The big woods are full of strange old ladies with odd habits. Revenge being a fine old backwoods tradition, this one made a hobby of it.
It was hot. Evening was creeping through the river-bottom country, and tree-shadow filled the clearing around her house, but the steamy heat hadn’t lifted a bit. Old Woman sat in the swing beneath her chinaberry tree, fanning vigorously with the cardboard fan that the Levi Garrett Snuff salesman had given her forty years before. Every time it went limp, over the long years, she stiffened it with starch and a hot iron, but it had been decades since she had seen the picture that decorated it.
A moth was dipping into the four o’clocks, unfurling his long proboscis to reach into the deep blossoms. A crow was punctuating the breathless quiet, when, out of no place, there came a hint of a cool breeze. The mockingbird in the elm struck up his evening song.
Old Woman sighed with satisfaction. She hadn’t felt like exerting herself in the heat of the day, but now she did. And this was, she felt in her bones, THE NIGHT.
Old Rupe, lying among the four o’clocks, raised his hind leg and thoughtfully scratched at a flea. Then he turned his nose toward the lane leading into the forest and perked up one ear. She understood him as clearly as if he had spoken.
“Somebody coming along the path, eh?” she asked. “Good. Maybe it’s the one I want to see, you think?”
The dog turned his faded brown eyes toward her and sighed as he laid his furry chin on his front paws. Not this time, his entire attitude told her.
“Oh, shoot!” she grunted. “Another of those giggly kids, I guess, wanting a fortune told. Dammit. I wonder why I ever started that foolishness. Such a bother, and on a hot evening too.”
She rocked herself back and forth in the swing by the pressure of one toe against the ground. The breeze was now cool enough for comfort, and she put the fan carefully into her antique reticule, which lay beside her on the weathered wooden seat. From its depths, she took a bundle of crochet thread and a needle and began hooking rapidly into and out of the linen strand. A spidery doily, incongruously dainty, grew between her arthritic fingers.
Rupe, eyes closed, monitored the approach of the visitor by minute twitches of his ears. She knew to the minute when to put away her work and look up to greet the newcomer.
There were two of them, this time, both young girls, obviously sisters. The sound of giggling reached the swing before they came into view around the sharp bend in the lane. When they saw Old Woman waiting for them, they hushed instantly, their gray eyes going wide, their tow-heads cocking alertly.
“You’d run away again, if you dared,” Old Woman said with satisfaction. “But you don’t dare, so come into my yard and sit on the bench. What brings you out here into the woods, so late in the evening? As if I didn’t know!”
The taller girl, perched nervously on the bench, glanced at the short lively one. “You tell her, Charlotte!”
The baby face scrunched up with concentration, as she cleared her throat. “At school, they told us you can see the future. Can you?” The question sounded more blunt than she had evidently intended. She looked a bit frightened.
Old Woman sighed. “Oh, I can, for what it’s worth. Best thing God ever did for our kind was to leave us in ignorance, though. You sure and certain you want to go digging into things better left to time?”
Charlotte giggled automatically. “We do. Oh, yes, we surely do. Which of us will marry Jim Hollander? Just tell us that, and we won’t ever have to fight about it again!”
Old Woman sighed. How many such sap-brained questions had been asked of her over the years? How many irrelevant visions had she conjured up to answer them? If her long-term purpose hadn’t held her to her course, she would have given up this nonsense long ago.
“I don’t do this for free, you know,” she said.
“What do you charge?” asked the older girl, taking a coin purse from the pocket of her tight jeans. “We brought some money.”
“I don’t charge money,” said Old Woman. “I live so far away, all alone, and I never get to town. Never see much of anybody. I ask people to run errands for me—nothing much at all. Just little things like giving messages to people.”
The girl put the purse into her pocket. “Sure. Glad to. Just tell us what you want, and we’ll do it.”
Old Woman wondered if this wasn’t a waste of time. Her instinct told her that he would come tonight, but she might as well be hanged for a goat as a sheep, she thought. “Tell Amos Harrington that I’m thinking about him,” she said. “Tell him I haven’t forgot, forty years or not, and that I have something for him, if he’ll come down here to see me.”
The sisters exchanged knowing glances. They knew all about love affairs, old and young, new and ancient. So the old lady had a lover forty years ago, Old Woman could see them thinking.
She smiled internally and said, “Come into the house. I need to stretch out, when I Vision myself. Even for a simple thing like this.... I’m not young anymore.” She sighed, rose, and led the way into her pine-log cabin that hunkered like a sleeping animal at the back of the clearing. It was already dark inside. She lit a kerosene lamp and showed the sisters where to sit while she conjured up the Vision.
When she sat up again, she was chuckling silently, though she managed to sober her face before confronting the girls. “I hate to tell you this, young ladies, but neither of you will marry Jim. He’s already got Lennie Miller in the family way, and her Daddy will make him marry her before the year’s out. So there’s no need for you to fuss any more about him—he’s got a date with a shotgun by the end of October.”
Charlotte jumped to her feet. “That two-timing...Helen, we’ve been wasting our time fussing and scratching and clawing, all for nothing!” She didn’t look directly at Old Woman.
Helen, too, was on her feet. “Better to know now than to waste any more time.” She turned to Old Woman. “We’ll take your message. Maybe you’ll be luckier than we were.”
