A Hard Witching Read Online Free PDF Page B

fat saskatoon berry.
    “What,” I said, trying to sound uninterested, “are you looking at?”
    “Watch,” he said, and rolled the berry slightly with the tip of one finger in a way that made me think of the Mexican jumping beans our parents sometimes bought us at Woolworth’s.
    “So?” I was about to say, when a tiny worm, fine as an eyelash and white-white against that purple flesh, twisted up out of the berry and made an absurd, desperate movement, as though rearing its head like a rattler: a movement of aggression or blindness, it could have been either. And it was, for some reason, the most awful, the most terrible thing I had ever seen. I hit Max’s hand hard harder than I’d meant to. The blow threw him off balance and he toppled onto his side in the dust, the berry landing with a leafy
thunk
in the bushes.
    He looked simply startled at first, then his face grew tight and red. “What’d you do that for?” he yelled.
    I was sorry I’d done it, and did not know why I had. I didn’t know what to say, so I went back to picking, leaving him sprawled on the ground, my body tensed, half expecting him to charge me from behind, pummeling me into the bushes. He didn’t, though, so I picked on, trying to act as if nothing had happened, even though I felt angry and ashamed and frightened, not of Max or of anything he could do to me, not of anything physical, not even of anything he could say to Grandma or Grandpa or Aunt Cherry in retaliation. I was afraid of something in me, something in both of us. I turned around and looked down at him, his mouth working silently, as though he were searching for words, terrible words, German words maybe; I looked down at that angry little face, the tender whiterim over his ears and neck where he’d just gotten a haircut, and I loved him fiercely, so much it made my skin burn, loved him for holding that ugliness in his palm, that ugliness that had made me think, There is nothing good anymore. And I knew I would cry then. I pretended to pick some more, and as I did I felt something subside, felt something sink a little, because I knew somehow this was the last summer for us, the last summer we would come to this place. Uncle Aloetius was dead and he’d taken something with him, something terrifying and tender and unnameable.
    When I finally looked back, Max was gone.
VIII
    It took me a while to pick enough berries to make a bowlful. I knew Max wouldn’t return to help; he was a sulker, we both were. When I finally walked back around the garage, a car I didn’t recognize was parked behind Grandpa’s Buick under the old cottonwood tree, and I thought, with a great flutter of my stomach, Aunt Cherry.
    But when I stepped into the kitchen with the bucket clenched tightly in my hand, it was not Aunt Cherry sitting at the table with Grandma. I was both relieved and disappointed. Grandma and the other woman turned to me as I stood in the doorway, made awkward by the presence of this stranger. Neither Max nor Grandpa was in the room.
    “Dump those in the sink,” Grandma said, “with some cold water to soak.”
    I crossed the kitchen stiffly, noticing that the woman watched me with a funny sort of half-smile as I went. She was old, much older than Grandma, though it was hard to tell that at first because her hair was an odd flat shade of red and her eyelids were smeared heavily with green shadow that glittered,but softly, like new snow. She leaned with both elbows on the kitchen table, arms folded. In one hand she held a cigarette, and on her finger she wore a big gold ring in the shape of a cat’s head, with two little green stones for eyes. It was hideous, but I couldn’t look away. The woman caught my stare.
    “You like this?” she said, wriggling her finger. “It’s a present. From a sweetheart of mine.”
    The word
sweetheart
sounded so strange on her lips, a foreign word, and at first I didn’t understand it, as though I’d never heard it before.
    She took a long drag