a stillborn child or sprinkled moondust in an open grave…and does it matter?”
Missy Crow had a face fissured and flaking-brown like that of an Egyptian mummy. When she grinned with that awful rictus, it seemed that face would split open like dry brushwood. There was a jagged pink scar running across her throat and disappearing behind her ears and it looked like a crooked mouth that wanted to open up and spit at you.
“Yes, Luke Strand, that there scar is from the noose,” she said in that voice of deserts and dry washes. “Tyler County, West Virginny, it was. The good and god-fearing folk there strung me up for witching and the practice of necromancy, which be the conjuring of spirits. They left me to swing near on three days from a black elder with birds pecking at me and flies nipping, until some good Christian gent cut me down and planted me proper. Three days later, aye, I kicked my way out of the grave and visited them what had done me harm. But ye haven’t come to hear my yarning, have ye?”
Strand swallowed. “I heard you can do things. Things like in the Bible.”
The straw-witch pulled at her pipe. “Did ye now? Do ye hear that I call up plagues and storms of locusts? Boils and frogs, blisters and blights? That I can cure yer firstborn and curse yer adultering wife? Is that what ye heard, Luke Strand?”
Strand shook his head, not liking those eyes of Missy Crow’s upon him. They were just as dark and oily as coffin varnish. They seemed to look inside you and know all the things you had done and you would yet do. “I heard…I heard you can raise up the dead.”
Those eyes were on him hard then, looking into him and maybe right through. Eyes that were mystical and cabalistic, peering out from shadow-riven glens, sacred groves, and misty mountaintops where the witch-clans gathered and sang their songs, flew through the air on hackberry rods and hickory shafts, casting the runes and harnessing malignant spirits and malevolent elementals.
