Meghan Palmer

Haints

Meghan Palmer

PART ONE

Chapter One

Vola and Granny Whitt stood together at the husk of the old woman's girlhood house. Vola’s young hand in Granny’s gnarled, stiff fingers, they regarded the familiar, weathered-gray boards and the sagging porch. Granite stones from the tall chimney that had been hauled up the Clinch River by traveling masons—stone gypsies, Granny called them—kept on their private migration from sky back to earth, tumbling down only when nobody was there to witness. Granny, who was really Vola's great-grandmother, was stooped with age, and the rims of her once-piercing irises had faded to gray. What hair she still had was like the wispy clouds streaking the sunset over the ridge. It was the summer of 1996.

"Granny, why are there five doors that go into the house?" Vola asked. "And none between the inside rooms?" The old woman seemed not to hear at first. She gazed at the house, as wisps of hair drifted slightly in the breeze. When she finally spoke, Vola jumped a little, startled.

"The doors confused the haints," Granny said. "When I was a girl, there wasn't near as many people in the holler as they is now." The holler was really the whole neighborhood—all the houses tucked in the undulating pockets in the long valley, bordered by one big ridge to the northeast and smaller hills rolling away to the southwest. It was a nuanced word, “holler.” It could mean everything they saw and then some, or it could mean one shady valley, a fold in the land. Their two hundred acres wasn’t “the holler,” though; it was “the farm.”

"Now, you throw one of them black walnuts yonder, and you might just hit two or three people. When I was a girl, wasn't nobody around for miles. If the spirits got their eye on you while you was doing chores of the evening or shutting up the chickens, why, you best get inside. Mom and Daddy used to tell me, 'Use a different door. Every time.'" Granny's story fell into the rhythm of her accent, part Appalachian and part just Granny. To the girl, listening to it was like feeling the soft nubs on her favorite crocheted afghan.

"But, wouldn't the spirits just follow you into whichever door you went in? If that was all it took, changing doors to confuse 'em, they must have been pretty stupid," Vola said. The old woman cackled, thinking that was the reason why old folks liked young ones so well; they said exactly what came to mind. They didn’t have layers of years to temper their words. No reason to put up a face that was anything other than their own. Vola was more special than most children, even allowing for the Whitt family talents. She quietly accepted Granny, with her repeated stories, her traditions, and her superstitions. And that girl was always thinking, always squirreling away information and turning it over and over in the cheerful way somebody might examine a fresh peach from the orchard. Granny shook her head slightly. Her mind did wander sometimes.

She turned a hawkish eye on the young girl, considering.

"Honey, you ever lost something?" she asked, bringing Vola's hand up to hold in both of hers. It was young and soft in her gnarled fingers. "Maybe a teddy bear you left when you was out with Mom? Or one of them...hair scrunchies you like. It prob'ly like to drove you crazy, tryin' to figure where it was. It's like that, see. Haints come after me 'cause I was a treat to 'em. They come after me, and I went in a different door every time. They got confused, couldn't find me. They can't see the world just like we do. They can't see it that way unless they take our eyes from us." Vola shivered, though the evening was warm. Granny looked up at the black, glassless windows.

"They would wander from door to window to door," she murmured, lost in the memory of it. "Trying to find the way in…but there were too many ways, and haints ain’t equipped with choice makers.” She tapped Vola on the head. “Then they would stay on the porch a while. They would forget, see? Why they was there. Then they would remember again, but they had to give up. I was already upstairs, already safe. But they come back again."

They come back again. They came back, and they come back. Both were true. The Appalachian way—the Whitt family way—confused the past tense with the present. She didn't think much on it now, but someday, when she was older, it would strike her that the ways on which she grew up were different. Vola would reflect that it was probably not ignorance, the way Granny spoke. Or some deliberate way of avoiding "talking proper," as her classmates said with such disgust. Here, time was funny. People were close to the old ways, yet...the old ways were forgotten at the same time.

Granny pointed a knotted finger to the top of the crumbling chimney, to a hole the size of a deck of cards between two remaining stones. She'd shown that hole to Vola before. It had been there even when the chimney was new and strong.

"That's the witch's keyhole. If haints got inside the house, why, they didn't have long before they's sucked right back up the chimney, through the keyhole. Everybody had one of them."

Vola had a vague idea of how old her great-grandmother really was; she was older than most kids' great-grandparents. Older than most people alive. Her age was only part of what made Granny unusual. Vola loved listening to her stories, letting her mind flow in and out of the woman's hill drawl. It was hypnotizing in its way.

