4
Under the sink, behind the borax and the dishrags and the empty mason jars, Adelaide finds an old box of mousetraps.
Many of the traps are warped by moisture and time, but most still snap shut as intended. Adelaide smiles. Finally, an advantage.
The afternoon sun has baked each smear into a hardened ridge, but the stench is in the air, on her skin, in her hair. She will need a bath after this.
Adelaide lays each trap faceup—nothing wrong with a little pinch—across the garden, among the pathways and garden beds, and conceals them with soil.
She replaces a few of the larger branches at the entrance to deter her chickens and turns to find all three of them before her, eyes like searchlights scanning her feet.
“Stay out of the garden today,” she warns them.
Moffit takes a step forward, defiant, and Adelaide kicks her foot. Three chickens scuttle through the air in a fury of feathers and displeasure. Only Henry looks back.
Adelaide disrobes and lays her clothes across the steps before walking to the river. She steps carefully over jagged rocks and twisted roots to slip into the water.
Winter is not kind to the elderly. The temperature has dropped, and the chill of the water shocks her skin, stiffens her joints.
Adelaide thinks of the mountain lion and laughs at her foolishness. Everything has spiraled so out of control. No one will want her little homestead when she is gone, as much as she may wish otherwise. Of course it belongs to the wild cats. And the squirrels and the coyotes and the birds and the chickens and all the other furred and winged critters. She’s carved out a place for herself alongside the most untamed parts of the forest, but her time in this wild world has come to an end.
After her bath, she will dress, remove those silly mousetraps from the garden, and throw them straight into the deepest part of the river. In the morning, she will don her white skirt and her white sweater, and she will take her pills and take her leave. Responsibly. Alone, as always.
Adelaide is examining her reflection in the river when she spots motion from the corner of her eye. A plume of dust rises from the dirt road along the mountain base.
Someone is coming.
It is not the young couple hauling supplies in their shiny, new pickup truck. Nor is it the man who brings mail to his neighbors. There’s only one other family on this side of the mountain, and Adelaide freezes, watching an old sedan draw closer to her driveway. Closer. Closer. And it turns.
Adelaide springs from the river and dashes to her cabin, covering her nakedness as best she can. Who is in the car? Why are they here? And what could they possibly want with a tired old crone like her?
Adelaide tugs her wet arms through a housedress as the knocks grow louder. A man peers through the smudged glass of her window, and she steps farther into the shadows.
A voice, young and slow, says, “Open the door. We know you’re there.”
We.
The knock comes again, deafening, insistent. No good has ever come of a knock on Adelaide’s door.
“Come on lady. Just concerned neighbors out here is all. Just some questions.”
His voice is smooth and pleasant, but Adelaide is not a young woman, and no longer so easily fooled. That velvet tone bears the unmistakable twinge of malevolence.
“Sonofabitch.” Spoken under the breath—not to her, but to someone else.
If she can wage war against a mountain lion, she can surely handle this. Whatever this is.
Thunder erupts from her door as a fist strikes it, over and over, until Adelaide practically sprints forward to open the door to relieve the sound.
A young man stands before her in the light. Another stands just behind the first, kicking the dirt. She studies their faces. Waxy skin. Pores like sinkholes tunneling into their flesh. The man before her smiles, and Adelaide looks into his eyes to avoid staring at the fragments of his teeth.
In his eyes is something familiar, though she has never met this person. But still, within those wells of chestnut brown lies something she has seen before. She takes a step back, grasping the door frame. The man laughs.
“You alright? You gonna fall?” he asks.
“No.”
“No, you not alright? Or no, you ain’t gonna fall?”
The reek of his breath quickly fills the space between them, and she looks to the man in shadow. His face, so similar to the first.
“You hear me?”
Adelaide tries to speak but her tongue fills the back of her throat. She holds her hand up to indicate that she does not require assistance.
The young man stares, his eyes roaming down her body, slow and lingering. Adelaide looks down to see that the wetness of her body has melded the fabric to her flesh. The folds of her skin, her areolae, even the age spots on her hips, are fully visible in the sunlight. Adelaide shakes the fabric from her body.
“Well,” he coughs and continues, “we’re here because there’s been some damage to our farm.”
An image of feces smeared across the garden flashes through her mind.
“You ain’t been up to our farm, have you?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“I s’pose not.”
He scans her body again, and Adelaide shuffles closer to the door frame.
“But you never know ’bout people sometimes.”
At last, the second man speaks. “You a witch?”
