A Retired Witch
by Josh Bell
Winner, 2023 Fiction Contest
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This was an old woman who had been called a witch. She chewed plug tobacco and made craft poisons in her kitchen. She wore a canary yellow dress most days and most days she drank tub whiskey. She kept a threesome of goats—for the fur and the companionship—in an old tri-bar pen out near the barn behind her peeling farmhouse.
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That morning the old woman went out to the tri-bar goatpen with a bucket of feed for the goats, clicking her teeth and calling her critter call. The old woman meant to be drunk and she was. The old woman’s critter call went “Whoop you goats.” “Whoop you goats!” the old woman called, and the food in the bucket was a good food for the goats, to put a rich shine in their fur and a thrum in their dark little hearts. But this morning, as it happened, the goats didn’t answer.
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When the old woman got to the tri-bar fence she could count only two goats in the pen, not the usual three. Only two, the females, spooked and shying from a blood trail in the hay that led from the tri-bar pen, through the grass, toward the hills. The blood shone metallic in the morning sun. The old woman looked at the blood and then she looked at the two goats. No matter how hard she looked at the goats they would not add up to more than two. It was the male goat missing. Something had either murdered it and carried it off or carried it off and murdered it.
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Even with the good-smelling bucket of feed in her hand the two does wouldn’t come near the old woman. She had to sit herself down on the edge of the water trough and talk to them, rationally. Eventually the one with the periwinkle blush of fur on its tummy walked its stilt-walk over to the old woman. The periwinkle butted its head against the woman’s knee and nibbled at the hem of the old woman’s canary dress. The old woman scratched the underside of the periwinkle’s chin and said: “What carried off your old man?”
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In the kitchen the old woman sipped a little tub-whiskey and she vialed up some poison she would sell to the clerk of the general store. She unhooked her white sunhat from the wall-peg and set it on her head, where—she had to admit—it didn’t feel right. She took the white sunhat off, looked at it. Then she turned it around and put it on again, this time frontways.
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The old woman had two stoves, one for cooking the stews that she froze and ate for herself during the winters, the second stove for the cooking of the poisons she sold in town. In between the two stoves was a scarred kitchen table and the old woman stood next to it in her canary dress and white sunhat. She had, even now, some poisons bubbling on the second stove. The poison in the tall black pot, for example, had been simmering slowly for about a month straight. Some poisons took longer, some poisons took less long. The old woman stirred the poison in the tall black pot and then she turned to check the second stove, not the poison stove, but the food stove, where a nice beef stew had been cooking. It was important not to confuse the stoves. The old woman lowered the flame beneath the stew and she collected her handbag. She put the poison vials, the ones she meant to sell, into the handbag. She wondered if maybe while she was in town she should see about buying another goat, but at last she thought it best to wait until she’d dealt with whatever had carried off her missing goat to begin with. No need to keep handing goats over. From a lavender sachet she popped a mushroom-looking plug of tobacco between her cheek and gum and she set out of the house and walked out to the dirt road that led to the nearby village.
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On her way to the village the old woman thought about the missing goat, the male, who had been a good goat. She had nutted that goat when he was a buckling and he had never even looked cross-wise at her. He had been a wise leader and with his hooves he sometimes scraped up worms and grubs for himself and the does to eat, standing off politely for the does, beard trembling as he worked his jaws. There had been no mountain lions or wolves in this country for some time. Coyote, maybe, or dog. A hungry enough dog could carry off a goat, sure, but the old woman believed that, in the night, she would’ve been awakened by what a dog would do. A dog would get confused as to whether killing a goat was business or fun and this might be likely to lead to an uproar. But the old woman had heard nothing all that night. It was perplexing. She had kept goats for a number of years and she had never lost a goat this way.
--
The poison the old woman sold in the village that afternoon was the poison she cooked up regularly, from a base of ferret weed, nothing special. The woman called this poison Sweet Prince. Sweet Prince was an easy poison to craft and it sold very well. The clerk was happy to get his hands on the Sweet Prince but he was interested in other flavors.
“Got any of that fine poison you sold me last Winter?” the clerk asked the old woman. The clerk was a younger man who wore a green visor and whose teeth curved inwardly like sickles. His father had been an older man who wore a green visor and whose teeth curved inwardly like sickles, but this father was dead now.
“Remind me,” the old woman said.
“It was a bluish concoction,” the clerk said, “and it worked quite swiftly, and it didn’t smell like anything.”
“Doom Bloom,” the old woman said.
“Yes,” the clerk said, tapping his visor with the tip of his pencil, “The Doom Bloom.”
“Just Doom Bloom,” the old woman said.
“Doom Bloom, yes. I sold out of it. It was a popular one. Gophers and step-mothers were dropping like flies all around the county.”
“Doom Bloom is out of season, I’m afraid,” the old woman said.
“Well,” the clerk said, “keep me in mind.”
“I will,” said the old woman, and then the old woman told the clerk about the missing goat and the blood trail.
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“A wild boy,” the clerk said.
“A what?”
“You’re not the first,” the clerk said. “The Porters down the way lost a sheep. The Joneses down the other way lost any number of chickens. And then the Wilsons.”
“What about the Wilsons?”
“Old man Wilson is the one who saw it,” the clerk said, glad the old woman had asked. He leaned on the counter. Behind him stood, on shelves, an army of canned goods, beans green and beans brown. “Old man Wilson heard a calf crying in the night. He got his shotgun and he went out to the fenceline. What he saw was a wild boy with its teeth in the neck of a calf, half riding it, half trying to drag it off.”
