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Ursula Vernon

Razorback

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Author’s Note: The story of Rawhead and Bloody Bones originated in Europe but migrated to the American South and underwent a local transformation. The definitive folklore version is likely S. E. Schlosser’s and is very much worth reading on its own.

There was a witch who lived up in the mountains, and I never heard but that she was a good one.

Some people will tell you she was old, but I don’t think she was. She just had one of those faces full of lines. With a face like that, you look a lot older than everybody else, but as time goes on, they all look older and you don’t, and you end up looking younger than everybody else by the time you die.

And you do learn early on not to get by on your looks, so there’s that.

I never did learn who her people were or if she had any. A whole lot of people wound up in the mountains—Lumbee and Cherokee and escaped slaves and the grandkids of people who lit off into the hills for one thing or another. Little bitty scraps of this group and that, all of ’em living together and having kids. Leftover people.

She was one of those. Most of us were, one way or another.

The witch had a couple of names, depending who you ask, but everybody in town called her “Sal. ” She wasn’t the only witch there, I’ll tell you right now, but she was the best of the lot.

If you went south and east from town, you got into the sandhills, where the rain runs down through the dirt without ever stopping, and there was a witch out there named Elizabeth Gray. Her heart was as dry as the sand and things ran through it without ever stopping. She couldn’t be moved by pity or anger, and she only dealt in cash.

If you went north, you’d run into the river, and there was a shack down on the riverbank and an old woman lived in it who was madder than a shoe. She’d have had to come a long way to just be senile. She believed she was a witch and she’d cast a curse for a slug of whiskey and a couple of cigarettes, but whether the curses did anything much, I couldn’t tell you.

(They do say that the sheriff riled her up and she cursed him and that’s why he took a nail in the foot and got sepsis and his daughter ran off with a horse-thief. If you ask me, though, the nail was bad luck, and his daughter was fixing to run off with the first person who looked at her twice. But I don’t know, maybe it was the woman from down on the mudflats. )

Sal, though … Sal was good. She never promised what she couldn’t deliver, and she wouldn’t ill-wish somebody just on a customer’s say-so. She wouldn’t brew up a love potion, but she’d cook up a charm to make a girl look a bit better or to give a bit of fire back to a man who was down to the last of the coals, if you understand what I’m saying.

And if somebody got a little too much fire in their belly, well, Sal knew how to make some unexpected surprises go away, too. That didn’t put her in good order with the preacher, but preachers aren’t traditionally fond of witches anyhow, so she didn’t lose much by it. You didn’t get so many girls in our town going to visit relatives for a year and turning back up with a baby and a tale of a dead husband, either.