An Apple for the Creature

“Not out here,” she said, looking around as if a crowd from church had gathered in the trees. “Not here.”

We went inside. Her cabin was dark, but it smelled like warm bread and coffee. She offered me none of that, except a handful of crumpled bills that looked like the right amount, though it was hard to tell. I didn’t count them. Ruth knew how to handle a cheater, well and good, which this woman surely knew.

I laid the poppet on the table. “You sure you want to do this yourself?”

The mother hesitated. “What does it take?”

“Burn it,” I said. “Or stab it. Twist its head to break his neck. Anything you do will kill him, slow or fast.”

She went pale. “That’s the Devil’s work.”

I offered back her money. “You said you wanted him gone.”

The mother stared at the doll and took a long, deep breath. I waited, already knowing the answer.

When I left her home, I carried the poppet in my satchel—and the money, too.

I walked toward the quarry.

—

The man was easy to find, as he was lunching with a girl no older than me, sixteen at best, pretty as morning with long blond hair and a face that might have been her mother’s, if her mother had ever been young and happy.

I watched them from the edge of the woods and ate my own lunch: a soft-boiled egg, a bit of bacon between some bread. Tapped my feet and rubbed my hands, trying to stay warm, watching the man and girl smile and laugh and make lovey-dovey with their eyes—and me, wondering all the while what that would feel like, wishing and afraid, but mostly wishing.

The girl left with a laugh and kiss. The man watched her go. His eyes, for her only. If he had ever wandered, I was certain he would never wander on her.

I started walking before he did, making my way through the woods so that I was waiting for him on the trail down to the quarry. He took his time, and was whistling when he saw me—though that stopped when he said, “Miss?”

Nothing hard in his face. Nothing bad, as was believed. The girl was right to love him. I had known it for weeks now, from the first time I seen them together.

I put my hand in the satchel, on the rough skin of the burlap doll. “I’ve come to warn you, mister.”

He frowned. “Who are you?”

“Someone who knows old Ruth,” I said, and something cold and small entered his eyes, natural as the ill, bone-chilling breeze passing around us on the trail. Ruth was like that breeze in these parts, known and accepted, and respected out of fear. Most granny women were, like as in the blood, born from the old country that was still rich in the veins of those who had settled these hills and valleys. Fear of a hoodoo woman was natural. Fear was how it had to be.

“Ruth has her eye on you,” I said. “When it comes, it’ll be her doing.”

He paled. “Done nothing wrong. Don’t even know her.”

I stepped back into the woods. “Remember what I told you. It was Ruth who ordered it.”

“Wait,” he began, reaching for me. I slipped away, but he did not try to follow. Instead he ran up the trail, away from the quarry. Chasing the girl, I thought. She was something he wanted to live for.

I pulled out the poppet, and twisted its head clear around.

—

The man was buried two days later, and the night after I slithered into that proper cemetery and dug for him. If he was watching from on high, I didn’t mind. I sawed off his hand, and wrapped it up tight.

—

I was good at digging for the dead. Ruth started me at the age of twelve, from necessity. It was time. I’d become a woman, my first bleed, and needles couldn’t be made from any old bone. So my own mother was first, and my grandmother after her—followed by her mother. Nothing less would do, Ruth said, and I believed her though it made me cry. Took a long while, too, and lucky for me my relatives were buried in the family plot, out in the hills where no one ever came.

All for sympathy, was something else Ruth taught me. Bones had to be sympathetic to make a hoodoo stitch work its wiles, and nothing was more in sympathy than a line of women, from mother to daughter and backward to beyond. Never mind any strife that might have pressed between generations. Who was left living mattered most to the dead. According to Ruth, that was me.

Though it seemed, as it had for some time, that it wasn’t just the bones of those come before that might matter in the stitching. Any bone, from a body with desire, might have a say in the power of a hoodoo.

Any bone at all.

—