I stopped at Morath's long enough to tell Miz Morath I wouldn't be able to milk for them awhile. That my wife's relatives had come and stolen her away, and I was going after them. I left my team there; Morath could use them or rent them out, to pay for their keep. Then I headed south on Route 51, and before I got forty miles, the truck quit on me. I figured it was the carburetor—I'd had trouble with it before—but fooling with it didn't help, so I gave up and hiked on into Assumption, where I hired myself a tow. The fella at the garage there fussed with it awhile, and I ended up getting a new one put on. All in all, it cost me more than three hours. I didn't know whether to swear or cry.
I'd never before felt the way I did then: dangerous. Never knew I could. I didn't feel at all like the Curtis Macurdy folks knew back in Washington County.
Then I drove on. North of Vandalia it threw a rod, and there wasn't a thing in hell I could do about that. Not in the time I had. I wondered if Idri'd cast a spell to keep me from following them, and told myself if she had, it wasn't going to work. Leaving the truck by the road, I started walking. Each time a car came along, I stuck a thumb out, and after a while a moving van went on by me a little way and pulled over. I took off running and climbed in.
"Where yew a-headin'?" the driver asked me. A southerner by the way he talked.
"Kentucky," I told him. "Muhlenberg County."
He laughed and slapped his leg. "Talk 'bout bein' in luck! I'm deliverin' this load to Central City; that's in Muhlenberg County." He reached under the truck seat, took out a clear glass bottle three-quarters full, and handed it to me. "Have a swig," he told me.
I handed it back. "Thanks," I said, "but my family's all teetotalers. Been that way as far back as anyone remembers."
He didn't take offense like some might. Just pulled the wooden stopper with his teeth, raised the bottle, took a big swig, and about strangled. "Good stuff," he said with his eyes watering. "Not like most of the rotgut folks sell these days. My uncle makes it hisself."
He started the truck then and drove on, talking about how he wished he was headed for home instead of Kentucky. After a while I started dozing, off and on. Woke up when he stopped the truck for gas. It was beginning to get dark out.
"Yew gonna git a crick in yore neck, yew sleep like that," he told me. "I'm figurin' to drive all night, if I can, but I'm apt to git sleepy. Can yew drive a truck?"
I told him I could.
"I put a sofa crosst the back of the load, so's I can go back there and sleep if I need to. Why don't yew go back there? Then if I git too sleepy to drive, yew'll be all rested, and we can change places. Git there quicker."
Anything to speed things up. I went around back, opened the doors and climbed in, latching them behind me. After a minute the truck started again. The sofa felt good enough, but laying there, I didn't feel sleepy any longer. I kept wondering how in the world I'd find the gate, once I got to Muhlenberg County. Finally I told myself, same way you found the pictures. However that was. Anyway it settled my mind enough that I got to sleep.
When I woke up, it seemed like I'd slept a long time. A long time full of dreams. Dreams with Varia in them. Laying there, I felt them slipping away, and they were gone, just like she was. The truck wasn't moving, so I got up, felt for the latch, and opened the doors. It was night out, moonlight, and a little spooky feeling, but nothing bad. I hopped down.
We were on a country road, stuck in a mudhole. I went to the cab; the driver was inside, laying against the steering wheel asleep. The door was locked, which surprised me, and so was the one on the other side, but moonlight on the seat showed the whiskey bottle laying on its side without the stopper. I decided he'd finished it off after he got stuck.
There was a little field across the road, but otherwise it seemed to be all woods around there, and a big big hill on the other side. Didn't look like any place I'd seen in Illinois or Indiana, the hill was too big, so I decided I was in Kentucky.
The moon was full and low in the sky, which meant it was near daybreak. I set off down the road with the moon at my back, not liking to leave the driver like that, but I needed to find that gate. I felt pretty optimistic. I'd made it to Kentucky in under a day, even though I'd lost my truck.
Right away I left the field behind, woods crowding the road on both sides. The night was mild, and in a little bit I started enjoying the hike. The leaves were coming out, and it smelled like spring. I must have walked a mile or more before I came to another cleared field, not more'n six or eight acres, with a little shack at the far end, just back from the road. By that time, morning had started lightening the sky a bit.
The whole shack turned out to be made of shakes, walls and all. I heard a dog woof inside; a minute later the front door opened and an old woman looked out.
"Who's out there?" she yelled.
