Read Online Oral History (9781101565612) by Lee Smith - Free Book Online

grieving. “Now that were one fine boy.”
    â€œIffen a body don’t want no holp, I can’t holp em,” I says, and Joe Johnson allowed that was so. I took my tobaccy and left.
    But I kept Almarine in my mind. I knowed what was happening, of course. A witch will ride a man in the night while he sleeps, she’ll ride him to death if she can. She can’t holp it, it is her nature to do so. The same way she’ll run a horse in the ground, and she done that too before long. Now Almarine had set a big store by that horse, and twerent another month till it was dead. She had run it to death, the same way she was doing to Almarine. Witches’ll leave their bodies in the night, you know, and slip into somebody else’s. They’ll do it while you’re asleep and they’ll drive you all night long with nary a speck of rest. They can take on any form. Sometimes they’ll go into a cat, or a cow, or a horse, or a rabbit, or a hoot owl out in the night. They leave their bodies in the bed and out they go. All that being so nice in the daytime was moren Red Emmy could take, what I think. She had to go hell for leather all night to make up for them long sweet days. Almarine was wore out all the time, of course. He laid in the bed and slept most of the time while she worked his farm and then she’d come in and get in the bed. He was servicing her, that’s all, while she liked to rode him to death. Red Emmy, she worked all day and she rode all night and she never slept. But a witch don’t need no sleep.
    Things went on like that into the summer. It was hot as fire, I recall, the day I crossed the mouth of the holler heading for Tug. It was a full moon coming on that night, which meant it’d be Marylou Harkins’s time for sure by the time I got there. They is nothing like a full moon to bring on a baby. I was stepping on the stones acrost Grassy Creek when I heerd my name.
    â€œGranny.” He was hunkered down by the side of the creek, throwing little old rocks in the water. He looked awful.
    â€œHo Almarine,” I says.
    I keep on stepping from rock to rock.
    â€œI been hoping to see you,” he says. Almarine’s eyes that used to be so blue had turned pale and runny. His collarbone showed through his shirt. His hair, that used to be so beautiful, looked just like old dry straw and that’s a fact.
    I was talking to a man bewitched.
    â€œGranny, I got to do something,” Almarine says.
    â€œYou’ll up and die if you don’t,” I says.
    I sit down on the grass where he’d hunkered, and bees buzzes all around us. It was the prettiest day.
    â€œYou got to holp me,” Almarine says.
    â€œI can’t do nothing,” I tell him, “even iffen I would. You’re under a spell and you’ve got to break it yourself,” I says.
    â€œWhat must I do?” he asks.
    â€œYou’ve got to throw her out,” I says. “You’ve got to make the mark of the cross on her breast and her forehead with ashes, and throw her out the door and say the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost as loud as ever you can.”
    â€œWhat iffen that don’t work?” Almarine looks down at the ground.
    â€œThen you’ve got to cut her,” I said, “and make the mark of the cross with her blood.”
    Almarine turns whiter yet and shakes his head. “I’ll not do that, Granny,” he said.
    â€œDo what you will,” I says.
    â€œI couldn’t cut her,” says Almarine. Then he busts out crying as hard as he can, and it is one of the awfulest sounds I ever did hear. Almarine loved her, is what it was. You know a man can love something he don’t even like, and Almarine loved her as much as he disgusted her, and scared as he was. I had seed them kiss in the rain and I knowed it. He loved her iffen she were a witch or no. Almarine put his head in my apron and cried, big old man that he