That’s when he slammed the door shut.
That’s when he threw the bolt.
And that’s when he ran down through the snow and brambles, ducking past dead oaks and vaulting fallen logs. He ran all the way to the cabin and stumbled and fell into the door. Then Uncle Arlen threw it open, yanking him inside, into that mouth of warmth and security, demanding to know what it was, what it was.
But James Lee could not tell.
The Ozarks back then had a fine story-telling tradition. Sometimes a man’s worth was judged on how hard he worked and how good of a yarn he could spin. So James Lee was no stranger to tales of ghosts and haunts, child-eating ogres that lived in the depths of the forests or blood-sucking devil clans that peopled secret hollows. For everything scarcely understood or completely misunderstood, there was a story to explain it. It was a region where folktale and myth were an inseparable part of everyday life. There were faith healers and power doctors, water witches and yarb grannies… you name it, it showed sooner or later.
And one thing the Ozarks never had a shortage of were witches.
Some good, some evil, some real and some storied, regardless, they were there. Ask just about anyone in any locality of the hills and they could tell you where to find one… or point you to someone who could.
The kids at school told of an old man named Heller the Witch-Man who lived up in some misty hollow that few dared venture to. He could cast out devils and call them up, cure disease and make hair grow.
James Lee figured it was just another story… then one day he was down in town. Uncle Arlen was picking up some feed. James Lee was standing out on the boardwalk, kicking pebbles into the street. Suddenly… he got the damnedest feeling. He felt dizzy and the birthmark on his back started to burn something awful.
He turned and some grizzled old man was standing there, staring at him.
He looked like some hillbilly from the high ridges, dirty and smelling in an old hide coat. He had a single gold tooth in his lower jaw and it sparkled in the sunlight.
“Boy… ye got the mark on ye,” he said. “Ye got it on ye and ye cain’t rid yerself of it…”
Then Uncle Arlen came out and dragged James Lee bodily away. And even after he threw him in the wagon and they made their way out of town, James Lee could feel those eyes on him, feel that mark on his back burning like a coal.
Uncle Arlen shouted and raged and warned James Lee about talking to strangers, because one day you meet the wrong one and soon enough, he sneaks up to the farm and slits all our throats.
James Lee just said: “It’s him, ain’t it? The Witch-Man.”
“Ain’t no such thing, damn ye! Ain’t no such thing!”
But James Lee couldn’t stop. “They say… they say how he can do things. Things no one else can. Maybe, maybe if we brought the… the crazy woman to him, he could cure her—”
James Lee caught the back of Uncle Arlen’s fist in the mouth for that. And when he got home, he got a better taste of it. When Uncle Arlen was done, James Lee was folded up on the ground bleeding.
“Ye never, ever, never mention that one ‘round me again, hear?” Uncle Arlen told him. “That heathen devil witch-man is nothin’ but pain and trouble! He cain’t cure nothin’ and no one, all he’ll bring ye is seven yards of hell!”
After that, James Lee didn’t mention Heller the Witch-Man again.
Even Auntie Maretta looked on him differently. She wasn’t exactly cold, but gone was the warmth and love he’d once known. Sometimes he got the feeling she was scared of him. And one night he heard Uncle Arlen say:
“What’d I tell ye, woman? Like calls to like.”
Although he didn’t mention the strange old man, James Lee never stopped thinking about him or what lived in the shack up yonder. Days became weeks that wrapped themselves around months and years. And it was from an old moonshiner named Crazy Martin that James Lee got the answers he wanted. Crazy Martin knew the old man, lived way up in a hollow known as Hell’s Half-Acre and with good reason.
So one summer afternoon, James Lee made the pilgrimage.
It took him hours to navigate the mud roads and pig trails that snaked through the deep forest. But finally, in a hollow where no birds sang and no insects buzzed and the vegetation had a gray, dead look about it, he located the Witch-Man’s shack.
Heller was sitting before a fire. “Come sit yeself down, boy,” he said, without once looking in James Lee’s direction. “I knewed ye’d come, sooner or later, I knewed ye had to. So sit down. Folks say I bite people, but don’t ye believe it none.”
James Lee sat before the fire, refusing to meet the old man’s eyes.
Heller had a fiddle on his lap and he played a slow, melancholy tune while his mouth rambled on and on about his crops and how they were taking and it would be a good year, save fire and frost.
“Ye said I was marked,” James Lee managed after he realized the old man was no flesh-eating booger like they said. He was just an old man who lived in a weird hollow who worried over his crops.
“I recall, boy, I recall.” He set the fiddle on his lap. “Yer pa… no sir, yer uncle, I think, yes… yer uncle didn’t cotton ye talking to me, did he?”
James Lee was astounded. Here, all these years later, the old man remembered a chance encounter like it was yesterday. And he seemed to know things without being told them. Maybe he wasn’t just some old dirt-farmer after all.
“I think… I think he’s afraid of ye,” James Lee said honestly. “I think lots of folks are.”
“Yessum, they is. They certainly is.” The old man thought about it. “Yer uncle… I figure he’s a wise sort. For commerce with me can come at a terrible price. Boy like you… he cain’t afford what I got. Less’n, he don’t value his soul. Ye value yer soul, boy?”
“Yes… yes, I do.”
“Good boy. Now state yer business, will ye? I cain’t pull everything outta yer head.”
So James Lee told him. About his mother, the mysteries surrounding their coming to Missouri. He went on and on, telling him the same things and asking him the same questions for these were things he’d never spoken aloud to anyone before, but had always itched to.
“First off, boy, yer mama… she’s beyond m’ help. M’ power does not extend far enough to fight what holds her. She was cursed, boy, cursed by… yes, by that evil old bitch. Yessum, I see her in my head, that hag. She packs a heap of power, boy… even dead, her medicine is strong.”
“I was hoping…”
“No, boy. But what has yer mama… yes, it’s weakened some. If’n ye wait… surely, there will be peace for yer mama.” The old man leaned forward, his eyes burning. “But hear me, boy, ye carry the mark… yer life’ll be a dark matter. Ain’t no sunshine comin’ yer way… jus’ darkness.”
James Lee couldn’t fathom any of that business. Heller waxed on about the “Devil’s Mark” and how those who wore it were cursed. But finally, the shadows growing long, Heller let him leave, telling him to follow the trail straight up and out of the hollow. Not to stop, not even to pee. To keep walking, looking straight ahead. That if he saw someone on the trail, to not look upon them, not to listen to what they said. And if he heard voices from the woods… to just ignore them, no matter what they said or what they promised.
“This holler, boy… it’s full of them what don’t rest easy.”
James Lee ran out of there and up into the sunshine and greenery again. When he got back to the cabin, no one would speak to him as if he carried a stain upon him. A stink of crazy old men and witches. The next day, he packed what he had and left the hills, figuring he was seventeen and a man. That it was time to make his way in the world.
West was where he was going.
And on the way he fell in with the wrong type. He seemed to naturally gravitate to them. And as the weeks and months past, whatever had been waiting in him all these years began to sprout, to take root and bloom. But it was no flower, but a mordant and eating cancer that devoured him an inch at a time.