“A wild boy,” the old woman said.
--
Back at the farmhouse the old woman led the two remaining goats from the pen and set them loose in the backyard for a spell to give them some room to stretch their legs. The old woman sat up on her back porch and rested and thought about the wild boy and she watched the goats in her yard. As usual the goats didn’t know what to do with their freedom. They stood for awhile beneath the old shade tree near the goatpen. They walked their stilt-walk to the porch steps and looked up at the old woman. After staring at the old woman for a bit, the periwinkle led the other female right back to the tri-bar pen. Once inside, the periwinkle turned around and stuck her head through the fence and looked at the old woman questioningly. The old woman stood and went into the house for a pail of the good-smelling goat feed.
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Toward dusk the old woman had an idea. She staked the two goats in the corner of the tri-bar pen nearest the barn and she gave them about four feet of tether. The periwinkle tested the tether and so did the other goat and both goats protested. “Hush now,” the old woman said to the goats.
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After staking the goats, the old woman walked across the pen, through the gate, and over to the barn. It had been a long day already and sadly the old woman had been sober for most of it. In a corner of the barn, under some old cheese-cloth, she found the wolf traps she was after, oily and closed-mouthed. When she leaned over to inspect the traps, her white sunhat tumbled off her head—she’d forgotten she was wearing it—and onto the floor of the barn. She picked up the sunhat and fixed it back to her head and then she took it off and she turned it around the right way and then she stood there looking at the traps. They looked like new. The wolf traps had been oiled and left there by a man named Robertson more than thirty years ago, back as far as when the old woman had not been an old woman. For a time the old woman had shared a bed with the man named Robertson, but she didn’t remember that much about him, other than Robertson had complained about the old woman’s habit of sleeping without her nightclothes on, which he thought unseemly. That and how the man Robertson had enjoyed a drink the same as the old woman, but thought the habit of drinking, at least in the female of the species, a sign of loose moral character.
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Now the old woman sat on the dirt in the middle of the pen, the three wolf traps in front of her. She listened to the stop and start sound of a cropduster flying somewhere nearby. From a vial and with a nail brush she was painting poison onto the teeth of the traps. She looked up from this work and she saw a nuthatch peeking out at her from behind the shade tree across the way, the sun red in the hills behind it. The nuthatch flicked around behind the tree and peeked out at the old woman from the other side of the tree, like he needed to have another look at her. The old woman looked down at what she was doing. Then she looked up and spoke to the nuthatch. She said, “It doesn’t make sense to me either.”
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The poison the old woman selected for this job was the poison called Down Time. Strained carefully and diluted with tap water, Down Time wasn’t a fatal poison. When she had trouble sleeping the old woman had even used Down Time on herself. The old woman sipped from her flask of tub-whiskey and sat in the pen and painted diluted poison onto the tooth of each trap, dipping her brush into the vial, careful not to get any on her fingers. It took her some time to do so. The sun disappeared behind the hills. The two goats stood quietly at the edge of their tether and watched the old woman work like she was a performer come to put on a show for them.
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In an arc a couple feet further than the goats could step, the old woman set the three painted wolf traps. Say what you will about the man Robertson, but he had stored his traps well. They opened easily and they set with no bother. She scattered hay over the traps, careful not to trigger them. She stood back and looked to see what it looked like. It looked exactly like someone had carefully tried to hide wolf traps under hay in her goatpen. It was too late in the evening to dig the traps into the dirt to make them less obvious, which the old woman realized she should have done to begin with. So she scattered hay here and there, all over the pen, to make the appearance of hay in the pen look somewhat natural. She spoke harshly to this hay when the hay didn’t fall where she meant for it to fall. She hoped this didn’t all wind up with her trapping a stray dog or one of her own goats. She looked at the two goats and she burped from tub whiskey and she said, “Let’s find out how stupid this wild boy is.”
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Later the old woman sat in a chair just inside the kitchen door and she drank tub whiskey from a flask and she had a good view of the goatpen. She kept the long gun, loaded, across her lap. For a drunk old woman, she kept good look-out, even if she did say so herself. She read a little from magazines while she waited. She looked at some mail-order pornography.
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The magazines the old woman favored were magazines in which strange women, not necessarily witches, talked about different kinds of poisons they’d crafted. The pornography the old woman favored was a pornography that depicted nude men in the act of parasailing. She had never been parasailing herself, nor seen an ocean, but she liked the idea of it and she liked looking at the pornography. She sipped at the whiskey and she looked at photos of young men in parasailing rigs and she looked out over her tri-bar goatpen. She fell asleep in her chair. It had been many years since there had been a wild boy loose in the hills.
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Not that night did the wild boy come, nor the next night, but the third. By this time the old woman had dug her traps in about three inches. She sat on the same chair just inside the kitchen door, her white sunhat like a moon on the wall-peg behind her, and as she watched, she saw the wild boy approaching the pen. The old woman did not quite believe what she was seeing and she blinked her eyes. “Here we go,” the old woman said.