Young Vola and Granny turned away from the old shack and started the walk back around the bend to the white farmhouse where the family now lived. As if waiting for that signal, a shaggy border collie trotted over from where she'd lain in the shade of a blackberry bramble.

"Hi, Gitli," said Vola, brushing one black ear tangled in burs as the dog went by. "Good girl." Gitli liked to walk just in front of them, the tip of her curved tail flipping back and forth with each step.

When Granny was a younger woman, they had left behind the old gray house in favor of building a bigger house in the next fold of the valley. Granny'd told Vola it was because the old house was done bein' lived in. Vola guessed that was true; after all, the chimney was losing its great stones and the windows were all empty. That old husk of a house had none of the warmth, none of the people-live-here quality of the big house where the Whitts now lived.

As she walked, Vola hummed to herself, letting her eyes slide out of focus, letting each step make the world seem to slowly bounce up and down around her, and pretending she wasn't doing the moving at all. The house, glowing white in the fast-coming twilight, loomed bigger with each slow bounce. The kitchen light came on, followed by lights in all the downstairs windows in a series of bright, homey winks. They made fierce, square beacons in the darkening evening: a promise of comfort. Of safety. The blush that had silhouetted the ridge to the south and west of the house was quickly fading as the sun dove behind the ridge and sank the farm into gloom. Fireflies began a sleepy blink in the hayfield, with cicadas and frogs tuning up for their nightly dialogue.

Later in the summer, the evening cicadas would be almost deafening in their insistent, undulating whine. It was the seven-years' turn, Grandpa June said. There was a seven-year cicada and a fifteen-year cicada. They stayed burrowed down in the ground that long until it was time to come out and sing, and sing, and sing like queerly tuned, one-stringed fiddles. Vola supposed she'd sing her heart out, too, if she'd stayed silent that many long years in the dirt. The thought of cicadas burrowed underground for so long brought haints to mind.

"Granny," she said. "Why don't our house...I mean, how come there's so many doors on the inside, between all the rooms? Why ain't we so worried over haints, like when you was a girl?"

Granny didn't have time to answer; right then, Mama called through the kitchen screen door: "Vola! Go down the valley and find Uncle Lacey. It's supper time."

"Okay!" Vola left Granny at the stone walk to the front door. The girl had asked a good question. It was one that fit Granny's own line of thought lately. Thinking of doors, the old woman went up the walk. She pushed open the heavy front door—the one that served as a front door, anyway, because it was closest to the driveway, and it was the most ornate. But each side of the big house had its own entry. It was in a Whitt's nature to never be too many steps from the out-a-doors. Light spilled out onto the porch, by contrast, deepening the gloom that fell over the farm, now that the sun had sunk down under the ridge yonder.

Vola jogged along the gravel drive that went down past the big house to Uncle Lacey's trailer house, a quarter-mile or so away. Gitli, who'd trotted up onto the porch in anticipation of dinner outside the kitchen door, couldn't resist joining Vola's run. She bounded into the yard to intercept Vola just as she passed the barn, the feed pen in the back obscured in the gloom. This time of night was perfect for running; cool air drifted up from the earth in pockets after the sun went down, thrilling her each time she leapt into chill from the humid, summertime warmth. Fireflies jigged and glowed in a cloud around Vola as she stretched her tan, play-bruised and scabbed legs, with each step pulling the road behind her, sneakers crunching gravel. Her breath huffed in tune with chirping frogs in the creek. Gitli looked up, seeming to grin before hopping off into the tall hay to snap at grasshoppers and fireflies making their way from across the hayfield to join Vola.

"Ho, young 'un!" Uncle Lacey stood and watched from his chicken huts as his niece came on, a cloud of softly glowing bugs marking her general shape. She waved back to him, the motion lit by a glowing sweep of fireflies in the falling night. Lacey came to meet her through the low gate. Closing up the chicken yard, he snatched out a quick handful of fireflies from Vola's entourage. He held them close to his face and waggled his eyebrows at her—his face a Halloween mask, his one good eye shining in their glow, the bad eye like dull, misshapen clay. Gitli jumped and barked around them, in on the joke.

Giggling more from good-naturedness than at the old joke, Vola blew on the fireflies in his palms, setting them a-flight in the air once more. They drifted around his wild shock of hair, and for a moment, he looked both ancient and exotic: a one-eyed totem god with hair of cold flames. He sneezed and shook his head, breaking the spell.

"Supper time, Uncle Lacey," she said.

"Mmm. What's the spread tonight?"