"Name's Curtis Macurdy," I told her. "I'm lost. I'd appreciate if you could tell me where I am."
She cackled like a hen. Her old hound came out past her and down the steps, to sniff my legs without making a sound. "Yew ain't from nowheres 'round yere," she said.
"No ma'am. I just left Illinois, headed for Kentucky."
"Kentucky?!" She cackled again. "Yewr in Missoura!"
Now I realized who she sounded like. Her accent was like the truck driver's, only thicker. He must have drank enough, he decided to go home, and these hills must be the Ozarks. From what I'd heard and read of the Ozarks, it could be a month before the van company found out where their truck was, if they ever did.
"How far to Kentucky?" I asked.
"Don't rightly know. But yew ain't goin' to walk there today. Tell ya what. I got to go fetch water. If'n yew'll tote it fer me, I'll feed ya breakfast."
She didn't have a well, but across the road just three, four chains, was a spring in the hillside, with a wooden trough for the water to run out of. She had two buckets hung on a shoulder yoke, and I carried them for her. If it'd been me living there, I'd have built a house on the other side of the road, and run the trough on down to it. Or better, put a pipe under the road.
While she fixed breakfast, she chattered on like someone who didn't have anyone to talk to very often. "I'm a-goin' up on the knob, when the sun comes up," she said. "I staked out a young cockerel up there last evenin'."
"Staked out a chicken?"
"Oh, that's right, yewr from up Illinois way. Yew don't know 'bout Injun Knob. It's a spirit mountain, and every full moon, the spirit comes a-hootin'."
"A-hootin'?"
"Yep. At midnight. Most folks cain't yere it, but I can, 'cause I'm a conjure woman."
"Really!"
"Yep. And it's good to give it a little somethin' now and then. I'll go up there, and the chicken'll be gone. It always is."
"Mightn't a fox have taken it?" I asked. "Or some other animal?" I'd read they still had wolves in the Ozarks.
"Not up there. Ain't no critters go up there on the night of the full moon. Fact is, up on top they ain't no critters anytime, not even birds. They know better. A couple times been young fellas went up there on a dare, the evenin' of a full moon, and they ain't none of 'em ever come back down. Then, eight, ten years ago, a perfessor come yere from the university with another feller, both of 'em wearing big ol' pistols on their side, and they never come back, neither." She cackled again. "The sheriff come with a posse, a day or two later, and combed the woods, but couldn't find hide nor hair of 'em."
The hairs on my neck started to bristle, and the old woman grinned at me. "Yew wanna go up there with me?"
I nodded. Varia had said there was more than one gate.
After breakfast, we started up the mountain on a little footpath. Most of the birds were back for the summer, and the woods was full of their singing. I saw gray squirrel and chipmunks and rabbit turds, and lots and lots of oaks and clumps of pine. It was a long steep path, with lots of stops for the old woman to rest a minute, till finally I could see the top close ahead. There was lots of bedrock showing by that time, and the trees were sparse and small. And there weren't any more birds or squirrels or chipmunks. I'm not sure what they felt that kept them away, but I was feeling something that had my neck hairs bristling again. Either that or I was imagining.
We took one last rest, the old woman breathing hard, and frowning.
"Anything the matter?" I asked her.
She didn't answer, and after a minute we went on. At the top, she knelt down by a knee-high pine seedling with a leather thong tied to it: the tether she'd tied the chicken with. But there wasn't any chicken now, nor feathers nor blood, like a possum or bobcat would have left. Just the leather thong, which was either awful short to start with, or something had shortened it.
She still wasn't talking, and the frown was still there. She stood up and closed her eyes so tight her whole face skrinched together, and she began mumbling something I couldn't make out. Cold chills ran down me from the top of my head to my feet. After a minute she started to talk.
"Some folks were up yere last night, in the dark. Two men and two women, folks o' power. And the mountain took three of 'em—not et 'em; received 'em—two witchy women, young and perty, and one of the men. I'm a-goin' back down, right now."
We went. She didn't have anything more to say all the way to her cabin. I didn't either, but my brain was going a mile a minute.
I knew just what I was going to do: get me a job around there somewhere, on a farm or in the woods. It wouldn't need to pay cash; bed and board would be plenty, and the bed could be hay in the barn. I had twenty-seven dollars in my shoe, more than enough to buy a pistol and a good rifle, and plenty of shells. And I'd be back on top of Injun Knob before dark, on the night of the next full moon.