Adelaide can’t help but laugh, though she’d prefer to knee him in the crotch, grind some salt into his eyes, and send him home with a good story. He does not smile, and both men stare openly, awaiting her response.
The young men standing before her are clearly brothers. It’s in the eyes. Something dark. Bewitching. The two men seem to mirror each other’s movements. When Brother #1 shifts his weight to the left foot, Brother #2 shifts to the right, as though ricocheting from the same point in opposite directions.
When she does not respond, Brother #2 speaks again. “People say it is all. You should know people say it.”
Adelaide nods slowly and looks to her hands, alabaster, cracked. The young have always constructed extravagant explanations for things they don’t understand. She wants to tell him that she is simply an old woman who lives in the woods. There are no fairy tales to be found here. No folklore. She wants to tell him that youth is the true magic of the world—so much to create, so much to destroy—and by the time he realizes the truth of that, he and his brother will be witches, too. But she says none of this.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“Told you. There’s been some damage to our farm.”
“I don’t know anything about your farm. I’m sorry.”
She begins to close the door, but Brother #1 places his hand against it and leans forward.
“You ever seen somethin’ out in those woods you shouldn’t?” he asks. His voice is low, as though he may be overheard.
Adelaide falters, but manages to say, “Just a cat is all.”
He smiles, his teeth like gravel at the edge of a cliff. “Ain’t no cat.”
His eyes bore into her. She wills him to take a step back, but he does not.
“Somethin’s been sniffin’ ’round our property. You know what we grow up there?”
“No,” she lies.
He nods. “Well, we can’t have somethin’ tearin’ up our crops. Family land n’ all.” He cranes his neck and stares into her home. “You got a husband? I’d like to talk to ’im.”
“No husband,” she says, and regrets it immediately.
Again, that false smile. “I s’pose not. Children?”
Adelaide swallows the stone that’s been growing in her throat. “No.”
He smiles. “I hear you got a daughter.”
“DO YOU SEE ANY CHILDREN HERE?” she bellows, and finally—finally—he releases her door and steps back into the dirt.
“Okay, okay, no need to yell.” He laughs, the sound like a barking dog. He stares at Adelaide in a silence that broadens and thickens between them until Adelaide fears she might drown within it.
Brother #2 speaks up from behind. “Can we go now?”
Brother #1 dips his head in courtesy, a demonstration of his fine manners. “Ma’am.”
Adelaide shuts the door—a little too hard—and the small, round mirror tumbles from the wall. It does not shatter, but the sound echoes through the cabin, and Adelaide feels it in her bones.
She plucks the mirror from the floor and raises it to the light. Her eyes are crazed, her nostrils flared. She traces a new wrinkle along her chin. Such a silly old woman she is. Those young men weren’t admiring her body—they were shocked by it. Adelaide had been in fear of what they might do to her, but she holds no sexual appeal to those men. No longer any need to worry about a man entering her home, eyes frenzied and aglow, pinning her down, ripping her clothes. Time has made her immune.
She hangs the mirror back on its nail and walks to the kitchen window to make sure that the men have indeed left her property.
Their car is still parked in her driveway, three figures inside.
We.
Her empty belly tilts.
One brother sits at the wheel, the other in the back. But there is another man. Thinner. Older. He leans forward in the passenger seat, staring at her cabin as the two young men are locked in conversation. He smiles, and Adelaide nearly cries out. She drops to the floor, throwing herself against the cabinets and out of his view.
Like her, he is old now. His shoulders hunched, his body fragile. But those eyes—she could never forget those eyes. Even so many years later.
Adelaide crouches against the floorboards and wills the car to be gone from her woods.
Why is he still here?
She pleads for the men to drive away.
What is he planning?
She wraps her arms around her knees like a little girl, and imagines stillness and peace surrounding her home in a tight circle, protecting her from wickedness. And then she wonders, if she stands right now, will the old man be at her window, his dark, bewitching eyes pressed against the glass?
When Adelaide finds the strength to stand, there is no man at her window. And there is no car in her driveway. She takes a deep breath and steadies herself against the sink. The forest is silent, as if it never even happened.
She envisioned it, and now everything is as it should be. Perhaps she is a witch after all.
Wind gusts against her cabin, and from deep in the woods, an incessant howl.
Adelaide has given up on slumber and instead lights the fireplace—the first of the season. In years past, this moment has been a celebration. Tonight, it is a vigil.
She draws her curtains for fear of being watched, pulls some pickled carrots from her cupboard, and listens to the tick-tick-tick of her clock. It may as well be laughing at her.