"I think a mess of beans and cornbread," Vola answered, turning to walk with her uncle, cutting through the field toward the big house. He and Gitli jumped the creek ahead of her before turning to offer a helping hand. She couldn't see the water in the muddy trench, but she trusted her legs to navigate the familiar path in the dark. Besides, Uncle Lacey was here, a warm, tall, familiar presence at her side. All was right, here in the dark, fireflies trailing them in a bobbing, swirling cloud. The hills loomed around the broad valley, like silhouettes of giants sleeping on their sides around them. In Vola's sweetly optimistic eyes, the sleeping giants protected the Whitt family nestled in their circle: Granny, Vola's mama Clary, her Grandpa June, Uncle Lacey, and her. And Gitli, of course. And the cows. And fireflies.

Overhead, stars sparked in a velvet sky. Over the ridge to the north, a faint glow revealed the direction of town, only a couple of miles as the crow flies. But folks didn't fly as crows, and roads here in the county were twisted and steep, so it took a fair few more miles to get over yonder. To visitors from places like New York or Georgia or Florida, this place was remote and isolated. The nearest town of consequence was forty-five minutes over the Clinch mountain range to the southwest, or a little further if you drove north, over the border to Middlesboro in Kentucky. To city folk, this was as far out as the Himalayas. Or the moon. To the Whitts, it seemed as though the population was crowding in around the farm fast and thick, though—truthfully—there weren't as many people living here as there had been a decade or two ago. Or maybe it was simply that the nature of the place had changed. Atrophied. In Grandpa June's day, there'd been two used-car dealers in town, plus a bowling alley. Now there wasn't much more'n a Hardees, a dollar store, a drug store and a handful of folk addicted to pills or meth wandering around back of the court house, looking to score. Or looking for a sleazy way to get a little money to score. Hookers in Greasy Rock might have only been twenty, but they looked to be sixty.

Families, enchanted by the beauty of this land, came from out of state. And they went, young people with brains in their heads getting out as soon as they were able. Some people stayed on for good: folks who had it easy here (a small group) because of a family business or small-time political connection, or folks who had it so bad they were stuck (the bigger part of the population).

The Whitts? They'd been here forever. And they'd probably stay here just as long.

Chapter Two

Whitts had lived in this valley just as long as anybody could remember. Longer than Melungeons, who lived over on Newman's Ridge. Longer than the Indians, some said, though how that could be was hard to tell. It didn't make sense, unless you took into account that the Whitts were witches. Some still used the old word: shamans. But to a Bible-thumping Baptist preacher, it all amounted to the same.

Granny was the oldest living Whitt. She was over a hundred years old, though she didn't look hardly a day over eighty. June was her boy. June, short for Junior, though Granny never did say who her boy was the junior to. Then there was Clary, June's daughter, and Vola, the youngest of the family at eleven. Oh, and June's boy, Lacey; he wasn't quite right in the head, not since he was a boy, since the day his eye was knocked out. But he was a good 'un, as June said. He was a good 'un. Even if he did forget what he was doing right in the middle sometimes.

Clary had a job in town, and Vola went to school. She'd be in the sixth grade come September. But the other Whitts mostly stayed on the farm, with June and Lacey driving in to the co-op to pick up feed or fencing or some such when it was necessary.

The lives of the Whitt family were as quiet as could be from the outside. Their farm, bounded by seven points—small, worn mountains pretty as a watercolor from far away, yet still tough to climb when a body had to—held just about everything they needed. Tall hay that rippled hypnotically, like water, in the summer breeze. A few head of cattle. Vegetable garden out the back door, fruit trees set in a small, sloping orchard to the southeast of the house. It was idyllic.

To a foreigner, anyway. That's what the earthy people of Greasy Rock called anybody "not from around here." And they said "furr-iner," drawing out that first syllable, making it inhospitable in their mouths. It was a bit confusing that the only category of folks held in deeper contempt than foreigners in these worn, forgotten hills was a Whitt.

"Only thing I hate worse'n a Whitt is a black snake," Vola'd heard a man once say while leaving the town's one grocery store with her Grandpa June. She'd looked up at her grandfather, surprised and a little frightened at the vehemence behind the words. He glanced down at her, then only six years old, and looked as though he might just walk on and ignore the man currently spitting a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the sidewalk behind them. He might have, too, except the man kept on.

"Queers and Whitts," the man said, words muddied with the wad of chew in his lip. "Ain't nothing worse but a black snake."

"Well, now," said Grandpa June, turning around. "I'd say that makes you a damned fool, Jared Greer. Black snakes is useful. They eat vermin. Rats." He tipped his battered hat to the man before setting off down the sidewalk again, grocery sack in one hand and his granddaughter skipping to keep up. They'd already started the old farm truck and headed toward home before Jared could figure out whether he'd been threatened or chastised.