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If the wild boy had ever worn clothes, he was not wearing clothes now. The wild boy did not move on all fours, like the old woman had thought he might, but crept slowly on two feet, nearly like a human. Even in the moonlight the old woman could tell the wild boy’s hair was a golden yellow. It was ratted and caked with filth and goat blood, but it was yellow. Outside of magazines the old woman had not seen yellow hair before. She was a brunette herself (when her hair had had color) and she’d lived all her life near a brunette village. But this wild boy was blond and he moved slowly, hunched over, his upper body parallel to the ground. The periwinkle goat stood and the other goat took notice and both goats began to warn each other about the intruder. The wild boy climbed over the tri-bar fencing and he did not look left or right, but moved directly, in a crouch, toward the periwinkle goat, who was the pick of the goats. The old woman watched it all. The wild boy stepped into the mouth of the center-most trap, perfectly, like it had been drawn in an illustration. The old woman feared he might collapse headlong into one of the other traps, but he didn’t. The wild boy fell down on his back and he howled.
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By the time the old woman got herself to the pen the Down Time poison was already working on the wild boy and the howling had turned into a mutter. The wild boy lay on his back muttering and he stretched out like he would just sleep that way with his foot in a trap in the moonlight as long as anyone didn’t mind it. The muttering turned to little dove-like coos. The old woman stood over the wild boy and looked down. The wild boy wouldn’t look at her. She could see that his body, also, was covered with a light golden fur. She lowered the nose of the long gun at the wild boy in case the wild boy knew what a long gun was. He didn’t seem to know what a long gun was. The wild boy touched the nose of the gun with a finger and closed his eyes.
The old woman said, “You killed my goat.”
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The two she-goats didn’t like how there was a wild boy in the pen with them and the old woman wasn’t sure what to do with the wild boy now that she had him. Why hadn’t she killed him outright? The old woman wondered about this. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have coated the teeth of the wolf trap with a fatal strength of Down Time or with any one of her more deadly poisons, but she had not done so. It would be easy, right now, to touch the nose of the long gun to the wild boy’s forehead and end it that way. But she found that she didn’t want to do this, either, particularly now, with the wild boy in the dust of the goatpen at her feet. She liked what color she could see of the wild boy’s ratted hair. She knew very well that you could not keep a wild boy, but neither did she want to be responsible for killing the last of something.
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“Therefore you have arranged this problem for yourself,” the old woman said. She said this to herself and she sat down on the hay next to the body of the wild boy and she rested the barrel of her long gun across the wild boy’s chest. She leaned over the wild boy’s body and lifted one of his eyelids and saw that the eye was blue. She had seen blue eyes before. She wasn’t a yokel. She ran her hands over the wild boy’s chest to feel the consistency of the yellow fur that grew fine and matted on his body. The genitalia between the wild boy’s legs was covered in the same fur and the old woman didn’t look very long at it. The boy had no real beard to speak of, again just the fine, light fur covering the cheeks and chin, like down. He was a wild boy, after all. The old woman wondered if the wild boy had ever had a home or knew a language. From the looks of him she doubted it. What you could see of his teeth was not a happy story. She sat there and she thought and she watched the wild boy’s breathing raise and lower the barrel of the gun she’d set across his chest. After awhile the old woman lifted her long gun and she stood in her canary dress. With sticks she triggered the two remaining wolf traps. She led the two she-goats by tether from the goatpen and she locked them over in the barn and she walked in the dark back up to the farmhouse.
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The old woman made several trips back and forth to the farmhouse. The moon was the one that looked like the horns of a snail. In the pen the old woman assembled the following items: a lantern, a bar of greenish soap and some towels, a pail, a couple more vials of Down Time (in case the wild boy should begin to stir), a medicine bag, a square of used plywood, and some bandages. She stood and looked over the items to see what she might have forgotten. She looked at the wild boy. Once more she returned to the farmhouse and when she came back she carried with her a silver pair of long-stemmed scissors and in her other hand she held the white sunhat by the brim.
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The old woman stuck a plug of tobacco between her cheek and gum and she leaned the long gun against the tri-bar fence. She turned and looked at the wild boy, dead to the world. The goats over in the barn didn’t like the dark of it and the old woman could hear one of the goats bleating and butting its head against the barn door. “That’ll be the periwinkle,” the old woman said to the wild boy.
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The old woman had hung the white sunhat on the gatepole of the pen and she turned and lifted up the sunhat now. She stood over the body of the wild boy and leaned down easily and she positioned the white sunhat over the wild boy’s genitals, for his modesty, she guessed, though she wasn’t certain. It had seemed like the thing to do and it’s why she’d brought the sunhat from its wall-peg in the kitchen in the first place, though the old woman had to admit that, when she looked down at the wild boy, naked and gold with a white sunhat covering his genitals, modesty hadn’t been the effect, exactly. Now it looked more like he was posing.
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The old woman stood there not knowing if she would laugh about the sunhat or not and she finally did and she drank from her flask of tub-whiskey. She looked down at wild boy’s trapped leg and she brought the lantern over and the medicine bag. The teeth of the trap had closed low on the wild boy’s calf and though it looked ugly the old woman didn’t think there were any problems with the bone. She set the lantern there close to the leg. She spat tobacco juice on the hay between the wild boy’s feet. She leaned over and got her fingers between the teeth of the trap and she pulled.
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With the wild boy’s leg cleaned and bandaged the old woman scooted the square of plywood beneath the wild boy’s head and then she stood and turned and drug the water-trough from its place at the fence-edge so that it paralleled the body of the wild boy. More stars had joined up with the moon and the sky seemed high up on tentpoles above her. She saw how the water in the trough bore bits of swollen goat feed, dead leaves. Even so, it was cleaner than the wild boy’s hair.
