T. O. Brandon

Adams, Tennessee

November 1837

Lucy Bell:

It started with the noises in the walls:

The rats’ paws and the bats and nameless beings

That groped, and clawed, and sometimes cried aloud,

Or tapped the windows like a hand of sleet.

But when John grabbed his gun and looked around

The house, he found no men or creatures there,

Just twisting forms of darkness in the trees.

In time, there came a cold, slow, grinding sound,

As if each night the nearby caves crept close

And pressed their lidless eyes against the house

Until ten thousand blind and broken things

Crawled out to gnaw the studs and rafter beams.

Then, over weeks, the sounds grew louder, nearer:

We felt the rats were teething at our beds,

And heard some hell-spawned dog come scratching up

The floor, as if to drag a carcass out

And crack marrow from its bones.

 Then she came.

One day that spring, our Betsy took a walk

Into the woods and found a girl there, hanging

From a tree. The girl’s face above the noose

Was cold, and yet, as Betsy watched, one eyelid

Split, then one flat black eyeball slid around

Like something wriggling from a fetid pond,

And then her parched lips stretched into a smile,

As if her hanging was a kind of joke

We wouldn’t understand—at least not yet,

We wouldn’t. Betsy screamed and ran, yet when

We came back to the grove, the girl was gone.

But maybe I had left our door ajar

Because we found out later that she’d come

Into the house and settled down, as if

Our fear invited her, or if not fear,

Then maybe something else.

 And so she stayed.

She hated John and sought to torment him.

She said “he’d earned a killing” for some sin

She never named. Each night when he would eat,

She’d drive hot iron wedges in his mouth,

Which no one at the table felt or saw,

And held them there until he gasped with pain

And fear, and couldn’t eat or speak. I watched

Him fade in time, and saw how thin he grew,

How what had been that vital force in him

Was spent on sputtering and useless rage.

But still, there was some cussedness that kept

Him fighting on for three more years before

The witch in all her hatred wore him down.

They say she poisoned him. I know they tell

A lie: there was no poison in the witch—

Her power wasn’t of that kind. He died

In fear and pain for what he always was,

As maybe all folks do when it’s their time.

The witch was at his funeral and sang

Loud drinking songs, and carried on and spat

While others there who knew him tried to mourn.

Could be she thought she had some cause, and yet

It was unkindness and it wasn’t right

To keep the neighbors’ prayers from finding him.

She hated Betsy too—I don’t know why—

I guess she saw herself too much in her.

She pulled her hair, and pinched her arms, and screamed,

And showed her horrid face inside the mirror

Till Betsy lived in terror for her life.

And when the Gardner boy came courting, she

Made loud how she objected to the match:

She sang, “Please, Betsy, please, don’t marry Josh,”

And sang it just like that for months on end

Until our Betsy, broken, called it off.

The stories say it was a jealousy

And meant to hurt the girl, but I’m not sure:

I wonder if perhaps she hadn’t seen

Some cruelty in Josh, as I had seen—

Like I had seen in John, but hadn’t known

Back then just what those glimpses should have meant.

She was like that, then. It was strange. At times,

She almost seemed a friend, if friends are those

Who do you kindness that you never asked. 

She knew my love of grapes, and in that winter

When I nearly died of pleurisy, she brought

Me dark black muscadine, and smoothed my hair

And spoke soft words and sang, and held cool hands

Across my forehead while I slept. The grapes

Were sweet and cold, so sweet and out of season.

She must have traveled world or time to find

Them sweet like that, those months of dark and snow.

She called me, “That most perfect woman, Lucy”—

The kind of thing that John had used to say,

Or maybe John had said to someone else.

She left the grapes out on my bed, and when

I woke, the sheets were stained, my dress was stained

From crushing them.

     And then she left for good.

I guess when John was dead she dropped the game:

She lost all interest in the rest of us,

And left us there alone with nothing more

Than dark, and woods, and all that frontier space

I’d hated since the day John brought us here.

We spread her story round. I think with pride

How Jackson’s men came down to clear the cave,

With all their guns and pretty uniforms,

But when they heard the stories we could tell,

They turned and ran before the evening fell.

We never ran. We stayed and bore the witch,

For she was ours as much as we were hers.

That priest who came from England said the witch

Was like those demons Paul cast out, the ones

That told dark secrets in the temple halls.

He wasn’t wrong, or I don’t think he was.

Like demons, she could promise kingdoms more

Than all this little world our lives had made.

If every spirit is an intercourse

With something more, perhaps it doesn’t matter

How we find our way. Or perhaps it does,

And I did wrong. It doesn’t matter now.

Last night I almost felt that she’d come back.

I went out in the wildness of the moon,

And found the cave some people say is hers,

A hole as wet and ragged as a wound.

I stared into that darkness like a glass,

And said—as you’re supposed to say—her name

Three times (I know her name, and John knows why):

I said, “Kate Batts, Kate Batts, come out, Kate Batts,

You have a lot to answer for. You know

It isn’t right for all that pain to mean

So little now, to steal our names and break

Our only crossing with that other world.

It isn’t right to change a life and leave

Like that—at least, I cannot think it right.”

I heard those old stones echo as I left:

They said, “It isn’t right… It isn’t right…”

Some things are everything until they’re not.

Now John is dead, and all the boys are gone,

And Betsy married to some other fool.

Sometimes I think I made her up, or that

I conjured her, as if there was a witchery

In what we want that changes everything.

It doesn’t matter now. So little’s left

Of me, a husk too spare to draw a witch.

I let it go. I cannot own her now.

It won’t be long—a month or two—before

I lie with John and let the story lie.