There are a plethora of nighttime sounds in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There are crickets and cicadas, mice and deer, creaky trees, and crooning owls, and other sounds that Adelaide has heard all her life but never known the origin. They are simply the sounds of the forest, running together in an orchestra of noise, thick and singular. Most nights, she doesn’t even notice it. But tonight is different. Tonight, Adelaide analyzes every creak, every whoosh. And no matter how close she inches toward the fire it does not eradicate her chill.
Adelaide plucks a carrot from the jar, licks the juice, and then crushes it against the roof of her mouth. For a moment, she believes she hears the sound of a car engine idling toward her cabin, but it is merely a spot of thunder that rumbles once more before falling away.
No, there will be no sleep tonight.
Behind the sofa, under the floorboard that pulls away from the nails, a box lies beneath. Adelaide thought she would never look inside it again, but tonight she finds herself wondering about the colors. The blanket—is it white with pink stripes or pink with white stripes? The small knitted cap—is it lemon yellow or butter yellow? There is a small stuffed toy as well. She nearly forgot. Is it an elephant or a hippo? My god, how the mind loses the small things.
A screech startles Adelaide from her thoughts, and the jar of carrots falls from her grasp, rolling across the room as she stands before the glowing embers of the fireplace. From outside her cabin, a sound like a whip cracking through the night, and then silence. Another crack, and another shriek.
Adelaide rushes to the kitchen window and pushes aside the curtain. The trees sway and jostle as something moves through them, fleeing her garden.
The mousetraps! She forgot to remove them this afternoon. Adelaide gasps. That poor creature. She stares into the night, but everything is once again still, aside from the breeze rushing down from the mountain.
Adelaide does not know what has woken her. Dawn is still hours away—she can tell by the opaque black beyond the windows. Inside, her cabin is warm, the embers in the fireplace still smoldering red. The ticking of her clock echoes like a mousetrap. Snap-snap-snap. Adelaide twitches with the passing of every second.
And then a sound. Hushed, but close, like something scraping against her cabin walls.
Adelaide bolts upright and steadies herself against the sofa. She’s still sleeping. Must be sleeping.
Something gallops past her living room window, and Adelaide ducks. It was large, low to the ground, running on all fours.
The beast.
She spins to face the kitchen and sees its silhouette rush past the drapes.
It’s circling her house.
Adelaide crawls toward her bedroom, but the creature is already there, a hulking shadow pressed against the glass. Pushing. Thumping. Looking for a way inside.
Adelaide drops to the floor, and dust floods her lungs. She coughs. So loud. So loud. The beast will surely hear her and come crashing through the glass to tear the tendons from her neck, splatter her home with her own scalding blood. She braves a peek at the bedroom window, but the condensation renders the creature shapeless and undefinable.
Her clock continues to tick, the sound like an admonishment, ashamed at what she has allowed to escalate. What she has brought on herself. The clock chastises, tsk-tsk-tsk.
She has lost this battle with the mountain lion. If that’s what it is. Visibility was obscured, but still, she did not see a cat outside her window—cats don’t gallop. She thinks of the young man who stood before her, just this morning, interrogating her about an animal destroying his crops. That look in his eyes when she said it was a cat. And he had said something—what had he said?
The creature is outside her front door now, and Adelaide pinches her knuckles, waiting for whatever comes next.
It’s all led up to this. She just had to fight, didn’t she? Had to win. Couldn’t let it go, goddammit.
The creature rubs its body against the door, the coarse bristle of fur on wood.
A tapping, gentle.
Pushing.
What is it doing?
The knob rattles.
Did she lock it?
Yes, she definitely locked it. But still, the creature is turning the knob somehow. Impossible. The metal latch shifts back and forth as the animal tests it from the other side. Please hold, she hopes—begs—and she hears her own voice somewhere in the distance chanting, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”
The beast slams its weight against the old wooden door. Adelaide stands. Her legs are warm and wet, and she realizes she has released her bladder.
And just as suddenly as it began, it stops.
The shadowy figure darts past the living room window, and Adelaide listens as the creature tunnels away from her cabin and into the woods. A howl fractures the night, like a wolf drawn to celebrate the full moon. But that was no wolf.
Adelaide is once again left with the silence, and the flood of a memory she’d been seeking. She remembers what Brother #1 had said, just this morning as he stood on her doorstep. Adelaide said it was a cat destroying the crops. He’d looked at her cross and he’d said something. She couldn’t remember his words before, but she does now. Adelaide remembers exactly what he said.
Ain’t no cat.