Old Woman returned to the yard and sat in the swing. The new moon was just above the trees, riding the tender turquoise of the evening sky as the last strands of color died from the west. A whip-poor-will was fluttering his plaintive cry from the hickory, and bullfrogs, crickets, and katydids were ratcheting and creaking high and low, in every tone from soprano to bass.
Rupe, a black shadow among the four o’clocks, raised his head, but only the rustle of the plants told her he had moved. She sat still, hidden by the chinaberry even from the pale light of the moon. To her right was the cover of the dry well, where a tumble of honeysuckle released its scent into the night air. A screech owl’s cry trembled through the wood as footsteps padded in the powdery dust of the path and Rupe growled low in his throat.
She had left the lamp burning in the front room of the cabin, and its light made a ruddy track on the flagged path to the porch. The man passed her, silent in the swing, without knowing she was there. Even after forty years, she knew his step, and something inside her surged, hot and fierce, before it subsided into cold waiting.
She rose, still silently, and followed as he mounted the porch and tapped on the sagging screen door. “Old Woman! Old Woman! Why do you keep sending word for me to come? Now I have, and you can quit pestering me for something that was done with forty years ago. Something nobody but you faulted me for. Old Woman! Are you there?”
He opened the screen and stepped inside. “You here? You all right? Old folks got no business living alone, away out at the back of beyond!”
He moved farther into the room, and she slipped up the porch and into the house. “I’m here, Amos. Right here, where I’ve been for forty years. Alone and without my sister, though that need not have been so.”
She clicked her fingers softly behind her, and Rupe came to stand in the darkness beside the path of light. “So nobody ever faulted you for Rose, eh? Nobody ever thought about her after she was gone. She was quiet, my sister. Quiet and shy and afraid to say boo to a goose. Afraid to tell you about the baby. I made her tell you, in the end, though it did more harm than good.”
Her voice took on an edge, and she struggled to control it.
“I knew you were rotten, the first time you came to take her to a camp meeting.”
The man jerked around at her first word. He stared at her in the dim red light. “What baby? Don’t think you can trick me, Old Woman. I don’t know anything about no baby or about your precious Rose, either. I took her to preaching a few times, and riding once or twice. Nothing to make a fuss over...what are you doing?”
Ole Woman had taken a bit of paper from the pocket of her apron. She thrust it at him, taking care not to touch his fingers as he took it from her. “Read that. And then tell me you had nothing to do with Rose’s death!”
He stared down, squinted hard, stretched his arms and turned to the lamp. As he read the scribbled note, he paled until the stubble of beard stood out dark against his bluish skin.
“Yes, she killed herself, but if you’d done right by her she would have had no need. You might as well have pushed her into the river yourself, and held her under until she drowned. She’d never have killed herself but for you.”
He stared at her, his color slowly returning. “So? What can you do about it now? Nothing! Never could and never will. A scandal forty years old is nothing. You should have yelled long before now, if you wanted my hide.”
She chuckled. “Been working for forty years to fix your comeuppance. Been studying on it and other things as well. Found out a heap of things nobody suspects exist, and fortune-telling’s the least of the bunch. You just watch….”
She stepped aside, and Rupe came into the house, his ears back, his brown eyes turned green and frightful. A more fearsome looking creature you never could see, she reckoned. Amos moved back, but the dog herded him to the door, onto the porch, and when the man leaped down to run the dog paused as Amos stopped and gasped. A cougar stood in the dim moonlight, looking up the track of lamplight with eyes that glowed green to match the dog’s.
Old Woman moved past the man to the dry well and heaved the heavy cover aside. The scent of bruised honeysuckle filled the night. “You know how long it takes to make a panther do your will?” she asked, though she never expected an answer. “Here!” she called. “Bring him here!”
The dog dropped behind, the cat moved cautiously at one side, as Amos sidled toward her, his face pale in the darkness, his breath coming harsh in his throat. He couldn’t see the well, for all his attention was fixed on the cougar. When he came up beside the swing, he turned to face her.
Now Old Woman knew that her own eyes glowed green, blazing in the shadow of the tree to match those of her familiars. Amos gasped and glanced about, but he stood at the center of a triangle of stares, which moved forward, forcing him toward a square of deeper blackness, from which came an irritable sound, like corn shucks rustling.
Or rattlesnakes?
“What are you doing?” He made a desperate dart, but the cat herded him easily back into place.
Old Woman grinned, as she crooned, “Oh, what indeed? Been working and working for years, getting a handle on the beasts. Then I worked and worked for months, catching all them rattlers. And now it’s ready, all ready, Amos, and you’re about to pay up for forty years of living high and handsome, while my Rosie rots in her grave.”
He tried to dash to the right again, but Rupe set his teeth into his calf and brought him to his knees. He struggled toward the left, but the cat lowered its face so close to him that he could smell the rank odor of its breath. He groaned as Old Woman reached down her hard brown arms, grabbed him, and gave a heave.
The groan turned into a scream, as he landed with a crunch amid a storm of rattles. There came a lot of shrieks, after that, and pleading wails as the cover went back onto the well. The honeysuckle was smoothed over again, leaving no trace that the thing had been opened.
Old Woman sat in the swing beside the well. The moon was down. The whip-poor-will had moved away into the woods, its cry now faint with distance. The frogs and crickets kept up their music, but a new note joined the song for a time.
Old Woman sat in the dark as long as that music lasted. When it ended, about midnight, she sighed and went into her cabin to bed.
Now she had her vengeance. But what would she do tomorrow?