The Witch of Blannie's Bottom

FICTION The Witch of Blannie's Bottom Oma Boyd I TURNED LEFT OFF WARDS GAP ROAD at the home-made sign that said Warnitsfer Sell. My car tires crunched the green walnuts as I drove up Mattie Millard's driveway. Pitted hard black shells, exposed from their green hulls by previous traffic, dried in the late autumn sun. I pulled my car over onto a patch of grass and opened the door. The raw, green odor of the new walnut crop was in the air. "Come on up and set a spell," Mattie invited from her perch on the log cabin's porch. She sat, hammer in hand, hunched over an upright backstick, strewn with shivers of walnut shells. Cracked shells lay on the floor around her, partly covering the over-sized men's shoes she wore for her arthritic feet. She pointed to a low-legged, straight-back chair and asked me to sit. "Have you ever seen that rock over in Blannie's bottom what's shaped like a chair?" Mattie inquired. She laid down her hammer and rubbed brown-stained fingers around her bun of gray hair. "They call it devil's chair 'cause they said it was where Granny Lettie, a witch, went to pray to the devil." The mention of Granny Lettie rekindled faint memories from my own childhood. My mother told me how her father would tell her tales about witches and ghosts. Granny Lettie was a name I had heard her mention. "Who was Granny Lettie?" I inquired. "Granny Lettie lived over across the state line," Mattie informed me. "They used to tell about how she wanted to be a witch. They said she heared that if she drank from a spring that ran north for nine consecutive days, she would turn into a witch. Well, she tried it. She went to a spring that ran north, and drank water from a silver cup ever day for nine days. On the ninth day, she turned into a witch." The old woman leaned forward, placed the two forefingers of her right hand to her puckered lips and shot a thin, straight stream of snuff juice over the porch railing and onto the leaves of a dying hollyhock. "I don't reckon they knowed it back then," she continued, "but they say if you call on the Lord it will break a witch's spell. You know if you say Lord, help me, or something like that. 59 "They told that one time Granny Lettie turned a man's horse into a big cat. That man said he was a-riding along one night, at the edge of some woods, when his horse turned into the biggest white cat he'd ever seen. When itjumped a gully, he said Lord have mercy and landed, whomp, on the ground. The cat had turned into a bale of hay. He broke the spell, by calling on the Lord. He said he walked on home to find his horse, lathered in sweat, tied up to an oak tree in his yard. He never did know how it got there. "Honey, it was a sight in this world what they told she done. I know mammy heared that one time Granny Lettie went to the woodpile and raked up some woodchips to use fer kindling. She put the chips in her apron and carried 'em in the house. They said when she got inside the house she flung the chips out of the apron, and they had turned into baby chicks. Said little yeller baby chicks ran all over the floor. She had turned them chips into baby chicks. Put a spell on 'em, you know!" Mattie dusted off her loosely tied apron. "They told how Granny Lettie put a spell on her neighbor's cow, she began. "Said she had been a-getting milk from 'em, and the cow had a new calf. Granny Lettie come to get milk, and they didn't have any fer her. Said Granny Lettie rubbed her hand over the cow's back and said Poor old cow. And that calf wouldn't suck another drop. It went to acting crazy. They said...