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She stepped across the wild boy’s body and she sat down on his chest like his chest was a saddle and she dipped her pail into the trough and poured the water over the wild boy’s head. It was an involved head of hair and it smelled rank and living and as she washed it she watched what fell from it, husks of cicadas, chicken bones, mud-dauber nests, a flattened tin can, what looked to be a human bicuspid, sticks and twigs and burrs, a small red rubber ball, a rusted necklace, a treble fish hook, three rusted twist ties, an old pill bottle, here and there a smattering of buckshot plinking out like diamonds onto the plywood board. It was not pleasant work, dying fleas rising up in the lather, but as she washed the hair the old woman grew happy to see the gold color of the hair brighten and deepen. She’d rise and fall lightly with the wild boy’s breathing and she’d work the green soap to a lather between her hands and then work it into the hair of the wild boy. She’d lift a length of it, heavy like a fish, and pour trough-water over it, then work the greenish soap into it again. It was best to work length by length. That way you didn’t get overwhelmed. At first the hair felt thick like tar but after awhile it began to plump and spread. The wild boy yelped a little in his sleep, a dream of farmers and chickens, maybe even of goats. The old woman stood up and fetched a vial of Down Time and droppered some onto the wild boy’s lips.
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It was a moldy mattress nibbled by mice and it had been the old woman’s marital mattress more than forty years ago, back when the old woman was not an old woman, back when she had been married, not to the man Robertson, but to a different man altogether, a man whose name the old woman had taken as her own for a time, a name she couldn’t, just now, remember. This man to whom the old woman had been married: he had called her a witch very often and he favored making love through a hole in a sheet, if at all. He did nothing but walk the forest-edge and sketch weedflowers. Later she would watch this man burning his own weedflower sketches in the firepit and wonder who in the world he was. She had been a teenager then. Everything had made sense in her head but rarely would anything outside her head match up with what was inside. When this man her husband had died (in his sleep it was said, though some said poison) the old woman had happily replaced the cornhusk mattress with one of fine goosedown and she had stored the cornhusk mattress in the cellar. Now the old woman drug this cornhusk mattress up from the cellar. It was not a heavy mattress but it was hard work to get the old mattress up from the cellar in the dark, to get the mattress out into the backyard in the night, to drag the mattress to the goatpen, harder still to roll the wild boy’s unconscious body onto the mattress, but she had done it, nipping tub-whiskey from a flask for strength, talking to herself of her own foolishness.
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The old woman took one last trip to the farmhouse. She was well drunk by now and she felt she had worked off the last of the cartilage in her skeleton and her bones felt unrelated to each other. In the bathroom she sat down to make water and nearly fell asleep while doing so. In her bedroom she located a little jarlet of honeysuckle perfume with which she meant to perfume the wild boy’s hair. In the chest at the foot of her bed she found the strawberry and mint quilt with which she would cover the wild boy’s sleeping body. In the kitchen she ladled out a large amount of hot stew into a pail and she took these things with her out to the goatpen.
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The old woman set the pail of stew next to the cornhusk mattress upon which the wild boy lay on his back, unconscious, the white towel bonneting his hair, the white sunhat covering him. The old woman knelt next to the mattress and she unwrapped the towel from the wild boy’s head and she dried the golden hair with the towel, holding the heaviness of the boy’s head between her palms. She spread the hair out on the mattress around his head so that it might dry faster. From the jarlet she sprinkled some of the honeysuckle perfume into this hair. She stood up with the strawberry and mint quilt and she flapped it over the wild boy’s body and let it fall over him. She reached beneath the quilt and brought forth the white sunhat and she hung the sunhat on the gatepole. And she stood there for awhile looking at the arrangement. Then, thinking of something, she picked up the lantern and turned and walked out of the goatpen and crossed her backyard, turned at the old shade tree, walked around a little, the lantern lowered in front of her, scanning the grass here and there with her eyes. She knelt in the grass and plucked from it a couple of small white weedflowers. She stood and brought the flowers with her back into the goatpen. She knelt and balanced the two weedflowers by the stems along the mouth of the stew pail.
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Lastly she took the silver pair of long-stemmed scissors and she bent and cut a lock of the wild boy’s golden hair. She figured the wild boy would run before morning, so she wanted a souvenir. She held the lock of hair up before her eyes in the moonlight and she looked at it and then she tucked it into the pocket of her canary dress. She was too tired, by now, to gather up the rest of her things. She made sure to bring her long gun and the scissors, anything with which the wild boy might hurt himself or her when he awoke. She patted the pocket of her canary dress for her flask of tub whiskey and it was there. She walked across the yard and up to the porch and in by the kitchen door. She drank a glass of water at the sink and she ladled some stew into a bowl for herself and she took it out to the porch with her so she might watch to see what the wild boy would do.
--
She figured the wild boy would run, but she meant to stay awake until morning if she could—to see how the wild boy would act when he woke up, to see how the wild boy felt about a bed for himself and a flower for his stew—and the old woman did stay awake for a while, looking out across the backyard at the white halo of her sunhat on the gatepole of the tri-bar pen, the glint of the wild boy’s hair in the moonlight, yellow like a fire that couldn’t burn anything, his chest rising and falling. The old woman touched at the lock of hair in the pocket of her canary dress and she talked to herself a little beneath the moon and she did not think about the man Robertson nor the man to whom she had been married once, if briefly. She nipped at the flask of tub-whiskey and she made sure to keep her long gun across her lap. She fell asleep for a long time and she dreamed of herself as a girl. In the dream her hair was yellow and she had much strength in her legs and she performed strange miracles with the power in them.
This was an old woman who had been called a witch. She chewed plug tobacco and made craft poisons in her kitchen. She wore a canary yellow dress most days and most days she drank tub whiskey. She kept a threesome of goats—for the fur and the companionship—in an old tri-bar pen out near the barn behind her peeling farmhouse.
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That morning the old woman went out to the tri-bar goatpen with a bucket of feed for the goats, clicking her teeth and calling her critter call. The old woman meant to be drunk and she was. The old woman’s critter call went “Whoop you goats.” “Whoop you goats!” the old woman called, and the food in the bucket was a good food for the goats, to put a rich shine in their fur and a thrum in their dark little hearts. But this morning, as it happened, the goats didn’t answer.
--
When the old woman got to the tri-bar fence she could count only two goats in the pen, not the usual three. Only two, the females, spooked and shying from a blood trail in the hay that led from the tri-bar pen, through the grass, toward the hills. The blood shone metallic in the morning sun. The old woman looked at the blood and then she looked at the two goats. No matter how hard she looked at the goats they would not add up to more than two. It was the male goat missing. Something had either murdered it and carried it off or carried it off and murdered it.
--
Even with the good-smelling bucket of feed in her hand the two does wouldn’t come near the old woman. She had to sit herself down on the edge of the water trough and talk to them, rationally. Eventually the one with the periwinkle blush of fur on its tummy walked its stilt-walk over to the old woman. The periwinkle butted its head against the woman’s knee and nibbled at the hem of the old woman’s canary dress. The old woman scratched the underside of the periwinkle’s chin and said: “What carried off your old man?”
--
In the kitchen the old woman sipped a little tub-whiskey and she vialed up some poison she would sell to the clerk of the general store. She unhooked her white sunhat from the wall-peg and set it on her head, where—she had to admit—it didn’t feel right. She took the white sunhat off, looked at it. Then she turned it around and put it on again, this time frontways.
--
The old woman had two stoves, one for cooking the stews that she froze and ate for herself during the winters, the second stove for the cooking of the poisons she sold in town. In between the two stoves was a scarred kitchen table and the old woman stood next to it in her canary dress and white sunhat. She had, even now, some poisons bubbling on the second stove. The poison in the tall black pot, for example, had been simmering slowly for about a month straight. Some poisons took longer, some poisons took less long. The old woman stirred the poison in the tall black pot and then she turned to check the second stove, not the poison stove, but the food stove, where a nice beef stew had been cooking. It was important not to confuse the stoves. The old woman lowered the flame beneath the stew and she collected her handbag. She put the poison vials, the ones she meant to sell, into the handbag. She wondered if maybe while she was in town she should see about buying another goat, but at last she thought it best to wait until she’d dealt with whatever had carried off her missing goat to begin with. No need to keep handing goats over. From a lavender sachet she popped a mushroom-looking plug of tobacco between her cheek and gum and she set out of the house and walked out to the dirt road that led to the nearby village.
--
On her way to the village the old woman thought about the missing goat, the male, who had been a good goat. She had nutted that goat when he was a buckling and he had never even looked cross-wise at her. He had been a wise leader and with his hooves he sometimes scraped up worms and grubs for himself and the does to eat, standing off politely for the does, beard trembling as he worked his jaws. There had been no mountain lions or wolves in this country for some time. Coyote, maybe, or dog. A hungry enough dog could carry off a goat, sure, but the old woman believed that, in the night, she would’ve been awakened by what a dog would do. A dog would get confused as to whether killing a goat was business or fun and this might be likely to lead to an uproar. But the old woman had heard nothing all that night. It was perplexing. She had kept goats for a number of years and she had never lost a goat this way.
--
The poison the old woman sold in the village that afternoon was the poison she cooked up regularly, from a base of ferret weed, nothing special. The woman called this poison Sweet Prince. Sweet Prince was an easy poison to craft and it sold very well. The clerk was happy to get his hands on the Sweet Prince but he was interested in other flavors.
“Got any of that fine poison you sold me last Winter?” the clerk asked the old woman. The clerk was a younger man who wore a green visor and whose teeth curved inwardly like sickles. His father had been an older man who wore a green visor and whose teeth curved inwardly like sickles, but this father was dead now.
“Remind me,” the old woman said.
“It was a bluish concoction,” the clerk said, “and it worked quite swiftly, and it didn’t smell like anything.”
“Doom Bloom,” the old woman said.
“Yes,” the clerk said, tapping his visor with the tip of his pencil, “The Doom Bloom.”
“Just Doom Bloom,” the old woman said.
“Doom Bloom, yes. I sold out of it. It was a popular one. Gophers and step-mothers were dropping like flies all around the county.”
“Doom Bloom is out of season, I’m afraid,” the old woman said.
“Well,” the clerk said, “keep me in mind.”
“I will,” said the old woman, and then the old woman told the clerk about the missing goat and the blood trail.
--
“A wild boy,” the clerk said.
“A what?”
“You’re not the first,” the clerk said. “The Porters down the way lost a sheep. The Joneses down the other way lost any number of chickens. And then the Wilsons.”
“What about the Wilsons?”
“Old man Wilson is the one who saw it,” the clerk said, glad the old woman had asked. He leaned on the counter. Behind him stood, on shelves, an army of canned goods, beans green and beans brown. “Old man Wilson heard a calf crying in the night. He got his shotgun and he went out to the fenceline. What he saw was a wild boy with its teeth in the neck of a calf, half riding it, half trying to drag it off.”
“A wild boy,” the old woman said.
--
Back at the farmhouse the old woman led the two remaining goats from the pen and set them loose in the backyard for a spell to give them some room to stretch their legs. The old woman sat up on her back porch and rested and thought about the wild boy and she watched the goats in her yard. As usual the goats didn’t know what to do with their freedom. They stood for awhile beneath the old shade tree near the goatpen. They walked their stilt-walk to the porch steps and looked up at the old woman. After staring at the old woman for a bit, the periwinkle led the other female right back to the tri-bar pen. Once inside, the periwinkle turned around and stuck her head through the fence and looked at the old woman questioningly. The old woman stood and went into the house for a pail of the good-smelling goat feed.
--
Toward dusk the old woman had an idea. She staked the two goats in the corner of the tri-bar pen nearest the barn and she gave them about four feet of tether. The periwinkle tested the tether and so did the other goat and both goats protested. “Hush now,” the old woman said to the goats.
--
After staking the goats, the old woman walked across the pen, through the gate, and over to the barn. It had been a long day already and sadly the old woman had been sober for most of it. In a corner of the barn, under some old cheese-cloth, she found the wolf traps she was after, oily and closed-mouthed. When she leaned over to inspect the traps, her white sunhat tumbled off her head—she’d forgotten she was wearing it—and onto the floor of the barn. She picked up the sunhat and fixed it back to her head and then she took it off and she turned it around the right way and then she stood there looking at the traps. They looked like new. The wolf traps had been oiled and left there by a man named Robertson more than thirty years ago, back as far as when the old woman had not been an old woman. For a time the old woman had shared a bed with the man named Robertson, but she didn’t remember that much about him, other than Robertson had complained about the old woman’s habit of sleeping without her nightclothes on, which he thought unseemly. That and how the man Robertson had enjoyed a drink the same as the old woman, but thought the habit of drinking, at least in the female of the species, a sign of loose moral character.
--
Now the old woman sat on the dirt in the middle of the pen, the three wolf traps in front of her. She listened to the stop and start sound of a cropduster flying somewhere nearby. From a vial and with a nail brush she was painting poison onto the teeth of the traps. She looked up from this work and she saw a nuthatch peeking out at her from behind the shade tree across the way, the sun red in the hills behind it. The nuthatch flicked around behind the tree and peeked out at the old woman from the other side of the tree, like he needed to have another look at her. The old woman looked down at what she was doing. Then she looked up and spoke to the nuthatch. She said, “It doesn’t make sense to me either.”
--
The poison the old woman selected for this job was the poison called Down Time. Strained carefully and diluted with tap water, Down Time wasn’t a fatal poison. When she had trouble sleeping the old woman had even used Down Time on herself. The old woman sipped from her flask of tub-whiskey and sat in the pen and painted diluted poison onto the tooth of each trap, dipping her brush into the vial, careful not to get any on her fingers. It took her some time to do so. The sun disappeared behind the hills. The two goats stood quietly at the edge of their tether and watched the old woman work like she was a performer come to put on a show for them.
--
In an arc a couple feet further than the goats could step, the old woman set the three painted wolf traps. Say what you will about the man Robertson, but he had stored his traps well. They opened easily and they set with no bother. She scattered hay over the traps, careful not to trigger them. She stood back and looked to see what it looked like. It looked exactly like someone had carefully tried to hide wolf traps under hay in her goatpen. It was too late in the evening to dig the traps into the dirt to make them less obvious, which the old woman realized she should have done to begin with. So she scattered hay here and there, all over the pen, to make the appearance of hay in the pen look somewhat natural. She spoke harshly to this hay when the hay didn’t fall where she meant for it to fall. She hoped this didn’t all wind up with her trapping a stray dog or one of her own goats. She looked at the two goats and she burped from tub whiskey and she said, “Let’s find out how stupid this wild boy is.”
--
Later the old woman sat in a chair just inside the kitchen door and she drank tub whiskey from a flask and she had a good view of the goatpen. She kept the long gun, loaded, across her lap. For a drunk old woman, she kept good look-out, even if she did say so herself. She read a little from magazines while she waited. She looked at some mail-order pornography.
--
The magazines the old woman favored were magazines in which strange women, not necessarily witches, talked about different kinds of poisons they’d crafted. The pornography the old woman favored was a pornography that depicted nude men in the act of parasailing. She had never been parasailing herself, nor seen an ocean, but she liked the idea of it and she liked looking at the pornography. She sipped at the whiskey and she looked at photos of young men in parasailing rigs and she looked out over her tri-bar goatpen. She fell asleep in her chair. It had been many years since there had been a wild boy loose in the hills.
--
Not that night did the wild boy come, nor the next night, but the third. By this time the old woman had dug her traps in about three inches. She sat on the same chair just inside the kitchen door, her white sunhat like a moon on the wall-peg behind her, and as she watched, she saw the wild boy approaching the pen. The old woman did not quite believe what she was seeing and she blinked her eyes. “Here we go,” the old woman said.
--
If the wild boy had ever worn clothes, he was not wearing clothes now. The wild boy did not move on all fours, like the old woman had thought he might, but crept slowly on two feet, nearly like a human. Even in the moonlight the old woman could tell the wild boy’s hair was a golden yellow. It was ratted and caked with filth and goat blood, but it was yellow. Outside of magazines the old woman had not seen yellow hair before. She was a brunette herself (when her hair had had color) and she’d lived all her life near a brunette village. But this wild boy was blond and he moved slowly, hunched over, his upper body parallel to the ground. The periwinkle goat stood and the other goat took notice and both goats began to warn each other about the intruder. The wild boy climbed over the tri-bar fencing and he did not look left or right, but moved directly, in a crouch, toward the periwinkle goat, who was the pick of the goats. The old woman watched it all. The wild boy stepped into the mouth of the center-most trap, perfectly, like it had been drawn in an illustration. The old woman feared he might collapse headlong into one of the other traps, but he didn’t. The wild boy fell down on his back and he howled.
--
By the time the old woman got herself to the pen the Down Time poison was already working on the wild boy and the howling had turned into a mutter. The wild boy lay on his back muttering and he stretched out like he would just sleep that way with his foot in a trap in the moonlight as long as anyone didn’t mind it. The muttering turned to little dove-like coos. The old woman stood over the wild boy and looked down. The wild boy wouldn’t look at her. She could see that his body, also, was covered with a light golden fur. She lowered the nose of the long gun at the wild boy in case the wild boy knew what a long gun was. He didn’t seem to know what a long gun was. The wild boy touched the nose of the gun with a finger and closed his eyes.
The old woman said, “You killed my goat.”
--
The two she-goats didn’t like how there was a wild boy in the pen with them and the old woman wasn’t sure what to do with the wild boy now that she had him. Why hadn’t she killed him outright? The old woman wondered about this. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have coated the teeth of the wolf trap with a fatal strength of Down Time or with any one of her more deadly poisons, but she had not done so. It would be easy, right now, to touch the nose of the long gun to the wild boy’s forehead and end it that way. But she found that she didn’t want to do this, either, particularly now, with the wild boy in the dust of the goatpen at her feet. She liked what color she could see of the wild boy’s ratted hair. She knew very well that you could not keep a wild boy, but neither did she want to be responsible for killing the last of something.
--
“Therefore you have arranged this problem for yourself,” the old woman said. She said this to herself and she sat down on the hay next to the body of the wild boy and she rested the barrel of her long gun across the wild boy’s chest. She leaned over the wild boy’s body and lifted one of his eyelids and saw that the eye was blue. She had seen blue eyes before. She wasn’t a yokel. She ran her hands over the wild boy’s chest to feel the consistency of the yellow fur that grew fine and matted on his body. The genitalia between the wild boy’s legs was covered in the same fur and the old woman didn’t look very long at it. The boy had no real beard to speak of, again just the fine, light fur covering the cheeks and chin, like down. He was a wild boy, after all. The old woman wondered if the wild boy had ever had a home or knew a language. From the looks of him she doubted it. What you could see of his teeth was not a happy story. She sat there and she thought and she watched the wild boy’s breathing raise and lower the barrel of the gun she’d set across his chest. After awhile the old woman lifted her long gun and she stood in her canary dress. With sticks she triggered the two remaining wolf traps. She led the two she-goats by tether from the goatpen and she locked them over in the barn and she walked in the dark back up to the farmhouse.
--
The old woman made several trips back and forth to the farmhouse. The moon was the one that looked like the horns of a snail. In the pen the old woman assembled the following items: a lantern, a bar of greenish soap and some towels, a pail, a couple more vials of Down Time (in case the wild boy should begin to stir), a medicine bag, a square of used plywood, and some bandages. She stood and looked over the items to see what she might have forgotten. She looked at the wild boy. Once more she returned to the farmhouse and when she came back she carried with her a silver pair of long-stemmed scissors and in her other hand she held the white sunhat by the brim.
--
The old woman stuck a plug of tobacco between her cheek and gum and she leaned the long gun against the tri-bar fence. She turned and looked at the wild boy, dead to the world. The goats over in the barn didn’t like the dark of it and the old woman could hear one of the goats bleating and butting its head against the barn door. “That’ll be the periwinkle,” the old woman said to the wild boy.
--
The old woman had hung the white sunhat on the gatepole of the pen and she turned and lifted up the sunhat now. She stood over the body of the wild boy and leaned down easily and she positioned the white sunhat over the wild boy’s genitals, for his modesty, she guessed, though she wasn’t certain. It had seemed like the thing to do and it’s why she’d brought the sunhat from its wall-peg in the kitchen in the first place, though the old woman had to admit that, when she looked down at the wild boy, naked and gold with a white sunhat covering his genitals, modesty hadn’t been the effect, exactly. Now it looked more like he was posing.
--
The old woman stood there not knowing if she would laugh about the sunhat or not and she finally did and she drank from her flask of tub-whiskey. She looked down at wild boy’s trapped leg and she brought the lantern over and the medicine bag. The teeth of the trap had closed low on the wild boy’s calf and though it looked ugly the old woman didn’t think there were any problems with the bone. She set the lantern there close to the leg. She spat tobacco juice on the hay between the wild boy’s feet. She leaned over and got her fingers between the teeth of the trap and she pulled.
--
With the wild boy’s leg cleaned and bandaged the old woman scooted the square of plywood beneath the wild boy’s head and then she stood and turned and drug the water-trough from its place at the fence-edge so that it paralleled the body of the wild boy. More stars had joined up with the moon and the sky seemed high up on tentpoles above her. She saw how the water in the trough bore bits of swollen goat feed, dead leaves. Even so, it was cleaner than the wild boy’s hair.
--
She stepped across the wild boy’s body and she sat down on his chest like his chest was a saddle and she dipped her pail into the trough and poured the water over the wild boy’s head. It was an involved head of hair and it smelled rank and living and as she washed it she watched what fell from it, husks of cicadas, chicken bones, mud-dauber nests, a flattened tin can, what looked to be a human bicuspid, sticks and twigs and burrs, a small red rubber ball, a rusted necklace, a treble fish hook, three rusted twist ties, an old pill bottle, here and there a smattering of buckshot plinking out like diamonds onto the plywood board. It was not pleasant work, dying fleas rising up in the lather, but as she washed the hair the old woman grew happy to see the gold color of the hair brighten and deepen. She’d rise and fall lightly with the wild boy’s breathing and she’d work the green soap to a lather between her hands and then work it into the hair of the wild boy. She’d lift a length of it, heavy like a fish, and pour trough-water over it, then work the greenish soap into it again. It was best to work length by length. That way you didn’t get overwhelmed. At first the hair felt thick like tar but after awhile it began to plump and spread. The wild boy yelped a little in his sleep, a dream of farmers and chickens, maybe even of goats. The old woman stood up and fetched a vial of Down Time and droppered some onto the wild boy’s lips.
--
It was a moldy mattress nibbled by mice and it had been the old woman’s marital mattress more than forty years ago, back when the old woman was not an old woman, back when she had been married, not to the man Robertson, but to a different man altogether, a man whose name the old woman had taken as her own for a time, a name she couldn’t, just now, remember. This man to whom the old woman had been married: he had called her a witch very often and he favored making love through a hole in a sheet, if at all. He did nothing but walk the forest-edge and sketch weedflowers. Later she would watch this man burning his own weedflower sketches in the firepit and wonder who in the world he was. She had been a teenager then. Everything had made sense in her head but rarely would anything outside her head match up with what was inside. When this man her husband had died (in his sleep it was said, though some said poison) the old woman had happily replaced the cornhusk mattress with one of fine goosedown and she had stored the cornhusk mattress in the cellar. Now the old woman drug this cornhusk mattress up from the cellar. It was not a heavy mattress but it was hard work to get the old mattress up from the cellar in the dark, to get the mattress out into the backyard in the night, to drag the mattress to the goatpen, harder still to roll the wild boy’s unconscious body onto the mattress, but she had done it, nipping tub-whiskey from a flask for strength, talking to herself of her own foolishness.
--
The old woman took one last trip to the farmhouse. She was well drunk by now and she felt she had worked off the last of the cartilage in her skeleton and her bones felt unrelated to each other. In the bathroom she sat down to make water and nearly fell asleep while doing so. In her bedroom she located a little jarlet of honeysuckle perfume with which she meant to perfume the wild boy’s hair. In the chest at the foot of her bed she found the strawberry and mint quilt with which she would cover the wild boy’s sleeping body. In the kitchen she ladled out a large amount of hot stew into a pail and she took these things with her out to the goatpen.
--
The old woman set the pail of stew next to the cornhusk mattress upon which the wild boy lay on his back, unconscious, the white towel bonneting his hair, the white sunhat covering him. The old woman knelt next to the mattress and she unwrapped the towel from the wild boy’s head and she dried the golden hair with the towel, holding the heaviness of the boy’s head between her palms. She spread the hair out on the mattress around his head so that it might dry faster. From the jarlet she sprinkled some of the honeysuckle perfume into this hair. She stood up with the strawberry and mint quilt and she flapped it over the wild boy’s body and let it fall over him. She reached beneath the quilt and brought forth the white sunhat and she hung the sunhat on the gatepole. And she stood there for awhile looking at the arrangement. Then, thinking of something, she picked up the lantern and turned and walked out of the goatpen and crossed her backyard, turned at the old shade tree, walked around a little, the lantern lowered in front of her, scanning the grass here and there with her eyes. She knelt in the grass and plucked from it a couple of small white weedflowers. She stood and brought the flowers with her back into the goatpen. She knelt and balanced the two weedflowers by the stems along the mouth of the stew pail.
--
Lastly she took the silver pair of long-stemmed scissors and she bent and cut a lock of the wild boy’s golden hair. She figured the wild boy would run before morning, so she wanted a souvenir. She held the lock of hair up before her eyes in the moonlight and she looked at it and then she tucked it into the pocket of her canary dress. She was too tired, by now, to gather up the rest of her things. She made sure to bring her long gun and the scissors, anything with which the wild boy might hurt himself or her when he awoke. She patted the pocket of her canary dress for her flask of tub whiskey and it was there. She walked across the yard and up to the porch and in by the kitchen door. She drank a glass of water at the sink and she ladled some stew into a bowl for herself and she took it out to the porch with her so she might watch to see what the wild boy would do.
--
She figured the wild boy would run, but she meant to stay awake until morning if she could—to see how the wild boy would act when he woke up, to see how the wild boy felt about a bed for himself and a flower for his stew—and the old woman did stay awake for a while, looking out across the backyard at the white halo of her sunhat on the gatepole of the tri-bar pen, the glint of the wild boy’s hair in the moonlight, yellow like a fire that couldn’t burn anything, his chest rising and falling. The old woman touched at the lock of hair in the pocket of her canary dress and she talked to herself a little beneath the moon and she did not think about the man Robertson nor the man to whom she had been married once, if briefly. She nipped at the flask of tub-whiskey and she made sure to keep her long gun across her lap. She fell asleep for a long time and she dreamed of herself as a girl. In the dream her hair was yellow and she had much strength in her legs and she performed strange miracles with the power in them.